Fluxblog #304: Pop Strikes Back 08-11 / Anchorsong • Tor • Lia Ices
Plus lots of stuff from old issues of Spin, Champagne Sharks on the podcast, and Rebecca Black
This week’s playlist is Pop Strikes Back 2008-2011, which covers a revolution in pop at the dawn of the 2010s in which Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Kesha, and Katy Perry all hit the big time. It’s almost all mega-hits, mostly no-thoughts-head-empty Obama-era bangers. It feels like a long time ago now. [Apple / Spotify]
This week’s episode of Fluxpod features Trevor Beaulieu of Champagne Sharks, one of my favorite podcasts. This is pretty much a freeform conversation that gets into a lot of different topics – media, comics, blogging, aging with music, record stores, SPIN magazine in the ‘90s, how bad Gen X can be about wokeness, forgettable 2000s rock bands, Eminem's music aging badly, etc. You can find it all the pod places and on the Fluxblog Patreon. If you subscribe to that you can also hear the most recent premium episode featuring the journalist Abraham Riesman, author of the new Stan Lee biography True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee.
I just acquired most of the issues of Spin from 1989 and 1993, and I’ve been sharing highlights from the magazines in my Instagram stories (and archived highlights) on the main Fluxblog account and the best photos on my vintage magazine account 20thCenturyRocks.
I’ve also shared some good stuff on my Twitter, including some lists that I turned into Spotify playlists.
Here’s a Spotify playlist I made from Spin’s 100 Greatest Singles of All Time from April of 1989, which is a very intriguing attempt at canon-making that was a direct response to Rolling Stone’s more predictable lists from the same year. It’s hard to imagine now, but this sort of list making wasn’t tremendously common before this point.
I also made a Spotify playlist out of the Top 100 Songs Of Our Time list determined by responses to Spin’s 1993 readers poll. It is a… fascinating snapshot of a moment in time.
Some more highlights…
Here are this week’s regular Fluxblog posts…
February 9th, 2021
It’s OK To Kill You
Anchorsong “Tunis Dream”
Anchorsong’s previous records were abstractions rooted in specific places, compositions that were meant to evoke a location in the way that a perfumer designs a scent so you can extrapolate a whole experience from small sensual details. “Tunis Dream” suits the current moment – with world travel off the table, Masaaki Yoshida has turned to evoking that same sense of place from his imagination. As he puts it, this song not meant to represent Tunisia so much as a Tunisia in his mind, and while the difference between him going for “realism” or something more impressionistic is mostly on his side of the music, the track does have a more loose and dreamy quality to it.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
Tor “Foxglove”
“Foxglove” has some bass-rattling busy-beat moments but the most memorable parts feel more like an uneventful equilibrium state before and after the more exciting bits. These sections pull me in mainly with the keyboard chords, which have a dazed rhythm similar to that of Radiohead’s “Everything In Its Right Place.” It gives me a very relaxed head-empty feeling, enough so that the threatening vocal sample just sort of washes over me.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
February 11th, 2021
Between The Evil And The Saint
Lia Ices “Hymn”
Lia Ices’ voice is slightly blurred by reverb in this song, like the audio equivalent of when your finger accidentally smudges the ink as you write with a pen – you can make out the words, but you have to look through that smear for the bolder forms beneath it. I don’t mean to give the impression that this is some sort of shoegaze thing, it’s very much a piano-based singer-songwriter sort of song, but this effect renders Ices’ vocal performance in a way that places all emphasis on the feeling in her tone and phrasing than in her words. It’s a good production decision, one that gives the song a bit of extra ambiance without making it too “vibey” and puts a focus on the raw sentimentality of the music rather than nudge the listener towards a more literal interpretation based on words. If anything the lyrics verify the feeling of the song, which I think anyone can intuit is about a deeply felt love that’s nevertheless tangled up in the complications of life.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
LINKS LINKS LINKS
• I wrote a little bit about Rebecca Black’s “Friday” for Ryan Broderick’s Garbage Day newsletter, which had an issue focused on that song to mark its 10th anniversary. It’s a great issue, but if you don’t want to click over here’s what I wrote:
• Here’s a critical essay in The Baffler by Tom Sexton of the Trillbilly Workers Party show that examines the way Dolly Parton has deliberately made herself a figure with very nebulous politics that nevertheless inspires people to claim her as a representative of their worldview – “various readings of her altruism have cast her as everything from a “Notorious RBG”-style liberal to Commandant Dolly—ready to foment a communist peasant rebellion from her humble cabin in Locust Ridge, Tennessee.”
Finally got around to this playlist and it's unsurprisingly one of my favorites. Pop just went nuts during this era. 2012 is definitely the right cutoff, not because pop got worse in 2013 but things changed a lot with Lorde and also the trap influence on Miley and Beyonce's records and Dark Horse etc. The other boundary is a bit hazier for me. You could easily just say it starts with Gaga and leave it at 2008. What about dipping into late 2007 for Blackout though? Talk about a record that was ahead of its time, Gimme More would fit seamlessly on this mix.
And agreed on Friday, always liked it, especially the second verse you mention with those countermelodies. I do miss the rap verse though.