Fluxblog 479: shakedown 1979
Plus new songs by Pond, Omar Apollo, and Hiatus Kaiyote
This week’s playlist is THIS WAS SUMMER 1979, featuring the popular music on the air, in stores, and on the streets in the final summer of the 70s. This is the world I was born into, and the vibes were immaculate!
✔️ top quality funk and disco
✔️ the pinnacle of power pop?
✔️ punk and new wave
✔️ "yacht rock"
✔️ hard rock songs that'll make you go "oh yeah forgot about that one, nice"
✔️ lots of classics across the board
[Spotify | Apple Music | YouTube]
I’m on the new episode of Pop Pantheon! I was a guest along with journalists Zach Schonfeld and Emily Stewart for a panel discussion about why a lot of big artists are having a hard time selling tickets for big shows this year. I go into a lot of detail here, but my feeling is that a lot of artists who are struggling are either at an awkward and ice cold point of their career they just have to ride out, or they simply don’t have a reputation for being a strong live act and people aren’t taking a risk on them when the ticket prices etc are only getting higher.
You can listen to Pop Pantheon on all the podcast platforms. I strongly suggest becoming a subscriber!
A Habit, A Predilection
Pond “So Lo”
“So Lo” presents as a swaggering and groovy funk rock song. And it is, so long as you don’t pay too much attention to the lyrics, which undermine the slick guy attitude by making it clear this is a fake-it-til-you-make-it situation for a guy who must invent “endless tides of fiction” to rationalize feeling or looking like a cool dude. It’s played as cheeky comedy from the opening line – “white dreads get my blood pumping, these tummy tablets got me breaking in two” – but the song is so fun and well-constructed that it’s easy to take it at face value musically. And speaking of, I really wish I had the technical knowledge to figure out why this sounds so incredibly mid-00s to me. It’s something about the tone, the particular palette, the way it’s mixed? Still getting used to hearing stuff that sounds retro 00s, but that’s just how it goes.
Buy it from Amazon.
So Tired Of Climbing
Omar Apollo “Drifting”
If you listen to “Drifting” closely you’ll hear a church organ. It’s very quiet in the mix, dialed down so low that you pick up the vibe and sense the chord changes, but without actively noticing it. It’s this ghost of a song hovering the background while a brighter, more circular keyboard part, the jog-in-place drums, and a few layers of vocals take up all the foreground. Omar Apollo’s vocal is the center of attention here – a very soft and sensitive masculinity, hot with emotion but cool and composed in his delivery. Teo Halm, the song’s producer and co-writer, also sings a harmony vocal – a little more uptight and “indie” in its intonation, but still lovely in its contrast with Apollo’s more angelic and graceful performance.
Buy it from Amazon.
Keep It Handsome
Hiatus Kaiyote “Love Heart Cheat Code”
Hiatus Kaiyote approach R&B with a lot of curiosity, often seeming as though their goal is to break up the standard components of the music and put the parts back together in unusual ways just to see if they can arrive at a new sort of feeling. That description would lead you to imagine a very studied and stiff band, but the songs all have a heart-on-sleeve warmth and the performances feel guided by intuition. They’re also fairly silly? Nai Palm’s vocal performance on “Love Heart Cheat Code” is earnestly sensual, but her lyrics are very playful and often seem like references to little romantic in-jokes. It’s a song about the value of leading with love in life broadly, but you really hear undiluted affection come through in her voice on those goofier lines, like “in there like swimwear” or the repeated refrain of “keep it handsome.”
Buy it from Amazon.
LINKS LINKS LINKS LINKS
• Nick Sylvester wrote about getting back to DJing again and has a really interesting observation about Charli XCX’s Brat material that draws on his deep knowledge of modern pop production:
Charli XCX and the Sound of Club-Not-Clubs. There is a difference between records made to perform well inside a club and records that are made to sound like they are a record being played inside a club. Charli XCX’s album is firmly in the latter category. None of these records, with maybe the faint exception of “Von Dutch”, have the kind of clarity of arrangement, the macro-dynamics, and focused low-end that I associate with a “competitive” dance record. In a word, there’s just too much shit happening – too much information. I also believe that’s what makes this album so special: It performs the smashed, smeared sensory overload of experiencing a loud dance record MP3 in a small club.
This probably explains why I never got much traction as a DJ despite doing it many times – a lot of my taste in pop production, particularly in my 20s when I did this more often, tends to be very busy.
• While on the topic of Charli XCX, Grace Robins-Somerville posted the first in a series of “Brat diaries” this week. As she puts it, this one is about “the abject humiliation of wanting success despite not being able to define what success would even mean to you and the thin line between self-awareness and self absorption.”
• Everyone Knows That: The Search For Ulterior Motives is a documentary podcast that’s right now halfway through its five episode run telling the story of how people from all over the internet attempted to identify a song. It’s interesting to listen to this already knowing the answer to the question – you get to hear some people be more correct than they realize, and others be wrong with absolute confidence.
thank you for the s/o matthew! (also i know i would have loved your Dj sets—just pick the right room!)