Fluxblog Weekly #208: Lizzo, Jade Bird, Men I Trust, Chrysta Bell
April 22nd, 2019
Mirror Mirror On The Wall
One of the reasons BuzzFeed has been extremely successful over the past decade comes down to focusing on the utility of content, particularly in how sharing a list, quiz, news article, essay, or video can express someone’s identity or start a conversation with friends and family. This was the basis of editorial philosophy before I started working there in 2012, and more recently was codified into something that was referred to internally as “cultural cartography.” The cultural cartography system existed both to catalog the utilities of pieces of content as well as encourage creators to fully consider what the potential use of their work could be before they even started making anything.
This is the essence of viral content – the work that succeeds on the grandest scale does so because it has clear objective utility. If you’re chasing this, you learn to make yourself useful. In social media, people are always looking for ways to talk about themselves or thorny personal issues in a way that softens it slightly through humor and allows a bit of distance in that the person sharing is understood not to be the author. Quizzes in particular thrive on giving readers results that allow them to share a boast with a shield of irony and plausible deniability – oh, it’s just a silly quiz!
Once you start seeing this pattern in people’s behavior it’s hard not to notice it in everything that becomes popular. It’s the key to really connecting with an audience, and when this is done organically, it’s fabulous. But it’s also something that can result in outrageously crass content, and somehow becomes more cringeworthy when it’s done with very good intentions. There’s not much room for ambiguity or abstraction in this – the work that will resonate most deeply is an emphatic statement of self and everything runs on a generalized sort of specificity intended to create relatable moments. Everything is crafted to invite you to go “it me!” and then share it with other people as either “I am ____” or “we are ____.”
Pop songs have worked in this mode forever, and the music with real staying power is typically the stuff with the most utility. The songs that end up being most heavily licensed to television, film, and advertisements are nearly always the ones that either offer a lyrical declaration that overtly states something in the narrative or has a mood that signals particular contextual connotations. Music is a tool in these things, it’s all a shorthand that uses the strengths of one art form to in many cases compensate for the flaws of another.
This bleeds into how people make playlists in the era of iPods and streaming. People will make playlists for specific moods, for specific settings, for specific sentiments, or seek out pre-existing playlists with these utilities on Spotify and Apple Music. Utility is a large part of how anyone engages with music, and the emergence of platforms with observable data and potential for virality – as well as a commercial dependence on the money that comes from licensing – has pushed many people in the music industry to approach creating songs with the same “cultural cartography” goals as anyone making content for BuzzFeed.
So, Lizzo. Lizzo is a perfect example of an artist who is thriving on creating content about identity that is highly relatable and has a clear objective utility in playlists and licensing. The odds are very good that your first exposure to Lizzo’s music was in a television show or movie, or failing that, a video or song that came your way when someone shared it to your feed. Maybe it was served to you algorithmically on YouTube or in an automated “discovery” playlist. Lizzo’s music is perfectly engineered for all of this, to the point that it can seem like it’s already gone through extensive A/B testing and optimization. It’s glossy and immediately accessible, but signals some degree of authenticity and soulfulness. It’s aggressively sincere and every song is clearly about a particular statement or relatable situation. It’s all geared towards feelings of empowerment, and given how many ads, shows, and movies want to sell that feeling, her songs are extremely effective and valuable, especially since up until recently she was not famous and thus not weighed down in the cultural baggage of celebrity. (If you used a Beyoncé or Rihanna song instead, your “girl boss” moment would in some way become about Beyoncé or Rihanna rather than your characters.)
I can’t hear Lizzo’s music without recognizing her cultural cartography savvy. A lot of music can achieve these goals without contrivance, often just as a natural side effect of an artist intuitively making resonant work, but Lizzo’s songs all sound very calculated to me. This is not such a bad thing – her skill in expressing herself in relatable ways is a major talent, and I’ve worked with many people who have this natural skill and hold them in very high regard. (I’m much better at telling people who they are rather than asking you to identify with who I am.) Lizzo has a good voice, and her songs range from “pretty good” to “undeniable banger” but I have mixed feelings about all of it because I know the game being played rather well, and because I’m uncomfortable with this self-consciously audience-pleasing approach to content creation becoming the primary mode of pop culture. I appreciate the value of empowering art – and as someone who has spent his entire adult life as a fat man, I am particularly sympathetic to Lizzo’s fat-positivity – but fear mainstream culture further devolving into nothing but shallow exclamations of self-affirmation. We’re more than halfway there already, especially when you factor in YouTube.
This music makes me want to rebel against it. I never ask that any music be “for me” – I prefer art to offer a window into other lives and ways of thinking – but Lizzo’s songs are often so transparent in their intended use as a way for square, insecure people to feel empowered and cool that I can’t help but hear it and think “but I don’t actually want or need this!” She reminds me a lot of Macklemore, whose big hits “Same Love” and “Thrift Shop” had a similar quasi-cool accessibility and cultural cartography value at the time. In both cases, making fun of them feels cheap and churlish, or like a sideways attack on fat women, LGBT rights, or uh, value shopping. But for me, it’s really just developing an allergy. I hear too much of music like this, or see too many shows and movies that are obviously designed with cultural cartography in mind, and I just run screaming back towards artsy ambiguity.
April 23rd, 2019
Do You Wanna Be Happy With Me?
Jade Bird “Side Effects”
“Side Effects” feels both loose and impatient, like someone who is anxiously waiting for the opportunity to let go and relax. Jade Bird sings from the perspective of someone who is eager for her relationship to kick into a new gear – the feelings part is sorted out, so what about actually going through with it? She sings with some traces of doubt in her voice, but with an absolute certainty about her need to move on to the next stage, and to get the hell out of wherever they are. Bird’s melodies are simple but lovely, and the song has a quick but graceful pace that makes it feel like you’re finally gliding down the highway once the chorus kicks in. She really makes you feel her freedom there.
Buy it from Amazon.
April 25th, 2019
I’ll Be Your Candle
Men I Trust “Numb”
“Numb” has a warm, comfortable feeling but a lightly melancholy vibe, like being stuck in an easy, pleasurable situation. The smooth chords and gentle groove frame a soft, low-key vocal melody sung by Emma Proulx that conveys a lot of nagging guilt – most of the lines she sings are apologetic, but it doesn’t even seem like she’s done much of anything wrong. She mostly just sounds like she’s scared of upsetting a precarious balance, and wrecking a very delicate situation. The mood of the song may suggest a dubious comfort zone, but she surely does not want to leave it.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
April 26th, 2019
Looking For Mystery
Chrysta Bell “Do You Think You Could Love Me?”
“Do You Think You Could Love Me,” perhaps deliberately, sounds a self-consciously dark and moody cover of an ’80s pop song that never was – an imaginary hit Olivia Newton-John, Irene Cara, or Taylor Dayne just never got around to making. The craft is strong, but the commitment to aesthetic is even stronger. Chrysta Bell is a frequent collaborator of David Lynch, and though he was not involved in this song his influence is very apparent. The effect is basically that whatever sexual intensity that would have been in the song regardless is run through a Lynchian filter of grim ambiguity – there’s a suggestion of fucked-up subtext that shifts the possible meaning of every line, so Bell’s motives are always difficult to read. What does she actually want? Is it exactly what she says, or is she toying with the person she’s addressing? It makes you feel like you need to know the answer.
Buy it from Amazon.