I have a head on my neck

Mix 32: Moth girl returns, Poppy regresses, Myriam Fares and Open Mike Eagle stay about the same, and Taylor Swift is someone's Tim McGraw

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.

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Alana Springsteen emcees Taylor Swift’s retirement party

Minimum of up-front chat this week as it took longer than usual to get this thing together and I am out of thoughts! Here, I’ll copy and paste something from a recent email about baile funk for you to ponder, from a time when my brain was working properly.

(There’s no baile funk this week but if you are curious about the c. 100-and-counting amapiano and baile funk tracks I haven’t included on these mixes, check them out in my funk/amapiano holdover playlist.)

I'm sure there must be a history of singing in Brazil that explains why there seems to be a widespread phenomenon that I'm just going to go ahead and clumsily call "melody literacy" in Brazil that rappers in the US never really gained en masse, though they made some progress first with Autotune in the late 00s and then with modal rap in the mid 10s. 

As far as I can tell, even the most seemingly tin-eared Brazilian rapper has an innate sense of where their voice needs to go to capture some of the melody of the beat they're rapping on, giving everything a potential melodicism that lends itself to areas of expression -- sweetness, melancholy, playfulness, though maybe not anger so much? -- that rappers can usually only get to with words and tone. For US rappers, if you have middling words and are one-note in your emotional performance or rapping style, there's not much room for you to do anything else. (It's very hard for Rick Ross to sound vulnerable or playful or doleful.) But in Brazil the singing of the melody itself regardless of the words you use will do some of the heavy lifting for you. 

Lil Wayne started to figure this out after 2006 and before the modal rap craze, with a heavy assist from Autotune, but I don't think it opened vistas of feeling to him half as much as all the other wild stuff he can just do with his voice without Autotune, especially during that mid-00s mixtape period. (That is, he could already make his voice hit the full spectrum of feeling without a melody attached.) 

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: I HAVE A HEAD ON MY NECK

1. LIA LIA: Am I Human?

There are several artists on this week’s mix who have appeared before this year — this is the second appearance from moth girl herself, LIA LIA, with a stronger single than her last one, though it is her second consecutive single with a question that can be answered by her breakthrough single. (“Am I Human? No: I AM A MOTH!!”)

2. Ice Spice: Deli

Second appearance from Ice Spice, a belated nod for “Deli,” which I’ve probably heard every week since her “extended EP” (don’t call it an album for some reason!) was released a few months ago. Not sure why it finally clicked this week—maybe because I needed a few more songs to round out the mix.

3. Poppy: Knockoff

First Poppy of the year but I will always make time for Poppy, even as she regresses all the way back to her first wave of mainstream pop credulity. My favorite Poppy phase is low-key grunge—especially her 2021 album, Flux.

4. Osees: Stunner

I had to go to Wikipedia to familiarize myself with the journey of Thee Oh Sees over the years. Freak folk in the mid-aughts, undifferentiated indie in the early 10s, and apparently, unbeknownst to me (don’t think I’ve heard them since…2012-ish?) have been doing genre exercises (remixes! Hardcore!) for the past few years. This one’s got Cars keybs, so…power-pop? (Or maybe they’re back to undifferentiated indie.)

5. Gacharic Spin: カチカチ山

6. Limited Express (has Gone?): BET ON ME

7. illiomote: BABY END

Three noisy tracks from Japan, two of them from return artists — Limited Express (has Gone?) was on Mix 28 and illiomote was on Mix 15. Gacharic Spin was a J-rock recommendation from jel, who also supplied an accurate response to a social media prompt to name my favorite song I’ve never heard. He knocked it out of the park with…

8. Cryalot: Hell Is Here (Melt-Banana Remix)

This remix of a track from 2022 by Cryalot, a post-Poppy pop weirdo given an impressive Sleigh Bells-esque makeover by Melt-Banana.

9. Dadifox f. Picoeisy, V3, Kieuny, and Celma Skill: É CÃO

Not to be confused with DJ Danifox, a different Portuguese DJ from the seemingly all-killer no-filler Príncipe label, though I could see how you could confuse them, as Dadifox also has at least some presence in or near Príncipe (via inclusion on a 2016 DJ compilation). Curious how far this style goes back, as I had no inkling of it in 2016 when that compilation was released, though according to an overview in Pitchfork from 2020 (around the time I started being aware of some of these artists) it has origins in the early ‘10s.

10. Fior 2 Bior & Didi B: On se met bien

C’ôte D’Ivoire team-up for a crackerjack coupé-decalé track.

11. Benny Adam f. NAYRA: Tit’souite

Moroccan-born and Montreal-based artist Benny Adam seems pan-African in his approach here, sounds great coming after the C’ôte D’Ivoire track.

12. Holy Hive f. The Shacks: Love It Is Not Love

Brooklyn band sounds stuck halfway between Daptone pastiche and twee-leaning indie shambles but I like the uncanny valley effect, as it’s a bit less hardened than if it alighted firmly on either of those two points. The band sounds like they’re not sure if they want to sound competent or not, which at its best can occasionally get you a Galaxie 500.

13. Vumbi Dekula: Maamajacy

Was certain this was an archival rerelease but it’s a 2023 release from a guitarist who spent the 80s and 90s playing with various Tanzanian bands and is now based in Sweden. More info on Bandcamp.

14. Nana Benz du Togo: Tite

Togo group just shy of too tasteful for my (tasteless?) tastes, but they smuggle in a crappy enough keyboard to give it the extra texture I needed. The KEXP live version above is better in some respects, but they unwisely chose a less annoying keyboard setting on their KORG, so check out the Spotify version if you can.

15. Myriam Fares: Tezalelha

Myriam Fares has the distinction of looking enough like my wife that our kid saw her on TV at a Middle Eastern restaurant when he was a toddler and thought mommy was in a music video. This means I’ve kept up with her for nearly ten years and am rarely disappointed.

16. Julio Bashmore: Bubblin

Shortlisted one of Julio Bashmore’s new singles for a few weeks before seeking out the other stuff he released this year and coming across this one, which Philip Sherburne singled out as a potential single of the summer over at Pitchfork and aptly describes as a cross between early Daft Punk and UK garage.

17. PRICE f. T-Pain: Mansa Musa

18. Open Mike Eagle f. Young Zee: BET’s rap city

Two alt-ish rap tracks, one with a characteristically strong but low-key T-Pain hook on a track by a rapper who I like but have never heard of, and the other from the new Open Mike Eagle album.

19. Vuma Levin: Concertina

South African jazz guitarist I’d longlisted on my 2023 albums list and promptly forgotten about, rediscovered on one of my periodic wades through those albums. Picked this one as it was the shortest representative track, and quite pretty.

20. Fievel Is Glauque: I’m Scanning Things I Can’t See

Fusion-y hipster group whose late 2022 album I featured on my first mix of the year.

21. Lê Ngọc Châu Anh x Andiez: bản tình ca không trọn vẹn

A Vietnamese song with Billie Eilish-esque bones but without that telltale killer melody to drive it home. Still good enough for inclusion, though, as the melody’s not bad, just doesn’t knock it out of the park.

22. Alana Springsteen: taylor did

Wanna feel old? Taylor Swift is Alana Springsteen’s Tim McGraw! I actually have a lot to say about this song but the words aren’t coming and I’ve got a totally arbitrary deadline. In the meantime, you can reflect on the absurdity of Taylor Swift’s career being what Taylor Swift’s career turned out to be by watching this mash-up of almost every song she’s ever released. Time for her to retire?

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I hope that you, too, someday become someone’s Tim McGraw!

—Dave Moore (the other one)

Title from LIA LIA’s “Am I Human?”