Fluxblog 589: 💖Y2K Pop 4ever💗
Plus new music by Memorials, Lime Garden, and PVA
This issue’s playlist is 💖Y2K POP 1999-2002💗, which I made in collaboration with Nicole Tremaglio of Nicstalgia. It’s part of a sequence of playlists I’ve been making outlining the history of pop-as-genre, as opposed to pop as catch-all term of any music that’s popular.
My earlier playlist The Origin Of Pop-As-Genre 1976-1996 sketched out the gradual evolution of pop as a distinct genre, deliberately cutting off just before the cultural moment featured in this new playlist, in which pop emerges fully as its own subculture with widely understood tropes and conventions.
As Nicole puts it:
By the turn of the century, pop is no longer derivative of another genre, but has unambiguously become a genre itself: ABBA was disco, but the A*Teens were pop.
“Y2K” has become a very vague term for aesthetics, music, and culture for an increasingly broad time period, so we wanted to hone in particularly on the turn of the century. 1999-2002 marked the explosion of Max Martin-esque Swedish production that would continue to define the genre throughout the 21st century. Record execs knew they struck gold with Britney Spears, and they wanted to recreate that extraordinarily lucrative circumstance as many times as humanly possible. I particularly live and breathe for the dramatic drum machines and the “wah wah wah” sound I can only describe as an onomatopoeia. It really does feel like a sugar rush.
While catchy, upbeat music marketed to kids and teens first peaked in the 60s – bubblegum pop, sunshine pop, etc. – it certainly came back in full force in the 90s (see: Groovival, my all-time favorite aesthetic). The difference here was that the sheer amount of products being sold had vastly increased. There weren’t just two boy bands, there were like, ten. (I love BSB and *NSYNC, but the fact that these insanely valuable and beloved cultural products were created as a front for a massive Ponzi scheme is the most American thing I’ve ever heard.) If Britney was a singular pop princess, there were at least 20 copycats. The upside to this is that we could experience a broader world and become invested in artists beyond the biggest stars.
This playlist features many of the major stars of this period (Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, *NSYNC, Backstreet Boys), regional superstars (Kylie Minogue, Robbie Williams, Billie Piper, S Club 7, B*Witched, M2M), and adjacent emerging pop stars (Jennifer Lopez, Avril Lavigne, Michelle Branch, Nelly Furtado). But the heart and soul of this story are the smaller artists who never quite made it – Eden’s Crush, Mikaila, Hoku, and the other musicians featured on this bag Nicole made, which was my initial inspiration for making this set.
🩷 Spotify
💖 Apple
💗 YouTube
Please note that the YouTube version features music videos for nearly every song in the mix!
PREVIOUSLY
Nothing Is Exactly As It Feels
Memorials “Cut Glass Hammer”
Memorials is a duo fronted by Verity Susman, who was a central player in Electrelane back in the 2000s. Memorials has a different dynamic than Electrelane – more streamlined arrangements, a little jazzier in a David Axelrod way here and there – but there’s a lot of overlap in aesthetic, to the point that this could just be labeled new Electrelane material and no one would blink. Susman’s prim vocal tone and dry affect is unmistakable, and the post-Stereolab droning vintage organ/high momentum groove combo on “Cut Glass Hammer” has always been in her wheelhouse. Susman and drummer Matthew Simms aren’t breaking new ground here, but they’re expert craftspeople when it comes to this lane of buzzing English psychedelic music. They’ll make you feel every dynamic shift in your gut as though you’re strapped to the hood of their speeding vehicle.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
Watch Me Decompose While Striking A Pose
Lime Garden “23”
There’s a lot of humility in the lyrics of “23,” but it’s coming from a place of having been humiliated more than any sort of innate virtue. Chloe Howard sings about feeling like she’s not made any material progress in life, and identifies moments in her past when she fumbled opportunities. This could easily be a miserable song but the tone is fairly bright and funky, and her vocal signals an even balance of snarky cynicism and low-key optimism that something might eventually work out. The arrangement feels very mid to late 00s indie to me – very clean tones, casually groovy in a post-DFA way, slinky but a little silly. It’s a great match for the lyrical sentiment, but maybe that’s just me connecting one bleak recession era to another.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
PVA “Peel”
What exactly is going on in this song? “Peel” doesn’t lay out a clear narrative, but if you add up all the evocative details you get something along the lines of a somewhat hostile erotic fantasy about remaking the body of an “awful stranger” by manually reshaping and removing their flesh. Is it sexual, is it violent? Sure, but I think the main thing here is the expression of an artistic impulse. “I create, I create, I create,” Ella Harris sings in a seductive half-whisper over pulsing keyboards. She’s pulling you in, making it all sound like a good idea, possibly even a very good time.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE
I went to see There There, an extremely accurate and ambitious Radiohead cover band, perform at Racket in Manhattan. These guys were not sticking to the easy stuff – they faithfully recreated key songs like “Idioteque,” “Everything In Its Right Place,” and “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi,” and absolutely nailed difficult numbers like “Bloom,” “Myxomatosis,” “Ful Stop,” and “Videotape.” I recommend checking them out if you ever get the opportunity.
LINKS LINKS
• David Peisner revisited the unusual discography of Talk Talk at the New York Times.
• Joel Gouveia on why the music industry keeps expecting music that thrives on algorithmic quirks to translate into artists with solid fanbases.
The tote is unbelievable
I physically can’t stop listening to this playlist, best collab ever 💕💗💖💞💓💘💝🩷