Fluxblog 397: Fiona Apple • Rauw Alejandro • JVKE
Plus a playlist of Christmas classics by jazz greats of the mid 20th century
This week’s playlist is JAZZY CHRISTMAS, BABY, a selection of Christmas classics performed by jazz greats from the mid 20th century including Bill Evans, Duke Ellington, Herbie Hancock, Ella Fitzgerald, McCoy Tyner, Dave Brubeck, Ramsey Lewis, and Vince Guaraldi. It’s perfect background music for your chill holiday gathering! [Spotify | Apple | YouTube]
This newsletter is free, but the work that goes into making Fluxblog and the playlists and the podcast etc takes up a lot of my time. I don’t like pestering people into signing up for the Patreon or doing one-time donations on Ko-Fi, but I will say that right now would be an excellent time to do this as I’m in very precarious economic situation as I’m still in the market for a new full time job. Your donations are always appreciated, but I can say for sure that right now they’re more appreciated than ever.
Too Shaky To Hold
Fiona Apple “Paper Bag”
Fiona Apple repeats the chorus of “Paper Bag” three times at the end of the song, each time with significantly different phrasing that maintains the shape of the melody but changes all the emotional emphasis. I doubt she’s ever sung this song the same way twice – she’s the kind of singer who really lives in the moment of any song she’s singing, and that presence in the moment makes all the little instinctive decisions captured in this studio recording all the more precious. She takes on a conversational tone through the verses in large part to sell the ironic humor in the lyrics, but by the time she’s running through these choruses she’s mostly riding the wave of the melody and arrangement, or in some moments ducking it or moving to the side of it. She speeds up, she slows down, she builds to little crescendos but climaxes by delivering the most crucial line as an understated and conspiratorial aside – “but starving…it works.”
“Paper Bag” is a song about having an unrequited crush and knowing in the moment that the person who’s taking up so much space in your mind is a mythologized and romanticized figure who’s only partly the actual person who exists in the world. She’s in love with a story she’s telling herself, and part of that story is in the failure to connect, the distance between them, the inevitability of this not becoming anything real. She gets the drama and excitement of the feeling, but none of the risk of being vulnerable with someone else. You could call it self-sabotage, but she knows what she’s doing and everything is going according to plan. This a lot of why the song feels light and comedic – she’s in on the joke, and knows that the joke is on her.
Buy it from Amazon.
No Lo Puedo Borrar, Baby
Rauw Alejandro “Dime Quién???”
I think when people look back on the early part of this decade one of the key sounds that will spark nostalgia will be this driving, ambiguously melancholy quasi-synthpop style that manifested in mega-hits like The Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights,” Harry Styles’ “As It Was,” The Kid Laroi and Justin Bieber’s “Stay,” and Rauw Alejandro’s “Todo de Ti.” The latter is the most interesting of the bunch, mainly because Alejandro grounds this vibe in reggaeton aesthetics and arrived at a mutant sound that was genuinely unique. “Dime Quién???,” from his new follow up record, goes even deeper into this sound, though it’s structurally and tonally closer to actual ‘80s synthpop. You lose maybe 20% of the novelty of “Todo de Ti” but the trade off is a high level of focused craft. This is an absolute nuke of a pop song, it’s the kind of tune that makes you yield to its charms, its emotional gravity, its hooks, its sheer momentum. It’s sung entirely in Spanish but even before checking for an English translation I was picking up on its romantic angst loud and clear. You can just feel this guy’s jealousy and yearning in that chorus, the specifics of it – which involve BeReal, a thing that will really ground this in 2022 for all eternity – are besides the point.
Buy it from Amazon.
It Sounds Super Cliché
JVKE “This Is What Falling In Love Feels Like”
What does falling in love feel like? According to JVKE it’s like a little bit of melodramatic strings, some major key twinkly piano, and a lot of big blasts of distorted keyboard chords that sound like the affirmative version of a WRONG buzzer on a game show. The melodies is “This Is What Falling In Love Feels Like” fall into a pleasant middle ground between musical theater aesthetics and extremely vague hip-hop adjacent cadences of modern pop, and it’s all packed into a tight two minutes like most music that comes up on social media platforms now. I would not have a problem with this song going on another minute or so but the jingle-ish brevity suits it well, particularly as falling in love can often be a rather fleeting moment.
Buy it from Amazon.
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• Josh Gondelman is always a delight but I particularly liked his pep talk for Mariah Carey in the new edition of his newsletter this week.
• Tumblr has released its annual set of lists of its users favorite things in pop culture, and as usual it’s a fascinating mix of exactly what you’d expect from Tumblr people plus a ton of weird curveballs.