The Singles Jukebox

You heard it here: TSJ rates American mood a [5.62]…

[Video]
[5.62]

David Moore: JoJo has been productive and omnivorous in the past few years but I’m pretty sure this is the first thing she’s done that’s this straightforwardly folky, and it suits her —  her calling card songs for years glided on acoustic guitar figures, after all; it just sounds right. So then the question is whether the thing’s pretty — check! — and whether the words are any good — “on the edge of empathy and privilege,” “what up, what up, it’s me again, well-informed and ignorant.” Truly a land of contrasts! But, yes, check.
[7]

Jeffrey Brister: Song itself is fine. Lyrics full of platitudes sung well, lots of beautiful melodies throughout. But Jojo’s voice — a force that pushes, set against a backdrop of acoustic guitars and strings that recall Joni Mitchell and Carole King — gives the entire thing a gently comic feeling. There’s no color or variance to the performance, mostly just changing levels of volume. Her mode of performance is largely unchanged from her days in the mid ’00’s, and it makes the whole thing sound off-puttingly weird.
[5]

Aaron Bergstrom: JoJo Stop Adding Unnecessary Extra Syllables To Every Other Word Challenge
[4]

John Seroff: JoJo’s extremely busy career as a pop R&B teen idol means that, at the ripe age of 30, she’s already had several “all grown up now” moments. “American Mood,” a bittersweet lament of class privilege delivered in a folk country mode and backed by a BIPOC guitar and string trio, may be the last. It’s a promo cut from the Raphael Saadiq-produced Global Citizen album, so perhaps I would be foolish to read too much in the genre swerve but, at the least, this serves as reasonable proof of concept that JoJo has the chops for a country album when she’s ready. She can certainly hit all the right notes.
[6]

Katherine St Asaph: Has anyone listened to Rihanna’s “American Oxygen” in the past — well, ever? Does anyone think that song played to her strengths? So it is for JoJo. “American Mood,” like all its popstar predecessors, is caught irreconcilably between being the Voice of a Generation and the voice of an individual artist. The lyric meanders from confessional to James Taylor homage to extremely polite social commentary — “to all the kids without a silver spoon, you deserve much more, this one’s for you” in particular falls on the wrong side of the “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” line. The track behind it strums aimlessly. I considered giving an extra point for the fourfiveseconds the guitar line sounded like it was going to segue into the (American) moodier “All Your Sisters“; maybe if it had lasted longer.
[3]

Alfred Soto: “We got so much growin’ up to do” — yeppers. The former teen star’s natural plaintiveness works until the acoustic ripples, as basic as Hayley Williams’s, and rather boneheaded lyrics smother her. The “silver spoon” she refers to might be a utensil she’s used for years.
[4]

Austin Nguyen: There’s an episode of Law & Order: SVU where an undercover cop-in-training meets her heavyweight champion idol, only to expose him as part of a pedophile ring. The dialogue is a standard back-and-forth between police and perp — “You’re under arrest for [crime],” “I didn’t do anything” — up until the last line: “You stay in this job long enough, all your heroes die.” It’s a bleak note to end on before commercial break, mostly because it’s not just true for cops. Growing up means becoming disillusioned at best, a cynic at worst, to say that nothing has changed and that nothing will, now even more so. To be hopeful, then, means to be lost (“My navigation’s broken”), backtracking each pessimistic step to start from zero and paving them over with something more life-affirming, precarious (“And everything could end in fire and rain”). It’s not exactly optimism, even without the alcohol and Ambien line, nor does empathy encapsulate it entirely. The setting is right — weightless harmonies threaded together like cirrus clouds; angelic light spun by a string section; JoJo’s voice gentle, strong, and weathered all at once — but the missing word, I think, is resilience: To look at the ever-unraveling path rife with privilege and ignorance, yet remain undeterred in learning anew.
[7]

Vikram Joseph: Call it the clear-eyed perspective of history or the smudged, imperfect lens of the retrospectoscope, but the passage of time has a way of manipulating us into remembering things in ways different to how they presented themselves at the time. There’s something about the fingerpicked guitars and sky-blue clarity of “American Mood” that feels achingly nostalgic for a time in the not-too-distant past; a time when it was easier to delude ourselves into thinking that the world was getting inexorably better, that the tide of inequality and prejudice was ever-receding. Of course, we know differently now. “American Mood” is a song that seems destined to soundtrack a bittersweet closing montage (it would have been perfect for The O.C. had it been released 15 years earlier), and it might be tempting to hear it as an epilogue to the Trump era. While this would be facile and dangerously US-centric, there’s something about it that feels cleansing, particularly when collectively emerging from a winter of almost literal hibernation into a season that feels a little more heartening. JoJo’s lyrics — balanced precariously between lucidity and naïveté, but balanced all the same — allude to these themes, informed by a burgeoning understanding of her place in society (“on the edge of empathy and privilege”) and gently undercutting the socioeconomic fallacy at the core of the American Dream (“where we can we be greater than, when we don’t know where we begin?”). Sincerity is scary, but less so when delivered in a package this crystalline and with vocals this piercingly soulful. A crumb of hope in these times? It’s more likely than you think!
[9]