Fluxblog #347: Black Beatles • K-Pop | Coldplay/BTS • Muna/Phoebe Bridgers • Arca • JPEGMAFIA
Plus the lads from __antiart__ talk about the best music of 2021
Two new playlists this week!
The first is BLACK BEATLES: R&B COVERS 1963-1972, in which The Beatles’ Black contemporaries interpret their songs often within months of the original recordings being released. This is one of my most popular playlists ever, and if you haven’t heard it yet I think there’s a good chance you or someone you know will love it. It features almost every major Black artist of the era – Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye, James Brown, Diana Ross and The Supremes, Tina Turner, Stevie Wonder, Bill Withers, Al Green, Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, Isaac Hayes, Smokey Robinson, Nina Simone, Ella Fitzgerald, and many many more. [Spotify | Apple Music | YouTube]
2021: THE YEAR K-POP BROKE is the first of my 2021 retrospectives, this one being a survey of what’s been going in K-Pop in a year when that music has become increasingly popular and vital on a world stage. This includes songs from all the major acts including BTS, Stray Kids, aespa, STAYC, LOONA, TWICE, Red Velvet, SHINee, ENHYPEN, and so much more. If you’re not really familiar with this music, this is a great place to jump in. [Spotify | Apple Music | YouTube]
This week’s Fluxpod features Ryan and Troy from __antiart__, a collective of music critics and shitposters on Instagram who I think are bringing back an energy I think has been missing from music media since the days of early Pitchfork and the mp3 blog era. We talk a bit about what they’ve been up to, and also about some of their favorite music from 2021. You can find the episode on all podcast platforms and the Fluxblog Patreon.
Never Ending Forever Baby
Coldplay featuring BTS “My Universe”
Coldplay has maintained commercial relevance for a very long time now, and a lot of that is because the band have worked very hard to maintain their position as one of the world’s most popular rock bands. But anyone can want to do that, the interesting thing about Coldplay is that as they’ve adapted to the whims of the pop market they’ve always sounded exactly like themselves. Some of this comes down to Chris Martin having a pleasant and immediately recognizable voice, but it’s more about how he is a nearly unrivaled expert in writing uplifting and romantic songs that make a listener feel like they’re living in a movie. There’s always going to be a space in pop culture for the sort of feelings Martin evokes, and as it turns out it works just as well in the context of ecstatic festival EDM as it did when they were working the U2 Junior lane.
Teaming up with BTS was a brilliant move both commercially, in that doing a song featuring the K-pop icons was basically a guaranteed hit, and artistically in that there probably is no Western rock band with an aesthetic that could fuse with BTS so seamlessly. “My Universe” is bright and bouncy and overflowing with a very earnest love. This song is the unashamed extreme of the nearly psychotic optimism and melodramatic movie romance that characterizes all their major works. BTS’ presence intensifies the wholesomeness of the song, balancing out Martin’s middle aged corniness with a more youthful guilelessness. It’s sorta miraculous for a song that’s essentially the merger of two powerful corporate brands to sound as devoid of cynicism as this does.
Buy it from Amazon.
Life’s So Fun
Muna featuring Phoebe Bridgers “Silk Chiffon”
“Silk Chiffon” has a hook so potent – “life’s so fun, life’s so fun, got my miniskirt and my rollerblades on” – that the rest of the song can’t help but feel like it was built around it like a delivery system for this nugget of pop perfection ideally suited to the TikTok era. And it’s not even the chorus! That part of the song brings the music to a cathartic moment but it isn’t quite as memorable, feeling more like a structural inevitability than the best part of the song. But beyond that one incredible hook “Silk Chiffon” has a very specific and recognizable late ‘90s mood, like Sixpence None the Richer or Paula Cole reconfigured into something proudly queer, but also openly neurotic. When Phoebe Bridgers shows up in the second verse of the song it’s almost like she’s going full self-parody as she announces “I’m high and feeling anxious inside the CVS.” It’s a line that’s just as much a knowing wink as it is something recognizably vulnerable and human, and it just makes her declaration of lust and infatuation more poignant. As the song moves along Muna and Bridgers double down on the sappy corniness, making you feel that this sort of goofy joy is very very hard won.
Buy it from Amazon.
Relevant Heaven Sent
Arca “Señorita”
“Señorita” is a brutal sort of mutated funk, a track that pulls from many genres but only really sounds like Arca. But like, a fully realized Arca – aggressively sexual and unapologetically self-mythologizing, more song-y than ever while unafraid to throw in a truly abrasive noise break in the middle of a club song. The bulk of the track reminds me of two things that were hot around the same time that I would’ve never thought to conflate – the caustic and clanging electro-punk of Mutsumi, and the staccato rapping style of Missy Elliott.
Buy it from Amazon.
JPEGMAFIA “What Kinda Rappin’ Is This?”
JPEGMAFIA has said that he became a rapper because no one wanted to rap on the tracks he built and “What Kinda Rappin’ Is This” is a very good example of a composition which I would imagine as being perplexing to even fairly adventurous vocalists. Like, opening with nearly a minute of a zonked-out drone with chords that seem to slowly stumble through the haze? And then some loop that feels like it belongs on an Animal Collective recording? Once a beat comes in it’s still disorienting, with waves of R&B vocals often blasting over his rap. He’s basically doing a rap equivalent to what Kevin Shields was doing with rock three decades ago – take a familiar genre and flip it inside out so that interesting tones and textures that would fill out a song are pushed into the foreground.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
I wrote about the penultimate issue of Jonathan Hickman’s big X-Men story this week, but for the love of god do not click on this unless you already read it because I immediately give away a major reveal not just for this issue but the whole dang mega-story.
LINKS LINKS LINKS LINKS LINKS LINKS
• Stereogum got Carl Newman of The New Pornographers to talk about the origins of every song on Mass Romantic.
• Vulture, as if trying to please me specifically, has an interview with Griffin Dunne entirely about his role in After Hours, one of my favorite films of all time.
• Rob Sheffield wrote a lovely tribute to the music critic Greg Tate, who passed away this week.
• You wanted financial advice from Courtney Love, right?