I’ve got a nosebleed now
Mix 43: Preparing for the improbable, fighting bullies without lashing in, plus Mexico's Poppy, amapiano salsa, and a quick V-pop skim.
Well, look, I wrote a very lengthy intro over the weekend, and then deleted it all in a nauseated fit of pique sometime late Tuesday night. It was a set of “good, bad, and ugly” observations that I thought would hold up regardless of what happened. But I really wanted the “good” to happen and clearly it didn’t come to pass.
As for the bad, I remember reading the Ida B. Wells biography by Paula J. Giddings, Ida: A Sword Among Lions, early in the first Trump administration and appreciating Giddings’s ability to convey a visceral sense of being stuck in a dangerous political wilderness. The book captures a fatalistic period of cascading reaction after Reconstruction with claw-backs of burgeoning rights and hideous violence. The Cleveland-Harrison-Cleveland stretch in particular is something I haven’t stopped thinking about since I read it in 2017: there were sickening historical echoes even then.
“Ugly,” meanwhile, isn’t supposed to mean “worse than bad.” It’s just ugly. I try to remind myself when I’m reading political media that most of these writers aren’t actually working with much more actionable knowledge than I have when it comes to their predictions and pronouncements. And I’m just some guy. We often just don’t really know what’s going to happen. If you’re a dispositional optimist, you carry some faith that occasionally the thing you couldn’t have predicted will work to your benefit. And, as J-pop star ano reminds us this week, you also have to be prepared for that moment, whenever it comes. (Also, have an ice pack handy.)
Previous 2024 mixes
MIX 43: I’VE GOT A NOSEBLEED NOW
1. ano: 許婚っきゅん
Kicking things off with a jolt of joy.
This is not only the music video of the year (be sure to watch it even if you don’t like the music!) — it is also almost exactly what I had in mind eleven years ago when I got weirdly obsessed with a schlubby indie song called “Shake It Off” by a group called the Spinto Band and was convinced that they needed to make a one-take video where they beat a bunch of random world records while nonchalantly lip-syncing the song. (I mentioned it in my eventual review of the other “Shake It Off” a year later.) I have watched and re-watched the first minute of this video about a dozen times, but I don’t want to spoil any of it for you so will relegate my thoughts to a footnote.1 When you’re done, there’s a 30-minute behind the scenes video of how they pulled it off.
Lucky for me, the song (the theme song for the new anime adaptation of manga Ranma 1/2) is great, too. It also tickles me that ano has a big viral video in the same year that noa put out her decidedly scrappier viral video. (I am now much more confident that noa is not ano than I was a year ago!) It’s really something special. Can’t wait to show it to my kids.
2. Bruses: I’m So Happy
I think the diffusion of hyperpop internationally has not only preserved what was always best about hyperpop — faster tempos, chipmunk voices, the counterintuitively humanizing quality of pushing Autotune to its breaking point—it has also provided a bit of a shot in the arm to every genre it rubs up against, in this case the bits of reggaeton that come through in what I can only describe as Mexico’s Poppy.
3. Alice Longyu Gao: Little Piggy
[A few content warnings: strobe in the video and eating disorder content in the lyrics]
A horrifying tale of suffering the abuse of bullies and lashing in instead of lashing out, but the song lashes out, not just in telling the story, but in making the insult boomerang back onto its source—you can see them all transforming into little piggies, trapped on the twisted little Pleasure Island Alice Longyu Gao built.
4. Imogen Heap: What Have You Done to Me?
A dense, arresting, and I think not entirely successful Imogen Heap epic that might have sounded even busier by paring things down a little more. It sounds like she tried to build the whole army on a massive set rather than suggest it in the edit.
5. Addison Rae: Aquamarine
Addison Rae and Ava Max are my two current A-pop faves, for basically opposite reasons: Ava Max is the, er, maximalist, pushing beyond cringe into cosmic shamelessness territory. Addison Rae is the inverse (in approach, not in shamelessness), not so much minimalist as the other pole: recessive maximalism. It’s bold, not only in who she’s stealing from, but in daring you to care about it. She refuses to sit on her chair properly. She smokes two cigarettes at once. This is the sort of proclamatory disaffection that in previous pop eras would have been a statement, if usually an ironic one. But for Rae it’s just a costume, and she doesn’t wear it in a costume-y way; it’s more like she decided that part of the bundle she bought from Spirit of Halloween would also make for a decent top year-round.
6. Mari Kraimbrery: Без обработки
Has been exceedingly difficult for me to keep up with Russian pop for the past year or two as a lot of it has been deprioritized, or blocked outright, from streaming sites—Spotify shut down in Russia in 2022. Mari Kraimbrery is the only Russian act I get regularly from the few folks who still try to compile the remaining Russian pop available on the platform, and I’m glad she’s been making it through. Even her just-OK material, like this brooding midtempo house-pop, is usually a highlight.
7. Chi Pu: Modern Medusa
8. Hoàng Tôn: Em Còn Nhớ Anh Không? (AEP Simon Remake)
9. Hoàng Yến Chibi: Duyệt
As promised, I took a peek under the hood of the genre machine to quickly scan for some 2024 V-pop (as tagged in Spotify, anyway). I found one of my favorite tracks of the year early in the list (“Nghĩ Đến Anh” by Juky San), which was a good sign. But the skim—about 200 or so songs—was overstuffed with balladeer sap, which still seems like a strong undercurrent in much of the maintream pop in Vietnam, whereas in other regional scenes in Asia there’s been more of a conscious decoupling of bangers and mush.
You can perhaps tell by the way I tucked these songs into a middle sequence that I wasn’t thrilled with them. My guess is that the more under-the-radar and experimental-leaning pop coming out of Vietnam (which I find mostly through recommendations and rarely from playlists) has more juice than their pop sphere. Vietnam has some echoes of what I notice in Poland, where thriving alt, underground, experimental, and (in Poland’s case) jazz scenes don’t seem to have much overlap with a scrappy ecosystem for pop and rap, even though I tend to find the scrappers more enjoyable, if much less consistent.
10. Danny Dwyer, Lava La Rue: System Overload
This might be the shaggiest track I’ve heard still making a play for the pop dnb zeitgeist — always nice when an indie group figures out a lifehack for shitty drumming.
11. Beau: Body Parts
That said, there’s also some charm in a mediocre band just getting by on personality, too. Beau is a duo of two daughters of NYC artists (I tracked down at least one of their parents but abandoned the search before stumbling into nepo exposé territory) who in parts sound a little like early Arcade Fire, which I guess is how you rebel against your art scenester Minimalist parents.
12. La Sécurité: Detour
Montreal indie continues to fire on all cylinders if you’re into that sort of thing (I am, sometimes!) and La Sécurité is shaping up to be a consistent favorite in a crowded field. Putting them in this sequence underlined how good the drumming is.
13. Samara Cyn: Rolling Stone
Second appearance from Samara Cyn, who sounds ready for her iPod commercial.
14. Göksel: Bir Günah Gibi
Turkish artist with a career going back to the 90s—and, speaking of which, has built a pretty cool pop song here around the melody to Nickelodeon horror anthology show Are You Afraid of the Dark. (Probably not intentionally.)
15. Patrick Cowley: Iko Iko [1981]
One of several ‘60s covers from a disco-era DJ who died in the early AIDS crisis but has been getting material rereleased on the Dark Entries label. This is the one I liked the most qua song, as opposed to qua novelty (of which there are several candidates). More info on Bandcamp.
16. Bamby: Don Dada
French dancehall artist provides some stiff competition to Samara Cyn for that iPod spot.
17. Josey: Tout laisse
Lovely coupe décalé R&B from an Ivorian star.
18. De Mthuda f. Kabza De Small, Young Stunna, Mkeyz, McKenzie, Mthunzi: Diwa Kae
Lokpo beat my playlists to the punch recommending some “amapiano moving into 90s NYC club territory — except for that accordion of course!” I hear a salsa influence, not that these are mutually exclusive. Whatever the secret sauce it, it’s a fun stylistic left turn for a few major amapiano artists.
19. Enam: Sabe
Moroccan DJ is the first from the region that I’ve found to incorporate amapiano logic and structure into something distinctive to Maghreb music. Didn’t see any info on the singing, which is a shame since it really carries the song.
20. Lizwi f. Atmos Blaq: Mama
Have toyed with a few Lizwi tracks that have shown up in my playlists but went with the one featuring South African artist of the year contender (or a high runner-up easy), Atmos Blaq, who as usual doesn’t sacrifice complexity for groove behind Lizwi’s spotlight vocals.
***
That’s it! Until next time.
—Dave Moore (the other one)
Title translated from ano’s “許婚っきゅん” (“鼻血ブーなのだ”)
What I really want to write more about is the song’s behind-the-scenes footage. You don’t need to speak any Japanese to get what’s going on. Was endeared and impressed watching ano pull it off. You can see that she’s not totally satisfied with the result even when she finally nails as much of the one-shot as she can make it through. (You see her icing her hand after breaking the blocks, which was supposed to be part of the one take, but it’s the one place they had to cut.)