Wednesday, July 3rd, 2024

Carbonne – Imagine

Anxiety, via romance, via rap, via flamenco, via Spain, via France, via TikTok…

Carbonne - Imagine
[Video]
[6.00]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: There’s not one factor that makes this the French tube de l’été; it’s a perfect smattering of smaller virtues. Carbonne, a relatively unknown Montpelliérain rapper turned TikTok hit maker, doesn’t really seem to know what to do with his overnight fame, but it does seem clear that his 5+ years in the industry have allowed him to crystallize a sound informed by Southern French rap, Euro-pop, and Spanish guitars. “Imagine” is also a summer smash because it’s about the high and low expectations of the season. On the one hand, Carbonne’s girl is dreaming of drinking Portuguese wine beneath beach umbrellas and traveling the world; on the other hand, Carbonne is paranoid about the relationship falling apart at any moment. People everywhere on the internet seem to relate, making pop, reggae, rock, and of course sped-up versions of the track. What they’re really doing, though, and the real reason this is the song of the summer, is shouting the monstrosity of a chorus together in a group, just like in the studio recording.
[7]

Kylo Nocom: Three years have passed since C. Tangana made his bid for recognition through the artsy cosmopolitanism of El Madrileño. Despite the occasionally embarrassing excess of that album’s cinematic gestures, Tangana’s subsequent Tiny Desk Concert succeeded by highlighting the plethora of collaborators singing and clapping together. Carbonne’s “Imagine” is on a similar wavelength: not only is it in the flamenco fusion vein Tangana previously mined, but its success was aided by a TikTok video highlighting his friends singing along to a hook primed for virality. The track is an outlier in the French rapper’s catalog: prior releases flirted with house and 2-step crossovers between stretches of fairly standard pop-rap. But the song is contemporary with artists who similarly track in Andalusian musical influence, such as TIF; the pivot has the slight stench of marketable novelty. While it’s too early to tell whether the success of “Imagine” will result in a hard launch of Carbonne as a Proper Artist, his actual rapping is fairly disposable. Still, though, those gang vocals aren’t nothing; one of life’s greatest joys is singing a song alongside the person who wrote it.
[5]

TA Inskeep: Carbonne sounds like a perfectly nice boy rapping over flamenco guitars and handclaps with all of his friends backing him on the chorus, which is exactly the problem. There’s no push here, no pull; “Imagine” just dully exists.
[3]

Nortey Dowuona: Rodolphe Babignan, a flamenco musician from Paris, plays the guitar lines that thread this song. His guitar is exciting and smooth: chords played slowly during the verses with little licks trickling from each side of the mix, lilting during the second verse before settling into the first pattern, then clustering and swirling around the soft drum programming. Babignan’s bridge licks feel so bright and bubbly that the loud group chant of despair and paranoia, the flip side of love, barely registers unless you are paying attention.
[8]

Katherine St. Asaph: There’s a loud banger trapped beneath the arrangement, thumping at the walls to break free. Carbonne is coolly determined not to let it.
[4]

Jonathan Bradley: Montpelier rapper Carbonne isn’t a reggaeton artist, but “Imagine” draws some influence from that sound: the murmured vocal is reminiscent of J Balvin’s conspiratorial cadence, for instance, and this lively flamenco guitar figure would sound great over dembow. It could almost suit a sidewalk café or chic wine bar too, but the lively handclap rhythm keeps things from becoming too genteel. The heady whimsy is apposite, though: Carbonne, caught in a reverie of travel and romance, knows a girl who hopes to run away with him, and he seems troubled by how attractive the idea is. 
[7]

Ian Mathers: I’m always relying on the translations of others for these, but there’s just something so intensely romantic to me (especially in context of the rest of the lyrics) about “we’re talking about living facing the sea, I can see that she’s not a homebody.” The whole song is this combination of being swept up in love with someone and imagining life and travel together, with maybe even an implication of being willing to leave one’s own comfort zone for the beloved’s sake, while at the same time being the kind of person who is immediately suspicious of losing what possibly feels like undeserved good fortune (or maybe I’m projecting). That heady, queasy seesaw between feeling on top of the world and borrowing trouble from a possible future, over such a sunny, pleasingly busy arrangement, hits surprisingly hard.
[8]

Brad Shoup: These last couple weeks some apropos Lloyd Banks lines have been going through my head: “Her panties wet over fame, fell in love with my chain/I wonder if I wasn’t an entertainer, would she remain?” I mean….. no???? “Wanna Get to Know You” is a perfect single for many reasons, one of which is that it captures the anxiety of the famous himbo. The swaggy yet devout 6’5″ tight end, the regional rapper with the fresh advance, the belovedly bewildered streamer whose aesthetic scale stretches from epic to so cursed, bro: guys who have devoted every waking minute to becoming what people want them to be, suddenly wondering if they’re loved for the right reasons. I adore that shit. I also adore flamenco pop, with its combination of hazy sensuality and technical rigidity. Carbonne repeatedly swamps the standard flamenco vocal interjections with a bro chorus that sounds like a terrace chant, or maybe a broker protest. The compás clicks like a countdown, as the singer grapples with a girlfriend who seems to like him for him. The title lands, at the end, like a punchline.
[7]

Alfred Soto: Justin Bieber, meet flamenco.
[5]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: At first, I suspected that I’d find this bauble of acoustic hip-hop much more annoying if it were in a language I understood — but even after reading a translation I find it breezy and inoffensive. That I like it as much as I do is perhaps an appreciation for Carbonne’s ability to meet the moment: this is just as frothy and light as it needs to be, unburdened by the need to make much of a point.
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