Monday, August 5th, 2024

SOPHIE ft. Kim Petras and BC Kingdom – Reason Why

Last up today, a reimagined, revisited SOPHIE demo.

SOPHIE ft. Kim Petras and BC Kingdom - Reason Why
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[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.
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