Fluxblog 421: here's your perfect chill party playlist
Plus classic songs by Janet Jackson, Steely Dan, Deee-lite and Aerosmith.
This week’s playlist is PLACE SERIES #7: INSTANT CHILL LOW KEY PARTY, a vibey and eclectic mix for dinner parties, cocktail parties, backyard parties, bar and restaurant atmosphere, whatever. This is one of my favorite playlists I’ve made, I find it immensely listenable for just walking around. If you end up using this one for a gathering of some kind and it goes over well, let me know! [Spotify | Apple | YouTube]
I appeared on an episode of Pop Pantheon this week with Molly Mary O’Brien and regular host DJ Louie XIV to discuss Lady Gaga’s Chromatica. This is a Patreon exclusive episode, but you can find a 12 minute preview on Spotify, Apple, etc.
Also, thank you to Dana Stevens and Julia Turner for recommending my playlists in the endorsements segment of this week’s Slate Culture Gabfest!
I needed a break from writing this week so there’s no new song posts, but here are a few old posts about classic songs from the archives that I like a lot.
July 15th, 2018 4:34pm
We Had To Prove Them Wrong
Janet Jackson “Love Would Never Do (Without You)”
Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis’ songs are typically highly dynamic, with mostly percussive elements shifting around to give the melody maximum emotional impact. In the case of their work on Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814, it’s like drawing several underlines beneath the hooks. There’s a softness in Janet’s voice, but the music explodes with great force. As expressive as her voice is, she’s always understating the feeling relative to the intensity of the keyboards and drum hits.
“Love Will Never Do (Without You)” is even more dynamic than usual because it was initially written as a duet with a man – they wanted Prince, then thought maybe they could get Ralph Tresvant, but nothing really worked out. So Jackson sings the first verse in a much lower register than usual, which greatly exaggerates her range within the track. This works to the advantage of the song, which starts out rather joyful but keeps escalating into dizzying ecstasy as it moves along.
The lyrics follow the sound of it, with the lowest vocal part at the start approaching the love between Janet and her partner in analytical terms but by the time she’s up in the giddy stratospheres, she’s nearly at a loss for words. (“No other love around has quite the same…ooh ooh!”) But as extraordinarily joyous as this song gets, the words are grounded and reasonable. The love in “Love Would Never Do” is not unrealistic – there’s work to be done, there’s conflicts and temptations, there’s a need to prove the doubters wrong. The loveliest and most romantic line in the song is so simple and direct: “I feel better when I have you near me.” If this song is doing anything, it’s just trying to capture that specific everyday happiness.
Buy it from Amazon.
2/24/16
Screen Out The Sorrow
Steely Dan “Black Cow”
Music is an abstract medium, but “Black Cow” sounds unmistakably like midtown Manhattan, or at least a somewhat romantic notion of it. There’s just something in the sway of it, the architecture of the chords, the way the tones evoke chrome, neon, and concrete. It insinuates classiness and grime in equal measures. It just matches.
The lyrics of “Black Cow” are firmly rooted in Manhattan, and are just as vivid as the sounds. Donald Fagen’s character in this song is a put-upon guy who’s trying to get out of a toxic relationship with some party girl with ambiguous addictions and a lot of other dudes on the side. Or so he says – Fagen’s men are unreliable narrators, and I think we should take it as a given that this dude is insecure and upset. The song is asking you to give him the benefit of the doubt, so let’s just roll with that.
Fagen’s lyrics draw a lot out of his characters with only a few careful details. The song starts out with the guy noticing her at Rudy’s, a dive bar in Hell’s Kitchen that actually still exists. She’s high again, and he’s disappointed in her, but he quickly ends up back at her place, where his issues with her are right there on the counter – her little black book, and her “remedies.” I think he’s jealous, sure, but I think the main frustration comes out later in the song: “I’m the one who must make everything right / talk it out till daylight.” He’s exhausted by having to take care of her, and the benefits of that – the sex, really – isn’t the draw that it used to be.
In the chorus, he takes her to a diner and breaks up with her, admitting that he doesn’t care anymore why she’s doing any of this. He’s not angry, just tired and bored. I like that there’s so little contempt for the woman in this song – the worst you get is just weary condescension. I get the impression that even if he thinks she’s being weak or self-destructive, he respects her and kinda wishes he was like her. The whole song is like that shrug older people have to do around the youngish: “Yeah, that all sounds like fun, but I’ve got to be responsible and go to work.” He knows it’s time to call it off when the vicarious thrill of being around a hot young train wreck is gone.
Buy it from Amazon.
7/23/18
Your Groove I Do Deeply Dig
Deee-Lite “Groove Is In the Heart”
“Groove Is In The Heart” was released in the summer of 1990, in the middle of a three–year period in which music culture was transitioning between the aesthetics of the 1980s and what would become the 1990s. This phase of music history is fascinating to me because it has an aesthetic unto itself – creatively ambitious as artists and labels attempted to envision a fresh pop future, colorful and glossy, generally upbeat and optimistic in tone, and gleefully eclectic in its embrace of hip-hop, house music, and retro kitsch.
If you imagine all of that as a Venn diagram, “Groove Is In The Heart” is at the center. The track is one of the finest sample-based compositions of all time, with at least a dozen samples weaved into a seamless, ecstatic pop tune. Super DJ Dmitry’s craft is impeccable – he borrows a few grooves outright, but the bulk of the sampling is piecing together flourishes from small moments of disparate recordings. This is masterful audio collage on par with the best of the Bomb Squad, the Dust Brothers, and Prince Paul, and something that would be prohibitively expensive to create and release today. It’s an art form almost entirely snuffed out by commerce.
As glorious as Dmitry’s track gets, this song is still all about Lady Miss Kier. Her style, confidence, and enthusiasm is so strong that it’s nearly overpowering, and you don’t need to actually see her to understand that you’re listening to the coolest, foxiest woman in the universe. (But it certainly does not hurt to look! These videos are astonishing.)
“Groove Is In the Heart” is one of the world’s greatest crush songs. The music has a generous and playful tone, and conveys the euphoric rush of infatuation but without a trace of anxiety or melodrama. I love the way Kier expresses a deep appreciation for the person she’s addressing – she sounds so excited about them, and so inspired by their presence. (I love the phrase “your groove I do deeply dig!” so much. All I really want is someone who deeply digs my groove.) She gets silly, she gets sassy, she gets funky. The way she sings “I couldn’t ask for another!” is thrilling, and easily one of the most deliriously joyful bits of any song in pop history. The best part of this is that her bliss is contagious, and this song is one of the most effective ways humans have ever devised to induce crushed-out feelings.
Buy it from Amazon.
7/26/21
The Toss Of The Dice
Aerosmith “What It Takes”
Steven Tyler doesn’t ever come across like a loser in his songs, even when he’s singing from the position of a guy who’s been dumped and can’t figure out how to move on in “What It Takes.” He’s always the cool guy, the sexed-up fun guy, the guy who’s rough around the edges but always has a high status. He’s a rock star and he’s always got a party, and he’s always inviting you to come along. His problem in “What It Takes” is not so much that he’s been dumped but that this happens so rarely to him that he doesn’t even know how to process it. He’s so used to being on the other end of the dynamic that not getting what he wants is somewhat alien to him. This could be kinda gross, but it’s not – the arrangement is rooted in blues but it’s played in a bright major key, and while Tyler sings with feeling he’s also giving us his usual razzle dazzle, so it’s more hammy and theatrical than genuinely melancholy. It’s more like he’s indulging in the idea of sadness than spiraling into actual despair. Maybe it’s supposed to be that thing of “let’s acknowledge this feeling, honor it, and move on.”
“What It Takes” is from Pump, the hugely popular follow-up to Aerosmith’s comeback album Permanent Vacation. That record re-established the band as hitmakers with the help of outside songwriters Jim Vallance and Desmond Child and while the soppy power ballad “Angel” has a touch of desperation to it, the band mostly just sounded like a brighter version of themselves with major late ‘80s studio gloss. Aerosmith fit in well with the hair metal party rockers of that era but the music was more complementary than similar, and the songs on Pump in particular have a high degree of ambition and sophistication that it’s easy to forget when the most memorable bits are just big dumb rock n’ roll. “What It Takes” is exceedingly warm and rich, a gloriously decorated dessert of a song that would have quite good but far less remarkable with a more standard rock arrangement, and possibly very bad with a more maudlin and earnest power ballad arrangement.
“Love In An Elevator” is a good example of studio excess of Pump working in Aerosmith’s favor. It’s a swaggering rock song about fucking on the job that starts with the line “workin’ like a dog for the boss man” and even attempts a winking double entendre on the word “fax.” It’s a song with some sledgehammer hooks, a dirty riff, and a Penthouse Letters lyrical conceit, and you really could just stop right there and you’d probably have a hit. But they just keep upping the ante, piling on harmonies and pushing the song higher until you get to the point where they basically decide to turn this horny himbo anthem into their “A Day In the Life.” It’s musically satisfying but also totally absurd, it makes the joke of the song funnier but also presents Tyler as someone who is horny on like, a cosmic or mythological level. I don’t know if anyone can relate to this or even if it’s necessarily aspirational, it’s more like listening to this is communing with some kind of raunchy godhead.
Buy it from Amazon.
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* Rob Harvilla brought Songs That Explain The 90s back for a new season with his biggest episode ever – it’s about Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” and features a 90 minute interview with Courtney Love. It’s a must-listen!
• Rob Sheffield wrote about The Cure on the occasion of their big North American tour launching this week.
• Alvvays went on the Tape Op podcast to talk about recording their truly excellent album Blue Rev, my favorite bit being when Molly said that “Pressed” was deliberately written to have Smiths-style verses and an R.E.M.-style chorus. They nailed it.
Fantastic issue.