The Singles Jukebox

Will Adams unearths a pop time capsule and presents his findings to the rest of us…

[Video]
[5.20]

Will Adams: I was aware of “Slay” ten years ago, even if it wasn’t on iTunes. Through truncated live performances and interview snippets, I got the concept instantly: a big silly pop song that co-opted common Stan Twitter parlance of the time into a motivational anthem. But despite a stellar previous single that showed great promise and an impressive CV of hits penned for other artists, McKee’s solo career seemed doomed to fizzle. With each passing month it became clearer that “Slay” would never see the light of day, so I couldn’t fully embrace the song. I didn’t believe I, myself, could slay. (Put less cornily and more accurately: McKee’s label Epic didn’t believe she could slay.) But ten years later, she announced her project to re-record her shelved album and release it independently, and the promise reignited. Then “Slay” dropped, and “reignite” felt less appropriate a descriptor than “exploded.” Over a bombastic arrangement with a cadence and chord progression that recalls Hoku, the song is quintessential McKee: inspirational rallying cries (“come on, everybody, let’s go!”, “we can do anything!”); imagery that’s punchy at first and confusing if given more than one second of thought (“flyer than firebirds”; “shine like razorblades”; “slaying like 1999”); a colossal bridge where she launches into the stratosphere and makes the song even bigger. And on top of that, spelling out the title in a pep rally affect. It’s unashamed to be big, be dumb, be earnest, which makes listening to it in 2023 that much more impactful. It would be easy to cast “Slay” off as naïve yearning for the Obama-era college years, our wasted youth that might not even have been as carefree as we thought. But in spite of it all — being hardened by a decade of Real Adult Life, of the awful shit that keeps on happening around us and to us, of the increased feeling of being unmoored from any sense of purpose — I want to embrace it. You see, Dorothy, you’ve always had the power to slay. Before the 2023 release, I wouldn’t have believed that.
[10]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: …iconic?
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Taylor Alatorre: As an incurable fan of the might-have-beens on the left of the proverbial dial, the impulse to stan a theoretical pop star is one that I empathize with. It can lead to some weird places, though, like pretending that this rewrite of Katy Perry’s “Roar,” shorn of its indie pop pretenses and with a muddier zero-to-hero narrative, would’ve lit up the charts as intended back in 2014. As with the hipster run-off of that era, maybe the wishfulness is part of the appeal. To the subset of the population for whom Bonnie McKee’s unreleased album is their Dear Tommy, I’m sincerely glad you’re getting what you wished for.
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Jeffrey Brister: We really need a critical reappraisal of Trouble, so we’ll get less of this.
[5]

Micha Cavaseno: The closest parallel I have to Bonnie McKee’s musical career is actually the directorial career of Elizabeth Banks. Everything about it is perfectly functional but burdened with a trite and immensely DOA sense of humor that maybe had a chance to thrive 8 or 9 years ago but now just completely misses the mark. (If you overextend the narrative here, this makes the Pitch Perfects and Katy Perry stuff a kind of perfect parallel because they both thrive off the weird see-saw between conservatism and quasi-quirkiness. But I digress!) “Slay” is essentially a Cocaine Bear, because even if the punchline feels like a decades old meme, it’s also slapped together in a kitsch from several decades ago. “Slay like 1999” while sounding like late ’00s/early ’10s pop nostalgia is a triple-double of identity crisis (made all the weirder by those subtle happy hardcore breaks at the bridge). It’s so perfectly amorphous and logically commercial, yet also missing every possible mark? I’m not even mad it exists, I’m just more concerned how we justified it needed to exist now?
[3]

Dorian Sinclair: Bonnie McKee has had a hell of a career and, in the process, been a writer on multiple all-time great songs (“Teenage Dream” is probably the crowning glory here, but let’s give a shout out to Britney’s “How I Roll” and CRJ’s “Turn Me Up”, two deeply underrated album cuts). I don’t know that “Slay” is going to join that pantheon, and it’s showing its age a bit after its release was deferred for a decade…but it’s a solid song from a solid writer, and it gets me looking forward to her long-delayed second album, which is enough to be counted as a win.
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Ian Mathers: On the one hand, this really makes me wonder why McKee didn’t just get to have Katy Perry’s career directly instead of writing a lot for her. On the other… I don’t actually like those Katy Perry singles that much, and all the goodwill towards McKee in the world doesn’t change that this sounds a lot like them.
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Michael Hong: The further we get from “Teenage Dream,” the less the American dream seems viable, the more it seems unattractive — unfortunate for Bonnie McKee, whose music sounds like sparklers and stars and stripes all written in glowing neon letters. This version is just too theatrical; the way she sings the word “technicolor” is far too excessive.
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Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: I naively thought we were doing away with this sort of label-mandated Search Engine Poptimisation, where keywords are stuffed into a song and its title, ensuring that it shows up at the top of confused uncles’ Google searches until the end of time. Brazen, yes, but if you can give this songwriting prompt some heft, the shortcut is forgiven. Nope! “SLAY” (even the try-hard all-caps!) is engineered to make you think of different better songs you’ve heard in different better places, a cynical DayGlo casing that sounds like it was destined for a Buffalo Wild Wings Pride commercial instead of a major label release. Screw the SEO and dig deeper; there is better, organic, REAL affirma-pop out there, and you know it.
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Brad Shoup: Will this be the last pop song to reference Technicolor? “Slay” is out of step in so many ways: a widescreen arena-pop yearner in a time of grim partying, with a title that would have been in the pop vanguard when McKee originally wrote it. (In the video, she pulls the song from a synthwave vault — door code 2013 — and it’s on a VHS tape.) It’s really moving to see that McKee still believes in these big gestures, in the goofy metaphor that ushers you to the towering bridge.
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Nortey Dowuona: “Welcome to the part of the show / where we fake it ’til we make it.” That’s an irritating thing to say on a pop song. First, it’s giving the game away. All pop is fake. It’s the amalgamation of every genre, flattened until acceptable and accessible to anyone who would turn their nose up at the depths of it. Why let anyone know that you fake it? Second, it’s an awkward line. The drum patter is kick snare kick-kick snare, and it lands so clumsily on that patter that it jars you either awake into “what, what does that even mean” or “oh ok, fine.” It’s not a sudden spark of wit, just a jarring reminder of the actual project here — allowing you a peek into a swelling bubble of confidence. Thirdly, each lyric after and at the beginning of the second verse is as clumsily sung, as is the chant, but it feels right to have them in that way, and they turn to mush the way pop song lyrics should. They’re not itchy and scratchy the way that first line is. Finally, because it’s so revealing, awkward and jarring, the rest of the song fades once you hear it, since the hook, the drums and even the seething synth line jumping up and down the chorus, all melt into each other since they all cancel each other out. It don’t slay, it just swipes.
[5]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: OMG it’s got a “spell out a word” hook I’m in love <3
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Tara Hillegeist: Oh, so that’s what Dua Lipa was missing.
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Alfred Soto: MARGO CHANNING: A mass of music and fire. That’s  me. An old kazoo and some sparkles.
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Katherine St Asaph: I got into an argument the other day with someone else my age about whether millennials are middle-aged yet — they thought no, I think yes. My argument is admittedly vibes-based, swayed less by historical context than how many gray hairs I eradicated on that particular morning. But it’s hard not to declare that you’re in your midlife crisis era when you hear millennial Don Quixote-core like “Slay,” which is only 10 years old but feels like an artifact from an ancient era with an equally ancient worldview. We all hear Katy Perry and “Halo”; what truly marks this as a genuine 2010s production rather than zoomer retromania is how many of the era’s minor artists you hear. Specifically, I hear Catcall in the shouts, and MS MR in the way Bonnie McKee clips notes short. McKee’s songwriting stakes out her usual turf, a lightly subversive yet unironically inspirational underdog anthem — think the midpoint of Grease, Tank Girl, and Ready Player One, for those who too were raised by the television. Ultimately, though, “Slay” is a Bonnie McKee song that wasn’t given to Katy Perry (or whomever); it’s too easy to devise just-so explanations for why. Were the hooks too dulled, too inconsistent? Maybe, but so were the ones in “Part of Me.” Were the lyrics miscalibrated — too razor-blade explicit, or conversely too earnest and uncool? We have pejoratives for this sort of thing now: girlboss, Disney adult, Marvel fan. (Whether someone actually likes Disney or Marvel or has a managerial job is irrelevant to the online gaze.) But for every “Fight Song” and “Roar” on the charts, there was a “Government Hooker” or “Cannibal” in the album tracks that got even bloodier. The most likely explanation is luck: someone woke up too hungover to send an email, too sick for the earworm to take, too grumpy to want to reach for glory from the gutter. Whatever the reason, the song’s nonexistence as an actual 2013 single adds another layer of subtext. Not only is “Slay” about seizing at a dream that’s a decade dead, it’s about seizing at a dream that maybe wasn’t even alive at the time either. McKee deploys the firebirds and pop hooks regardless, and they roar to life oblivious but loud. We slay on, us aging diamonds.
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