Best of 2024 Pt. 1 - Best Words
Best of the blog, Bluesky, and beyond
I wrote a lot this year, so as is now customary, I’ll spend my first of four year-end posts to highlight as much as possible.
First, links to longer stuff: There are two essays in my Taylor Swift series, one on Taylor Swift’s imperial 2023 and the other on The Tortured Poets Department as mixtape decoupage. I was also interviewed in the Ringer about Swift, along with Toms Ewing and Breihan.
I did a lot of retrospective writing, mostly via social media music challenges. I wrote about Japanese music from 1974 based on Brad Luen’s 1974 poll, and wrote about 50 singles you may not have heard (or heard of) from 1962 for the MyYearInMix challenge. I also used Jel Bugle’s novelty music challenge to work out a tongue-in-cheek taxonomy of novelty, which I’ve collected in one place here.
At the end of the year, I shared some autobiographical writing on Bluesky that I’d never previously published, about “You Are My Sunshine” and “I Will Always Love You” (Whitney Houston version).
And now, the rest! Fair warning, this might hit the email cutoff.
A-Pop
A-Pop: A way to conceptualize American pop music as a regional combatant in a global landscape, the same way you would describe K-pop or J-pop. I posited back in 2013 that will.i.am was making A-Pop, a meta encapsulation of major Western pop strands that had no obvious auteur at the helm but a kind of mad genius conductor (or direct access to the collective zeitgeist), creating the template for a smaller, regional pop music landscape competing against other countries on a more level playing field than the past 50 years of hegemonic(ish) dominance.
—February 8
In America, and maybe the Anglophone mainstream pop sphere more generally, pop stars are trying to find their way into the rarified air of mass culture, a Western dominance of global culture that includes maybe a dozen (mostly American/British) celebrity musicians. And these lesser stars are getting trapped in a bubble far below the impact of mass culture or regional global cultural significance, but without seeing themselves as a coherent regional pop movement. American pop stars below the megastar level put me in mind of Eurovision contestants with no country.
Internationally, there are a few regional stars who wind up appealing to a remaining sense of “mass culture” as their way to get global popularity, but often they’re not really central to the broader regional ecosystem they emerged from. Psy’s “Gangnam Style” succeeded as mass culture in a way that BTS and BLACKPINK went straight to global culture. (I personally know young people for whom BTS and BLACKPINK were gateways to K-pop, whereas I don’t think Psy, a longtime veteran of K-pop, necessarily got people into K-pop fandom with “Gangnam Style,” though he maybe paved a route for others?) Tyla’s “Water” succeeded as an amapiano mass culture event (too early to tell its impact) while Burna Boy went from Afrobeats to global culture without really needing the mass culture pit stop.
—April 11
After grappling with three different posts in a tentative A-pop series—and being dissatisfied with all of them—I’ve decided the problem is the concept. I kept beginning essays with phrases like “any theory of A-pop begins with the banal observation that America is not the only country in the world,” but then the idea functionally kept ending there, too, as I weaved in various related ideas that never seemed to add up to a capital-T theory, and didn’t seem very interesting as scattered observations forming theory in the negative space.
So instead, A-pop will remain a capital-B bit: a tongue-in-cheek shorthand for imagining American (and broader western Anglophone etc.) pop music as a regional concern competing with other ascendant global styles.
—May 30
One thing I’ve been grasping at with my A-pop writing is a shift in global cultural transmission, whose broad strokes were obvious by 1990, where the timeline in Michael Bourdaghs’s book Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon: A Geopolitical Prehistory of J-Pop stops. Bourdaghs claims: “J-pop exists in a different historical moment from the popular music [from 1945-1990] I discuss in the book: it names a new kind of map.”
The book sketches out one side of that shift in transmission: the emergence of a regional music that is in some ways formed through, or operating parallel to, a global hegemonic mass culture, but ultimately (eventually) stands on its own two feet. With the A-pop idea, I’m getting at a logical flip side that I think has been roughly true for a long time theoretically, but maybe hasn’t been felt as acutely until the last decade or so: that is, what happens when the pop forms comprising the “Euro-America” (Anglo/American) locus of popular culture are put in the position of grappling with a globally comparative existence themselves?
—August 22
A-Pop Titans (Addison Rae and Ava Max)
[Re: “My Oh My”] Ava Max is still doing…whatever it is Ava Max is supposed to be doing. “America as a serious Eurovision contestant”? The last time I heard “there’s a place in France” quoted in a pop song was Kesha’s “Take It Off,” and the distance between there and here is telling, I think. I wouldn’t call Ava Max tasteful, per se, but there is something oddly muted about it, like a germaphobe trying to convince you they love trash. (Kesha was Oscar the Grouch and Gonzo at the same time.)
—April 18
[Re: “Diet Pepsi”] Sabrina Carpenter asks “what if Taylor Swift still had songs,” but I’ll take Swift’s exhausting authenticity over Carpenter’s winky confessional-flavored filler (I will not, however, complete the phrase and take Taylor any day of the week—exhausting’s exhausting—so they can split attentional custody). Addison Rae, on the other hand, was smart enough to just make a xerox of Taylor’s xerox of Lana Del Rey. Now we know the answer to the question “who will Single White Female the Single White Female?”
—September 3
[Re: “Spot a Fake”] Ava Max has emerged as the fakest and maybe best of a crop of pop stars that folks who have not yet cheekily adopted the term A-Pop sometimes refer to as the “pop girlies.” She threatens true cringe with all of those ‘80s sounds that her too-damn-tasteful peers won’t touch—real training montage shit. If she didn’t curse at the phony new girlfriend, I’d even play it for my kids.
—September 26
[Re: “Aquamarine”] Addison Rae and Ava Max are my two current A-pop faves, for basically opposite reasons: Ava Max is the, er, maximalist, pushing beyond cringe into cosmic shamelessness territory. Addison Rae is the inverse (in approach, not in shamelessness), not so much minimalist as the other pole: recessive maximalism. It’s bold, not only in who she’s stealing from, but in daring you to care about it. She refuses to sit on her chair properly. She smokes two cigarettes at once. This is the sort of proclamatory disaffection that in previous pop eras would have been a statement, if usually an ironic one. But for Rae it’s just a costume, and she doesn’t wear it in a costume-y way; it’s more like she decided that part of the bundle she bought from Spirit of Halloween would also make for a decent top year-round.
—November 7
Alice Longyu Gao, “Little Piggy”
A horrifying tale of suffering the abuse of bullies and lashing in instead of lashing out, but the song lashes out, not just in telling the story, but in making the insult boomerang back onto its source—you can see them all transforming into little piggies, trapped on the twisted little Pleasure Island Alice Longyu Gao built.
—November 7
Amapiano (and 3-step)
I’ve begun to wonder if amapiano may be finally making its soft landing out of ferment, though I wouldn’t say this of South African dance music as a whole, which seems to be getting a lot of life from other Afrohouse styles after a banner year for amapiano that was still ultimately eclipsed by 3-step. (Immediately after wondering all of this, I heard an extremely popular and good amapiano song that will likely lead off next week’s mix, so what do I know.)
At the same time, amapiano may finally be traveling a bit more outside of the mutually beneficial Afrobeats pipeline. Across the weekly playlists I’m hearing some attempts at amapiano in ways that strike me as clumsy but make a serious go of integration.
—February 29
Every time I think I’m out of amapiano, they pull me back in. And “they” in this case is Shakes & Les, a duo that seems to have wrested the title of “Best Amapiano Ampersand” from Mellow & Sleazy (for now).
I wonder if — between the combination of the amapiano R&B breakthrough via Tyla, amapiano’s sounds finally taking root in multiple international scenes, and the ongoing cross-pollination of Afrobeats and amapiano — amapiano has found a way to keep a spotlight on vocalists while keeping the best elements of non-hierarchal composition? Last year I complained about a few pop crossover spotlights on vocals being antithetical to what amapiano was doing best. But I’m kind of over that quibble—maybe amapiano is just stabilizing as a more scalable and exportable pop form in its own right.
—April 11
UK-raised South African Charisse C helps me clarify what the heck I’m going to call these recent crossover trends in amapiano music — I think ama-pop works just fine.
—April 18
After several months, I have 15 minutes to spare for an extremely long amapiano masterpiece from Kabza De Small [“Kabza Chant”]. Amapiano has been holding its own this year, but it seems like the ground has been shifting — this is basically Kabza De Small’s 3-step epic, bringing on tons of prominent collaborators for something that might be a swan song, a victory lap, or a headlong rush into an unknown future. Time will tell.
—August 8
Shakes & Les & co. have brought back immersive jazz instrumental amapiano this year, the sort of stuff that takes you back to the mythical jam session that sparked the whole movement.
—August 29
If you squint at the characteristically sprawling credits on this one [“Amalanga”], you can pick out DJ Maphorisa and Kabza De Small. That plus Chley on vocals was enough for inclusion, but there’s also an ease to this one that feels neither tethered to the cresting (waning?) amapiano zeitgeist c. 2019-2022, nor restlessly reaching for something bigger or different. I can’t imagine anything harder than figuring out how to “evolve” in such a doggedly vibes-based milieu, but then I’m too annoyingly cerebral to ever actually make any of this stuff. Tragically, I’m only wired for making power-pop.
—October 3
3-step creator Thakzin is decisively out of the limelight/zeitgeist in a scene that ages in dog years and where three or four years of success is like having a legacy career, but everything he puts out has something to recommend it.
—October 17
[Musical Jazz’s “Heshkha (Jaiva)”] has an economical bent to it that gives it the same freshness that Shakes & Les (who feature on their album) also explore in their Funk Series—basically, the game is how few elements can you retain in an amapiano song and still give a sense of full immersion. It’s like they’ve figured out how to weave in room tone like another instrument.
—November 21
One reason I love amapiano specifically and many (not all) sorts of dance music is how it really lays out the alchemical nature of music production, shows you the parts and the sum in plain sight but the trick works anyway. Some very good amapiano this year has pushed this aspect even further. The Shakes & Les Funk Series album is instructive to me because at one point on “Funk Dala” they bust out the jazz scat preset from a Roland keyboard I bought in 1999. It still sounds good. This is unfathomable to me. I think in pop music we often punt alchemy to obvious markers of human expression in the human voice — grain, words, etc. But it’s really in the fabric of every part of music-making, beyond e.g. structure (classical) or ingenuity (jazz).
—November 22, Bluesky
Chappell Roan
Just heard “Good Luck Babe” tucked between Michael Jackson songs at the janky beach arcade. Perhaps Chappell Roan has the juice after all. I still think she sounds like the main character in an A24 fake pop star biopic that has too many ponderous shots of people staring out the window and falls apart in the third act but is still a solid 3 stars.
—August 17, Bluesky
Have decided not to write an essay about the era of A24 pop stars, where everything is weirdly tasteful, even the crassness; things are grayer and shots held longer than they need to be; and I wouldn’t say any of it is bad (is much better than average!) but is constantly kneecapping its potential. Previous pop stars played at being gods, with various levels of success. A24 pop stars are playing at being pop stars, like how A24 treats independent cinema as a genre. Don’t think this is unique or unprecedented (for movie studios or pop stars), I’m just surprised that it’s working, that people accept that it’s good enough.
—August 31, Bluesky
Broke: “Good Luck Babe” is actually kind of bad
Woke: “GLB” is good but there are parts that are very annoying
Bespoke (but incorrect): “GLB” is the apex of current human musical achievement and it is you that needs adjustment.
—September 1, Bluesky
“Good Luck Babe” sounded perfect at the janky beach arcade in August but it does not work at all in the janky ice cream place in November. I think the moment has passed.
—November 15, Bluesky
Christina Aguilera, “Genie in a Bottle”
Britney was the sea change, but “Genie in a Bottle” came out of nowhere, and there is no reason it should have worked this well given any of its contributors. It was the 1999 teenpop song that totally stopped me in my tracks when I heard it on the radio. “I feel like I’ve been locked up tight” is also the actual lyric of the teenpop takeover, rather than anything from “…Baby One More Time,” which only works at the phonemic level. The genius of Max Martin is that he made you feel like you were learning songs in a language you already speak phonetically—you’re memorizing the whole deal of the song, not the words per se.
—November 15, Bluesky
Dreams
I dreamt that I had taken on the ambitious project of writing about the 500 best confessional teenpop songs from 1999-2009 and called the book “KISS OFF.” It was a play on a similar book about the best punk songs called “PISS OFF.”
—October 2, Bluesky
Had a dream I was invited to go to space in a special NASA program for couples, then was rejected at the opening reception because they gave you two small bottles of wine and expected you only to drink one of them. The people dismissed for this transgression saw a presentation by a disgruntled leftist called “Space Is a Scam” and went back to their hotel in a massive shuttle, everyone sobbing, one woman distraught because people who’ve been to space can ask to have their hair brushed lovingly by NASA administrators.
—October 20, Bluesky
Eurovision
Current Eurovision feels like moneyball for novelty music.
—January 18
Thinking about “pop” as a closed genre: the narrowing of “pop” into a moribund (or at least rigidly bounded) genre like rock or jazz coincides with the fall of EDM at the end of the ’10s and the absorption of hyperpop into regional popular music(s). If the twin last gasps of rock-as-genre were nu-metal and 00’s iPod indie, then EDM and hyperpop are the corresponding last gasps for capital-P pop. This is directly related to my sense of Eurovision’s weird role in the pop landscape—it’s never been easier to imagine the United States participating in Eurovision, and I’m not sure that’s a good thing.
—February 8
This week I finally listened to all of the Eurovision finalists, which is nothing if not a graveyard for pale imitations—lots of minimum viable pop, or worse. I always have the same reaction to Eurovision entries when I first hear them: disappointment because I’m not in the right headspace to listen to Eurovision as Eurovision. I’m using the wrong lens, so only the few entries that I would think to put into rotation in my everyday listening stand out. (If I’m lucky, this will be three or four songs.)
But then over time (this year, it was less than 24 hours!) I snap into Eurovision’s whole deal and adjust my expectations accordingly. I start to hear the whole thing in a way that frames schlock and obnoxiousness as spectacle. Eurovision is fundamentally a visual/audio sensory experience for most folks, whereas I usually ignore visuals whenever possible. But with a lot of the finalists, you can sort of hear the visuals—the costumes, the staging, the singers mugging the camera. I hesitate to say any of this enhances the music, per se (I still wouldn’t put several songs I now respect as spectacles on a mix), but it changes the nature of the experience. My kids are insisting that we watch it together this year.
—March 28
Genre
I really like the Glenn McDonald book [You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favorite Song] but he's not sufficiently Kogan/Eddy-pilled for intellectual coherence around genre, hence my frustration with some of the outré genre-splicing you get. There’s no way to build a genre machine in that model, so this is probably better than the alternative (i.e. nothing).
“Whatever you call the thing that The Who, Boston, Guns N Roses, Led Zeppelin and Lynyrd Skynrd share, Rihanna doesn’t have very much of it” (pg. 186). This, e.g., is a form of intellectual violence to me even though it is “correct” in terms of what a client is asking for, which is a rock song recommender that doesn’t just give you Rihanna.
—September 22, Bluesky
I’m a big believer that genre’s role in music listening and discourse and life-living has to include at its core serendipity and contestation, both of which seem like potential casualties of the approach to categorization that animates a lot of McDonald’s writing, where serendipity is managed and contestation is redirected to a new and separate branch in the category architecture. There’s a telling anecdote where McDonald describes how helpful the METAL section at the music store was in sorting out what he was looking for as a young, pre-internet music consumer. He goes on to say that with Spotify, you can now have a section just for gothic symphonic metal.
But this potentially erodes the provocative social value of genre, which doesn’t just reflect communities and their parties, but dares everyone else into the party, too, perhaps in the very process of trying to keep everyone out (and thus conveniently sorted). You can maybe ask “what the hell is Teena Marie doing in the METAL section?” but no one’s ever going to sort her under gothic symphonic metal. And she definitely won’t get in if the program is designed for her numbers never to match.
Collapsing the distinction between genre as a battleground/playground and as terminology designed for descriptive precision seems misguided to me as an intellectual project, even if it impresses as a feat of engineering. It helps you build an incredible machine, but it also just doesn’t sit right to keep “Fire Bomb” by Rihanna out of rock radio, even in the age of the celestial jukebox. Whose utopia is this anyway?
—September 26
Hyperpop in Latin America
[Re: AKRILLA’s “Popper!”] Not sure what to call this subgenre of short, noisy art-reggaeton from Chile. Hyperton?
—June 27
[Re: AKRIILA’s “para siempre (｡ᐳ﹏ᐸ)” ed. note: I didn’t realize this was the second appearance of AKRIILA on my mixes, and also got the country wrong this time out] Landfill hyperpop from Colombia Chile. I seem to love all of this long-tail stuff better than hyperpop proper. It needed global absorption and a sense of being totally played out to reach its true potential.
—August 8
[Re: Bruses’s “I’m So Happy”] I think the diffusion of hyperpop internationally has not only preserved what was always best about hyperpop — faster tempos, chipmunk voices, the counterintuitively humanizing quality of pushing Autotune to its breaking point—it has also provided a bit of a shot in the arm to every genre it rubs up against, in this case the bits of reggaeton that come through in what I can only describe as Mexico’s Poppy.
—November 7
[Re: CRRDR’s “Toy En Nota”] Here’s some reggaeton tachycardia from Sam 3K’s radio show. CRRDR is Colombian avant-pop, a bit too traditionally hyper to get a “hyper-” prefix, which often suggests a certain clinical distance from the pure Pixy-Stix-snorting high you get from this.
—November 21
Katy Perry
You’re telling me Katy Perry found her calling doing Ark Music Factory-level app jingles in the UK and then tried to do a Dr. L*ke comeback to mainstream pop?? She should be singing about Royal Match to my children after I decline their tablet purchase requests.
—July 31, Bluesky
Kesha, “Joy Ride”
Get in, losers, Kesha’s free and she brought an accordion.
—July 11
Olivia Rodrigo
My time as a congenial Olivia Rodrigo hater may be coming to an end — her partnership with the National Network of Abortion Funds looks strong, and most of my annoyances are too petty to begrudge good politics in an already nasty election year. But mostly I’m tired of feeling tired.
So I will use my final nominally anti-Rodrigo newsletter to ponder whether or not she was in any way inspired to write “bad idea right?” from the song “bad idea!” from Girl in Red, the Norwegian proto-Rodrigo who leads off the mix this week. Plagiarism claims rarely stick to Rodrigo, who is usually canny enough to couch her references in heavy quotation marks, and litigating influence is a sucker’s game anyway. But part of what I’ve resented about Rodrigo is the way that she leans into a Glee-informed karaoke cosplay, so when I do find similarities, I’m not very charitable (except when it was Radiohead, that was great…did they ever do Radiohead on Glee?).
—March 7
What to do with Pom Pom Squad, sometime alleged visual influence for Olivia Rodrigo, and not not annoying in the same way that Rodrigo can be. The new album is so good that I’m less prickly about any role they have in the alt-pop-girlie turn of the 20s, and it also makes me wonder if I’m ready to cast the chip from my shoulder and revisit the whole zeitgeist. I can only nurse a grudge about the erasure of mid-aughts teen confessional from critical conversations for so long…right? Certainly I couldn’t just seethe about it forever…?
—November 21
Optimism
I think that imagining times to be deep shit habitually is no way to live one’s life, flames or no, and there’s a strong case that dispositional cautious optimism does more to improve people’s lives than righteous fatalism. It’s tricky, though, and maybe not just a question of habit — my mom was an optimist on her death bed. So maybe I was born this way.
—October 24
I try to remind myself when I’m reading political media that most of these writers aren’t actually working with much more actionable knowledge than I have when it comes to their predictions and pronouncements. And I’m just some guy. We often just don’t really know what’s going to happen. If you’re a dispositional optimist, you carry some faith that occasionally the thing you couldn’t have predicted will work to your benefit. And, as J-pop star ano reminds us this week, you also have to be prepared for that moment, whenever it comes. (Also, have an ice pack handy.)
—November 7
Pale Waves, Who Am I?
I never really expounded on why I loved Pale Waves’ Who Am I?, my album of the year in 2021 (by a nose, against Playboi Carti’s Whole Lotta Red, which itself is retroactively the best album of 2020 — it came out in December 2020). I saw it as a Borgesian miracle: the successful application of Pierre Menard’s gambit to Avril Lavigne.
—June 27
Pain
I think pain is probably less like a river and more like the fluvial features of streams and waterfalls in a forest, all of them subtly pointing toward the river without you necessarily being able to see the thing, and when you close your eyes you can imagine the whole ocean. A river is too medium-sized for pain, neither here (in the moment) nor there (in the void). It’s probably a better metaphor for time—as the Judds once put it: life’s forever beginning, beginning again.
—February 22
People’s Pop
[Final and third-place matches: Kate Bush “Running Up That Hill” vs. Donna Summer “I Feel Love” and Madonna “Like a Prayer” vs. Deee-Lite “Groove Is in the Heart]
“Running Up That Hill” is a song that sounds and feels bigger in your imagination than it could possibly live up to when you listen again, but you can impart that imagined bigness onto it each time: it gets bigger. This is pop’s sublime magic trick.
“I Feel Love” gets at the sublime from a different angle, immerses you in a set of contradictions — solid, ephemeral, contained, immense — that feel easy. Every time you think you’ve figured it out there’s another corner to go around. (Also there appear to be no corners.)
The other match has form and strategy crossed— “Like a Prayer” the funhouse to explore (all corners, secret rooms) but still requires you to feed its myth back to it, “Groove” the rickety little vessel that makes you imagine you’re on a yacht but you don’t think twice about it.
Pet Shop Boys
The Pet Shop Boys construct pop like an abandoned Christmas village: confronted with the discomfiting counter-forces of bodily movement (theory only) and psychological alienation (real!), you run up to an inviting-looking facade and knock on the door only to realize you’re alone in the cold. This one, “Loneliness,” is like that, but it’s about that, too.
—February 15
Phonk
I have no idea where this music comes from, I imagine it’s a funky-smelling slime mold growing in some dank corner of Soundcloud. (According to the bio, this particular variety of brainless phonk amoeba is Scandinavian.)
—May 23
Podcasts (A.I.-generated)
You may think you’ve had a bad day, but I’ll bet you haven’t heard A.I. podcasters synthesize your blog post and say “well that was a mouthful.” Our pathetic robo overlords can’t even handle “melodramatic chanteuse electro existentialism”!
—September 17, Bluesky
Thank you to our incompetent robot overlords, who have provided a nice dust jacket blurb in their response to said cryptic closing statement: “Like something your grandpa would say — full of wisdom but a little baffling.”
—September 19
Pravi, Barbara, “Exister”
The French 2021 Eurovision runner-up’s strident new single is melodramatic chanteuse electro existentialism with a nasty bite to it, like “Viva La Vida” told at the moment before the fall. Drums like an army approaching, the title chanted incessantly — feel something, damn it — and whattaya know, I did!
—September 12
Process (see also: slop-sorting)
Luke Stacks: I have a more general question about your process, and I'm sorry if you've already answered it. How do you make yourself present and attentive for the large volume of music you try out? Or is this something you don't worry about? How did you develop trust in your initial impressions? I have been trying to sample more new music this year but often zone out, and I listen to, at most, a tenth of what you go through each week.
Oh that’s easy—I do not make myself present and attentive for the large volume of music I try out at all! I consider this an almost entirely intuitive (not to say random) process. Since I was a kid I’ve had an extremely annoying compulsion to speed-seek through radio stations until my brain tells me to stop, and this is just that tendency applied to as close as we have to a celestial jukebox.
To toot my own horn, I am very good at sussing out the general shape of a song within about four seconds, at least in terms of whether I’m going to immediately click with it. “Immediately clicking” is strongly correlated to whether I’ll actually like it but it’s not 1:1, and if I have even a moment’s hesitation of skipping I pull it out for a relisten. My “relisten” playlist whittles things from 2,500 a week down to about 50, of which 20-25 will make a weekly mix. I did a little informal study a few years ago, where I wrote down an impression of each of about 500 songs. The #1 skip quality is vocals, which are an immediate green light/red light, followed by tempo (not just the tempo itself but whether the song feels too slow for what it’s doing; songs are rarely too fast to me), then instrumentation.
To un-toot my own horn, I accept that I probably burn lots of good songs every week—but the longer I do this the less convinced I am that I’m really missing as much as you’d think. And I have lots of evidence of re-selecting songs a following week that I’ve already shortlisted, or listening again to a huge section I forgot to delete and picking the exact same songs. Missing even one perfect song would be a shame—but I’m so thankful for how much music I have frictionless access to that I kind of let the chips fall where they may. And I do still read other people to fill in gaps, though my gap-filling songs are usually only 1-2 selections in a given week.
—July 2
As someone who does actually go through a vast deluge of slop to find music, I will say that most of what I do is indiscriminately throw together thousands of recommended tracks from some good and some dubious sources. What I’ve learned after about four years of doing this is that in a more or less random sample of competent music, I will be interested to hear about 2-3% of it again, and will ultimately like 1% of it enough to want to share with someone else.
(“Competent” is somewhat subjective, but it’s real: I tried my method with the MP3[dot]com archives a few years ago and the hit rate was far less than 1%, to the point that I physically couldn’t do it anymore.)
It’s a numbers game: I could listen to 100 songs carefully and find one or two I like, or I could listen to 3,000 songs for a few seconds at a time and find 30. It really doesn’t matter where the songs come from, and the ones that are going to make it into my personal pantheon are unpredictable.
The more heavily curated a list is—especially according to tastes I already trust—the more songs I’m likely to pull from it. But it’s only at an order of about 10x improvement, so that means in a highly curated 100-song playlist I’m getting 10 songs instead of 1.
The People’s Pop polls found something like an exact midpoint between random sampling and curated experience, and the hit rate was as high as heavy curation while offering a much less curated feeling and more discovery-oriented experience.
This sorting process has also yielded a better sense of what I’ve been calling “ferment,” movement happening in a genre or region that I can then explore through more traditional research means. You can find ferment just by being a global scenester, but my brain doesn't work that way.
—September 22, Bluesky
—November 30, Bluesky
Soundcloud funk
Soundcloud is a good place to reliably get your face melted. But one of the things I love about Brazilian funk is not just its abrasiveness per se, but the way that it insists on making beauty abrasive and on making abrasion beautiful. It’s a tricky balance — and for me, face meltage is a secondary pleasure, icing on the cake. Granted, in this metaphor I have no idea what the cake is, but whatever it is, you can have it and eat it, too.
—March 21
Taylor Swift
During a conversation about the butterfly effect, my kid asked me how you could stop Taylor Swift from being famous with a time machine, and I quickly explained that the most harmless way would be to get her cast as a supporting character in Nancy Drew (2007). What I find interesting about the “what if no Taylor Swift” hypothetical is that I don’t see anyone replacing her, or her absence even necessarily causing any huge changes to the pop music landscape.
—April 5, Bluesky
Tom Ewing recently finished an incredible essay series on Cerebus the Aardvark, the massive multi-decade comics project from troubled auteur Dave Sim that began as an idiosyncratic genre pastiche incorporating popular trends in mainstream and alternative comic art but eventually devolved into a convoluted, paranoid morass of dubious quasi-religious lore.
…Did I mention I’m writing about Taylor Swift again?
—April 25
How did I just notice that “Friday” [by Rebecca Black] is a Taylor Swift song? Specifically, it’s what would happen if you stripped away everything that makes Taylor Swift Taylor Swift and kept only the basic chord/melodic/rhythm patterns underlying her songs. This is why all the parody Taylor Swift songs don’t sound like Taylor Swift. They sound like “Friday.”
—November 7, Bluesky
Tuca, Dracula I Love You
I was totally enraptured by Brazilian chanteuse and Françoise Hardy collaborator Tuca’s 1974 album Dracula, I Love You, her final album (she died a few years after recording it). I knew that the words were moving me even though I couldn’t understand them. Eventually I did my best to translate as many songs as I could. I’m glad I did—they suggested some images and phrases that now have some literary import. But that literary import wasn’t so much an “unlocking” of the songs as an additive bonus; I could already hear what was going on. Though this is rare for music in a language I don’t speak, it’s not impossible.
—September 12
Who Is Brazilian Funk’s Lindsay Lohan?
Last year I kept shortlisting overbearingly porn-y Brazilian MC Bibi Babydoll’s breakout song, “Automotivo Fogosa.” Was put off by her visuals, which are uncomfortable in their tryhard provocation, and wasn’t quite sold on the music. But One Weird Trick —keeping the much better d.silvestre beat from her track “Onlyfans,” with its insinuating sample of the guitar line from Ultra Naté’s “Free,” but pasting on the vocals from “Automotivo Fogosa”—has finally made the whole thing gel for me. Bibi Babydoll seems extremely affected as a performer, like she’s doing baile funk as Brechtian distancing, or maybe as Paris Hilton (same difference?).
—May 2
This song is a meeting of what may eventually prove to be two-thirds Brazil’s very own “bimbo summit,” with MC Pipokinha’s Britney being joined by Bibi Babydoll’s Paris Hilton. (“Who is the baile funk Lindsay Lohan?” is the kind of question I was born to ask.)
—May 30
I recently set myself the task of finding the Lindsay Lohan to MC Pipokinha’s Britney Spears and Bibi Babydoll’s Paris Hilton. I think the most promising candidate is Frank Kogan’s suggestion, MC Thammy, who probably fits the bill. Mc Morena, who is new to me and carries this song nearly acapella, is one to keep on standby. Or maybe cast her in a minor supporting role—the baile funk Hayden Panettiere?
—June 13
Most of my funk energies this week went into compiling a curated and lightly sequenced Ari Falcão playlist of songs from 2024 (there are over 100 to choose from this year to date), based on Frank Kogan’s championing of her. She is definitely the missing link in the Brazilian Bimbo Summit, the Lindsay Lohan to MC Pipokinha’s Britney Spears and Bibi Babydoll’s Paris Hilton.
—October 31
Willow
Billie Eilish’s new album is an on-brand admirable disappointment, another example of one of the most famous people in the world just not applying herself. Eilish has an incredible—maybe generational—gift for melody shared with almost no one in her pop peer group in this age of mealy melodies. This fact seems to be outside of the top 20 things anyone else cares about who is not a professional songwriter (“where were you?” asks Cynthia Erivo, to which Carl Perkins might reply, “the spirit world”).
So I’ll need to settle for Willow, who is also a gifted melodicist, with a few quirks of style I happen to like — lots of unexpected leaps up a fifth or sixth interval at the end of a phrase, giving her melodies a certain provocative queasiness — and has for the second album in a row possibly put out an AOTY stuffed to the brim with sharpie marker self-help lyrics, pairing some kind of artistic genius with the feeling that you’re being forced to point to variations of a smiley face on a medical chart. (May I make a modest request for Willow to at least learn some Portuguese or something?)
—May 23
In the past few years Willow has quietly become the most incredible pop artist that you are begging to hear in a language you don’t speak. But, much to my own surprise, I couldn’t care less about the dippy poetry and therapyspeak—the right syllables always seem to stick to the right melodies and assemble themselves into the right songs. She’s a genius.
—June 6, The Singles Jukebox