Who has seen the biggest rat?
Mix 38: Suzanne Vega came back as a rat, Poppy came back as a metal shrieker, and the '90s came back in parentheses and otherwise
I have, perhaps ill-advisedly, taken on another major online music challenge—UncoolTwo50, the latest in a series of polls based on Gary Mulholland’s writing and designed by challenge maestro Arron Wright. The hopelessly daunting prompt: list your favorite 50 singles from 1977-1999. Lots of folks are participating over at Bluesky, so if you wanted to read, say, Kieron Gillen go long on “Bouffant Headbutt” by Shampoo, now is your chance.
After the research and writing I did for 1962 (still going for a few days, available on a static newsletter page here) I decided I would just post my songs—chosen quickly and intuitively—without commentary.1 I’ve written about a few of these songs before, though, and may share links to that, or finally post some long-gestating unpublished writing if the mood strikes.2
But after reading one whole no-foolin’ music book last week(!), my attention is exhausted for anything but scattershot musings. And anyway it’s a holiday (l’shanah tovah y’all), so let’s get on with it.
Previous 2024 mixes
MIX 38: WHO HAS SEEN THE BIGGEST RAT?
1. Suzanne Vega: Rats
Spoiler alert for my Uncool ‘77-’99 list, but Suzanne Vega wound up on it, something I wouldn’t have guessed going in. I have an inordinate fondness for Vega despite not loving the majority of her work—the bold plainspokenness of much of her lyric-writing is a double-edged sword, as it can point directly to a deep reserve of feeling (and, importantly, to feelings not commonly tackled in pop songs) or come across as mawkish or maudlin. Or it can occasionally do both simultaneously. On what sounds like her first serious attempt at a comeback single in at least 10 and maybe closer to 20+ years, she tackles the uncommon feeling of just how skin-crawlingly icky vermin infestations are and makes it sound kind of fun, like you’re laughing about how bad it was later. Is there some political valence? Maybe, but the apocalyptic pessimism seems broadly nonpartisan. Mostly what you get is the writhing horde, here there and everywhere. Yuck, but also, heh.
2. Luísa Sonza: Luísa Manequim
The rare Brazilian artist who has captured my ears from outside of funk music, though there are little flecks of funk in the album, Escândalo Íntimo, in the same way there will likely be flecks of ceramic around when you throw in the kitchen sink while all the dirty dishes are still sloshing around in there. It’s a fun and wide-ranging collection in cosmopolitan pop singer-songwriter mode, the album already overstuffed with ideas in its original 24 tracks let alone the deluxe’s 32.
3. Sujka: Dziewczyny
Gloomy Polish indie heavy on toms and tambourine. Made more of an immediate impression than most of the 90s-alt-fetishist stuff I gave ample space to at the end of the mix.
4. Artificial Glo: Pay Phone
Short ‘n’ spiky riot grrrl fare that is wise to include some of X’s ruthless tunefulness.
5. Poppy: They’re All Around Us
Jump scare!!!! Spooky season indeed. Is my only proper metal song on one of these mixes in two years really going to be Poppy playtime? You bet.
6. Shelailai: By You
Canadian singer has that Tierra Whack-ish mainstream-emergent weirdo R&B/rap flow down pat. I’m a sucker for this genre of cool nerd. No idea her role in the pop ecosystem in Canada or elsewhere, except that she had a track featured on an EA Sports video game.
7. Vlada K: Mantra
One of the stronger Ukrainian pop tracks I’ve heard this year, the telltale melancholy sounding more muscular than usual thanks to a game choral gang I’d expect on a Troye Sivan track. (Maybe I’d like Troye Sivan better if he was sadder?)
8. Derya Yıldırım & Grup Şimşek: Cool Hand
Breezy Turkish funk with sweet singing from Yıldırım and a nifty bridge section where she closely doubles a synth solo, a trick I’m not sure I remember hearing much outside of maybe Chick Corea style fusion.
9. The Paradise Bangkok Molam International Band: Pimjai Lam Plearn
Interesting rock/trad fusion from Thailand that incorporates molam, a form I’m not familiar with that originates in Laos and the ethnically Lao Thai Isan region. This led me to a Sublime Frequencies comp of early “electric molam” music from the ‘70s, Molam: Thai Country Groove From Isan.
10. Awa Gambia: Douma Daw
Thanks to Lokpo’s recent migration over to Bluesky, I can now aim the genre machine toward Senegal and mbalax, another relative blindspot that deserves more attention. I did indeed find some playlists, but a deeper dive will have to wait. This week, I managed to pluck out a nice Gambian mbalax track, tricky polyrhythms in six like coupé décalé and related Francophone African pop, but with a gentler invitation to the party.
11. Mas Musiq, Lawd Weezy, DJ Maphorisa f. TO Starquality, Chley, & Kabza De Small: Amalanga
If you squint at the characteristically sprawling credits on this one, you can pick out DJ Maphorisa and Kabza De Small. That plus Chley on vocals was enough for inclusion, but there’s also an ease to this one that feels neither tethered to the cresting (waning?) amapiano zeitgeist c. 2019-2022, nor restlessly reaching for something bigger or different. I can’t imagine anything harder than figuring out how to “evolve” in such a doggedly vibes-based milieu, but then I’m too annoyingly cerebral to ever actually make any of this stuff. Tragically, I’m only wired for making power-pop.
12. Hala: Bat3ala2
A third inclusion of Hala from blindfold taste testing, and thus she becomes my de facto Egyptian artist of the year, despite this also being the third blurb in a row where I will admit to having learned nothing about her. (A gentle reminder that this newsletter is free.)
13. TKD, Natoxie: Vieux clébard
I featured Natoxie, a Martinique bouyon artist, on a mix early this year and still have little to say about the sonics. But I’d forgotten that the first time I wrote about him, I said “on my list of subjects for future research—don’t know this scene at all.” After last week’s Caribbean adventure, this is no longer technically true!
14. Tarta Relena: Si veriash a la rana
An interesting Spanish pop-folk (not vice versa) song with close duet harmonies. According to its YouTube, it’s a “traditional Sephardic melody and original lyrics based on the biblical story of Jephthah.” OK!
15. Mamman Sani, Tropikal Camel: Sultan Umnaru’s Trip
A synth early adopter from Niger whose music from the ‘70s and ‘80s was rereleased about ten years ago by Sahel Sounds. The success of the rereleases led to an ongoing contemporary career, including this new album with Berlin producer Tropikal Camel, which is noticeably less like “the soundtrack to a 1970s Nigerien space program that never was” (as Paste puts it) than the old stuff. The snyths, though still pleasantly noodly, are integrated into a fuller backing and to be honest I don’t miss the MIDI.
16. Echo Tides: Βροχή
I do seem to love bargain basement goth pop pastiche in foreign languages. This one’s Greek.
17. Ultra Bra: Aarre
Ah, have waited weeks for an appropriate spot for something so odd and baroque, Andrew Lloyd Webber pomp-rock. Surprised to learn Ultra Bra is a very in-the-weeds lefty factional political Finnish band, which just goes to show that politics remains conveniently uncorrelated with how or why a given piece of music hits. I’d be just as willing to believe this was a right-wing Christian group, or a bunch of anarchist vegans, or the blandly apolitical house band for some weird Scandinavian panel show.
18. Sunday(1994): Blossom
This group wants you to think about 1994 so much that they put it in their band name, which is the most brazen attempt to get in on the Women in Grunge fairy dust that so much modern music continues to draw on, with a pretty high success rate.
19. Cassie Ramone: He’s Still On My Mind
More ‘94 hearkenin’, and I imagine it’s what a lot of people would describe as neo-shoegaze, though I’m not sure the descriptor really helps much — do we need a whole indie pop subgenre for reverb?
20. Ozean: Fall [1993]
One final example of ‘94 by way of 2024, this one very interesting because it’s doing its longing for the past from the past (it came out in ‘93). One of two mix-concluding Numero Group re-releases, from a Bay Area shoegaze also-ran that now sounds damn near prophetic. I don’t think hundreds of bedroom artists are trying to sound like Ozean, but that’s who they sound like.
21. Third Point: Spirit [1976]
It’s been interesting to scoop up more archival Numero Group releases in my weekly playlists, because the hit rate is about the same as any other random sample, about 1-2%. Turns out there’s plenty of dreck in those old crates, too — survivorship bias is a beast. This is a good one, though, some solid disco-leaning soul from a group that as far as I can tell only put out two singles.
***
That’s it! Until next time, I hope you will remain one of my lucky readers who has NOT seen the biggest rat.
—Dave Moore (the other one)
Title from “Rats” by Suzanne Vega.
Arron does a ton of admin for his challenges and tallies up everyone’s picks to come up with a cumulative list, so there is an opportunity for tactical voting. Mostly, though, I just wanted to avoid an impossible amount of research, so tried to hew as much as possible to songs that I could stand to listen to at least 10 times in a row without getting sick of it. This includes several bad songs that I happen to love.
About five years ago I wrote a ton of material I thought might be a book, but ended up being either a disjointed and borderline unreadable memoir or an artful diary. A few things in it hold up as writing and criticism in their own right—I shaped a couple of sections into other essays, and there are a few other bits I think I could salvage.