2023 Year in Music, Pt. 1
The best...words?
December has hardly started and the Year in Music is already over, with a deluge of best-of’s wending their way through my remaining patchwork of social media. I’m struggling to write much about the albums I liked, and anyway there are only three that I liked so much that I actually went out and purchased them: Kesha’s Gag Order, Núria Graham’s Cyclamen, and Felo Le Tee x Mellow & Sleazy’s The III Wise Men. So listen to those! Maybe I’ll write about them later.
Instead, this post just highlights some things I wrote this year that I liked. Most of it is from the newsletter, some from social media posts, and some from the end of year Singles Jukebox special (which is still going at least this week and next).
The overall best thing I wrote this year has been the “How You Get the World” series about Taylor Swift, but I’m exempting anything from that series in this post for space reasons. You now have various holiday downtime excuses to finally read it!
Abraham, Farrah
I don't think I ever noticed that AV Club called the Farrah Abraham album [My Teenage Dream Ended] the “least essential album of 2012”—and quoted me!—which means they've named two of my favorite albums ever as their least essential (the other one is Dangerous and Moving by t.A.T.u. in 2005):
[H]er insanely Auto-Tuned vocals and bland production shocked even the teen mom’s actual fans and earned her a heaping helping of derision from the snarky denizens of the Internet, some of whom even went so far to suggest that it might be an example of outsider art, or as a writer from The Atlantic put it, “a dark and compelling experiment in abstracting and compressing the vicissitudes of ‘high school drama.’” As anyone who’s seen Teen Mom could tell you, though, that’s giving Abraham way too much credit. She just made a terrible record and, even more relevant for our purposes, a completely unnecessary record.
“That’s giving [artist] too much credit”—this is not school, the art gets all the credit. Sorry artists!
I have a lot of appreciation for craft and the intellectual and spiritual effort that can go into creating art. But this is only correlated to whether the thing I’m listening to is the best thing. Anything could be the best thing, if it happens to be the best thing.
What I find odd is that anyone would be bothered that you can record your spoken-word journal entries to a click track, have a middling semi-pro producer pile a bunch of presets on top of it, crank up the autotune, and make a goddamn masterpiece. This is in fact a miracle!
Low barriers for entry and serendipitous routes to the sublime are exactly what make music the most surprising and resilient and egalitarian medium for artistic expression. Sorry that bothers you!
A.I.
Should I talk about A.I. this week? My strongest opinion is that people need to use both periods in the acronym because otherwise I confuse artificial intelligence with some poor guy named AL.
I think A.I.’s influence is going to be like any other technology — disruptive in a lot of ways we don’t see coming, not disruptive in a lot of ways we currently predict, and the bringer of a bunch of random effects that wind up being a huge part of the “real story” when the dust settles. Should be weird!
One thing I think we’ll see more of now that A.I. is the buzz-idea du jour is that things we used to talk about being done “by committee” we will just shift to being done “by artificial intelligence.” We have lots of terms for facelessness and soullessness, especially in pop music, when the realistic modes of pop production are always merely shady-cabal-generated at worst. This song, “It’s Euphoric” by Georgia,” sounds like everyone and no one wrote it, in a way that really is faceless. But it’s not unappealing; turns out “face” is not always a criterion I care about.
Which forms are better suited to A.I.? My first thought is electronic and dance music, but anyone who listens to a lot of dance music, or has tried to make it, knows that it’s a place where the subtleties matter a lot. The line between a banger and a corny hodgepodge of presets can be thin in a technical sense, but there’s a world of difference (and craft) on either side of the line.
I think A.I. will probably excel at churning out music goop — shapeless orchestral atmosphere, fake ambient music, and plodding new age background piano. But I should note that this is already how hacks and fakers juke their stats and strike oil (or keep the oil to themselves) on Spotify. Good riddance to all that; maybe a computer should do it, since the resulting A.I.-generated music probably can’t be copyrighted, which might be useful for sampling.
I think the short term impact on A.I. for vocals is probably the creation of fake vocals using real voices that are indistinguishable from genuine recordings. But interestingly the only ones that don’t scan as tech novelties so far are the ones where the vocals already sound heavily processed (like the GrimesAI). And it’s not that these faked A.I. vocals sound bad per se (though they’re still a little wonky), it’s that no one has figured out what to do with them and I don’t really understand the value (or the problem) with A.I. knock off voices except the usual concerns around deepfakes and malign actors. (“That’s not really Drake singing—so what?”)
Amapiano
Amapiano builds on a deceptively simple template: the foundation is almost always a shaker playing sixteenth notes at about 112 BPM (though the accent of the pattern can vary, the shaker is usually steady and omnipresent), and each song then layers in its own palette of sounds and voices, everything in percussive service of the groove. That standardized base and consistent tempo lets you click different songs together like LEGOs, though amapiano is also known for relatively long song lengths.
Amapiano is in some ways the flipside of baile funk, which isolates strange rhythms and sounds and timbres and ideas and forces you to reckon with what the fuck they’re doing in relation to each other in sequence—it’s Eisensteinian montage. By contrast amapiano is more like pointillism: you’re not thinking closely about any single point, and from a distance everything takes on a dreamy texture that it would lose if you inspected too closely.
Amapiano artists will often take warm acoustic percussion and pretty, playful vocals—all of them bringing a soft swing feel, somewhere between dancing and swaying—and pit them directly against much harder four-on-the-floor house elements (synth blares, jagged squelchy bass hits) put off at a seeming distance, like the distant echo of a car alarm going off way down the street that happens to be in the same key as the song you’re listening to in your headphones. The palettes artists use and the way they layer everything in vary from song to song and artist to artist, but because the foundation is so similar across the songs, changes in the genre over time can be subtle enough that it almost feels like you’re watching evolution at the individual genetic mutation level.
And there are tons of cool vocals in amapiano, hard posturing and playful posing becoming indistinguishable (as they are on this song—or, if not indistinguishable, a kind of multiple perspective game where you can see it both ways) as it all washes out in the sound bath along with everything else. And heck, sometimes you get a no-foolin’ xylophone, too, not even the thing most people think is a xylophone but is actually a glockenspiel. Or you get a synth that sounds like a vuvuzela. Why not?
Amapiano, 3step and
South African house music has evolved recently and is continuing to evolve into a form currently called 3step, invented/named by producer Thakzin, whom you can see discuss the process here. In 3step, as best as I can tell, there is a lopsided emphasis on the second two beats out of four (often dropping the second beat entirely), to produce a rhythm that anticipates the one but doesn’t land on it as hard as other funk, house, and dance music tends to. This gives you lots of the mellowness and expansiveness of amapiano— where you keep your footing but sort of lose yourself in the thicket of the beat—but it also has more of a sense of assuredness and lockstep, feels less amorphous than amapiano can, which tends to bathe you in the beat and throw in tension quasi-randomly with specific elements, most recognizably the ratatat of the log drum sound.
The most simplified version of the 3step beat I’ve found, which gives a good sense of the mechanics but is not much of a song per se, is the song “Hey Sister” by DJ Bongz, Dlala Thukzin, and Funky Qla. Though so far 3step, to my ears, doesn’t have as predictable a template or set of ingredients as amapiano does. Lokpo has a long thread on Thakzin and 3-step here.
Amapiano, Robert Altman and
Amapiano’s strength is in letting everything cohabitate in surprising ways. It’s like a Robert Altman film—he’ll let everyone play together in a series of long shots; your attention has to find its own resting point. It all seems intentional, but you can’t feel Altman guiding your attention. There’s a great interview where Altman describes trying to explain to Stanley Kubrick how he got an incredible shot, in the opening scene of McCabe and Mrs. Miller, of Warren Beatty lighting a cigar in the dim murk of the evening—a shot Altman had filmed personally while his cinematographer was away.
Altman: “He [Kubrick] said, ‘but how’d you know you got it?’ I said, ‘I just assumed we did.’ And he had a hard time understanding, because Stanley really liked to be very precise about everything, and he wanted to be exactly proper.”
I doubt Stanley Kubrick could ever make anything like a Robert Altman film for the same reason I doubt Major Lazer could ever make a good amapiano song. They figure you must have to do something to “get it.”
Amapiano, shoegaze and
Mellow & Sleazy have released an incredible album, The III Wise Men, with Felo Le Tee, another of my favorite current amapiano producers. This song [“uDali”] was a personal highlight — in the first minute of the song I get faint traces of shoegaze with the introduction of the electric guitar figure; it reminds me of “Soon” by My Bloody Valentine which, listening back I’m now imagining as an amapiano song. The logic is there: everything’s somehow de-centered in the mix and ephemeral but also right in your face at the same time, though Kevin Shields uses some vaseline on the lens to get the ephemerality across while amapiano does everything in plain sight. Now I’m rethinking my claim that Kubrick could never make an Altman film (maybe he tried with Barry Lyndon?): Kevin Shields is nothing if not Kubrickian.
“Ava Maria” by Ian Power
My friend Ian Power’s piece “Ava Maria: Variations on a Theme by Giacinto Scelsi,” with pianist Anne Rainwater, 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.
Baile funk
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.)
DJ Arana
My baile funk find of the week [“Famoso Machuca Xota”] is by DJ Arana. He has a demented streak, evidenced here only in the way he uses the turntable fader on his vocal to introduce the beat, making the silence the drums, but it’s on full display in an even better track that I couldn’t put on the mix because it inexplicably opens with a found footage style recording so disturbing I felt physically ill listening to it. (Fair warning: “O Invasor - Eu So o Mago - O Returno.”) Mc Larissa is also a good find, lots of personality in whoops and hiccups.
A jagged epic of a baile funk track [“ABCDário Da Guerra”] from DJ Arana. I’m tempted to say that this is what would happen if you tried to bring the mini-opera logic of “Bohemian Rhapsody” to funk’s embodiment of Manny Farber’s concept of termite art, though I’d need to think it through. Anyway, I think it works, though I don’t recommend playing the second half of this one while operating heavy machinery.
Eilish, Billie
I have an ongoing conversation with my friend Isabel about Billie Eilish, who we are convinced is a classical songwriter of a bygone era. In Isabel’s words, Eilish’s songs all have “good bones,” and this is Exhibit B after LeAnn Rimes’s rendition of “When the Party’s Over” on The Masked Singer, where Rimes is so studied she even replicates some of Eilish’s vocal mannerisms like an opera singer enunciating in a foreign language.
This [“Getting Older” by Adam Lambert] is a smart cover of a very smart song— glam is more direct and showy than the original’s bedroom dirge, and Lambert isn’t afraid to forcefully mark the chorus as a chorus, launching that sucker up into the rafters.
It feels weird to say that someone who was maybe the most popular artist in the world for two years before she even turned 20 and is probably a no-foolin’ genius besides has a tendency to hide her light under a bushel, so the analogy I’ve landed on for Billie Eilish is early Randy Newman, who had his own clear, if idiosyncratic, interpretation of his own work, but also shopped it around to other singers who could highlight the songcraft.
So when I said that I thought Billie Eilish was the Zoomer Randy Newman a few mixes ago, I did not expect her to literally put out the heartbreaking ballad for a mega-hyped toy movie.
What I meant was that when she delivers her own songs, they can seem a little odd because of her specific vocal mannerisms, but when other people cover them you understand that she’s a bread-and-butter songwriting genius with a particular gift for melody. And having looked at a few videos of Billie and Finneas in the studio, I think she’s as responsible for those melodies as her brother; she improvises melody like Paul McCartney—about whom, as I never tire of telling people, Carl Perkins once said: “now listen, if you think this boy's not got a connection with the spirit world....”
This micro-cover of “Hotline Bling” is Billie Eilish goofing around with a ukulele and a megaton of vocal reverb for 60 seconds and it’s great. I’ve crossed the rubicon and now believe she can do no wrong — give her a MacArthur genius grant or something.
Amadeus, but Taylor Swift is Salieri and Billie Eilish is Mozart.
Headache, “The Party That Never Ends”
It’s hard to figure out exactly what this song is — I’ve been sitting on it for three weeks, and every time I listened to it I felt myself stubbornly refusing its advances. Is it a midlife “Sunscreen Song”? Is it “Fitter Happier,” but in the spirit of the new Kesha album? (Trick question, Kesha’s new album is already OK Computer and thus includes its own “Fitter Happier”!) I suspect a machine-learning vocal generator was used to make it and for some reason don’t want to research it to confirm or deny. But why should I care one way or the other? It’s got the profundity right there—the depth’s all on the surface. I’d rather just accept it than continue to hunt for something that gives me pause. Because they’re right: the heart knows the truth.
K-pop, words and
I’m reminded that K-pop isn’t just multilingual, but often meta-lingual in the way that so much (all?) good pop is, refusing to let words get by as mere signifiers and forcing us to reckon with words at the phonemic, molecular level. How wild is it that the entire basis of our civilization is built on these funky noises we make with our mouths and tongues and lungs and noses and throats? I think that’s neat.
Lavigne, Avril
As for Avril Lavigne’s own relationship to real and fake, I will say that while Ashlee Simpson is, as Robert Christgau once noted (in what I believe are the only four words he ever wrote about Ashlee Simpson’s music), “the real Avril Lavigne” and Skye Sweetnam is, as I once noted, “the fake Avril Lavigne,” Avril Lavigne herself is a paradox: Schroedinger’s confessional pop star, perpetually in a theoretical state of simultaneous real and fake.
MC Pipokinha
MC Pipokinha has to be the most “interesting” performer in Brazilian funk right now, and there’s a lot hiding in those scare quotes, vibrancy and humor and audacity and awfulness and greatness. It’s like how Ke$ha was “interesting” in 2010. There’s a lot to be written about her, and I feel spectacularly unequipped to do it.
There’s also the question of handling the volume. On Spotify there are about 80 tracks credited to MC Pipokinha since January 2023. The best of the lot, “Bota na Pipoka,” is a riff or update (in name, at least) on her breakthrough hit, “Bota na Pipokinha” from 2021. (If you want to listen to everything available on Spotify, I compiled it here.)
Nia Archives, “Off Wiv Ya Head”
My wife quite sensibly asks why on earth you would play this version rather than the original “Heads Will Roll” or at least the A-Trak remix that Nia Archives sticks into a centrifuge. To which I can only reply…why wouldn’t you play this version?
Rexha, Bebe, Miley Cyrus and (or vice versa)
[Re: Bebe Rexha’s “Heart Wants What It Wants”] Congratulations to Bebe Rexha, whom I can imagine as Indiana Jones dodging booby traps and outrunning rolling boulders to steal a precious artifact from Miley Cyrus’s recording studio. Bebe Rexha has been making music for a decade now and this is her second good song. I’d say you have to respect the hustle, but…do you?
[Re: Miley Cyrus’s “Flowers”] I’m a digital download pump-priming truther, so I guess if the alternative is fascists getting to #1 for a week or two I’ll take a full calendar year’s slow and steady drip of Miley’s mids as a form of pop chart harm reduction. And this is one of those songs like Bebe Rexha’s “Last Hurrah” that I appreciate the personal connection to without it affecting my sense of how dumb it is. My youngest really likes this one! We both laugh about the part where she says she could talk to herself for hours (that seems weird!), and he is fascinated by the idea that writing your name in the sand is something that people who are dating might do, because he also likes to write things in sand and does not yet fully understand dating, but he did, unbeknownst to me, download an app on his tablet to practice kissing, and he also downloaded a “love app” and correctly noted that in one picture the two people are in love with each other even though she’s his crush, which means technically she shouldn’t love him back (he’s six… to her credit, Miley Cyrus has always deeply understood six-year-olds, the low end of her old Radio Disney demo). And hey, speaking of Bebe Rexha and endearing constitutional midness, isn’t it kind of funny that the one person in the world worse at being a pop star than Miley Cyrus happened to put out the best Miley Cyrus song of the year and no one cared? They should have paid for more digital downloads!
RXK Nephew/RX Papi
Their rap style has a disorienting rubato to it: lines rush the tempo pathologically, then comes a procrastination, which necessitates another last-second barrage of syllables for everything to scan (and even then sometimes the lines don't totally scan—they'll rhyme one word with the same word, sometimes multiple times, or they won't bother rhyming at all).
The effect is of a rap that's been recorded without a reference tempo and then pieced together against the beat line by line in a messy decoupage. Frank Zappa used to do something like this, especially with his guitar solos, in a process he called “xenochrony”—he would take previously recorded instrument tracks and graft them on to new songs in different tempos and time signatures, synchronized through editing or serendipity.
Swift, Taylor
My youngest said [of “Hits Different”]: “I knew this was Taylor Swift before I even read her name because all of her songs sound like that. You know, it’s like…this sound they all have?” I knew exactly what he was talking about.
I finally saw the Eras tour movie with my son, who let me know that it was “very Taylor Swift-y.” And he was right, but I couldn’t pinpoint exactly what was so Taylor Swift-y about it. I thought it had something to do with the melodies, the way they were all sort of bleeding into each other. The 10-minute “All Too Well,” which required a brief trip to the cinema arcade and bathroom, cemented for me that I was experiencing the concert as drone. (Not unpleasant.)