The Singles Jukebox

Going to the forest or the park is probably a better way to get a tan than from your iPhone, just sayin’…

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Leonel Manzanares de la Rosa: Italian Pop is the actual mold in which all of European Pop was modeled after — let’s not forget, Eurovision was based on Sanremo — and that is mostly because of the Italian language’s natural musicality. “L’esercito del selfie”, stripped from its modern touches and the lyrics critiquing selfie culture (blandly), sounds and feels like the most quintessential Italian melody (maybe that’s why it’s number 1 on the charts), but it offers nothing more. It’s also kind of a waste of Arisa’s voice, generally onto more powerful stuff. For a better Italian “what’s going on in today” song, redirect here.  
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Cassy Gress: In this 60s pastiche, Arisa plays a girl who has isolated herself from the real world via selfies on her iPhone, and Lorenzo plays her long-suffering boyfriend. The concept could be very obnoxious, and maybe would be if I knew more Italian, but instead is a massive earworm; I have been humming “Siamo l’esercito del seeelfiiie… di chi si abbronza con l’iPhoooone…” for days now.
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Stephen Eisermann: Social commentaries on our obsession with cellphones is tired as hell… right? Apparently not when framed with a retro musical composition and a lyric thrown in about how our iPhones are making us more tan. A new song in the cellphones are bad category shouldn’t be welcome, but the originality of this one gives it a pass.
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Iain Mew: The extravagant musical clutter and the concerns about the replacement of contact with likes could both almost pass as something from the new Arcade Fire album. In a world of infinite content, a surprising amount of it turns out to be the same ideas filtered through different types of irony.
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Nortey Dowuona: The drums pop, the bass slides and the synthesizers and trumpets hum as the two voices harmonize, then split apart.
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Ryo Miyauchi: They fluff this retro pop with charming irony as well as good, light-hearted jokes: getting sunburned off the iPhone screen is quite the imagery. But at this point, I’d rather hear a pop song about FOMO or really anything fresher than the tired-and-old “we don’t talk face to face anymore” stance on how social media is eating away at our livelihood.
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