Fluxblog 423: bubblegum drum and bass! high bpm bops!
Plus new songs by Jam City, Genesis Owusu, and Locate S,1
This week’s playlist is BUBBLEGUM DRUM & BASS: HIGH BPM BOPS 2021-PRESENT, spotlighting my favorite thing happening in pop music right now. The majority of these songs from the past 12 months, this is very much a moment in progress. Almost all of these acts are from the UK, and many of the artists are connected as part of the emerging Loud LDN collective. If you are an old school drum and bass fan, this should make you very happy, but if you just like really fun up-tempo pop you’re going to find a lot to love here. [Spotify | Apple | YouTube]
Thanks to Alex Pappademas and Rob Harvilla for talking about my recent The 90s Sophisticate playlist on this week’s episode of 60 Songs That Explain the 90s in their discussion of Beck and his cultural context. Alex talks about how my playlists have this way of telling people “this is who you are, even if you didn’t realize it,” which is funny to me because I myself never really connected these projects to my old quiz work at BuzzFeed, but there it is.
Also, I highly recommend Alex and Joan LeMay’s Quantum Criminals, an amazing new book about Steely Dan in which he writes about their body of work with an emphasis on the many odd characters in their lyrics, and LeMay paints gorgeous images of them all.
I greatly appreciate it when people let other people know about Fluxblog and the playlists. There’s no machine pushing any of this stuff into people’s lives, it circulates entirely by word of mouth and every bit of potential exposure is amazing whether it’s done on a popular podcast or you just forwarding this newsletter to someone else. I’m not trying to keep all this stuff a secret.
Two Heartbeats Beating Way Too Loud
Jam City featuring Empress Of “Wild N Sweet”
“Wild N Sweet” is a bop. It’s a major glorious summertime bop, and I need to tell you that right away because it would be dumb to bury that lede and risk you skimming over the point. Jam City’s arrangement doesn’t reinvent the EDM pop wheel but the craft level is very high, carefully calibrating its joyous energy so every part of it feels like candy, but the peak of the sugar rush of the drop doesn’t come til over two minutes into it. Empress Of’s vocal is pretty sweet too, initially coming off kinda innocent but as the song moves along it’s more like very earnest horniness. The lyrics are basically about hooking up with someone you barely know and feeling extremely alive in the moment, but also feeling a bit of tension as you don’t really know how discrete they want to be. She repeats “can you keep a promise?” several times through the song, but it’s not some anxious thing ruining the fun. She sounds optimistic and trusting more than anything else.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
Big Smile As The Flames Approaching
Genesis Owusu “Leaving the Light”
“Leaving the Light” sounds like a grandchild to Time Zone’s “World Destruction,” a cousin to Death Grips’ “I’ve Seen Footage,” and a nephew to at least five great TV on the Radio songs. It’s a very particular merging of punk and early rap aesthetics, a forceful and aggressive rhythmic attack that makes the music sound very athletic, as though you should be grunting “UGH!!!” at the end of each measure. Genesis Owusu has covered similar ground before, notably on a song last year called “Get Inspired,” and it’s a great use of his voice, particularly when he adds a touch of sly wit to the blunt impact of rhythmic shouting. I love the lyrical angle on this one – Owusu is on the run from God Himself, and he’s not willing to slow down or give in. Truly, if you’re going to write a song where you sound like the Hulk about to tear a skyscraper down for fun, why not make your opponent God?
Buy it from Amazon.
Now That The Story Is Over
Locate S,1 “You Were Right About One Thing”
“You Were Right About One Thing” is a 70s-style country rock ballad, but it’s not some off-the-rack pastiche. Christina Schneider tailors the sound precisely, bending it into the distinctive shape of a Locate S,1 song – slightly jagged rhythms, interesting meter choices, and lyrics that approach very emotional subjects with some post-modern distance without diluting the sentiment with heavy irony. This sound works really well for her, I think in part because it’s so immediately pleasing to the ear that it smooths out some of her more contrary impulses as a writer. It’s also just a lovely setting for her voice, which is typically pretty high and sits comfortably with all the treble in the arrangement.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
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• Jason Farago’s review of the comedian Hannah Gadsby’s Brooklyn Museum exhibit It’s Pablo-matic for the New York Times is very sharp and seems like the start of a sea change in critical writing. Farago is pretty ruthless in panning what sounds like a truly horrendous and cringe-inducing show, but I think the real meat of this is in showing a lot of rhetorical moves that have dominated discourse over the past ten years or so now seeming shallow or useless now that it’s all been so fully metabolized by corporations. This isn’t some anti-woke thing, this isn’t about acting as though social justice is bullshit. It’s more about how we need to move ahead with new rhetorical strategies since so many that have been leaned on for years have become cliche or fully co-opted by disingenuous people.
• Miranda Reinert’s essay about, in her words, “the difference between wanting to love artists who reflect your values and expecting public figures to conform to the morals you've projected onto them” is on a similar wavelength. Taylor Swift fans losing their minds over her dating The 1975’s dipshit frontman is the topic, but it’s really about a bigger thing that’s dominated cultural conversations that really needs to either get phased out or move to a more mature rhetorical stage by now.
I'm glad you liked the Steely Dan book! When I heard we were publishing it I definitely thought of you.