The Singles Jukebox

YouTube: “I’m from Sweden and this hits harder then our meatballs!”

[Video]
[6.30]

Alfred Soto: Reaching a new peak of #23 on the Billboard Hot 100 with no signs of stopping, “Big Dawgs” is one of the more traditional hip-hop tracks to score. This Indian producer-writer team has got “money on my mind,” a trope no less tiresome for sounding fresh in its secondhandedness: Kalmi and Hanumankind after all absorbed these tropes as kids. Energy and skill it’s got, if not much inspiration.
[7]

Jonathan Bradley: In 2024, Texas rap no longer requires Texan rappers. Hanumankind claims a “Southern family” in “Big Dawgs,” which checks out: he’s from the south Indian state of Kerala, and spent some time in Houston. He has a slick, bumptious flow, and he’s versatile enough to quote Pimp C before switching up into a Project Pat cadence for a few bars. It would work better if he wasn’t playing Rap-a-Lot Mad Libs with his rhymes: he’s standing on business, he’s got money on his mind, he would like hoes to get up off his dick. The beat rumbles like a dirt bike, except it also buzzes like a mosquito, and the longer it goes on the more like the latter it sounds. I like how he says he’s rolling through the city with his lawyer with him; it makes him sound like Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas careening through the streets with a dubiously identified attorney as sidekick.
[5]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: The kind of rap hit only a Goldman Sachs analyst could write — every second optimized for hookiness, every boast a little self-satisfied and unearned. The Project Pat and Pimp C bites are cute, and I don’t doubt this guy was listening to UGK as a teenager, but the aggregate effect of this (and Kalmi’s big, aggro beat) is less to thrill and more to annoy. With every listen I find something new to dislike.
[3]

Katherine St. Asaph: This is so fucking stupid.
[6]

Taylor Alatorre: Maybe it’s the suppressed debate-club nerd in me, but I appreciate how much of “Big Dawgs” is constructed as an argument for its own right to exist. The guy clearly wanted to do a straightforward Project Pat imitation — no reason, just ’cause — but he knew this would ruffle feathers, so he spends most of the song’s back half pre-addressing the controversy, inhabiting the guise of his soon-to-be critics: “how you get like this?” His answers range from standard brush-offs to some genuinely provoking commentary, most notably his suggestion that those of brown skin color “face closed curtains” worldwide. Knock him if you must for jacking the Memphis flow, but Cherukat did at least grow up in Houston, that sprawling sweatbox of contrasts — a global magnet for high-skilled immigration whose suburbs can nonetheless foster protests against a Hindu temple’s new Hanuman statue. Lest you wander too far intto the political weeds and end up thinking “promises are broken” is a veiled reference to H-1B visa caps, Hanumankind brings things back to the carnal with a well-timed sexual boast, a head-spinning turnaround that helps ward off any party-unfriendly grievance wallowing. The spiky defensiveness ends up working in the song’s favor; both lyrics and delivery act out the kind of immigrant hustle that was valorized in M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes,” the most recent South Asian crossover hit of this magnitude. Confident that his points have been made, Hanumankind signs off with a lengthy chop-and-screw session that’s indulgent in the best of ways, bolstering the song’s “anything goes” sense of slippery self-assurance. He ain’t worried about it, so why should we be?
[9]

Nortey Dowuona: “In school, I used to fight the bullies — now I’m fighting with the law. Guess some things don’t leave you fully.”
[10]

Mark Sinker: The wind and grind of the backing is good, but he should half-speed his voice all the time; au naturel it’s too weedy. “We ain’t got the time for you fuckin’ bugs” is a strong near-closer of a line — except he actually just says “bums,” and that’s weedy too. 
[5]

Kristen S. Hé: No idea why people are calling this TikTok rap when it’s clearly pro wrestling entrance theme music — but for whom?
[6]

Edward Okulicz: I look forward to hearing 20 seconds of this accompanying a montage of some contact sport as I channel-surf. The cool bit is the whir and grind under the verses, like an ’80s home computer trying to sound like a car engine. The slowed-down finale breaks up the monotony a bit, and the kids listening to it don’t realise that trick is about 35 years old because they’re half that.
[5]

Ian Mathers: How you feel about him yelling “hey, shut the fuck up!” at the standard “don’t imitate these stunts” warning at the beginning of the video is probably a good shorthand for how you’ll feel about “Big Dawgs” as a whole. The production is nicely blocky, buzzy, and abrasive, and the flow follows suit. It feels likely to be divisive, in the kind of way where both sides go “see?” and point to the same lines/elements to prove their point. Those stunts, though… those stunts are pretty cool to watch. Maybe that’s a good shorthand too.
[7]

no blergs » Tuesday, September 3rd, 2024 11:07 pm

the “kehlani” version with kehlani

[Video]
[6.56]

Ian Mathers: You can easily hear Adetunji sing parts of this song in his actual voice, and it sounds great, which just makes it an even weirder and greater move that he shot his shot so effectively that Kehlani actually shows up — with production that makes him sound about 13 years old. The affect doesn’t particularly go with the production or Kehlani’s performance (both great), but somehow it still works. Not hoping this starts any kind of trend, but on its own? Hugely fun.
[8]

Alfred Soto: If you’re going to appear on an eponymous track functioning as a valentine, then giving the audience these parched star poses won’t do.
[4]

Harlan Talib Ockey: “Kehlani” (song) drags a lot for only three minutes. The beat is basically static, and the only major change in the production throughout the entire song is how much you can hear the Summer Walker sample. Because of this, the chorus feels ridiculously long; the verses use most of the same melodic phrases as the chorus, mixing everything further into mush. But if you only have 30 seconds to spend on this song, it’s fine. Adding Kehlani (singer) was a net positive, since their verse has easily the best lines (see: “step out like my wife but bust me down like she my enemy”). 
[3]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Post-Weekndian R&B struggles with the disease of the eternal pre-chorus — songs that build and build toward nowhere, their languid melodies always slouching toward something greater that never arrives. The original “Kehlani” exemplified this tendency, its moderately catchy melody hammering into you and each additional R&B singer Adetunji listed like an entry in the Domesday Book. The remix — and Kehlani themself — breaks the monotony. They sound like they’re bemused at the very concept of a song that pays tribute to them, not because they don’t think they deserve it but because the praise feels fitting. 
[7]

Taylor Alatorre: There’s nothing necessarily wrong about making a Zoomer brainrot edition of Ne-Yo’s “Miss Independent,” but you’d think that an adopter of the Woman Respecter persona would show a bit more humility in this situation. Geeked off his social media triumph, Adetunji slots in Kehlani’s perfectly serviceable contribution then refuses to trim any of his own parts to accommodate it, resulting in a final minute of deflationary pointlessness. I don’t think Kehlani was intending to insult Adetunji by stressing their name’s correct pronunciation in their verse, but I admire the pettiness.
[4]

Mark Sinker: ppl shd be nice abt each other more often
[8]

Jonathan Bradley: It’s almost ambient, a composition of slow dark textures splintered by distant snare taps. Adetunji raps, I suppose, but his tumbling melodic syllables are so choppy, so resistant to legibility, that I imagine them as shards of light filtering at dawn through the gaps of an abandoned building. Does a track still count as hauntological if its remix summons the apparition it invokes?
[7]

Nortey Dowuona: can’t be objective, furious it’s not me. even angrier that jordan is credited as the recording, mixing and mastering engineer. and he seems like a cool ass dude. jpegmafia could have a pop hit with kehlani too. haha this sucks man.
[10]

Katherine St. Asaph: Kehlani owns this song, and thus proves its point.
[8]

no blergs » Tuesday, September 3rd, 2024 5:57 pm

A full 8 years since we’ve covered these folks — what is time anyway…

[Video]
[6.55]

Nortey Dowuona: Stormzy had it all. He was the highest up in the UK grime scene, the best-known British MC worldwide; he had the Banksy vest, he was the one. Then the pandemic happened, he got into Christianity hardcore, he had choirs on his albums, and he and Maya Jama finally broke up. But strangely, this seems to have liberated him. After all, he still established MerkyBooks, Merky FC, that lil scholarship for a couple black kids. All he built hasn’t crumbled — it survived. Now he can relax and get back to more immediate, arrogant and boisterous MCing; thus, this song. The screeching little riff that keeps popping up in the beginning is snapped so harshly out of existence by the drum-and-bass drop that when the drums slip out for 2000s-type breakbeats, the energy never comes down. Big Mike back in the yard, fucking shit up — but like Antonio Rüdiger.
[9]

Alfred Soto: With the sonic verities of grime resistant to Brexit, Boris Johnson, and new loft construction, it’s a pleasure to hear Stormzy growl through this almost perfunctory demonstration of relevance. Standing pat is standing tall — for now.
[7]

Taylor Alatorre: “Don’t tell us how it used to be, just tell us how it is.” Chase & Status are at a point in their career where their last three albums haven’t even gotten Wikipedia articles written about them, and Stormzy’s place at the top of grime’s hierarchy has been bloodlessly toppled by Central Cee. There’s a chip on the shoulder of this collab, a palpable sense that one’s laurels are a false comfort, because you’re only really as good as your latest festival banger. That fear of fading can paralyze, but in this case it hones and focuses. Drum and bass formalism is politely nodded at but is mostly repurposed for parts, used to fashion nimble musical phrases that veer sharply around corners, defying easy prediction while remaining punchy and cleanly legible. The aggression is of an inviting warm-blooded kind, with Stormzy dissing house music more out of deference to his guests than from genuine animus — he does still call himself a singer, after all. There’s enough mutual trust going on for Stormzy to be given the task of orchestrating the drop, his staggered vocals injecting the title phrase with more heft than it logically should have.
[8]

Scott Mildenhall: More power to the Chase & Status resurgence, as more power is needed. “Backbone” is regrettably tepid for a duo that burst through and back with hits of intensity. Neither they nor Stormzy leave first gear, ensuring that they stay upright and little more. It’s not robotic, but it only has Walcott on the bench.
[6]

Katherine St. Asaph: You don’t get to diss “all that fuckin’ house shit” on a track that comes this close to all that fuckin’ brostep shit.
[2]

TA Inskeep: LTJ Bukem and MC Conrad (RIP) walked almost 30 years ago so that Chase & Status and Stormzy could run to a #1 UK single. Hearing DnB hitting the top in 2024 will never not make me happy.
[7]

Jonathan Bradley: Stormzy’s hook aims for the eerie simplicity of ScHoolboy Q’s “Collard Greens,” but its sing-song is of the nursery-rhyme kind. He brings some bluster on his verses, telling us many times how unimpressed he is with these “pussies” and pronouncing the word with the insistence of a schoolyard bully who hopes the force of the insult alone might establish his authority. The maniacally spurting synth sounds more worrying, but a brisk drum-and-bass rhythm reassures: the beat and the low end are why we’re here. Everything else is unnecessary distraction.
[5]

Mark Sinker: Fragment of a harder (or anyway more chaotic) DnB version can be found on IG, which some will prefer as it definitely moves the focus back to the production duo (now half as old as time, or even as me). In the official release they do seem to be backing out of Stormzy’s way, maybe because as self-announcing defiance goes, his rap seems rambling and querulous — opaque in a good way, but also kind of small-time? Uneasy stands the dad who wears the crown. 
[7]

Isabel Cole: Makes me feel like an American studying abroad, in that I’m pretty sure I’m overrating this because of the accent.
[6]

Ian Mathers: There will always be a space for tracks that fulfill the important criterion of “I think I could run through a wall if I was listening to this loud enough and timed it so I hit the right moment and the wall simultaneously.”
[8]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: It would do this track a disservice to spend too much analyzing its relative merits and demerits; this is extremely effective music to get rowdy to, and I hope that you take this time to do so in whatever way you see fit.
[7]

no blergs » Tuesday, September 3rd, 2024 2:30 am

To follow up “Guess,” here’s something at the other end of the horny axis…

[Video]
[5.38]

Kayla Beardslee: The depth of the BTS vault in the last year has been genuinely impressive; the results have been mixed in vision and execution. “Who” is a song driven totally by the topline — having even one or two moments where the melody pauses to let the music riff in conversation with it would be nice — but something feels really off-putting about the vocal production that’s meant to be carrying the song. I can sense Jimin’s mouth moving with every syllable, yet it also sounds like he recorded his performance from the back of a cave. I’m a lover of ambitious K-pop tracks, but the instrumental here doesn’t feel very K-pop at all, in that it picks one idea and sticks with it for the entire song without changing up. To be fair, “Who” is at least a year old and was recorded as a stopgap to tide fans over during BTS’s enlistment period, so realistically it’s not the time to expect Jimin to release anything fresh or ambitious. (Did anyone else listen to that J-Hope EP, though? That was fun.)
[5]

Alfred Soto: I wish the former BTS singer the best, which includes better tunes than ones that ape “Like I Love You”‘s plastic acoustic funk and Ed Sheeran’s fan dance of sincerity.
[4]

Nortey Dowuona: Jon Bellion came a long way: from playing switch hitter on Logic songs to writing bops for the Korean Beatles, from dropping “All Time Low” to rescuing Justin Bieber, Halsey and Miley Cyrus from all time lows, from playing on beat pads in Long Island to touring the world with twenty one pilots. But he is only human, and he makes mistakes, such as putting in a 5 count in the second verse to fill time. (Pete Nappi has much to answer for.) Jimin boldly puts his thin tenor to work trying to sell this, though, and delivers a surprisingly courageous run, a sterling performance that commits to the 2003-era bit. (Tenroc, responsible for the guitar licks and additional synth riffs and drum programming, probably heard that run and rued the day he willingly entered that other guy’s studio session.) If this is the first Jimin solo offering, I will take it.
[8]

Jonathan Bradley: “Who” bursts forth with the energy of a dancefloor filler, but Jimin’s feathery vocal points toward an underlying R&B framework that is more delicate and compelling than the airless production allows for. With acoustic guitar stutters that call to mind early Justin Timberlake and a gasped tenor that suggests the emergency of The Weeknd (if not the skeeviness), there’s no shortage of things to like about this. See also: a “why-why-why” interjection that’s strong enough to be a hook but sticks harder for only appearing once. For a song drawn with stark emotional and musical lines, though, “Who” would be easier to appreciate if the negative spaces were emptier.
[7]

Michael Hong: “Who” is surprisingly slick, even if it can’t seem to decide whether it wants Jimin to look romantic or erotic. The better part of this leans toward the former with its restraint, ready to fall in love but still waiting for the right person. It’s the latter part that’s hard to stomach; the showy high-notes are grating, and that heavy bass sets its sights on something more explicit, souring the flirtatious ambience of the guitar melody.
[4]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Exquisitely corny — every guitar strum and each of Jimin’s treble-y wails signals a grand ambition to sentimental pop greatness that is only fleetingly met by the threadbare song undergirding “Who.” I’m sympathetic; it’s a song about love in a gnostic sense, where the actual existence of an external one to be loved is less important than the internal knowledge that the heart has something to wait for. Yet this concept proves brittle in Jimin’s hands, less a romantic epic and more a yearning vamp, never quite reaching the heights it wants to exceed.
[6]

Katherine St. Asaph: The degree of fanservice here — who is his heart waiting for? Is it someone he’s never met, someone who lives thousands of miles away, oh my God could it be you? — is so shameless and OTT it’s genuinely remarkable. So is the old-fashioned PG-rated romanticism — for all the hyperpop vocal smear and sophistipop instrumentation details (that synth glissando!), this sounds not far off from, like, Enrique Iglesias or the A*Teens, and somehow makes that refreshing.
[7]

Edward Okulicz: It’s OK to be nostalgic for 2003, but this isn’t any of the things I’m nostalgic for, but rather quite a few things that need to stay back in memories — “Like I Love You” rhythm, outrageously piercing hooks and chords and melodies that remind me of not-very-distinguished British boybands I became familiar with through my trawls through the Eurocharts back in the day.
[3]

Iain Mew: Something in the melody and the way it steps into the stutter of the backing keeps making me think of JLS’s “Beat Again.” With Jimin’s blasé commitment to expending nights, his mind, and the world on someone he hasn’t even identified yet, it might even be a prologue to the same relationship that JLS offer the batshit one-sided epilogue to. 
[5]

Mark Sinker: The two poles of Jimin’s public being are (a) that he graduated from GLOBAL CYBER UNIVERSITY (as others did also, tbf) and (b) the preternaturally sensible haircut he sports in his Wikipedia photo (warning: this may change). Here he solves future couple-dom as if it’s a data-processing problem, addressed with both vim and angst: “someone she can count on – 1 2 3 4 5!” Meanwhile I saw family cars in riot-flame off the corner of the square where I lived, and here he slides and glides through a stage-set of much the same as if this semi-infinite numerated care had no weight to it at all.
[9]

Ian Mathers: You know pop criticism/fandom is in a healthy place right now, because I have the passing thought “I wonder if I’ll be hounded off the internet for this” when my primary visceral reaction to “Who” is “did they not notice that the vocals and/or vocal production is offputting?” The song itself is fine, if a bit generic, but there’s something a bit too trebly or piercing for me, and since the singing is unsurprisingly front and centre it’s hard to get past. 
[4]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: I’m not super picky when it comes to audio mixing, but something about the way that Jimin’s voice is tuned sounds so deeply off that I actually checked to see if my headphones were malfunctioning.
[2]

Dave Moore: Sleek, hyperprocessed vocals, spiritually closer to “Believe” than hyperpop, against a transnational production that sounds like it’s from everywhere and nowhere. It provided a fun global guessing game until I cheated and checked the credits. Huh, probably more interesting than anything I’ve heard from BTS, good for him.
[6]

no blergs » Tuesday, September 3rd, 2024 12:50 am

You didn’t have to guess the score we’d give…

[Video]
[7.06]

Jonathan Bradley: Of the three big Brat remixes, “Guess” is the first to offer something more than stunt casting. In Charli’s hands, the track is a flirtation with a voyeuristic public and a bravura attempt to stare down surveillance; she hopes to wrest back control by titillating on her own terms. It doesn’t quite work; Charli sounds most attuned to her subject when she splinters her voice to transform the pseudo-eroticism into Daft Punk robotics qua “Technologic.” Eilish’s intrusion into the track adds dimension; she is the voyeur, bringing a louche sensuality to an engagement that had only been conceptual; her come-on provides frisson to a track whose intimacy had existed only for cameras and screens. Billie’s lasciviousness transfixes like eye contact held for too long, and it’s there that the relentless, insistent electro beat abandons the club and begins to pound like a rush of blood to the head.
[8]

Edward Okulicz: Everyone’s talking about Brat, and have been since it came out. I listened to it — seriously, nothing. Clicks, articles, references in the media, social media buzz, but none of the songs stuck, and none have become breakout hits in the way Taylor or Beyoncé or Adele get at least one chart-topper per album campaign or near enough. Then Billie Eilish adds a verse to “Guess,” and it becomes a hit in its own right. That tells you something: Billie is huge enough to give other people instant chart purchase. Charli’s success as a writer and an exponent of a pop ideal means that her essence has seeped so much into the charts that she’s not even the best at what she does, nor the best thing on her own records, whereas Billie has seemlessly moved from death-goth-wisp to menacing queer death-diva and caught a delectable second wind. The production sounds like it was made for her — she eats Charli for lunch (in the normal sense of the phrase). She instinctively knows how to dance in front of and behind the beat. She’s laugh-out-loud funny on her verse, and the “…unless” takes the tragedy of a million failed attempts at hitting on the straights and makes it something you laugh about in the moment, rather than years later.
[7]

Harlan Talib Ockey: Billie Eilish takes this from draft to song, adding not only new lyrics but the thorny sapphic chemistry of “I’d hit that. Just kidding. Unless?” The production levels up much less between the two versions, though the way Charli and Billie’s voices are mixed into each other during the outro gives it some extra polish; the main issue is that it’s very audibly The Dare, rather than Charli’s more usual collaborator A.G. Cook. In theory, this would be refreshing, but the “Guess” instrumental sounds more like a remix of Daft Punk’s “Technologic” than an original song — much like The Dare’s flagship single, “Girls,” sounds like an LCD Soundsystem track that was left in the microwave for too long. Still, a general success at being “Guess and it’s the same but it’s even more deliriously horny so it’s not.”
[7]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Fun as a bonus track trifle, tedious as a big event single. Every time I try to talk myself into it I realize that the parts I like — the gleeful back-and-forth of the breakdown/outro most of all — are offset by the awkwardness of the verses, Charli’s insouciance undercut by Billie’s eagerness. Maybe I just don’t want to listen to a song where The Dare and underwear occur in such close proximity. 
[5]

Isabel Cole: The song itself is a little lifeless, but I get such a kick out of Billie Eilish bashfully mumble-mouthing about wanting to eat pussy. She sounds so awkward! It’s adorable!
[6]

TA Inskeep: I’m obsessed with Eilish’s seemingly tossed-off “Charli likes boys, but she knows I’d hit it” lyric; why is her dyke era feeling so right right now? And besides that, Eilish’s verse completes “Guess,” which was originally just the same verse 2x in need of something else. Between the brilliant additions of Billie putting her oh-so-California flat voice against Charli’s Essex leer and her brother Finneas putting his oontz-oontz behind the boards, this version just bangs harder than its original — it interpolates Daft Punk’s “Technologic” atop electroclash! And that’s to say nothing of its stupidly brilliant video. Maybe, just maybe, Charli’s made the best two singles of 2024? 
[10]

Hannah Jocelyn: After the trio of “Pretty Girls,” “Lead Me On,” and “Good Luck, Babe!”, where women deal with others uncertain about their sexuality, we now have the logical conclusion: a song from the point of view of the girl leading the gay one on. There’s a power fantasy inherent in wanting a straight girl to want you, and a guilt in that because of its proximity to the “predatory lesbian” stereotype. (And it’s a reversal of men saying “you haven’t tried me yet,” but that’s another can of worms.) I’m sure there’s something satisfying on the straight-girl end, but I am not a straight girl, so I don’t know. Regardless, it’s shocking to hear Billie Eilish just spell it out when she says “Charli likes boys but she knows I’d hit it” then tops it immediately with “Charli, call me if you’re with it.” Forget Rebecca Lucy Taylor warning someone “I’m not your tour guide” — Billie will happily be an “experiment” just to maybe see what Charli’s got going on down there. (God, this is a weird song.) It’s supposed to be campy, but I don’t know if it works — I am not a fan of the “my name is Billie, and I’m here to say/I like girls in a horny way” cadence, nor the unimaginative deep house production from The Dare. Billie and Charli have more than enough chemistry to carry this over, and the video is phenomenal, but even as they tell me not to take it seriously, I find it hard to fully laugh along with them. 
[6]

Dave Moore: This has all the sexual chemistry (alone or in pairs) of an HR seminar on inappropriate icebreakers in the workplace. It’s sort of funny, but not nearly funny enough for a song with so much underwear in it.
[5]

Jeffrey Brister: The mainstream has become a lot hornier over the last few years: fewer winky faces, fewer coy lyrics, more explicit lyrics about specific acts, and most heartening to see, more expressions of queer desire. Hearing it just makes me feel good, sending thrills through my body of the aren’t-you-a-little-pervert and the this-makes-my-soul-glow-with-happiness variety. “Guess” pulses with need, that breath catching in your nose as you try to control your breathing, sweat prickling your arms. The lyrical bluntness just makes it feel sexier, an acknowledgement of desire and a dare to do it.
[9]

Mark Sinker: “Everything happens so much,” as @horse_ebooks spookily noted long ago — and you can be very for it all (or some of it all) and still know why the sex-negative TikTok Zoomer has since become an en masse thing.
[7]

Alfred Soto: The wobbly bass had me thinking of Disclosure’s Jessie Ware collaboration “Confess to Me,” the whispery-whiskery vocals of many anonymous electroclash bangers I danced to out of my head in 2002. Billie Eilish’s increasing skill at applying humor and intelligence — the same things, really — to her queerness complements Charli XCX’s bruiser overstatement. “Guess” could be longer, but it kept me guessing.
[7]

Katherine St. Asaph: Automatic electroclash high score. Anything calling itself “indie sleaze” (whether literally or in vibe) should sound sleazy, unsafe, and not fully endorseable, like the parties they’d play at are genuinely bad ideas and the people at them genuinely seedy; and should sound cooler not just than the normie Brat Summer memers but also you. Then Billie and Finneas come in — the former homeschoolers sounding like they understand the assignment better than someone who actually lived through the MySpace incarnation of this — to add newer, messier, better-baiting sexual politics and new vectors to what was already an omnitaunt. 
[8]

Taylor Alatorre: When arch-New Yorker Lenny Kaye went digging for Nuggets in 1972, he thought he was pick-axing “The First Psychedelic Era,” and it would take another decade for “garage rock” to become the preferred retroactive term for mid-’60s fuzz tunes. For that reason, I can’t fault “indie sleaze” for being late to its own christening. I can fault it for singlehandedly summoning the Dare, though. The animatronic suit-and-cigarette act gives the knowingly naïve scene exactly what it’s lined up for, which is nominative determinism: “indie” = post-poptimist post-punk, pumped out of NYC neighborhoods whose names I shouldn’t know but do; “sleaze” = yelping about sex in a way that makes the writers of Meet Me in the Bathroom wish they had chosen a different Strokes song. It’s possible that Brat as we know it would not exist if “Girls” hadn’t become a subcultural hit in 2022, so the Dare’s agenda-setting presence here, complete with namecheck, was also predetermined. Eilish’s presence was not, but the lack of wiggle room within the song’s overclocked prurience has her ending up as drably utilitarian as the Daft Punk rip. On paper, she throws a cinder block to the first verse’s question-begging OnlyFans pitch, muffling Charli’s lips as she raises the notion that perhaps the male gaze has been given a bum deal. On record, though, Billie is tied down by her typecasting as voracious pansexual caricature, a role she’s all too eager to play as long as it gets some theoretical listener’s knickers in a twist. This emphasis on trolling over songcraft is present throughout, from the vicarious “Britney, bitch”-style adlibs to the plodding metamodernisms that slam the door on us, thinking they’ve just won the argument. And yeah, you might say, that troll-baiting, that self-awareness of the drug-fueled ridiculousness of it all, is part of the electroclash package; this is just what reviving the revival looks like. Except the rest of Brat proved that it didn’t have to be, as did the Dare’s forebears in dance-punk revivalism. “Losing My Edge” had “the art-school Brooklynites in little jackets,” but it also had “and they’re actually really, really nice,” and “GIL! SCOTT! HERON!,” and a bleeding-heart belief that all these rare crate finds had a real, defining importance that persisted even after the last anonymous partygoer staggered out into the daybreak. Maybe the joke’s on me for weighing His Eminence James Murphy against a two-minute camgirl rhapsody; or maybe both joke and rhapsody would be improved if Charli and her producer weren’t staring at their sub count the entire time.
[3]

Nortey Dowuona: The Dare having a great year, speculation about sexual proclivities, white women rapping. Who said rap was dead?
[7]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: The week after this came out, I went to a party for Market Days on the rooftop of Chicago’s queer north side community center. Four DJs with four vastly different styles mixed, but you know what they all had in common? A cut of “Guess.” Each time, every queer in the crowd knew every irreverent, petulant, sex-tinged word. Charli knows how to write a hook, how to tease a friend out of her shell, and how to keep momentum barreling forward. 
[8]

Ian Mathers: Every one of these new brat versions has taken a song that definitely felt complete on its own and spun it off into giddy new heights. I sometimes use Andrew WK’s I Get Wet as an example of an album I’d give 10/10 just because it knows what it wants to do and then does it as hard and successfully as it possibly can. And while I do like “Guess” (and this version of it) an awful lot, my mark here also partially reflects my similar feelings about the whole brat project. One of the most fun things in pop is when someone who is having a Moment seems to know exactly what they want to do with it.
[10]

no blergs » Monday, September 2nd, 2024 10:15 pm

We still ride for you, Kesha!

[Video]
[7.25]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Kesha: unburdened by what has been, living in the context, realizing what can be. 
[8]

Katherine St. Asaph: It’s hard not to overrate Kesha singles. Like all right-minded pop listeners, I want her to thrive, and I want every song to sound like proof that she is. I initially thought “Raising Hell” was the glorious height of Kesha’s hedonism; in retrospect, it was a little perfunctory. Likewise, I really want “Joyride” to be the Rabelaisian outsider carnival everyone says it is, enough to resist the reality that nothing about it is outside the bounds of normie pop. Cowriter Madison Love has a back catalogue spanning years of pop singles with a similar chaos quotient: Lady Gaga’s “Sour Candy,” Machine Gun Kelly and Camila Cabello’s “Bad Things,” Ava Max’s “Sweet But Psycho”; to contextualize even further, she’s written enough for enough B-listers that some of that back catalogue inevitably went through Dr. Luke. (A few antis have tried to turn this fact into a gotcha, as if it’s impossible to work with an asshole colleague then want to stop.) The arrangement is less love honk than cruise control, coasting in the lane of its donk. The chorus sounds kinetic, springing out and bouncing around like a jack-in-the-box; it also sounds like “Run the World (Girls)” but slower. The lyrics can’t decide whether they’re about sex or Regina Georgish camaraderie (I doubt it’s both), and while Kesha sounds as depraved as ever, slurring and purring out bars like “label whore, but I’m tired of wearing clothes,” none of them outsleaze her Simple Life days, let alone a brat summer. All this said, the song pre-empts every criticism possible: she has, truly, earned the right to be like this. I’ve written all these objective pans, and my heart is in none of them. 
[7]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: I often (perhaps too often?) critique a song by saying it sounds like something out of a movie about a fake pop star. Those songs are worthy of critique, obviously — they’re constructed entirely out of cliches and misremembered fragments of out of date pop hits, with any hooks accrued seemingly by accident. Yet “something out of a movie” is not necessarily the right put down. Case in point: “Joyride,” from its deliriously overcranked accordion hook on down, sounds absolutely like something out of some feverish fictional property. And yet, this absolutely works — the first Kesha single in years to work as both commentary and as a straight ahead banger.
[7]

Leah Isobel: Kesha’s 2022 loosie “Rich White Straight Men” introduced a soundscape that was big not in the sense of pop but in the sense of density: it was carnivalesque and menacing, stuffed with cartoonish sound effects, barely making room for her theatrically affected vocal. While Gag Order had an austere musculature that spoke to the effort of keeping hope alive, that song was the sound of despair, garish and hopeless and too much in every respect. Like everything that overflows with sincerity, it was a little alienating, a little cringe. “Joyride” revisits that soundscape, but offers an innovation: by pairing a similarly maniacal accordion loop with the straightforward momentum of her dance-pop side, the song achieves something that I almost want to call Brechtian? It is impossible to listen to a new Kesha song without immediately thinking of her context, her Story, her Narrative; this has made it exceedingly difficult for her to reclaim the joy and delight that was her trademark. But the accordion is so fucking ridiculous, so cringe, that it actually short-circuits all other considerations. The question goes from “is Kesha happy?” to “what is that?” And then I’m dancing. She fucking did it.
[8]

Alex Clifton: Have you ever wanted to go to a lightly demonic monster truck rally run by evil clowns who love to dance? Because that’s exactly the kind of wild party Kesha’s conjuring here, silly and fun and insanely catchy. Initially I was a little over the “I am Mother” line, thinking, “that will date this all to hell,” but maybe this one should absolutely be dated. July 2024: the first month Kesha released new music unshackled from Dr. Luke. The sense of freedom and excitement here is so palpable; Kesha’s clearly having a ball on the recording, hamming up her performance in a way that’s simultaneously goofy and sexy. (The only other singer I can see delivering “beep-beep bitch” this well is Gaga, the established queen of camp.) I’m excited to see where newly-freed Kesha goes next, as she’s bound to show us the best night of our lives. 
[9]

Joshua Lu: Hedonistic carnival final boss OST — nobody knows how to make trashy pop music like Kesha.
[8]

Jonathan Bradley: I respect the outré ambition here — it’s fun to hear Kesha find new paths into the realm of the obtuse — but this song has some very annoying sounds. The accordion is annoying! The brassy high-pitched delivery of the title on the hook is annoying! Declaring yourself to be “mother” more than a year after Meghan Trainor did it is annoying!
[3]

Alfred Soto: Immersing himself into the Eurotrash with which she has long flited, Kesha sounds buoyant like she hasn’t been all decade. She sounds best when harmonizing with bleeps and bloops and synth gahoozits. 
[8]

Ian Mathers: Not the accordions I thought I wanted but, it turns out, the accordions I needed. Hyperpolka? Can that be a thing for a bit?
[7]

Taylor Alatorre: It’s an open question why the most prototypically American pop singer to emerge from the Recession Era – sorry, Lana, but you first hit the U.S. top 40 with a Cedric Gervais remix – would want to declare her label independence with a high-density slab of blaring Eurotrash. In freeing herself from one set of constraints, Kesha seems to have placed herself under a not-entirely-new one: a dual mandate of familiarity and novelty, of embracing the garishly extroverted attitude of Animal and Cannibal while running away from their most obvious sonic totems. “Joyride” is too fixated on these matters of branding and self-presentation to truly give off the uninhibited vibe it wants to, though Kesha’s everything-at-the-wall approach does produce at least one undeniable hook: those perfectly timed, perfectly trashy car horns. An appeal to the 5-year-old in all of us, who just wants to hear the big vroom-vroom machine go beep-beep.
[5]

Hannah Jocelyn: When someone’s trying to make another campy “Padam Padam”-style summer hit, I hear it and I know — this is a fascinating mix of effortless strangeness and ‘omg this is for the gaaayzzz brat summmerrrrr so juuuliiaaaa’ pandering. There’s a lot of off-putting material here; the chorus melody sounds like that meme where every note in “Fireflies” is tuned to C and the spoken title drop sounds uncannily lifted from an ARTPOP reject (you can’t tell me that’s not Gaga!). In a lot of ways, this isn’t too far from a song like Camila Cabello’s “I Luv It”, but Kesha is an actual weirdo cramming her weirdness into a pop song, not Cabello retrofitting her normalcy into a would-be weird song. That’s why she’s much better at calling herself “Mother” than other singers, and why she can get away with an accordion in place of the usual synthesizers. “Joyride” is not trying to be an accidental masterpiece; it’s just zaniness for the sake of zaniness. There’s nothing wrong with letting her be like that. 
[7]

Will Adams: “I’ve earned the right to be like this” is one hell of a mission statement (and she’s right). “Joyride,” like any other successful Kesha single, has an appealing weirdness — the accordion riff, the octave swoops in the chorus, dramatic-ass choir — that makes for a fun ride. However, there’s some light pandering in the form of “mother” and the Mean Girls quote which stops it just short of being a full Obnoxious Banger (though this self-remix by producer Zhone takes it there).
[7]

Jackie Powell: What makes Kesha such an instinctual pop star is how well she knows herself. With “Joyride” she returns to the type of cheekiness and camp that introduced her to the world. Her diction and enunciation on some of the consonants in each verse is what is so unique to Kesha. She knows what words to accent and which ones not to. Not every artist has this awareness. Kesha had to take a bit of an artistic journey to return to her old sound with as much spunk and moxie as “Joyride”, and unlike another artist we know, she did it successfully. Kesha and Madison Love wrote a song that empowers without being too cheesy, frivolous but without being meaningless. 
[7]

Kat Stevens: Admittedly I’ve left it a little late to qualify for Paris 2024, so I must now set my sights on LA 2028. It’s true that I’m now older than US swimmer Dara ‘Grandma’ Torres was when she won three silver medals in Beijing, however legendary Uzbek gymnast Oksana Chusovitina managed an average 14.166 score for her two vaults in Tokyo (aged 46), and still hasn’t officially retired. There’s hope for me yet! As such I got cracking with my altitude training this morning (running up Crystal Palace hill, elevation above sea level: 112m) and switched up my playlist from French house to a new Los Angeles-themed one, with “Joyride” by Kesha in pride of place at the top. Beep-beep, bitch — we’re going to the Olympics!
[9]

Nortey Dowuona: Madison Love woke up in the morning, saying fuck P. Diddy. 
[6]

Mark Sinker: Nothing shorthands my favourite year in pop for a long time than responding to whatever anyone now says or does with the word “JOYRIDE” in a Kesha voice. 
[10]

3 blergs » Friday, August 9th, 2024 11:55 pm

The “Livin’ La Vida Loca” reference makes me wonder what we would have given “The Thong Song”…

[Video]
[5.12]

Michelle Myers: Stray Kids work best with a light touch and a wink. The harder they seem to try, the more tedious the results. “Chk Chk Boom” doesn’t reach their pandemic era heights, but it is their best title track since 2022’s “Maniac.” Changbin’s gravelly, rolled r’s are the highlight, but I’m also charmed the lyrics–innuendos so excessively bowdlerized that they add much needed levity.
[7]

Taylor Alatorre: These variegated vignettes of boys’ noise are intended to show off how wild and untamable and “catastrophic” the crew is; their apparent fear that the robo-reggaeton riddim would be incomplete without some pidgin Spanish grafted onto it tells a different story. “Livin’ La Vida Loca” deserves better than to be made a proxy for “donde esta la biblioteca.”
[4]

Nortey Dowuona: This is dallasK’s fault. (Also Bang Chan, but I expect young industry professionals to be either circumspect or self indulgent.) Also, what is with the terrible reggaeton drums?
[1]

Ian Mathers: [watches music video] “Huh, you know, K-pop is starting to feel a bit like pop’s equivalent of the MCU.”
[5]

Harlan Talib Ockey: My impression of Stray Kids up to now has been that the production does most of the heavy lifting, and “Chk Chk Boom” isn’t exactly proving me wrong. This warped reggaeton beat is an immediate [10]. The verses are more cohesive than, say, “God’s Menu”, and at their best (Han & Felix, 1:25-1:35) they’re genuinely delightful. I’m very tempted to deduct a few points for the agonizingly forced Deadpool & Wolverine promo, but that probably isn’t fair on Stray Kids themselves.
[7]

Katherine St. Asaph: Today in US politics: NRA types are attempting to smear vice presidential nominee and avowed pheasant hunter Tim Walz as a fake and unconvincing gun guy — in gunfucker terminology, a “Fudd.” I have to assume they haven’t heard Stray Kids’ poseurish “rat-tat-tat-tat”s. The synth kinda sounds like Mya’s “Step,” though, so I can’t hate it too much.
[6]

John S. Quinn-Puerta: I do feel like name dropping “Livin’ La Vida Loca” on a song that stutters through its rhythmic identity shouldn’t work this well. But the lack of stability on the beat is half the point, forcing me to stay on my toes while I find a flow to dance to.
[8]

Hannah Jocelyn: What is this trying to be? Is that a trap beat? A dembow beat? A four on the floor stomp? It’s trying to be dazzling but the beat switches are indistinguishable so I’m just left confused. It just throws a bunch of shit at the wall for two minutes, trying to be zany but refusing to commit to the bit. The festival version is better because it’s bland.
[3]

no blergs » Friday, August 9th, 2024 6:10 pm

“Weird Al”‘s first Jukebox appearance… today, we have finally truly become the Singles Jokebox.

[Video]
[4.38]

TA Inskeep: Oh look, vaguely recent pop hits set to polkas. <Miranda Priestly voice> Groundbreaking. </Miranda Priestly voice>
[2]

Kat Stevens: There are a certain subset of songs which I’ve only ever encountered in “Weird Al” polka medley form: I have no idea what the original “Cradle of Love” sounds like, nor have I any real interest in finding out. So it spoils the fun a little when it turns out I know all the tunes already.
[4]

Julian Axelrod: “Weird Al” Yankovic was one of my first favorite artists, which means I was exposed to some of the biggest pop hits in history via parodies and polka medleys. So while “Polkamania!” might disgust and confound the average listener, I find it charming that he’s still committing to this incredibly specific bit forty years into his career. It’s been a decade since “NOW That’s What I Call Polka!”, which means Al has a wide array of hits to cover, from the obvious (“Shake It Off”) to the inspired (“Vampire”) to the baffling. (My biggest laugh came not from his polkafied version of “WAP,” but the censored rendition of “Thank U, Next” that immediately follows.) It’s hard to judge this through a contemporary critical lens when it exists mainly as a funhouse inversion of pop’s immediate past. Listening to a “Weird Al” polka medley in the year 2024 feels like returning to your hometown and finding out your favorite old haunt is still standing and still run by the same curly-haired weirdo, untouched by the evolution of taste and the passage of time.
[7]

Katherine St. Asaph: A foil to Eminem: Em is crass where Al is gosh-darn unoffensive, dying to offend where Al is dying to please, but the two artists share a drive to present themselves as more chaotic than they actually are. (I interviewed “Weird Al” once, and he was so unwaveringly on-message that it felt like interviewing a career politician.) Their pop-culture medleys are as routine and unsurprising as holiday concerts, though Al’s are more event managed: doing the press circuit, he was happy to break down all the logistics of the “Polkamania” assembly and approval process. In doing so, he critiqued the song better than I ever could: SZA ghosted him, but Lin-Manuel Miranda returned his call in like 30 seconds.
[4]

Tim de Reuse: I’m sorry, Al. This kind of thing was your bread and butter, but we’ve pulled the rug out from under you. The genre-cloud of “recognizable song awkwardly re-rendered in different style” is the basis for a million clickbait YouTube thumbnails, ten percent of all videos on TikTok, and probably a quarter of all audio-based generative AI prompts. I’ve already heard all of these songs as Gregorian chant, as Norwegian black metal, Midwest emo, using the soundfonts from Super Mario 64, performed by a bad Kate Bush impersonator, in fucking “Negative Harmony” — never of my own volition. This stuff is just in the air now, competing for my attention, and it all sounds the same as every cell phone ad. Wat’s left here? Polka? Is polka still funny on its own merits? Was it ever? It’s not you, Al. It’s us. I’m sorry for what we did.
[1]

Joshua Lu: “NOW That’s What I Call Polka!” was a guilty pleasure of mine, operating as a genuinely catchy and humorous summation of then-recent hits made by a man with a palatable appreciation for pop music and a knack for taking on unserious tasks with the utmost seriousness. “Polkamania!” is mostly the same, and in being his first mashup since then (aside from some Hamilton thing I can’t bring myself to listen to), he’s had to distill over a decade of hits down instead of just a few years’ worth. All of these songs included make sense, but every other song just instills a sense of “Oh yeah, that was a thing once,” culminating in a Taylor Swift remake that surely would’ve amused me in 2013 but now just feels a dozen lifetimes old. It doesn’t help that some of these songs are just kind of boring and don’t offer much by way of humor, forcing pretty straightforward polkafications and awkward transitions. 
[5]

Ian Mathers: Look, none of these will ever equal “Polka Your Eyes Out” to me, both because of the song selection there and because I was 10 when it came out. But I’m happy Al’s out there doing his thing, and I hope he never changes.
[6]

Mark Sinker: OK, back in April some clown called on him to become our beloved worm-man god-emperor, and now look what happened: “Brat Al” Yankovic! There’s a whole slab of cultural and music theory to be explored one day, about what happens when you convert modern pop into sheet music and then convert it back out again into your favoured local sound-style: what gets elided, but also what’s gained (not nothing)! And maybe some day someone will write it up — but that day is not today and that someone is not me. 
[5]

Hannah Jocelyn: The polka medleys were never my favorites; it’s almost always the same shtick and there’s none of the cleverness of his usual material or his (underappreciated!) style parodies. There’s inspiration here to be sure, “Weird Al” doing “Bad Guy” as klezmer gets this a positive score on those grounds alone. Maybe if he released this five years ago or in five years it would work and not fall victim to the Anxious Interval. But this is “Weird Al”, long-reigning king of kitsch. Who wants him to be in touch?
[6]

Nortey Dowuona: Both 10 years out of date and 10 years into the future. Welcome back, polka. (And “Weird Al,” too.)
[10]

Taylor Alatorre: I appreciate that there’s a person out there who can get me to say with a straight face a sentence like “I miss when the polkas were more thematically consistent.”
[5]

Jonathan Bradley: “Weird Al” sucks. I feel so mean to say that: people love this guy who, let’s face it, is completely harmless and has been delighting (mostly) children for decades, and here I am telling you how appalled I feel that we celebrate such a pristinely executed vision of pure crappiness. And yet, here we are blurbing him, so: I hate the querulous insipidity of Al’s interpretation of pop music. His schtick demands familiarity with pop — otherwise the parodies make no sense — but shies away from the music’s flair and vision and emotion, as if the pleasure these things offer is too terrifying and too adult, and must be remediated through the lens of banality so as to be controlled. His jokes rarely riff on details of the texts themselves, the way a Lonely Island video might, but replace any intensity of feeling with artefacts of suburban triviality: crappy television, crappy minor medical ailments, and so much crappy, crappy food. Even the verisimilitude of his productions — his greatest actual talent — runs headlong into the crappiness of his adenoidal voice, reassuring us that he’s not so proficient at his craft as to be mistaken for a star. And then there’s his sideshow of playing covers with an accordion, which we understand to be a joke instrument, in the style of polka, which we understand to be a joke genre. Is his polka any good? None of his listeners care. Do they go on to explore more polka? Why would they? Do people who enjoy polka think Al is contributing anything to the music they love? Who cares; the incredible notion that someone somewhere might enjoy polka is part of the joke. Because the most desiccated and shriveled aspect of Al’s relationship with pop is that he can’t imagine it has its own jokes. Cardi B is funnier in “WAP” than he is here. Lil Nas X was a better troll on “Old Town Road.” Billie Eilish had better comic timing with her interjected “duh” on “Bad Guy.” And I understand how churlish I sound saying all this. I am Seymour Skinner; I am Ed Rooney. But I like jokes! (I’m not mad. Please don’t put in the newspaper that I got mad.) The problem is that there is nothing fun happening here!
[0]

Alfred Soto: I’m happy Al exists. This song sucks.
[2]

2 blergs » Friday, August 9th, 2024 4:25 pm

“In April 2017, [Yseult] worked in a writing seminar for the Black Eyed Peas, organised by Polydor, after which she decided to end her contract with the label later that year.”

[Video]
[7.43]

Harlan Talib Ockey: Sevdaliza sounding ethereal, a viscerally satisfying reggaeton drop, both Pabllo Vittar and Yseult doing an operatic Kate Bush impression. What’s not to like?
[8]

Ian Mathers: Always a bold move to work with two other singers who just outsing you on your own track, but the whole of this works well enough that it comes across more like confidence and good taste.
[8]

Leah Isobel: Sevdaliza’s music is intent in its solemnity, so even when she throws of our most cartoonishly delightful popstars on a baile funk beat, the end result still feels startlingly corseted. I like the way she delivers the song’s title as a farewell and the way her melodies embroider the vworps and zwooms of the synth bass, but there’s a classical sort of prettiness here that I wish she’d scuff up a little.
[7]

Katherine St. Asaph: The operatic thrills and eclecticism mostly make up for the plodding chorus.
[7]

Nortey Dowuona: Katherine St. Asaph once compared Sevdaliza to Tracey Thorn, remarking on the richness of their voices as well as the woo that one would have to push through in order to enjoy the music. Yseult and Vittar, both of whom are sterling vocalists, strain to cut above the noise here. Vittar swings boldly for the fences in the first and last two lines of the intro and the bridge to grab the listener by the hand and thrust them into the chorus, while Yseult, a Nouvelle Star graduate with a sterling soprano, flutters above the drumwork by Mucky and Mathias Janmaat, who suffocate the Totó la Momposina sample under dimming filters to not overshadow the lead artist. Sevdaliza’s voice, a low, girded drawl, thrives in this environment amid the heavy rhythmic swing of the drum programming, and she manages to make some of her most woo-woo lyrics ripple through the mix.
[8]

Jonathan Bradley: There’s more melodrama in the spiky synth riff than anything else, though our three stars give it their best with lines like “when was the last time you felt safe in the dark?” and “this world was never meant for a woman’s heart.” Pabllo Vittar’s warbled bridge is certainly overwrought, and a wobbly drill-adjacent bass tugs us deeper, but I never feel like we fall through the veil into the world these three have constructed for themselves.
[5]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Takes me back to a place when early 2000s pop music took itself way too seriously, and when the stakes were always inexplicably “ride or die.” “Alibi” is the sexiest and deadliest thing I’ve heard this year, in three languages. 
[9]

no blergs » Friday, August 9th, 2024 12:49 am

You’re doing mid, Oklahoma…

[Video]
[5.62]

Ian Mathers: This goes so much harder than anything from Twisters: The Album ought to that it verges on false advertising.
[8]

Julian Axelrod: There are two songs on the Twisters soundtrack with “Oklahoma” in the title. Lainey Wilson’s “Out of Oklahoma” is a tender, conflicted ballad that underlines both our heroine Kate’s complicated feelings toward her hometown and Daisy Edgar-Jones’s complicated feelings toward American accents. On the other end of the spectrum is Luke Combs’s “Ain’t No Love in Oklahoma,” a big honking stomper that blares out of YouTube storm chaser Tyler’s truck every time he drives into frame. “Out of Oklahoma” is a much better song, but “Ain’t No Love in Oklahoma” feels truer to the movie around it: unapologetically dumb, unfathomably huge, and completely uninterested in weather science. In a way, Luke Combs is the Glen Powell of the Twisters soundtrack: He feels it, he rides it, he secures the bag.
[6]

Katherine St. Asaph: You know what they say about the weather in Oklahoma (and every other state with a version of this adage): if you don’t like how badass a song about it sounds, wait two minutes.
[4]

Tim de Reuse: My bona fides: I grew up in tornado alley, a stone’s throw from the same Red River that Combs is caterwauling about here, and I spent every spring and summer hiding in basements and bathrooms with a battery-powered radio whenever the sirens turned on. If you’re going to write an aggressive, regionally-themed country belter, then the theme of middle-American inclement weather gives you a lot to work with! A skinny little fuck-you from heaven that selectively plucks entire neighborhoods off the map, terrifying in its unpredictability but boring in its yearly ritualization — you could say a lot there about vice, adrenaline, self-destruction, or maybe just the texture of life in Oklahoma itself. But outside of a few lines that explicitly reference storm-chasing, ostensibly added out of contractual obligation, it’s Combs-by-numbers, albeit with a soundtrack-ass hard-rock production job that bounces off his voice completely. If someone else had gotten this paycheck they might have accidentally done something interesting.
[4]

Nortey Dowuona: Not bad, just not good. Doesn’t tell me anything about who you are, or what you feel.
[6]

Alfred Soto: I want my tornado songs to sound like sax solos on Stooges tracks or to depict romantic entanglement like this forgotten 1996 beauty. Luke Combs doesn’t sound like a windstorm — he blows hot air like a MAGA on a street corner.
[3]

Taylor Alatorre: There were probably discussions at some point about wanting to learn from the mistakes of “Humans Being,” which is unfortunate because “Humans Being” is Van Hagar at their messy, pissed-off best, mixing chaos and composure in a way that perfectly mirrors the characters on screen. Combs’s paean to the perils of storm chasing is more deliberate in its pacing and more literal in its writing, while still leaving enough lyrical wiggle room for those who really do just want the tornadoes to be metaphors. The focus on duality and ambivalence is appropriate for a disaster film in which the disaster is both sought out and avoided in equal measure. And if the tough-talking country-rock grit scans as generic upon first listen, those few seconds of breathing room after each verse offer both variety and a hint of the “silent extreme” that Hagar spoke of.
[7]

Jonathan Bradley: As unnecessary as making a sequel to Twister and at least as gloriously obvious as titling it Twisters. In recent years, the distortion pedal has been cause for concern in country music, not because it’s a sign of inauthenticity or any of that guff but because Nashville wields it like a dumb man with an oversized truck: as an easy marker of lunkish masculinity that’s never actually used to get anything from A to B — wit, wordplay, weltanschauung. “Ain’t No Love in Oklahoma” sounds like that type of thing, but Luke Combs matches the storm-sized riff with roaring intensity. The lyrics about chasing the devil down a Sooner State highway don’t get deep or dark enough to suggest any actual hell is being raised, but this is a song off the soundtrack of a summer blockbuster; it’s enough to kick moderate quantities of ass.
[7]

1 blerg » Thursday, August 8th, 2024 11:16 pm