Fluxblog 482: all the nights she's known
Plus new songs by Caribou, Father John Misty, and Artemas.
This week’s playlist is ALL THE NIGHTS SHE'S KNOWN, a 90 minute soundtrack style mix with songs mostly from the 1970s. The vibe is suave, stylish, sexy, dramatic, and just a bit silly. I imagine something like a romantic farce set in Los Angeles in the mid 70s.
[Spotify | Apple Music | YouTube]
You Know How It Feels
Caribou “Volume”
I remember hearing M|A|R|R|S’ “Pump Up the Volume” as a kid, usually in passing on the radio or on television. I had very little context for it but understood that it was extremely cool and futuristic, and everything about it was strange and magical and mysterious that stood apart from anything else I knew up to that point in the late 80s. It was like turning the dial on the radio and receiving a musical message from another world.
Caribou’s Dan Snaith is about the same age as me, and had the same experience. He says it was his first experience with electronic music, and I suppose that’s probably true for me as well, depending on how you’d define “electronic music” in an era when almost everything on the radio had was built around drum machines and synthesizers. “Pump Up the Volume” was essentially a dense collage of samples, rooted in the more ambitious end of hip-hop production in that era but with a different vibe altogether. Hip-hop was unmistakably connected to Black urban life in America, but “Pump Up the Volume” was less specific – it sounded like everywhere on the planet all at once, or like a scramble of radio signals from Earth getting mixed in deep space.
Snaith’s rework of “Pump Up the Volume” focuses on one of the song’s most memorable parts, which I can’t confidently identify – a loop of a marimba, or a keyboard on a marimba setting? It’s the part in the song that establishes you’ve entered the song’s odd atmosphere, and after establishing the base tone Snaith immediately starts warping it to create his own little alien world. He retains the “pump up the volume” vocal sample, so it basically comes across as a remix up until around 90 seconds in when a female vocal part enters the mix and it starts to sound like a dance pop song transposed with the M|A|R|R|S composition. I’m not sure whether that pop song is Snaith’s own original material or not, but it doesn’t really matter – the thing that matters is that it’s building on the sense that “Pump Up the Volume” is built to absorb sounds, and Snaith understood that he couldn’t just stop at altering the music. He had to make an offering, something to keep the song’s fire burning.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
See also:
PUMP UP THE VOLUME: SAMPLES, SCRATCHES, ACID, HOUSE 1987-1990
[Spotify | Apple Music]
After A Millennia Of Good Times
Father John Misty “I Guess Time Just Makes Fools of Us All”
I saw Father John Misty perform an early version of “I Guess Time Just Makes Fools of Us All” back in 2019 so I know it wasn’t written with the purpose of appearing on his greatest hits album. But regardless, it’s very appropriate for that utility. I mean, even setting aside the joke in the 8th verse about “doing my greatest hits” in Las Vegas, it comes across as a commentary on his career to date. And this being Father John Misty that commentary goes heavy on weary cynicism and bitter irony, and the best jokes are all at his expense. The sound of the track is full-on 70s show biz razzle dazzle – a little disco, a little country, a little Rolling Thunder Revue – and while it’s delivered with a fairly aggressive wink, he didn’t half-ass anything about the arrangement. He’s so totally committed to the bit that it stops being a bit at all. He can’t help but make jokes and be clever, but he’s dead serious about the despair at the heart of this song and so many others he’s written through the years.
Buy it from Amazon.
The Coldest Stars I’ve Ever Seen
Artemas “You’ve Been A Bad Girl”
“You’ve Been A Bad Girl” sounds like the Venn diagram overlap of The Weeknd and Tame Impala’s aesthetics, which makes a lot of sense since I imagine a lot of young guys today grew up steeped in both artists’ catalogs. The vibe merger sacrifices some of Tame’s chillness and tamps down The Weeknd’s malevolent sex vampire energy, but results in a dynamic pop song that evades easy categorization. Artemas’ lyrics hit a lot of the same buttons as The Weeknd’s – straight guy bedeviled by a hot woman he’s obsessed with – but it’s a little more down to earth. He’s portraying himself as a victim here – “you’ve been a bad girl, I’ve been in therapy picking up the pieces of all the things you said to me” – but only so much, since he’s comparing her to drugs and begging her to “meet me in the bathroom, come get high with me” on the bridge.
Buy it from Amazon.
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LINKS LINKS LINKS LINKS
• Molly O’Brien wrote a good piece pushing back on the moronic and incurious notion that people should only listen to music of their own cohort in their youth.
• Amanda Mull wrote an article for Bloomberg about how chain stores locking up large portions of their inventory to prevent theft has backfired, since most people don’t want to deal with this sort of hassle. I still can't understand how loss prevention freaks managed to make the heads of these companies totally forget how capitalism works - who is selling the plexiglass cases, who is gaining from making big box stores bleed money like this? It just seems like they’re getting played.