August 9th, 2018 12:59am
Robyn knows what we want. She knows that we want her to make the kind of songs you dance to when you’re upset. She knows we want her to take our loneliness and heartache and turn it into romantic, cinematic, and cathartic moments that are sometimes more satisfying than actually feeling good. She knows no one else can do this for us like she can. And so here’s “Missing U,” a song that gives us what we want and what we need. Robyn is not very prolific, but she is generous.
Robyn knows her way around a hook, but the reason her songs work comes down to the sound of her voice. She always sounds like a strong person cracking under the pressure of enormous feelings, like she’s trying to hold it together just a bit longer. She always sounds like her pride is slipping away, like someone ready to totally debase herself to get the feeling out. She never loses control in the song, but it always sounds like if you keep playing it over and over, she might.
August 8th, 2018 2:09am
“Living in a symbol land.” That phrase, central to this song, really gets under my skin. Symbols in and of themselves are fine – utilitarian, a crucial part of how we process language, images, and life. But the way we lean on symbols for shorthand can be disastrous. A lot of the problems in the world come from an over reliance on symbolism: A laziness in interpreting other people that justifies casual cruelty, the intellectual bankruptcy of only seeing action and ideas for their symbolic value, the accumulation of empty signifiers in capitalism.
“Symbol Land,” as a song, isn’t quite as political as my interpretation of that line would suggest. It’s more of a broken love song, with Anthony Ferraro singing about attempting to parse the meaning of a collapsing relationship. His melody is gorgeous, and the sound of the chords and harmony has a stately and angelic quality, like John Lennon’s “Imagine” by way of Brian Wilson. Ferraro’s words are left deliberately ambiguous, almost as though he’s attempting to disrupt the symbols that weighed down this relationship in expectations beyond simple, pure love.
August 7th, 2018 11:46am
I hate to share a song and say that it sounds just like something else – it feels lazy and disrespectful to me – but… I have to do that here. This band sounds so much like Erase Errata that it’s uncanny. I first encountered Lithics when they opened for Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks recently, and I was stunned by how specifically they sounded like Erase Errata. Not post-punk in general, or other similar bands like Delta 5 or The Raincoats. Erase Errata, right on down to the tone of Aubrey Hornor’s voice.
But this is not a complaint. I miss Erase Errata, and Lithics are very good at making this type of jagged, disaffected music. “Still Forms” has a weird sort of swing to it, and its main guitar riffs have a peculiar sharp trebly clang that is like the musical equivalent of a bitter taste on the tongue. Hornor’s lyrics are evocative too, particular with her cold, blunt delivery. A line like “TV remote lying in a field of golden wheat” comes off as a menacing implication.
August 6th, 2018 2:38pm
It’s so interesting to hear Taylor Swift doubt herself so much. “Delicate” is a love song, but from the perspective of someone who is desperately afraid that this amazing connection she’s made is about to be poisoned by her past, or ruined by allowing herself to be vulnerable too soon. And all she wants is to honest, and to just tell this guy what she’s feeling. She’s censoring herself, editing out as much as she can to maintain an illusion, but she’s not sure if it’s working.
She really makes you feel her angst here – the urgency of her desire crashing into the anxious need for self-preservation. You can hear the classic Taylor crush vibes in the song, but it’s muffled and muted by the icy arrangement. The song is all tormented restraint, so when the bridge comes and allows a brief moment of pure honesty – “sometimes when I look into your eyes I pretend you’re mine, all the damn time” – it’s incredibly cathartic. But then the song snaps back into the chorus – “is it cool that I said all that, is it chill that you’re in my head?” – and she sounds so totally defeated by her need to protect herself.
August 3rd, 2018 2:14pm
What does a woman want? It’s hard to say, as all of them are different. Your assumptions, especially as a straight man, are probably off base given your personal assortment of hopes and fears. But if you care – and this is not a given, a lot of men really don’t care – this question can drive you mad. Every woman you fall for offers fresh new ways to tie yourself up in knots trying to figure out how to make her happy and want you. And if you care, it’s all you want.
Leonard Cohen wrote “I’m Your Man” after trying and failing to figure out what women want. “I myself have decided to abandon the inquiry, I have decided to surrender,” Cohen has said introducing the song. “I’m ready to be whatever I must be in order to deserve her voluntary caress. That is why I say without shame and unconditionally: I’m your man.”
“I’m Your Man” is sung from a position of vulnerability and humility. It’s worshipful in tone, but willing to back away from that on a moment’s notice if he got the sense that worship would turn her off. He adores her so much, and just wants to feel worthy of her. His esteem for her is so high, it’s unlikely he ever will.
The synthesizer arrangement of this song sounds a bit cheesy and dated today, but the artifice was always intentional. The sound is aiming for suave sophistication, but what you hear is a slightly awkward simulation. It’s the musical equivalent of another mask he’s willing to put on to please this woman. It’s an act, but the intention is incredibly sincere. He just wants to be her man.
August 3rd, 2018 4:10am
“Hummer” is a song Billy Corgan wrote about coming out of a period of depression and writers block. Corgan often talks about his art as the result of divine inspiration, and while I can’t relate to his faith, I will say that the way creativity and epiphanies seem to come and go can be so inexplicable that it being God’s will is as good an explanation as anything else. In my own experience, it’s like a light bulb being turned on or off. The off periods are a dull malaise. The on periods are a glorious high. Either position feels permanent in the moment, but it never is. And you can’t ever anticipate when the switch goes on or off.
“Hummer” is a song of joy and hope, but Corgan doles out the ecstatic moments carefully. A lot of the song is riding a placid groove, with Corgan playing crisp, calm lead parts or gently chiming chords. The big distorted parts signal overwhelming happiness on a monumental scale, and seem to shoot upwards like skyscrapers bursting from the ground. How else are you supposed to accompany a sentiment like “When I woke up from that sleep I was happier than I’d ever been”?
This is also a love song. Corgan buries the lede a bit here, but the most dramatic element of the song is him trying to square this feeling of renewal and creative fertility with his love for someone. Every feeling he has is intensified, but he seems worried about holding on to this love. “Yeah, I want something new, but what am I supposed to do about you?,” he asks. He immediately knows the answer: “I love you, it’s true.”
August 1st, 2018 12:25pm
There is no timeline in “Tangled Up in Blue,” just scattered memories of small moments burned into the mind of the narrator, who could be singing about one woman or several different women over the course of his life. It’s all deliberately unclear, to the point that sometimes he might be a different person too. Some sections seem like vivid recollections, and others feel more like fantasies. But memory is shaky and unreliable, and is mostly just the story you tell yourself to make sense of your life and define yourself. People change over the years. I prefer to hear this song as being about just two people drawn to one another but almost always out of synch. It’s more romantic that way, and more tragic.
In “Tangled Up In Blue,” love is easy but life is complicated. Every moment of profound connection is fleeting, and every commitment is subject to change. Love gives him focus and purpose but it’s inevitably thwarted, and he’s often complicit in the failure. The music moves in circles, mirroring the way these people orbit one another, and suggesting that they will eventually connect again. There’s a brightness in the notes, a glimmer of hope. She may be gone for years on end, but she never escapes his mind. His lingering love for her and regret about losing her flattens and scrambles his timeline. It’s always her, somehow. And in his heart, it’s always her, someday.
July 31st, 2018 2:34am
You know how if you put a seashell to your ear you can “hear the ocean” in its hollow? The guitar chords of “Rock & Roll” are sorta like that, but the space between strums contains faint echoes of the Manhattan of the late 1960s. You can feel it in the tone, and in the attack – a hustling groove, but played with a bit of “so what?” slack. I’ve never been to that version of Manhattan, but I’m certain that’s the sound of it. It sounds just like it.
“Rock & Roll” is meant to do this. It’s designed to evoke New York City, and conjure a romanticized vision of a space full of exciting people where you’re not, but could someday be. The entire song is about the way sound can take you where you need to go, if only you can just hear it. The girl in the song, a stand-in for Lou Reed as a young man, finds love and life and meaning on the radio. The “New York station” is a beacon for everyone in range of its transmission.
When Lou Reed wrote “her life was saved by rock & roll,” that sentiment was not the corny Pinterest cliché it is today. The need for escape was far more urgent, the stakes were much higher. “Rock & Roll” expresses the joy of finding your people, even if you haven’t really met them yet. The sound is a map, and it takes you to a place. In this case, it’s Manhattan and it’s 1969.
July 27th, 2018 3:47am
“Take Me With U” contains one of the most charming moments in the history of pop music: The bit in the third verse in which Prince sings “you’re sheer perfection” and Apollonia replies “thank you.” The very idea of this exchange is cute, but the exact tone of their voices is what makes it so special – he’s so thirsty and earnest, and she’s so polite and demure. She sounds like she’s blushing. He sounds like he’s sweating.
“Take Me With U” is one of the few songs where Prince sounds genuinely nervous, like he’s trying to be chill about his love but is failing completely. He’s desperate for her company, he just wants her soooooo much. He can’t hold back anything, so he’s laying it all on the line: “All I want is to spend the night together, all I want is to spend the night in your arms.” To me, this is Prince at his most romantic. His desire is so pure, his love is so respectful. There’s no trace of toxic masculinity, there’s nothing controlling or manipulative or selfish. It’s just this guy declaring exactly what he wants, and being a real sweetheart about it.
And uhhh, she has a mansion? That’s cool, I guess.
July 26th, 2018 2:57am
“Crazy for You” is Madonna’s best love song and finest ballad, in large part because she so fully commits to the forthright earnestness of Jon Lind and John Bettis’ music and lyrics. It’s not unusual for Madonna to be so heart-on-her-sleeve, but her most famous songs from the ’80s often have some arch or ironic quality. Here she’s tender, direct, and incredibly vulnerable as she confesses to huge, overwhelming feelings: “I never wanted anyone like this, it’s all brand new.” That last bit is what really gets me about this song – she feels out of her depth, she has no roadmap for this. What she’s experiencing is beautiful and exciting, but also quite scary. But regardless of the fear and possibility of rejection, she is absolutely certain of how she feels. It’s such a pure sentiment.
The clarity of the chorus is in sharp contrast with the verses, which look outside her feelings to observe the space around her. Lind and Bettis’ language is so vivid here, sketching out a scene in which other people in the club pair off and clear out, but Madonna’s character is waiting for something to happen. I love how this raises the stakes of the song – you feel the time slipping away, heightening her anticipation and longing. She’s trying to find a way to express herself, to make it happen. “Can’t you feel the weight of my stare?,” she wonders. “If you read my mind,” she fantasizes. As the song progresses she seems to get closer to the one she wants, but you never get any sort of resolution. There’s a very good chance that the intense love she feels goes unrequited and she heads home alone.
July 23rd, 2018 6:42pm
“Groove Is In The Heart” was released in the summer of 1990, in the middle of a three–year period in which music culture was transitioning between the aesthetics of the 1980s and what would become the 1990s. This phase of music history is fascinating to me because it has an aesthetic unto itself – creatively ambitious as artists and labels attempted to envision a fresh pop future, colorful and glossy, generally upbeat and optimistic in tone, and gleefully eclectic in its embrace of hip-hop, house music, and retro kitsch.
If you imagine all of that as a Venn diagram, “Groove Is In The Heart” is at the center. The track is one of the finest sample-based compositions of all time, with at least a dozen samples weaved into a seamless, ecstatic pop tune. Super DJ Dmitry’s craft is impeccable – he borrows a few grooves outright, but the bulk of the sampling is piecing together flourishes from small moments of disparate recordings. This is masterful audio collage on par with the best of the Bomb Squad, the Dust Brothers, and Prince Paul, and something that would be prohibitively expensive to create and release today. It’s an art form almost entirely snuffed out by commerce.
As glorious as Dmitry’s track gets, this song is still all about Lady Miss Kier. Her style, confidence, and enthusiasm is so strong that it’s nearly overpowering, and you don’t need to actually see her to understand that you’re listening to the coolest, foxiest woman in the universe. (But it certainly does not hurt to look! These videos are astonishing.)
“Groove Is In the Heart” is one of the world’s greatest crush songs. The music has a generous and playful tone, and conveys the euphoric rush of infatuation but without a trace of anxiety or melodrama. I love the way Kier expresses a deep appreciation for the person she’s addressing – she sounds so excited about them, and so inspired by their presence. (I love the phrase “your groove I do deeply dig!” so much. All I really want is someone who deeply digs my groove.) She gets silly, she gets sassy, she gets funky. The way she sings “I couldn’t ask for another!” is thrilling, and easily one of the most deliriously joyful bits of any song in pop history. The best part of this is that her bliss is contagious, and this song is one of the most effective ways humans have ever devised to induce crushed-out feelings.
July 22nd, 2018 11:59pm
The WPIX Archive is one of my favorite things on the internet, as it combines two things that will always fascinate me: Generally quite banal footage from the 20th century, and New York City history. The stuff I love most in the archive are from the ’70s through the mid ’90s, as they are glimpses into the world just before my existence or the adult world I only partially perceived as a child.
But one clip from the 21st century stands out – the last live footage WPIX shot of the World Trade Center on the morning of 9/11. It’s not even a good shot of the buildings; it’s just a helicopter view of the skyline. The footage wouldn’t even be all that interesting if not for the context – the chatter of the Good Day New York hosts wrapping up their program for the morning, and that it’s soundtracked by Robbie Dupree’s “Steal Away.” Everything is cheery and relaxed. It’s just another boring late summer day.
“Steal Away” is a very appropriately titled song, given that it flagrantly rips off key elements of two major hits that came out in the two years before its release – The Doobie Brothers and Michael McDonald’s soft rock classic “What A Fool Believes,” and Eddie Money’s radio staple “Baby Hold On.” But please do not hold this against “Steal Away.” It’s a magnificent song in its own right, and frankly, more songs should have keyboard parts like “What A Fool Believes.” How many terrible punk songs are essentially the same damn thing, and no one complains about that? I could do without a hundred thousand of those, and but would be grateful for just one other good “What A Fool Believes” ripoff.
“Steal Away” is a song about an affair. It’s unclear what the entanglement is – is Dupree simply the Other Man, or is he cheating on someone too? It doesn’t really matter. The point is that despite knowing that he’s doing something wrong, he definitely can’t say no. The interesting thing here is how the chill vibe of the music defuses the conflict in the lyrics, and how despite the “into the night, I know it ain’t right” refrain, there’s almost no trace of guilt in the feeling of the song. Dupree tips back and forth between passivity and action, guided mainly by lust and excitement. This isn’t a song concerned with the aftermath of actions, it’s all about a moment. And that moment is quite romantic. I like to think that song is the start of one of those relationships that begin as some illicit affair, but end up being stable, loving partnerships.
July 17th, 2018 1:05am
We have our ways of making songs what we want them to be. I’ve read the lyrics of “Bodysnatchers” and understand that it’s a paranoid fantasy about helplessness and living a lie, but I decided what this song was about for me 11 years ago. It’s all in one line: “I’M TRAPPED IN THIS BODY AND CAN’T GET OUT.” That line, in a song that sounds like trying to frantically shake your own skin off, is what I’ve connected to, and that’s because I so badly have needed that song to exist.
I saw Radiohead play this song for the first time since 2006 on Friday night. It came near the end of the best show I’ve ever seen them play, and one of the most powerful live experiences I’ve ever had in terms of being at a high level of emotional and physical connection to the music for such a sustained period of time. “Bodysnatchers” was the emotional pinnacle of the show, and shouting “I’M TRAPPED IN THIS BODY AND CAN’T GET OUT” along with Thom Yorke was an incredibly cathartic moment for me. I felt like I was letting go of an idea I’d been holding on to very tightly for most of my life.
In that moment, during that song and during this show, I didn’t feel trapped in my body at all. My movements, typically either rigid or self-conscious, were loose and intuitive. Not graceful, but comfortable. I came out of that show feeling like I’d reversed a hex I put on myself many years ago, if just by fully realizing how horrifying Yorke’s line really is and that I don’t have to live like that if I don’t want to.
July 16th, 2018 12:29pm
A few weeks ago, after a series of epiphanies that have given me a lot of new focus in life, I heard this song accidentally as the result of an algorithm and unknowingly hitting a bunch of buttons on my phone. It felt like Björk herself appearing to tell me personally that I was making all the right decisions. “You can’t say no to hope, you can’t say no to happiness,” she sings. “It doesn’t scare me at all!”
“Alarm Call” has been a very inspirational song for me for about half my life now, but in that moment I felt like I was hearing it with new ears. What once sounded like advice now resonated as truth. The hope I feel and the happiness I want aren’t scary to me now, they are simply goals to work towards, and feelings I’ve opened myself up to. For most of my life desire was a frightening thing because it seemed like I wasn’t in the position to want things, and I could only envision how I might fail. But it’s better to not focus on outcomes as much as obeying intuition and satisfying curiosity. Follow the feeling and you’ll get closer to it.
“Alarm Call” is one of Björk’s most joyful pieces of music, and also one of the most pop things she’s ever made. It’s her version of Michael Jackson – a densely packed groove that nevertheless feels light as air, with a lot of wordless emoting coloring in between the lines of well composed vocal hooks. Her message here is optimistic and utopian, but very aware of the flaws of the human mind. This positive feeling, this “enlightenment,” it only comes if you fight for it. You get there if you let go of fear, and work for hope and happiness. She’s telling you this is possible, because she’s made it up to the top of the mountaintop. She’s got a radio and good batteries, and this is the joyous tune that she believes will free the human race from suffering.
Well, I don’t know about the rest of you, but it definitely has worked on me.
July 15th, 2018 4:34pm
Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis’ songs are typically highly dynamic, with mostly percussive elements shifting around to give the melody maximum emotional impact. In the case of their work on Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814, it’s like drawing several underlines beneath the hooks. There’s a softness in Janet’s voice, but the music explodes with great force. As expressive as her voice is, she’s always understating the feeling relative to the intensity of the keyboards and drum hits.
“Love Will Never Do (Without You)” is even more dynamic than usual because it was initially written as a duet with a man – they wanted Prince, then thought maybe they could get Ralph Tresvant, but nothing really worked out. So Jackson sings the first verse in a much lower register than usual, which greatly exaggerates her range within the track. This works to the advantage of the song, which starts out rather joyful but keeps escalating into dizzying ecstasy as it moves along.
The lyrics follow the sound of it, with the lowest vocal part at the start approaching the love between Janet and her partner in analytical terms but by the time she’s up in the giddy stratospheres, she’s nearly at a loss for words. (“No other love around has quite the same…ooh ooh!”) But as extraordinarily joyous as this song gets, the words are grounded and reasonable. The love in “Love Would Never Do” is not unrealistic – there’s work to be done, there’s conflicts and temptations, there’s a need to prove the doubters wrong. The loveliest and most romantic line in the song is so simple and direct: “I feel better when I have you near me.” If this song is doing anything, it’s just trying to capture that specific everyday happiness.
July 14th, 2018 10:26pm
Not long after this song came out nearly a decade ago, some brilliant person made a video for it cutting together scenes from John Hughes movies from the 1980s. Maybe you remember it! The “Brat pack mashup” video is a joy to watch, partly for obviously nostalgic reasons, but mostly because it connected the essence of the song – and Phoenix’s overall aesthetic – to this kindred spirit from the past. The editor of the video recognized what was happening in “Lisztomania” from the start: The boppy rhythm that invites you to swivel your hips and lighten your shoulders, the vocal that expresses a pure-hearted desire with a small dash of neurosis.
Thomas Mars’ lyrics are on the cryptic side, but it’s clear what this is all about. It’s about needing the thrill of romance, and cherishing the rush of raw, undiluted emotion. It’s about fetishizing the obstacles in the way of love, because they make everything more exciting. It’s about epiphanies and desire and dancing. It’s about wanting to feel fully alive.
Hughes movies are so resonant because the emotions and desires of the characters are amplified by youthful hormones, but have incredible clarity because they don’t have much more to think about aside from social status. This is true of a lot of fiction about teenagers, but what makes this all so seductive is that Hughes knows this is all great FUN. The creation of identity, the pursuit of connection, the ecstatic angst of a crush, the burning need to rise above your circumstances to something more glamorous and beautiful and exciting. You watch these films, and listen to the sort of pop songs that evoke the same feeling, because you yearn to feel like these kids. It’s all very instructive and aspirational. There’s a power in wanting things very badly.
Phoenix’s music comes from an adult perspective, but makes a case that this sort of feeling is not a thing you grow out of: It comes, it comes, it comes, it comes, it comes and goes! Mars sounds like he’s talking himself out of his feelings at first – “so sentimental, not sentimental, no / romantic, not disgusting yet” – but the music makes him succumb to it. It starts with the hip swivel and the lightness in the shoulders, and it quickly moves to your heart.
July 13th, 2018 1:24am
“New Coupe, Who Dis?” seems to float gently in a cloud of sparse organ chords, with just enough bounce and swing to register as funky. The placid groove suits Mick Jenkins, whose verse slinks around the beat with a loose and playfully melodic flow similar to that of his Chicago peers Chance and Noname. Smino is a whole other thing, though – his voice is high and cartoonish in some moments, raspy and soulful in others. Once he moves into verses, his words seem to spiral around the beat like vines. There’s a lot going on in this song that sounds like just hanging around doing nothing on a pleasant night.
July 10th, 2018 3:02am
“The Internet of Love” moves at a languorous, hungover pace. It’s a slow drag of music, with piano notes and guitar chords that trickle out gradually as if the song itself barely has the energy to get up. The feeling of it is just as stuck as the sound. There’s a not a lot of lyrics, but what you get sketches out a portrait of someone who is alone and yearning for someone they’ve lost somehow. They’re lonely and heartbroken and retreating into themselves, imagining a future together that is just not going to happen. What really gets to me about this song is the self-awareness – he knows how bad obsessing over this is for him, and how it only makes the chances of getting what he wants more impossible. But he can’t stop sinking deeper into the feeling.
July 9th, 2018 1:04am
This song basically sounds like someone trying very hard to make their own version of Donald Fagen’s The Nightfly in their bedroom with no budget, no session musicians, and only a fraction of Fagen’s chops. But you know what? It works for me, and Video Age’s earnest desire to write a classy, swinging early ’80s sort of pop tune is very charming to me. “Pop Therapy” is certainly much more tender and sweet than anything Fagen would write, and the vocals and lyrics convey a neurotic desire for affection and understanding that’s a bit dweeby but still very relatable.
July 9th, 2018 12:46am
If you’re familiar with Kendrick Lamar’s “Untitled 06 | 06.30.2014,” then you know this song. That’s easily one of my favorite songs by Lamar, so it took a bit to get used to hearing a version of this without him on it and to grow accustomed to different shifts in the song that give more space to Cee-Lo Green’s voice. And though I quite like both songs, I feel a little bad that “Questions” – despite being the source material – has to be secondary, simply because it came out after Lamar’s track. This is an exceptionally composed R&B tune that nods to ’70s soul aesthetics while having a very distinct feeling to it. There’s a tranquility to the chords, and Green expresses a remarkable humility while singing lines like “I am wonderful, let me count the ways” and repeatedly uttering the phrase “let me explain.” This not a song coming from an arrogant place – it’s more about self-love and clarity opening your heart to other people and things greater than yourself.
Support Me on Ko-fi
