Get out if you're not an icon
Mix 36: Paris Hilton: still rich; Lil Wayne: still good at rhyming; the 90s: alive with indie rock, kuduro, and Towa Tei; plus baile funk: sampling Ciara
Each week I skim through about 2,000 songs mostly from Spotify's company-curated New Music Friday playlists. Whenever I find 80 minutes worth of music I like, I make a CD-length mix and write a newsletter about it.
Paris Hilton appears on this mix! Which gives me a reason to remind everyone that the photo of her in a shirt that says “STOP BEING POOR” was Photoshopped. The shirt said “STOP BEING DESPERATE,” which I think we can all agree is much funnier.
I have no interest in getting back into the Paris Wars of twenty-ought-six, but I will say that it’s nice for enough time to have passed that she can just show up on Kim Petras’s song, rhyme “Teslas” with “necklace,” call herself an icon, and bounce.
Speaking of icons, this week wound up long on groove and short on lyrics, so you’ll have to settle for Lil Wayne rhyming the word “icon” 40 times in a minute flat, as promised last week. (Sometimes you hold a track back a week and the mix transition possibility opens itself up to you.)
I am still writing about Taylor Swift if you’re interested — so far I’m pleased with it as a series. Have a post brewing on the idea of the “imperial phase” in a post-streaming world, maybe something on Miley Cyrus as an inept first draft of Taylor Swift, and then probably a final post centered on the release of “Love Story” in September, 2008.
Mix 1 // Mix 2 // Mix 3 // Mix 4 // Mix 5 // Mix 6 // Mix 7 // Mix 8 // Mix 9 // Mix 10 // Mix 11 // Mix 12 // Mix 13 // Mix 14 // Mix 15 // Mix 16 // Mix 17 // Mix 18 // Mix 19 // Mix 20 // Mix 21 // Mix 22 // Mix 23 // Mix 24 // Mix 25 // Mix 26 // Mix 27 // Mix 28 // Mix 29 // Mix 30 // Mix 31 // Mix 32 // Mix 33 // Mix 34 // Mix 35
MIX 36: GET OUT IF YOU’RE NOT AN ICON
1. Bakar f. Summer Walker: Hell N Back
The Bakar album, which seems to have been in limbo for four years, came out officially this week. “Hell N Back” is a 2019 single and I only include it here because it was updated with a Summer Walker feature for the 2023 release and I think the song works better as a duet. Bakar’s conversational, very British singing style gets a little grating without some relief.
2. Take Van: Can’t Get Over Me
Florida singer makes good on the post-PinkPantheress landscape — we need more mid-tier versions of this sound, especially since PinkPantheress herself doesn’t seem sustainable (and works best in miniature — sometimes you need to water a sound down and stretch it out to sustain longevity, which is probably why hyperpop never really had an exit strategy).
3. Kim Petras f. Paris Hilton: All She Wants
Amazing that the second (and a half?) Kim Petras song I like is more or less identical in its content to the first one — “I want it! Give it to me!” — but unlike “I Don’t Want It At All,” this one is so desiccated-sounding it sounds less like satire and more like self-parody. Does what it needs to do, though, and provides the proper backdrop for Paris Hilton strictly in cameo mode, though her appearance does make me hear the “dah dah dah” hook as an homage to “Nothing In This World.”
4. Nas f. Lil Wayne: Never Die
This is the one where Lil Wayne rhymes “icon” forty times. A lot of Wayne’s guest verses have been great this year (even his verse on will.i.am’s Formula 1 song was pretty good), even though the two solo tracks I’ve heard (“Kant Nobody” and “Kat Food”) have been much less good. Oh yeah, Nas also appears on this one, I guess he has a new album out.
5. Mykki Blanco: Magic On My Back
Not sure what happened to Mykki Blanco since putting out the song that I adored and made the cat I was fostering at the time go insane every time it came on (“Haze.Boogie.Life”) but this is the first time anything has captured my attention since — and it’s an odd one, a 70s rock pastiche.
6. Tsunami: Old City [1997]
Heard this in my blindfold taste test and thought to myself “oh wow, none of these new indie bands trying to capture the mid-90s zeitgeist sound anything like this, who finally got it right??” only to see it’s a Numero Group rerelease of Virginia indie group Tsunami from 1997. Hey, new indie bands — try to sound more like this!
7. Grrrl Gang: Cool Girl
Have heard a few songs from Grrrl Gang and this is the only one with ambitions modest enough and execution disciplined enough to make the sound really work, and then only for approximately one minute before they just start chanting for the remaining 45 seconds.
8. 野口文: bottoVIII
Glitchy Japanese bedroom pop from a conceptual song suite that, judging from the promotional preview video, was put together with sticks and twine in a home studio (reminds me of videos of Billie Eilish and FINNEAS at work). Other than that I didn’t learn much. Good album, though.
9. Karen y Los Remedios: Flama Eterna
Mexican pop that I suppose I could describe as Golden Beat-core, just the right mix of art-pop, pop-pop, and pretty-sounding lyrics not in English, that makes you feel like you’ve stumbled on a hidden gem. (Which you probably have.)
10. Damaso, Mc Madimbu, & DJ TELL FERNANDES: Saliente Eletrofunk
The violin sample was driving me crazy, I knew it very well and would have sworn it was Vivaldi but then thought it must be a soundalike from a commercial I saw a million times in the 90s. Turns out it was Ciara’s “Like a Boy”! Anyway, automatic inclusion, good work, fellas.
11. Maureen: Pum Fat
French dancehall artist, best as I can tell from Martinique, “pum fat” as in “boom clap.”
12. Sarz f. Crayon & Skrillex: Yo Fam!
Another notch for Skrillex’s Good Taste belt in 2023, here riding Naija pop without getting in the way. Now, what he did to get his name in the mix I have no idea, but even the amapiano donks are all in the right places, so congratulations to Skrillex’s skill and/or hands-off savvy and silent blessing here.
13. aisu: ALO?
Anatolian weirdo rap, still no idea why the New Music Friday Turkey list is so well-curated this year but I’m not complaining, maybe in my top 5 Turkish tracks I’ve heard this year through this exercise.
14. TOWA TEI: FRESH!
Dove into Towa Tei’s discography during the People’s Pop 1994 tournament with new-to-me “BATUCADA,” and this song from his new album — which cheesily promises “the in sound!” — has a foot firmly in bachelor pad from the mid-90s.
15. KABEAUSHÉ: GO WITH GUT
One of two Nyege Nyege Tapes (or adjacent — this is on Hakuna Kulala) artists on the mix this week, neither of which I’d have guessed were on the label. Kabeaushé’s falsetto might sound at home with slightly off-kiter soul of the mid-00s with artists like Van Hunt, but with the radical cut-n-paste of current pop trends swirling behind.
16. Bontan: Get Down
London DJ leans in to tropicalia just hip enough to avoid sounding like…well, Towa Tei. Not sure if that’s a mark against the song or a point in its favor.
17. DJ Znobia: Cuba em Angola [c. 1999-2005]
The other surprising Nyege Nyege Tapes release, a compilation of Angolan artist DJ Znobia’s 90s and 00s kuduro work. Apparently I can just pick out good kuduro music now on sound alone? Love developing new “other skills” for my CV. (But Dave, you might say, why don’t you just, like, read the Guardian occasionally? Because I’m busy doing this!) Learned in researching this blurb that Znobia was slated to produce a track on Kala but got in a car accident when MIA arrived, so she settled for recording “World Town” in Liberia instead. Has anyone written a good book about Kala yet or have we thrown the baby out with the bathwater on that score?
18. Nandele: Muatide
Mozambique DJ who gets a nasty synth tone going at the halfway point that’s nice and bracing like cold water in the face. Pulled several tracks this week, including this one, from the Pan African Music Spotify list, would love to know more about who’s curating that one as this song and artist have basically zero plays on Spotify.
19. HAAi: ZiGGY
A track from London DJ HAAi’s DJ-Kicks mix due out in November. Don’t know anything about HAAi, but here’s her artist statement via MixMag:
"I’m so proud to present my DJ-Kicks filled with exclusive tracks from some of my favourite artists from around the globe," HAAi says on the release. "The theme of the mix is ‘Always Ascending’ with each artist interpreting this brief individually. From I. JORDAN’s 'Life On The Wing' to The Blessed Madonna’s 'Strong'. The mix was made to give the listener the feeling of constantly ascending to collective euphoria."
Couldn’t have said it better myself! (But only because I’m terrible at describing instrumental dance music.)
20. mouse on the keys: Pointillism04
Japanese band calls themselves post-hardcore (electronic variety) but here there’s more of a cyclical acoustic click-n-clack of techno filtered through someone getting a PhD in musical composition (compliment). Reminds me a bit of Aphex Twin’s experiment with computer-controlled acoustic instruments, memorably titled Computer Controlled Acoustic Instruments pt2.
21. Daniel Ögren: Annalena [2019]
This song from a contributor to Dina Ögon, featured back on Mix 4, has too much mid-90s lo-fi bachelor pad charm not to include it on a mix with Towa Tei, even though it turns out it was released in 2019.
22. Kosmos: Martwa natura z balonikiem
Wow, do I really have time for ten minutes of Polish psych-jazz this week? I do! Excellent.
***
That’s it! Until next time, don’t Photoshop offensive slogans on celebrities’ shirts just because “it seems plausible that they would have done that.” It’s important for seemingly believable things to actually be true!
—Dave Moore (the other one)
Title from Kim Petras f. Paris Hilton’s “All She Wants.”