The Singles Jukebox

It’s true. Everyone on The Singles Jukebox is startlingly attractive with great hair.

[Video]
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Scott Mildenhall: It takes skill to make something so stupid with so much heart. “Everyone’s Hot” is fraught with the inevitable tension that arises between sophisticated introspection and its vicious-cycle partner, a pathological fear of narcissism. It is, in all the best ways, all over the place. There’s the gusto of Fischerspooner doing “Emerge,” the attitude of Fierce Girl and the lo-fi acidity of “Trendy Discotheque” as well as the low-key ruminations of Metronomy, and all of that is underscored by lyrics veering from on-the-nose to off-the-wall. Masking “I feel like a leper” with “I’m a librarian… from Wigan” is a compelling response to the real-life situation they describe — daft, self-effacing, and maybe even too self-effacing. “I was joking,” he says, and that seems as true as it is false.
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Edward Okulicz: On the face of it, this does much the same thing that a track like GIRLI’s “Up and Down” did, though this isn’t quite as agile, and maybe it paradoxically hits too close to home to actually hit me. After a few listens, it has the feel of a 90s TV skit even without the video, and with it, it is definitely more routine than song. It’s a good skit, a good routine, but the jarring move from self-laceration to flippancy to poignancy means it doesn’t quite nail any of them, despite a few great lines.
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Juana Giaimo: As an avid twitter user, I love self-deprecating humor and Lynks seems to like it a lot too. The upbeat over-energetic music and spoken-word delivery adds even more irony to the lyrics. However, there is a moment when things suddenly get darker, revealing that humor always hides something real — that the self-deprecation isn’t just just a joke, but also our emotional pain. He interrupts himself to say “everyone’s pretty bored of this, right? Let’s do the other thing”, but I can’t get back in to the bouncy mood after that. I get it’s also part of the irony, but I wished he had dug deeper into that gloomy part of the joke.  
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Austin Nguyen: Dumb melodramatic wallowing self-deprecation that, fittingly and at the same time, makes no sense (“train station,” if not for the rhyme scheme, should really be “train wreck,” and haven’t amphibians been more popular than reptiles for a while now?) and a little too much (“Everyone’s police, but they don’t arrest me” is near-Prufrockian in its too-ugly-to-be-allured-ness while the bridge, whiplashing from spectacle to sincerity, feels like a post-promposal-rejection monologue initiated by that infamous line: “It’s not you; it’s me”). The pandemic has carved out plenty of time for this type of self-loathing contemplation — fixating on the productivity of others, wondering when the transition from “shit” to “fit” will suddenly kick in (it never does!) — and now, there’s finally a song to boot, with pitch-bending synths to match wobbling minds.
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Vikram Joseph: Lynks uses a Drag Race-ish electro banger as a canvas to sketch out some thoughts on an aspect of gay culture that rarely appears in art — feelings of deep inadequacy by comparison to those around you. This isn’t the sole property of the gays, of course, but it’s certainly magnified by the people you fancy also being the people you’re directly comparing yourself to, which you’d better believe can result in an unhealthy mental spiral on a night out. I use the word “sketch” deliberately, because there’s an enjoyably knockabout, DIY feel to “Everyone’s Hot”; Lynks is happy to throw a bunch of ideas at the wall and see what sticks. “Everyone’s a model, they’re all Brazilian — I’m a librarian… from Wigan,” is good, in a United Kingdolls sort of way; “Everyone’s police but they don’t arrest me,” is probably not the one right now, but I’ll let it pass because “A nice straight girl tells me that I look good, but I really, really, really wish a gay guy would,” is Queer Canon. Dragging the middle-eight out for twice as long as it needs to be, purely to use it as a comic device to springboard back into the pinball riff, is certainly a choice – that it works is entirely down to Lynks’ endearing presence as a vocalist. (There are shades of Courtney Barnett, who Lynks has covered, especially in the intonation of “… and I’m an amphibian!”). Humour as a coping mechanism is an art form in itself, and Lynks is a pretty effective exponent of it.
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Samson Savill de Jong: I have never related to song more in my entire life. I’m at a different point on the triangle (girls who like boys (Lynks) who like boys (me) who like girls) of shit than him, and I’m probably vastly underselling the uniquely harrowing queer experience of having to figure out if someone’s also queer on top of whether they’re in to you specifically which exacerbates everything that Lynks is doing and saying here, but nevertheless I know the feeling of being surrounded by all these attractive people who are resolutely not into you (and so becoming convinced that they’re correct) and on the rare occasion someone is into you you not being able to reciprocate (I’ve been one of the straight guys Lynks has had to pretend he’s joking about with to more men than had any other event happen in my “romantic life”). The feeling of everyone else being hot is, I desperately hope suspect fairly common regardless of sexuality or gender, but it’s not one often addressed by musicians. For a song that might sound silly initially, there’s a lot of depth to this. For example, masking the way that being alone and “ugly” can make you genuinely feel shitty with humour and self-deprecation (incidentally “my bread roll doesn’t taste good to the ducks/and the kids don’t want the candy in my truck” are absolutely killer bars), as Lynks does by ending the breakdown by trashing the emotionally vulnerable moment he’s just had and trying to go back to the fun before. Speaking of the fun bit, this shit fucking slaps. The beat is upbeat and punchy and feels a bit like it’s about to fall apart which is exactly the right emotion for this song.
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Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: If you were really into LCD Soundsystem as a middle schooler and are a queer now, this is for you! This is for ME.
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Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Deeply, deeply cringe-y: I hate this, I relate to this, and I hate how much I relate to this. Where is Caroline Polachek when you need her? 
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Katherine St Asaph: Clearly the opposite end as Luciana on the hot/not axis of some hypothetical political-compass meme. What’s the other axis, then? Gonzo electro vs. serious acoustic? Stupid-stupid versus stupid-great?
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