We make love through telepathy
Mix 10: Abrasive beauty, beautiful abrasion, rap pugilists, and an amapiano gateway artist returns
Sure, there was a Pitchfork oral history published in which I got my requisite two cents in, as I do every couple of years for these sorts of things (call it my indie cred residuals), but the big news out of my(?) corner of the internet last week was the billdifferen Top 100 Funk Songs of 2023 (Part 1 and Part 2). Be sure to read through for the subgenre and regional accounting, which is extremely thorough.
The Soundcloud focus presents an almost entirely different landscape from the one I map haphazardly via Spotify, which is probably the worst of the major streaming platforms for representative sampling (not just in funk but most genres). I’d probably be better off giving my compulsive wanderings over to YouTube or Soundcloud or even Bandcamp. But I can’t seem to make those places habitual haunts, and I tend to get search fatigue long before I cobble together enough songs to sort through. On Spotify I just quickly pile up a truckload of garbage and start sifting.
I also suspect I’m not really a Soundcloud surfer in methodology or taste. To be clear, I am thrilled by all 100 of the funk tracks featured (of which I knew only a handful, I’d guess half or less are on Spotify), but few of them are ones I’d necessarily choose over anything else I stumble across absent the effort of a comprehensive genre survey.
Soundcloud is a good place to reliably get your face melted. But one of the things I love about funk is not just its abrasiveness per se, but the way that it insists on making beauty abrasive and on making abrasion beautiful. It’s a tricky balance — and for me, face meltage is a secondary pleasure, icing on the cake. Granted, in this metaphor I have no idea what the cake is, but whatever it is, you can have it and eat it, too.
Mix 1 // Mix 2 // Mix 3 // Mix 4 // Mix 5 // Mix 6 // Mix 7 // Mix 8 // Mix 9
MIX 10: WE MAKE LOVE THROUGH TELEPATHY
1. Os Gemeos da Putaria f. DJ Ws da Igrejinha, MC Pânico: Você Me dá Água na Boca
Note: A day after I scheduled the newsletter to go out, this song was removed from Spotify. I’ve kept the “grayed out” song as a placeholder in the Spotify playlist — as sometimes songs do return to streaming — but otherwise it’s YouTube-only.
I’m not sure what it is about this song that is so captivating to me — it’s a simple gimmick, wub-wub bass and a pretty Rita Lee sample played straight. But maybe because the sample is used so straightforwardly, it opens up a really expressive space for melody that doesn’t just suture it to the rhythms but lets the melody really lead the song, all without forgoing the locked-horns fight to the death in the rhythm section.
2. Dj Anderson do Paraiso f. Dj Dg Do Rb, Mc Paulin do G, Braian, Pepu, Dãan: Sadomasoquista [2020]
This was a serendipitous segue — another melodically-driven funk track, this time with a cello figure front and center that is pretty but also sounds like it might be crawling up your drain pipe to kill you. I think it’s the oldest track on Dj Anderson do Paraiso’s great album out on Nyege Nyege Tapes, originally released in 2020, but it sounded too good (and was too on-theme for this opening sequence) not to let it sing, release date asterisk be damned.
3. Silva Mc, MC LCKaiique, Skorps: Tu Movimenta em Câmera Lenta
And now a third way to let melody lead, very different from the other two — sounds like a someone learning how to play “Three Blind Mice” on a bandoneon and repeating it ad nauseam until you’re just about ready to defenestrate the instrument, or maybe yourself.
4. Deize Tigrona f. KD Soundsystem: Bctnh Ploc Ploc
And finally, a much older-sounding funk track that reminds me that you can literally base your entire song on gunshots and not make someone feel half as threatened you could with a cello.
5. Natoxie, TKD, Honey Bees: My Eyes Only
Martinique dancehall/shatta artists with a song that reminds me of K.I.G.’s “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes” in the way it takes a nursery rhyme cadence and makes it sound much cooler than you’d think possible.
6. Pik Pik f. Koder: Nie chcę zranić Cię
Ah, I’ve been waiting for a Polish lite hypertrap banger. This will do nicely.
7. Baby Kia: OD CRASHIN
Another face-melter from a billdifferen tweet, which is where I first saw Baby Kia’s appearance at an Atlanta high school before the song showed up on a rap up-and-comer playlist this week. The comments on that YouTube video of the appearance range from “WHY DID THEY LET THIS MAN IN A HIGH SCHOOL” to “PLEASE COME TO MY HIGH SCHOOL,” which should give you some sense of the energy. That said, my favorite thing about this isn’t the overexerted vocal pummeling, but how he keeps ducking in and out of the beat, furiously shadowboxing and then retreating to the corner to shit-talk a phantom between rounds.
8. Glorygirl2950: Real J5
A recommendation from Mike Barthel by way of Alphonse Pierre (who if I remember correctly introduced me to Vayda last year). Glorygirl2950 goes for cramped RXK-style cut-and-paste vocal overlap and it works for her presumably for the same reason it works for RXK Nephew. (I do not understand what that reason is.)
9. MFS: Binbo
Japanese rapper sounds positively Cretaceous compared to the last two, but has enough personality to get it over the two-minute mark.
10. Ann in Black: Ї-їбашить
Ukrainian house-pop. Put me in mind of Young Leosia, a Polish rapper who hasn’t yet surpassed her best song, “Szklanki” from 2021, but has a new EP that seems popular, if not quite good enough to make the mix. The title track, “PG$,” is Pretty Good($).
11. Juky San: Nghĩ Đến Anh
A Vietnamese ballad that Joshua Minsoo Kim shared. The vocal is sticking with me, in part because it just barely lands on the good side of the line between sweet and cloying. That’s a feat more impressive than the video’s one-shot conceit, which, unlike Juky San’s vocal, cheats a few times with fake camera pans.
12. Suboi: Dâu Thiên Hạ
Glad I was able to find another V-pop song from the playlists this week for a pairing, from a rapper you can add to the long list of artists who honed their chops rapping along to Eminem as a teenager, just like Taylor Swift (I’d bet).
13. La Luz: Strange World
I haven’t really followed Seattle indie band La Luz closely but have been aware of and liked them for several years, though the only evidence I find of them on my playlists is “Oh Blue” on my 2021 tracks. (This was a recommendation from Katherine St. Asaph.)
14. Corridor: Mon Argent
Montreal band Corridor is the latest reminder that Montreal has been living in indie rock’s mid-aughts heyday for over a decade now, a fact that surprised me last year when I started pulling from a weekly Canadian Francophone playlist.
15. Ekko Astral: Baethoven
Crisply-produced, punky DC band that Paste Magazine (and the band’s PR bio) says is “pairing innovative sounds and community-building with trans liberation.” Sounds good to me!
16. Sahra Halgan: Sharaf
Segues well into Sahra Halgan, a singer and activist for Somaliland culture with some raucous, if a little slick-sounding, garage rock with a few desert blues flourishes. There’s a nice profile of her from 2020 at Bandcamp.
17. NakamuraEmi: 晴るく
Japanese singer-songwriter hits on a cluster of triplets that carry the whole song, feels like rushing to get somewhere in lovely weather and not sweating being a few minutes late.
18. Muthoni Drummer Queen: Pomoni
Nairobi singer whose voice seems in contrast with the Afrobeats backing — her other work genre-hops in a way that makes me think that perhaps there’s an element of dress-up about it, not that I would have called it that upon first hearing it.
19. Semi Tee, Ma Lemon f. Bongza: Sgcebezana
Semi Tee is the producer who drew me in to amapiano back in 2020. I burned his album, I’m Only Tweentyone, to CD and printed cover art for it so it would live in a jewel case on the music shelf (I almost never do this). I still think it’s the single best album-length document of the amapiano explosion, though I’ve gone back and loved a few other early collections, like the DJ Maphorisa/Kabza De Small Scorpion Kings from 2019. After a strong album with MDU aka TRP in 2021 (Tales of the 2 Peers), I didn’t hear much from Semi Tee, who has put out a few songs in the interim but didn’t catch my ear again until now.
20. Omah Lay: Holy Ghost (Martin Solveig Extended Remix)
Another Katherine St. Asaph pick, a remix of a song by Nigerian artist Omah Lay that I like about equally in both forms, which pencils out to pretty high praise for Solveig given how good the original is.
21. Something Sweet: อยากเจออีกจัง ยังรอที่เดิม
Thai sunshine indie-pop that sounds like a decaffeinated “Crocodile Rock.”
22. Project Gemini f. Wendy Martinez: Entre chien et loup
Has Jon Brion ever worked with a French singer? I bet that would sound good.
23. Konradsen: Æ og Min Elskede
Ending things with acoustic Norwegian indie whose melody is reminding me of “The Peace Carol” that John Denver sang on the Muppets Christmas album. When I was growing up, I always assumed Denver wrote it, but since I have nothing else to say about the song at hand, I have instead taken this opportunity to educate myself: it was written by Bob Beers of the Beers Family folk singers.
***
Until next week, I hope you can find beauty while your face melts, as these are not mutually exclusive properties.
—Dave Moore (the other one)
Title translated from Os Gemeos da Putaria’s “Você Me dá Água na Boca,” via Rita Lee’s “Mania De Você” (“A gente faz amor por telepatia”)