Fluxblog 511: 2010s GOD TIER
Plus old songs by The Beach Boys, Spice Girls, Kylie Minogue, Sophie B. Hawkins, Juliana Hatfield, and Elvis Costello
2010s GOD TIER is a playlist I made for my own use at the end of the last decade that has done pretty well on Spotify over the years despite not getting the standard promo push I put behind new playlists since that became a central part of this operation. This means it never got cross-posted to Apple and YouTube…until now. As the title suggests, this is a long playlist of my personal favorite songs from the previous decade. It’s almost exclusively music that I wrote about at some point on Fluxblog, and I basically made it by pulling my top favorites from all my survey playlists from this period. It’s nothing but perfect bangers as far as I’m concerned!
[Spotify | Apple Music | YouTube]
I wrote about an old song by The Beach Boys that was somehow totally new to me earlier this week and have decided it would be better to send it out with some other posts about older songs rather than put it in the context of posts about random new songs. I realized recently that I don’t make enough use of my vast back catalog, and realistically most people have either never read or would not remember posts from 5-15 years ago, so I should highlight the better ones now and then. I hope you like them!
January 20th, 2025 6:21pm
The Beach Was The Place To Go
The Beach Boys “Do It Again”
“Do It Again” is a Beach Boys single from 1968, at the tail end of the most critically celebrated and commercially successful period of the act’s career. I’ve never gone too deep on The Beach Boys, so even in spite of it being a modest hit that appears on a lot of their greatest hits compilations, I never heard it before a few weeks ago. I encountered it while listening to a recent episode of Andrew Hickey’s A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, and the experience of hearing it for the first time was a little profound. It’s not just that “Do It Again” is a great song, but that it feels like a Beach Boys song made to my exact specifications. I have no idea how I avoided this song for so long, but finding it now felt like a miraculous little gift.
“Do It Again” is essentially the result of a post-Pet Sounds/“Good Vibrations” studio wizard version of The Beach Boys self-consciously trying to reconnect with the carefree surf music that was their bread and butter in the first phase of their career. It’s basically the best of both worlds – simple, innocent joy rendered a little bit strange by studio experimentation. (Check out the severe delay effect on the drums!) It’s everything I like about The Beach Boys compressed into a little over 2 minutes – unusual sounds, sweet harmonies, earnest happiness tinged with vague melancholy.
Mike Love’s lyrics are extremely direct and openly nostalgic for aimless days spent at the beach with beautiful girls. I don’t think Love had anything to say besides “Remember how fun that was? Let’s get back together and do it again.” But even if he sounds optimistic, there’s a sense in the music that it may not be so easy to get back, and that recreating happy moments from the past isn’t as satisfying as just finding new happy moments.
The song feels more poignant now, nearly 60 years after its initial release. Sure, people still hang out on the beach in California and there’s plenty of surfers, but Love’s utopian vision of the Southern California coast is particular to the mid 20th century. It’s post-war boom time USA, not too far out from the cultural creation of the teenager. It’s a vision of California as the promised land, a triumphant paradise at the end of Manifest Destiny. It’s kids goofing off at the edge of the continent, looking to the horizon and expecting even more. I think if I could have experienced something like that – a triumph you can feel but don’t think too deeply about to consciously understand – I would only dream of getting back to it too.
Buy it from Amazon.
August 26th, 2018 11:32pm
Will This Deja Vu Never End
Spice Girls “Say You’ll Be There”
The Spice Girls spent the majority of their debut album singing songs about negotiating the terms of relationships and assertively stating what they did and did not want out of love. It’s remarkably mature stuff in retrospect – music for teens about setting boundaries, asking for what you need, emphasizing consent, and expecting emotional reciprocity. “Say You’ll Be There,” their best single, is about attempting to gracefully transition from friendship to romance. The lyrics are plain and direct, but respectful of the audience’s intelligence. You can certainly nitpick about whether or not their commodified “girl power” was Good Feminism, but I think in terms of presenting pop songs about love, they were Good Role Models. If only we could all be as forthright and sensible about relationships as the Spice Girls were in the mid 90s.
“Say You’ll Be There” is the sort of pop song that sounds relatively normal until you pay attention and notice it’s actually a little odd. The melodies are rooted in the glossy UK pop of its time, but its groove is heavily indebted to Dr. Dre and P-Funk. There’s a harmonica solo that sounds like someone doing a pretty good job of mimicking Stevie Wonder in the ’70s, and while it’s a major highlight of the song, it’s hard to fathom how it ended up in the arrangement. The pre-chorus has an elegant feel to it, but it slams into a proper chorus that sounds like it was deliberately designed so large groups of drunk women would eventually sing it together at bars.
There’s a bit of glittery disco glamour in the mix, but it’s nearly neutralized by how much the Spice Girls sound like a bunch of silly kids rather than the sort of bold, sassy women who fronted songs in the disco era. Those songs were aspirational, but the Spice Girls’ funk is highly accessible. Everyone’s invited to dance at their club, and they want you to sing along. And maybe when you sing along, you might just internalize some good ideas about love.
Buy it from Amazon.
2/18/19
From Wrong To Right
Kylie Minogue “Love At First Sight”
My two favorite Kylie Minogue songs are about finding a profound connection with someone via music. In “Love At First Sight,” it’s falling in love with the taste of a DJ. In “Sweet Music” it’s about the intimacy of collaborating with someone on creating music. I’ve felt different ways about this sort of thing through my life – around the time these songs came out, this was the dream. Then I went through a long phase of thinking this sort of thing was actually sort of shallow. Then I found out that from experience that was actually very false, and now bonding over a deep love of art feels incredibly important to me again, something I would never want to live without. It’s the least superficial thing, really – it’s shared values and aesthetics, it’s emotional resonance and soul.
“Love At First Sight” doesn’t need lyrics to get across this feeling. It’s built to convey a feeling of sudden clarity, and joy washing over you as complications seem to completely disappear from your mind. It’s like this simple emotional arithmetic where everything adds up to YOU no matter how you run the numbers. The best part of the song dramatizes two beautiful moments in sequence – that dawning realization, and the euphoria of KNOWING and FEELING it all. They replay it a few times as part of a standard pop structure, and just getting to feel a special moment a few times over right there reminds you of how wonderful pop music can be.
Buy it from Amazon.
1/9/19
You’re The Only Shoe That Fits
Sophie B. Hawkins “Damn, I Wish I Was Your Lover”
“Damn, I Wish Your Lover” is the ultimate example of how if your big chorus hook is easy to relate to, you can say absolutely bonkers nonsense in the verses and most people won’t notice or care. And like, it’s not the actual premise of the song that is particularly weird – Sophie B. Hawkins is singing about pining for a woman trapped in an abusive relationship – but that she articulates this with colorful, mind-boggling phrases like “I give you something sweet each time you come inside my jungle book.” This is not a complaint, by the way! I think it’s better for songs to embrace strange language. It’s usually more musical, and songs with odd turns of phrase tend to stick out in your head more than a song with bland, prosaic lyrics. It’s a big part of popular music. There’s a certain thrill in paying attention to a song and going “WTF? Come inside her jungle book??”
But again, the verses aren’t really what you’re here for. This song is an expertly crafted chorus delivery system, and anyone who has ever experienced the feeling of lust can click into Hawkins belting out the title phrase. At some points in the song she swaps out “damn” for a wholesome, demure “shucks!” and that sort of dorkiness only makes the song more resonant. It’s unguarded, it’s sweet, it’s self-effacing. There’s no pride in this song, just someone laying it all on the line and owning a desire they figure is entirely futile. But the feeling is there, and it’s got to be expressed somehow or she’ll lose her mind. There’s a desperation here too, as if by writing and singing this song, it’s a last ditch attempt to push this feeling from unrequited to reciprocated. She wants to be a hero to this woman and get her out of a bad situation, but it’s more like she’s hoping she can rescue her from loneliness and humiliation.
Buy it from Amazon.
9/4/18
Beauty Can Be Sad
Juliana Hatfield “Universal Heart-Beat”
“Universal Heart-Beat” has an extremely bright and perky sound, like if music could somehow be made out of Starbursts and Skittles. The overwhelming sweetness of the sound barely masks the bitterness of the lyrics, in which Juliana Hatfield argues that love is entirely inseparable from pain. “A heart that hurts is a heart that works!” she sings cheerfully in the chorus, which feels like early ’80s aerobics pop filtered through crunchy mid-’90s alt-rock chords. It all sounds very fun, and that’s half her point: The high highs and the low lows are an emotional rollercoaster ride, and if you get over your anxiety and just go along with it, it’s a total rush. The bad parts don’t even seem so bad in retrospect – she comes across as rather nostalgic when she recalls the more humbling and pathetic moments. Better than feeling numb, right? That’s just boring.
Buy it from Amazon.
July 6th, 2011 1:00am
Charged With Insults And Flattery
Elvis Costello “Beyond Belief”
The lyrics of “Beyond Belief” undoubtedly rank among the finest ever penned for a rock song; Costello’s words are so finely chosen and edited that a novel’s worth of character and nuance gracefully unfold in just over a couple minutes. It’s a miracle of lyrical economy and precision. I’ve been obsessing over this song for a few weeks, replaying it incessantly and alternately dissecting lines and taking in the seedy, desperate ambiance of the music.
Costello’s pick-up artist is bereft of soul but he’s not a shallow caricature – more than anything, he seems bored senseless by the empty ritual of his predatory routine. The intensity of his self-loathing has totally soured whatever pleasure he gets from scoring with these women. The pick-up is equally ruthless and half-hearted; he’s distracted during the actual sex act.
One of the most stunning aspects of Costello’s composition is that when the sex arrives in this narrative, the pace suddenly picks up and the sound builds to a brief, frantic peak. In a clever turn, all of the singer’s metaphors contain vaginal imagery – fault lines, vaults, canals. But he’s so lost in his angst and self-awareness that he seems even more alone. His voice changes in this section: more pinched, more hollow. The treble in the arrangement surges and then climaxes: “I come to you beyond belief.” Climax, come. You get the idea.
The song shifts back into its primary mode. It’s like snapping back into reality. After that night’s “Alice” is discarded, the character takes in the scene for a moment before getting sucked back into his head. The chorus finally comes at the end and repeats into fade-out, suggesting an endless loop. That’s when you get a sense of consequence. This time the phrase “beyond belief” takes a slightly different meaning: “Once this seemed so appealing, now I am beyond belief.” It could be the low moment that inspires him to change. Or he could just loop back to the start: “History repeats the old conceits.”
Buy it from Amazon.
LINKS LINKS LINKS LINKS
• This recent half-hour stand up performance by Josh Johnson about the fallout of the Drake vs Kendrick Lamar beef and Drake’s reasoning for pursuing legal action is very funny, but it’s also the best piece of cultural criticism on this topic I’ve encountered, and veers into actual music journalism territory. Really fantastic stuff.
• Jacqueline Codiga wrote a really long and thoughtful piece about Ethel Cain’s new album Perverts.
• Andy Greene investigated the grim final years of power pop titan Eric Carmen for Rolling Stone. Even if you don’t know who that is, I’d bet you know his song “All By Myself.”
• I enjoyed Stephen Thomas Erlewine’s review of Frank Black’s Teenager of the Year anniversary reissue for Pitchfork. It makes me happy to see this record get canonized, I think it includes a lot of his best songs with or without the Pixies.