I'm really not as happy as I seem
Mix 36: A.I. podcaster dust jacket blurbs, girls with problems, TVOTR, yet another goose band, and an extended dork dance party
I had the odd experience this week of creating an A.I. podcast about my previous newsletter. I’ve been cautious about messing around with any of this stuff given what I understand about the massive energy needed to fuel what currently seems at most a novelty and at worst an active enshittifier. I would say the “podcast your prose” tool’s primary value is as exposure therapy for fear of overhearing strangers talking about you on bad podcasts (this has happened to me!), and it does more or less sound like a bad podcast.
If you’d like to sensibly avoid listening to more than a few seconds of it, here’s what my “podcasters” said about last week’s newsletter:
Podcaster A: OK, we’re ready to dive in. This time, we’re all about global pop.
Podcaster B: Sounds fun!
A: We’re going through music blogger Other Dave Moore’s playlist, from September 12, 2024.
B: OK!
A: It’s called, get this, “Mix 35: But At Least I Would Have Existed.”
B: Wow…that’s, uh, that’s a title.
A: Right. Makes you think of it, doesn’t it?
B: Definitely. (Laughs) Not your average playlist name.
A: Exactly. And that’s what I like about Other Dave. He’s always—and, yeah, that’s how he writes it, with the quotes, like it’s his brand.
…
A: What’s cool is that Other Dave is curating this experience. Y’know.
B: It’s not just an algorithm spitting out similar sounds.
A: Right, it’s deliberate. Like a glimpse into how people find new music these days.
B: With so much out there, you need a guide sometimes.
A: Totally. And he starts strong, with Barbara Pravi’s “Exist-er” [sic]. Even the name, right?
B: “Exister”…yeah I can see that being a whole vibe.
A: And Other Dave describes it as “melodramatic chanteuse electro existentialism.”
B: OK, now that’s a mouthful.
A: He even compares it to Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida.”
B: Really! Huh. I can kind of hear it, I guess. Big sound, for sure.
A: Yeah but “Exister” has that French chanson thing going on.
B: True — that melancholy melody, the poetic lyrics. It’s different.
A: Exactly. And that emotional depth seems to be what grabs Other Dave.
It devolves into a series of predictive text misfires after that. Toward the end they conclude with:
B: It’s like he’s saying there’s so much to discover, but don’t overthink it.
A: Yeah, yeah. Don’t get lost in the details. And speaking of which, you know how he ends his blog post?
B: Let me guess — with some cryptic statement. He seems to like those.
A: He does.
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.”
Previous 2024 mixes
MIX 36: I’M REALLY NOT AS HAPPY AS I SEEM
1. Amy Allen: Girl with a Problem
Decided to check out the brain trust behind Sabrina Carpenter’s new album, by which I mean co-writer Amy Allen’s solo album, half of which showed up in my playlist pull. The comparison to Kara DioGuardi’s role in confessional teenpop in the mid-00s seems obvious, but Allen isn’t as sharp of a writer solo as DioGuardi is. Although I like this song better than anything off of Short ‘n’ Sweet, it’s because the song feels alive as performed by Allen even though the lyrics on the page aren’t particularly inspired. I wouldn’t say I can hear the link between solo and for-hire work—collaboration brings something new out in her. Maybe it’s more like Adam Schlesinger, who often thrived in the creative constraints of trying not to sound like himself. My favorite Kara DioGuardi songs tend to be the most Kara DioGuardi songs, whereas with Schlesinger I always liked him best when he was trying to fit into some impossible box.
2. Halsey: Ego
Al Shipley recently went viral when Halsey retweeted this:
In his response he mentioned that her 2022 album If I Can't Have Love, I Want Power is his #1 of the decade so far. Not sure why I never clicked with it—on paper it is very much my sort of thing, but 2022 wasn’t a good year for my charitable listening muscles. (The album’s much better than I remember.) Now she’s pandering to me more directly with the sort of Avril Lavigne pastiche that Pale Waves perfected back in 2021. Halsey is better off being actively imperfect, though, not even attempting the alchemy that Pale Waves pulled off, and thus getting closer to Avril’s warts-and-all charm.
3. Coca Puma: Quasi a casa
A quick palate cleanser before the extended dorky dance party. This is from the soundtrack to an Italian film about a young woman who meets her pop idol, but the song itself isn’t pop idol stuff, sounds more like the sunny opener that sets our protagonist into motion on whatever forms of transportation are included in the travel montage, presumably pre-disillusionment.
4. Sofi Tukker f. Kah-Lo: Woof
Dork dance party pt. 1: Sofi Tukker continues to get closer to mix inclusion the more they sound like a Target commercial.
5. GOOSE: Down Below
Dork dance party pt. 2: I have absolutely no idea where this GOOSE stands in the gaggle of geese I have showcased over the last two years (Gooooose, Goofy Geese, Geese). They are not the Goose that has a jam band circuit cult following; they are instead the all-caps GOOSE from Belgium, electronic-ish dance-ish band that’s put out some material on !K7.
6. Fcukers: Bon Bon
Dork dance party pt. 3: Sell-out indie dance band called “rich kid east coast liberal arts school bullshit” over on Reddit for exaggerating a claim about opening for Speedy Ortiz. (From what I understand of the controversy, it’s in the same way that I can claim to have opened for Blues Traveler.) Indie sleazy, certainly…but is it Sleaze?
7. Gavin Turek: Disco Boots
Dork dance party pt. 4: Disco pastiche so wafer-thin that I’d swear it was from the mid-aughts (a lot of that going around this week, welcome back Rex the Dog!), or at least that Gavin Turek was from Norway rather than L.A.
8. Original: Sen Qaidan Bilasan (How Do You Know) [1982]
Dork dance party pt. 5: An arguably dorky but nonetheless dance-y inclusion from an Uzbek band featured on a new compilation of early 80s dance and disco from former SSRs and Central Asia: Synthesizing the Silk Roads: Uzbek Disco, Tajik Folktronica, Uyghur Rock & Tatar Jazz from 1980s Soviet Central Asia. More info at Bandcamp.
9. Baba Zula: Arsız Saksağan
Transitioning out of the dork disco suite with a new single from a Turkish psych band that sounds like it could have been released any time in their c. 30-year career, or c. 30 years before that.
10. Şatellites: Zülüf Dökülmüs Yüze
More psych from a Turkish artist based in Tel Aviv whom I’ve featured before (under the name Eje Eje).
11. Góp Thong Thả: Nốt Hôm Nay
Rollicking, if a bit cloying, Vietnamese country-tinged-rock trifle that yielded very little in the way of meaningful background.
12. Rex the Dog: Laika
Had to check to see how long Kompakt has been a relevant player in dance music in the two decades since I was actively paying attention to it, especially since the usual suspects I’ve long been aware of, and who are featured on their Kompakt: Total 24 compilation — Rex the Dog, Michael Mayer, Jürgen Paape — all have material on it that sounds like it could have been shelved 20 years ago. Wouldn’t have guessed they’ve done this every damn year, but clearly it’s not my scene.
13. che: It’s My Party and I’ll Die if I Want To
This certainly does not sound 20 years old, but it does sound quaint compared to Playboi Carti in 2020, which I remarked would have sounded very out of place 20 years prior in my review of “@ MEH” by Playboi Carti over at the Singles Jukebox:
What would someone have thought of this song showing up on Napster in 2000? In that sense it is “futuristic,” I guess, how no one in 2000 would have had any idea what the hell this was or who it was for. It reminds you that this is the future, the one we couldn’t have imagined. This song would have made Kid A sound like Shania Twain. (Shania Twain sounds weird now. It’s so much! Remember when you could just do that? Be Shania Twain?)
14. BABii: Scarface
British easy listening hyperpop with producer Iglooghost in the credits, which is what I’m ascribing to it working as well as it does.
15. The Dahlia: Leather No Shoes
Bit of a whiplash transition to some ska-inflected Japanese indie rock. A good time will be had by some.
16. Sløtface: I Used to Be a Piece of Shit
Gave this a much more sympathetic listen with the I Think You Should Leave reference, which did help, but it mostly won me over because it’s not afraid to sound a like the Dollyrots.
17. Royel Otis: Adored
One of those indie-pop bands where I regularly pull sogs aside for consideration before they get lost in the limbo of [6.5]. This one just barely tipped the scales to [7] and sounded good in sequence. Congrats!
18. TV on the Radio: Final Fantasy [2004]
I thought Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes was a disappointment coming off of the Young Liars EP, which remains the only TVOTR album I’ve ever liked (or owned). I don’t think the band has ever sounded better than they did in 2003; there was a sort of dullness to the production in 2004 that was most obvious in the version of “Staring at the Sun” included on the album. This one sounds much more like something that didn’t make the cut for the EP, which might literally be the case — it’s an early version of a song that wound up on the album, “Bomb Yourself.”
19. Lola Parda: Tu bebotear
Lovely little blues-rocker from Argentina.
20. Caldera: Rabun
Lovely little bossa from Indonesia.
21. The The: I Want to Wake Up with You
The The is a band that has long had my number but doesn’t call as regularly as they seem like they should. “Lonely Planet.” scored a coveted spot on the mix I made for my first wedding anniversary, as close to a personal pop pantheon as I get, but the rest of their work is hit and miss for me. Was skeptical of a new album after almost a quarter century, but as far as I can tell they haven’t changed their sound an iota, which means the odds were good I’d find at least something that moved me a little, and this was the winner.
***
That’s it! Until next time, don’t generate A.I. podcasts about yourself to counter your idiosyncratic phobias without the guidance of a mental health professional.
—Dave Moore (the other one)
Title from Halsey’s “Ego”