You're questioning the science 'cause you don't understand
Mix 46: A final through-the-cracks mix of 2023, from Singles Jukeboxers, social media pals, the People's Pop 2023 poll, and more
Happy New Year!
This is my final 2023 mix. All of it is based on my year-end listening and not from going through massive Spotify playlists. I’ve basically conducted a small experiment about my personal music discovery process — the question is, how much higher is the hit rate when all the music I listen to has been curated by people whose tastes I trust? I have come to the following conclusions:
When I listen to a deluge of new music not just recommended by peers and experts, I ultimately select 1% of the available music for mixes.
When I instead seek out a smaller deluge of music only from peers and experts, the hit rate is closer to 3-5%. (I’d estimate that I listened to between 400-600 new songs in the past four weeks, of which I kept 22.)
However, it takes me four times longer to find 80 minutes worth of songs I like doing it this way, even at the end of the year when song recommendations are abundant.
So my “slog through an enormous pile of junk at rapid speeds” method is about as effective, and orders of magnitude more efficient, than going strictly by traditional recommendations.
I’ve also learned a bit about myself over the past year — one, when I listen to new music as a regular habit to keep up a writing practice, I don’t find it unbearable. Two, despite knowing I should investigate some of my finds further and augment my somewhat random understanding with deeper dives into specific scenes and artists, I just don’t do this very often. When I try to do it, I don’t do it very well.
So I think the right balance for me is to churn through stuff and then rely on other people to provide the context whenever possible. This is suspiciously convenient for me not having to do things I don’t like doing, but I’ll take it!
Here are the songs that made it through the final sieve. About a third of them are from Singles Jukebox writers—via their recommendations for the TSJ year-end special, contributors’ assorted newsletters, or their direct recommendations on social media. Another third come from my preliminary Golden Beat pool in the list of Peoples’ Pop 2023 nominations. The rest are from regulars new and old.
So that’s a wrap for 2023 — I will never think about this year again! (Just kidding, I’m guessing I’ll have a bunch of December songs on my first couple mixes, starting up again next week.)
Here’s an online spreadsheet of every song I covered in 2023:
And here are all my previous 2023 newsletters:
Mix 1 // Mix 2 // Mix 3 // Mix 4 // Mix 5 // Mix 6 // Mix 7 // Mix 8 // Mix 9 // Mix 10 // Mix 11 // Mix 12 // Mix 13 // Mix 14 // Mix 15 // Mix 16 // Mix 17 // Mix 18 // Mix 19 // Mix 20 // Mix 21 // Mix 22 // Mix 23 // Mix 24 // Mix 25 // Mix 26 // Mix 27 // Mix 28 // Mix 29 // Mix 30 // Mix 31 // Mix 32 // Mix 33 // Mix 34 // Mix 35 // Mix 36 // Mix 37 // Mix 38 // Mix 39 // Mix 40 // Mix 41 // Mix 42 // Mix 43 // Mix 44 // Mix 45
MIX 46: YOU’RE QUESTIONING THE SCIENCE ‘CAUSE YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND
1. Miley Cyrus: Handstand
A wonderful shaggy dog story with the weirdo sonic and performance touches (“just me ‘n’ Twitchy…”) that make me like her Dead Petz project with the Flaming Lips more as an album than any other Miley Cyrus album, despite not loving a single song from it. This is Chuck Eddy’s single(?) of the year, and as always he’s worth reading not only for his analysis but for the impeccable quality of his RIYL’s: Stacy Q’s “The River” and Seduction’s “Seduction’s Theme.”
2. Sophie Powers: Better on Mute
A low-rent Dev update, via a blue-wigged 19-year-old who says “I still miss the old days.” Delightfully annoying.
3. Emilia, Ludmilla, & Zecca: No_se_ve.mp3
One of two entries from Argentine reggaeton star Emilia in the People’s Pop 2023 poll. I almost included both of them before I reviewed the track list — gave the nod to this one, which somehow my beloved “Meherbaan” by Reet Talwar beat to get out of the qualifiers(!).
4. 2pillz f. tlinh: Hoàng hôn
From Joshua Minsoo Kim’s round-up of Vietnamese music, blissful house-pop. No matter how you arrange the artist credits (2pillz f. thinh or vice versa), everything I’ve heard is great.
5. Sofia Kourtesis: Si Te Portas Bonito
Was encouraged to listen to this album after I dropped my Europe-ish regional playlist. Enjoyed a brief listen, but finally clicked with Kourtesis listening to this one in People’s Pop, where she has been steamrolling everything in her path. I am now firmly a convert. (It pays to re-listen to things sometimes! Just not that often.)
6. ELIO: A2B
Welsh-born Canadian artist figured out, perhaps accidentally, how to ride the “uh huh, yeah yeah, baby, uh huh” hook from Outkast’s “Rosa Parks” for the requisite two minutes and ten seconds of any proper post-hyperpop joyride.
7. LADIPOE & Bella Shmurda: Guy Man
Nigerian rap about as far from Afrobeats and Naija pop as you can get while still maintaining a patina of the genre(s)’ arm’s-length luster.
8. Chase & Status x Bou f. Flowden, IRAH, Trigga, & Takura: Baddadan
I slot these guys as British dance with a drum ‘n’ bass lean, but this song — which is apparently pretty huge, went to #5 on the UK charts — is a little harder-edged than what I was expecting, thanks in no small part to the guest verses. For some reason this is reminding that James Blake also went much harder than usually does earlier this year.
9. AyooLii: Shmackin Town
I’ve gone back and forth on this one all year. Folks whose tastes I trust swear by it, and I even helped get it into the People’s Pop poll as a guest selector (hence its inclusion here), but there’s something about the whole world of basement/Soundcloud rap — “hey, my uncle’s got an empty apartment with no art on the walls and a smoke detector on low battery alert, let’s put on a show!” — that keeps me at a bit of a distance.
10. 9th Ward Judy: Summertime.
11. Rari 9: easter 22 [2022]
The next two are New Orleans bounce music from the billdifferent Spotify approximation list that Lokpo assembled — almost none of the music on that list is on Spotify (it’s very Soundcloud heavy) so I was skimming through a few of Lokpo’s substitutions, including one from 9th Ward Judy that elbows its way into “Hot in Herre” so forcefully but somehow naturally-sounding you’d think it was baile funk.
The real tour de force, though, is from teenage bounce prodigy Rari 9, whose “easter 22” from last year is the only track of his represented on Spotify and is totally remarkable, at least an EP’s worth of ideas crammed into six frenetic minutes.
12. Thrown: On the Verge
Gave this one a pithy one-liner that earned me my only lead review at the Singles Jukebox year-end special (“power music, nu metal revival!”). Other reviewers point to the nod to phonk at the beginning, but that doesn’t sound like where the band’s heart lies, or maybe more accurately they’ve incorporated phonk the way Rage Against the Machine incorporated hip-hop, as another instrument to thrash to.
13. Tanner Adell: Buckle Bunny
One of the selections from No Fences Review I found intriguing. I feel like this is the sort of rap/country hybrid artist that could either have NPR credibility or just be some rando from TikTok (I guess Jessie Murph wasn’t as much of a thing as I thought?). It’s the former — Ann Powers: “Don’t mess with this mini-skirted mini-mart queen.”
14. Young Posse: Macaroni Cheese
Surely the dumbest K-pop song I heard sampling a hundred or so of them. Welcome to the party, Young Posse!
15. N-FENI: Sugar
A Radiohead-echoing Japanese rock rec from Tara Hillegeist, whose writing on Japanese tracks from scenes I cannot begin to parse has been illuminating. From the Singles Jukebox special: VTuber Suisei Hoshimachi and YOASOBI’s “IDOL,” for which Tara wrote the longest blurb in Jukebox history (!!).
16. Dept - ประกาศให้โลกรู้
Thai indie, recommended by Jacob Sujin Kuppermann on his 2023 playlist.
17. Sophia Chablau e Uma Enorme Perda de Tempo: Segredo
18. Melenas: Bang
Two Spanish Golden Beats from the People’s Pop 2023 poll. It was really hard for me to get excited about any indie rock that was not in Spanish this year. (Or maybe French; turns out indie’s Very Montreal Mid-Aughts just...kept going there?)
19. Mandy, Indiana: Pinking Shears
20. twst: Off-World
Two Singles Jukebox picks, from Ian Mathers and Hannah Jocelyn. (Hannah just published an essay called “Sympathy for the Gaylor” that you should read, and not just because she links to my Taylor Swift stuff!) I would have given both 7’s — only got around to blurbing twst — but they’re the two that have stuck around in memory since the reviews ran.
Not much to say about Mandy, Indiana, except to read Ian on them and trust that whatever you think they might sound like, they do not sound like that.
Wrote this about twst:
A lovely take on one of my absolute favorite tropes in pop music: escaping the burden of society, and maybe corporeality altogether, in outer space! My personal standard-bearer is t.A.T.u.’s “Cosmos,” which is to say I’m missing another dollop of melodrama, and I have minor quibbles with the words tilting more toward metaphor than they need to — can I get one reference to a spaceship or something? But that’s probably just a taste issue.
21. D’Athiz x Ke-nny x Locomeister: Gumba Fire
Killer South African track from Frank Kogan that starts amapiano and goes gqom as the intensity ratchets up (or something like that). I thought I was relaxing to this and slowly realized I was getting very anxious. This in turn reminded me of Frank’s response on Twitter to a jokey use of a YouTube comment (about an Emma Bunton song in the People’s Pop 2003 poll), “it’s very soothing and edgy”:
“‘It’s very soothing and edgy’ are what half my reviews come down to.” (See also: Frank’s “iPlan” review.)
22. DJ Kent, Mo-T, Mo-T, Mörda, Brenden Praise: Horns in the Sun (Thakzin Remix)
How could I not end things with one of the Thakzin songs I missed this year? Just go listen to this DJ set, it’s incredible.
****
That’s it! I’ll be back next week with the first mix of 2024, pending further Spotify playlist erosion. I have 1,000 fewer tracks in my pull this week than the average pull in 2023, but it also might just be a release date dead zone. Fingers crossed.
—Dave Moore (the other one)