Watch My Life Like It’s A Movie

The BPA featuring David Byrne and Dizzee Rascal “Toe Jam” – Norman Cook writes music like an advertising genius. His best songs hit the listener’s pleasure centers with a sort of blunt precision — the sound is huge and obvious, but it is nevertheless carefully calibrated and skillful in its manipulation of your thoughts and emotions. He’s very good at loading his tracks with somewhat vague musical signifiers that mean very little in abstract, but nudge the audience toward making positive unconscious associations. Specifically, Cook wants to make you feel like you’re a star when you’re listening to his songs — a swaggering, omnipotent celebrity action hero who lives in a perfect, glamorous world. In this track, David Byrne and Dizzee Rascal show up to play that role, and live it up in Cook’s fantasy land. Byrne is goofy and cheerful, and mostly sings about dancing around in Cook’s version of New York City. Dizzee drops in for a quick verse about flirting with girls at a club, and though it’s maybe one of his more prosaic rhymes, his speedy, exuberant delivery taps directly into Cook’s brand of wish-fulfillment pop, and kicks the song up to an even higher level of giddiness. (Click here for the BPA MySpace page.)