Fluxblog 514: 💕I couldn't ask for another💞
Plus new songs by Eddie Chacon, Jennie, and Oklou
Happy Valentine’s Day! I don’t have a playlist for you this week, but I’d like to share an old post from the archives about one of the best crush songs ever written…
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.
I Was Blind On My Own
Eddie Chacon “If I Ever Let You Go”
“If I Ever Let You Go” has a highly stylized arrangement – incredibly wet reverb on the percussion, somewhat warbling effects on the vocal, a relatively dry primary keyboard that sounds like moonlight. It’s a little disorienting, but absolutely gorgeous. It’s essentially a romantic ballad about gratitude, of understanding how good you’ve got it and hoping you never screw it up. The first half of the chorus is “if I ever let you go…,” a hypothetical he immediately shoots down in the following line: “I will never let you go.” He repeats it a few times over towards the end, as the music drifts off into a woozy psychedelic haze. The song ends feeling a little unsettled and elliptical, but it needs to do that to honor the sentiment. He’s facing the future, looking off to the unknown, and making a vow.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
Single Double Triple Back
Jennie featuring Dominic Fike “Love Hangover”
This is not a cover of the Diana Ross classic, but rather a new song with pretty much the opposite sentiment. For Ross, a love hangover is the result of overwhelming passion and she doesn’t want a cure. For Jennie and Dominic Fike, it’s a flimsy explanation for hooking up repeatedly despite seeming to actively dislike each other. It’s another pop tune for the Age of Situationships, and as bubbly as the chorus gets, there’s a lot of cynicism at the core of this song.
But don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a dark or depressing song. The tone is closer to a modern rom-com, and their volatile relationship is played for laughs rather than drama. In rom-com logic, this is just a tumultuous stage before they inevitably truly see one another and fall in love. There’s nothing like that in this song, but the light tone suggests that’s a likely outcome. Maybe it’s not that cynical?
One more thing: There’s a recurring mini-hook in Jennie’s first verse that goes “Who sent you? Who sent you? Who sent you?” It’s melodically interesting, slowing down slightly after a few lines that seem to bounce around frenetically off the beat. But there’s something so funny to me about that line – it doesn’t quite fit in context, and comes off kinda bug-eyed and paranoid. It reminds me a bit of the old Deborah Cox R&B hit with the (unintentionally?) hilarious chorus hook “how did you get here? / nobody’s supposed to be here.”
Buy it from Amazon.
My Little AV Disaster
Oklou “Thank You for Recording”
“Thank You for Recording” is alluring but perplexing, a song that sounds like it’s either hundreds of years old or from a hundred years into the future. It certainly shows me the limits of my own musical knowledge, as I can’t place any of the classical influences here on a timeline, but I can tell you that Oklou’s conservatory background and grounding in modern electronic production–aided by PC Music’s A.G. Cook on this track–has rather uncanny results. The more buzzy and clanging electronic elements are obviously jarring in proximity to the more delicate and Boroque elements of the song, but I think choosing to use a synth flute rather than an actual flute does more to make this track feel so strange and beautiful. It could be a choice made out of practicality, but the just-slightly-off quality of the sound removes any trace of “authenticity” and earthiness, and complements lyrics in which Oklou sings about getting out of her head and calming herself by watching footage of a tornado. (I think that’s what’s going on, anyway?)
Buy it from Bandcamp.
LINKS LINKS LINKS LINKS
• Tom Breihan wrote about Kendrick Lamar’s excellent Super Bowl halftime performance, and the ongoing humiliation of Drake for Stereogum.
• Can Drake come back from the Kendrick beef, and the resulting measurable decline in his popularity? Check out Nicole Tremaglio’s recent presentation about Drake’s proven knack for reinvention at the 2024 Sixposium. As she says: “Don’t cry because Drake is over, smile because it happened and will likely happen again.”
Look, I can’t tell you I haven’t been thrilled for months on end to watch Drake finally crash and burn. I can’t get enough of it, to be honest with you. But if I was giving Drake advice, I’d tell him to transition into acting in action movies. I think that’s the best path available to him going forward.
• I recommend checking out the back half of Marc Maron’s interview of Ariana Grande, where she gets to excitedly talk about the details of how she works in the studio and gets into her artistic philosophy a bit. Have you ever seen footage of Ariana working in the studio, by the way? She’s posted some clips on YouTube and it’s incredible to see her work out detailed vocal arrangements on the fly with an engineer.