Ciao, Satan
Mix 44: Last Poets, lost FLO hits, Flying Lotus, ska(?) (Polish), funk show-offs, rancid roses, and lost cat -- woe's us.
Welcome to hell!
…Just kidding. Satan is the name of a lost cat (the full lyric: “Ciao, Satan…meow”). Specifically this cat:
My family recently acquired a new cat — our old cat passed away a few years ago. If you’ve followed me on the internet long enough, you might know our old cat as the one I would frequently wear as a hat in profile pictures. This new cat will abide being worn as a hat, but it’s not the same. He’s a good cat — a very plain and hardy sort of cat — and his name is Marvin. He also has a microchip.
As you can perhaps tell, I am very taken with the title track today — “Ciao Satan” by Flavien Berger. So much so that I’ll use this opportunity to shout out its recommender in the intro rather than in the song blurb. Thanks to Marcello Carlin, who also wrote what might be my favorite music criticism this year, a review of “Genesis” by RAYE. The subsequent JADE review is in the running for second-favorite.
You know what? Maybe RAYE is singing to all of us, to show us that there is indeed Another Way, a way which we perhaps always knew was there but allowed the blackly-holed sun of social media to blot out for a time. She's saying — “THIS IS WHAT I'M TALKIN’ ‘BOUT!” — that it’s so, so much better for the troubled mind to have a relatively small audience who will absolutely understand and empathise with what you're saying, than a huge, impassive audience determined to understand nothing and undermine everything that makes life worth owning. Humans are by nature social animals who like to be happy and together — not separated and converted into robotic receptacles by solvent morose mavericks who find people an inconvenience.
For those of you still looking for social animals who (for now) like to be happy and together, Bluesky is finally taking off in earnest, and it has not yet tilted into robotic receptacle territory. (No promises, though.) Come hang out with us if you’re so inclined.
And finally, we’re getting close to 1,000 tracks on the Big Mix. I have two more 2024 mixes planned for the year. In December, I’ll post some best-of material (writing, songs, stats) and follow that up with a 2024 stragglers and discoveries round-up before kicking off Year 3(!) of the newsletter. The price has not increased — tell your friends. Onward!
Previous 2024 mixes
MIX 44: CIAO, SATAN
1. The Last Poets, Tony Allen f. Egypt 80: Two Little Boys
The prolific Tony Allen’s final material continues to be released posthumously — this is from his last sessions with the remaining members of Last Poets, Abiodun Oyewole and Umar Bin Hassan, and Seun Anikulapo Kuti’s Egypt 80. It’s a rerecording of a track from Last Poets’ 1970 debut LP. The spoken word style is resilient — more “out of time” than “hasn’t aged” — so it doesn’t sound as much like a time capsule as you might think. Circumstances can’t help but make it seem a little elegiac. But I suppose elegy is fitting.
2. Snoop Dogg f. Dr. Dre, Jhené Aiko: Gorgeous
And speaking of “out of time”…not really a return to form for Snoop, but there’s a genuine party in here, even if it’s a bit forced. Jhené Aiko is parachuted in for the hook, like (appropriately?) Julia Roberts filming her Hook scenes in grumpy isolation. It’s a late Dre party beat in middle school dance mode, similar in approach, if not in euphoria, to his last truly great song, “Shit Popped Off” with T.I., where the boys and girls stand on different sides of the party until T.I. puts on “California Love.”1
3. Damian “Jr. Gong” Marley: Banner
It’s been about fifteen years since I’ve paid any attention to a Damian Marley song—on the great “As We Enter” with Nas. I don’t know how this compares to his patchy decade-plus of work since; a quick skim of 2017’s Stony Hill reveals a crop of songs more trad and at turns anodyne than I would have expected. So call it a comeback, I guess?
4. Flying Lotus f. Dawn Richard: Let Me Cook
There’s another album’s worth of Dawn Richard and Spencer Zahn moodlighting out, lovely but not my thing, so I need to look to her features for my periodic fix — on the great Kaytranada album and now on new Flying Lotus material. Flying Lotus is the star here, though, with a beat worthy of Sade.
5. FLO: Check
I suppose FLO are too reverential to really take off in their own right, but I hope they keep on putting out various shades of aughts jams whether anyone else listens or not. Their newest material on the AAA EP(ish?) has made it up to the end of that decade, especially on this one, where they channel Electrik Red.
6. Haruomi Hosono f. mei ehara: Jusho Futei Mushoku Tei Shunyu
An interesting remix/interpretation/tribute album to the Japanese pop titan (from Happy End and Yellow Magic Orchestra) Haruomi Hosono and his 1973 album Hosono House. This is an off-beat indie-pop take from mei ehara, who has featured on songs by Faye Webster and Cornelius in addition to her own work, which I need to check out. More info at Bandcamp.
7. Kali Mija, Atmos Blaq: Nobody Cares
To my ears this is the closest to pop Atmos Blaq has gotten with 3-step. It immediately became an inclusion on my Golden Beatology Playlist, which is a list of songs that I believe would have the best chance of being welcome new discoveries for contributors to the People’s Pop Polls. Tom Ewing recently announced there will be a Best of 2024 pop poll (more of a “music challenge”) in January on Bluesky. I will probably nominate at least one Atmos Blaq song.
8. DJ Arana f. MC Fabinho da Osk, MC PG, MC Tavinho: Automotivo Toma Karen X Só Tem um Mago
This is the second year in a row that DJ Arana has put out a kaleidoscopic baile funk sampler, this time providing a tour through the year’s funk norms with a bit less force than last year’s “ABCDário Da Guerra” but more of a sense of generosity, almost like he’s being patient with outsiders. It takes you by the hand — here, look at how it all works now: atmospheric synths, pretty melodies, ambiguous clave, annoying sine wave alarms. It doesn’t seem to have taken off, but I appreciate how many ideas it has, and how thoughtful it is about methodically shoving them all in your face.
9. Timmy Trumpet, Steve Aoki, 3rd Wall f. Luciano Pavarotti: Nessun Dorma
Is this the worst song I’ve heard all year? In one sense, yes: it is an affront to taste and to the senses (multiple — you can practically smell this thing, a pungent bouquet of roses spoiled by fungus). In another sense, though, this might be the most brazen does-what-it-says-on-the-tin track I’ve heard all year, a ruthlessly BOSH interpretation of Pavarotti that required three producers to make it as bracingly unholy as it wound up. If I had to put money on the special sauce, it would be Timmy Trumpet, who also managed to pull off a similar trick — “this is terrible, you HAVE to try it!” (yep, there’s taste, too!) — with Smash Mouth, on 2021’s “Camelot.”
10. World Brain: cAPTCHA
German bedroom-pop wiseacre has captured the annoyance of a CAPTCHA, but he has not really captured the horror of what it actually sounds like when you play the audio version of a CAPTCHA:
11. Azari: Blood
As A.I. vocals continue to proliferate at a decent clip far below the enshittification warp speed of search engines, I can’t help but feel a certain fondness for the fake-on-the-surface charm of well-constructed Vocaloid, especially when it goes carnivalesque.
12. Käärijä: Takavoltti
The 2023 Eurovision people’s champion, all right, and activated my kids’ sense of righteous anger over archaic institutions producing unjust results a full year before a major American election. This follow-up proves that “Cha Cha Cha” was no fluke, but that Käärijä probably is one.
13. Kelompok Penerbang Roket: Sesa(a)t
What is it with Indonesian pop and well-rendered pastiche? It seems to work for every genre — in this case mid-70s sludge-rock. How am I even going to research this phenomenon?
14. Warsaw Village Band, Bassałyki: Kalinowy mostek
Wasn’t sure where this song, a global fusion with a foundation of Polish folk, was heading but it settles into something closer to…what is that, ska? Rocksteady? Reminds me a bit of “Uptown Top Ranking”…
15. Kokoroko f. Azekel: Three Piece Suit
…Ha! It didn’t even occur to me that I put the new Kokoroko single after a song that vaguely reminded me of Althea and Donna, who were singing over “Three Piece Suit” by Trinity. This suit appears to be no relation — the song is inspired by the group’s grandparents emigrating to England from Nigeria and dressing for the success they wanted to hand down to their children. The arrangement is strictly business casual, with the singers and horn section vibing their way into a passable chorus.
16. Giungla: Something
17. Nieuwe Gezichten, L.A.J.: Zonder Met Jou
More international pastiche: two pitch-perfect indie rockers from Italy and Netherlands, respectively. The first sounds insular and bedroom-bound, and the second has grander festival aims.
18. Sylvia Vartan: La Maritza (Andréas Rework)
An aggressive neo-disco remix of an arch little Vartan song from ‘68. A lot of Vartan has been showing up in my playlists lately, not sure if this is an artifact of my ‘62 research or if there’s some milestone being celebrated (this remix is new).
19. Flavien Berger: Ciao Satan
I’m so wowed by how well the text of the lost cat flyer serves as a melancholy miniature in the intro that I hardly notice when things dissolve into a much larger, if still peculiar, trip-hop masterpiece.
20. Sam Gendel, Benny Bock: Everything Happens to Me
“Everything Happens To Me” was the first standard I learned when I made an ill-fated switch from classical to jazz piano in high school. My trouble with it was a sign that I wasn’t ready to iron out my gnarly classical piano neural pathways and give myself over to jazz arrangement and improvisation. This stripped-down sax arrangement is very clever if you’re into that sort of thing, with what sounds like a mix of multi-tracking, filters, and provocatively samey instrumentation providing an almost didactic diagram of how to make the song more interesting in a way I could never manage.
21. White Poppy: Paradise Gardens Theme Song
Blissed-out Canadian dream-pop that I wouldn’t have bet any money on having been reviewed in Pitchfork (though if you had told me it was reviewed there I would have correctly guessed they gave it a 7.5 and quietly tucked it away). This is from an album of outtakes that didn’t make that 2020 album, and I think I prefer them; this sort of music demands as little structure as possible. Better to merely putter around with pretty.
***
That’s it! Until next time, if you’re going to putter around, make it pretty.
—Dave Moore (the other one)
Title from Flavien Berger’s “Ciao Satan.”
Annoyingly, the superior 2009 version with just T.I.’s vocals don’t seem to be on YouTube, which only has the version that starts with a Dr. Dre verse. You can listen to it here, though: