Go ask to a cloud, I dunno
Mix 40: Music video event pop, nepo babies who can't rap (yet), the Veronicas' eternal recurrence, and baile funk finds more beauty and weirdness
Each week I skim through about 2,500 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.
We’re winding down, folks — I have started to get my first signs of Christmas music in the big playlist. It’s feeling more like a slog, too, but there are gems as usual, even if my stamina for blurb-writing has gone from “low” to “no.”
At the same time I’m curious about other methods of finding new music each week, especially as my beloved People’s Pop polls fade out. Frank Kogan recently reminded me of Radio Garden, where you can scan online radio stations from around the world, a site I learned about in 2016 but didn’t use much.
There’s still something about this particular dumpster-diving method that appeals to me—the regular ritual of it, the absurd impossibility of giving everything a fair shake and hence an outsized role for randomness and serendipity—even as Spotify figures out how to pay artists even less money and the reasons to diversify seem as obvious as they do in all other eroding online spaces.
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MIX 40: GO ASK TO A CLOUD, I DUNNO
1. Jamila Woods f. Saba: Practice
The first music video in a very long time that sold me on a song — I relented to Jamila Woods’s charms earlier in the year, too, but this song, a riff on the Allen Iverson quote, was strictly an “event” experience, needed the (NSFW) visuals to clue me in to the song’s charm.
2. Flo Milli: BCG
“X-rated, ain’t shit PG ‘bout me,” she says, but this is in fact the closest to PG she’s ever gotten as far as I can tell, and it’s real sellout stuff — I’m surprised the video isn’t intercut with scenes from a raunchy teen comedy (PG-13 by a nose). And it’s my favorite thing she’s done this year!
3. The Veronicas: Perfect
The Veronicas are very good at being “back…BACK!” without really coming back, and this is the closest to old-school “back” they’ve gotten in some time, the inflatable guitar riffs missing that Max Martin juice, but still hitting their marks.
4. Missing Persons: Ice Blue Eyes
The first of two songs I figured were archival — turns out the second one is, but this one is the Missing Persons “comeback” single (true to how these things go, it turns out they’ve been coming back in fits and starts since 2014), from a new wave band I’ve heard of but know little about: the brainchild of a few Zappa collaborators, including Warren Cuccurullo, a name anyone who went through a heavy enough Zappa phase immediately sings in their head the way they sing it in “Catholic Girls.” Lead singer Dale Bozzio had a solo stint on Paisley Park Records, which led me to her minor dance chart hit “Simon Simon.”
5. Mande Dahl: Ooh, I Don’t Feel Nothin’ [1979]
This is the Numero Group archival one, a very Lou Reed-y post-punk single from a minor punk scene fixture, with what seems like a deliberate homage to “Oh! Sweet Nuthin.” I didn’t know anything about Mande Dahl’s career until finding her website, which is so exhaustive that I now believe I know literally everything there is to know about it. It’s a good time capsule for some early 80s public access TV experimentation.
6. Ana Frango Elétrico: Electric Fish
I found a different Ana Frango Elétrico song in the Spotify pull this week, but checked out the album to see if there was anything else I liked. I settled on the opener, “Electric Fish,” only to discover the next day that it had been nominated for the People’s Pop World Cup of Animal Songs, possibly the most kismet Other Dave/People’s Pop crossover yet.
7. Emma Donovan: Blak Nation
Indigenous Australian soul artist I didn’t know, subject for future research. She claims in an interview that she’s working on a country album for 2024, could be good.
8. Balming Tiger: Moving Forward
Korean, indie, funk-leaning. They call themselves a “multi-national alternative K-pop group,” but the first Google result you get in People Also Ask is: “Is Balming Tiger a K-pop?” [sic].
9. Floating Points: Problems
Always forget this guy can do dance music, as he’s usually fooling around in the jazz/experimental pond to build his cred instead of putting out workmanlike house bangers. I hope he doesn’t think this sort of stuff is beneath him — I mean, what could be more pandering than a Pharoah Sanders residency?
10. Paloma Mami: COPY+PASTE
Chilean-American artist coaxes beauty out of chipmunk vocals, automatic inclusion.
11. La Pangola & Aunty Rayzor: Bobo
Another winner from AUNTY RAZOR, no idea where it comes from but it’s not on her new album. Don’t know the label, Blanc Manioc, should probably check it out.
12. El Micha, Sam Diem, & Lenox: Descontrol
Really need to focus on countries and regions that Spotify has blind spots for — from what I can tell, this might be the first Cuban song on my mixes all year.
13. MJ Nebreda & La Venek: Belmont y el Gloss
Spanish language quasi-banger from a Miami artist. Pitchfork calls the mixtape this comes from “shamelessly horny.”
14. Tropa do Bruxo f. DJ Ws da Ingrejinha: Baile do Bruxo
Love it when baile funk stays weird but also gets pretty — the warped Enya (by way of Fugees?) sample works really well here. First of two LokpoLokpo baile funk tips based in Belo Horizonte, home to DJ Ws da Igrejinha and DJ Wesley Gonzaga (who appears later).
15. Menudo: Tú y Yo
Not sure what incarnation of Menudo this early-Beiber-sounding ensemble is — it’s billed as a reboot; I think there must be at least a couple other versions, right? So call it the Tom Holland, which sort of works: a little hipper than the others and has its own charm, nothing groundbreaking, but you have the sense it won’t go too far off the rails.
16. Jockstrap & Taylor Skye: Good Girl
Jockstrap might be the band I like the most while loathing their band name, and now they’ve gone and done an electro collab that I might like even more.
17. Adonis: My Man Freestyle
I thought it would be hilarious if Drake’s 6-year-old son ended up on my mixes before Drake did, and then I was pleasantly surprised to find that they really let Drake’s son sound like an actual six-year-old freestyling, activating my deep love of weirdo youth media experiments while still being able amuse myself with a complete Drake shut-out in a year when I’ve probably been exposed to at least 100 Drake songs.
18. เก่ง ธชย "ทุย (TUI)" [Keng Tachaya: Tui]
Thai television personality hits the animal noises pretty hard — gotta represent cluck-pop wherever I find it.
19. Qarpa: Kerch
Ukrainian hard rock that flirts with metal in the chorus settles closer to Rage Against the Machine. Seems like they have plenty to be raging against over there.
20. GG Magree & LEVEL UP: Ruin U
An odd one, starts within the Avril Lavigne tradition that Avril herself most wanted to cultivate (not the Matrix lilt-pop and pop-punk, but her pop-metal guitar sound, courtesy Clif Magness) before swerving hard into an unfashionable EDM drop.
21. DJ Wesley Gonzaga f. Mc Magrinho: Medley Antidepressivo
The second Belo Horizonte representative on the mix, from my top baile funk artist of 2021, DJ Wesley Gonzaga, here finding new avenues for discordance after getting me to dance to tones you could use to torture people — playing Pitbull out of tune with sci-fi alien synths, making a monstrous clatter. Love it.
22. Shuta Hasunuma f. Aragaki Mutsumi: Fairlight Bright
A collaboration between two Japanese experimental electronic artists, not sure what the contributor balance is (Mutsumi has a featured credit). Could have gone with something else here since I have no intention of learning much more about it, BUT it provides an indirect way to plug my friend Ian Power’s piece “Ava Maria: Variations on a Theme by Giacinto Scelsi” with pianist Anne Rainwater, which figures out how many Jenga blocks you can pull from the “Ave Maria” theme (no, the other one), and then pile ‘em all back on top — along with a bunch of extras from an additional box, and maybe a few pieces from the wrong game, too — without the whole thing falling over. I’m reminded of the creatures in Annihilation, organic matter falling away and re-amassing in heaping, arbitrary clumps until you have only a dim sense of what the original animal template might have been. There is also purportedly a “bizarre ritual where the pianist must perform an impossible task and be held musically accountable for their mistakes,” but to me that’s not bizarre, in fact it sounds like a decent job description of writing about music.
***
Until next time, I hope you continue to do impossible things with at least some sense of accountability for your inevitable mistakes.
—Dave Moore (the other one)
Title from Adonis’s “My Man Freestyle.”