The Singles Jukebox

Stans are speculating that “La Croix” will be the next to come in the LDR carbonated beverage saga…

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[6.54]Katherine St Asaph: Would you look at that: a real folk song by Lana Del Rey that has real tension and melancholy, rather than grayness and stupor! And what’s this: a B-section that alters the musical palette and ups the stakes even more — albeit via the played-out beats and fuzz of Kanye West 13 years ago, but still, tension! Amazing how Lana’s soprano pity-pleas and her one lyrical theme become actually poignant when they’re given an interesting arrangement. The last minute regresses her right back to the Born to Die trollgaze start, but people are ~*critically reassessing*~ that album now, so what do I know? Not sure why the title is so coy — unless it’s a reference to the “All American Food” chain, which would be so improbably on-the-nose I don’t know whether I’d dock or add a point.
[7]

Frank Falisi: “Did you hear the new Lana?” Ben asks me, adjusting his perch on top of the lousy excuse for stools we had behind the info desk at the bookstore. “We’ve sort of been digging it all morning.” With the obvious caveat that there’s no better occasion to receive new music than recommendation, even one as tentative and gentle as this one, I’m struck thinking you could do worse than “book store” as model and mark for Lana’s operating aesthetic project. On a purely practical level to start: you can play Lana Del Rey in bookstores. Unremembered seventies folk, foggy vinyl trap, a tendency to fade towards the background without sounding sinisterly canned…it’s not a bad sound to bubble around your ears while your eyes go about the task of shopping around words. But beyond her sound’s practical application, there’s something literary to the fractured America in her voices hups and gulps, as much Cheever as it is Cookie Mueller, as much “FICTION” as it is the bougie floral stationery by the door. A bookstore is a container for aesthetics for sale, not unlike pop music. And what does it mean to call a sound “novelistic”? It’s an interiority for understanding any number of larger-than-yourself concepts: American womanhood, sex in the twenty-twenties, the racial politics of interpolating Doo-wop traditions into your Antonoff-produced single. A novel can contradict in ways a pop narrative doesn’t always, not merely through the liberation of an unreliable narrator, but, by allaying itself with a consciousness, opening itself up to the myriad contradictions we undergo in every moment. “A&W” contradicts itself, both a handy essence-ial symbology of the Lana Del Rey myth as well as a disbursement with obfuscation: this is what it feels like. Confessions, thirsts, poetry chapbooks, a wink to “Video Games”, the re-apparition of ‘Jim’, realizations that catch, that slip. A split at the middle worthy of Lorde’s “Hard Feelings/ Loveless” ensures that the proceedings are as grounded in the body, an advantage the pop song has to the novel. You have to sing it, you have to make the body do the things that let it sing it. There’s a lot of glee in this second half, pitch-flips and falsettos that flange, all a reminder that the best literary theory of Lana Del Rey start and end with voice, that most peculiar aspect of the literary that we simultaneous prize beyond any other quality and which may, in fact, not exist at all.
[8]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: One of those songs where I’d rather write a book about it than a blurb. But considering that no publishers are calling me this will have to do. Every second of “A&W” is, as they say, a rich text — the drones, the dirge-leaning turns of the melody, the vape hits — all coming together into a work of staggering information density. Where “Venice Bitch”, her prior moment of proggy grandeur, was shaggy and hallucinogenic, “A&W” is bracing and unadorned — she’s some how gotten Jack Antonoff to do his best impression of outsider art on the second half. Lana’s own performance is a fulfillment of all the hopes and aspersions cast upon her at the dawn of her career, a totally self-obsessed collection of mantras and streams of consciousness that also feel like fragments from some great work of experimental fiction. It’s a true one-of-one, a song that I can’t imagine any other artist even treading water with.
[9]

Leah Isobel: At this point, Lana’s mythology is so baked-in that every new song becomes an exercise in revision, and her tactics have become less disguised over time. The juxtaposition between the first and second halves of “A&W” makes those strategies more naked than ever. Her critic-bait piano/siren-wail mode comes from the Norman Fucking Rockwell! playbook, the fried-out “Jimmy Jimmy” breakdown from (the run-up to) Born To Die. If nothing else, it ably demonstrates how the distance between the two arcs of Lana’s career is actually not that long, and how the acclaim that greeted her sonic shift probably felt to her like respectability politics writ large; so that even as she’s become accepted by the pop literati that once shunned her, she still has something to prove. But her response here is just as disingenuous. “If I said I was raped” is an extremely huge and consequential “if,” even for a songwriter whose conditional tenses and comparisons are central to her work’s effects. I suppose this is the experience of being an American woman: feeling the need to foreground your trauma, or its immanent possibility, in order to really be heard. But “A&W” leaves no path forward, just infinite recursion into her preoccupations. Which is probably why it got nominated for a Grammy.
[6]

Michael Hong: The piecemeal “A&W,” a condensation of eras of Lana Del Rey to become the most Lana track available, is impossible to judge separately from what it is and what you believe of her. Is her self-characterization of being an “American whore” laced with excessive melancholy or is it a proper nihilistic wink? Is the music’s languor masturbatory or rewarding? Are the sing-speak taunts lame or fun? I find “A&W” a tad overindulgent, yet favour the latter answers, but that’s only because last I heard of Lana, she was waitressing down at a Waffle House in Alabama.
[6]

Michelle Myers: This level of self-pity is only bearable because Lana is willing to implicate herself in her own misery. She slurs through her lyrics at 2:55. “Look at the length of it and the shape of my body.” Her pitched-down vocals on “Jimmy only love me when he wanna get high,” croak against the flimsy sadgirl hip-hop beat. There’s little glamor in her day-three-bender, vomit-in-the-hair act this time around, and I find that refreshing.
[7]

Brad Shoup: There are a lot of great details in the first half, both musical (Antonoff’s urgent psych-folk flutter that suggests Will Oldham at his most windswept) and textual (trying to find Forensic Files on the hotel TV, the cop that turns the shower on before calling). And every time she says “American whore,” it degausses everything around it. It turns the room into a diorama. It’s a relief when she makes like a desperado under the eaves for some trap-pop taunting. Antonoff launches triumphant countermelodies on the Mellotron; Del Rey uncorks some truly sardonic coos while doing donuts in the Ramada parking lot. By itself, I’m sure it would be slight; after all the underlining that precedes it, it’s cathartic.
[6]

Jonathan Bradley: “The last time I did a cartwheel is when I was nine.” I love when Lana Del Rey begins her songs as if she’s writing the first page of a 20th-century realist novel. I also love when Lana Del Rey works on epic scale; it suits her predilection towards myth and symbolism and narrative slippage. And yet I do not love “A&W,” which starts with woolly guitar picked like a mid-period Laura Marling single and then transforms into a rumbling 808 lope — it might be her first trunk-rattler. That’s a broad stylistic range, but none of it coheres, and while she addresses the bleak subject matter more plainly than usual, the telling isn’t striking enough to make cohesion not matter.
[5]

Ian Mathers: Look, I absolutely recognize that there are important things being addressed here, but in the spirit of “this meeting could have been an email” it’s also fucking interminable. Ethel Cain has decisively lapped her at this point, the transition between parts is dull as dishwater, and the second part just feels superfluous. Plus now I want a root beer, and I don’t have a root beer.
[2]

Alfred Soto: Those who write about lockjaw as a spiritual malaise should not sing as if with lockjaw.
[5]

Nortey Dowuona: Very good but the back end fucked it up big time.
[6]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Imagine the structure of “Partition,” except where instead of having the first half being about feeling badass and the second half being about having kinky sex with Jay-Z, the first half is about the experience of being sexualized and objectified and the second half is about confronting the mother of your lover. This is Lana aiming for and achieving vulnerability, epicness, and humor. “A&W” contains such striking reflections (“I mean look at my hair/Look at the length of it and the shape of my body/If I told you that I was raped/Do you really think that anybody would think/I didn’t ask for it?”) that when it turns into “Jimmy” you can’t help but being taken aback at the slyness and humor with which Lana quips, “Your mom called, I told her, you’re fuckin’ up big time.”
[8]

Will Adams: Every second of “A&W” feels important. If that sounds over-dramatic, consider this is Lana Del Rey we’re dealing with. She’s spent the last fifteen years chiseling away at her mission to distill the experience of American womanhood; there’s going to be lore. There’s the usual self-reference at play — the hotel/motel settings of her shelved Lana Del Ray aka Lizzy Grant; the hip-hop beats and schoolyard chants of Born to Die; an actual flash of strings from “Norman Fucking Rockwell” — while Lana flits through the many voices she’s established: the somber croon, the raspy head voice, the sedated mumble. Over seven minutes, she builds a narrative of sexuality turned hedonistic. It’s unsettling from the start, with a major/minor chord progression and detuned piano. A bit of sweetness enters in the pre-chorus, until the arrangement collapses at the refrain of, “this is the experience of being an American whore,” each time mounting with a throbbing sub bass. And then there’s the second half, where the ornate arpeggios are replaced with woozy trap, the detailed lyrics with repetition: “Jimmy only love me when he wanna get high,” she deadpans. It echoes the quiet resentment of the breakout song that launched a thousand takes, “Video Games,” but now there’s less neediness and more nihilism. NFR remains Lana’s magnum opus on an album level, but “A&W” might represent the same as a single song.
[10]

no blergs » Friday, December 1st, 2023 7:00 pm

What better time for recognition of skill and talent than Amnesty Week at The Singles Jukebox!

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[8.29]

Matias Taylor: The year’s grandest hit single is a tour-de-force not only for Raye as a songwriter and vocalist, dissecting grief and heartbreak into the year’s most devastating hook (“I don’t want to feel like I did last night”), but also for producer Mike Sabath, whose claustrophobic soundscape of piercing riffs and frantic percussion coils itself around her, matching and suffocating the song as it grows in intensity and sex-and-drugs desperation to escape having to feel in the moment. Then enters 070 Shake, ghost-like offering grim wisdom that provides little relief (“I’ll be naked when I leave and I was naked when I came”), before the song turns inside out and exhausts itself right on cue. They don’t make ’em like this every day.
[10]

Rose Stuart: I first heard this in December 2022, when I was feeling quite down on the current state of music. It had been one too many years of perfectly pleasant-sounding songs that were more white noise than music; songs that you could vaguely remember but made you feel nothing. And then along came “Escapism.” with it’s wailing synth that sounds like ambulance sirens and a drum beat that makes the blood pound in your ears. It’s a song that from the very first note forces a visceral reaction out of you, and only grows more dizzying as it speeds up, slows down, splits, and comes back together. More than anything, in a time when songwriters are taking ‘leave them wanting more’ a bit too much to heart, “Escapism.” has honest to god parts: intros, outros, choruses and post choruses, even musical intervals that make every second of its 4:33 minute run time feel earned. Still, not once does it lose you, because each part no matter how seemingly disconnected is a variance on the same musical theme. An increasing number of songs are slapping together whatever ideas they have and calling it a day, but “Escapism.” is deftly composed, growing into a symphony of drunken depression. Even a couple of lyrical missteps can’t keep it down. This is why, even though music has been picking up in recent months, “Escapism.” is the song I keep coming back to. It’s the anthem of bad times, and more than any other encapsulates 2023. 
[10]

Leah Isobel: As a longtime Raye booster and impassioned advocate for the destruction of major labels, “Escapism.” offers a narrative consummation that is practically irresistible: prodigy-level pop talent publicly breaks free of restrictive label contract after years of limbo, then scores the biggest hit of her career with a baroque banger that feels diametrically opposed to radio trends. (Never mind the TikToks.) More to the point, the song feels engineered to show off the skills that Raye honed during her time with Polydor — the dynamic vocal performance careening from conversational Cockney back phrases to delicate, precise vibrato; the songwriting that stacks tiny Instagrammable hooks in every corner. It’s a bravura performance and an incredibly gutsy and vulnerable bit of Grand Guignol pop. But its splattery undertones don’t quite sit right; it doesn’t escape me that the Raye single that crossed over wasn’t the vengeful rage-banger but the one that lets us witness her implosion without needing to think about why it’s happening. Still, after years and years of denial, I can’t fault Raye for excess.
[7]

Nortey Dowuona: You need somebody to push the bounds. Raye is that someone. It’s become pretty clear every other artist doing pop is just doing the bare minimum from songwriting to composition to vocals — just enough to count as one song. But Raye has compressed 6 years of hooky, accessible pop tunes into one jagged, wizzing pop, that wiggles out from her fists as a sneering whine, which morphs into a desperate prayer, that waits behind the off-key synth line which melts over the soft breakbeat drums, then IN COMES THE BASS. And I’m already acting like a dick, so you might as well stick it in. It’s been 50 years since rap cohesion began and if Raye is one of the first to shatter it beyond repair by attaching a fantastic performance from 070 “DON’T CALL ON SOCIAL MEDIA” Shake, who traps the ennui in her amber voice, then cracks as Raye feels the 4/4 pound in her head, a last desperate cry to cling to life, then so be it. Raye has been forced (ACTUALLY forced) into adherence to every rule and boundary we demand of pop music, popular musicians and of the industry and for one shining moment, she has taken the sharp edges of those boundaries and cut them out of her head — and ours. The bounds have now been pushed — off a cliff. It’s time to feel out a new way.
[10]

Katherine St Asaph: There’s “Novacane” in here, obviously, and Amy Winehouse and Rated R. And there are actually multiple layers of escapism here. The B-section doesn’t cut to the feeling so much as deflect it with vocal prowess; those “doctor, doctor” lines in that voice deflect it further with cliche. Every time that B-section rolls around, you just want the hedonism back, the Beyoncéan swag, the lyrics that fall out brash and shard-sharp and faster than the pain does, the siren synths and night-luxe chords, the bad behavior recounted with immediacy and allure. Which is just it, isn’t it? Check the YouTube graph: everyone else replays the first section too. Isn’t it convenient how “2019” rhymes with so many preceding years?
[9]

Taylor Alatorre: Much of My 21st Century Blues, from the title on down, feels like a lost album from 2014 that was shelved for accounting reasons, and “Escapism.” is no exception. With its mix of soulful piano chords and mellow hip hop sass, its tales of regretful hedonism, its “ironic” luxury name-drops, and its “not like the other girls” energy, it would fit comfortably on a radio playlist between Tove Lo and John Newman. But unlike the sad party songs of that era, which in part were a reaction to the excesses of peak EDM, “Escapism.” seems to exist in a universe of its own, unconcerned with trends, though laced with enough relatable truths to become trendy in spite of itself. The retro-contemporary stylings don’t grate as much as they otherwise would because they never threaten to upstage Raye herself, whose single overriding concern is to tell a story of disenchanted young adulthood — something that will never go out of style.
[6]

John S. Quinn-Puerta: A Jason Bourne credits nothing of a song that thinks pitch shifting is creativity. Done before, done better, done to death.
[3]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Not quite as thrilling of a B-movie as it wants to be — I keep expecting Raye to hit another gear but instead there’s just 070 Shake doing her haunted cyborg shtick.
[6]

Brad Shoup: There’s a very conscious sweep here — lyrical motifs and beat switchups and the earth-swallowing pitched-down mumble that indicates Decision Paralysis — so it’s fascinating that Raye spends the first half in Golden Age storyteller mode. “A little context if you care to listen/I find myself in a shit position” — that’s basically a Slick Rick opener (Tons of bars here, almost none by Shake.) Raye ends on a line about dancefloor drums but it’s the classic hip-hop kick (and a siren-like synth figure that could have been crafted by the RZA) that nudges this from the depths everyone here is bent on plumbing. 
[7]

Harlan Talib Ockey: It’s really funny seeing Genius trying to force this into a standard pop song structure when it is very much not. I instinctively want to compare this to an operatic aria or a story song, but what makes “Escapism.” special isn’t just its narrative, it’s the way it careens between sections in a drunken haze. Raye’s narrator is even self-aware, starting in medias res, telling us she’s backing up with “a little context”, and then carrying on. In fact, she heads “back to the intro, back to the bar” a lot. Raye’s voice reels through several different reference points and accents, acing both numb debauchery and haunting desperation. (And a genuinely mystifying pronunciation of “doctor, doctor”.) The twisting screech in the production never fully feels in sync with anything else, a powerfully unsettling choice. Once we’d reached the runtime of a typical 2023 pop single, I was wondering how we could possibly fit a whole 070 Shake feature in here. She ends up as the voice of oblivion, darkness at the core of stupor that shows what looks like escapism is a sprint towards self-destruction.
[10]

Jackie Powell: When I heard “Escapism” for the first time on the radio over six months ago, I was drawn to the way Raye sang the word “doctor.” She introduces the listener to her mixed head voice on that word and manages to allow her South London accent to trickle in. Her diction on that one word drew me in. I hadn’t really heard someone sing that way before. It was memorable. Sure, the way Raye sang that word was my personal hook into the song, but that’s not the central nervous system of “Escapism.” The beat is infectious, indicating the moments in the track when Raye is at her most confident and fervent. When the Mike Sabath beat halts, Raye and 070 Shake are forced to reflect upon what they actually are feeling. They can’t hide behind how infectious and how great the beat feels in the current moment. When the beat is stripped away, the reflection occurs. The alcohol has worn off. The beat takes the pain away just like how Raye wants it to be. But she knows better, that escape from pain is only temporary.
[9]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Escape from what and how, exactly? On its surface, “Escapism.” is just another song about masking the pain of a break-up using drugs and alcohol–but it also finds itself at the center of all of the narratives around power, abuse, and addiction that have dominated Raye’s career. Two years ago when we last covered her, she had just cried out to her fans, “I have come an expert at hiding my tears and my pain and I wanted to talk about it today.” Her label Polydor Records had been gaslighting her about releasing an album for seven years, threatening her, and forcing her to change her sound. (Now that “Escapism.” has gone #1 in the UK with Raye as an independent artist, I hope they feel foolish.) Years before, when she was 7, 21, 17, and 11, she had been sexually assaulted by record producer. Still determined to pursue her musical career, but unsure how to manage this all, along with growing body dysmorphia, she turned to alcohol and opiates. All of these perspectives inform “Escapism.,” which Raye has said is about “Chasing a maze of smoke and mirrors because clarity is bitterly intimidating.” The breathlessly-paced verses are about the recklessly going clubbing alone; the chorus is an aching plea for mercy and permanent dissociation. Raye performance is straight-up theater-girl, dark, gripped by last-minute key changes, soaring highs, and devastating lows. This was the first 2023 track I sang in the shower, holding my phone reading the lyrics, determined to emulate her delivery: making sure to draw out the syllables in “all of my diamonds are dripping on him,” and “I left everyone I love on read.” “Escapism.” works as at least a quadruple entendre, but it’s musical meaning, perhaps the cheesiest and least literal, is the most important for me. But Raye couldn’t have summed it up better herself: “I think music, on the whole, is escapism for us. I listen to music to escape or elevate out of anything. That’s one of the most important purposes of music — to feel good, sad or aided in processing any necessary emotion.”
[10]

Kayla Beardslee: I saw Raye live in October, and when she closed with this song, I kept thinking about what an unlikely hit “Escapism” is. It’s four-and-a-half minutes long, the title isn’t said once, and the lyrics are extremely dense, so fast and wordy they’re almost overwhelming. It’s a grim, gritty song where Raye deliberately shows her audience the worst sides of her; it’s also a song for the songwriting nerds, swells and ebbs in the arrangement mirroring the emotional turmoil of the lyrics, that has no intention of watering itself down to be more accessible. Yet it became her breakout smash anyway. Why? Because Raye is a goddamn star, that’s why, and the rest of the world is at fault for taking so long to catch up. Of course her biggest hit to date is one of the most idiosyncratic songs in her discography: no one else could have pulled off “Escapism” quite like Raye does, either as writer or performer, and that’s why it resonates despite all the complexities that on paper would seem to drag it down. Occasionally, talented people do get the recognition they deserve, and occasionally, the best songs do become hits. It doesn’t happen as often as it should, so when the moment comes along, you’ve got to make sure to celebrate it.
[9]

Ian Mathers: No comment.
[10]

3 blergs » Friday, December 1st, 2023 3:00 pm

We may prefer to have flowers brought to us in the pouring rain…

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[4.60]

Edward Okulicz: Something about this song clearly resonated with a lot of people, and months later I’m still unsure what it is. My best guess is that the self-confidence of the lyrics is given a mournful undertone by the melody and delivery. Now twice the people going through a break-up can relate! Good work, Miley; it’s a strong melody.
[7]

Tara Hillegeist: Fucking Miley.
[1]

Frank Falisi: What’s in a voice? Intention with friction, and then time. To write about Miley’s voice in terms of its recognizability risks the redundancy of writing about the sun’s warmth or the grass blade’s cool. Listen: she sings with one of the seminal grains in pop music. In spite of this fact or because of it, the voice has jostled through myriad transforming forms, since Hannah Montana, since Breakout. Sometimes a singular instrument bargains too recklessly with the free market, and while the chameleonic pop path is far from exclusive to Miley, her voice has been aggressively strip-mined by trends and forecasts, by its singer. And like a Fielder-Safdie-Stone curse, that Billboard cover story where she forced the voice to renounce hip-hop as a regressive and swear fealty to respectable family/blasé liberal politics, the changes have felt like market calibrations rather than aesthetic ones. She apologized, and to be sure, no pop presence deserves to be read one way: part of a stardom’s symbolism is that it speaks in a voice all on its own, in fact has no choice in the matter. But the voice’s grain has turned to game (show). Everything since has been a reduction: upraising “authentic country”, a half-hearted dalliance with Joan Jettness, eventually embracing life as a jukebox quartering out covers; the plastic glam-gloss possibilities of Bangerz barely warble out in the fricatives. “Flowers” is ostensibly a kiss-off, but all it does is reaffirm the transfiguration of a pop arc into a loop. It trades “Malibu”‘s domestic bliss for independent womanhood, a similar and familiar commodity de rigueur for re-branding icons. One wonders what the song would do if it rose to the occasion with real venom, if it let the voice (which is to say, the feeling) jab through the veneer of canned narrative. It doesn’t. “Flowers” doesn’t go anywhere, its chorus maintaining the same no-go goop groove that its verses offer. Not stuck in your head but just plain stuck, a voice circles. 
[2]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: So labored in its delivery that the message starts to make sense. Yes, I start to think, the sluggish melody has the semblance of pushing through pain. And then those harmonies arrive to shove the Inspiration down your throat. I don’t like self-love when it’s obnoxious.
[3]

Ian Mathers: One of the few faint silver linings of TSJ gracefully exiting the stage is I thought I’d never have to reveal certain shameful secrets once I wasn’t writing about certain pop stars. But I have to face up to it: I just don’t enjoy Miley Cyrus’s voice. It’s a perfectly fine voice! And I’m not talking about her performance or anything. There’s just something about the timbre of her voice that doesn’t work for me. I’ve never exactly striven for the illusion of objectivity in these blurbs (C’mon. C’mon!), but I admit I’ve caught myself humming the chorus here enough that I’m trying not to hold my irrational and visceral dislike of Cyrus singing against it.
[6]

Jonathan Bradley: As she’s grown older, Miley’s grainy voice has gathered more charm and personality, not qualities it had been lacking in her youth — even as a Disney Channel actor she evinced a sharp sense of performance savvy and comic timing. She’s also learned that the public will punish her if she gets too outré, which is why her big hit of 2023 was a song of low-key melancholia colored by gestures towards independence that resonate faintly without being at all disruptive. No one’s ever going to be troubled if she buys her own bouquet. The result is this year’s answer to “Cold Heart”: a song catchy enough to become omnipresent and wan enough to quickly wear out its welcome.
[4]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Honestly if we had reviewed this when it came out I’d probably be a few points higher on it — but everything that seemed charming here upon first listen has faded with time. That disco groove feels stiffer and more focus-grouped the more times it loops, Miley’s insouciance has morphed to laziness, and that Bruno Mars quote has lost what little cleverness it had to begin with. What remains is a thoroughly under-written event single, a nothing of a song in the vague outline of a hit.
[2]

Alex Clifton: I’ve heard this song so many times and I can easily hum it, but I can’t remember any lyrics beyond “I can buy myself flowers/write my name in the sand.” Am I just bad at paying attention? I mean, kind of, but I think it speaks to how I view Cyrus’s work overall: really catchy, memorable melodies, but weak lyrics that wash away. It’s a shame as it’s a neat hook, but acts as a six-second intrusive thought, built more for bite-sized consumption. Added a point because I will never be able to buy flowers again without thinking of this song, in much the same way that my brain automatically turns to Katy Perry whenever I see plastic bags. 
[6]

Leah Isobel: Arid guitars, parched Miley vocals, lyrics so terse they might as well be mirages: this is global warming pop. So when she says “I can buy myself flowers,” it’s not just aspirational in the sense of being over someone’s bullshit; it’s aspirational in the sense that flowers will someday cost as much as a house in Malibu.
[5]

Nortey Dowuona: It’s a little surprising that Miley Cyrus is now a respectable pop singer who makes convincing country pop, mainly cuz for a while she was off following her own weird muse into any direction and making albums with her Dead Petz and singing with Lil Nas X. But now she’s making conventional guitar pop with either neatly mixed drums or very lively drum programming that launch each chorus into a brightly lit croon that lights up at the tail end, Miley’s last searing “than you can” lingering before the song ebbs and stops. And it’s a little surprising because it’s actually pretty good. (It ain’t Slide Away tho.)
[8]

Brad Shoup: I’m more appreciative of ballads than I used to be, and a disco ballad is a great change of pace. Miley is aiming this at the dive bar; there’s no show-stopping bit, just a constant smolder goosed by guitar and electric piano. (The strings should’ve gotten to sob a little!) When the high-stepping chorus comes in all I can think of is “When I Was Your Man”: partly the melody, partly the flowers. 
[7]

Taylor Alatorre: I don’t know whether the thing about “When I Was Your Man” being one of Liam Hemsworth’s favorite songs is just a cop-out to avoid having to pay royalties to the Smeezingtons, but Miley doesn’t seem very determined to disprove that theory here. Her unbothered, above-it-all delivery could stand to be a little more bothered, and parts of the song’s structure are just plain frustrating, like the stubborn, senseless pause that precedes every chorus and forces its already-limited stock of momentum to restart back at zero. The wobbly contours of Miley’s voice are arresting enough to prevent a complete collapse of listener interest, but it’s hard to fashion a convincing portrait of liberated selfhood out of an earlier song that’s built on woeful penitence.
[4]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Miley’s music as of late has evolved to genuinely interesting places steeped in introspection and authenticity. It’s a disappointment, then, that “Flowers” is the biggest hit she’s had in years. It retreads ground she’s covered in a format that can only be described as maudlin, drab, and too on-the-nose.
[4]

Jeffrey Brister: I don’t listen to terrestrial radio, like, ever. Haven’t in years. All of my music consumption comes exclusively from RSS feeds, social media, and hallowed sites like the one you’re reading right now. My only exposure to “what’s on the radio” is in segments of seconds as my wife’s alarm goes off, notes wafting from a tinny speaker at a progressively louder volume. In those moments, immediately after waking, I’m groggy and confused, unable to form higher level thoughts. This particular song has been a part of that ritual of gaining awareness, and every single time it has come on, my first truly coherent thought is, “man, this Lady Gaga song is not good.”
[3]

Katherine St Asaph: I know that after the “Blurred Lines” case songwriters reportedly got paranoid about receiving vibes-based lawsuits and started changing or crediting anything that even kind of sounds like another famous song, but is that even true? Have they stopped? Because this is just Cher’s “Strong Enough.”
[5]

Scott Mildenhall: Clever writing, textually appropriate plagiarism and memorable melodies — but while these flowers are neatly arranged, that just means they’ve been dispassionately stuffed into a panel. Perhaps it sounded better on first listen, but at this stage it’s flaural wallpaper.
[7]

Alfred Soto: After a flop album that I enjoyed, Miley Cyrus returned with — what exactly? Why and how “Flowers” resonated for millions in the first half of 2023 baffles me. Her nasal Stevie Nicks-indebted goat-warble is its own attraction, the hook is pretty good, and… well, what? Combine her timbre with the line “I can buy myself flowers” and presto — a yearbook quote if yearbooks existed. 
[7]

David Moore: I’m a digital download pump-priming truther, so I guess if the alternative is fascists getting to #1 for a week or two I’ll take a full calendar year’s slow and steady drip of Miley’s mids as a form of pop chart harm reduction. And this is one of those songs like Bebe Rexha’s “Last Hurrah” that I appreciate the personal connection to without it affecting my sense of how dumb it is. My youngest really likes this one! We both laugh about the part where she says she could talk to herself for hours (that seems weird!), and he is fascinated by the idea that writing your name in the sand is something that people who are dating might do, because he also likes to write things in sand and does not yet fully understand dating, but he did, unbeknownst to me, download an app on his tablet to practice kissing, and he also downloaded a “love app” and correctly noted that in one picture the two people are in love with each other even though she’s his crush, which means technically she shouldn’t love him back (he’s six… to her credit, Miley Cyrus has always deeply understood six-year-olds, the low end of her old Radio Disney demo). And hey, speaking of Bebe Rexha and endearing constitutional midness, isn’t it kind of funny that the one person in the world worse at being a pop star than Miley Cyrus happened to put out the best Miley Cyrus song of the year and no one cared? They should have paid for more digital downloads! 
[5]

Will Adams: EDITOR’S NOTE: To prevent attracting attention from Ms. Cyrus’ passionate fanbase, this review has been amended for the writer’s protection. Ten years on from being a twerk-pop provocateur, Miley has firmly cemented her status as a C-list an A-list pop star who releases some of the most boring iconic music put to tape. From the zen lite-rock of “Malibu” to the shiny-leather pop of “Midnight Sky” to the disco of “Flowers,” it seems she’s never always had anything something interesting to say, no matter the outfit. Perhaps that’s what helped “Flowers” become Spotify’s most streamed song globally this year: it sounds like nothing everything. The arrangement is terminally limp serve. The self-love imagery is beyond basic vivid. Miley pushes her voice as usual, but with such staid slay surroundings, the song’s failure legend behavior becomes that much more apparent; the flowers have already wilted outsold Ariana.
[3]

Michelle Myers: Personhood is fundamentally lonesome, and we should all seek ways to break free from ourselves. Dance, drink, laugh, make music together. Make music that isn’t boring nu-disco! You can buy yourself flowers, but a dandelion from someone who loves you means so much more.
[3]

1 blerg » Friday, December 1st, 2023 11:00 am

Separation, Shakira-style!

[Video]
[8.35]

Nortey Dowuona: FC Andorra are 7th in the Segunda Division; Karol G is on the Barbie soundtrack. I say this divorce was the best thing to ever happen to them.
[9]

Peter Ryan: A comprehensive public clobbering, an icy-caustic bookend to the relationship that wormed its way into her discography with the ebullient “Me Enamoré”, stuffed with double entendre indictments sharp and specific enough to preemptively render any rebuttal pathetic. Structurally it ranks among her most ambitious, all polyrhythms and quasi-freestyle character, the latter part no doubt owing to the BZRP Music Sessions format. There’s catharsis in her kicking open the door on the private strife about which she’d previously stayed tight-lipped, and in the meta-narrative of the megastar shaking off the dead weight and finding creative reinvigoration. While they’ve become fewer and farther between in the last decade, she hasn’t lost her knack for creating a Moment — I heard this at the corner store, wafting out of passing car windows, on the dancefloor — she wasn’t kidding about cashing in.
[9]

Alex Ostroff: The main attractions here are Shakira’s righteous and yet somehow still icy fury and her impeccable wordplay. She wishes her ex the best with her “supuesto reeemplazo”, but makes it absolutely clear that nobody is capable of actually replacing her. In someone else’s version of this revenge-pop anthem, your husband absconding with a woman half your age might be a source of insecurity, but for Shakira it’s another sign of his cluelessness — at 44, she’s worth two 22-year-olds and presents it as a simple and obvious fact. Bizarrap initially seems to take a backseat, but he brings plenty to the table, evolving his production and adding details that accentuate and complement hers. Tonight, I’m obsessed with the way he brings in that reggaeton-esque percussion right at “Me dejaste de vecina a la suegra/Con la prensa en la puerta y la deude en Hacienda” and how that propels the song into Shakira’s triplet of creíste/heriste/volviste rhymes. Shakira’s best material in the post-Fijación Oral era of her career has consistently been her Spanish albums, but until the restructuring of streaming and Billboard chart metrics in recent years, their popularity (and pop excellence) was never properly reflected. Of Pique’s many, many sins, the one I’m most angry about was causing Shakira to relocate to Spain — away from her main collaborators and recording studios — and thus keeping her away from the radio at a time when audiences’ engagement with global pop (and especially music in Spanish) seems much bigger and more permanent than the limited crossover moments of the 90’s and early 2000’s. Her post-BZRP releases have mostly been collaborations with an extremely varied list of rising Latinx stars in a wide range of genres, from a reggaeton heartbreak diss track with Karol G to a regional Mexican polka track with Fuerza Regida about labor rights and Pique firing the nanny who snitched on him for cheating. I have absolutely no idea what to expect from Shakira next, and I couldn’t be more excited. 
[10]

Harlan Talib Ockey: 1) Cultural reset. 2) I love mess. 3) We now go live to Pique stepping on a rake. 4) Infinitely more energy than “Te Felicito” or “Monotonía”. 5) Actually, Shakira hasn’t sounded this forceful in a long time. 6) Bizarrap at the top of his own game rather than trying super hard to make corridos, for example. 7) “¡LAS MUJERES YA NO LLORAN, LAS MUJERES FACTURAN!”
[9]

Aaron Bergstrom: As a non-Spanish speaker, I’m probably missing out on some of the nuance here, but allow me to offer a brief letter of recommendation for 1) listening to this for the first time with minimal context, 2) focusing only on Shakira’s inflection and intonation, 3) picking out a few lines where she sounds especially pleased with herself, 4) thinking “ooohhhh, I bet these are daggers,” and then 5) looking up the English translation and confirming that every single one is just as vicious as you’d hoped. Because let me tell you, it is a delightful experience.
[8]

Jessica Doyle: Cuando era niña, en mi escuela podría estudiar solamente francés; no  empecé a aprender hablar español hasta desde cuatro o cinco años. Hoy  tengo una cita cada día con Duolingo y puedo comprender unas frases,  pero quiero apreciar el idioma mucho más, y lo que me motiva, es esta  canción. Shakira canta como sus palabras tienen pesos y formas; se puede  esucuchar y sentir cuando ellas se chocan con el suelo–“mastique’ y trague’, trague y mastique’,” “con la deuda  a la Hacienda.” Además, ella gana confianza y acelera, asi que cuando  ella canta, “Yo valgo por dos de 22,” no es un cope defensivo, es una  declaración de hecho. El idioma es su arma y su poder. Y el ritmo es  único; ella no lo podría haber canto en inglés. Entonces, escribí este  blurb en español; no lo escribí en inglés y traducé. Sé que hay muchos  errores (Google Translate me dice que “I translated” no es “traducé,” es  “traduje”), pero creo que sería un error más grande hablar de esta  canción en inglés. La escucho y me hace querer estudiar y aprendar más.
[8]

Will Adams: An undersung aspect of what makes “Pa Tipos Como Tú” so compelling is how Bizarrap’s beat switch-ups throughout the song propel it forward. It begins as an icy breath of Italo that recalls She Wolf‘s more delirious moments. Midway through the second verse, the floor caves in to reveal a heavy, rhythmic groove, as if gathering power for the next attack. The second chorus arrives with a walloping synth bass, reminiscent of “Padam Padam” but even more menacing. It makes for one of the most exciting listening experiences of the year, instilling an uncertainty of where this thing is headed next. All the while, Shakira floats on top, mercilessly delivering a brutal takedown that leaves nothing in its wake.
[8]

Tara Hillegeist: The last time anyone on Shakira’s level tried to write a song about how mad she isn’t like this, it was over a decade ago, and “Irreplaceable” that effort absolutely wasn’t, drowned in goopy self-affirmation and breathy lack of confidence. Compare the liquid contempt swirling around every syllable, here, the bared-fang sharpness of the enunciation as she howls “You thought you’d hurt me, you only made me stronger/Women no longer cry, women get paid”. Shakira’s fury isn’t the fury of a woman left abandoned, with only scorn as her cold comfort — as one of pop’s inarguable queens, she has an entire country at her back. It’s only natural that she can’t simply settle for destroying her ex’s memory alone, when there’s an entire dancefloor waiting to destroy it in her honor instead. Pity Shakira’s ex-husband, who will go down in pop-cultural history as nothing more than the expertly character-assassinated trophy this song leaves behind to hang on the she-wolf’s wall, alongside all the others who thought to make a prize of her instead, only to find, as ever, that it’s not their world to rule, but hers. Or don’t; the viperous specificity with which she approaches the subject matter in question makes it readily apparent that from her perspective, this reckoning was only ever held at bay by the love he squandered in the first place. The other woman should probably count herself lucky Shakira only holds her accountable for thinking herself entitled to taking Shakira’s place in his affections; if there were any other reasons, Shakira clearly wouldn’t have hesitated to include them. Let the dancefloor show mercy, then, if there’s any to be found. 
[9]

Katherine St Asaph: Shakira’s hips don’t lie; their involuntary sway, she’s said, is how she identified Bizarrap’s track as a Depeche Mode homage too chilly to pass up. And yet the track is not nearly as cold as the way Shakira vaporizes her song’s targets from on high. That her specific complaints are relatively petty — basically, that getting cheated on has stuck Shakira with a lot of rich person problems — is beside the point. Repeatedly, she drops the real names of two real-ass people, syllable by syllable via careful wordplay, as if putting a scope into place. Her vocal is mixed loud, processed past any human timbre, and arranged to fill all space in the track. She sounds less like an individual jilted woman than a metallic weapon, than the genderless, pitiless, all-judging voice of God. Finally comes the killing smite: “and now you’re with someone just like you.” It’s not often that experiencing a punching-down feels this bitter and inevitable, this compelling and correct.
[10]

Rose Stuart: I said in my review of Olivia Rodrigo’s “Vampire” that, in the year of breakup songs, hers was the only one that wasn’t full of posturing. This is the only song where that posturing feels earned. Where other songs made neither their pain nor strength convincing, Shakira comes out triumphant, coming for blood with each finely picked detail in every savage line. The song never stops going in, even using the name of her ex’s partner for some masterful wordplay. I’ve heard many breakup songs that try to go at the singer’s ex, but this is the first time I’ve actually felt sorry for the song’s subject — after all, it must be hard to show your face in public after being roasted this thoroughly. 
[9]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: A swaggering, sexy encounter that has me simultaneously wanting me to say “I’m too good for you, bitches!” and “Step on my face, mother!”
[9]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: lol hell yeah
[8]

Alfred Soto: With any insignificant number of synths per track signifying as “1980s” the response to this track was a given, but the thudding insistence of its beat muscled past those assumptions. As alert as a burglar with good tools, Shakira talks so much shit that the judgment fades before the verdict. Imagine if they’d released this at the height of the 2010-2011 EDM epoch.
[8]

Jonathan Bradley: Bizarrap’s sleek, gleaming disco sets off the lack of adventure in Dua Lipa’s 2023 comeback; these cool synths glide with a propulsive sense of drama. Shakira, uncharacteristically, is the weak spot though, allowing herself to recede into the background. She doesn’t always command attention, but even her reserve is usually compelling all on its own. Here, she’s content to vibe, waiting for someone else to make something happen. 
[5]

Brad Shoup: Impeccably imaged: we’re used to that from Shakira. But the chilliness is something else: a brisk disco kiss-off that fogs up the anguish she’s audibly fighting. The way she paces herself is really cool: icy pop in the first verse, a switch to reggaeton cadence at the end of the second that fully detonates in the third. She’s acting as her own feature rapper: just another power move.
[8]

Ian Mathers: I was the high mark last time we covered Shakira, but even if I was going to be here (doubt it!) it’ll clearly be for very different reasons. With “Don’t Wait Up” it was that fucked-up little organ (or whatever) riff, and while Shakira was good, her performance wasn’t specifically what drew me to the track. Here, while the production is good, it’s her performance that’s much more central. Even before my monolingual ass looks up a translation you can kinda just tell from the vibe that someone is getting it in the neck, and/or Shakira is feeling her oats (“and,” as it turns out) and then once you do… “Sorry, I already took another plane” is a hell of a way to start. Plenty of specific detail lurking in there, but the repeated “I was too big for you and that’s why you are with a girl just like you” fairly blisters as it goes past.
[8]

Taylor Alatorre: All else aside, it must really suck to not only have the Tsar Bomba of diss tracks dropped on you, but to have that track sent out to the world with this podcast episode-ass title. Like, at least Jay-Z can boast that he’s part of the reason we all say “ethered” now; no such consolation here. The tossed-off nature of the release, while adding insult to injury — you don’t even get an album track! — makes it harder to admit this into the pantheon of the greatest diss songs of all time. But I get the sense that legacy is not really what Shakira is concerned with here. This is a crime committed in the heat of the moment, in broad daylight, and everyone will remember where they were when they witnessed it. For her, that is enough.
[7]

3 blergs » Friday, December 1st, 2023 7:00 am

We conclude Country/Folk Thursday with the top song of the year, and current bottom song of the year for us…

[Video]
[3.06]

Taylor Alatorre: User: “Please compose a paragraph-length song review, otherwise known as a ‘blurb,’ for a collaborative music writing website called The Singles Jukebox. The song in question is ‘Last Night’ by Morgan Wallen, who was an established star prior to your January 2022 cutoff but has since leapt into superstardom. Your blurb should briefly reflect on this rise on popularity before moving on to discuss the song itself, noting its subject matter of a drunken tryst within a troubled relationship, set to the backdrop of a repeated acoustic riff and soon accompanied by percussive hip hop-style snapping that heralds the apotheosis of the early 2010s ‘bro-country’ style. The next part of the review should be a joke about the large number of songwriters on Wallen’s albums, and how the predictability of these assembly-line productions is reminiscent of the uncanny, routinized output of language models such as ChatGPT. Please try to avoid making the joke a hackneyed or trite one, though I recognize the difficulty of this. Finally, end the blurb with a more positive couple of sentences that justify the decision to avoid giving the song an aggressively low numerical rating — perhaps praising it for not imposing itself on the listener or taking up too much of their time, or for creating a sonic atmosphere that somewhat evokes the feelings it’s describing. The overall tone of the blurb should be jocular, yet insightful.” [ There was an error generating a response ]
[4]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: There’s a reason that discourse about the musical dimensions of the longest running Billboard #1 doesn’t exist: outside of its noxious role in today’s culture wars, “Last Night” is utterly boring. 
[3]

Will Adams: Really sums up the dire state of this year’s Billboard chart that of the spate of country #1s we saw, perhaps the least odious was a song by Morgan Wallen. “Last Night” hits the marks of your standard crossover via a slick production, but it hovers. We’re left anticipating a Zedd-esque drop that never arrives.
[4]

Edward Okulicz: This song was huge, and I probably didn’t need to hear it again but in the interest of critical integrity I did. And then it kept playing the album, and I was horrified that it all sounded well-crafted — except that each song has a bit that sounds like it was left blank for a committee to insert a gratuitous reference to booze. “Last Night” at least makes sense. I know he’s a dick, but dicks sometimes make passable art.
[6]

Ian Mathers: I try not to let past biases or other factors cut me off from music, especially what’s popular, because engaging with that stuff is always interesting even when I don’t like it. But if the price of never having to listen to the likes of this dude again is never quite understanding the genre that was incredibly popular in my hometown when I was growing up and I hated, and if he seems like a huge piece of shit too? Fuck it, I’ll take that deal. I hate “I like everything but rap and country” BS the same as most here, but if we all get our own little niches to be personally reactionary about, this particular flavour of bro-country is mine.
[0]

Frank Falisi: What exactly is a “Morgan Wallen?? An $80 haircut that smells like brand tie-in whiskey, which is to say, paint thinner? A law firm that represents boring pop country songs? (“The song in question didn’t know any better, your honor, and its love of Jason Mraz clearly speaks to its high moral character.”) An “Alan Smithee” pseudonym Nashville songwriters credit to projects they’d rather disown? Say what you will about the tenets of Billy Ray Cyrus, at least his pop’s got the beef. The disemboweled “Last Night” sounds like at least three instruments have been removed from the mix, like the chorus went unfinished but not in an interesting Roy Orbison aria way. It suggests the purest calcification of Nashville cultural aesthetic as the dominant songwriting engine of country songs. “Last Night” is a country song a la la croix: essence and static, wisps of myths, handclaps so you don’t forget to. It doesn’t ever start, so it never feels like it ends. You can’t just say you’re singing about desire. You have to actually sing it. Doesn’t a song about kissing need to have a body?
[1]

Katherine St Asaph: “Last night we let the liquor talk — I can’t remember everything we said, but we said it all.” So you can remember it, then. What exactly did you say? As Sam Sodomsky wrote in Pitchfork, Morgan Wallen’s music now has the double task of functioning as love songs or drunk songs or whatever, while alluding as vaguely as possible to the real-life events (i.e., getting filmed saying racial slurs) that he knows he’s being forgiven for. Did the songwriters have that in mind? Probably not; nothing about “Last Night” has the specificity to be meant for any particular singer. Does the subtext loom? Yes, and hard; that’s probably part of why this went No. 1. But a larger part is surely “Last Night”‘s routine politeness. I miss when bro-country sounded bro-y. And when I didn’t think I’d ever write the words “the enduring influence of Taio Cruz’s “Dynamite.”
[2]

Leah Isobel: “You know you love to fight / And I say shit I don’t mean” is really the whole story here, huh? It would be interesting if Morgan took the position of an unreliable narrator — if that line was meant to come across as an insecure projection — but the way he flips the title around to land precisely on the tonic indicates to me that, no, he’s supposed to come across as a clear-eyed truth teller. And the truth he’s telling is one shared by many: that men always deserve context and understanding; that women are always crazy; that entrenched power differentials are natural and good. Why else would he be so popular?
[3]

Brad Shoup: This is dirtbag music in the worst possible sense. It’s nearly three minutes of someone being hunted for sport. Like the townspeople of Wake in Fright, Wallen cultivates a boozy grayness wherein only he can draw out black and white. His would-be ex’s friends send her back; her calls never reach her mother; her truck never makes it out of his driveway. It feels like horror-movie shit. Country usually deals with these situations wryly or with regret. He’s just smug: a drunken master of sex and debate. The only time he cracks is when he barks “I know you packed your shit“: an ominous sneer. Otherwise, Wallen is flat, just bobbing along the mud-brown production, a mush of perfunctory snaps and guitar. Out of everything on One Thing at a Time, this song feels legitimately evil.
[0]

Alfred Soto: The Morgan Wallen Problem wouldn’t exist if he wasn’t a rather ruthless chronicler of his own dissipation. Let’s face it: just about all of the (many, many) songs on his last two albums depict embarrassments, whether it’s saying the wrong thing to a woman or picking unnecessary fights, but all for the sake of another shot. The songs would be as sodden as him if the negotiation between programmed beats and hot country band weren’t so careful. The guitar twang of “Last Night” complements his Bert-of-Sesame-Street gnarl, and as a result I’ve no problem with this mega-hit sharing space with a similar Zach Bryan tune — only Bryan isn’t as good a collaborator. 
[8]

Aaron Bergstrom: A love song to alcohol and spite with an incidental romantic relationship tacked on for cover. Just imagine how exhausting it must be to be be friends with either of these people.
[2]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: I have not categorically ruled out the possibility of enjoying Morgan Wallen — I liked “7 Summers” a lot! But this is dire. What was once a crowd-pleasing lack of specificity in his work has become complete blankness, the four writers here managing to include no relevant details about any aspect of what they’re writing about. “Last Night” is one of those songs that’s a massive hit by any standards but has inspired essentially no worthy critical appraisal, a piece of pop dark matter looming in the background of the culture, too boring to analyze. Every line, every production choice, every aching honk in Wallen’s voice is a Potemkin village.
[2]

David Moore: I’ve gone the whole year without knowingly hearing this song. It’s fascinating — the unholy endpoint of Lil Nas X and Taylor Swift’s shadow transformation of modern country’s sound (hypnotic go-nowhere rhythmic twang, clumsy rap cadence, restriction of vocal range to three to five inceessantly repeated notes, markedly reduced distance between verse and chorus) as interpreted, not unfaithfully, by some racist C.H.U.D.
[3]

Harlan Talib Ockey: What if Maroon 5 went country?
[1]

Jonathan Bradley: Wallen structures “Last Night” like a rap song, his wandering guitar figure looping back on itself like the Red Hot Chili Peppers sample that Crazy Town used on “Butterfly.” There’s also some rap cadence in how he delivers his lyric, which country singers like Sam Hunt have proven can be effective for this storytelling genre, but here it reveals the weakness in Wallen’s narrative. He just doesn’t have a lot to say, and what he does have to say isn’t very inspired. Wallen let the liquor talk, he can’t remember everything he said, he said shit he don’t mean (yikes, maybe this isn’t a subject you want to bring up, dude). The anger and angst in his voice as he growls “you packed your shit and slammed the door” is the rare moment where it sounds like he might be referring to a specific event rather than a generic couple’s fight, and “you call your mama and I call your bluff” is a good-enough bit of wordplay. But for the most part, this is a sub-three minute song that returns to its bland hooks too often.
[4]

John S. Quinn-Puerta: As much as I want to find the repetition annoying, and as intolerable as the keyboard affectation of the looping acoustic becomes, I can’t deny I enjoy this. There were undoubtedly some truly awful high school talent show covers of this around my hometown last spring, but I might have joined in on them twelve (TWELVE?!) years ago. It’s the persistent singability of the melody coupled with the tragic human affection for patterns. This is what Heat Waves did to me all over again. 
[6]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: I’m afraid this sounds too much like the first song I learned on guitar — City and Colour’s “Hello, I’m In Delaware” — to truly hate. I just wish Wallen didn’t add the stock drum track; the song is propulsive enough in both its gliding melodies and self-impressed vitriol. He sings with a smirk, well aware that he’s getting away with every empty word, and it’s catchy enough that you know people will join in. Someone should probably **** him.
[6]

Nortey Dowuona: Fuck Morgan Wallen and everyone who loves him.
[0]

2 blergs » Thursday, November 30th, 2023 7:51 pm

An old Jukebox fave meets a new country darling we apparently also kinda like…

[Video]
[6.57]

Nortey Dowuona: There are 3 white men I trust. Zach Bryan is one of them. Mainly because he doesn’t attempt to append holier than thou posturing for internet brownie point, beg for bigots approval to make his crashing career successful or fuck around making bad Jeremih songs to appear ahead of the curve. He just writes honest, sincere songs about being a deeply flawed man who is consistently putting himself out there to be loved and to love back, despite the consequences or the punishment of pain, shame, loneliness, failure. Kacey thrives in the midst of these moments and within the turmoil, making a home for herself alongside him, despite it coming apart at the seams due to the aforementioned flaws. And as they sing the final chorus together, you feel the strained, flickering love that is leaning and diminishing, only one breath away from being extinguished.
[8]

Jonathan Bradley: Imagine Zach Bryan two decades ago: this ex-military ne’er-do-well recording lo-fi country ballads on his lonesome out in Oklahoma would have been signed to Lost Highway and then lost in the thickets of Paste write-ups. Now he’s number one on Billboard. Times change, but so do the hooks, and Bryan has landed on a good one, the way he and Kacey Musgraves wail “you only smile like that when you’re drinking,” lovelorn and desolate together. Bryan is a folk singer of negative space; he illuminates his glowing little melodies while the song surrounding him lives in that vast blackness stretching into the great plains beyond.
[9]

Alfred Soto: Zach Bryan writes about blasted, blighted lives, and his workaday conviction elevates the occasionally staid material. Rotgut whiskey and Kacey Musgraves can’t ease his mind. So he dwells in the shadow of memory.
[6]

Michael Hong: Bryan’s gruffness sounds great on his plain arrangements, but the thinness of Musgraves’ voice on her solo take of the chorus makes the whole track feel stiff. The real gem off his self-titled album is with Sierra Ferrell, the plainness making their harmonies and its melodic simplicity shine.
[4]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: I’ll be honest: the first several times I only listened to this for Kacey Musgraves. The more I hear “I Remember Everything,” however, the more I see how Kacey’s diaphanous, hazy delivery only works because of how Bryan acts as a brusk, grounded foil. He seems like a perfectly pleasant, reclusive, well-therapized man, one who has earned the moment in the sun he’s experienced this year. 
[7]

Ian Mathers: It is kind of wild to think that this guy is considered the same basic genre (and has hits on the same charts) as that Morgan Wallen fuck; chunks of this are not that far away from, say, Damien Jurado. I’m sure it’s not Bryan’s only mode (he put out a fucking triple album, for god’s sake), but it works here.
[7]

Thomas Inskeep: The music on the verses (especially the first) almost sounds like it’s being played at the wrong speed? And what’s with Bryan’s mush-mouthed singing voice? Not to mention that this doesn’t sounds like the duet it should be, just two singer’s verses spliced together. I’d love to like this, but not much about it works for me.
[4]

Leah Isobel: “I Remember Everything” is approximately two steps away from Pity Sex; even its flashes of humor bend toward flowery emo sentiment (“You’re like concrete feet in the summer heat/ It burns like hell when two soles meet”). It’s fertile ground, but the weepy arrangement and Zach’s whimpery, crackling vocal oversell it a bit.
[6]

Katherine St Asaph: Three things elevate “I Remember Everything” from the staid “see, this is real country music” ballads that it’s not far off from. Zach Bryan’s songwriting is carefully observed, and his muted voice suggests a low emotional ceiling — making it extra powerful when he rips through it. And in turn Kacey Musgraves’ voice, while still youthful and winning, is maturing nicely into a less tremulous Emmylou or Dolly.
[8]

Hannah Jocelyn: There’s this slightly late guitar strum at 1:34 (and again at 3:03) that’s annoyed me all year, and I have to point it out because nobody else has. Otherwise, this is an above-average Civil Wars song with some pretty 7/4 verses, marred by a rushed production job — the arrangement aims for gravitas, but you need lush Daniel Lanois or Gary Pacsoza production for that, not first-take-best-take performances. Yet if it’s Zach Bryan or Noah Kahan, I’m taking Bryan every time.
[6]

John S. Quinn-Puerta: Between this and Noah Kahan’s ascendancy I’m convinced that folk and country will make it 2013 again through science or magic. If it means more duets, I’ll take it!
[8]

Tara Hillegeist: Soulful melancholy over gentle strumming meant to put the emphasis on the observed detail, the folksy reminiscences, of the singer’s well-waxed lyricism is as much a posture as the cocksure drunkard’s swagger, where country’s concerned; it all comes down to whether you can back the pose up with a sincere enough delivery to match. Good thing Bryan has a voice like an old train engine run hard off homemade distillations, instead of something studio-smooth and syrupy-slick; it sells the vibe almost as well as the images his lyrics conjure up can manage, all by themselves. Musgraves’ lighter touch doesn’t shift the tenor of the piece so much as add another tone to the portrait being sonically painted; the flecks of sunlight and gold, coming in through the glass bottle you can all but hear, sitting not far from Bryan’s hand. Indeed, she’s the one to shed a little needed light on one of those ironic details that can give the rest of a song the kind of wry, bittersweet bite it needs to go down feelingly. For all that the song is a story told by Bryan’s narrator, it’s Musgraves’ girl that’s remembered early, lyrically, as the better tale-spinner of the two. So, naturally, when it’s her turn on the verse, it comes out that the one time Bryan’s narrator went so far as to imagine up a future between the two of them, she already knew he couldn’t really mean it. A less controlled song would’ve found a moment to resolve that tension before it ended; “I Remember Everything” simply lingers in the revelation, and the melancholy, and the might’ve-beens, till the sun comes up and the unwise urge to do more than live with it passes.
[8]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: He’s just some guy, which is the point. And this is stately, well-struck, and a little bit boring — “Dawns” did it better, and not just because Maggie Rogers is a much better fit within the Zach Bryan sonic universe — but I still find it charming even through all of the tedious talk of authenticity and roots rock stardom. Much like everything he’s done, “I Remember Everything” is self-conscious of Zach Bryan’s place in the world — the lyric is all lived-in small town signifiers, less a narrative or even a “Don’t You Want Me” style point-counterpoint and more a slice of life, but everything else aims for grandeur. Kacey Musgraves is perhaps the crux of “I Remember Everything” — unlike the rest of the guests (The Lumineers and a bunch of guys that sound like The Lumineers) on Zach Bryan by Zach Bryan, she’s (a) made interesting music herself and (b) grappled with that same lyrical/musical divide in her own work. And yet the slight distance in her performance is what ultimately consigns the song to being an interesting curio rather than a barn-burner: the two sketch slightly different frames on the same moment, Musgraves remembering but Bryan desperately asking to be remembered. 
[6]

Brad Shoup: Maybe it’s the sand or the “grown men don’t cry” bit, but this feels like Bryan’s Lana Del Rey homage: I’m kinda surprised the violins weren’t boosted about 25%, or that the drummer didn’t try something more martial. As soon as I realized we were getting a boy-girl duet about slugging down whiskey, I thought about Paisley/Krauss. But Bryan’s not interested in that kind of operatic tragedy. He’s more glum than maudlin, fiddling with the memory of a truck like the screwcap on some Kentucky Gentleman. Musgraves is the voice of reason, or maybe just exasperation; she can’t caress the melody alongside Bryan because that would be commiseration.
[5]

1 blerg » Thursday, November 30th, 2023 3:00 pm

Smokin’ in the boys room…

[Video]
[6.35]

Tara Hillegeist: Like much of boygenius’ output, group name included, this is sublime hangout music with pretenses towards something sublimated — pretenses that just about manage to get in the way of the autumn-sunset-at-lakeside vibes the group’s folksy gestures are set on evoking, instead, before falling apart in the face of that sideways glance of a crescendo this song calls a bridge. But it’s hard for me to argue with the evidence at hand that boygenius’ reason for being is a sound one. Imagine if all the anhedonia we shared with each other could sound this sweet; maybe that less-lonely world would have need of fewer critics.
[6]

Hannah Jocelyn: I’ve been working on a Boygenius essay all year, that I may or may not publish; how I relate to, differ from, and yes, envy their collective gender presentation as a trans woman. I’ve written 4,000 words, a lot of which are probably filled with tangents and redundancies, but very little is about the music. That’s because, for the most part, The Record is an unapologetic major-label victory lap, where the three musketeers indulge in mushy love songs for one another and celebrate their bond. It’s impossible to tell who wrote what, as the trio peacefully melt into one another until they’re a massive sapphic hydra. “Not Strong Enough” soars above all this, Sheryl Crow allusion and all, because it’s just a good pop song. It doesn’t have the wit or emotional resonance of their best individual material, but it does have a hook worthy of Crow and some great ear candy (the pumping sweep effect at 2:07, Lucy Dacus’ echoing ad-lib of “go home alone”). Also, Julien Baker name-drops “Boys Don’t Cry” over the chords of “Just Like Heaven.” Nice!
[7]

Michael Hong: On their lead tringle, you can trace the songwriting down to each member: Julien Baker’s nihilistic self-disgust is present under the messy “$20,” Phoebe Bridgers is blunt despite all apologies on “Emily, I’m Sorry,” and Lucy Dacus’ “True Blue” is laced with rich detail — except when it isn’t. “True Blue” cops out on the bridge. “You’ve never done me wrong, except for that one time / that we don’t talk about,” an awkward aside for anyone who hasn’t been disillusioned by the group’s PR campaign. “Not Strong Enough” attempts to split the songwriting and in the process lands with the same issues. Its in-jokes and references are played without so much of a wink, too serious to sound clever. While the three-part harmony at the tail of the bridge is a nice reminder of the distinctions of each vocalist, their verses are economical to the point that individual characteristics, for better or for worse, are difficult to trace in the song.
[4]

Alfred Soto: Bored by the well-intentioned poignancy of their solo music, I was surprised by the speed at which I fell in love with boygenius’ group work. They love performing their intimacy — can you imagine how queerness might’ve advanced had, say, CSN&Y bussed each other on stage? “Not Strong Enough” marries a strong strummed melody to lyrics that take advantage of Julien Baker, Lucy Dacus, and Phoebe Bridges’ harmonic strengths, a pleasure in itself. The plainspoken confessions match the women’s timbres. 
[8]

Nortey Dowuona: Remember when Chance the Rapper decided to make a great pop rap album as the rapping member of the SoX Experiment and people wanted the next Chance solo album instead and then he did that and y’all hated him more and more? Pray this don’t happen to Phoebe Bridgers.
[7]

Crystal Leww: Women can be fuckboys, too — set to guitar! 
[2]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: The closer that these three get to being an actual band, the more they leave me cold. I loved their EP from half a decade ago in part because it kept the essential character of each songwriter intact — these were demos that they had brought to their friends to finish up, not hivemind exercises. Despite working with musicians I like (can we just hear the Melina Duterte/Sarah Tudzin/Carla Azar trio instead?) and doing everything they’re supposed to do as an artistic unit (If I have to hear about the three of them going to therapy together again I’ll have to go to therapy myself), the returns still diminish. “Not Strong Enough” is neither good enough to save rock music nor bad enough to capsize it. Instead, it’s a charmingly indistinct piece of big gesture indie, the kind of song that I can intellectually understand the appeal of while feeling nothing for. It’s end credits music, a slow fade that, for all of my wishing, won’t ever be fireworks.
[4]

Ian Mathers: It is hard to avoid the “people are so weird about this band” field boygenius generates now to just write about the song. But I am 30 or 40 years old and I do not need that (to those shouting “skill issue” or “you deliberately haven’t been paying attention to that stuff”… I see you, and you’re valid). I listen to boygenius as a band, not some weird referendum on who’s solo stuff I like best. And so with “Not Strong Enough” I just hear a lovely and frequently moving song where all three singers get to take a good chorus around the block, and all of them nail it in different ways. The only extra commentary I want is the line from Bridgers I saw quoted on Genius: “Self-hatred is a god complex sometimes.” It sure fucking is!
[9]

Katherine St Asaph: I just think of the thousands of singer-songwriters who get a fraction of their press, while making music that isn’t bland.
[4]

Aaron Bergstrom: The boygenius project could have been a success even if it never exceeded the sum of its parts. It could have been a long-distance book club and mutual admiration society, three wildly talented songwriters who occasionally got together to sing backing vocals on each other’s songs. Maybe it stops there. Even the most like-minded artists can’t always find the same creative wavelength. It happens. When the first three singles from the record were very clearly The Julien Song, The Phoebe Song, and The Lucy Song, it wasn’t necessarily a disappointment (all three are excellent in their own right). It just felt like the group had a ceiling. “Not Strong Enough,” though, points to something bigger. It’s the first song that sounds like boygenius as a band. It’s a song that none of them could have produced individually. The titular hook is Phoebe’s, the “always an angel, never a god” climax is Lucy’s, and Julien’s guitar holds it together (plus she gets to drag race through the canyon singing “Boys Don’t Cry”). There’s a collective joy, a thrill of possibility, something above and beyond their individual brilliance. Listen to them talk about it. It’s cool that they played Madison Square Garden, and Saturday Night Live, and it’s great that they’re going to be near the top of every year-end list that anybody cares about, but none of that explains why this was The Year of Boygenius as definitively as “the way Phoebe looks at Lucy when she talks about songwriting.”
[10]

Leela Grace: In fall 2017 I called my friend from where I was camping in Montana and said, “I heard a song that reminded me of us!” and I sang her the verse from “Funeral” that ends with “we talk until we think we might just kill ourselves/then we laugh until it disappears.” This year we got married. The members of Boygenius have sad-girl brands musically but together, their extratextual joy makes its way into the harmonies. Finding people who understand you is such a rare and special thing, in whatever form it takes, for however long it lasts, and sadness shared is easier to bear. Maybe you can’t control when people leave you or the marks they’ll leave on you: you are always an angel, never a god. But when you sing together you come close.
[9]

Josh Love: The Record is a real “greater than the sum of its parts” type of album. Over the course of its whole running time, the camaraderie and charm of these three women swapping songs and verses, harmonizing and singing background on each other’s cuts, communicates something far more resonant than a single isolated song. There’s not even a Lucy Dacus verse! The greater magic here is how these three roughly similar artists can each evince such distinct personae, to the extent that it’s incredibly easy to attest to an allegiance for any one of them above the other two. I went into boygenius sure I was a Phoebe, but now I’m convinced I’m a Julien.
[7]

Tim de Reuse: Gorgeous, lush — antiseptically corporate. A paint-by-numbers masterpiece in half-formed suburban anxieties. A sleek vehicle assembled by collage: the indie rock appeal to road trips, the indie rock domestic imagery, the indie rock rousing chantalong. I, too, have spent many nights staring at a ceiling fan and catastrophizing. It didn’t sound like a delicate synth arpeggio. I don’t think something this grandiose would comfort me, either.
[4]

Oliver Maier: I don’t really agree with the critique that boygenius is total wallpaper mood music; they’re not here, anyway. The production is satisfying and crisp, the drums clatter compellingly, as if unable or unwilling to find a firm footing on the beat, and there’s no denying the swoop of the chorus melody. But, since by ideology there’s no jostling for space on a boygenius song, accomodating everyone makes “Not Strong Enough” feel like a whistle-stop insecurity sightseeing tour, where nobody has time to explore their stop. Julien Baker revs up a car crash fantasy that vanishes into the hook. Phoebe Bridgers’ lyrical style — rushes of home video vignettes designed to push out the waterworks — doesn’t always land for me, but she usually has more lines than this to give it a fair shake. As for the Lucy-led bridge…well, I’m sure it sounded cool in their heads. 
[6]

Taylor Alatorre: Designed more for Red Rocks than for headphones, the “angel/god” chant-along is the record‘s most obvious effort to transcend the comforting strictures of indie rock nichedom and instead seat the trio in their rightful place as arena rock eminences. It doesn’t exactly do that, mainly because it telegraphs its intent too cleanly and presents too big of a contrast with the rest of the track’s artful self-effacing. The good news for Boygenius is that it didn’t need to do that, because everything that came before that point in the song was already grand and sweeping and buoyantly pensive enough to make any U2 comparisons seem beside the point. (Sorry, I’m not strong enough to avoid making a U2 comparison.)
[7]

Brad Shoup: Along with Drop Nineteens’ “Gal,” one of two alt-rock tracks I’m aware of from this year that references a Cure song. I love how magisterial this sounds–elevated adult alternative — how everyone gets to step into the light. “Always an angel/Never a god” seemed like a weird complaint to me at first — I’d much rather be an angel, people don’t get mad at you — but I was missing the theme.
[8]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: That acoustic guitar is strummed with enough vim that you can feel every clang. It provides an initial pulse, then too the bassline and snare. Everything just keeps marching along, traces of beauty found amid the doldrums: listen to those electric guitar flutters, arriving like sunlight upon your face; hear the way each vocalist’s timbre provides new shades of beige. It has an everyday beauty that hides everyday pain. And then the bridge arrives: bullshit tedium in the name of profundity. Always content with the fine-enough, boygenius draw emotion from a vacantness that I wish were all-consuming. Those flickering synths announce a precious listlessness that reminds you that there’s more — I just wish it weren’t so A24 meets Hallmark.
[3]

Jonathan Bradley: “I don’t know why I am the way I am,” the Boys sing in turn, their thoughts so dislocated from their surroundings that walking through the kitchen might as well be speeding along a highway. An insistent drum rhythm hustles the decidedly gentle guitar arrangement, capturing with unsettling precision the feel of being completely lost while the world is rushing headlong without you.
[8]

Jeffrey Brister: Writing about exactly WHY I like a song can be so difficult, because I love this one. It has a lush, full, utterly beautiful arrangement–an array of guitar sounds layered over one another, with a the right amount of synth flourishes that let the ear wander and notice things on repeated listens. Tightly played drums that aren’t too reverb-drenched, dry enough to sit in the middle of the mix without overwhelming or getting lost, an anchor holding the song in place. Three incredible vocal performances, each pulling out different aspects of the melody, and singing in brilliant harmony. A structure that builds and breaks, that drives and explodes with melancholy. It’s a song that I would simply say is “gorgeous”, and leave it at that, but I feel like I wanted a bit of a word count.
[9]

Will Adams: Eh, it’s pretty, I guess.
[5]

1 blerg » Thursday, November 30th, 2023 11:00 am

TSJ Today reports…

[Video]
[7.29]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: I need to get a couple things out of the way: 1) Why wasn’t this released as a single during the actual Lover era four years ago?; 2) My enjoyment for this song, as I suspect it may have for many of you as well, has decreased since it turned from an secretly adored album cut to a Billboard #1 in 2023; 3) Why did a song called “Cruel Summer” go #1 during the second half of October? Who was in charge of this timing?; 4) The gaming of the charts to get this to go #1 is expected for all major artists, but still pretty craven: these remixes and live versions are… not it; 5) Love it or hate it, this is Jack Antonoff at his most Jack Antonoff, vocoders and all; 6) We were deprived of a real music video for this and I’m still annoyed; 7) Taylor’s voice sounds shrill, especially when she’s reaching the high notes in the chorus; 8) Tickets for the Eras tour were way too expensive and comically absurd to acquire; 9) My extreme audiophile boyfriend continues to tell me that Taylor releasing four different versions of every vinyl record is choking up the global market and causing all records to be more expensive; 10) Everyone is exhausted by the Travis Kelce media cycle already, and I’m salty that this song was written about Joe Alwyn. Now, enjoy.
[10]

Alex Clifton: “Cruel Summer” is a shot of dopamine straight to the heart. It turns everything neon and demands to be screamed loudly in a car with the windows down. I want to inject it into my veins. It makes me thrilled to be alive in a way few other songs do these days.
[10]

Alfred Soto: Listening to Lover before masks went on all over the world, I noted superficial resemblances to Bowie in his so-called Berlin era. “Cruel Summer” is Swift’s “Joe the Lion,” Bowie’s 1977 desperate, almost frantic account of Berliners crawling home from bars who can’t quiet the din in their heads. I liked it in 2019, I love it now. Her most easeful collaboration in years, her best single since “Blank Space,” the electronic clippety-clops and vocoderized enthusiasm building to a chorus of sustained euphoria. For all the blather about her songwriting prowess, let’s hear it for the instinct that left oooh-ahh-ahh as a placeholder. 
[10]

Will Rivitz: By far the most vibrant, well-written, and captivating single off Lover.
[4]

David Moore: The unfortunate reality of dealing with Taylor Swift in 2023 is that she has dominated the few remaining metrics for gauging commercial pop success for almost the entirety of her career, in a sort of never-ending imperial phase, so it gets harder to enjoy her with each passing year even if you’re so inclined. I’ve been writing about it a lot lately: Taylor Swift’s consolidation of dying formats in old-media youth culture, like the Bain Capital of teenpop; Taylor Swift’s absurdly stable career trajectory and how the only analogue I can think of with 15 years of unfettered and untroubled dominance within their milieu is “Weird Al” Yankovic; my increasing antipathy toward Taylor Swift’s success, stemming from my evergreen bitterness about what happened to Ashlee Simpson; the cosmic weirdness of how Taylor Swift’s gambit for world domination depended on the slow-burn success of “Teardrops on My Guitar,” a song literally no one on earth has cared about since 2007; Taylor Swift’s limited melodic palette and how her emphasis on rhythm and personality are of a piece with rap’s melodic turn in the 2010’s. And all that is just the stuff no one was already writing about! There’s a full-time reporter for Taylor Swift! She broke box office records with a tour movie so dorky that the background dancers aren’t allowed to dance, and the costumes look like an intern snagged them from TJ Maxx 15 minutes before the show, and when Taylor Swift doesn’t have a guitar or a piano shoved in front of her she mimes every! single! lyric! with her hands (on enough occasions that I lost count, she sings the word “time” and points to her wrist)! So of course an OK summer song she didn’t even bother finishing the chorus for got trotted out four years later for “impact” and it actually worked. Everything Taylor Swift does works. Taylor Swift can do whatever the fuck she wants. We can’t get rid of her. No one is even trying to. We’ve been living in Taylor Swift’s 2008 for 15 years, and we might have to walk another thousand miles to find one river of peace.
[6]

Tara Hillegeist: Relistening to Lover-era Swift is the sort of experience that makes one yearn for the days when the UN actually tried to enforce the Geneva Convention anywhere outside of the Steam storefront.
[4]

Katherine St Asaph: The problem with “Cruel Summer” is the problem with all of Taylor’s infinite songs about supposedly dangerous lovers: I have never heard anything less dangerous in my life.
[5]

Leah Isobel: Look: I am a Taylor Swift hater. It is my divine calling. The way she vocalizes “devils roll the daice” is like a needle digging into my brain. The fact that if you search “Cruel Summer” you get this and not the endlessly superior Bananarama song is a crime against pop music in general and me, specifically. She sounds like fucking Hannah Montana when she yells that last line on the bridge. All of her music comes across to me like a teenager discovering, to her disbelief, that other people exist with their own individual desires — that being alive in the world means contending with those desires, learning how to coexist — and throwing a tantrum about it. It’s not that I don’t relate, but that I listen to her music and I feel forcibly emotionally regressed, like I am eating candy for breakfast, lunch, and dinner; like I am driving a Fisher-Price car to work at an Easy-Bake Oven. And yet. Listening to “Cruel Summer,” trying to nail down a score, I am forced to admit that this random Pennsylvanian lady knows how to write songs. Kill me now.
[6]

Oliver Maier: The sunset on the horizon beyond Reputation and a late bloomer from the only Taylor Swift record that doesn’t totally scan like a coherent chapter in her narrative (though I’m hardly a scholar). One wonders what her career would have looked like had the pandemic, and Folklore, not intervened. More like this would have been nice.
[7]

Ian Mathers: I don’t think I ever noticed just how gonzo background Taylor sounds going “he looks up grinning like a devil!” at the end of the bridge. I’m not going to wade into trying to figure out whether it’s amazing they accidentally left that in (she sounds like a goof) or it’s some sort of 3D chess move to make sure yet another market segment finds her endearing or it’s a key that when combined with other lore tells you the middle name of her 3rd last boyfriend (or some secret fourth thing). Even if it is calculated, it makes me laugh like a drain. I can’t not hear it now. Tik Tok is good for something after all.
[6]

Kayla Beardslee: This is obviously a [10]. It’s been a [10] since it came out four years ago. Its fate as the hit of Lover was written in stone before the album was even released, thanks to the Secret Session whispers. This is Taylor Swift parting the impossibly wide pastel-colored ocean before her to somehow make room for her presence, dominating thanks to the sense of reckless abandon in her voice that dwarfs even the reverberating Antonoff synths. Her desperation is delivered with a wink, slideshow images heightening the drama for the sake of performance (“cut the headlights, summer’s a knife”). Yet this is also Taylor Swift, whose only constant has been always being able to put it into words, collapsing into “ooohs” at the end of the chorus and admitting defeat. Her career is performance: a stab to the heart on stage will still leave a mark in her mind, sincerity betrayed in moments like the loss of composure on “If I bleed, you’ll be the last to know” or her scream of “I don’t want to keep secrets just to keep you!” The delicious thrill of going too fast is inseparable from her fear of the crash, sure that it’ll happen just around the next bend in the road, so hold on tight right now and feel this moment to the utmost before it disappears — but when the song ends and we’re drawn back into the real world, all that’s left is a soft, nostalgic smile among the pastel-pink clouds. It’s the tale of a summer of girlish hedonism: sure, you got a little too drunk and fell a little too hard, but it was ultimately harmless. They were your own mistakes to make, and you had the freedom to make them. The summer may have been cruel to you, but it was only casually cruel in the name of being honest. “Here’s how ‘Cruel Summer’ can still be a single!”, went the gleeful cries of stans in fall 2019 who were still holding out hope. Nothing on earth could come along to diminish the force of this brightest-shining, joyfully hollering star of “I’m drunk in the back of the car,” not even — shit. And now it’s 2023, and we’re looking back at that summer through rose-colored glasses and trying to bring it back to life. No, it’s not the same, but we just want to know that we were holding on for something worth it after all, and that idealism and excitement still have a place in the moments in between. Have you or a loved one lost the summer that you were promised? If so, you may be entitled to compensation. At least that compensation comes in the form of a few perfect bars of pop music that gives you an excuse to scream at the top of your lungs.
[10]

Joshua Lu: “Cruel Summer” is probably the most median Taylor Swift™ song in existence, and your enjoyment of this song probably depends on how much Taylor Swift™ you’ve been able to withstand this year. It’s largely made up by lines that sound nice and cohere poorly — especially that chorus, which features many words that rhyme together and not much else, or the bridge, with familiar images of crying in cars and her scream-singing that’s become a literal legal cornerstone of her artistry. The song’s catchiness and overall dramatic charm still shine through, like many of her best songs, but in revisiting this Lover highlight, it’s evident how much that era lacked a proper point of view.
[6]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: The fun of “Cruel Summer” has waned with every year since it came out — even at the time, I liked “The Archer” better in terms of moody synth-pop bangers off of Lover, but every moment here that once felt anthemic has become tedious. It’s a song that’s become a pop hit because enough fans convinced themselves it’s shaped like a pop hit — of course it’s sharp and hooky, shorn of the overly-writerly trappings of her more recent work, but every time someone accuses “Cruel Summer” of pop perfection its flaws become all the more apparent. Those verses are rough — all that doggerel about bad boys and shiny toys — but the bridge, and in particular its climax (you know, the big line where he looks so gritty like a devil or whatever) is where my disbelief fails. For all of the skill with which its crafted, I can’t tell what sort of feeling “Cruel Summer” wants me to take away from it — for all of the illicit thrill the lyrics glance at, Jack Antonoff  surrounds Taylor with so much high-wattage synth work that none of her lines really land. It’s all too much — a grand spectacle of a pop hit that feels more inert the more closely I look at it.
[4]

Thomas Inskeep: I’m by & large not a fan of Swift in pop mode (I miss her as a country artist, and think her best albums are — cliché alert — evermore and folklore), and I’m happy to largely blame production choices: Max Martin was a bad pairing for her, period, and Jack Antonoff doesn’t generally do it for me behind the boards either. To my ears, maximalism doesn’t become her. But this works, and part of it’s definitely the production, particularly the Daft Punkish touches Antonoff and Swift provide. St. Vincent’s songwriting contributions help too. That second verse opening line — “Hang your head low in the glow of the vending machine” — is so dead-on, and a perfect exemplification of Swift’s lyrical prowess. Somehow, “Cruel Summer” is nearly magical, the kind of thing that more mainstream pop should sound like. 
[8]

Brad Shoup: Once again I’m hearing Mutt Lange where it doesn’t matter (those robotic yeahs that end the track on a self-deprecating joke) but not where it does; on a chorus that could have dug in harder, and maybe have managed a not-goofy rhyme for the title. Somehow both frantic and grandiose: is there anything she can’t do? 
[6]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: Reputation was Taylor Swift’s villain era, but only in the sense that any White Girl Whose Cringe Is Swag should be considered illegal. Hearing her coo “You like the bad ones too” before Future barrels through his “End Game” verse? Sublime levels of dorkery. The stilted EDM chorus in “Dancing With Our Hands Tied”? You can practically envision her stiff, awkward swaying. The strained heaving of “Take it off, off, off” on “Dress”? Well, not all of us can sound sexy when horny. She reached unprecedented levels of personable, and with this came new changes in her approach to songwriting. Most obvious was her newfound love for alcohol (She’s drinking beer on rooftops! She’s spilling wine in bathtubs!) but more subtle, and lost beneath all the “Taylor Swift is rapping!” discussion, was how her toplines became more flexible. Every verse on “Getaway Car” is a chance to put on voices in miniature, to stumble through lines for syllabic emphasis, and to consider rhyme schemes for their texture. That song is the blueprint for Lover‘s “Cruel Summer.” Everything’s just a little bit better — the vocoder is tastefully incorporated, the chorus is more anthemic — but it’s all a bit too cotton candy. She’s not drinking old fashioneds, she’s just drunk. The shouting is more summer camp than summer romp. The vibe is undeniably “ME!” It was painful in 2019 and it’s painful now. She hasn’t been this uncool since.
[6]

Jonathan Bradley: The lavender synth haze of Taylor Swift’s Midnights first found life in the swelling pastels of Lover, so the return of “Cruel Summer” four years on fits her current sound just fine. Swift and Jack Antonoff allow the swollen chords to drift over soft and sleepy textures that envelop like a warm bed or a warm night, punctuating the verse lines with a warped and treated backing vocal murmuring come-ons in dream language. But Swift’s own words are glittering sharp, hers is a summer that cuts headlights like a knife, slices to the bone, invites devils to roll dice and kills with desire. Swift sings of a tryst so forbidden that its pleasure can only be expressed in terms of panic and crisis. This is a relationship that needs to remain discrete, and the tension and thrill balanced between her marvelled “the shape of your body is new,” and cry of “I don’t want to keep secrets just to keep you” shifts this into the queerer end of the her catalogue. Swift’s fans have memed her faculty with a bridge into dull received wisdom — “We have arrived at the very first bridge of the evening,” Swift says during her “Cruel Summer” performance in the Eras Tour film, knowing what’s expected from her — but this one spatters synth shards that pull the narrative into a sudden climax. Swift tipsy and sobbing, her careful plans and subterfuge undone, being driven home from the pub, her night miserable and magical all at once.
[10]

Aaron Bergstrom:  The fact that “Cruel Summer” had to wait its turn behind singles that the Jukebox (charitably) scored at [3.53] and [3.65] is the kind of decision that makes me wish you could send FOIA requests to record labels. (There were meetings! There was market research! This is someone’s job!) I know Jack Antonoff’s Whole Deal™isn’t for everyone, but this is the Swift/Antonoff playbook run to perfection, an update on the best parts of 1989 centered on a bulletproof bridge that lets Swift debut her punk-rock snarl on a line that I mistakenly heard as “he looks so pretty like a devil” for an embarrassingly long time. (She is not at all convincing, but that’s what makes it so endearing.) A [10] when it was released, and the summers have only gotten crueler since. 
[10]

Nortey Dowuona: It’s only a cruel summer if you watch the world spin on your terms and your whims, when you’re the most powerful musician in the world and massive corporations and governments need to attain your approval, when you’re criticized for being so much that your most dedicated fans will silence anyone who says so, when you can stop one of the most powerful sports franchises to pay you ever more attention, when you can re-record the entire public legacy of your songs and erase the memories made with the music you made now stolen from your grasp, when anyone will pick up your call and accept your terms. It’s a crueler one when you are utterly powerless in the face of all the public scrutiny.
[6]

Taylor Alatorre: Is it too much of a stretch to view the belated popularity of “Cruel Summer” as symbolic of the possibilities that were either foreclosed or deferred by a confluence of events in early 2020, including but not limited to the removal of Bernie Sanders as a relevant figure in U.S. politics? Probably, yeah, but this is the kind of song that makes you want to stretch that far. It livens the spirit, it quickens your step, it justifies an album that didn’t need to be justified in the first place. “You say that we’ll just screw it up in these trying times; we’re not trying.” How one feels about that slacker-chic line, with its simultaneous wallowing and reveling in youthful apathy, is perhaps as much a barometer of 2024 sentiment as “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”
[9]

Lauren Gilbert: This is how Cruel Summer can still be a single.
[10]

2 blergs » Thursday, November 30th, 2023 7:00 am

Your Fun Pop Factoid Of The Day: the uncredited vocals on will.i.am’s “I Got It From My Mama” are by Kat Graham.

[Video]
[7.65]Nortey Dowuona: I TOUCHED A JAGUAR’S SWAG AND NOW I HAVE A TAIL: STORYTIME
[9]

Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: The backstory for Victoria Monét’s “On My Mama” may overpower the song one day: sat in the studio during COVID, battling postpartum depression, singing affirmations that she didn’t yet believe. It’s powerful, and now that it’s a hit, it’s the type of tale that pastors will add extra sizzle to, knowing it’ll ring the congregation’s bells. And yet, the song is slinkier and more pared-down than the built-in uplift would have you believe. Cheekier, too, zapped with tossed-off gags that are Monét’s secret weapon: I always giggle at “[I] might be too fine to hit it from behi-yi-yi-yind“. Ribald and heartwarming — quite a combination.
[8]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: The bassline’s two-note filigrees are self-assured in their minimalist swerve — effortless cool without lifting much more than a finger. “On My Mama” operates in this reserved mode for its entire runtime, capturing the righteous act of feeling yourself via Chalie Boy’s “I Look Good.” Ironically, the hook sounds constrained in this new context, trapped inside the hallowed gloss of triumphant brass. It’s less thrilling when the instrumentation telegraphs that — why let anything else explain that you’re good enough? Still, this sleeked out take on Southern-rap braggadocio does find a moment of comparable excellence when Monét utters “sex game go stuUUupid.” It isn’t playful or horny, just domineering and cocksure; she doesn’t sing that line for anyone but herself.
[6]

Ian Mathers: Monét weaves so effortlessly and precisely among all the little bass pushes and gently peaking horns that it’d be easy to overlook how crucial her performance is here. But it is, and she nails the hell out of it. She rightfully mentions being deep in her bag, but this whole thing is also almost impossibly in several different kinds of pocket at once.
[9]

Oliver Maier: Professional, fairly tedious, sounding so built for Tiny Desk that I’m shocked it hasn’t happened yet. This would really benefit from some oomph, or at least some hi-hats.
[4]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: The bass doesn’t slap quite as hard as I want it to. But really, that’s the only note I have here — Ms. Monét is so self-assured here on this slab of funk, stringing together one-liners that lesser artists would be lucky to get one of like she’s got an infinite supply. I always want extended versions of pop songs, but I especially want one here.
[8]

Alfred Soto: Like a suite in a four-star hotel, everything’s where it’s supposed to be: the horn section, the bass line, and Victoria Monét’s polished vocal. From Jamila Woods recording her own Avalon and Corinne Bailey Rae her own Sign ‘o the Times on one disc to K Michelle reveling in tradition, 2023 was a wonderful year for female R&B artists: they sing their bodies eclectic. “I think we deserve it, right?” Monét asks rhetorically.
[8]

Leah Isobel: “I just wanna live in a fantasy,” Monét sings, her voice burnished gold. “I think we deserve it, right?” This song — by design — makes me remember 2000s R&B and pop, the era of Ciara and “Do It To It” and Usher’s imperial phase, when the whole industry’s center of gravity briefly shifted to Atlanta. The welding of hip-hop’s stance and production with pop’s melody created what felt, at the time, like the most impossibly cool music I had ever heard, both celebratory and strong. That trend passed, as all pop music trends do; as I left childhood, pop music became more nihilistically post-human. I like that stuff, too. But “On My Mama” triggers a specific memory button in which I remember a version of the world in which it seemed like people could keep pace, if you were tough enough. Monét brings a soft allure to that fantasy: it could be good. It could still be good.
[8]

David Moore: There’s been a scourge of millennial hip-hop worship that somehow takes some of the most joyous music ever produced and reduces it to the great gray blob of content, just execrable nostalgia-mining of the lowest order for almost every major rap and R&B hit between c. 2002 and 2007, so how refreshing is it to hear a pitch-perfect post-Aaliyah minimal R&B performance with the period-appropriate accoutrement to match: is that a real horn section? Chopped and screwed ad-libs? Oh my god, are those punchlines?? “I’m so deep in my bag like a grandma with a peppermint / they say ooh she smell good, that’s because I’m heaven scent.” Perfect.
[9]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: “On My Mama” is sexy, swaggering, and most importantly, fun. Victoria Monét’s glow-up from Ariana Grande sidekick to Grammy Award nominee is the exact type of thing everyone should have predicted on their 2023 bingo card. Extra point for making me smile with “I’m so deep in my bag/Like a grandma with a peppermint.”
[8]

Kayla Beardslee: “I’m so deep in my bag, like a grandma with a peppermint / They say, ‘Oh she smell good,’ that’s just ’cause I’m heaven-scent” isn’t actually the lyric of the year… or is it??
[9]

Katherine St Asaph: Cocaine-decor sumptuous to an almost surreal extent. Wish Monét hadn’t crammed all her good lines into the second verse, though.
[7]

Brad Shoup: Starts off luxe and slinky, a getting-ready ode that annexes the club before she walks through the door, similar to Kelly Rowland’s “Like This”. After the first chorus, she’s thoroughly feeling herself, and the jokes and vocal elasticism put her in Post Malone territory. Not a bad thing! Peak Posty would’ve avoided the triumphant “SpottieOttieDopaliscious” horns (his loss), but probably wouldn’t have bothered sampling Chalie Boy after a perfectly fine interpolation. Feels like padding.
[7]

Alex Ostroff: Any song with even a passing resemblance to “SpottieOttieDopaliscious” is always going to hit almost every pleasure centre in my brain.
[8]

Michelle Myers: Jaguar II is a phenomenal album, but I’m hard-pressed to pick a single track that demonstrates how sophisticated and immersive this record is when experienced in full. It’s definitely not “On My Mama.”
[6]

Rachel Saywitz: “On My Mama” isn’t Victoria Monét’s best single, but it’s unsurprising that it’s the one that’s garnered the most critical and commercial acclaim. There’s a homely essence to its meandering horn lines and grounding low rumbles, like the human-shaped indent on your grandparents’ old leather couch that looks like it’s been there forever. Here, Monét eschews her honeyed voice to command in a deeper, wiser tone, as if relaying knowledge from her elders onto a new generation, and I’d absolutely love it if I didn’t already know that Monét is capable of more wondrous and sexy R&B. And yet, listening to “On My Mama” still sounds like a bit of a triumph. The song, along with its success, seems like a testament to all the work Monét has put in to get to this moment: you can hear, for example, the trademarks of her writing that are more widely known in the voices of others, such in the Ariana-like playful tilt of its second verse. For those fans who’ve been with her for years, it’s hard not to think of “On My Mama” as anything other than a long-anticipated greeting — a toasty home on a chilly day, a sweet smile and open arms, the words, “welcome home.”
[7]

Aaron Bergstrom: Man, to tell the truuuuth, my opinion is irrelevant.
[9]

2 blergs » Wednesday, November 29th, 2023 7:00 pm

Spooky season lasting a little longer than anticipated…

[Video]
[4.75]Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Doja Cat’s music and Doja Cat’s public image are in this weird inverse dynamic where the more outré and provocative she gets the more boring her work gets. This has no distinguishing features at all, an expensive sample wrapped around a platonic solid. For an artist that, at her best, could be either an exquisite pop-rap irritant or an effortlessly charming hook machine, here she seemingly intentionally choses to be neither. At this point, she’s an empty retread of her empty retreads.
[3]

Michelle Myers: Massive, obvious samples like this are actually quite bold if you consider how easy they are to do poorly. Helps that the selection isn’t arbitrary. “Paint the Town Red” channels the same refined resentment that Dionne Warwick mastered in the ’60s. The raps are flowy and villainous with some genuinely weird phrasing. Euch!
[7]

Jackie Powell: I couldn’t be more glad that Dionne Warwick, an underrated legacy artist, once again gets her mainstream due. First she was the queen of Twitter before Elon Musk turned it into a dumpster fire, second she was impersonated by Ego Nwodim on SNL, and now she’s been included in a Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 hit. Unfortunately “Walk On By” didn’t have a random revival cover, but rather Doja Cat took Warwick’s hook followed by the two-bar trumpet riff that follows it to serve as the heart and soul of her diss track “Paint the Town Red.” Warwick’s original song is about getting over heartbreak, but Doja Cat uses Warwick’s vulnerable hook as a chiller means to say buzz off. That’s why “Paint the Town Red” feels lyrically out of place. Doja is trying to emulate an I-don’t-give-a-fuck type of attitude alongside one of the more vulnerable hooks of the 1960s. That contrast leads me to believe that Doja Cat actually does care about the droves of people on the internet that have a problem with her. Using the phrase “walk on by” to dispel haters might make sense initially, but writers Burt Bacharach and Hal David intended for it to be much more introspective and about personal accountability. That doesn’t happen in “Paint the Town Red.”
[5]

Harlan Talib Ockey: Every time I hear this song, I immediately cue up its slowed and reverb remix, and then I am at peace. I’m going to avoid engaging in Doja Discourse (you hate your old music and your fans, okay), but for something that’s supposed to be a demonic clapback, this ends up feeling a little too bouncy and endearing. The snaps in the percussion leave the trumpet sample sounding oddly jaunty. Even the title is quaint, more “pleasant carousing” than scaring the haters into submission. (Unless the implication is she’s painting the town red WITH BLOOD, but that’s just funny.) The one element that is genuinely intimidating is the vocal harmonies, and I think what keeps dragging me back to the slowed and reverb remixes is the extra depth and menace they gain.
[6]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Tik Tok background music that dissipates into invisible wisps of smoke when it’s asked to foster any IRL connection.
[3]

Tim de Reuse: I do not like Doja Cat. There’s a featheriness in her aesthetic that itches at me. At high enough energies her delivery is like being caught on the kiddie coaster at the fair malfunctioning at sixty miles an hour. I [1]’ed her breakout hits on this very site back in the day. I hate fun; My poptimist card has long lapsed; I’m never here to have a good time. But here, there’s a heaviness to her delivery. No longer failing to seduce, now proudly misanthropic, her style — finally, finally! — clicks into place, immune to my curmudgeonly nitpicks. If I dug in, I might find insincerity, awkward rhymes, lazy lyrics, but that’s not a fight I can win. She is not here for me to have a good time. Finally, we agree on something.
[7]

Nortey Dowuona: Doja Cat deciding to embrace her super serious Little Brother side proves that some folks need to stop running from liking browbeating purist rap. We’ve been doing it for years now, and whenever this happens. it’s dispiriting to the actual true schoolers who won’t switch up and chose to continue making purist rap and the cynicism by certain pop rappers who wish to escape the scrutiny and hype caused by their own actions and sharpen their hooks, pick more important and complimentary beats, get makeovers, then chafe at the restrictions and try to become serious without undertaking the necessary effort to make oneself — at this point, the writer realized he was in this picture and ragequit.
[6]

Ian Mathers: An earworm of a chorus deployed over a lovely use of the Warwick “Walk on By” and maybe the only song I’ve heard to make me think of both Kendrick and “212,” but ultimately with this kind of power move it comes down to: when she starts off with “bitch, I said what I said,” does it signify? I discounted this one on first listen and then came back a few days later and rewrote this blurb after I couldn’t get it out of my head, so you tell me.
[8]

Oliver Maier: Boring, mostly because Doja is entertaining as a rapper when she’s being a weird little sex gremlin, not brandishing a huge inexplicable chip on her shoulder about being one of the most successful musicians on the planet. Even the touches of whimsy — like the breathy, higher register she brings out on the god-awful chorus — feel perfunctory, like they’re only there to remind you who you’re listening to. More whole lotta nothing than whole lotta red.
[3]

Brad Shoup: A jaw-dropping heel display here, a weapons-grade blister agent: like prime Eminem without the self-thinkpiecing. She makes one feeble attempt to sort the fans from the freaks–otherwise, it’s omnidirectional menace. The jokes are great; the image she inhabits is too. To sound famous, Doja Cat risks looking ridiculous (“ain’t no sign I can’t smoke here”), getting so deep into her lore I’m honestly surprised she didn’t threaten to show feet. The sophistipop sample is big and obvious, but she doesn’t interact with it like on “Vegas”. In fact, listen hard enough and Warwick becomes a beleaguered member of Doja Cat’s team, pleading with her to drop it already.
[9]

Katherine St Asaph: At the risk of engaging in the sort of parasocial shit Doja Cat openly despises, including on this song: What demon lord are we talking here? Lamashtu? Oublivae? What is the Doja Cat lore? (Besides an Internet history of far-right chat rooms and a present history of working with Dr. Luke. Just pretend the “Walk on By” sample is siphoning more of the proceeds to Burt Bacharach than it probably actually is.)
[7]

Michael Hong: Explained Doja Cat lore to my friend under the dim lighting of a restaurant, from “she was showing feet! in the racial chatroom!” to her berating her fans for acting like they know her. Knowing that, it’s incredible how little bite, or anything resembling weirdness, her music has.
[3]

Taylor Alatorre: For most people under the age of 60, “paint the town red” is not a phrase that immediately calls forth any specific, tangible emotions or experiences, if indeed it ever did. That doesn’t mean it can’t be used as the basis for a contemporary song, but it should ideally be expanded upon, with some sturdier reference points brought in to help with the heavy lifting, rather than left to fend for itself in an ocean of tetchy self-justifications. Name-drop Carti or Trippie, claim a tenuous connection to the Bloods if you have to, just do something. Maybe the Dionne Warwick nod is meant to do that — an old-timey phrase paired with an old-timey tune — but I doubt it. If that were the case, they probably would’ve done something with the sample beyond giving it the most basic Pro Tools treatment imaginable.
[1]

Aaron Bergstrom: It sure doesn’t take long for that sample to go from pleasantly hypnotic to painfully tedious, which is a problem since it’s the most interesting part of the song.
[3]

Leah Isobel: This year, Kim Petras released an album called Problématique, a title that petulantly nods to her association with Dr. Luke and the aura of controversy that has consequently clung to her work. Earlier that week, “Paint The Town Red” hit number one. While Doja’s association with Luke hasn’t impacted her career in precisely the same way as it has Kim’s, his presence has undoubtedly shaped the discourse around her. “Paint The Town Red,” and the whole Scarlet album cycle, demonstrates how that discourse has, in turn, shaped Doja right back. The needling repetition of the line “Bitch, I said what I said” has big I’m-not-bothered-you’re-bothered energy, turning the laid-back bounce of the sample into something testy and passive-aggressive; the post-chorus slide into the third person is like she’s psyching herself up, trying to summon her persona in order to escape her own emotions. I’m very sympathetic to Doja — her work is admirably honest about how dehumanizing it is to be a woman who makes pop. This feels more and more vital as the industry contracts around the demands of major labels, who have a habit of hiring dudes like Luke to flatten out creative and talented women. In this light, Doja’s edgelord heel turn isn’t surprising; it’s just sad, and predictable.
[4]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: Becomes tiresome with every passing minute. Everyone who complained about TikTok songs being 90 seconds was wrong.
[1]

4 blergs » Wednesday, November 29th, 2023 3:00 pm