With this rage inside of me
2025 Mix 17: One-wave-wonders, the most metal playlist ever, Mexican rap, fairies and trap, and PinkPantheress takes a bow (for now)
I have next to no interest in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame but I am somewhat interested in the responses I’ve seen to the induction of Chubby Checker. Am specifically thinking of this post from Phil Freeman:
The most baffling aspect of 2025 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame discourse has to be the attempted rehabilitation of Chubby Checker, a replacement-level R&B singer who rode a fluke hit to a decades-long career as a nostalgia act.
When I say “replacement-level,” I mean it literally: Dick Clark wanted Hank Ballard to come on American Bandstand and perform “The Twist,” but Ballard wasn’t available, so Clark hired Chubby Checker to record a cover version, and even gave him his stage name.
I think that’s an uncharitable account of Chubby Checker’s career and influence while also not being wrong, per se. I’m fascinated by how enormous “The Twist” was, without Checker ever really reaching anything near the same height but still having a long and varied career. (He has a bizarre psych album!)
I categorize Checker as a one-wave-wonder, someone who sparked an enormous zeitgeist without really going beyond it, like the proverbial butterfly that causes a tidal wave. A one-wave-wonder has more reach (and often more songs) than a one-hit-wonder, but also a sort of “where are they now” vibe settling in despite a massive early influence on the landscape. “The Twist” isn’t Chubby Checker’s only hit, but the influence of “The Twist” on pop leading up to the Beatles was very apparent when I spent some time digging through 1962 on Discogs. (After a few hours of tossing aside twist after twist, I wished I could mute the term: it was its own genre and a global phenomenon, a sort of cultural epicenter.)
The other one-wave-wonders that came to mind are Alanis Morissette, Avril Lavigne, and Lorde, all of them in a continuum of alt-confessional. I’ll write more about Jagged Little Pill sometime soon (I hope), because it did have a huge impact on me at the time, and a huge impact on pop music, but Morissette herself never really got to ride her own wave very far.
Avril Lavigne had a longer arc of success, and I’m tempted to disqualify her because she technically shaped the landscape twice, once in 2002 and again with post-confessional cheerleader-stomp in 2006.
As for Lorde, I’m convinced that Taylor Swift basically pulled a Single White Female on her but gave it a happy ending for the usurper, like what she did with Romeo and Juliet in “Love Story.” Back of the envelope calculation: Taylor Swift owes Lorde approximately 100 million dollars. (Lana Del Rey got the cred equivalent of points on the back end.)
The two most recent examples I can think of are Lil Nas X and PinkPantheress. The jury’s still out on their careers, but I’d bet a considerable amount of money on both being this sort of figure in pop music (no small achievement).
Anyway, my feeling is that one-wave-wonders should absolutely get into any relevant Hall of Fame. It is, in fact, a rarer feat than just having a successful career. Maybe it should have its own category: the Butterfly Impact Award?
1. BABYMETAL f. Poppy: From Me to U
Japan/US
Well, it’s very much not a Golden Beatology week, so here goes: let’s open with Babymetal and another canny collaboration. (I also liked their Eurovision-y collaboration with German group Electric Callboy last year, “Ratatata.”) This time they bring Poppy in as a screamo ringer. I liked Poppy’s death metal turn last year, though liked her solo stuff better than her breakout hit with Knocked Loose.
I keep thinking I’m missing something with metal generally, and then I listen to thrash from 1989 or Poppy-fronted metal and remember that I like pop metal. Also enjoyed Jel Bugle’s recommendation of Indian nu-metal group Bloodywood’s Nu Delhi. And, speaking of Jelcore...
2. Schönberg: ロサ・エチュード
Japan
Here is another metal track, courtesy Jel’s ongoing yearly playlist. (I think that makes it my third or fourth proper metal track in over two years of newsletters, and two of them featured Poppy.) Symphonic Japanese power metal, another direct descendant of the stuff from the ‘80s and ‘90s that I enjoyed as a kid. Feel free to recommend me more stuff that sounds like this.
3. Jane Remover f. Danny Brown: Psychoboost
US
Moving on from metal into other areas of dissonance. First up is Jane Remover, currently in a do-no-wrong phase and finding lots of scuzzy corners to stash Danny Brown.
4. electro ma non troppo, MC Yallah: E gelosia
Spain/Uganda
Ugandan rapper MC Yallah sounds good over just about anything — I’ve featured her with her frequent collaborator Debmaster, but also on top of video game music and riding a psych loop from Swedish band Goat. Here it’s an operatic Spanish electro track.
5. FLVCKKA: Tsunami
Mexico
Mexican rapper grabs a stuffed animal and a fur hat and hops on a vintage Juvenile beat like it’s a moonbounce, which of course it is.
6. Chy Cartier: No Bring Ins
UK
Just wrote about Chy Cartier and CLIPZ not reaching the heights of “New,” but both are consistently good, and this one is even better than that.
7. BunnaB: No Drought
US
Atlanta rapper BunnaB is taking off with “Bunna Summa,” which has an official video, a glowing Pitchfork write-up, and a boa constrictor, but this is my favorite of hers, a cheap-sounding beat, overlapping verse, and simple three-clap hook popping up in the chorus. “Bunna Summa” is about looking good and hanging out with your friends on burning asphalt, but this one sounds like it.
8. Myaap: Fairy
US
Despite being about fairies, this does not qualify as fairy trap, the genre explored in depth in a recent George Henderson post that highlights Jvcki Wai and Zheani, but it is both fairy and trap, harp and piano swirling around a bounce beat.
9. BbyMutha: DICKEATERRR
US
BbyMutha (the bio reminds me: actual mother of four) usually falls in the like-not-love category but the new album is promising so far, and this is a big woozy highlight.
10. BADMIXY, Lumyai Hitongkam, TangBadVoice: อ้ายสาด
Thailand
Arguably closer to fairy trap than the actual fairy rapper is—with the rapper on the hook approximating chipmunk autotune with their un-processed cartoon voice—but falls into a category I would just describe as Thai goof-rap, of which there is a lot. The personalities here gel about as naturally as “Black Strap Molasses,” and reminds me in its anti-seamlessness (seamfulness?) of a song that Holly Boson shared from 2021 by an even rogue-r gallery: Bear Knuckle, F.HERO, and Apiwat Boonanak’s “ZOOM.”
11. femtanyl, ISSBROKIE: NASTYWERKKKK!
US
This one is extremely online, hence inaccessible to me, a merely too online person—doing even light research on this was like looking directly into the sun.
12. Hikaru Utada: Electricity (salute remix)
Japan, UK
Producer salute, who put out an album last year that I thought would be bigger (maybe it was?) provides a lovely French house remix for Hikaru Utadu’s singer-songwriter lite disco original.
13. Holly: ONME
US
Indie dnb-pop, one of many derivatives I like better than the pure uncut stuff, featured below in what feels like will be PinkPantheress’s Other Dave swan song.
14. Lola Young: Messy (Łaszewo edit)
UK/US
Pulled this one on synth sound alone and suspected Polish provenance, but was a little disappointed to find that this is instead a fairly straightforward dance remix of Lola Young’s “Messy” by a group that as far as I can tell is not Polish at all, just liked the stylized “Ł.” This puts me in the position of having to express an opinion on “Messy,” a huge song in the UK that seems to have only made a ripple stateside. I like the way the original dunks Young’s post-confessional snarl into a warm bath of floaty two-chord Fleetwood Mac, but also find her persona a little dated and off-putting.
15. lullahush: Maddy na Farraige
Ireland
Another frantic breakbeat, but for non-dnb-pop purposes, goes a bit more avant with a simple two-part folk harmony that sounds like what would happen if you were to sing into a box fan in the middle of a cathedral.
16. Cö shu Nie, HYDE: Maisie
Japan
A new anime theme that I will not embarrass myself trying to describe anything about or provide context for. Sounded good, who’s next?
17. Mastrobiso: Tonhão
Brazil
Brazilian hard rock w/ sprechgesang. Seems like every country but the UK does this really well!
18. Lifeguard: It Will Get Worse
US
Have to fill the shaggy indie quota for the month. (I’ll count this retroactively toward April’s total if need be, like contributing to a retirement fund.)
19. Nate Visstick, Yellow Claw f. OGAQUAFINA: Real Bad Things
Netherlands
This song talks a lot about “bad things,” but in a way that doesn’t evoke many really bad things. It does, however, say the title enough to make me think of the movie Very Bad Things from 1998, one of the more unpleasant cinematic experiences I’ve ever had. It is still amazing to me that the creator of Friday Night Lights made as his debut film something so totally, pointlessly devoid of humanity. I should watch it again to see if it still has the power to knock the wind out of me (derogatory?). This song would not fit on its soundtrack.
20. M Lisa: Şu Halime Baksana
Turkey
Melancholy Turkish ballad to commence the cool-down, such as it is. There are a lot of sore thumbs in this mix, so the cool-down may not take.
21. PinkPantheress: Tonight
UK
PinkPantheress looks utterly bored in this video, falling short of Marie Antoinette and landing closer to Paris Hilton, but looking more in need of a nap than Paris Hilton ever did. There’s decadent ennui, and then there’s just plain out of gas. I suspect PinkPantheress is running on empty, even though this song is pretty good.
22. rincs: Don’t Wanna Go to the Pool
US
Ah, yes, another good indie track. Quota achieved!
23. Lonnie Holley f. billy woods: I Looked Over My Shoulder
US
One from the new quasi-experimental album by artist Lonnie Holley, whose poetry and songish masses of sounds and instrumentation cohere just enough, which is to say not too much. Nice foreword from Hanif Abdurraqib.
***
That’s it! Until next time, go figure out how to start one (1) decent wave.
—Dave Moore (the other one)
Title from Babymetal f. Poppy: “From Me to You”
Just riffing on the debate re: Avril, but I feel like I have a stake in this conversation in the sense that Let Go was the first album that really felt like "mine" as a child, i.e. surreptitiously passed to me on the playground with no input from my parents and then pored over daily at home like a sacred text. I liked all the big teen pop stars, but I couldn't relate to them, and by that age, I had already internalized an idea that young women in popular music were spectacles rather than authors of their own stories and identities. I had never thought hard about it, and of course I didn't understand why, but the absence of a familiar-feeling voice was that palpable.
When I got that album and flipped through the booklet and saw a teenage girl's name credited under every song — sad songs, angry songs, songs about her life — not just as the singer but a real writer of the words and music I was hearing, that radicalized me. Like, my whole world opened up in just that one instant on my bedroom floor with this album in my hands. Maybe I could look back on it now and consider the actual quality of those songs with a more discerning ear, but I 100% believe their existence alone at that point in my development easily changed the course of my life. (I also liked Alanis as a kid! But I needed Avril first to find my way to her.)
Taylor, obviously, has branded this appeal to a level of art. When 1989 came out with those bonus tracks showing her songwriting process, I was like, oh, man, this would've lit me on fire at twelve. I'm quite fond of Taylor from a distance now (Reputation was the one that finally did it for me), but I know without a shadow of a doubt that if I had been just that little bit younger when she was coming up and not a teenager myself, too cynical and entrenched in my own taste by that point for her to work on me, I would be a diehard Swiftie. Knowing I avoided this fate by a hair is somehow both an incredible relief and slightly disappointing.
In other words, as but one member of the designated target audience for both these artists, I think your read is spot on and totally in line with my own observations over the years.
I don't know how many hits Pink Pantheress has had but she makes a wave in music far bigger than herself and her songs. FLVCKKA album has some lovely solo stuff like that one (near the pop end of fairy trap), as usual the collabs are more dicey, but 'Frios' is a strong one.
I think the harp tune on Myaap's 'Fairy' might be a gaming reference, track's pretty great