The Singles Jukebox

What better time for recognition of skill and talent than Amnesty Week at The Singles Jukebox!

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Matias Taylor: The year’s grandest hit single is a tour-de-force not only for Raye as a songwriter and vocalist, dissecting grief and heartbreak into the year’s most devastating hook (“I don’t want to feel like I did last night”), but also for producer Mike Sabath, whose claustrophobic soundscape of piercing riffs and frantic percussion coils itself around her, matching and suffocating the song as it grows in intensity and sex-and-drugs desperation to escape having to feel in the moment. Then enters 070 Shake, ghost-like offering grim wisdom that provides little relief (“I’ll be naked when I leave and I was naked when I came”), before the song turns inside out and exhausts itself right on cue. They don’t make ’em like this every day.
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Rose Stuart: I first heard this in December 2022, when I was feeling quite down on the current state of music. It had been one too many years of perfectly pleasant-sounding songs that were more white noise than music; songs that you could vaguely remember but made you feel nothing. And then along came “Escapism.” with it’s wailing synth that sounds like ambulance sirens and a drum beat that makes the blood pound in your ears. It’s a song that from the very first note forces a visceral reaction out of you, and only grows more dizzying as it speeds up, slows down, splits, and comes back together. More than anything, in a time when songwriters are taking ‘leave them wanting more’ a bit too much to heart, “Escapism.” has honest to god parts: intros, outros, choruses and post choruses, even musical intervals that make every second of its 4:33 minute run time feel earned. Still, not once does it lose you, because each part no matter how seemingly disconnected is a variance on the same musical theme. An increasing number of songs are slapping together whatever ideas they have and calling it a day, but “Escapism.” is deftly composed, growing into a symphony of drunken depression. Even a couple of lyrical missteps can’t keep it down. This is why, even though music has been picking up in recent months, “Escapism.” is the song I keep coming back to. It’s the anthem of bad times, and more than any other encapsulates 2023. 
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Leah Isobel: As a longtime Raye booster and impassioned advocate for the destruction of major labels, “Escapism.” offers a narrative consummation that is practically irresistible: prodigy-level pop talent publicly breaks free of restrictive label contract after years of limbo, then scores the biggest hit of her career with a baroque banger that feels diametrically opposed to radio trends. (Never mind the TikToks.) More to the point, the song feels engineered to show off the skills that Raye honed during her time with Polydor — the dynamic vocal performance careening from conversational Cockney back phrases to delicate, precise vibrato; the songwriting that stacks tiny Instagrammable hooks in every corner. It’s a bravura performance and an incredibly gutsy and vulnerable bit of Grand Guignol pop. But its splattery undertones don’t quite sit right; it doesn’t escape me that the Raye single that crossed over wasn’t the vengeful rage-banger but the one that lets us witness her implosion without needing to think about why it’s happening. Still, after years and years of denial, I can’t fault Raye for excess.
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Nortey Dowuona: You need somebody to push the bounds. Raye is that someone. It’s become pretty clear every other artist doing pop is just doing the bare minimum from songwriting to composition to vocals — just enough to count as one song. But Raye has compressed 6 years of hooky, accessible pop tunes into one jagged, wizzing pop, that wiggles out from her fists as a sneering whine, which morphs into a desperate prayer, that waits behind the off-key synth line which melts over the soft breakbeat drums, then IN COMES THE BASS. And I’m already acting like a dick, so you might as well stick it in. It’s been 50 years since rap cohesion began and if Raye is one of the first to shatter it beyond repair by attaching a fantastic performance from 070 “DON’T CALL ON SOCIAL MEDIA” Shake, who traps the ennui in her amber voice, then cracks as Raye feels the 4/4 pound in her head, a last desperate cry to cling to life, then so be it. Raye has been forced (ACTUALLY forced) into adherence to every rule and boundary we demand of pop music, popular musicians and of the industry and for one shining moment, she has taken the sharp edges of those boundaries and cut them out of her head — and ours. The bounds have now been pushed — off a cliff. It’s time to feel out a new way.
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Katherine St Asaph: There’s “Novacane” in here, obviously, and Amy Winehouse and Rated R. And there are actually multiple layers of escapism here. The B-section doesn’t cut to the feeling so much as deflect it with vocal prowess; those “doctor, doctor” lines in that voice deflect it further with cliche. Every time that B-section rolls around, you just want the hedonism back, the Beyoncéan swag, the lyrics that fall out brash and shard-sharp and faster than the pain does, the siren synths and night-luxe chords, the bad behavior recounted with immediacy and allure. Which is just it, isn’t it? Check the YouTube graph: everyone else replays the first section too. Isn’t it convenient how “2019” rhymes with so many preceding years?
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Taylor Alatorre: Much of My 21st Century Blues, from the title on down, feels like a lost album from 2014 that was shelved for accounting reasons, and “Escapism.” is no exception. With its mix of soulful piano chords and mellow hip hop sass, its tales of regretful hedonism, its “ironic” luxury name-drops, and its “not like the other girls” energy, it would fit comfortably on a radio playlist between Tove Lo and John Newman. But unlike the sad party songs of that era, which in part were a reaction to the excesses of peak EDM, “Escapism.” seems to exist in a universe of its own, unconcerned with trends, though laced with enough relatable truths to become trendy in spite of itself. The retro-contemporary stylings don’t grate as much as they otherwise would because they never threaten to upstage Raye herself, whose single overriding concern is to tell a story of disenchanted young adulthood — something that will never go out of style.
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John S. Quinn-Puerta: A Jason Bourne credits nothing of a song that thinks pitch shifting is creativity. Done before, done better, done to death.
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Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Not quite as thrilling of a B-movie as it wants to be — I keep expecting Raye to hit another gear but instead there’s just 070 Shake doing her haunted cyborg shtick.
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Brad Shoup: There’s a very conscious sweep here — lyrical motifs and beat switchups and the earth-swallowing pitched-down mumble that indicates Decision Paralysis — so it’s fascinating that Raye spends the first half in Golden Age storyteller mode. “A little context if you care to listen/I find myself in a shit position” — that’s basically a Slick Rick opener (Tons of bars here, almost none by Shake.) Raye ends on a line about dancefloor drums but it’s the classic hip-hop kick (and a siren-like synth figure that could have been crafted by the RZA) that nudges this from the depths everyone here is bent on plumbing. 
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Harlan Talib Ockey: It’s really funny seeing Genius trying to force this into a standard pop song structure when it is very much not. I instinctively want to compare this to an operatic aria or a story song, but what makes “Escapism.” special isn’t just its narrative, it’s the way it careens between sections in a drunken haze. Raye’s narrator is even self-aware, starting in medias res, telling us she’s backing up with “a little context”, and then carrying on. In fact, she heads “back to the intro, back to the bar” a lot. Raye’s voice reels through several different reference points and accents, acing both numb debauchery and haunting desperation. (And a genuinely mystifying pronunciation of “doctor, doctor”.) The twisting screech in the production never fully feels in sync with anything else, a powerfully unsettling choice. Once we’d reached the runtime of a typical 2023 pop single, I was wondering how we could possibly fit a whole 070 Shake feature in here. She ends up as the voice of oblivion, darkness at the core of stupor that shows what looks like escapism is a sprint towards self-destruction.
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Jackie Powell: When I heard “Escapism” for the first time on the radio over six months ago, I was drawn to the way Raye sang the word “doctor.” She introduces the listener to her mixed head voice on that word and manages to allow her South London accent to trickle in. Her diction on that one word drew me in. I hadn’t really heard someone sing that way before. It was memorable. Sure, the way Raye sang that word was my personal hook into the song, but that’s not the central nervous system of “Escapism.” The beat is infectious, indicating the moments in the track when Raye is at her most confident and fervent. When the Mike Sabath beat halts, Raye and 070 Shake are forced to reflect upon what they actually are feeling. They can’t hide behind how infectious and how great the beat feels in the current moment. When the beat is stripped away, the reflection occurs. The alcohol has worn off. The beat takes the pain away just like how Raye wants it to be. But she knows better, that escape from pain is only temporary.
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Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Escape from what and how, exactly? On its surface, “Escapism.” is just another song about masking the pain of a break-up using drugs and alcohol–but it also finds itself at the center of all of the narratives around power, abuse, and addiction that have dominated Raye’s career. Two years ago when we last covered her, she had just cried out to her fans, “I have come an expert at hiding my tears and my pain and I wanted to talk about it today.” Her label Polydor Records had been gaslighting her about releasing an album for seven years, threatening her, and forcing her to change her sound. (Now that “Escapism.” has gone #1 in the UK with Raye as an independent artist, I hope they feel foolish.) Years before, when she was 7, 21, 17, and 11, she had been sexually assaulted by record producer. Still determined to pursue her musical career, but unsure how to manage this all, along with growing body dysmorphia, she turned to alcohol and opiates. All of these perspectives inform “Escapism.,” which Raye has said is about “Chasing a maze of smoke and mirrors because clarity is bitterly intimidating.” The breathlessly-paced verses are about the recklessly going clubbing alone; the chorus is an aching plea for mercy and permanent dissociation. Raye performance is straight-up theater-girl, dark, gripped by last-minute key changes, soaring highs, and devastating lows. This was the first 2023 track I sang in the shower, holding my phone reading the lyrics, determined to emulate her delivery: making sure to draw out the syllables in “all of my diamonds are dripping on him,” and “I left everyone I love on read.” “Escapism.” works as at least a quadruple entendre, but it’s musical meaning, perhaps the cheesiest and least literal, is the most important for me. But Raye couldn’t have summed it up better herself: “I think music, on the whole, is escapism for us. I listen to music to escape or elevate out of anything. That’s one of the most important purposes of music — to feel good, sad or aided in processing any necessary emotion.”
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Kayla Beardslee: I saw Raye live in October, and when she closed with this song, I kept thinking about what an unlikely hit “Escapism” is. It’s four-and-a-half minutes long, the title isn’t said once, and the lyrics are extremely dense, so fast and wordy they’re almost overwhelming. It’s a grim, gritty song where Raye deliberately shows her audience the worst sides of her; it’s also a song for the songwriting nerds, swells and ebbs in the arrangement mirroring the emotional turmoil of the lyrics, that has no intention of watering itself down to be more accessible. Yet it became her breakout smash anyway. Why? Because Raye is a goddamn star, that’s why, and the rest of the world is at fault for taking so long to catch up. Of course her biggest hit to date is one of the most idiosyncratic songs in her discography: no one else could have pulled off “Escapism” quite like Raye does, either as writer or performer, and that’s why it resonates despite all the complexities that on paper would seem to drag it down. Occasionally, talented people do get the recognition they deserve, and occasionally, the best songs do become hits. It doesn’t happen as often as it should, so when the moment comes along, you’ve got to make sure to celebrate it.
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Ian Mathers: No comment.
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