The Singles Jukebox

We too are sticking together on this…

[Video]
[7.11]

Jonathan Bradley: The catchiest and prettiest thing on Hit Me Hard and Soft is this micro-scale nighttime fantasia, a burble of dazed affection and death imagery; it’s Billie’s most mellow evocation of the macabre to date. Her vocal is light but dexterous, pushing some syllables away, swooning on others, opening out when restraint threatens to take over entirely. A lesser performer would melt into the production — the sort that we used to call lap-pop, back when not all pop could be produced on a home computer and that could mark a sound. It’s interior in outlook, a composition of detail rather than impact. And the details are what sell this: the pattering thump of drums, the sleepy sprawl of the synth textures, the faint sparkling of guitar arpeggios that decorate rather than dominate. It’s a toybox tune, but one where the toys come to life as you dream.
[8]

Kat Stevens: This is how I remember it: Sharon and Tracey are trying to win a cash prize at a karaoke competition, presumably to get themselves out of some sort of financial scrape. Tracey is reluctant at first but eventually commits to their hamfisted “I Will Survive” dance routine. However, Sharon gets stage fright at the last minute, leaving their man-eating, snobby next-door neighbour Dorian to save the day. Dorian pinch-hits “Like A Virgin” to the delighted crowd, and I decide that the next time I do karaoke, I will copy this schtick down to the very last gyration. Everything else about Birds Of A Feather was shit, so Billie has a low bar to clear here.
[5]

Katherine St. Asaph: The sort of genial soft-rock arrangement Haim have made a whole career of, enlivened by the kind of vocal acrobatics Billie normally holds back.
[7]

Jackie Powell: When “Birds of a Feather” was first released, critics immediately projected that it could be a top 40 radio mainstay or song of the summer, as this track is the “purest pop” Billie Eilish probably has in her catalog. It’s a foot tapper, and the combination of kazoos, acoustic guitars and melodic synthesizers emulate how a bird typically flitters around. But I don’t view “Birds of a Feather” as Eilish selling out or chart-hunting. Creating a song that sounds like the younger sister of Wham!’s “Last Christmas” — which Eilish’s main collaborator and brother Finneas believes is a major compliment — isn’t complying with some sort of industry trend. It’s not like Eilish went country like so many other pop acts have in the past three months. She also challenges herself vocally. Eilish has always been gifted at blending her upper register with her chest voice, and she shows off her excellent mixing in each pre-chorus, especially on the phrases “I don’t” and “might not.” So where does she challenge herself? Right in that final chorus, where Eilish crescendos on each overlapped response that begins with “til.” There are three of them. She begins in her head voice, mixes on the second, and then takes a risk and belts in a way we’ve never really heard before, her voice going on the proverbial rollercoaster that vocal teachers always have their students visualize and try to execute in warmups. “I couldn’t belt until I was literally 18,” Eilish told Zane Lowe. “I couldn’t physically do it.” Now she clearly can, and she’s all the more versatile — the exact opposite of an artist’s intent when “selling out.”
[8]

Mark Sinker: Not doctorate-level semiotics here, but this comes into focus as a song – from sweetly yearning fuzzgoth to something more bodily and bitter and present — when the verse rhyme-endings switch from open vowels (-ay, -oo, -ee) to that hard array of -its. Which, I mean, yes, it’s actually Californian alveolar tapping shading into glottal stops, and that final rhyme of “stupi… ” actually trails off into the Billie-est of ether, so the bitter bodily array is way more implied than it’s physically there.
[8]

Alfred Soto: Part of the charm of “BIRDS” is how it sounds like a demo for a dance-floor banger. That’s also one of its hindrances. “I’ll love you till the day that I die” is fine once, a place-filler every other time. 
[7]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: This John Legend, Lewis Capaldi corny-ass song sounds slightly pleasant when sung by Billie, but do yourself a favor and go listen to the “Guess” remix instead. 
[6]

Ian Mathers: On the surface this is just pleasant (hits me soft, you could say), but I keep coming back to the “say you wanna quit, don’t be stupid” part. Whether you hear this as about siblings or romance, there’s just enough of that element to undercut (or maybe ground) the florid declarations of the rest of it.
[8]

Nortey Dowuona: At one point in 1886, it was estimated that 50 American bird species were hunted for their feathers. Passenger pigeons and Carolina parakeets went extinct, one after the other. If not for the crusading of Harriet Hemenway and cousin Minna Hall and the passage of the Weeks-McLean Law (aka the Migratory Bird Act) by Congress in 1913, backed by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, snowy egrets would’ve been plucked to extinction. Think of all the years it took to get that passed into law and backed by the Supreme Court. Think of how much longer it will be until trans rights and the rights of the entire LGBT community are enshrined into law. And how much longer this song will last until that happens, long after me and Billie and you are dead.
[7]

1 blerg » Thursday, August 8th, 2024 9:59 pm

This Colombian takes us to the Dominican…

[Video]
[6.29]

Ian Mathers: Whoever the piano player is, pay them extra, because they’re a big part of this song’s extra pep in its step. 
[8]

Nortey Dowuona: Rios, a rather popular songwriter/producer who’s worked most with Ozuna and Nicky Jam, handles songwriting duties alongside producers Edge and Sky Rompiendo, the Colombian TM88 to J Balvin’s Future, as well as Karol herself. Together they sketch a sweet, lightly played fantasy of sweeping a man away from his girl — even trying to hook up with both, but clearly centering taking the man from her and making him hers. And through Karol’s bright soprano, it sounds ebullient and joyful, thus everybody wins (unless you are the shy girl in the situation). But you know, not everyone can win.
[8]

Tim de Reuse: A workable little melody, but her delivery is a little too faraway and detached to adequately sell the subject matter in the ways I would’ve liked; it’s too lighthearted and jumpy to be cathartically bitter but it’s got too much still-into-him to come off totally content. The role of tone-setter instead falls to the most melancholic, dead-eyed keyboard preset I’ve ever heard: a truly pathetic little clink-clank, dry as a bone and meandering around a sparse, half-finished beat. The atmosphere we reach is kind of stunted and shallow but, I mean, from some angles, that works; a hazy, day-drunk boredom where you’ve got nothing better to do than mull over a bunch of stale what-ifs that you aren’t really that invested in. I’ve had worse afternoons, I guess.
[6]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Not quite as fun as it wants to be. It’s still a summer jam par excellence, but there’s a gap between ambition and execution here. Karol G’s vocals sound antiseptic and restrained for far too long — she gets to stretch out a little as the song ends, buoyed by a very charming gang vocal — and the mambo rhythms here deserve something more playful.
[6]

Jonathan Bradley: Karol G’s reggaeton is a light touch anyway, but she might well be walking on air on this merengue, which shimmers with such easy joy it could be a shampoo commercial. Like Carbonne, she knows summer songs sound even sunnier if you’ve got friends who’ll shout the words along with you.
[6]

Katherine St. Asaph: If nothing else, the video made me look up merengue karaoke mixes.
[3]

Alfred Soto: Give the piano player a raise. Not that Karol G isn’t doing her part, but at times she sounds like a guest in her own home. Nevertheless, “Si Antes…” is spirited pop.
[7]

no blergs » Thursday, August 8th, 2024 12:34 am

We’re staying out late tonight…

[Video]
[6.89]

Katherine St. Asaph: An immaculate vibe, a great hang, a simmering build; the feeling of realizing you’d love to linger indefinitely, transmuted into sound.
[8]

Alfred Soto: At ease in ruminative mode, Kehlani hasn’t recorded many club bangers these days. The Nina Sky interpolation gets them to shake the mopes, or, rather, coaxes them to put their fluttery wishcasting into a kinetic mode that occasionally suits them.
[7]

Taylor Alatorre: “In a room full of strangers… it feels like we’re alone.” Okay, pretty standard club dichotomy there. So then why would you foreground the former over the latter by turning the chorus into this communal come-hither chant? Makes me feel like I’m being courted by a hive mind or polycule or both. Maybe that’s part of the weirdness that comes with adapting the “Coolie Dance” riddim to a song about one-on-one intimacy; it didn’t have to be, though.
[5]

Jackie Powell: It’s difficult to know Kehlani’s true intent with “After Hours.” Are they trying for a dark horse R&B hit with hints of afrobeats? Is this a reggae track? Or are they paying homage to Destiny’s Child? (They released a remix of the song that plops their vocals on top of the instrumental to Destiny’s Child’s “Cater 2 U.”)  Kehlani tries to accomplish all of the above, but it’s hard to say whether they execute. The song features a sample within a sample. The first sound is the percussive rhythm that rose to popularity via Nina Sky’s “Move Ya Body,” but that sound is a sample in itself, a beat originally made by Jamaican artist Cordell ‘Scatta’ Burrell in his song “Coolie Dance Rhythm.” “After Hours” could have easily begun after that eight-second sample, which prompts the question as to why they needed it. Were they trying to bring in more mainstream listeners who would recognize the first seconds immediately? It isn’t clear. The track becomes most compelling when Kehlani gets to their refrain and then the subsequent pre-chorus. Kehlani has an overdubbed call and response that builds and builds and is quite sexy, but disappoints by the time the chorus hits. The payoff is weak, and the supposed hook sounds like an extended version of Tyla’s “Water,” especially with the echoing backing vocals that aren’t Kehlani’s. In the original “After Hours,” there is a trace of Destiny’s Child’s signature sauce: the harmony on the call-and-response sections. But the “Cater 2 U” remix slows the song’s tempo and completely changes the vibe of the song. Is this a song for the club or for the hotel room they take their lover to the night of the ensuing hookup? 
[6]

Ian Mathers: Just a fun, light party track, and I mean that as a compliment. I’m actually kind of glad this only uses the same riddim as “Move Ya Body” instead of interpolating it like the intro made me think might happen. But while I’ll be happy to hear this come up on the radio etc., I suspect every time I hear that intro I’m going to be a just a little disappointed it’s not Nina Sky.
[7]

Jonathan Bradley: There are no shortage of songs in 2024 sampling the hits of the ’00s, but Kehlani’s Nina Sky flip sounds more like yet another take on the Coolie Dance riddim than nostalgia bait; this is how dancehall is supposed to work. “After Hours” is light and pleasant, with an ingratiating synth line that finds new use for old trop house parts. Kehlani is the least essential part, but they don’t need to break a sweat to make this replayable. If it were summer here, I might bump my score up by a point.
[6]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: I’ve long been in favor of Kehlani using as many 2000s R&B samples as possible. This is further vindication — over a vague outline of Nina Sky, they sound like they’re having more fun than they have in years; the searing, melodramatic quality of their voice works much better as an invitation to debauchery than, say, a duet partner to Ty Dolla $ign. 
[7]

Will Adams: The use of the Coolie Dance riddim is smart; the club is still pumping, but the soft synths and half-stepping bass suggest that closing time is approaching, and there’s someone who wants to take you home. That transient moment creates heat for “After Hours,” even though I’d rather have that interaction while “Move Ya Body” is playing instead.
[6]

Nortey Dowuona: After Cordell and Everton Burrell released the Coolie Dance riddim in 2003, they probably had no idea that 25 artists(!!???) would flood to use it almost immediately, but they did expect it to be successful and used. When he and his brother were their most successful, most of the riddims that were produced were given directly to artists in both reggae and dancehall, who, in exchange for the song, would have “gentleman’s agreements” with the producers, who would plow through their equipment to create the riddims yet depended on those agreements to work. Each song was meant for a dub plate, to be performed so the artist could eat. The producer, however, got left in the dust. Khristopher Riddick-Tynes of the Rascals, as well as Alex Goldblatt, who is the co-producer of this sweet little gem, didn’t even count Cordell or Everton as producers but merely as songwriters, since they took the riddim from this little gem produced by Lionel Bermingham and Elijah Wells. Cordell does get a songwriting credit and a cameo in the video, as well as Diovanna Frasier, choreographer, and Daniel Church, who can rock a pretty solid Jeremih impression. Now, Kehlani does deliver quite handily in the vocals department (with assistance from Jaycen Joshua and his trusty sidekick, Mike Seaberg), but the creation, completion and delivery of one of the best songs of the year depends on at least seven other people who you don’t know and couldn’t pick out of a lineup unless you’re a Mixed by the Masters fanboy. They’re the ones who create the spellbinding songs we’re listening to while we miss last call to keep on talking, and I think they deserve just as much lucre and recognition as the Bay’s worst-kept secret.
[10]

no blergs » Wednesday, August 7th, 2024 2:49 pm

Who’s afraid of little old meh?

[Video]
[5.25]

Hannah Jocelyn: Hey, she played something with a fucking beat!
[6]

Alfred Soto: An obscenity-laden ode to being as fabulous as Taylor Swift in 2024, “I Can Do with a Broken Heart” is as confident as “My Name Is” and “Izzo (H.O.V.A.).” If the performance sounds cagier, even more tentative than the words and vocal track suggest, blame Jack Antonoff, whose mix turns the instrumental foundation into yesterday’s mud. In all the ways in which I imagined Swift developing, “lyrics first” would not have topped my list.
[5]

Jackie Powell: Part of why “Anti-Hero” remains one of the best songs Taylor Swift has ever written is that the melody is just as strong as the relatable story Swift tells. There’s relatability here too, but the melody is “made to fit the music, rather than the other way around,” an astute observation that Pitchfork’s Olivia Horn made in her review of The Tortured Poets Department. It annoys me that the kick drum that I can’t stop tapping my foot to doesn’t lead to the appropriate burst of emotion in the chorus. This is a song about the compartmentalizing and suppression of raw emotions, yet the hook feels matter-of-fact. Would these lyrics have been more potent if the melody wasn’t so stale? I know a lot of folks have been saying this, but it’s time for Swift to work with someone besides Jack Antonoff. 
[5]

Alex Clifton: Witnessing the Eras Tour was an experience unlike any other. It’s an impressive feat of endurance, and it was surreal to know that 70,000 people (including me) had come to watch this one woman do her show. Every so often I had to remind myself: this is real, she’s actually doing all of this, she’s a real human being and yet I can’t think how she does this and has a life offstage. Well, now we know! As a commentary on the Eras Tour, fame, and the parasocial relationship Swift’s fans have with her, it’s pretty neat, and I like that she goes for the grimmer side of the glamour. She has every right to brag about her professionalism here; I can barely get out of bed on bad days, let alone put on a dazzling show. But sonically it’s just another Antonoff plinky-plonky-blippy collaboration; I definitely ignored it the first couple times I listened to Tortured Poets. To me that’s the biggest letdown: a song full of potential that doesn’t quite get to burst and sparkle the way it could. Instead it’s merely fine, 6/10, I don’t hate it but she’s done better. However, I deducted a point because while I try not to care who songs are about, knowing this is likely about Ratty Healy dampened it for me. He’s not worth wasting these kinds of feelings on!
[5]

Jonathan Bradley: The public perception that Swift’s oeuvre centers on lovers and feuds is eternal, yet a subject she has returned to throughout her career has been work, both as labor and as something to take pride in when it’s done well. Work is different for a 34-year-old woman whose job has been songwriter and recording artist since she was 16, but she approaches her toil industriously. The subject has been present in her work since her debut, which had multiple tracks that used songwriting (“Tim McGraw,” “Our Song”) as a structural device, but she turned her attention to labor directly in 2010’s “Long Live,” which wielded the fairytale imagery of “Love Story” and “White Horse” to consider what it means to lead an enterprise — in this case, a touring band — and hope your combined efforts might build a creative legacy. “If you have children some day,” she asked, casting her gaze into the far future. “Tell them how the crowds went wild.” In 2024, the far future is now, and Swift is still working as a songwriter and a member of a touring band, and still conscious of the transcendence that promises and the dull effort required to achieve it. “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” is a song about being a professional and executing her craft even while she’s falling apart emotionally. “I am so productive,” she promises, a one-woman economic stimulus package. She is condescending (“I’m a real tough kid”) and callous to herself (“lights, camera — bitch, smile”), and offers her disintegrated person (“all the pieces of me shattered”) to a public that demands and maybe deserves all of her. What do the thoughts and feelings of Little Old Her matter in the face of the Taylor Swift Industrial Complex? Yet it doesn’t sound effortful; this is a party song, and heartbeat rhythm and accelerated tempo feels like the anticipation in the hours before an arena show put on by your favorite pop star. The arrangement’s synth-pop pulse oscillates like a radio transmission: dancefloor-ready the way an accelerated revision of Folklore‘s spotlit slow-jam “Mirrorball” might be. (If this were 1996, the maxi-single would contain at least three inappropriately boshing remixes, and we are lesser for their absence.) But “I Can Do It” calls back to another period of Swift’s career too: Reputation, an album that began with a flight to a secluded island and ended with the intimate domesticity of two lovers tidying up the remains of a party. The thesis statement of that album was that, for all her confessional lyrics and public scrutiny, Taylor Swift is fundamentally unknowable even to her most ardent fans. And look! Here she has performed a world-conquering tour, unprecedented in scale, and night after night kept secret this gloom consuming her. “I’m miserable,” she crows as the song culminates, thrilling in subterfuge the way a magician might. “And nobody even knows!” 
[10]

Taylor Alatorre: How’d it take Swift this long to have a charting single that uses the word “productive” as the shining centerpiece of its chorus? She’s always had something of the overachieving AP student about her, and Tortured Poets is where she finally stopped trying to hide this and instead decided to make big-budget fanfic out of it. The tinker-toy soundscape, showily but not fussily busy, conjures up a Stephen Biesty cross-section of the inside of the Taylor Swift Hit Factory, all the whirring deadlines and clattering headlines that require teams of professionals to help manage them (“don’t know my schedule on the 5th,” as a smaller-scale pop neurotic put it). In “Broken Heart,” Swift is eager to pull back the curtain from the machine further than she’s ever done, though she naturally stops short of throwing her body upon the gears and wheels Mario Savio-style. I choose to believe that her lilting inflection of the word “it” is an allusion to sex in the manner of the Cole Porter standard, because that’d maximize the song’s fertile intersection between public and private. Even if I’m wrong, though, and this really is just a condensed Behind the Music episode for Every Taylor Swift Break-Up Song, it at least hits the crucial mark of putting entertainment first and autofictional indulgence second.
[7]

Nortey Dowuona: “He said he’d love me all his life!” is a frustrating sentence. At first, it’s simple and cutting, a reminder of the anguish of losing someone who made a flimsy, insubstantial promise in a haze of heady, exaggerated joy then retracted it. The frustrating part is that this doesn’t seem to be the realization — the realization is the betrayal and anger at the betrayal, not an acceptance of the fading nature of the promise. Worse, it’s phrased like “he said — he’d love — me all — his life!”, a leap forward over the four hits of the kick that only appears to jog you out of a stupor. The same effect is meant for “he said — he’d love — me for — all time!”, but the rest of the prechorus settles into that flat stupor. Swift isn’t moved to sing in a deeper or brighter soprano, but returns to the same four measures of quarter notes, so once the chorus appears, it evaporates over the Broadway synthesizers. The synths are also weak, a hidden piano arpeggio flattened by limp pads, and when the drums and real synth line take the forefront, the prechorus synths seem even weaker. The even more frustrating part is that if you have no idea who and what Taylor Swift is, you have no idea who the “he” is who is dragging her into a pit of despair. “He said he’d love me all his life”/”he said he’d love me for all time” appears apropos of nothing and holds no weight; there is no way to make it noticeable unless you phrase it wrong. This is why Jack Antonoff is a bad producer: he can’t prompt the songwriter to provide a more rhythmic or better-written prechorus, so the whole song cannot transition from verse to chorus without gracelessly lashing out.
[4]

Will Adams: My lingering impression of TTPD was that the songs were all so hazy and drumless it might as well have been a two-hour compilation of the “pop song playing in an abandoned mall” genre. Revisiting “I Can Do It…” is refreshing; the drop, once it finally arrives, is fizzy and percolating. But then there are the lyrics. As ever, the tortured poet rears her head here, seemingly pouring out her feelings about the trappings of fame while never revealing too much. Even the attempts at catchphrase — “lights, camera, bitch, smile” — feel guarded.
[5]

Ian Mathers: Keeping the count-in from the producer there in the background is the kind of thing that usually works for me, but it never quite gels here; volume? timing? Who knows. But it’s the kind of not-quite-rightness that seems to be afflicting a lot of Swift’s recent material. The later repetitions of the “birthday”/”plague” lines over the post-Chvrches synths make me think her going full synth pop might actually work in a way I wouldn’t have guessed (or maybe I’ve been listening to too much early OMD recently). Lyrically and thematically this one kind of winds up in the “Anti-Hero” space of… yes, you’ve got a point, and some of the lines work, but no amount of self-awareness makes the ones that don’t clunk any less. As with… everything to do with Swift, it would benefit from everything around her being at least slightly less exhausting/omnipresent.
[6]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Distinctly post-prime in a way that even “Fortnight” didn’t hit. It’s reminiscent of nothing less than Russell Westbrook on the Los Angeles Lakers; she’s hitting all the right poses, putting on a good attitude about the whole enterprise, but nothing ever coheres — the same tricks that worked to varying degrees on the “Mean”-“Blank Space”-“Delicate”-“Anti-Hero” continuum, the intentional conflation of romance, selfhood, and fame, no longer land in quite the same way. What was once clever albeit effortful now is adorned with flop sweat; “lights, camera, bitch smile” and “I’m so depressed I act like it’s my birthday every day” would’ve sounded leaden and cliché even on Lover. Everything is bright and shiny and rather boring — the skeleton of a great Taylor Swift song that in practice can only remind me of past glories.
[3]

Leah Isobel: The more time passes the more I think “Dancing On My Own” should never have happened; the long procession of diluted knock-offs makes the original seem more formulaic, watery, and obvious every year. Taylor’s take on the concept doesn’t bother to invest its mixed emotions with any sort of physical reality: her performance is so Disney-princess smiley, the synth throbs and jittering hi-hats are so wimpy, and that disgusting little piano twing is so… hateful! This is tacky, the performance of performance, and it might work if Taylor had any semblance of camp about her. She does not. This sucks!
[2]

Katherine St. Asaph: The year 2024 has brought two attempts to revamp Britney Spears’ “Lucky“: an explicit cover by Halsey, and this implicit remake by Taylor Swift. Superficially, the three songs are the same: pop stars cry too. Yet in their nuances, they are products of drastically different cultures. The biggest distinction is that unlike Halsey and Swift, Britney didn’t write her single; the main writers were Max Martin and Rami Yacoub (plus ambiguous “additional songwriting” by Alexander Kronlund; maybe he just popped in on a session like on “Side to Side”). Some might be tempted to draw the easy #menwritingwomen conclusion here, but I don’t think that’s quite it. As a songwriter, Martin famously thinks of lyrics as phonics over subtext, and Yacoub is also not a lyricist first. Their skill is to write melodies that sound like they were engraved in the musical scale for centuries; it is not to provide psychological depth. If Lucky has introspected at all on her pain — why do these tears come at night? — Britney doesn’t let on. The song is narrated in third person; even the chorus is just words “they say.” Halsey and Swift, though, write not just in the first person but in a confessional mode. They allude to documented events in their lives, psychoanalyze what drives them and invite you to agree, and openly admit to how they’re offering up their pain for public consumption — all things that are demanded from celebrities far more now than in 2000. Despite Swift’s reputation as pop’s parasocial princess, though, Halsey’s heroine is the one whose hell is basically parasocial: she does it all to be “liked by strangers that she met online.” “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” is closer to Spears’ idea of celebrity: pop star as remote idol rather than universal bestie. Both songs linger on their sugary hooks, on the glamour and the sequins of it all; they even both rhyme off “winning.” The key difference, though, is that Britney’s Lucky has no agency; she wakes up to handlers knocking on her door, and what she wakes up into is just more dreamsleep. Taylor Swift — or at least the autofictional “Taylor Swift” in this song — is constitutionally terrified of the fact that there are things in life beyond her control. The problem of heartbreak making her miserable is secondary to the problem of heartbreak being a career liability she hasn’t yet addressed. She’s the girlboss’s girlboss; as with “Woman’s World,” you get the sense that “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” would have killed 10 years ago. In 2024, though, the song doesn’t benefit from that hit of zeitgeisty extramusical energy; it must manage to do it with an outdated heart. The chorus is powered by self-loathing melodrama, like @SoSadToday set to the melody of “Guess I’ll Go Eat Worms.” How much it works depends entirely on how much it gets you to repeat stuff like “I’m so obsessed with him but he avoids me like the plague :D” on chipper singsong autopilot in such situations — and for that, it admittedly works quite well. But the production is thin, as if the “Dancing on My Own” Jack Antonoff liked and bit was the radio edit and not the album version; besides the bubblegum melody, the chorus hardly registers as pop. This should sound show-stopping and manic and iconic; instead it sounds perfectly professional. [ ] Exceeds Expectations [X] Meets Expectations [ ] Below Expectations
[5]

no blergs » Wednesday, August 7th, 2024 11:08 am

We’re generally okay with this sort of rock-ism…

[Video]
[6.44]

Kat Stevens: Like when there was a wasp trapped behind the radiator in the office and my colleague threw her shoe at it (complimentary).
[8]

Leah Isobel: Equal parts delightful and boring, “Rockstar” distinguishes itself from LISA’s previous solo material by having ideas, or at least the semblance of them: the switches between celestial melody and skittering momentum, the blunt sexuality of the post-chorus, and the critique embedded in the chorus’ “teach me Japanese” bit all point to a real personality. But its blockbuster soundscape and paucity of structural interest — that chorus is worn out by the third repetition — squeeze out the more interesting parts. It’s a La Croix song, with just a hint of flavor beneath all the empty fizz.
[5]

Jonathan Bradley: “‘Lisa, can you teach me Japanese?’/I said ‘hai, hai’” is such an ostentatiously silly lyric, especially for one that recurs that many times, but it helps lighten a song that could otherwise be too self-serious in its stunting. LISA’s got a likeable charisma, but she doesn’t fit imperious well, which is perhaps why her royal fanfare comes in the form of a mere Tame Impala sample. Likewise, that sample drops in just before the harsh pinging production threatens to become alienating. A pose of indomitability that is fortunate not to be as uncompromising as it imagines itself to be.
[7]

Taylor Alatorre: The self-orientalizing doesn’t land as hard as it should because it aims a bit too broadly — after two decades of hallyu, it’s more plausible that an oblivious fan would mistake Lisa for being Korean than Japanese. Hip hop is built on hyperbole, but the low-hanging “all look same” punchline represents a missed opportunity to foreground her status as the only Thai member of a flagship K-pop group. CL, while lacking such status, seemed to have more fun with her version of this trick on “Hello Bitches,” zipping from Macau to Kakao to sake with breathless irreverence. But “Rockstar” is more stylishly produced than “Hello Bitches” was, with a refurbished griminess built of interlocking machine parts. If the end result is to evoke the kind of amalgamated cyber-Asia that forms the backbone of Bullet Train and Elon’s Twitter feed, that isn’t the worst possible thing; at least it gives the joke a proper setting.
[6]

Will Adams: Much like a lesser known Rihanna single of a similar title, “Rockstar” is an endearing game of play-pretend that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Do I believe LISA is actually a rock star? No. Do I believe she’s having fun? Oh yeah.
[7]

Ian Mathers: It didn’t fuck me up when I saw people roughly my age noting that kids these days will sometimes refer to “taping” shows without understanding why we call it that, or that they don’t recognize what the save icon is a picture of. But I did get a bit of a jolt listening to this and realizing that “rockstar” as a term is probably as referent-less these days as “dialing” a phone number is (and that’s without getting into the precipitous and not wholly unwelcome decline of calling people). That doesn’t mean the use of “rockstar” feels inappropriate here at all; for the length of “Rockstar” LISA certainly feels like one in the modern sense, even as the song doesn’t even vaguely gesture towards the music genre that used to inform the term. But who cares? It kinda bangs.
[7]

Nortey Dowuona: James Essien, a Ghanaian songwriter who cowrote “Hurt People” for Belizeian-Trinidadian pop singer Kamal., is one of the three co-writers (along with Delacey of “Drama Queen” and Lucy Healey of “imtyn”  by Grace Enger), alongside producers Ryan Tedder and Sam Homaee. These have nothing to do with the light faux Tame Impala drums that play for two bars, but I’d rather mention all of that than anything that happens in this song.
[3]

Katherine St. Asaph: I don’t know how I feel about Ryan Tedder being brat.
[6]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Perhaps the most obnoxious piece of music I’ve heard this year.
[9]

2 blergs » Tuesday, August 6th, 2024 6:30 pm

It’s time to be a cowboy nooowwwww / and cowboys DO cry…

[Video]
[5.78]

Julian Axelrod: Noah Kahan’s email inbox must look crazy these days. After securing a string of Stick Season features from his famous friends, I can imagine him slowly working through a stack of requests for verses like he’s Ty Dolla $ign in 2016. Kelsea Ballerini is among the first to cash in on the Kahanaissance, and she’s not fucking around: Nothing says “I, too, would like to sell out arenas in Vermont” like an earnest folk ballad about fragile masculinity and the complicated relationships between fathers and sons. Unsurprisingly, Noah rises to the challenge, and their voices come together beautifully. But coming off a year of promoting her most “personal” work yet, it’s telling that Kelsea feels most comfortable fading into the background.
[5]

Katherine St. Asaph: A surprisingly tender, nuanced lament on toxic masculinity. Both Ballerini and Kahan are credited; perhaps they’re to thank for the empathy?
[7]

Will Adams: A comment on the lyric video by one darrensawyer-ju9bn: “Thank you for bringing attention to the fact that men have emotions too.” I genuinely cannot tell if this comment is facetious or sincere. My cynical, too-online brain wants to cast off “Cowboys Cry Too” as obvious and self-serving, but there’s a little seed in there that truly believes Ballerini and Kahan pull it off. It helps that their take on toxic masculinity acknowledges the generational aspect (“I grew up wishing I could close off the way my dad did”) and the woman’s perspective (“when he’s showing his skin… that’s when he’s toughest to me”). It’s pretty, too, which also helps.
[6]

Jonathan Bradley: “Cowboys Cry Too” would like to signpost changing expectations of masculinity, but it underestimates the terrain: country music since its inception has offered an arena in which men were permitted to be more emotional and more sentimental than they can outside the honky tonk. Cowboys are complex: as well as weepers, they are creatures mommas should not want their sons to grow up to become, but they’re also frequently secretly fond of each other. Noah Kahan is not a cowboy or a country artist, but his folk ballads offer something like a Vermont corollary to the genre’s implicit Southernness. Kahan can’t deliver a melody as expertly as Ballerini, who here attempts empathy but ends up sounding stunted (boys have feelings — who knew?), but his first-person narrative of fathers and burning “too many miles trying to ride out the sadness” paints a more nuanced portrait. But there’s also the ghost of Reba McEntire; if cowboys cry, Brooks and Dunn told us cowgirls don’t, and using that song’s motifs puts into relief how emotionally austere this one is. There’s too much Yankee stoicism here and not enough tears.
[6]

Taylor Alatorre: I’m okay with country music existing in this imaginary space where everyone’s either a cowboy or cowgirl, regardless of their suburb or exurb of origin. But when used in a song title like this, and especially when paired with “I never knew,” the effect is rather infantilizing, like your therapist giving you advice from a Pixar movie. However, Ballerini’s decision to buck the Western imagery and reach all the way to Vermont for a duet partner was improbably the correct one. If Noah Kahan has any misgivings about being typecast as a weepy folk balladeer, he doesn’t show them here, as he pins down the kitschy platitudes into a more concrete narrative about fatherhood and fears of abandonment. Notably, though, he doesn’t make any reference to rural life in his lyrics, suggesting that he too might be quietly ashamed of working under this banner. A good illustration of a case where keeping one’s feelings bottled up really is the best option.
[6]

Nortey Dowuona: Alysa Vanderheym once co-wrote a song called “Talk You Out of It” for Florida Georgia Line. Hence why, when she got to be part of a good song, she went hard in the paint with the steel guitar.
[9]

Ian Mathers: “This Whole Thing Smacks Of Gender,” i holler as i overturn Kelsea and Noah’s overpriced-sounding milquetoast pop country song and turn its Jukebox score into the 4th of Shit
[4]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Give me my “Dawns” back.
[3]

Alfred Soto: The fusty tropes don’t smother Kelsea Ballerini’s lack of affect; she knows how to weigh her feelings by sticking to the script. Noah Kahan isn’t there yet, but in a fictional world where a song about cowboys a-weepin’ enters the Hot Country Airplay top five his pathos is a glass of fresh iced tea. 
[6]

no blergs » Tuesday, August 6th, 2024 1:00 pm

but fair…

[Video]
[5.27]

Julian Axelrod: Lana hopping on a Quavo song seems random until you look through her posts from Hangout Fest in May and realize this is exactly the kind of song you’d make after spending a weekend in Alabama partying with Jelly Roll and Sexyy Red. Even more impressively, Quavo meets her on her home turf and acquits himself nicely, from the slurred-sung verses to the swampy hook to the bit on the outro where they recreate the end of the “Telephone” video. I tend to bristle when non-country artists try on the genre signifiers and half-ass the music, but everyone involved keeps a straight face without feeling too stiff. Quavo’s coming off a tough year, and if he wants to make his Did you know there’s a bando under ocean blvd, I’ll welcome it with open arms.
[7]

Leah Isobel: I mean, it’s nice to hear Lana do a song that’s attempting some kind of pop resonance. She’s so deep into her own mythology that hearing her try to reconnect with the mainstream is interesting. But while “Tough” achieves an easygoing appeal from its guitar twangs and loping rhythm, it only ever feels like an aesthetic exercise, an experiment in negative space: its attempts to accommodate both Lana and Quavo result in a flattened song that complements neither.
[5]

Alfred Soto: The moment for this duet has passed — imagine it on Lana Del Rey’s Lust For Life seven years ago in conversation with the other collaborations. As an abstraction — a distraction — “Tough” is not much at all.
[3]

Will Adams: Quavo and Lana sound good together, but so did she and A$AP Rocky and Playboi Carti on their respective Lust For Life collabs, both of which were more interesting than this bland soup of country signifiers. At times it really feels like the hook is going to go, “Tough like the new Ford F-150. Lease now with 0% APR.”
[5]

Harlan Talib Ockey: The chorus sounds just like the Weeknd’s “Starboy”, which I realized halfway through writing this review and now find incredibly distracting. That aside: Lana Del Rey’s previous collaborations with rappers have sounded like they’re work friends, rather than real friends. (It’s still unclear whether she and A$AP Rocky were even talking about the same thing in “Summer Bummer”.) In “Tough”, however, her chemistry with Quavo is not only existent, but genuinely moving. Quavo’s delivery alternates between soft and anguished, coming off as particularly vulnerable — Del Rey’s sighed initial consonants do the same. Using thickly reverbed guitars to create a pensive, dreamlike feeling is a trick that doesn’t go out of style. “Tough”, for all its nostalgia, never sounds retrograde. 
[8]

Nortey Dowuona: Jaxson Free, co-writer of previous Kane Brown’s “I Can Feel It,” is credited alongside prodigy Maddox Batson, singer/songwriter of “Tears in the River,” and Elysse Yulo, whose only other credit is Dan Harrison’s “Running Out of Radio.” Their contributions are those of many a songwriter in the music industry: patiently and with great humor assembling a patchwork of lines, melodies, and counter melodies into a track left with each of their publishing companies, praying to the empty sky that their hard work will yield them a windfall. This song of theirs is not very compelling despite the effort poured into it by all parties involved (except Cirkut, who probably put in the terrible trap drum pattern), but it has become successful, and thus Jaxson, Maddox and Elysse live to write another day.
[4]

Taylor Alatorre: The producers, led by Andrew Watt at his most sangfroid, go to great lengths to pre-empt any hint of discord or chaos to convince us that what we’re hearing is natural and normal and, most of all, inevitable. This is Quavo and Lana doing a wistful country-trap duet about a Southern-fried romance, and this is what was always going to sound like, and you’re a sucker if you expected or hoped for anything different. The repetitive insistence of the sixteenth-note click track seems to taunt me with its imperious sense of destiny — the aural manifestation of There Is No Alternative. “If you come from where you come, then you were born tough.” Yeah I guess.
[4]

Katherine St. Asaph: I’ve written the same blurb on every Lana Del Rey single for years because we have a core, unchangeable musical incompatibility: I do not enjoy soporific music, which is what Lana Del Rey primarily makes. “Tough” seems custom-engineered to prove my point: the first YouTube closed caption is [TWANGY GUITAR MUSIC STARTS], and I was fully prepared to just make that my blurb because nothing else was sparking any interest. Then Quavo’s part comes in, and maybe I’m just confusing quality with loudness or the presence of a beat (it’s happened), but it’s astounding how much dynamic the song becomes in that instant. (Someone else can unpack the morass of politics.)
[5]

Jessica Doyle: There is a risk, in talking about the silver linings of a particular cloud, of being seen as endorsing the cloud. (Elif Batuman just talked about this, in relation to David Copperfield: the horrible treatment David receives in school persisted in part because his classmates, looking back, waxed nostalgic.) The signifers in “Tough” all point back to clouds: the specific horrible tragedy of Takeoff’s murder, but also more general adverse childhood experiences (the “stuff in your grandpa’s glass” line becomes more ominous the more you think about it). Reformers push back on the idea that treating people badly to make them “tough” has net benefits, and rightly so. But it’s difficult to do this without suggesting that your listener is erring in finding the silver lining of their own adverse experiences: your rejection of their retelling of their own story. There’s a political dimension here, too — or, rather, multiple political dimensions, in that the likelihood of having lived through adverse childhood experiences is in itself a class divide. (See Charles Murray’s now-outdated bubble quiz, or basically anything Rob Henderson has written.) The adult who suffered less as a child may be better equipped to estimate the damage done, but also may be driven to smug, condescending judgment; the adult who suffered more may be justly proud of what they’ve accomplished anyway, but may also be driven to defensive bleating nastiness. I don’t know if “Tough” was conceived or written to thread this needle, with Lana, presumably on one side of the divide, offering affirmation and a sympathetic ear, and Quavo, on the other, trusting her with his story. (Sentimentalist that I am, I want to believe that someday they’ll go on a road trip and she’ll introduce him to her friends at the Florence Waffle House.) I’m inclined to call “Tough” not great but very good, a skilled piece of American mythmaking. Which may be exactly why others might hate it. And they might be right. But we may never have the world where it’s not necessary, no matter how much we improve, and given that, we’d be worse off without it.
[7]

Jonathan Bradley: Quavo and Lana Del Rey are each practiced at creating rich dramas from the artefacts and artifices of their respective worlds, but in “Tough” they struggle to find a way to mesh their outsized personalities into a coherent whole. Del Rey likes to play as a damaged all-American princess or fallen starlet who can be as plucky as she is fragile, but she doesn’t seem to know which side of herself to put forward here. Somehow she barely leaves a mark on a line pitched perfectly for her like “I’m cut like a diamond in the rough”; the only time she only does more than waft is when she giggles in the outro in response to Quavo’s charming invitation to play Atlanta tour guide. The woozy, gothic arrangement is Del Rey’s territory, and Quavo finds some smart ways to adapt himself to it, accentuating the melancholy in the icy allusion to his band’s recent past on “if you ever lost someone that you love,” but he more often sounds like he’s restraining himself from overshadowing his duet partner. The pair finds fleeting connection at “tough like the stuff in your grandpa’s glass”: for a moment, all the details sound real, the imagery interlocking in the burn of an old man’s rotgut whiskey.
[5]

Ian Mathers: Two middling tastes that taste… fine together.
[5]

no blergs » Tuesday, August 6th, 2024 8:00 am

Last up today, a reimagined, revisited SOPHIE demo.

[Video]
[6.82]

Ian Mathers: When someone as brilliant as SOPHIE dies as young as she did, with so much work underway, it’s hard not to place too much weight on whatever we’re left with. I deliberately avoided looking up any context here; for now, at least, I just want to hear this as a new SOPHIE song I hadn’t heard before, with no extra information colouring how I’m hearing it. And it just… sounds good. I love that vocal loop in the background. I will listen to this again, a lot, and I wish this wasn’t one of the last times I’ll have the experience of hearing a new song from her.
[9]

Jonathan Bradley: Sophie’s pop avant garde has found a posthumous mainstream presence this year in the from of Charli XCX’s Brat, and while that album has its highs, it is thrilling to hear this much focus and intensity restored to a sound that had come to be dominated by event and memification. The hook, a quasar emission from an astral Kim Petras, resists literal interpretation (“in your mind/in your eye/take a little look inside”), but Sophie’s heady club thump makes it sound soul-piercing, a dance taking place in the cavernous space of the psyche as much as upon a physical floor. A song of dark spaces punctuated by brilliant neon, its power is in its sense of purpose, even if the ultimate reason why is to surrender corporeal form and be subsumed into gleam and thump. It doesn’t quiet its anguish so much as make it vaporous — photonic even. A bonus: Petras has never found a party so conducive to her inconstant but palpable talent; she should drop by here more often.
[9]

Katherine St. Asaph: Better as a reflection of SOPHIE’s mythology than her music, or even her experimentalism; the tinny synth chords just recall “California Gurls.”
[5]

Tim de Reuse: For all the people who cite her as inspiration, for all the breathless praise and all her purported influence, it’s striking that years after SOPHIE’s passing even her disciples have never replicated her particular alchemy. I think it’s just that nobody has the chutzpah to arrange a mix like she does. Ultra-clean, ultra-crisp, overstuffed trop-house, all sharp edges, no air; Kim Petras wailing, half-coherent, dragged along by Sophie’s velocity and struggling to keep up. BC Kingdom sound lost. A real earworm is halfway to irritation, she’s saying. A real earworm has claws.
[9]

Brad Shoup: Because it’s by SOPHIE, I’m looking for angles that may not exist: something more playful than the club-synth murmur or Petras’ over-it posing. BC Kingdom try to bring things into the realm of the existential, or the interpersonal; Petras pats them on the head and sends them to the bar.
[5]

Nortey Dowuona: The drums were Benny’s fault. Everyone else was fine — the drums are just wack and ill-fitting. This is how you fail your sister’s legacy. Will look into BC Kingdom though.
[3]

Andrew Karpan: It’s moving, the way you can hear the mummers of SOPHIE’s wafting, digital haze move through and surround KP’s more direct, and more mildly anonymous, manner of positioning herself as a neo-disco diva, everywhere and nowhere like a gentle fog.   
[6]

Taylor Alatorre: True to her words, the Kim Petras hook is engineered to make it sound like it’s unspooling from within your own mind, “in your eyes,” like it’s always been in there and just required this elephant stomp of a bass drum to be dislodged. The pitching-up is complemented by the babyish way she slurs her phrases, amplifying the pre-verbal and almost primordial appeal of the sentiment — by the song’s end, we know what the reason why is, even if we don’t know any words for it. The soul-searching aspects of the hook heighten its contrast with the rote hedonism of Petras’ verse, and when hook and verse are overlaid, something rare emerges: a Sad Party Song that gracefully reveals itself rather than announcing itself loudly at the entrance. I hope that I’d still be hearing these things if the song had arrived under the originally intended circumstances, but there is no vacuum-sealed bubble in which to evaluate and enjoy music sans context. Even if there were, why would you want to deprive yourself by listening to Sophie that way?
[8]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: A perfectly decent Cashmere Cat song that makes me feel a deep and unabating melancholy.
[4]

Alfred Soto: Why listeners will love it is what sharpens my resistance: that high-pitched “reason why” sample repeated ad infinitum. The clickety beat and the warmth of BC Kingdom and Kim Petras need air to breathe. Nevertheless, an example of the late SOPHIE’s talent. “Can’t people like you love people like me? (And I know the reason why)” is the most empathetic queer lyric I’ve heard this year.
[7]

Leah Isobel: I hate talking about transness like it’s mysticism. It’s corny and feels like chaser language — as if I’m not a human woman but some sort of unicorn beamed in from Venus, look at my magical sexy body. I get where it comes from, but most of the time I’d rather have my feet on the ground, have a body that I can just move and sleep and fuck in or whatever. Mysticism pushes myself away from myself: I rationalize and explain my choices, as if they need to be rationalized and explained and justified, and as if the only possible justification can come from the divine. I do not feel divine when I inject estradiol; I feel a little pain, and then some itching as the puncture heals. I do not feel divine at the electrologist’s office; I feel an hour and a half of pain that I gladly pay for and will pay for again in two to three weeks once my skin heals. I did not feel divine doing surgery consultations over Zoom or paying $300 to get my name and gender legally changed. I pay the money, I jump through the hoops, and I land back on the earth the same as I was. The first time I heard “Reason Why” was… so long ago that I can’t remember now. SOPHIE played it in live sets for years; it circulated online as “It’s Your Life,” BPM sped up as all of SOPHIE’s songs were at the time. (Shout out to all the girls who heard the live rip of “Vroom Vroom” as “Let’s Ride” almost ten years ago and knew something good was about to happen.) The clearest version came from Nina Las Vegas’ NTS radio show in 2019, its tempo vaguely manic, the synth baubles rubbery and harsh rather than soft and pearlescent. In that iteration, the part that stuck to me was Kim’s verse: “Pop a couple in Ibiza / Getting money like a DJ,” hilarious and wistful and stupid, God bless the slant rhyme. It felt cyborg-mechanical, a pumped-up power fantasy. I needed that fantasy because I felt that the most valuable, most fun part of my life was over. The shock and joy and blessed emotional volatility of the first year of medical transition had worn down to a nub, and I came back to the same life I had before, stuck in dirty New York snow, acting like I wasn’t freezing. Now, listening to this final version, I hear that girl like she’s standing next to me: I hear her desire to be invulnerable, loved endlessly, catapulted into a juvenile fantasy. I hear how afraid and how disconnected she — I — was from her — my — body. I hear how thoroughly I absorbed the messages I received about how I was most valuable when I was available, fuckable, disposable, and how turning 25 felt like the end of the world because it meant I wouldn’t be that way forever. In my creative life, I imagined myself as invulnerable and evanescent, named Angel, wearing elf ears and stick-on jewels; in my regular life, I was tired all the time, letting myself evaporate. I wanted to be ethereal more than human, which also made me not human. I read SOPHIE’s work as empathetic to that desire, even affirming — I took a song like “Immaterial” seriously, literally. Looking back, the empathy is there, but SOPHIE’s music feels more like it insists on returning me to my body and its immediate physical sensations. The final version of “Reason Why” is softer, slower, deeper than the leaks; the new context pushes Kim’s wish-fulfillment fantasies further back, foregrounding the first verse and the basic, elemental question at the heart of the song. Why does there have to be a reason? Why do I need to justify myself? Why should I listen to voices who don’t understand me? Why should I minimize my love? Can’t people like you love people like me? When it was released I walked into the stockroom at work, put in my headphones, and cried — my emotions, my soul, my metaphysical heart, expressed through my body, my real body. I love that I can feel, that I can cry, that I can hear. I love what my body can do. I love the real world.
[10]

no blergs » Monday, August 5th, 2024 7:39 pm

“New Theory: Cody LaRae is the name of a SPAM employee“

[Video]
[5.55]

Taylor Alatorre: Sooner or later, the zeitgeist outruns you. “Lithonia” is Gambino’s half-willing surrender to the New World, and despite its overfamiliar post-apocalyptic mode, it is nothing more than the long-delayed acceptance that what he’s “with” is no longer “it.” He’ll never again be the 30-year-old kid who predicted the American Dialect Society’s 2013 Word of the Year; more thankfully, he’ll also never again be the guy who called himself rap’s Andrew Auernheimer. Left with little choice but to lean further into his out-of-touchness, he concludes that it must be rock opera time. It helps that the list of canonical rock operas is so small as to make faithful homage largely plug-and-play: a vaguely sketched outsider hero to serve as author surrogate, power chords as brick walls to be broken through, references to drugs and fame and the combination thereof, and you’re 90% done. Ever a student of pop culture, Glover doesn’t try to rescue the form from its post-Green Day cultural ignominy and instead embraces its excesses for entirely pragmatic reasons – there is simply no better backing track for the Life-Altering Realization. We don’t need to know much about who Cody LaRae is, only that he’s at a point where a regressive teenage sentiment like “nobody gives a fuck” can seem like profound insight (it is), and also that his name is more fun to say than Tommy or Pink.
[7]

Jonathan Bradley: Donald Glover is capable of producing a genuinely great song — “Redbone,” if nothing else, demonstrated that — but a lot of his Childish Gambino work gets by on affect: stylish set pieces that demand attention but, on subsequent listens, reveal a paucity of ideas. Is “This is America” getting plays in 2024? “Lithonia” is stunning in conception and execution, recasting Glover as emo revivalist drenched in a downpour of torrid guitar distortion and angst, but once the storm ebbs, I don’t feel as if it left much of anything behind. It’s a glorious noise, though; hopefully “nobody gives a fuck” will not turn out to be clairvoyant.
[6]

Katherine St. Asaph: An uncharacteristically chameleonic Max Martin tries to turn this into an ABBA song while Childish Gambino tries to turn it into a pop-punk song, and I assume that if I imbibed more of the album’s lore I would learn who Cody LaRae is and what he tried to do. (Alas, the Donald Glover Wiki is no help, as the only edit this summer is some guy saying “Wtf.”) When you release a rock-opera-coded single severed from its rock opera, you risk the possibility that nobody gives a fuck.
[5]

Ian Mathers: What are N*E*R*D up to these days, anyway?
[6]

Harlan Talib Ockey: “Lithonia” is full of meta recursion. LaRae/Stone had a break from music, and so did Glover/Gambino. LaRae is from an Atlanta suburb, and so is Glover. Musically, he alternates LaRae’s amateurish belting with Bando Stone’s more nuanced vocal delivery. The lyrics switch between first and third person, letting Gambino extrapolate on LaRae and LaRae on himself and Stone. It’s very intellectually interesting, but all this lyrical lore forms an impermeable layer between the listener and the actual song.
[6]

Brad Shoup: Sorta-crunchy, kinda-glammy scene setting, where the feedback precedes the blocky Weezer downstrokes and the vocals keen like Panic! at the Disco. It feels like I’m missing a playbill.
[4]

Nortey Dowuona: The frustrating thing about “Lithonia” is that it doesn’t explode into glorious technicolor as Max Martin’s work is supposed to do, but simply crashes against the wall. The drum production hides the way it strikes the kick then stumble through the snare, scattering little tom runs that stop the momentum whenever they appear, then reveals them to present the beating heart below the frustration and bitterness. Either way, the color drains out of the song whenever they arrive or leave. It’s a novel part, not a masterful one, since being novel is how you earn money and mastery is how you become a ghoul.
[6]

Leah Isobel: “Lithonia” swings wildly between corny and affecting. Donald’s lead vocal is overdone, but his backing harmonies have a gentle shininess; the guitars have a nice bit of crunch and the bassline is lovely, but the synth piano and strings are just tacky. The insistence on making things just a little wrong draws attention to the places where they aren’t, like a pair of pre-Sharpied sneakers. It feels slightly condescending.
[5]

Alfred Soto: Organ? Guitar power chords? Childish Gambino-the-thespian has sure learned shock tactics for the sake of Childish-Gambino-the-musician. I’m less inclined to endorse a statement like “Nobody gives a fuck” in 2024, but “Lithonia” isn’t my song. What lets it down are its strengths. After the melodramatic opening, it doesn’t have anywhere to go. I might come to the same conclusion about Gambino’s career so far.
[5]

Andrew Karpan: In committing himself to making nihilist post-Kanye pop jams for the vitally unimportant Urban Outfitters vinyl buying demographic, Glover prepares himself to eventually make his own Norman Fucking Rockwell! I have to admit that I’m with him on this. Good riddance to Childish Gambino! Good riddance to 2011, prestige TV, refried electronic soul, and the other forgotten dreams best unremembered from that decade. 
[5]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: When I saw Childish Gambino live in 2013, it was perhaps the worst show I’ve been to in my life. Packed high up into the Shrine Auditorium in LA, gazing down onto Donald Glover from the rafters, I realized that he didn’t quite have it; he lacked some ineffable skill that would allow all of the grand visions of his project to cohere. He performed in a projected simulacrum of a vast and empty mansion, sounding completely swallowed up in the work; the clothes were wearing him, as they say. When I saw him again, on the other side of the decade, he finally lived up to his ambitions; after a number one hit, an acclaimed TV show, a role in Star Wars, he was suddenly the performer he always wished he could be. Even when performing lesser works, he seemed a magnetic force, his sweaty face on the music festival screen impossible to look away from. Now we stand at the putative end of Childish Gambino’s project, his attentions turned elsewhere. “Lithonia” feels at once tossed off and deeply effortful — which makes it in some sense the perfect Childish Gambino track. He’s brilliant at times — the chorus here, in all of its arena-rock meathead glory, has worn me down — and utterly ineffectual the rest, executing the minimum viable versions of his ideas and hoping that everything hangs together. In “Lithonia,” it does, but only barely; every iteration of Childish Gambino fights for control, with no clear victor by song’s end.
[6]

no blergs » Monday, August 5th, 2024 6:01 pm

Laughter is not an essential component of satire; in fact, there are types of satire that are not meant to be “funny” at all.

[Video]
[2.15]

Joshua Lu: The prevailing narrative around Katy Perry has transformed: not just about her being a bad artist making bad music, but also about her being a bad person on top of it all. It’s easy to justify every mark. “Woman’s World” is dated in concept (empty feminist dribble), sound (plodding synthpop that would fit into any of her past three albums), and execution (scatterbrained music video rationalized via “it’s just satire bro”). Choosing Dr. Luke as the song’s producer was not only morally questionable but also marketed as her executive decision. There are bad artists who are bad people making bad music and still hugely successful; Katy Perry’s inability to join those ranks is weirdly comforting, in almost a cosmic sort of way.
[3]

Andrew Karpan: Rarely do songs flop by sounding so purely evil: a collage of bad taste arranged in a way that scans as faintly ominous, weird and off-putting, the sound of a dystopian future nostalgically looking back to the past. 
[2]

Alex Clifton: Katy Perry is trying so desperately to have it both ways, and it muddies the message she wants to send. If we are to take “Woman’s World” as earnest, the song might’ve fueled teen feminist awakenings back in 2011 but now comes across so dated. If we are to take it as satire, then it’s a disaster as there’s zero bite or personality on display. Say what you will about Taylor Swift and her complicated relationship with feminism (and I will), but at least “The Man” had her fingerprints all over it with a few snarky zingers. There’s nothing in “Woman’s World” that I can laugh at (and that’s not even considering the Dr. Luke of it all). I was rooting for Katy, I really was, but someone girlbossed too close to the sun. 
[2]

Brad Shoup: A pale stick of factory-engineered cheese, where all the laughs thud and all the flexes result in pulled muscles. Perry used to be one of our very best pop panderers. Now what?
[1]

Alfred Soto: Bet some of y’all want to hear her Kate Bush cover.
[4]

Jonathan Bradley: She’s a winner, a champion; she’s a flower, she’s a thorn. She’s a bitch, she’s a lover, she’s a child, she’s a mother, she’s a sinner, she’s a saint. But shouldn’t she feel a little ashamed about failing to clear the low bar of discount Dua Lipa?
[2]

Nortey Dowuona: Katy’s flat, nasal soprano is produced by Kalani Thompson and Ryan OG. Both are experienced hands, but clearly they could only do so much with the take they got. The melody Katy sings in the first verse is so flat and thin that when she ramps into the chorus, she barely resolves the melody, the “it” a jarring cut before the chords resolve. Thompson and Ryan try to multitrack her voice to give it the power it doesn’t have — a trick he’s learned from working with Kim Petras and The Kid Laroi, both of whom have weak yet distinctive voices — but it doesn’t work. During the second verse, the multitracked echoes below just remind the listener of the lack of depth in the main vocal, pitch corrected so noticeably that it sounds even more inhuman. Since the first and second verse play the same barely moving melody, there’s very little else the producers can do. And while the hook is where their work shines, the abortive chorus and warmed-over chords prevent Katy from selling anything. If only Thompson and OG had a better vocal to work with, or a less rapist producer.
[0]

Leah Isobel: I honestly don’t feel anything when people work with Luke anymore. Maybe that makes me a bad survivor, or a bad feminist; I’m sure that if I said that on Twitter a bunch of transphobes would immediately jump down my throat and call me a rapist. But it’s the truth. If there was a true window for accountability — and I’m not convinced there was — it closed when “Say So” hit number 1 and the industry was like, cool, let’s toss a bunch of other young women into a room with this guy. Or maybe it closed earlier, when Kesha performed “Praying” at the Grammys and seemed to collapse into herself after the song ended, to which James Corden responded with a blank, ineffectual “Wow” before moving the show along. Maybe it closed even earlier, when Bonnie McKee compared him to the devil and said that “Dr. Luke’s deals are famously bad, everyone knows that,” but still credited him with launching her career; or maybe it closed when, that same year, “New Rules” became Dua Lipa’s breakout hit, earning Luke’s publishing arm money via the songwriter Emily Warren. Maybe it was earlier than that, when Max Martin took Luke under his wing and made some of the most beloved pop hits of the form now known as “recession pop.” But honestly, it was probably earlier: when capitalism took the place of feudalism, when some British guys sailed across the Atlantic Ocean and established a society built on the exploitation of people and nature, when the music industry was built off of vaudeville and the systems of domination it valorized. When artists choose to work with Luke, they are thinking like record executives; they are often rewarded. (Quoth the prophet: “As long as everybody getting paid, right?/ Everything gonna be okay, right?”) Kim Petras is the first openly transgender woman to have a #1 single, and she only got there because she signed a contract with Luke. Nicki Minaj earned her first solo #1 with “Super Freaky Girl,” a Luke production. Joy Oladokun performed at the fucking White House. That’s not to excuse Katy’s decision, but to say that these kinds of decisions are often papered over as “compromises” instead of sacrifices. This single’s anodyne synths and bland, dated uplift smack of sacrifice. Any interesting perspective is filtered out of the song and redirected toward the video, with its blunt satire and strange pops of body horror. (If I had a nickel for every time a Katy Perry video’s visual metaphors made me wince, I’d have two nickels, etc.) The oddity of the whole package suggests a certain helplessness in the face of doom. If it is truly a woman’s world, it’s in the sense of Andrea Long Chu’s edgelordy Females: “The self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another.“
[3]

Aaron Bergstrom: If the erstwhile Katy Hudson never actually broke with her fundamentalist evangelical upbringing and has in fact been working as a deep cover operative trying to discredit godless feminism and destroy it from the inside, how would that look any different from what she’s doing now?
[1]

Jackie Powell: Katy Perry is doing a lot. She’s doing too much. She’s straddling trying to be relevant, putting out an earworm, honoring her on-brand silliness that worked over 10 years ago, all while attempting to embody the current moment where rights in America are being taken away. “Woman’s World” has been discussed alongside “Chained to the Rhythm,” which Perry put out after Donald Trump was inaugurated, but while “Chained to the Rhythm” wasn’t great, it at least had some sort of message and substance. “Woman’s World” doesn’t answer why this is a woman’s world that we’re living in. It is just a list of adjectives. There’s an argument to be made that Perry is still functioning in a pre-November 8, 2016 world where Hillary Rodham Clinton was trying to make history but was too polished, calculated and apologetic to do so. But the name of the game in 2024 is being unapologetic, a little silly, and authentic. That’s why Kamala is Brat and not living in whatever suffocating universe Perry is in — I can tell you she’s not living on Chromatica, amid all of the comparisons to Lady Gaga’s “Stupid Love”. There’s one mashup on YouTube where Perry’s “Woman’s World” vocal is smashed on top of the Gaga “Stupid Love” instrumental, and the chord progressions and family of synths are indeed similar. But as usual with a Lady Gaga song, “Stupid Love” had more dissonant sounds that gave the track some intrigue and punch. I’m a firm believer in the concept that being an artist involves a certain amount of thievery. But instead of stealing like an artist—there’s a book written about that—Perry is stealing like a manufacturer or corporate bigwig without a soul, just like the incredibly flawed person who produced the track. 
[3]

Katherine St. Asaph: It feels reductive.
[5]

Hannah Jocelyn: There’s no incentive besides the moral one to side with the abused, and who needs morals, especially when the abuser and their enablers are this powerful? That’s why Dr. Luke came back, and why he never left, depending on who you ask. Katy sounds good here (we’re not in straining “Daisies” territory anymore), and the beat is serviceably in-your-face and refreshingly loud. If this wasn’t Luke, I wouldn’t really care about it. In any other context, I’d even like the chorus line “we ain’t going away”; post-Roe it reads as hope that societal progress won’t be entirely reversed to the ’50s and/or before. But if we are, in fact, “going away,” that’s partly because of power-hungry, entitled men much like Lukasz Gottwald. It’s a predator’s world, always has been and maybe always will be; he’s lucky to be living in it, and Katy Perry’s happy to enable it. Neat harmonies on the word “celebrate,” though. 
[3]

Ian Mathers: We live in the stupidest fucking dystopia, don’t we?
[4]

Will Adams: A failure of a lead pop single by almost every conceivable metric (sonically: uninspired; lyrically: dated; visually: contradictory; contextually: yikes), “Woman’s World” deserved its intense backlash from the moment its ill-fated snippet dropped. But the dust has settled, and my impression of the song now is mostly boredom and mild fascination. It is beyond me why Perry, whose career-long brand has been cartoonish kitsch — sharks, furniture, toilets, oh my! — thinks she’s at all equipped to deliver message music. And this was after Witness.
[3]

Isabel Cole: Sometimes I feel bad for hating so thoroughly on Katy Perry, America’s living embodiment of what the Madonna/whore complex does to a mf, for having not one real thought in her big empty brain, but then she’ll do something like reuniting with Luke in a pathetic attempt to rewind the clock back to when the two of them were still relevant. The lyrics are giving something between “Olympics-themed sportswear ad” and “studio exec who has never had a conversation with a woman his own age discussing his vision for a female superhero project.” There are pop stars in the world who can take dumb lines and make them sound like they mean something, but possibly nobody is less suited to that task than Katy Perry, whose musical identity, insofar as she has ever had one, has mostly rested on taking dumb lines and making them sound even dumber. It’s not just that her voice is grating, or that she’s never once in her career displayed any kind of musical intuition or finesse or really any quality one might associate with an ostensible professional singer beyond “loud”; it’s that she sings like she’s doing a bit. On something gleefully stupid like “California Gurls,” that served her well, or at least decently: it’s camp! On a song pretending at genuine sentiment — well, arguably it’s also camp, in Sontag’s formulation of “failed seriousness,” but it’s mostly just annoying. Luke, too, apparently has had not one single idea in the decade and a half since Teenage Dream, or else maybe he thought that putting out a track that would slot neatly onto the back half of that album would subliminally fool us into thinking it was 2010 again. But it’s not, and rather than nostalgia the utter banality of the sound invites incredulity: was it really worth it, for this?
[0]

Taylor Alatorre: “If we ended all collaboration with Dr. Luke tomorrow – and I will, if he deserves it, if the allegations against him are proven in a court of law – would that end sexism? (Crowd: No!) Would that end toxic masculinity? (Crowd: No!) Would that end record industry gatekeeping against mold-breaking female artists? (Crowd: No!) Would that protect other artists from those predators and abusers whose careers have continued unscathed? (Crowd: No!) Would that make the public any more receptive toward a stubbornly dated electropop stomper that misidentifies ‘girl power’ as a key ingredient of Teenage Dream‘s success, but whose uncompromising Moroder pulse and surprisingly diva-esque vocal turn are almost enough to override its intrinsic cheugy-ness? (Crowd: confused murmurs, smattering of applause)”
[4]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: I can’t write anything more clever or devastating than what the internet has already written. Katy Perry has been so completely and rightfully been savaged—for her aesthetic, singing, taste, and existence—that I almost feel sympathetic toward her. Just not quite. 
[0]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Defies even post-post-ironic enjoyment — no thinkpiece, no stannish counterfactual interpretation, no attempt to toss this into a running playlist or daily mix will survive exposure to this complete void. It’s hard to even discern what she was trying to do here.
[1]

Will Rivitz: Was she satirizing chart success too?
[2]

Kayla Beardslee: I want to weigh in with my score, but everyone has already roasted this song so thoroughly, I don’t have anything left to say. Just like Katy Perry!
[0]

no blergs » Monday, August 5th, 2024 2:44 pm