Fluxblog Weekly #174: Ariana Grande, Mitski, Echo & The Bunnymen, The New Pornographers, Brandy
Here's a week of songs about crushes and/or the concept of fate. I hope you like it!
August 23rd, 2018
How’s Life?
Ariana Grande “Sweetener”
Pop albums take time to make, while pop star relationships tend to burn bright and fast. As a result, it’s easy to approach Ariana Grande’s new album Sweetener as a collection of songs about her intense romance with the comedian Pete Davidson. (There is, of course, a song on the record called “Pete Davidson.”) But many of these songs have been in the works for some time, and “Sweetener” in particular apparently dates back to 2016 when Grande was still involved with Mac Miller. (A lyrical tip-off is the entire verse about enjoying getting head from this lover, and Miller is a guy who proudly rapped “I just eat pussy, other people need food” in his album-length tribute to Grande, The Divine Feminine.)
Fun fact, right? Cool trivia. But I think this context is valuable in understanding where Grande is coming from as a person and as an artist. This is a woman who had her heart set on singing songs that conveyed a joyful, lustful love, regardless of what relationship she was in. She’s chasing a feeling, and trying to capture it in sound, and she absolutely nails it when she works with Pharrell Williams. Williams, one of the great geniuses of modern pop R&B, has an instinctive understanding of what chords and melodies flatter Grande’s voice and persona that most of her other collaborators have lacked. His chord structures float and sparkle around her voice, which is at once bold and sweetly delicate, like Mariah Carey in her youth. The songs sound light and dreamy, like she’s just levitating in a haze of infatuation.
This is the state of mind she wants to be in, like, all the time. Blissful, horny, and removed from stress and the horrors of the world. And whomst among us does not want this? Look at this gif of Ariana Grande and Pete Davidson from earlier this week. Who doesn’t want to feel like Ariana in this moment? Who doesn’t want to have someone look at them the way she looks at Davidson? This is an ideal state!
The idea driving all of this – her life, her songs – is that this is a choice. You have to want it, to chase it, to bring it into your life and cherish it. This is a woman who recently endured a horrific trauma, and made a decision to throw herself into love. She made a record about love rather than the hate and murder and cruelty she witnessed firsthand. She’s singing about her experience, but offering the best advice she can give to anyone else struggling: Find love, embrace love, hold on to it. You need that sweetener.
Buy it from Amazon.
August 23rd, 2018
Paint It Over
Mitski “Why Didn’t You Stop Me?”
Mitski’s voice is a stumbling block for me. Her compositions, especially on her new record Be the Cowboy, are bold and expressive, and her lyrics are sharp and emotion. Her voice, however, is pleasant but oddly lacking in affect. She undersells every line in a way that makes it hard for me to tell whether she’s being deadpan or emotionally reserved. I’m inclined to believe “Why Didn’t You Stop Me?” is more the former, and we’re meant to take find her indecisive and low-key selfish lyrics to be darkly humorous, probably at her own expense. Her composition, particularly the dramatic keyboard hook and lead guitar parts, carry the emotion of the song and indicate emotional stakes far greater than her vocal would imply. It’s certainly interesting to me to contrast that bombast with a vocal approach that presents a rather distant and cerebral take on raw feelings, but the result is a song I admire far more than I connect with it.
Buy it from Amazon.
August 18th, 2018
Fate Up Against Your Will
Echo and the Bunnymen “The Killing Moon”
I have spent a lot of time trying to parse who “me,” “you,” & “him” are in “The Killing Moon.” Is this a love triangle? A cuck fantasy? A love song about two men? Three men? Is the singer always a passive character, or does he switch perspective when active – another self that he’s alienated from? Is “him”…God? Is “him”…death?
Ian McCulloch deliberately wrote “The Killing Moon” to be ambiguous. That’s a lot of why it’s so powerful and timeless – a lot of songs invite you to make it your own with interpretation, but McCulloch’s lyrics are so vivid and intense that they seem to be telling you something very important that you must decode. It’s like he’s offering a key to something inside of you: What are you afraid of? What turns you on? Who do you want? Who do you want, but resist? What do you feel is unavoidable?
“The Killing Moon” is a song about desire and inevitability, and how desire can create a situation that is more or less inevitable, and how desire can also resist inevitability. There is romance in either scenario. The lust in this song is so strong – it’s repressed to a large extent, but the gothic romance atmosphere of the music gives it away. It’s sexy, but incredibly gloomy and bleak in tone. McCulloch is singing about a maddening desire, something so mind-bending that every kiss is cosmic in scale. He sings it all with a weary desperation.
So, is their love the inevitable thing, predetermined by fate? Or does his lust invariably lead to madness or humiliation? Is heartbreak inescapable? Is he doomed to never consummate this love? All of that and more seems plausible to me. Anything is possible in “The Killing Moon,” because it is stuck indefinitely in the moment before resolution. Something feels destined, but you don’t know what it is. You hope for the best, you fear the worst. You wait for the moment, and then you let go of your pride and submit to it. You give yourself to it.
Buy it from Amazon.
August 19th, 2018
The Best Wishes On Both Ends Extended
The New Pornographers “We End Up Together”
“We End Up Together” came out eight years ago, and ever since I periodically come back to it to obsess over the implication of the title phrase. In the context of the music, it’s played like this triumph of inevitability, a celebration of abandoning free will. But I know enough that this song is in some way about Carl Newman and his wife, so I think it’s meant to be sort of tender? “We end up together” surely would come across as unambiguously romantic in other contexts, but as dramatic as this song gets it never conveys that sort of feeling. It’s mostly pensive and melancholy until the bombast kicks in, and even that part feels a bit cold and distant. The chorus is an expression of distracted confusion: “You looked like you were saying something.” This song is very lost in its head.
This isn’t a song about a relationship so much as it’s about everything that leads up to the relationship – generations of family history, social and cultural context, the damage of living and loving and searching until you finally find someone to settle down with. “We End Up Together” seems to come from the perspective of the moment just after the deal is sealed and the story finally becomes clear. All of this, everything, was leading to this thing that now seems, in retrospect, to be destiny: We end up together.
Buy it from Amazon.
August 22nd, 2018
I Have But One Concern
Brandy “Sittin’ Up In My Room”
Babyface was in his mid 30s when he wrote “Sittin’ Up In My Room.” It’s vaguely surprising to learn that he wrote it entirely on his own because the vibe and sentiment of the song is so purely “teenage girl” – I’ve always felt a little like I’m trespassing in some girl’s room and reading her diary when I hear it. But I suppose it doesn’t take all that much imagination to picture a girl sitting in her room mooning over a crush, and to channel her thoughts and feelings. Especially when the truth is the feeling of the song is fairly universal and it’s just the setting that is specific. A crush is essentially the same at any age.
I love the little tells in the lyrics that show this song was in fact written by a guy in his mid 30s. “I must confess” is a pretty standard line, but here it’s built out of a legal conceit. There’s talk of “investing” in her happiness. The language gets a little formal in cute ways – “I have but one concern, how can I get with you?” Brandy makes it all sound so light and breezy, and the casual funkiness of the track goes down so smoothly that I never noticed any of this for 20 years. She exudes warmth and sweetness in this song, the crush is so pure and good-hearted. It’s not a problem aside from not knowing how it will turn out, and that concern taking over her mind. It’s stressful and emotionally taxing, but it’s fun to have this in your head. It opens you up to happy possibilities! It feels exciting! She was probably very bored while sitting up in her room before this crush came along.
Buy it from Amazon.