The Singles Jukebox

Frank Falisi brings us PC Music’s shutdown…

[Video]
[6.35]

Frank Falisi: There’s plenty of irony in pop music, an inherently ironic enterprise. What other word could you use to describe the process of transacting the mutability of feeling into occupational singularity? Perfect pop doesn’t set us free, it locks us up: think of nothing else for three minutes. That locking (moving, swerving, heeling) doesn’t have to be carceral, but it often is. The domination of image as product means that TikTok becomes pharmakon, manufacturing the lonely need to be occupied and the momentary balm. What does a free pop music look like, then? Imperfect, gum in ear, melted plastic. How do we approach the imperfect? Irony can crack the door open, show a sheen and weaponize it, turn pop into a puncture. First, Hannah Diamond was this gesture, a nonexisting weapon of the pop theory factory. Unstable, she became the extended mix, a concrete angel made to detonate: soon I won’t see you at all. A full length, more reflections. Are all of these sounds ironic? Only if self-doubting distance is irony, or if the absent song we call “missing you” is irony. In the kernel of a throbbed and upward-facing synth, Hannah Diamond finds the greatest love of all: “Affirmations.” It re-stages the space between irony and earnestness by making love the vehicle for pop instead of the other way around. Neither distanced by detachment or enfranchisement, as open to the virality of a plastic world as it is inoculated from the bottom line, it’s the sound of all the lessons of theory and their summary dismissal. Think of everything else for three minutes, one song at a time. Here you are in the song.
[9]

Will Adams: A self-help pep-talk set to a synthpop arrangement so shiny and gargantuan that it’s bound to pump you up way more than the words themselves. Sort of like if you mashed up MUNA’s “Number One Fan” and “Home By Now.” (Not a bad concept.)
[7]

Alfred Soto: David Gamson co-produced and co-wrote “Affirmations,” and I can hear traces of the slippery electro-funk he contributed to Scritti Politti’s Cupid & Psyche ’85 long ago and far away. This inspirational track is too explicit for a would-be dancefloor banger — Hannah Diamond wants you to pay attention to her lyrics — but I am not wont to hold my nose at friends finding solidarity where and when they can.
[7]

Crystal Leww: Love her DJ sets!
[5]

Leah Isobel: Hannah Diamond’s sincerity was always on the surface of her music. Her early singles’ lyrics were constructed as straightforward sentences, forcing the melodies to meander in order to fit in all of the syllables. That wordiness could scan as parodic when paired with a melody (and, it must be said, a vocal performance) as grating as that of “Attachment,” but the stack of qualifiers and half-confessions on “Every Night” proved to me that she wasn’t playing a game. Vulnerability is usually imperfect, and asserting your own desire is usually messy. The point wasn’t that the words were articulated and sung perfectly, but that they were sung at all; singing them was an act that reaffirmed her own existence as a whole self with feelings, ideas, and goals. It’s a short skip and a jump from that thematic framework to the somewhat overdetermined practice of hyping yourself up in the mirror. But if “Affirmations” feels a little simplistic and pandering at first, Hannah’s sincerity still wins me over by the end. It doesn’t hurt that David Gamson is a better musical partner for her than A.G. Cook was, since Gamson’s productions actually have a bit of physicality and body to counteract their shiny gleam. I love the way the chorus synths do little cartwheels, and I love the driving bass beneath her. Most of all, I love how Hannah’s voice sits slightly below the production, warm and open. She invites us into the world that she’s built, but she doesn’t force. The self doesn’t manifest by raw strength; it manifests with patience, care, and attention. And when that happens, it’s worth celebrating.
[7]

Oliver Maier: Has society progressed past the need for Hannah Diamond? She tries to emphasise that it’s the other way around on “Affirmations”, and good for her, but I’m not getting much out of it. Like most of her PC Music peers she’s left behind the caustic feel of her mid-’10s work for something a bit more sedate, if still faintly tongue-in-cheek. She’s interested in the same themes, but she hasn’t addressed the problem that’s followed her for a decade: the songs aren’t always there. “Affirmations” sounds like “Hang With Me” stripped of either big melodies or emotional highs and lows, and that’s hard for me to get on board with.
[4]

Aaron Bergstrom: As someone who still believes in the revolutionary potential of guitar rock in the year 2023, I certainly can’t begrudge Hannah Diamond for summoning the old PC Music spirits one more time to see if any of the ancient incantations still resonate. There’s some nostalgic sparkle in the “affirmations/creations” chorus opener the first time around, but I don’t think a song has ever lost me as fast as this one did by following up the believable underdog innocence of “I am building my own world” with the grindset soullessness of “I’m a business woman and my own C … E … O.”
[3]

Alex Clifton: I feel like I’m supposed to leap up in rapturous applause, thrilled that someone at this seminar has reminded me that I’m worth something for the low, low price of $500.
[4]

Katherine St Asaph: I’ve got new rules, I count ’em. I gotta girlboss to myself.
[4]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: It is extremely difficult to parse these lyrics such that you actually get five affirmations, which I kind of love — the nature of self-confidence and self-help is always expansive and nebulous, a long and muddled engagement in the mires of doubt. “Affirmations” is joyous enough in its straight-ahead synth-pop arrangement that it almost seems too easy. But there’s a certain wan tone to Hannah Diamond’s vocal here, the subtlest hint of melancholy embedded between the big hooks and major chords, that leaves “Affirmations” just bitter enough for me to enjoy it. 
[6]

Brad Shoup: It’s a synthpop memory in 4K. There are too many kinda-correct details, all of them too sharp: like a Scritti Politti song finished with machine learning, or a Rachid Lotf poster. I like songs that are shameless about entertaining and songs that are sneaky about being sad, and we’ve got a little of both here. The repetition of “keep repeating” is hackwork elevated by vocal fuckery that renders each new phrase in a different typeface. There’s a bit about recharging (“When I’m all alone late at night/I recalibrate my eyes”) that literally sounds like it’s coming from a robot pretending to be human. If she’d sung the lines about being a businesswoman and CEO I might have given this a [10] and/or linked “Our Wedding”.
[8]

Nortey Dowuona: Hannah and David Gamson constantly keep stopping and starting the song. Throughout each chorus, they take the ’80s pop drum loop and chop it underfoot, leaving certain synth loops hanging, unspooling like spilt intestines out of the belly. They’re purposely ugly moments, like the song is supposed to deny the audience their expectation that it will finish the progression the synth keys promise. The effect gets less jarring and more novel as it keeps going, especially since the song does actually end with a wriggling synth arpeggio and a limp note played until the fader is brought down.
[8]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Frustratingly, this never breaks through into the more vulnerable and exposed place that the chorus promises. On the other hand, Passion Pit’s Gossamer is one of my favorite albums, so the floor is high. 
[6]

Micha Cavaseno: I’ve been recently going through my bookmarks that I’ve repeatedly transferred between browsers since… I dunno, since I was in my teens? I’ve made a point to check in on those links and see what died and what lives on, what’s worth keeping, what’s worth frantically seeking via web archives and such. Much like the cockroach, the PC Music thinkpieces and features remain and clutter; it’s very funny watching the game be so redundant barely a few years later, like pop’s own personal GTA V. Hannah Diamond doesn’t sound like she’s doing her “is it ironic or is it sincere” pop pastiche anymore, with that extremely post-Goldsmiths jag to it, but instead like the competent parodies of pop you see in comedy skits. Which isn’t even to say it’s a joke, but the best parts of PC Music were the extra-egging nudges that made you question the sincerity even when it was overflowing. It’s why I still mull over SOPHIE’s debut, eternally uncertain whether so much of that record was a put-on or a come-out. Here, Hannah’s best chances are that she’s just giving a little paean or a half-hearted sarcastic tease. Oh well, I preferred GFOTY anyway.
[3]

David Moore: I was always skeptical about PC Music. The question of sincerity nagged at me, but in a minor way, like a mosquito bite flares up again the next day — still with this? — and I mostly ignored it. When the occasional annoying novelty song came along and riled everyone up, I was capable of enjoying it. But it never really occurred to me to just accept it straight, as pop music indistinguishable from any of the other stuff, until I heard “Affirmations.” In part that’s because so much time has passed that the sincerity questions all dissipated — everything seems basically sincere now, but in an oppressive way, almost as if it’s somehow worse that the PC Music project turned out to be fundamentally uncynical. But maybe I’ve changed, too. I played this one for my kids and they loved it, as much as they love Taylor Swift and NewJeans and “Meherbaan” by Reet Talwar and this weird Polish Kidz Bop type song. They don’t differentiate between any of it; they accept everything I throw at them in the way I’d bet kids always have. But I differentiate less, too. A lot of battles that used to seem important seem so small compared to the great atomized infinity of music that just keeps on churning itself out into the void. Why shouldn’t I listen to “Affirmations” completely straight? You keep repeating, and it turns out you really can be whatever you want to be.
[8]

Ian Mathers: As someone who frequently loves pop music and is suspicious of affirmations but also has the sneaking feeling that they’d do me some good, this is perfect for me! Remember, we only say things like “I will NEVER give up” when things are going super well!
[9]

Taylor Alatorre: (OOC: I cannot shake the feeling that I don’t belong here.) When I applied to the Jukebox in 2016, I was in my senior year of college, and I couldn’t wait to get out. Not because I had something great to look forward to, but because I felt I had nothing to look back upon. I’d gone from having a stable group of friends in high school to going entire weeks without speaking outside of classes, not even to my perfectly nice roommate, whom I avoided whenever possible. I would walk around campus silently hating everyone in view, because I assumed they hated me, the mere sight and presence of me. I still thought of autism as some foreign, abstract thing that affected certain “other people,” rather than a governing condition of my own life that bled into every interaction, every averted glance, every fenced-off path and never-to-be-opened email. In the midst of this barrenness, I had music, which I listened to religiously and on a disciplined timetable: 600 albums apiece in 2014 and 2015, 615 in 2016. Kacey Musgraves Bully Tyga Desaparecidos. I clicked on every Stereogum link and made lists of new iTunes singles. I nodded along to turn-up anthems without ever going to a party, and breakup anthems without ever bringing someone home. What was I trying to find in all of this? A substitute for connection, a distraction from despair, a safe place in which to feel feelings and act out scenarios, or the pages from that lost instruction manual on how to basically resemble a human being? Like many of my favorite songs from those years, “Affirmations” can be all of those things. A wind tunnel blast of a chorus that’s large enough to see myself moving around in; a steady synthesized undercurrent that floods the gaps in my identity and carries me along without pushing; little shiny baubles of sound like items in a school gift shop; girlhood inhabitable from a distance. Hannah Diamond aligns her voice with monotone precision to the notes on a staff, suggesting a diligent observance of the song’s titular practice — then proceeds to blow up such niceties by flinging herself in seven or eight different directions, mindfulness be damned. Such is the joyous paradox of a song whose outwardly polished and public-facing elements are placed in service of these embarrassingly, thrillingly private rituals — “all my secrets / I can’t tell.” Even the self-mocking literalness of the CEO talk does its part by validating the collegiate cynic in me who’s allergic to the “validation” game, affirming the part of me who still “knows” that I have nothing positive to affirm. The song generously makes room for such doubts even as it nominally moves to vanquish them, an ecumenical approach that many self-help tunes could stand to learn from. So even if I never fully lose the sense that I’m unqualified to write about pop music due to lacking the proper life experiences or neurotype, that’s okay. I’ll still keep repeating, ke–keep repeating that garbage anyway.
[10]