Thursday, July 25th, 2019

Sam Feldt ft. RANI – Post Malone

Your editor is still proud of “Post-Malonious thunk” from their Jerika review…


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John Seroff: As fate has it, there once existed a common bird the natives of our land called the Feldtrani. I’m told one could recognize the Feldtrani by its faded plumage, its constantly bobbing head, its highly predictable loops and swoops through the air. What made the Feldtrani memorable to our people was its penchant for the musical theft of other birds’ songs, lifting the sounds of a dozen different species all at once and belting them out in a great meaningless noisy mash. These audio kleptomaniacs became colloquially known as “poor-man’s mockingbirds” and, while somewhat sufferable as individuals, their cacophony in migration was enough to try the patience of any man. In those days, the birds were so common and their flocks so dense that if you were to fire a haphazard shot into the air at a festival in Ibiza, a dozen Feldtrani would fall to the earth. The myth goes that the end of the Feldtrani came when one specimen, having copied the calls a thousand other species of birds before them, had the bright idea of echoing the Feldtrani flying beside it. The idea spread like a virus and each Feldtrani copied the first and the next in an endless sampling and regurgitation of sound. This went on for perhaps a day until the Feldtranis’ songs grew so loud and mindless and vast and pointless that they achieved a sort of otic apex, then all at once simply ceased to be, plucked out of the sky as sand from the eye of god. That is why, wherever the unnecessary repetitive quavers of robbed rhythm echo from our radios, the oldest of our tribe stand and say “Is that the Feldtrani?  Is that bastard bird back again?” You see, shit rained down as they traveled and they tasted resolutely foul no matter how you cooked them. So we hardly miss them.
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Joshua Lu: Theory: This song came from a parallel dimension, where the trend of simplistic EDM and trop-pop blends never quite went out of style, and hit songs still had bland, faceless vocalists. (Our version of RANI could very well be, I don’t know, Sabi.) Evidence: The titular hook about partying “like Post Malone,” when laid over an equally cheery and banal drop, doesn’t bring to mind the Post Malone that I know, the one with bleak, ponderous hit songs. Clearly, Sam Feldt’s Post Malone is the equivalent of our dimension’s LMFAO.
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Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Post Malone, seriously? This makes me nostalgic for a time when terrible songs dedicated toward stars were at least about actual legends. One point because at least I get another entry on my Rihanna-voice playlist. 
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Will Adams: Same shit, different era. At the start of the decade the “hey, I know that!”-reference to make was Mick Jagger, because it rhymes with “swagger,” the pop currency of the time. And now we’ve got an EDM song professing to go all night like Post Malone, because the pop currency now is SEO maximization. Or perhaps it’s just meant to distract from the soul-sucking void of a track that 2014-era Tiësto would’ve kept on the shelves.
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Michael Hong: Naming the track “Post Malone” just feels designed to cheat the system in the streaming era, hoping maybe some listeners will just get confused and leave it on. But the references to Post Malone never really go beyond the line “we party like Post Malone,” so I can’t imagine anyone staying for this generic house track.
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Scott Mildenhall: This has so little to do with Post Malone that he’s liable to write a song pining after it. Like a demo for Zara Larsson that she didn’t solicit, record or hear, it seems content to offer little more than its snowclone potential. Going on holiday like Lewis Capaldi? Hanging out with the girls like my guy Juice WRLD? Running low on ideas like whoever is Madison Beer?
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Joshua Minsoo Kim: I like the idea of this song because it clearly has a fundamental misunderstanding of who Post Malone is. He’s used here as a cipher here for “chart topping, agreeable music that can be safely played at most parties,” and his name is recognizable enough for the lay person to understand that oblique analogy. It only makes sense that “Post Malone” is the sort of unambitious, wallpaper pop song that can be appreciated by people who don’t ask much from pop beyond the vague “good things, good things, good things.”
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Alfred Soto: If I saw people partying all night like Post Malone I’d be on the phone to Robert Mueller. 
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Iris Xie: Tropical House: Sparknotes Edition with a faux-Rihanna. I know she would never stand to record a song like this.
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Hannah Jocelyn: If it Walks Like Rihanna, sounds like Bruce Hornsby, drops like DJ Snake, and search-engine-optimizes like those Finger Family videos… the result is a musical uncanny valley, a mid-2010s tropical pop reject that somehow surfaced with a reference to the premier late-2010s pop star. Here’s some SEO for you: my reaction was similar to the visceral repulsion people had at the CATS trailer. I’ve never heard a song so unstuck in time. Genuinely disturbing.
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Nortey Dowuona: Rani sounds a bit like Zara Larsson but she’ll eventually find a way to distinguish herself, especially since she’s where Zara was with “Lush Life” in 2015. She should find a safe home in the EDM world, and since this is pop now she’ll be golden for next few years. I think Rani can one day make something pretty guud, but this isn’t it. Still, sometimes the song you don’t really like becomes the smash hit. 
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Ramzi Awn: Wowwwww, another song about partying all night long with a generic beat and an amped-up pre-chorus. The vocal blips and bleeps on the hook really take it home. The only thing that stands out on “Post Malone” is the piano, which lasts for all of five seconds. At a time when nuanced cultural issues abound and we need pop music more than ever to fulfill its promise as a spiritual getaway, recycled odes to Bacardi and Ferraris just don’t cut it.     
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Will Rivitz: Is Katherine’s Tracery script licensed under Creative Commons? Asking for a friend. (The friend is me.)
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Reader average: [2] (3 votes)

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One Response to “Sam Feldt ft. RANI – Post Malone”

  1. of course it is