jackals. jackals everywhere

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blood on the tracks is fifty (sort of)

trying to do consciously what I used to do unconsciously

Jonathan Cott: Why is [Blood on the Tracks] so intense?

Bob Dylan: Because there’s physical blood in the soul, and flesh and blood are portraying it to you. Will power. Will power is what makes it intense… not anything to do with the past, or the future.

Bob Dylan is a genius – this is about as indisputable as the fact that he’s Jewish, or a bad harmonica player. ‘Genius’ is even more quicksilver than ‘talent’, implying profound artistic capability attained neither via ten thousand hours, nor some prodigious spark. Genius can only be measured by the end result, and even then defies measurement – a brilliance so severe and undeniable it bleeds through borders. Genius is guided there by vision alone, and is sometimes underscored by the sheer defiant recklessness of its methods, the “how did you do that?” at its end. Few have summitted the zeitgeist as sloppily as Bob Dylan; few have summitted the zeitgeist at all.

Hell, type “zeitgeist definition” into the search bar – the example sentence refers to “the zeitgeist of the late 60s”, the climax of the decade which chaotically propelled our world into its current state of defective enlightenment. Dylan might be the most influential public figure of the ‘60s, the Zeliglike ghost in its screaming machines. He turned the folkies’ backward gaze forward and the Beats’ navel gaze outward, thrust countercultural battles to the top of the pops, singlehandedly shifted the Beatles’ attention to the possibilities of the medium they ruled, and burst the hippies’ bubble without leaving his basement.

The way Dylan’s verve, moxie, and intuition – his genius – transformed or simply cut through his limited facility had been noticed from the start. He couldn’t hit those notes as well as Caruso, though the claim that he could hold his breath three times as long felt truer with every drawn-out string of syllables. His voice could be as shrill and undisciplined as the screech of his harmonica, which he’d return to ravenously, like the next cigarette in the chain. Guitarwise, his rhythm was off, his dexterity nil. His chords were borrowed if not outright stolen. His lyrics had zero respect for meter, smushing the poetic into the primitive with all the care of gum smeared under a chair.

Yet he was the best – the best pop star, the best pop artist – and while nearly everyone followed, no one could match the sheer force of his idiosyncrasy. He was seen as messianic as early as 1964, and for the next two years, he twisted that into his own terms. In tossing off the mantle of cultural savior, he exposed his leftist folk colleagues’ elitist self-delusions while functionally democratizing rock and roll, turning it avant-garde again. He casually fused the two genres in the process, or at least invented the Byrds, who with others more or less instigated the psychedelic movement, which more or less led to the cultural mainstreaming of sex and drugs and the advent of rock music as we know it.

I can hear my culturehound friends cringing at these shorthands. But like James Brown, a lot can be traced back to the revolution of a single mind. That said, it was easier to be mythic in the ‘60s. The rich, sprawling landscape of the subsequent “art decade” was viewed as a comparative disappointment (until the following “commerce decade”). Thus, Dylan’s decision to stop everything in 1966, even if he technically didn’t, remains an easier episode to romanticize than his ingeniously executed return eight years later, the way 1966 is easier to romanticize in general than the much-maligned 1974. When the jester made the decision to foreshorten his restless farewell, he knew as usual which way the wind was blowing. The world was ready for a rhyme unthinkable the last time he’d appeared on stage.

Give or take Levon Helm, the Band (née Hawks) had withstood boos, jeers and the errant “Judas!” while setting fires behind their almost-fearless leader. With Dylan’s acidic sneer as its vicious apex, the music’s anarchic abandon presaged punk – a style that would spend the next several years underground. In the long season leading up to Dylan’s return, juggernauts like Yes and Led Zeppelin had not only invented arena-rock, the polar opposite of punk, but muscled it into the mainstream. The series of stadium gigs Dylan booked with the Band in 1974 pioneered the megalithic rock star stadium tour: gouge-away ticket prices, nosebleed seats, and a bizarre sense of distance. Dylan later spoke of that distance as something he felt to his core – “it just wasn’t a very passionate trip for any of us”.

But as has always been weirdly characteristic, he was distorting, underselling, or just plain missing his own achievement. For the first time, he was doing something he’s now insisted on doing for 50 years: he disrespected his own songbook, uncovering novel and riveting things in the process. Having smoked far more than he’d sang for the better part of a decade, all he could do now was blow a hurricane’s worth of wind through his ravaged larynx. This new force shot his greener early songs through with blood-red vitality. The Band found this contagious. Where they’d once made their name with a gently rolling brew of soul, country and folk(-rock), for many years their music had felt embalmed and directionless. They’d once been the soundtrack to all of late-‘60s America’s pastoral aspirations; now they sounded like they wanted to burn down the cornfield.

Yet again, Dylan had lucked himself into an artistic triumph. Even his weakest albums were coups. Self-Portrait and the corporate ripoff Dylan were bad enough to feel like events, and his very presence in Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid was a master class in bare-minimum geniusing (book a plum role in a Peckinpah flick without bothering to act; only write one real song for the soundtrack, and the song is “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”). And while scrappy half-measure Planet Waves – cut to sell something other than t-shirts on the tour – was two hundredths as effortful as Court and Spark (the Joni Mitchell masterpiece Dylan fell asleep to at the Asylum listening party), it was so personal in spots, it almost felt soulful.

The album and tour were widely lauded, a testament to how fervently the world had awaited his return. But sales for the former, and responses to the latter, had let Dylan down – all he’d found in the superstar supermarket were sour grapes. So of course, his next move was to take a painting class, before anyone who’d laid eyes on the Planet Waves cover could slip the suggestion into small talk. No one knows exactly how Norman Raeben awakened in his pupil the sudden ability “to do consciously what I had done unconsciously”. Dylan’s painting may not have improved, but he was about to fill a trio of notebooks with the most carefully constructed and emotionally attuned songs he would ever write.

Dylan was feeling raw that summer, for reasons the millions spinning Planet Waves could connect back to a sad-eyed longtime muse. Anti-love songs like “Dirge” and “Wedding Song” betrayed the curdling in the mothers’ milk of a marriage he’d once serenely celebrated. To cope with it, he’d taken up with a Columbia employee, Ellen Bernstein, falling in love on his way back to the label he’d just escaped. Cinematic and autumnal, introspective and so vulnerable, a magic array of new material mourned and celebrated these dueling loves. Before David Geffen could count his flock, Dylan was back in his old haunt A&R Studios on Columbia’s dime, ready to put it all to tape.

For all the authority he’s sustained since his unprecedented ascent, there’s always been a childlike quality to Bob Dylan. The juxtaposition of the callow perpetual adolescent with the wisdom beyond his years enriches his best work – same as the ragged beats and missed notes and fudged lyrics (“you angel you/you’re as – got me under your wing…”). Bashfully turning up with his guitar* at old fellow travelers’ doorsteps (Mike Bloomfield or Jerry Garcia or Shel Silverstein), he proceeded to pour out the gentlest, most robust music of his life – so poignant and unreserved, one could only tell it was him by its genius.

He'd nominally turned up for feedback. Yet the effect was like a tour of what he pulled on Donovan back in ’65 – he knew exactly what he had. But this time, he may have needed to show off to build a callus around his new material’s uncharacteristic intimacy. Dylan has long played half-assed games around conceding that Blood on the Tracks is autobiographical – the most telling remark being a rueful “it’s hard for me to relate to people enjoying that kind of pain” in an interview the April after its release. Yet those dodges aren’t entirely insincere. He proudly described the songs as having “no sense of time”; their assiduously carpentered allusions are the ethereal opposite of “Sara”’s clumsy, desperate literalism.

Monday, September 19th, 1974. Producer Phil Ramone concealed a pig-in-shit elation behind his taskmaster’s countenance, while Ellen Bernstein stood by to support (and time, with her giant stopwatch) epic ballads she’d informed from their inception. Sparse studio personnel did their best wallflower acts, ready for anecdotes they’d embellish over the rest of their lives. Having toiled and prepared almost more than ever, Dylan still felt unusually on the spot, in a studio where he’d already recorded more than one classic LP. But the first song he ran down – “If You See Her, Say Hello” – was so unbearably gorgeous, his performance so openhearted yet so shrewd, it might’ve been the greatest thing he’d ever played.

And though our separation, it pierced me to the heart She still lives inside of me; we’ve never been apart

Neither of the first two takes clearly bests the other – both are miracles. He’d never sung lines with such honest ache, such unimpeded connection to his own emotional state. He deploys the grit in his voice, and the memories threatening his tear ducts, with an actor’s sense of delivery and presence – you can’t imagine Dylan crying ever, but these recordings teeter on the precipice. Each syllable is so spontaneous and so in its place, you can’t tell what’s raw and what’s rehearsed. He then slips fluidly into “You’re a Big Girl Now”, the title not reflecting but commenting on his sexism; the lyric is one of his most gracious and empathetic. Alike in tuning and sentiment, the songs are a pair of wistful sisters.

It was just Dylan and his guitar. The ambience in the room, as heard on the takes released on More Blood, More Tracks (the only Bootleg Series entry since the first four that doesn’t hit like a robbery), negates the need for reverb. The palpable hush around the man and his songs is like another instrument. When Ramone punches in to praise the material, obviously awed, he’s taken the words right out of your mouth. Then come the first stabs at “A Simple Twist of Fate”. In the wake of the last two songs, the throbbing sense of loss is almost too much. Accordingly, Dylan begins to overdo his vocals, leaning too far into the tone he’s struck, skirting maudlin, while a few bluesy frills violate the mood.

The night is young, and the nervy auteur reemerges out of his uncommonly subdued sense of focus. He returns to “You’re a Big Girl Now” for a manful yet slightly overworked take, then tries out “Up to Me”, a less developed cousin of “Shelter from the Storm”. Its similarity to the latter probably sealed its fate as an outtake – same circular chords, practically the same melody landing on the repeated hook. But as with all the takes from this first session, there’s an elegiac, documentary quality to the version here; even the ungainly line about Crystal and Dupree fails to obscure its heartrending nakedness. It was all up to him, and he was up for it tonight.

It frightens me, the awful truth of how sweet life can be But she ain’t gonna make me move; I guess it must be up to me

And after that, an anomaly – the one track on Tracks you can’t mistake for the truth. Even taken as metaphor, “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts” is an oddity, as most of Blood’s songs are Dylan at his most unmasked. Especially given its unapologetic length, many have called it out as the album’s sore thumb – and everybody believes the LP has one (if only one, and never the same one). What’s remarkable about the lone complete take isn’t just that he doesn’t forget any lyrics, but how easily he blends this high-tension cowboy cosplay in with the rest of the album’s mournful tone.

No other artist valorized “on the fly” like Dylan; by now it was legend. After some of the most effective solo acoustic performances of his career, the solitude started to itch. The session had kicked off on Rosh Hashanah, and as such, musicians were in compromised supply. But at the last minute, Dylan was able to rope in his old Gaslight compadre Eric Weisberg (of “Dueling Banjos” infamy) and his crew of godless heathens, eye-rollingly dubbed Deliverance. They were promptly disheartened by Dylan’s disinterest in giving direction. Dylan’s inspiration is often matched by his impatience, and his taste for loose proceedings is due in part to precision being beyond his expertise. Deliverance was expected to deliver on the spot. It should have been a foregone conclusion – how could Bob Dylan’s reputation not have preceded him?

The result was an unlistenably slipshod set of takes, the sound of which puts the blame on the band. Yet the musicians had a right to their frustration, and it’s clear that the window to earn their slot was slim. The ricky-tick drums, all rim and hi-hat, and phased guitars licks would be smartly reappropriated for the released version of “You’re a Big Girl Now”. But it’s still awfully close to the most embalmed-sounding mid-‘70s studio-rock, and “A Simple Twist of Fate” and “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonseome When You Go” wither under the treatment. It yielded just one diamond – an amazing half-speed take of “Lonesome”. Though it threatens to fall to pieces at almost every stanza, it achieves a simmering torch-song feel that Dylan for some reason never felt the urge to revisit.

Finally meeting the attendant musicians halfway as the sessions crawled toward morning, the vexed artiste decided to play around a little. “Call Letter Blues” was never really a song, a raunchy repeated riff whose reason for existence remains the bitter couplet “the kids they cry for mother/I told them mother took a trip!”. In a matter of moments, it transforms into the laid-back, ginned-up “Meet Me in the Morning”, included as-is on the Blood on the Tracks we know, Dylan’s electrifying vocal forcefully singeing the top of his range. Here’s one number that justified the inefficiency of his dedication to spontaneity.

Still – it was clear by now that the group was ill-suited to the tenderness and complexity of the more writerly material Dylan had come to record. But as devil-may-care as his methods were, his ears were always attuned to fleeting strokes of luck. Before the session was over, Dylan pulled bassist Tony Brown aside to debut two new masterpieces – “Tangled Up in Blue”, the crown jewel of the entire set, and the notoriously vituperative “Idiot Wind”. Each was as winning at a somber temperature as they remain in their joyous full-band final versions. Singling out Brown’s knack for understated support was inspired – the musician offers the softest answers to songs full of restive questions.

So now I’m going back again – I’ve got to get to her somehow All the people we used to know, they’re an illusion to me now

Here was the sound he was after, and Brown found himself in the welcome if awkward position of being the only member of his band to have passed the audition. On the next night, with an album’s worth of breathtaking solo takes already in the can, Dylan used the studio time to explore gentle embellishments – to feel around for the sparest additions to songs that really never needed more than him and his guitar. Keyboardist Paul Griffin, who’d played on all three of Dylan’s middle-‘60s masterpieces, was brought in to provide swaths of spectral organ. None of it would make the final cut.

Nor would any of the astonishing takes from the prior night. Dylan would never again arrive at perfection so effortlessly, nor so doggedly (or neurotically) pursue something better. Before half the album was hastily replaced, the only track from the 16th was “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts”, and only because that song was never reattempted. In the wake of those controversial eleventh-hour moves, participants would surmise that the material’s atypical self-exposure frightened this master of masks. “Lily”’s lyrics were their own mask, but for the more heart-on-sleeve songs, he might have felt too laid bare without at least one other person beside him.

Two cuts from the second night would make the final album – sturdy enough to survive the original edition’s ruthless makeover. “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go” might be the most jubilant parting song ever recorded; the moment he and Brown finally land the familiar take is nothing short of rapturous. Then there’s “Shelter from the Storm”, perhaps Blood’s most perfectly edited lyric, so plaintive and to the point. That persistent hush on Blood’s quieter songsis never more potent than on this track. (That night also saw a wondrous, impassioned run through “Spanish is the Loving Tongue”, with Griffin on piano – an awful piss-take of which Columbia had just included on the Dylan collection.)

Now there’s a wall between us; something there’s been lost I took too much for granted, I got my signals crossed

The 18th is noteworthy not for its four abortive “Buckets of Rain”s – the only work done that evening – but for the appearance of Mick Jagger, and the tidbit that the rest of the night’s plans were a Little Feat concert. While observers described Jagger as characteristically gregarious and Dylan as characteristically antisocial, compare the music they were each making at this time. While Dylan was baring his soul as he never had before, Jagger had recently wrapped up the dispirited It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll, which saw the world’s former greatest rock ‘n’ roll band giving in to the era’s corniest, glitziest tricks. The notion of the Glimmer Twin as a witness to Dylan’s most forthright, most human music is nothing if not surreal.

Jagger would return the following night, which stretched well into the 20th, and saw Dylan finally settling on the takes he felt did his material justice. (A charming feature of his aversion to perfectionism is the occasional and very audible rattle of his jacket buttons against his guitar – not even in rhythm, and somehow never spoiling the music’s majesty.) One by one, he accepted victory, though more than ever he felt tangled up in uncertainty. “Simple Twist of Fate”, with those winsome high notes. A bewitching final “If You See Her, Say Hello”. “Buckets of Rain”, so wry and stately. “Idiot Wind”, graced with ghostly organ. And “Tangled Up in Blue”, possibly his greatest song, so wounded yet so resolute.

“OK, now imagine applause…” Ramone gently validated after the last performance. That was a wrap on a wildly productive week, and it was barely Friday. All the artist had to do was wait the obligatory few months for the record to be pressed, and perhaps more than ever, he could be certain it would be a classic. For all the false starts and reattempts, he had perhaps never been quite so assured or tended to while cutting an LP; he’d definitely never been better-prepared coming in. Ellen Bernstein could rest easy as the muse and shepherd of a slippery genius’ least guarded work. Ramone could rest easy as the producer of a gold-standard Bob Dylan album.

But Dylan never rested easy – not for a few more decades, anyway. He’d evinced a casual curiosity at the listening party about the touch of reverb added in post, but seemed mostly satisfied. But in a few weeks, he started making compulsive phone calls, to Ramone and other label insiders, suggesting if never quite confirming a hesitation over the golden goose set for imminent release. As is so frequently the case with Dylan, what happened next is shrouded in mystery. The story goes that he went home for the holidays and his brother David – even less of an artist than Jagger’s brother Chris, or Paul McCartney’s brother Mike – casually opined that the album was too stark to sell well. Rapidly thereafter, Dylan booked time in a Minneapolis studio.

The rest is history. Those sessions were among the most furtive of Dylan’s career – no outtakes survive. David, said to be a sometime producer and manager (details are scarce), found the musicians, none of them boasting very impressive résumés, at least until that December. They vividly enlivened “Tangled Up in Blue”, “Idiot Wind” and “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts”, absolutely desecrated “If You See Her, Say Hello”, and proved “You’re a Big Girl Now”’s remarkable sturdiness, outfitting it with a slick sheen which somehow deepened it. As far as Dylan was concerned, this was just what Blood on the Tracks needed. Columbia scrambled to re-press the LP, which is now seen as one of the greatest of all time. Ramone still refuses to talk about it.

Like the motorcycle crash on which he blamed his ’66 retreat, there’s something fishy to the tale that an offhand comment during a family Christmas sent Dylan running in a new direction. It might be true, but it’s probably not the whole truth, and as planted PR goes, it’s perfect – the flimsiness of the blame shift offset by the thrill of the mystique. Myself, I don’t buy that Dylan found the original Blood too revealing. I think he found it too sincere, the instrumental palette too one-note. There’s more to spoiled love than tear-stained sorrow, and in avoiding (as usual) the plainest truth, he'd put dimensions in his lyrics the music ultimately failed to reflect. Maybe the gorgeous, open-tuned strumming captured a feeling better than his unschooled musicality had allowed before, and sure, maybe he felt a little exposed clad in only that – hence his impulsive search for accompanists. But I think he was simply bored by how downbeat it all felt. And if anybody could spin boredom into gold, it was Bob Dylan.

Inevitably, the original takes were quickly bootlegged. Debates have raged ever since whether Dylan improved on or undermined songs no one has ever questioned are among his finest. Somewhere between his well-documented aversion to attention and his sale of every scrap to the company is what I take to be the charming truth – he wanted people to hear his alternate takes, he just didn’t want to be held responsible for them. A hidden half of a great album – great in an entirely different yet totally apt way – is one of the most valuable treasures you can bury. It extends the life of a deeply rewarding experience: one version synthesizes heartbreak, while the other heals it (or at least half of it). Every song is wonderful, but different ones become highlights of each edition.

The challenge of getting Dylan straight has never been limited to matters of persona, or personal life –since that ’74 tour, he’s insisted on trying out every possible reinterpretation of his own work. This embrace of chaos, these elements of self-disrespect, only render him a more singular artist. Yet Blood on the Tracks marks the only time he tried to rise to his own material, instead of rolling the dice to land on genius. After years in the wilderness, his legend long secure, he set to proving he could do consciously what he’d always done unconsciously: achieve spontaneous, broken-open brilliance by working hard and being careful, and trusting that his own true emotions could make for the most compelling art.

“Hey – this is hard, man, making records like this. You’ve gotta keep three or four things going at the same time. Just like life.” – Bob Dylan (after a take of “Buckets of Rain” breaks down midway through)

pop report #8 (today's top hits, 9/24/24)

today's top twenty – short n' salty

A whole Brat Summer has come and gone since we last left off. I tumbled belatedly down Charli’s rabbit hole in January, when I was looking for something to flatter a high, and she ended up blowing my world apart. I’d slept on her a decade ago, when she was both sugar and spice – everything nice, really – in hits which have aged varying degrees of well. Yet her 2015 union with PC Music was what put the form to her urge to soundscape – unlike the DMT-addled Todd Rundgren of fifty years ago, of whom she’s a fan, she’s nothing if not collaborative. When I first played brat, besotted as any sane person would be by the effervescent “360”, I found its music too metallic and its melodies overly astringent. Mea culpa – now no less an authority than our next president [knock, knock] has validated her cultural primacy.

So you won’t catch me complaining anymore – it couldn’t have happened to a more visionary icon. But of course, the year belongs to neither Charli, nor the victor in the battle of the quarter-century (not talking about Beyoncé v. Swift, who I think it’s safe to say overdid themselves into a draw this time out). Armed with little more than a wand, a rabbit, and a kabuki-meets-Cyndi Lauper aesthetic, the Midwest Princess finally completed her year-long rise this fall. Meanwhile, in Chappell’s shadow, the Last Straight Femme has put a bow on a fascinating saga that kicked off with “Drivers License”, while Olivia takes sour selfies abroad. And the season of the sticks is long over, with the cabal of bros who once threatened to turn 2024 into the Year of the Dude proving one-hit wonders – or if not one, at least a lot less than F-1 trillion.

But the bro atop half of Today’s Top Hit, Bruno Mars, is a different breed altogether – like his duet partner, one L. Gaga, a star so massive he’s transcended this plane, if not the material world. The languidly soulful waltz “Die with a Smile” sounds to me like an AI dream about “Beautiful Things” being less annoying, and as with everything else America can’t stop listening to (including “Beautiful Things”), someday soon I’m sure I’ll love it. But it still turns on vocals which grind into sincerity, yielding more sawdust than sparks, and presumably won’t unite a wedding dancefloor like “Uptown Funk” or “Bad Romance” ages from now. I suppose each artist thought they had to remind us that they were alive, and forgive my cynicism that the song is doing so well on branding power alone (well, and maybe those outfits).

Tate McRae is another one who feels greedier for the public than vice versa, but it’s ok – “It’s ok I’m ok” is a bit more than OK, the rapid-fire rap hook and sudden wash of synth atmospherics disrupting its relative self-repetition. It's another one that promises to grow over a slow fade; I’d say pop hits are fading slower than ever, but really, it’s always been this way. It does boast some brevity, said to be the soul of something in limited currency – its brisk two and a half minutes feel closer to 75 seconds. Lasting as long is #3, a single about lingering, Short n’ Sweet (ha)’s attention-seizing opener “Taste”. Whereas Olivia’s overtures to authenticity made her so compelling, Sabrina leans into the prefab, and it’s fab every time, fam. Its throwback feel is one of its chiefest virtues – it’s a dead ringer for the Divinvyls, and who doesn't dig the Divinyvls?

The fun of Chappell Roan is which of her big hits you can’t escape at any given moment – only “Pink Pony Club”, which is basically a standard now, is falling behind the rest of the pack. #4 on today’s TTH is “Good Luck, Babe”, its chorus such a pristine flourish of frosting it’s always good for getting through, coming out or kissing off. It’s the first in a trio of queer victories down the list, followed by Charli’s zero-melody banger “Guess”, feat. Billie E, whose subsequently-slotted “Birds of a Feather” is to “we can’t be friends” (#21) as Sour is to Short n’ Sweet. Here’s a girl who writes like she earned both her Oscars. This sapphic streak goes up in flames with the Weeknd, a painfully-straight whose strongest hits sound super gay anyway. After The Idol, the flames are all he can dance in.

#s 8-12 are five stalwart inescapables – that me espresso, H-O-T-T-O-G-O, J.J. Abrams’ nepo baby keenly cornering the “wounded submissive with an acoustic guitar” half of the Taylor Swift market (her vocals softening Olivia’s bratty diction with Billie’s volume control – “I Love You, I’m Sorry”, not as good as “Risk” but still good), Hozier cornering the Adam Levine market (it’s not my aphrodisiac, but the sky still splits open at that wailing instrumental break), errybody in the bahr gittin’ tyup-seh. Then the crisp, honeyed “Apple”, one of a handful of excellent hooks (not to mention lyrics) I missed like a dumb bitch when I was being a brat about brat. Benson Boone’s “Slow it Down” (no one asked you to, BB) sounds extra hoary directly after – though yet again, he builds up to something more worth your while than you expect from the first minute.

Depending on how you look at it, no two bros need more or less help than Post Malone and Morgan Wallen. But for their stab at the song of the summer – per Billboard, it worked – six additional bros lent a hand (though, credit where due, one of them is named Ashley). “I Had Some Help” is solid, and as with all decent-plus generic pop hits gets better or worse depending on the weather in your town or head. Still, the main takeaway is that both men would love to be Sabrina Carpenter, if not Chappell Roan. Next in line is the only member of the Tortured Poets’ Department that doesn’t sound asleep, "I Can Do it With a Broken Heart", a missile aimed directly under Joe Alwyn’s skin – the same summer the latter decided it would be a canny career move to play a rapist in Yorgos Lanthimos’ hasty surrender of his newly-acquired feminist cred.

After Tommy “Temporarily” Richman’s programmatic percolator “Million Dollar Baby” – his album will be called Coyote, though he might’ve just as easily gone with I, Robot – comes a new one for the stomp-clappers Noah Kahan pulled out of the woodwork: Myles Smith’s “Stargazing”. Anyone who’s ever wondered what Chris Martin would sound like fronting Mumford & Sons will be free to turn their attention elsewhere. Then there’s an arresting little club-designed mystery I haven’t heard before – “Move”, by two white guys (Adam Port and Stryv) and a Black vocalist (Malachiii) gently cashing in on a bourgeoning Afrobeats bubble (on this hemisphere, anyway – it’s an embarrassment of riches on the other). It’s a big hit in Belgium, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Austria – shades of ABBA, who never crossed the color line in their lives.

pop report #7 (billboard hot 100, week of 5/18/24)

america is not bored (for a minute, anyway)

Sometimes America gets bored, and dilutes its own hit parade. Only mass disengagement – ideal in an election year – could let that sacred democratic space become occupied, sorry preoccupied, with ranking thirty-one new Taylor songs from least to most enervated. But last week’s chart reflected a striking exception, a national rubberneck. For Drake and Kendrick Lamar are, yes, quite conceivably the Mike Jack and Prince of their genre (a proposed big third has been reviewed and rejected), and no serious, high-profile hip-hop feud has yet graced the streaming era. The 5/18 Hot 100 reflects a sudden, vicious bloom of disses, each star ultimately having accused the other – with apparent sincerity – of something unforgivable. It was savage, yet it perversely brought out the best in both artists, and showed up the old-headline hits as trivialities.

Drake has no status as an innovator, though his preference for doleful singing over speaking has proven influential, helping blur the lines between popular genres. Moreover, he can but must not dance – ergo, not much of a Mike Jack. Yet his place is secure atop the album charts, no matter what he’s on about this time around, and he rivals fellow maybe-mercenary Swift for consolidating power over time. Kendrick’s prolificacy would earned him a verbal dressing-down from the spirit at Paisley Park, and his joie de vivre dwells at an opposite pole. But unlike the Dylan Nobel, that K-dot deserved his Pulitzer felt self-evident. As with Jackson and Nelson, the division of clout and cred feels clean until you stare longer – and also, the artsier one is much pricklier about being associated with the less artsy one closer to world domination.

Amid innumerable chronicles of the fracas are good articles; the beef isn't mine to condense. But the records remain the record. In a field of cherry-bomb epics, Lamar’s “Not Like Us” scorched the widest radius, and now it’s a #1 forever, just like “First Person Shooter”. After a breath of sweet soul comes that graveyard stab of strings, pilfered from a Monk Higgins cover of Ray Charles’ ominous lament “I Believe to My Soul” and sped the hell up. Lamar is hopped up on his own venom, every accusation a gouge; he means fucking business, and it’s the coldest of kills (“stab this way, stab that way”). It’s ruthless, but the smooth dexterity of his performance is riveting – whatever’s on the tip of his rapier, the music is still the point, which helps the unease go down easier.

After all, imagine what a dark landmark this would be if hip-hop’s most handsomely paid icon is, y’know, guilty of all that. “I think that Oakland show gon’ be your last stop,” Lamar spits, after raising (as opposed to prefabricating) the specter of Tupac, half of the most famous such feud – a bicoastal tempest that left two all-time luminaries dead. Without comparing each hypothetical loss to art, the threat of either principal failing to survive this spat has been too terrible to touch, the way the horrific inconvenience of a civil war maybe keeps it from manifesting in our violently polarized era. The level of discomfort this event has and could attain was built to compel morbid fascination. As Americans, we’re awfully accustomed to unimaginable outcomes – and what we move on from says strange things about our ways of processing.

But even when we can't, we often insist on stepping into a sweet denial chamber for a second. Sandwiched between two million-selling musical murders is “Million Dollar Baby”, the club-ready runaway smash from one of those sleepy-eyed white guys with a certain kind of facial hair. The now-aptly named Tommy Richman is from TikTok, and his robotic funk savvy reminds me of Peter Brown’s “Do You Wanna Get Funky With Me”, a one-man simulation of something Black that feels bloodless, but more than functional. The summer and its songs are now upon us, and one of them is that other musical murder: “Euphoria”, Kendrick’s first full-length shot across the bow. “You’re not a rap artist, you’re a scam artist” has waited behind a lot of lips since Drake’s ascendency, but nothing could sound as juicy as Kendrick just letting it slip over a dreamy Teddy Pendergrass sample. Then he erupts with molten contempt, trenchantly transforming a human mess into something profound.

“This conflict did not begin with an act of violence,” Michael Harriot reminds. “In a sense, [this] is really about Black excellence.” And although Lamar’s bars being brilliant is as foregone a conclusion as Drake’s next album going #1 – though any fallout remains to be seen – it remains the apparent responsibility of the Black musical icon to vault over established standards, to pull out every stop. No album has masterpieced harder than Cowboy Carter in a hot minute, and had it lassoed the entire top 10 like Swift’s album did, it would’ve resulted from a livelier, more rewarding mass listening project. Yet stats suggest Taylor’s unwieldy latest affair is winning the attention war – though it rarely gets more exciting than the dirgey “Fortnight”, a flagship single featuring Post Malone, the original sleepy-eyed white guy with a certain kind of facial hair.

Though the album gives up slow rewards (like “I wanna kill him”, it’s in stray lines that hit you sideways, as opposed to the inescapable hooks we rely on her for), I’m on Team Disappointed – and yeah, tTPD’s concurrence with Beyoncé’s ambitious and open-armed coup amplifies my chagrin. The theory that unprecedented validation has eroded TS’s humility and editorial sense is confused by how casual and canny Midnights was at once. Maybe after a tumultuous personal spell and a generous spectacle of a victory-lap tour, this functioning workaholic has earned a This One’s for Her. Yet the album’s overall efficacy as a sedative or a diary feels limited, especially comparing it to the sumptuous acoustic textures and painstaking craft of folklore. She’s not banal yet, but the watered-down EDM “Fortnight” revisits is beginning to wear thin.

Three places down from the archetypal club hit by the white kid is a folky country banger by Shaboozey, a Black performer, rather closer to Zach Bryan’s misty reveries than Morgan Wallen’s rap-smitten flexes. “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” stands as strong a chance of uniting and lighting up a crowded room as “Million Dollar Baby”, though the vibes are otherwise irreconcilable. Our country’s ever-unresolved racial dialogue can feel most productive, or at least most interesting, in the pop-musical realm, though it isn’t always easy to know what questions and answers the constant cross-pollinations are raising. Disheartening recent influx of male artists notwithstanding, the way the Blackest and whitest pop genres are talking to each other right now is politically exciting. It goes beyond softened borders, with Bey’s panoramic expansion of an old Ray Charles concept merely the most pointed, adventurous example. But masc vs. femme, Black vs. white, queer-coded vs. painfully straight, in the box vs. new under the sun, Champagne Papi vs. Kung Fu Kenny – our musical landscape is an ever-restless one, the central conundrums rarely under threat of resolution.

My point, such as I have one, is that if you slice off the top of the charts you always end up with an interesting double record, with even the most recent Swift swallow a more interesting double record. Cue up side 2 of whatever variant you chose of this round, and you get the casually buzzing hornet’s nest “Like That”, with Kendrick already sounding brutally peeved on his verse. The needle then hustles you into the petulant intro to Drake’s “Family Matters”, for which “Euphoria” already provided some context if you’ve been off the grid. Drake's track lands no point harder than how long this month has lasted.

Compare the normally sedate, reflective Kendrick’s palpable anger – you feel the threatening brush of the quills of his mind – to the normally sedate, unreflective Drake’s manufactured-sounding intensity. His sense of affront sounds weakened by his well-funded complacency – easy to project, like the idea that he farms out his verses. But rap is like jazz; the central instrument is too communicative to conceal much. For the former Degrassi MVP, anything like sharpness feels like an imitation. He sounds inconvenienced where his rival sounds murderous, a comprehensible tactic that as fits go earned worst-dressed on the skirmish’s fizzled-out conclusion(?), “The Heart Part 6”. “Matters” is a deft cut which admirably matches the mood-shifting “epic” vibe of “Euphoria” et al. But even with Drizzy stepping up, the contest was never exactly a close one.

The temptation down the rabbit-hole of whether Kendrick is a spousal abuser – a charge so hyped up in the drop, it has the feel of a secret a kid can’t keep in, rather than, like, a lie – isn't much match for the distracting allure of Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso”, the latest surefire trifle in a neo-neo-disco wave. Dance music hasn't sounded so percolation-for-percolation sumptuous as it does on this (or, say, the casually flawless “Dance the Night”) since Nile Rodgers was still [c]hic. The song’s unhesitant strut is the kind of thing you just bow down to, pure feelin-yourself momentum from a versatile new star whose identity appears as malleable as Chappell Roan’s is uncompromising. Its phrasemaking, its effervescence, its on-vacation give a fucks – the song is like “Flowers” in full flower, being single as a garden of delights earthly and otherwise.

This top ten is rounded out by a far more gentlemanly duel, for it’s the season of not just the sticks but the Growly Boys. The unabashedly dramatic “Beautiful Things” and “Lose Control” are how-tos for those interested in self-immolation, over a cause Macklemore will swiftly remind you isn’t the end of the world (love, or pussy I suppose. or both). Benson Boone and Teddy Swims sure do have diaphragms; not a dandruff-grain of irony sullies either’s heaving shoulders. Each song has a guaranteed valentine future: karaoke challenge, front-lawn boom box staple, so forth. And both, if you listen over and over (which, why), largely validate their own abundant sincerity. Both also serve to make the “take me to church” guy sound like a paragon of smoothness and restraint, on his new one, which lands like a less self-satisfied, slightly doomier Maroon 5 hit.

pop report #6 (billboard 200, week of 2/3/2024)

on dicks, or things that sound like them

I’ve mentioned it before, but my late buddy and I had a different relationship with the pop charts. I was raised – digesting the star-ratings in my dad’s giant album guides like gospel – to distrust the pop cultural world around me. I always felt out of step (like that girl in the Onion article) with the trends of my time; I was always making heroes out of bygone artists out of step with theirs. My bestie similarly distrusted new culture – it being the early 2000s, what was popular was often mean-spirited and overly prefab. But an odd affection for numbers (innate) and a higher tolerance for boomer-sanctioned fluff (instilled) made him pleased as peaches to ride around to the local oldies station. We doubled down on our anachronisms in a bunker of a band, but when we broke up and stepped separately into daylight, we each had new pop epiphanies. Because somewhere between ‘07 and ‘13, radio music got juicy.

Strong melodies are rarely in short supply, but other things had been adjusted. Hip-hop and pop production became indiscernible, the hook emphasis and contrapuntal construction of the latter absorbing the atmospheric and rhythmic virtues of the former. Spearheaded by artists like Lady Gaga and Beyoncé, women (many non-white) took pop over, tamping down indie tumors like Mumford and Sons and keeping the bros at bay. The most conventional such superstar, Taylor Swift, opened her music and mind to the new sonic fashions, while maintaining her foundation of catchy, emotionally inhabitable songs. A vision of a braver, more equitable world felt represented on the radio, and it was a trip to listen to. With digital production outgrowing its ungainly hallmarks, everything started to sound a little like a dream, and by six or seven years ago, what most people wanted to listen to was wonderful.

But pendulums have a way of swinging back, and while I can’t put my finger on what’s changing, I’m at least equipped to note a few data points and go hmmm. For instance: the top five albums currently perching atop Billboard’s 200 chart are by male artists. I’m a lot less savvy when it comes to analyzing the album charts, in some part because my friend talked about them less than the song charts. It’s often a mixed bag of rap platters, country platters, pop platters, soundtrack platters and evergreen old faves (Thriller; Rumours; Queen’s greatest hits; Elton John’s greatest hits; these days every Taylor Swift album). But with the influx of country bros up said charts – who as far as I’m concerned are always named Luke or Zach, even when they’re named Blake or Chris – you wonder why the Eagles’ Greatest Hits isn’t the hotcake it once was.

It bears mentioning that none of country-pop (much less country)’s women – Taylor Swift hasn’t counted for a while – are selling like the dudes are. I mused a few blogs ago that MAGA might partially account for the whitest genre’s ascendence, but if I’m being cynical I could go bigger. The resistance #metoo engendered (as progress does) obviously includes more than just the red hats. Not that I figure All Men are bulk-buying Morgan Wallen CDs solely out of spite, but it’s hard to imagine any mild-mannered or self-reflective men even streaming him. “Last Night” is one of many smashes he’s racked up to date. His country-rock is inflected with a steely pop sheen, and beefed up with rap-adjacent beats, not to mention a looser and less laconic vernacular than Southern-drawl singers are usually armed with. But that cocky song and its album were each the #1 sellers of 2023, which seems a shame when the best stuff (“Anti-Hero”, “Kill Bill”, “Flowers”, any Barbie single) came, yet again, from the better side of the battle of the sexes.

Unrefined as he may be, Wallen isn’t a menace – if grassroots red meat like “Rich Men North of Richmond” was always on top, things would be less nice. But he does seem likea dick, and it’s a shame when dicks win. Wallen’s album isn’t at #1 anymore, and I’m not super familiar with superseder 21 Savage’s work – though he was half of Drake’s sus Her Loss, which definitely had an indulgent-resentment-of-women vibe. And although from the opening monologue, his album American Dream codes sincere (sincere almost never being preferable), it’s nice in theory to have an album called American Dream at #1 when that album is by a Black hip-hop artist making no overt pop concessions. Anyway, like I said, I haven’t given it sufficient attention, and maybe it’s great. But it’s not revolutionary I’ll betcha, and a scan of the reviews solidifies this enough for me to write all this on my blog without worrying about doing 21 Savage too dirty.

Wallen’s album is at #2 – on the charts for the 47th week. I wonder, without caring to do the work to find out, if its preeminence is comparable to that of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, enduring bestseller Elton John’s half-century-old blockbuster. That was a 2-LP set with 17 songs, and because Elton was the biggest artist in the pop music galaxy at that time, it listed for $5 more than a normal LP ($6.98). Wallen’s albums always contain something like 200 songs, so in theory, that spiffs up his sales. Also, his occasional loose tongue (“take care of this n*****”) and the “I’m a jerk but you love me” aura hallmarking his biggest hits almost definitely guarantees a dose of racists and douchebags in his audience share. But you don’t get to #1 without a portion of your constituency being honest-to-goodness Very Fine People. Then again, a lot of people sit out elections – just like Ariana says, “in case you haven’t noticed/everybody’s tired”.

Drake’s latest is #3, and while the title and imagery of For All the Dogs is less self-celebratorily male than Her Loss, it’s still a bad look from a distance. Drake really is the Elton John of his generation – every one of his albums and mixtapes and “playlists” has gone #1 on the Billboard 200, except the very early So Far Gone (#5 pop, #1 elsewhere) and something called Dark Lane Demo Tapes (#2 pop, #1 elsewhere). His reign has just about tripled John’s heyday (though the double-disc compilation Diamonds wouldn’t be a perpetual top 40 staple if John didn’t have decades’ worth of hits to his name). Though when his streak began, it was the Degrassi alum’s sheer niceness that set him apart – to where, when he came on strong to nominal work friends Nicki Minaj and Rihanna, you had to stifle a smirk – he’s been on something of a Dark Aubrey kick for a while. His flow remains a highly agreeable sound, but the charm’s been low (which is never Jay-Z’s problem), and his invention has never been strong enough to counterbalance it.

Next is Green Day. Green Day! A band, with guitars! At this point Green Day are an American institution, at a level above many of their diverse bands-with-guitars ‘90s peers – it doesn’t seem likely Billy Corgan, for instance, will be asked to turn one of his concept albums into a Broadway musical anytime soon. The band’s staying power, although they capitalized on fashionable liberal resistance and indie-derived pretentiousness with American Idiot, can be chalked up to the fact that they’ve always been more of a pop band than a punk band. But coming on like a punk band still helps. “The American Dream* is Killing Me”, Saviors’ opener, couches its good old-fashioned generalized protest in generic, Beatley melodics, and couches that in hard-within-reason guitars. The Tik Tok time-warping that tosses aging acts up the charts is heartening. Whether or not Saviors is good, Green Day feel like old-guard underdogs now, or at least old friends.

Rounding out our Penis Quintet is Noah Kahan’s Stick Season, the indie-boy fluke du jour. Every once in a while, people want to open the window of the pop palace we’re living in to more organic styles, e.g. the Green Day pop-punk model. When indie started really selling in this country, it wasn’t the soundscaping experimentalists or mordant wordsmiths – it was the real teary-eyed and sincere (wuh oh)-sounding people, leading up to people like the Lumineers, who lived at the crossroads between Arcade Fire and Mumford & Sons, and had about as much depth as the Archies but pretended otherwise. You can hear why Kahan is setting himself apart – the unconventional tinge in his voice helps lend a unique air to his lyrics, which are also unconventionally tinged. This isn’t the same as “clear-eyed” or “incisive”, though (much less mordant); the trick is to make you think you’re hearing something more outside the box than you are, which on the pop charts is sometimes just outside the box enough to be compelling. Nevertheless, he doesn’t seem like a dick – his music is as nice as it sounds, and his words’ heart is in the right place despite the weakness of the sauce. They aren’t very funny, but Kahan certainly is, at least when he’s talking about sunflower seed shells.

The rest of the top ten discontinues the pattern. Taylor bookends – #6 is her latest, which happens to be the long-awaited, marginally-differentiated re-recording of the album that launched her into pop super-stardom. Nothing she says isn’t calculated, but she’s right to tout her own prescience in the liner notes. There was liberation as well as mercenary benefit in roping pop into her music, in all its Nashville-bucking, cybernetic glory – and using the tradition of sexualized pop stars as a vehicle to amplify her rich-young-woman-about-town themes. But if 1989 wasn’t a money move (it was, at least a little), 1989 (Taylor’s Version) begins in that category. I note that “Is it Over Now”, her 9000th hit, has more of a self-repetitive vibe than usual. Then there’s Lover at #10 – on the wings of “Cruel Summer”, surely. The notoriously sunny album, brimming with shrewder pop gestures than her more consciously “artistic” last three, increasingly hits like a pre-COVID time capsule if not balm.

In between are two girls and a guy. #7 is last year’s from SZA, an always thoughtful, rarely compromising album auteur whose music rides that line between art and commerce better than most. #9 is country’s best example of same – the self-titled from Zach Bryan, foremost among the Luke and Blake crop as a singer and writer even if he’s no Tyler Childers in either department. Sandwiched between at #8 is Pink Friday 2, sequel to an album that back in 2010 felt like the shape of things to come. Well before huffers and puffers tread on the toes Taylor was dipping into pop waters, Nicki was getting slammed for loving pop and showing it. Now Pink Friday is regarded as the kind of classic none of her subsequent albums, which are always overlong and (how do I safely say this) temperamentally disagreeable, can hope to measure up to. Back around PF1, her verbal invention and shapeshifting ubiquity had me thinking, rockistly, “new Dylan”. Well: she wasn’t. But I’m glad she’s still selling some records.

I never turned my observation of the top five’s all-sausage status into a hypothesis; I’m not really good at hypotheses. But I wonder if there’s also a connection to the #1 song in the country right now, which is by Jack Harlow and is called “Lovin’ On Me”. On sight, Harlow is like a post-Post Malone, a beardy, dirtbaggy-looking white guy who’s sort of hip-hop and sort of not, and he’s been a big star for a minute. (My editor: “he doesn’t look like he has a stylist… or a shower, maybe.”) Like Drake, his flow has a downtempo, low-effort-seductive quality, and he’s possibly hotter than Post Malone – you can sort of see why Dua Lipa dated him, even if it took him putting out a million-selling mash note called “Dua Lipa” and it doesn’t look like it worked out. But I have to admit, I just don’t understand why “Lovin’ on Me” is number one. It’s one of those club-style songs so totally unmelodic it almost feels like an insult, and though “I’m vanilla baby/I’ll choke you but I ain’t a killer baby” is more on the gentlemanly side than is common for this playa-hype stuff, the attitude and verbiage are mostly not mold-breaking.

That line does give me pause; if your partner wants to be choked, and consent is properly brokered, then obliging is not only nice, but, lovin’, even. And while the chorus is a rejection, not an embrace, of BDSM predilections, it still hinges on “you can’t tie me down”, an age-old I’m-a-man-and-I-can-do-what-I-want trope. If American elections have proven anything, it’s that Americans don’t always pay careful attention to what they’re giving power to. The single’s lyric is all over the place (“I keep it short with a bitch, Lord Farquaad”), but one thing it is not is self-effacing. So maybe “Lovin’ on Me” is the druggy-hangout or night-at-the-strip-club soundtrack staple of the moment – for the kind of white bro who likes to pretend he’s (his idea of) a Black bro, or for Black bros united with them via sexism and taste for a certain sound. It’s also worth entertaining that, given its current primacy, a number of women like the song too.

I know it’s dumb and dangerous to speculate along dichotomous demographics (he says, right after doing just that). I remember quizzing my Black Lyft driver about his passion for Luke Combs’ “Fast Car”, which he did not know was a Tracy Chapman song and did not listen closely to enough to hear Combs refer to himself as a “checkout girl”. Instead, he felt drawn to it because of the nature of the narrator’s care, the I’ll-do-whatever-it-takes-for-us of it all. The reasons people love the music they love are often more visceral than complex. It’s not only conceivable but inevitable that “Lovin’ on Me”, by a white rapper who’s on record as a BLM supporter and has been praised for his self-interrogation, appeals to otherwise irreconcilable categories of listeners. But not the category I’m in, which is something like “well-intentioned, open-hearted, bi-vibes older millennial who loves music more than anything.”

Men are people too; I’m one, albeit a self-hating one. And lest I slip into misandry, let me concede that some forms of male aggro do relate to necessary strength, rather than the typical insecurity/emotional avoidance/urge to violence. Hip-hop’s strivers are economic cousins to Nashville’s nouveau riche, because some class disadvantages necessitate hardness to thrive and provide. Inherited toxicities can enflame this already combustible component something awful, but DJ Khaled (for example) insisting he deserves oral sex but his wife doesn’t because he puts food on the table (“ya gotta understand, I’m the king, I’m the don”, he actually said, not in a song but an interview) is an especially low bar. But men sometimes do live up to their projected strength – and there are times when what they’ve got is just what somebody needs. Looking askance at any consensus, like what song or album the biggest number of people are listening to, is a slippery slope if you don’t try to understand it first. Still, I’m playing American Dream right now, and still not sure how it’s won over this many people.

Maybe there's another key to what’s going on here. Many of today’s top hits are het-up and horny, just like “Lovin On Me” – Tate McRae’s “Greedy” (#3) which is plenty feminist, or Teddy Swims’ “Lose Control” (#4), a different twist on America’s main racial binary (country-looking white dude belts out barn-burning gospel/soul), or Tyla’s blissfully lubricious “Water” (#11). So maybe that’s why people keep banging “Lovin’ On Me”, which is also the first hit single since Rihanna’s “S&M” a bajillion years ago to turn on the phrase “whips and chains”. The cold is keeping people indoors, and Harlow’s hit is giving them ideas, so they’re jamming to it. Not here to knock your love, America: you fuck to what you wanna fuck to. But maybe being a straight man (ugh) is why I just can’t get it up, be it on a dancefloor or behind closed doors, to anyone who comes on like a dick.

a wizard/a true star is fifty

some folks was even higher than me – but probably not too many

“It isn’t supposed to be for having major epiphanies. It’s supposed to be for looking at colorful shit.”

I still recall how intensely I resisted my sister’s advice – seldom the choicest instinct. She was my sitter, uniquely predisposed as she was and is to equanimity and sweetness. Of the two of us, I tend to be the handful, and she has enough patience and self-control for both of us – sometimes I wonder if I left mine behind in the womb for her. Anyway, she’d brought two tabs of LSD, a gift from a boy she lived with who shared her name, a former child prodigy violinist who’d completed his descent into defiant chaos. Drug-dealing was a part of this, and it’s another testament to my sis that she only ever did a few bumps of coke, in such proximity to his tundra of a stash. I’d have ended up at the “being murdered for pinching” part of the process in weeks, and I don’t even like cocaine – though that’s mostly because I’ve never tried it, having somehow sustained a rule to avoid anything that could kill me.

She’d had her first experience with acid that summer, nearly five decades after the of-love one, and neither of us could say if the stuff in our possession shared one molecule of ‘60s acid’s chemistry – the stuff that woke the Beatles up, and spurred them in 1967 to blur the lines between rock ‘n’ roll and some wondrous something else. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was the first album to come clad in a self-consciously artistic garb: the world’s most famous band disguised in mustaches and multicolored marching band outfits, the unwieldy misdirect of a title printed on a bass drum and BEATLES spelled out in flowers. In books they loved (Through the Looking Glass et al.), Lennon & co. had learned how to translate the beguiling mystery of dreams into text. For three LPs, climaxing with Pepper, they’d more or less invented the music for it, too.

That kicked off a little epoch of people trying to do the same – my favorite in pop history. Every sound was new, all prior rules relaxed as fresh ones were being fashioned. The “rock” music of that ’67-‘74 era – a wild mass art project which for me includes Stevie Wonder and Joni Mitchell’s tonal palettes – eludes description. Music itself is remarkably emotional, endlessly communicative beyond the purely verbal. It’s a mysterious, potent substance, these infinite combinations of waves. Short of a more inventive image, Pepper and its descendants were radiant splashes of color bleeding through greyscale lines, indelibly staining blank canvas with unprecedented tints and shades. Even decades ago, people tried to wave their hands through that pink smoke with complaints about Western chauvinism and “high art” gentrification. But to me, it’s surrealism + genderfluidity + pure melodic rapture. You say you want a revolution?

Drugs were the primary engine of a lot of this effort. But by the mid-‘70s, which were a long time ago, even the best art-rock sounded washed out – overfed and overfunded. The hippies’ sweet dreams had barely weathered a dark night of the soul in full swing just a year after they’d hit full flower. But even without a ‘68 to bring everybody down, the fact remains – few dreams survive daybreak. And the waking dreams drugs deliver do usually crash into some kind of foggy hangover, “that elusive feeling” alcoholics talk about reliably dragging them closer to the gates of insanity or death. As for me, I first tried a drug – marijuana – just in time for my 21st birthday, after a youth spent getting high on people and rarely subduing my lows. It did feel like a waking dream – and as with any other addict, that enchantment came to haunt me. No common sense could keep my cat-curiosity from pulling me toward a second try.

Just a few years later, the obsession was total. My rock bottom was still a long way down, but anytime I could get my hands out of my empty pockets and on something which promised a buzz – an escape from reality’s perpetual itch and unrelenting anxiety – I made sure I did. I invited myself anywhere that held the promise of a shared smoke, and when no such invitation/intrusion was available, I credit-carded locked doors and quietly opened drawers minutes before the absent party returned. On a particularly audacious occasion, I found my way through a window I’d only hoped would be so easy to jigger open on the ride over. So often is marijuana insisted to be non-addictive, yet I went to insane lengths to disprove this, with no intention of sharing the data – the hiding, a product of the shame, is a huge part of addiction. I wasted time dreamin’ of the myth of California sobriety, but I was as much a mess as anyone stuck in their cups.

The accumulation of highs puts you sorely in the red on time and money you’ll never get back, and distances you from the longer-lasting highs you could, and ought to, build toward. But along with peacing (when not freaking) you out, drugs might, at their friendliest, convince you that you can see for miles and miles and miles. Oh yeah. What is it about, say, a THC high? It illuminates and then softens the barriers between you and the ether, that magical otherworld glimpsed in dazzling flashes but so elusive, drowned out by reality (or is it society?)’s dutiful buzzkill. It really connects you with something that does feel cosmic or spiritual or otherwise enlightening, and it can lead to breathtaking external or internal connections, or – if you happen to be an artist – invaluable arrangements of elements not otherwise discoverable. At its most benevolent, it can make artists of us all. But is the art you make true enough to be worth it, when it’s not you creating – it’s you through some disorienting filter?

Why I’d waste the actual prime of my life on all those fuzzed-out “highs” speaks to questions I’ve yet to answer. Other than being a lifelong self-sabotager, there’s no solid explanation available. Some of the motivation, though, lies in that first night I ever tried LSD. My quest for profound realizations was thwarted by a sudden inability to properly complete sentences. This did not ease my passage to becalmed bliss, and eventually my sister accepted that while I would probably prevent myself from enjoying/embracing the experience, I also wouldn’t die. She left, but it’s OK. She reclaimed her night, and I reclaimed my sanity (such as it was) by discovering how much nicer Can’s “Future Days” and Parliament’s “Flash Light” suddenly felt – my sister’s advice in vivid action.

I once read a quote about a researcher of some kind discussing two test groups of scientists, boldly exploring the frontier of recreationally ingesting mind-altering substances (for science). It was something about the marijuana users sitting around discussing life’s most profound questions, and the LSD users sticking their fingers in their bellybuttons. My only worthwhile experiences on LSD the three or four stomach-churning times I tried it that summer were musical. This translated to marijuana, which at least did me the favor of not disabling communication (and by extension, creativity). But in general, I was not asking profound questions while on weed – I’d just hole up and let my mind wander, with music becoming my most irresistible companion.

Frankly, the harmonic and structural advancements THC spurred in music I wrote were indispensable – bar its inconvenient side-effect of keeping me from finishing 80% of my ideas. The music I replaced these incomplete masterpieces with was an endless stream of Spotify playlists, glutted with mostly “art rock” from mostly the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. Much of it was designed for something like weed – you have no reason to play a Yes album more than once otherwise. I distracted myself from the fact that I was merely distracting myself with so much art whose sole purpose was to capture the whims of its perpetrators’ wasted minds. Still: in a big-beat, multi-track format, that approach can yield some real fun. Just marvel at the complete works of the second-chiefest (after sex) pleasure of my brief LSD patch, Jimi Hendrix, who died chasing his extraplanetary visions, but sure sounded dynamite giving them life.

Fifty years ago, Todd Rundgren, who like a lot of painfully white folks loved Jimi Hendrix, had ended up on the same astral plane Jimi crashed in. Having avoided drugs for ages, the better to maintain his uptight aloofness (and develop those acrobatic arrangements, and produce like nine other albums a year), by 1973, he was in a position to spend a lot of time and money getting audibly smacked sideways by substances. The hardest thing he’d taken before had been Ritalin, which resulted in the double-disc talent tour Something/Anything. But after disliking his first taste of psychedelics (DMT, the one where you have that fleeting field trip to a land of elves), Todd fell headfirst into his own head. What he saw made him hear beautiful music only he was capable of concretizing.

“I became more aware [through psychedelic drug use] of what music and sound were like in my internal environment, and how different that was from the music I had been making,” Todd told Mike Myers’ brother, who proved himself an excellent reporter (and très enthusiastic fan) for a 2010 biography. “My new challenge was to try to map, as directly as I could, the various kinds of chaotic musical element[s] in my head.” The artist began to externalize these mad visions by building himself a studio, and enlisting fellow musical utopians in the reification of his own flights of fancy. The resultant A Wizard/A True Star was an hour long – a two-LP length. But Rundgren crammed it onto one record, risking the loss in fidelity for his magnum opus in order to honor its unbroken sides. Wizard is the white Electric Ladyland: a production fantasia only a talent as hyperactive/producer as unkempt as Todd could’ve fashioned.

The standard for headphone music fifty years ago was the clean dreariness of Dark Side of the Moon, the first rock LP where all technological shortfall has been eliminated from the recording process. But Rundgren’s facile pop confections reliably share two characteristics – impudence and impatience. At his best, these qualities are more temperate – don’t let Mark David Chapman scare you off the brilliant (if deceptively deep) Ballad of Todd Rundgren. Yet a lot of times Todd’s natural insolence is what makes him fun – makes him punk, albeit a punk who’d never give up pop. He remains the corniest musician ever to secure Patti Smith’s stamp of approval (Blue Öyster Cult are close), but even she’s ignited by his messy genius. “Clever as a fox, my spirit lights,” she says in a poem Wizard included. “Spirit laughing free as water, in a ring of fire, with its hair aflame.” Todd had dyed his hair three neon colors that season.

Few records are as nice a listen high as Wizard – which inevitably means it loses a little luster when you’re not, its flaws magnified in the first rays of the new rising sun. It is the surest proof of one sad principle: the music intensifies the wonder of the drugs, but the drugs don’t deepen the meaning of the music. In any case, Wizard pulls out all the trippy tricks beautifully at its beginning. It kicks off with a fractalized tone dancing from one corner of your brain to another. Then the simulated sound of a rocket’s billowing plumes, then a slurp up to the stars on some synthesizer setting, and finally, a resonant keyboard ostinato Pete Townsend might give his sad-eyed nod to. It’s as if AI were told to synthesize “far out, man!” into a piece of music, and AI had a trace of wit (yet). It spills into a wonderful pop song, one which actualizes the automatic agape of psychedelic euphoria. “International Feel”’s pretty chord sequence that helps spruce up its words, which are only not nonsense under certain conditions.

(There is more) international feel

(And there’s more) interplanetary deals

(Still there’s more) interstellar appeal

(Still there’s more) universal ideal

“I only want to see if you’ll give up on me,” he sings. Decades later, he bragged during a commencement speech about how Wizard halved his audience, touting it as an example of the valiance of following your own nose. Not terrible advice for a graduating class – but an arguable misreading of what his endeavor represented. Wizard was designed as mass outreach, but when Todd turned on, it turned people off. Alienation is no virtue, and it’s definitely no way to establish a utopia. The fact is, so many drug users imprisoning themselves in their own heads think the things they’re conjuring up in there would set the entire world free – but good luck getting a coherent message across when you’ve returned to Earth. So the fun of this record is in its self-referential games, not its cockeyed aperçus, a technicolor extrapolation of Something/Anything’s cute “sounds of the studio” interlude. “Just as surely as I’m in your ears”, he winks at you at one point, and I can never for the life of me remember the second half of that thought.

After “International Feel”, Todd drifts into a number from the Mary Martin Peter Pan before the primary fear of a “head trip” hits – that the good part will fade soon (better get more!). “Tic, Tic, Tic (It Wears Off)” takes you on a cheerful march through the LP’s main style – intricately layered synthesizer doodles, unless Todd is picking up his guitar and brontosauring around in the manner of the most indulgent Roy Wood. It resembles Something/Anything’s “Breathless”, though wiggier and more whimsical, which is welcome. At its most arbitrary, Wizard feels like nothing more than exercises in overdubbing – but if you’re in an altered mindstate, everything is illuminated. He then crashes into a song that bellows “WHAT YOU NEED IS YOUR HEAD”, even as the artiste sounds like he’s lost his. The album is usually either a kaleidoscopic confluence of alluring cadences, or a lot of weird shit piling up around you.

It doesn’t puncture the dreamlike aura, but “You Need Your Head” unleashes Todd’s mean streak, which no magnitude of good vibrations can subdue. For a willow of a wunderkind, at his worst, Todd was a notorious asshole. Though the bar was low enough to reach, the vitriolic “Rock ‘n’ Roll Pussy” is a much weaker song than the contemporary work of its target, John Lennon. Of all those impotent dogfight insults, the word “pussy” – so sensual in its other sense – is especially noxious. Lennon was a far gentler spirit than Rundgren, but Rundgren has the advantage of never dealing anything but verbal blows. “Pussy” is commendable for calling this out, but when Rundgren took it farther in offhand comments, he got his ass handed to him, in the finest thing Lennon wrote in 1974.

After that, Rundgren layers himself pretending to be dogs laughing for another transitional minute – it’s annoying, but not ineffective, especially if you’re in that tense interval every high guarantees. This whole sequence of vignettes slides by so fast, and is so disorienting and unprecedented, that it can be a rush in context. But as I write about it, the meaner-spirited it all feels. This is especially true of the supercute but indefensible “You Don’t Have to Camp Around”, on which Todd (who somewhere on side B sings “my voice is so high, you would think I was gay”) confers upon himself the authority to call out the queer male community’s “mincy lisping” as some kind of pose. Wilde might smirk at the “tssss-ts-ts-tssss” vocal percussion, but mostly, it's typical ‘70s hate humor. The permission it thinks it gives for gay men to liberate themselves from already liberated behavior is a condescension that could only spew forth from a giant fucking dick.

Still, it’s in keeping with the concept, which is apt for a drug album: Whatever Just Occurred to Todd, verbally and musically. Yet another arch instrumental (“Flamingo”, get it?) blends into side A’s captivating, perplexing centerpiece, “Zen Archer”. It seems bent on being a battle hymn for Martians, and the lyrics scrape at significance without ever getting there. But as it gives way to a swirl of harmonies (a Rundgren specialty, that callow, childish voice going all angelic in a choir of itself), and as those simulated arrows soar between your ears, you’re under the wizard’s spell, and buying everything the true star is selling. On a song like this, the endless sardonics lighten a heavier tread – Todd is too sarcastic not to palliate self-serious caprices such as this.

Still there’s more. Todd impersonates a nightmare oompah band on “Just Another Onionhead”, another set of words the drugs told him were profound enough to write down (“the falling of the hare“, “prime cut of baby’s butt”). It switches on a dime to “Da Da Dali”, an ersatz Al Jolson croon over an atomized jumble of deliberately fucked-up Tin Pan Alley chords. Then comes “When the Shit Hits the Fans; Sunset Blvd.”, another blast of macho-rock – as Todd sings elsewhere, “I play my guitar in such a man-cock way”, and this proves it again. One of the ways Wizard best flatters a high is how you can let your mind wander about fifteen minutes in and you won’t miss anything. But when it all surges back into “International Feel”’s glorious refrain, well. You feel like you’ve really been somewhere.

As I inferred earlier in this piece, I didn’t want to take drugs to turn my mind off. Todd has spoken of the same objective. Trouble is, when you take drugs, you’re not necessarily likely to strengthen your mind. Indeed, you’re ceding its control to an occupier that can’t think, but sure has some ideas about how you should be doing it. Even a few years into my abuse of weed, I recognized that what I appreciated about it was uncomfortably close to one of alcohol’s many dubious assets: the parameters of its impairment momentarily strengthened a focus. (Being a millennial means having ADHD – like Todd – so I shudder to imagine how many problems of mine a first sniff of cocaine might appear to solve.) It’s just an illusion, and all its confusion will catch up to you sooner or later. Some of Wizard’s players crowed to Paul Myers about how nice the muddled-ethereal chords are for “Sometimes I Just Don’t Know What to Feel”, but the lyrics prove its clearest thought is the titular one. It vies for incisive, but ambles toward aimless.

That song is an uncertainty manifesto: a self-negating oxymoron. But the parts that aren’t dour or overambitious are really gorgeous, and the rest of side B is a string of some of the nicest pearls ever to form in an acid-addled noggin. “Does Anybody Love You” boasts a master melodist’s most effervescent melody, and the auteur’s chirping vocal improves one more unaccountably bitchy lyric, knocking a mirror-gazing narcissist of the female persuasion. (He was with Bebe Buell at the time, a person who’s made a career of her own promiscuity, and who inspired another talented sexist, Elvis Costello, to pen his most vituperative tunes.) It's a testament to Todd’s equal-opportunity nastiness that he manages to sling mud at the vain and the self-disgusted (“love between the ugly is the most beautiful love of all”) in the same two-stanza track; it’s a testament to his voracious taste for sweeter melodies that he cloaks this dagger in one of the sweetest.

He then spares us further transitional crotchets by borrowing some of the most beautiful melodies of all. Like so many Philly musicians, pop-soul was in Todd’s blood. To kick off the medley in this side’s middle, he chooses one exquisite hit each from the genre’s greatest innovators, Curtis Mayfield (the Impressions’ “I’m So Proud”) and Smokey Robinson (the Miracles’ “Ooh Baby Baby”). The choices are astute – two of the dreamiest songs by two of the dreamiest writers, who shared a gift for sifting disarming emotion out of the harmonic atmosphere. The songs’ mutual tone is so gentle and compassionate that the long break they offer from Todd’s uncut ego dissolves any bad taste he’s left. I wish he’d gone with Chairmen of the Board’s “Give Me Just a Little More Time” or the Five Stairsteps’ “O-o-h Child” over the Delfonics’ “La La Means I Love You” for his third, but his bratty delivery adds an odd resonance to its innocence, and he would’ve ruined those other, better songs anyway. And though his 7/4 rendition of “Cool Jerk”, the medley’s conclusion, is another burst of buzzy racket, for once, the music justifies the discord.

After the dumb “Hungry for Love” – which always flies by even though it technically hangs around for two minutes too long – come two cuts, one feather-soft and one diamond-hard, which pull off the unusual trick of partially justifying their own toxic politics. “I Don’t Want to Tie You Down” is the most vulnerable Todd ever let himself be in front of a microphone, a rare concession that the double standard men impose on liberated women (a still-fresh concept in 1973!) is bullshit. As I-fucked-up songs go, it’s a blue valentine. “It gives my life a bit more meaning to feel in love with you,” Todd admits, letting his codependency show. But he sees this shaky foundation, and a glimmer of saving-grace interdependence: “The balance of our minds together, the perfect give and take/for me to let my love possess you, that would be my worst mistake”. Only once does he compulsively mar his own perfect picture, cracking his paper thin voice as he leans into the one stupid line he allows: “oh JEsus/I don’t want to nail you down.”

Then there’s the striking “Is It My Name”. An ardent, searing plea to some ladyperson who doesn’t want to deal with Todd’s bullshit, there’s plenty of it to step in throughout the lyric – not just the gay voice-“man-cock” couplet, but the indecipherable chorus itself. Is Todd’s hypothesis that she doesn’t want to go out with him because he’s too famous (haha), or because he has one of the unsexiest (Rundgren) names (Todd Rundgren) in rock ‘n’ roll history? And does he seriously not know that’s not it? But the opening line is “there is cause and effect/there’s a reason I’m so erect”, and it’s belted with such openhearted urgency, the crotch-rock of it all is dispelled in the sheer candor. Its extended coda is a clunky blizzard, but if your mind was blurry to begin with, this feels like a real climax. Then he closes out with five flawless minutes: “Just One Victory”, as celestially empowering an anthem as was ever divinely dictated to a nerdy white pseud.

I spent ten years high on not just weed but the same small chunk of pop history. I eroded my resolve against the hippie era’s long-disproven false promises with a dangerous cocktail: records, mixed with stronger and less pure intoxicants than the stuff they had back then. A horribly destructive bout of alcoholism – that habit is a whole year kicked – pulled me away from pot for a hot minute. But I still tricked myself into thinking that being a clean half century away from 1973 meant I should drown myself in its music, which, barring some anomalies, was either painfully pillowy or deliriously droogy. That year was peak bleak ‘60s hangover, and while I’m glad coke and quaaludes aren’t all the rage anymore, I gobbled enough space candy to simulate each, tearing myself off my own yellow brick road. And I frequently returned to “International Feel”, giving into the urge to tickle my brain with the same distressingly impermanent hour on trips that got me precisely nowhere.

I don’t know what Todd and I were looking for – escape, I suppose, a version of consciousness featuring frills only mirages can provide. In any case, he never got where he was trying to go either – his next three records, Todd, Todd Rundgren’s Utopia and Initiation,took unchecked psychedelic doodling well beyond the humanly tolerable. Because Todd’s best work (productions for other artists aside) was behind him by 1973, I’d forgotten how self-parodic and sanctimonious so much of his later work could be, even after he’d rediscovered form’s function. He was so talented, I have a permanent soft spot for him, and I was licking my lips reading the effusive descriptions of heavenly harmonies on the much later Nearly Human’s “The Waiting Game”, which Todd claims he dreamed. Put it on and you hear ‘80s hell. Rundgren is too sharp today to suspect he stayed stoned, but I wonder how unblown a mind can become. The loss of whatever he traded away was a fatal one.

pop report #5: endless summer edition (9/16/23)

a sundazed glance at Billboard’s top 20 from two weeks ago – bitch, I said what I said

Summer’s over, the heat from the proverbial kitchen and literal sun still burning the other cheek I feebly turned to both. Per tradition, we’re bidding the season goodbye with a smattering of typical plaints that it wasn’t long enough, or felt like it didn’t happen. But here in Texas, it’s in full swing by early May, with not much mystery over what we’re in for beyond what degree (Fahrenheit) of punishing. So yeah – we’re pretty sure it happened. Yet again, we thought we were ready for it, and yet again, it went a little harder on us than it needed to. Whatever else went down, that lucky old sun made it cruel enough to justify a now-ancient Taylor chorus shooting up the pop charts. Like anything else that shoots up the pop charts these days, reasons why were imperfectly clear. One more testament to the inimitable inhabitability of the One True Pop Star’s catchy canon, perhaps? My summer wasn’t my fave; I can still feel it from here.

I’ve barely touched this new blog o’ mine, which I dreamt of putting up for years – the present you ogle at through the shop window for ages only to take it home and unwrap it, and see all that built-up desire instantly brown with oxidization. While Jackals! still doesn’t have a hook, for the first four weeks of 2023, at a rate of productivity that was ultimately to no one’s benefit, I looked at the pop charts and decided to think out loud about what they meant. But the thing is, in a year when people are thinking about it more out loud than usual, nobody seems to know exactly what they mean. There are analyses trenchant and muddled, and scattered rebuttals to both, strewn throughout comments sections we’ll never read. I’m too bored to even try to recap what I think I know about how these numbers are measured. Even my late best friend’s agitated analyses resisted my comprehension. Why dull the aesthetic with the statistical?

Suffice it to say, there are so many theories about “gaming the system” floating around, it feels a bit like last election year. Most of the people on my radar are in some way convinced that one Oliver Anthony Music’s “Rich Men North of Richmond” won its surprise Billboard victory through nefarious right-wing interference – comparable, you hear, to that Jim Caviezel movie about (fighting) child trafficking, where people bought out whole theatres just to stick it to Brandon. It’s not about the music, they say, it’s about waving a righteous-anger rag, and the rallying cry might as well be coming from any red-faced red-haired Bible-belt boy with a banjo who caught the Qanon virus at très-unmasked family get-togethers. A more neutral friend points out that “Rich Men North of Richmond” hung in at a basically ungameable top 3 place on Spotify for a bit. It was all great industry all around: for MAGAfolk, thinkpiecers, Billy Bragg.

Times change fast, though, so even if a few people are still reeling from them, the Billboard chart – much less Spotify’s Today’s Top Hits, where Anthony has vanished – has moved on to its latest single-star infiltration. That star is Queen Zillennial Olivia Rodrigo, whose guts are is filled with readymade hits, and who may portend a long-awaited pendulum swing back to a more rockist zeitgeist. But because it still literally does not matter what I do here, I wanna warm up these lazy fingers some by casting an eye back to two weeks ago, a whole world away, when the charts looked a bit more like they did in the middle of swelter season. At the ground floor of that top 20 was the indefatigable fatigue-pop of “Anti-Hero”, my most favorite song, which does not seem to have engendered a self-reflection revolution here on earth. But hey, maybe people are just keeping quiet about it. Even Taylor is going through some shit.

#19 is “Thinkin’ Bout Me”, by Morgan Wallen, the, uh, hot-button country artist about whom many folks certainly have thoughts. I haven’t heard this song as of this point in this paragraph, and I suspect it’s not as good as Frank Ocean’s pillow-pop classic “Thinkin’ Bout You”, which is the next song you get when you type “thinkin bout” in the search bar. Mr. Wallen, a reformed butt-rocker, has a harder edge than many of his southern-pop peers, and an excellent article I linked to earlier in this piece, written by a (non-right-wing) writer who’s spent just a little more time with young Wallen’s proudly endless albums than I have, suggests his lyrics even bespeak hip-hop (gasp!) influences. Perhaps this explains some words he enjoys using. The beat of this one is ripped unaltered from hip-hop; the lyrics might pass too, if rapped, though not in what I perhaps unfairly call “truck nuts voice”. Wallen is feeling upset, and entitled, about a recent breakup in this enduring hit, not helping his case by singing the song like an asshole. (More on this later.)

Country really is in its butt-rock era, in a sense – the guitars are amped-up and grinding, the (male) vox are growly and real-ass proud about it. “Need a Favor”, by something called Jelly Roll that’s miles away from Morton, was cited recently in an AA meeting I attended by someone it caught unsuspecting on the radio. We’re a very talk-to-God crowd in AA, and contra Wallen, there’s a humility in this song that’s not matched at all by its sound, but which pushes its stridence into something resembling passion. I’ve just found out via Google/Wikipedia that Jelly Roll is apparently an “American rapper”. He looks like a heavier Post Malone – also an “American rapper” even though everything he puts out sounds just like a pop song – and has a narrative about being incarcerated many times, which also lends some poignant complexity to his hit’s hook. Verdict: annoying if you’re in the wrong mood, but not necessarily bad for your health.

Next in my discovery journey is finding out who the War & Treaty are – they’re a Black husband and wife who weave country and rock into more traditionally Black styles like soul and blues. It makes sense that they’d team up with Zach Bryan, one of the better and, dare I say it, more soulful heavy country hitters hanging out in the high end of these charts. “Hey Driver”, which doesn’t trouble you with electric guitars or even drums at the top, is really stirring. The juxtaposition of tW&T’s full-bodied harmonies against Bryan’s voice, which crumbles once it hits the air, is gorgeous, and the lyrics boast a complexity rarely troubled with on most of these hits. It’s all sincerity, but for the most part, I feel like it earns it. Though the Billboard charts continue to exhibit a kind of separate-but-equal mélange of genres, this sort of crossover still feels rare – even if so much pop, R&B and country takes production cues from hip-hop.

At #16 (we’re at #16 btw) is the ever-restless, currently-somewhat-exhausted Miley Cyrus, whose tired but empowered “Flowers” is already one of pop’s great breakup anthems and stands as one of the songs of last summer. I spent some time in Ms. Cyrus’ canon last spring for a piece I’m proud of, but it didn’t dispel the impression I’ve always had that behind that fabulous voice and insouciant demeanor is not a very clear artistic vision. Cyrus swings from new tack to new tack, and unless she’s put a truly fantastic single together – she does this every so often – there’s always a trace of “unconvincing” there for me. “Used to Be Young” is scarcely different. A piano ballad, something she seems to personally favor, it has an air of reflective weariness (cf. “Malibu”) and light penitence (perhaps for She is Coming?). The media was rarely kind to her, but the hurt only comes out in her songs. The hook is solid, if a little programmatic (“you say I used to be wild, I say I used to be young”), and the music narrowly avoids sappiness with an atmospheric, beaty arrangement. And the fact is, when she starts to belt, she thins out her competition.

“Religiously” by Bailey Zimmerman – I would’ve typed “Blake” based on his face and sound if I hadn’t looked twice – is another revved-up, growly country song about having been deserted, and unlike Mr. Wallen, Zimmy doesn’t wink at you that she was super wrong to leave. The chorus – “I ain’t got the only woman who was there for me/religiously” – skirts patriarchal discomfort, but the lucky among us have had a deeply patient, unwaveringly supportive partner, so the regret is broadly relatable. The religious content is also rather muted – not like this is worship music or anything, though I guess it could pass if it were cornier – weaving the spiritual and secular in a seemingly seamless way. But it’s not not corny. It’s not clear if BZ has a sense of humor, and while his voice has some nice gristle to it (a la ZB), like most of country’s current heavy hitters, the music sounds straight from the factory (a factory with mandolins).

Lil Durk (feat. J. Cole)’s “All My Life”, #14, is also corny, but not enough to drag it down. The slow unfurl of its polysyllabic ruminations (there’s an element of hip-hop the rest of pop would do well to absorb), the classic-Kanye style kids’-choir hook, the simple, gorgeous chord progression: this is a song that aims to make you cry, and more or less earns it. Cole’s climactic middle section about slain young rappers is the highlight, of course; never were more brilliant pop stars cut down too soon than in the modern rap era. But the whole thing has a humility and sense of dynamics that arrests you the whole way through, even the verses you’re not following perfectly between choruses. There is a problem here, though – the single’s sweet sugar was harvested and glazed over by none other than Dr. Luke, one of music’s accused whose charges seemed credible enough to strip him of his license to practice. Can’t Ke$ha count on us?

#13 is “Flowers”, and #12 one of three fantastic hits from the indisputable movie of the summer. Barbie was fainter for me than I wanted, though I’m not sure how much more subversive – it’s quite subversive! – it could’ve been while still nailing the something-for-everyone thing. And anyway, what do I know? I’m just a Ken (or perhaps an Allan). “Barbie World”, the #12 in question two weeks ago – remember, this is all two weeks ago, I make the rules here – is the weakest of the trio. It’s a trap-haze interpolation of the old Aqua hit, a great song which nevertheless felt so aggressively hyper back in the ‘90s, it could hit like a form of torture in the wrong mood. Nicki Minaj, my original 2010s hero, hasn’t helped herself personally for a bit, but her effortless, earth-scorching command, even at a low temperature, is a perfect vessel for the universal empowerment this theme and its film intend – “all of the Barbies is pretty” indeed. #6 on this chart is Dua Lipa’s mint-condition, made-to-order disco anthem “Dance the Night”, the sort of banger that feels like it’s been around forever. The last Barbie hit, Billie Eilish’s startlingly canny “What Was I Made For”, a ballad that astounds a little harder every time it languidly unfolds, hung in at #22.

Oliver Anthony Music had dropped just outside the top 10 at this time. Part of my picking an earlier chart is that I wanted to write about him; that said, I don’t know that a single song has had more written about it in the recent past, and all in one week. Much was made of Anthony(whose beard conceals his build)’s irritation with people who use taxpayer-funded welfare to buy cheap treats. In fact, his fatphobia is the clearest toxicity in the lyrics, though the reference to “minors on an island somewhere” – as if the U.S. government did a thing to keep Jeffrey Epstein from hurting people – codes conspiracy theorist. But all the carping about his fishy success belies the fact that the song sounds great. Mr. Music’s voice is searing and powerful, the stark banjo and the outdoor ambience a production coup, and if it wasn’t so clear he was coming at this from the wrong place (though to be fair, he’s abjured any party affiliation), it would speak to the great open secret of U.S. politics, which is that bullshit pay is everybody’s problem, and these wedge issues, however serious, are there to distract us from uniting against our oppressors. As Billy Bragg put it in his pitch-perfect rebuttal, “join a union”. We’ve just been reminded strikes still work.

Having already touched on #6, I’ll breeze through 10 to 7. 10 is Rema & Selena Gomez’s “Calm Down”, an Afrobeat-graced pop hit with a vibe much resemblant of Bad Bunny and other recent Latin pop. Gomez’s post-Waverly Place penchant for coming on like she’s absolutely done with everything and is too tired to be bothered anymore suits the single’s quiet storm perfectly. “Vampire” is Olivia’s current piano-kissoff coup, and you already know how much it doesn’t suck. Gunna’s “Fukumean” gets stuck in my head here and there – well, just the “Fukumean” part – and I always subsequently wonder what it sounds like on the radio, where you still can’t quite say exactly what the fukumean. The music feels generic if peppy; the lyrics are conventional hip-hop aggro-bravado. SZA’s “Snooze” is no snooze, but also no “Kill Bill”.

I went through a breakup this summer, right around the time Morgan Wallen’s “Last Night” blew up. His music is insistently catchy and melodically brawny, so for a short time “no way it was our last night” was sort of a pet chorus in my head. But this deteriorated quickly, paying attention to the rest of the lyrics – said night was booze-fueled, not the most relatable or charming thing for a grateful recovering alcoholic, and once again, Wallen’s greasy cockiness is an automatic turn-off. There’s very little indication that his ex wants to stick around, much less that Wallen, whose cultural function is primarily as a “cancelled” superstar half of the country is propping up in retaliation, has done a lot of self-interrogation about it. The song really does sound great, and its hook is invincible, but once again, it isn’t exactly good for you.

The late-breaking triumph of Taylor’s “Cruel Summer” would also leave a bad taste if the song weren’t one of her best. I say this because of the recent scenario in which our new pop hero Olivia Rodrigo had to pay Swift, whose business acumen seems genuinely frightening, for a touch of inspiration from this song (a chanted section…?) that could be ungenerously interpreted as some sort of theft for which some sort of repayment is in order. Their lawyers worked it out, but bad blood feels inevitable; Swift famously supported Rodrigo in a deliberately maternal way when “Drivers License” (sorry, “drivers license”) hit, but it’s not impossible to imagine that zillionaire cipher feeling a twinge of jealousy from which a few petty things might result. Rodrigo’s evasive responses in interviews seem to give credit to this suspicion.

Into the top #3, and here sits one of my favorite curios, Luke Combs’ musically beefed-up but lyrically unaltered cover of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car”. Combs absolutely has truck nuts voice, and I’m still not clear what people who prefer that voice above all others do when he drops the line about his time as a checkout girl. It’s hard to pinpoint anything nefarious here; Combs has just sent an influx of money into the bank account of a more-or-less forgotten Black female singer-songwriter – though that song endures, and is now living in the high reaches of the charts, because it’s fucking fantastic. But then, I haven’t read any thinkpieces about it, and I’m getting about as tired of writing as you are of reading, so we’ll move on.

aladdin sane is fifty

a look back from the future on an album that predicted it

Hey sweetie – do you think you could sit a little bit, you know… stiller? I know, I know, I’m sorry – I can tell you’re anxious about time, but don’t worry, I’ve got my eye on it. We’ll at least get you there before the party really picks up. Yeah, yeah, I’m joking. And yeah, OK, I wouldn’t know. Does your generation not do “fashionably late”?

Anyway, I know part of your mood is that you really didn’t want your old dad to do your makeup for you. Your mom has the magic artist’s hands; I knock over every third thing I touch. Just try to relax, OK? Here: let me tell you about the album this look comes from. Nobody knows the album, but everybody knows the cover.

Sometimes I wonder what “kids” these days think about Bowie. Yeah, old kids like you – old enough to have started thinking like adults, or at least making a very serious attempt of it. I mean, he’s the kind of public figure you just know about, from early on – I know you think I’m old, but God, I’d love to be old enough to have seen him when he was something new. It’s impossible to imagine the joyous shock of it. Yes, I did just say “joyous shock”. Hold still. I don’t know – young people seem to sort of idolize him by default. His cool has no parallels, after all. In a way, he is directly culturally responsible for my trend-bucking, impossibly stylish nonbinary teen.

But what do you think about his music? Like, what three songs come to mind first? OK, cool, “Rebel Rebel”. The one moment of uninterrupted brilliance on a great, if flawed, album – the one with the cover that you always used to get scared of. “Major Tom”, OK – it’s called “Space Oddity”, I know you knew that, though saying it out loud makes me realize it’s the kind of title you could only get away with in 1969. “Ashes to Ashes”, nice. Deep cut, I’m proud. So do people your age know that Bowie made almost no listenable music after the album “Ashes to Ashes” is on? Sure, sure, “Let’s Dance”. “Modern Love”, OK. And then yeah, Blackstar, at the end. Bowie spent a lot longer just being Bowie than he spent doing the kind of work that fixes a name in the stars for good. He did it all in one artful burst, one it had taken him a while to conceive.

I know you know “Ziggy Stardust”; you knew all the words before you knew what they meant. Hell, I don’t know even what some of them mean – what’s this about a fly trying to break our bones? That was my album, kid. I was 12, and it was 1999. You know, you just can’t start an album with something as beautiful as “Five Years” and expect people won’t play the whole thing over and over just to get back to it again and again. Honestly, that was the thing that first struck me about Bowie. His melodies. So many of those early songs were as gorgeous as he was. Those strings on “Space Oddity”, from the master – Paul Buckmaster, to be precise. Sorry – dad joke. “Life On Mars?”, God, try not to cry while you’re straining to hit that note. OK, sure, yeah. You don’t have to strain, but.

But the other thing that struck me was my sense that this person was just different. All those decades after he’d landed on Earth, the dangerous things he flirted with still felt… dangerous. I mean, it was still not OK to be gay in 1999. The threat of permanent othering greeted your every transgressive sashay before your mind even completed the thought. All those old hateful clichés were waiting around the corner to strike you dead in the face. Yes, yes, I know you know your dad’s not gay, and wonder if you know that neither, perhaps, was Bowie.

While Elton John, the other biggest pop star at the time, was stuck agonizing in his closet, Bowie made it cool to overtly suggest you switched sides on a whim. Just by coming on like he did, Bowie liberated millions into doing far more than he perhaps ever tried himself. And even for fans who weren’t gay, but weren’t conventionally masculine, he kicked open a door: now, threading that needle between masculine and feminine was fashionable. There were countless who’d been waiting forever for this.

Progress isn’t linear, of course – everything got wrenched back six steps in the eighties, Bowie included. But once you open the box, it’s hard get it all back in. For me, a boy who never felt anything like a “boy”, but was pretty sure he wasn’t gay or trans, Bowie threw light on a secret space: with the right amount of conviction, you could be anything. It was all in that voice – that indulgently theatrical, unabashedly British voice, in a perpetual search for the feyest cadence. Bowie stitched his image together from a zillion borrowed ideas. But nobody has ever sounded quite like him since, and believe me – hundreds upon hundreds have tried.

The funny thing is, Bowie actually took forever to figure himself out. He was one of those young people whose life was fueled entirely by the art he encountered, and one of those young people possessed with this nagging sense that they were destined for something unimaginably big. Of course, it was hard for a young white British man not to suspect this in the wake of the Beatles. In 1964, however many Brit kids believed in God, all had faith in this giant hand in the sky that would whisk you away to American stardom – provided you started a group with guitars and matching suits. So Bowie formed one, playing blues covers, which perhaps he should have been legally barred from ever doing.

But the key to Bowie is that he wasn’t really a musician. He had almost no technical facility. He’d had training, sure – as a mime. But not only could he not play any instrument particularly well (including the saxophone you couldn’t rip out of his hands), he couldn’t actually sing that well. People don’t usually notice this, because his voice is so arresting. But Bowie’s one of the greatest non-singers pop ever saw. It was all fabulous contrivance, every vocal the sound of a man circling his favorite songs or albums like a vulture. That silly band he formed was doing Velvet Underground covers back when less than a thousand people knew about them. He always saw pop music as a concept, and he’d road-tested multiple theories before the eureka.

His first three albums are total miscalculations. The forced whimsy of the first David Bowie, from ’67 right before Sgt. Pepper blew a billion minds, is the only music he ever made that sounds completely dated. The album feels like him trying on a dozen different funny hats, and all of them are the wrong hat. When I was growing up, that album was seen a false start, and was harder to find than the others, which is just fine. You used to like “The Laughing Gnome” when you were little, you know. Oh – you don’t remember that one? Well, forget I said anything. If you go and play it, you’ll stop speaking to me, and I’m not ready for that phase just yet.

Anyway, he realized he hadn’t pulled off what he wanted to, and for a minute, flirted with being half of a duo – like Simon & Garfunkel. Can you imagine? But then he struck gold with “Space Oddity”, a hit so beloved nobody cared that the rest of the album sucked. It’s a bunch of acid-damaged freak-folk, and yeah, I just made it sound cool as hell, but it’s not. It’s boring and distracted and not one song is anywhere near as good as “Space Oddity”. So he tried rebranding again with The Man Who Sold the World, another strange, poorly defined collection of rambling non-songs, this time with a bunch of electric rather than acoustic guitars. Oh yeah, no – that’s not a Nirvana song. But Kurt Cobain was really good at rescuing songs. At this point, Bowie’s whole deal was that he really didn’t see his own strengths.  But he got the cover right: himself, elegantly reclining in a satin dress. Naturally, in America it was replaced with a horrible drawing of an unshaven, gunslinging cowboy.

But all of a sudden, with Hunky Dory, he knew what he was doing. It’s the first of three albums that I think sum up what people think of when they think of “Bowie”. Then came four decades of using that image and its stardom as a license to do the most unexpected things he could think of. But Bowie’s genuinely weird albums always have this dour, almost museum-y vibe. From ’71-’73, he’s having insane fun, in the most contagious way possible.

Look – Hunky Dory is still probably his best record. In a way, that cover is perfect, and sets the tone for everything to come. What face is he making, exactly? It’s said to be an imitation of Marlene Dietrich or Lauren Bacall or somebody – I’d look it up right now if I wasn’t totally nailing the end of this lightning bolt, just wait till you see this. But something about it… his eyes glancing up to heaven, or maybe his home planet, there’s something mock-desperate but also actually desperate in his face. Even without the dress he exudes feminine allure. And the songs, God, the songs, a menagerie of styles that sums him up so well he could’ve crashed on the jet to America with his entire legacy secured.

“Changes” is on that one! Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes. Yeah! Nice. OK, but if you keep singing, you’re guaranteeing that your dad is going to make you look like you did this yourself without a mirror. You can “turn and face the stranger” later – right now turn and face me, please. We’re so close, kid.

But Ziggy Stardust really set things in motion. Androgyny wasn’t the only untapped territory waiting to be mined by a superstar. By 1972, America was getting a little sick of hippies. There was a deep craving, especially in the UK, for the shock of the new – out with beards and jeans and back-to-the-earth, in with femme looks and outlandish outfits and outsider myths about outer space. Bowie songs like “Five Years” and “All the Young Dudes” – you know Bowie wrote that, right? – were “carrying news” of a truly apocalyptic conclusion to society, one he really thought was coming soon. He decided that the world would notice better if the warning were coming from a sexy, dangerous, genderless alien, and that it would require a special vessel: namely, the catchiest pop songs he’d ever written.

Still, none of that was the true breakthrough. This was actual rock theatre – Bowie was pretending to be “Ziggy Stardust”, on record and on stage, with all the commitment of an actor, and a good one, which ironically he really wasn’t. But offstage, he was coy about the difference between Ziggy and David. This was an inversion of the unique thing about musicians, as opposed to movie stars. It’s performance, but also a kind of reality, in that the person you’re seeing perform really is that person, filtering themselves through music. Bowie was taking the Dylan trick of shifting one’s identity further – you could occupy two identities at once, and you could deliberately blur the line between real and fake. And god knows, in the drug-addled rush of his heyday, that line got blurred in Bowie’s own head. Like so many spectacles, it was built to flash so bright and burn out so quickly. But for that brief, bizarre moment, it conquered the world – because it cut a picture that had never been cut, and filled a space that had never been filled.

Aaaaaaaaaaaand OK. We’re done. Let’s get you over to the mirror – oh, wait, shit. What time is it? How long have I been talking? Weren’t you watching the clock? No, no, OK, yeah, I told you to sit still and face me… Look, we can absolutely make it. If I take that backroad route the cops usually avoid, I can probably get you there no more than fifteen minutes late. And you know I will go to jail if I need to, so long as it gets you there! Alright – grab your shoes. We’ll listen to Aladdin Sane in the car, and I’ll tell you more.

–

God, I love this one. Watch that maaaaaaa-ee-aaaaaaan… Yes, I saw it turn green. I’m just savoring the moment! It’s what life’s all about. Anyway, the thing about 1973 is that it was the first year that the Rolling Stones made a bad album. But that year, a whole bunch of people started putting out Rolling Stones songs better than they could. Elton John, the New York Dolls, Bowie. The best thing about Aladdin Sane is that army of crunching guitars. See, Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust, they’re not really rock ‘n’ roll records. They play with cabaret and beautiful ballads, all sorts of soft stuff. But for the most part, Aladdin Sane, which also plays with cabaret and beautiful ballads, KICKS ASS. Absolute ass. It’s the sound of the prettiest star, #1 in the UK and a wildfire rumor everywhere else, high on his own supply.

The thing about the Ziggy Stardust “concept” or “story” is that there really isn’t one. It’s all just scenes and songs, loosely linked together. Same with the Diamond Dogs album, which was originally supposed to be a musical about 1984 before George Orwell’s widow took legal action to stop him. So Aladdin Sane is often described as “Ziggy Goes to Washington”, the obsessed-with-America album. And the character Aladdin Sane, the one I just painted you to look like, is often described as a kind of Ziggy-Stardust-from-another-angle. But that’s really all the “concept” there is – and Bowie later admitted that his ideas were much vaguer for this album. Which is fine! He wasn’t an actor or storyteller or playwright or even a mime. He was a rock musician, so the concept of this album is “self-made androgynous alien superstar gets to make an album from the pinnacle of worldwide fame for the first time”. This is Bowie leaning back and enjoying being Bowie, thrilling to how well he’s curated the image he now inhabited from stage to stage.

But that was short-lived: at the end of the year he declaimed from one such stage that he was retiring from performance for good. Obviously, it didn’t take. Bowie wouldn’t be trapped by an image any more than Bob Dylan would – at a moment’s notice, he’d switch his costume and his sound. But because he didn’t yet know how smoothly he could execute those ch-ch-ch-ch-changes – sorry – something about Aladdin Sane is a little confused, the kind of album that doesn’t know exactly what it wants to be. This is probably why people don’t put it on lists of the greatest records of all time. Also, “Time” sucks. Here, listen to that one. No, wait, let me fast forward to this bit. This stupid bit in the middle, after the stupid bit about how time “falls wanking to the floor”, this bit where he talk-sings “screeeeams!” in the most self-parodic way possible. Honestly, I start to like it when the chorus builds at the coda. And I mean, look up the lyrics to “Watch That Man” one day. No one was better at hiding terrible ideas in terrific songs.

There’s an attitude throughout this album, a tough and liberated attitude that animates you like the cocaine Bowie was having for breakfast around this time. No, I’ve never tried it, I’ve told you that. And you’d do well to follow my example. Just look at Bowie, baby. Do you want to wake up one day having no memory of recording some of your greatest music, or deciding you should only eat milk and peppers, or having so fogged your mind you get caught by paparazzi doing a Nazi salute just for the hell of it? Anyway, this album hypes you all the way up. “Cracked Actor”? Crack, baby, crack, show me your reel… He was never this menacing, this pointed, this savage. Put that in my ears and I’ll run that mile in double time. Or even the why-did-you-do-this? cover of the Stones’ “Let’s Spend the Night Together”, on which he triples the intensity while dispassionately ripping all the tenderness out of it.

Shoot! I haven’t even mentioned Mick Ronson! Mick Ronson is the reason all the guitar solos on these albums sound like sorcery. Mick Ronson was the deputy of Bowie’s dreams. Honestly, I don’t need to say anything about Mick Ronson. Just google “David Bowie Mick Ronson” right now, and feast your eyes.

But what was I talking about. Uhhh… yeah. There was a lot on Bowie’s mind on this album. He’s obsessed with the US, but still hung up on the apocalypse stuff too. So you get the futurist doo-wop of “Drive-In Saturday”, about kids learning how to make out from watching clips of Mick Jagger in Performance – please do not do this – or “Panic in Detroit”, about god knows what. These songs are Bowie at his best as a lyricist – chopped-up lines that are all frantic suggestion, a gumbo of weird images adding up to a feeling, as opposed to a story. They cloud upbeat music in a doomy mood, and the juxtaposition is genius. And then there’s “Jean Genie”! Which is said to be about Iggy Pop, who was one of many forgotten pioneers Bowie used his power to resurrect by producing their records in ‘72 and ’73 – Mott the Hoople, Lou Reed… I said that Bowie should go to prison for trying to play the blues. But! When he filters it through his lilywhite cyborg vision, when that hard soul grows steel-cold and passion fossilizes into deadpan indifference…

OK, OK. I’ll stop. No, I don’t know why your dad talks like that. But who knows? Maybe pretension is hereditary. And if Bowie taught us anything, it’s that pretension is cool, if you have a little fun with it.

Anyway, we’re five minutes away, says here. Which is perfect, because it’s just enough time for us to listen to all of the title track. I’ll shut up for all five if you will. Well, no, I’ve barely let you get a word in edgewise, so you can talk. But you must keep perfectly silent for the entirety of the piano solo at 2:03.

…

Fuck.

Oh shit – pretend you didn’t hear that. Ah, fuck it – who am I to restrict you from any part of the vast and diverse plains of language? It’s a powerful word, Vinyl – deploy it only when necessary.

after midnights

on Tay’s latest remedy for an emotionally abusive life

It’s in my ears right now, and it sounds fucking great. An instant warm bath of sound, like the first fond flush of a high (lavender haze, indeed). Four counts in, then a jarring vocal sample in your right ear – except you can’t call it jarring, because while it’s alien and sudden, it also feels just right, no less soothing somehow than the underwater throb of the beat or the faint glow of synthesizer. “Meet me at midnight,” the pop empress requests, through a soft veil of software, the last syllable twisting up into that very en vogue chipmunk zone. It’s instantly sensual and instantly corny, and a lot more of the latter. But already it feels like a balm – a peaceful sort of medicinal, like somebody slipped you some spiritual tonic and its effects are taking waking-dream hold. A fleeting little snip, left ear this time, and we’re off.

We’re used to Swift keeping a toe in the organic, but on Midnights she’s singing to us from a basilica of agape machines. Yet she’s reliably explored discrete musical worlds in her various – oh, let’s call them eras. Reputation and 1989 often sounded like a pop star trying on trends, though neither was quite as inorganic as Midnights. Greil Marcus groused that it’s the “musical equivalent” of an Autopen – that’s for mass autographs – but the kids don’t mind the machines these days. In fact, most pop musicians have harnessed them fabulously, and found a glorious interzone between fake and flesh. Some of today’s hits can flatter your high like Electric Ladyland – but at its best, this album can cause one. You need to calm down, and Swift is on it.

As a producer, Jack Antonoff flips between contributor and co-auteur, and this is the first time he’s been the latter for Swift. He obviously travels in elite circles these days, but like Swift, he never seems corrupted by privilege. Trying to pinpoint what makes him remarkable tends to run you up against how ordinary he is: sometimes he seems a little small-minded, and sometimes he’s a genius and you’re happy he’s on the radio. Surely, if his equipment wasn’t state of the art already, Swift could garnish it for their new collab. Yet Midnights is bereft of the big-money bang of the Max Martin/Shellback megahits (“We Are Never…”, “Blank Space”). Antonoff prefers the gentle decay of lo-fi beats and beds of sweet, modest synths, and he hasn’t particularly evolved this sound for Swift’s album – though he’s never been quite so atmospheric as this, nor filled his corners out with such hip-hop-indebted imagination. It would be wonderful if Midnights’ repudiation of the hi-fi is prescient – so many gifted bedroom-pop musicians could hear this album, and craft similar music that won’t need a millionaire’s budget to resonate as valuably.

Of course, there’s a person at the center of all of this. A living, breathing, brilliant writer, and these are her new songs. Well, hers ‘n’ his – though waking dream Zöe Kravitz pitched something in on the first track and Lana Del Rey sprinkles a small amount of words on another song and TS’s boyfriend picked a cute pseudonym for his sole writing credit. And she’s an adult. folkore opened with “I’m doing good, I’m on some new shit,” the slight street parlance of the second bit intoned in such a steely yet casual way. Sparse “fuck”s followed; it was thrilling. But cursing is old news on Midnights (if not the single), and as Gawker put it, “At 32, Taylor Swift Can Almost Convincingly Swear”. It’s less an issue of delivery than diction. But it opens her up, and it feels helpful in the way that Obama coming out for gay marriage in 2012 was – too little too late, but from a great platform to perhaps open other people up. The album’s liberally scattered expletives are how most people talk, at least of her generation – peppering general conversation with whatever fuckin’ shit seems appropriate for emphasis. It’s as tactical as ever, but a key part of what becomes clear is an escalated self-revelation, from the safety of a technopop sanctuary.

Reactions to this album have been fairly mixed by her standard – or as mixed as swallowing the top 10 can be, and to some extent I think it’s because people can’t pigeonhole this one as efficiently as the others. Midnights is miles more fun than folklore (I don’t need to drag evermore into this), but there she justified her heavy sincerity with soothing and enticing settings and really impressively crafted lyrics. On this album, she’s a lot more playful with a lot less poise. That first hint on Instagram, “…the stories of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout my life”, seemed to suggest something diaristic and dubious – this was serious Swift, not laughs in the middle of her song to let you know she’s not serious Swift. But it set the tone for something downbeat, and as it happens this music is a lot more of a rush, the artist taking more chances without carefully plotting them out. It is such a strange mix of ridiculous and intelligent.

Blissed-out cocoon “Lavender Haze” is actually the product of six different minds (excluding jazz prodigy Braxton Cook’s snatch of vocal, an affecting hook whose soul still feels smoothed out somehow). Beyond Zöe and the copilots, it's Kendrick collaborator Sounwave and Bey/J collaborator Jahaan Sweet and Wale collaborator Sam Dew. You aren’t meant know who wrote what; you’re meant to hear Swift as alone in the dark, except you’re somehow alone there with her. It’s both casually triumphant and strikingly solitary – self-empowerment that doesn’t need to bellow about itself to mean business. “I’m damned if I do give a damn what people say” is a typical nice-try, but whichever one of the six came up with “get it off your chest/get it off my desk” should get a raise. And though she has a credible, THC-free explanation for the title (it was a line on Mad Men), that hint of edge isn’t a bad look for her.

“Maroon” is a mood and a half, the kind of song where Swift puts herself back in a shared room some old night with some old lover, all those delicate details (“your roommate’s cheap-ass screw-top rosé”) flooding back so much more forcefully than her reason for being there. Once again, she sings with a conscious detachment, a half-beleaguered, half-determined evenness, never bare in the mix even if Antonoff keeps the filter light. The quiet ways she and her music convey waves of emotion throughout the LP are proof she has a gift for subtlety (or has been taking classes). Blood courses hot through the icicle-adorned electronic arrangement, and “so scarlet it was maroon” (cheeks, lips) is one of her sexiest and most allusive images, so specific, yet viscerally visual. Notes beam like sirens over a power-ballad beat, pulsing slowly and insistently. Contradictions everywhere – here’s a song you could cry or fuck to.

“Anti-Hero”, which I’ve written about on here more than once, is closest to my heart. Despite the slings and arrows she regularly invites, Swift’s personal transgressions are likely a safe distance from shocking. But many of us have dealt heartbreaks that felt like they drew blood, or at least broke the skin. No one knows how many assholes there are in the world, but there are a lot, and as I see it, Swift’s achievement here is more significant than a pop song can usually claim: it’s a vehicle for fuckups singing along (or just listening) to process festering guilt. No matter how much pain is infused in the words, her melodies are here to protect you. This one is the loveliest; that lilting third (“I have this thing”) hits like an even more treacherous jump than it is. Synthesizers burn bright under a blanket of sweet sorrow. The note-perfect vocal disintegration (“everybody agreeeeeees”) in the middle; the wacky fantasy about the daughter-in-law; the “It’s me. Hi.” hook alone – the ingenuity here feels limitless. Her best songs abound with great ideas, but they’re rarely as piquant as this.

Those crystalline pizzicato strings that herald “Snow on the Beach” always rip me back to the streets of Manhattan, my hands hiding poetically in my pockets, on a wonderful and tearful trip two weeks after the album’s release. Swift always sings so sufficiently (and specifically), we forget it’s not one of her strengths. But here she puts her fragile, ethereal falsetto to marvelous use, with Antonoff projecting it through at least two panes of frosted glass. Much has been made of Lana Del Rey’s ghostly cameo, buried if not inaudible; I respect the choice without understanding it. Del Rey is a specialist at surreal, threatening auras, and thus allows Swift to get a little sentimental (and get away with “now I’m all for you like Janet” – type that lyric into your phone and you’ll get an eyeroll emoji) without the sugar-sweetness getting sickly. Judge her, Del Rey whispers as she lurks, and I’ll bite you through a key vein. And it’s not like Swift is a cream puff here – “life is emotionally abusive” is an acid coup of a couplet.

Swift’s track 5s traditionally receive special attention. It’s not an ironclad rule, but they’re often loci for uniquely vulnerable emotional expression. No one who knows her needs to be told about “All Too Well”, and you could end up dead if you get caught on the wrong side of “All You Had to Do Was Stay”’s lyric. “My Tears Ricochet”, “Delicate” – searing statements from quiet places. “You’re On Your Own, Kid” is one of the sweetest and saddest of these. As throughout Midnights, Swift allows herself an unusually probing glimpse at her own insecurity (“I searched the party of better bodies/just to learn that my dreams aren't rare”), but cushions her catharsis with intentionally indirect imagery. The muted beats and single-string guitar(!) remain restrained throughout, so when it breaks out into the smallest instrumental elaborations after the choruses, it feels seismic and majestic. And its hook won’t let me pass with dry eyes. “You always have been” is the title’s other half. But yeah, she lets you know as she steps back out: “you can face this”.

I’m addicted to the disarming opening sample of “Midnight Rain”, Swift’s voice with its pitch brought down about the same distance as the leap up between “night” and “rain”. (Others I know find this hook upsetting.) The song lets itself drag along a late-night suburban street, shimmering in the wake of a drizzle and through nostalgia’s lavender haze. The song strikes a bittersweet balance, a doleful and so-pretty look back at a broken hometown romance, untroubled by obligatory regret. So many small-pond love stories promise a forever that will affix you somewhere for good, and trading your chance to freely explore the world outside could disconnect you from your most burning desires. The line the vocal treads this time is between morose articulation and unmistakable internal contentment. There’s no pain in her recollection – she had to move on, and that feels realer than usual.

Appropriately nestled between the album proper’s first and last halves is its murkiest and most confused track, the aptly titled “Question”. If the sonic profile wasn’t already so welcomely pacifying, the song’s lack of definition might drag its music too far into the ether to make out its contours, much less sink your fingers into it. In a way it feels like a depository for all the unsettled sentiments Swift couldn’t fit into the other songs. But it’s also a necessary breather – an easygoing break in the middle of a healing experience that’s neither leisurely nor hasty. And as it happens, song #7 made its chart debut at #7 – so perhaps somewhere in its scattered plaints and discursion about “politics and gender roles and you’re not sure and I don’t know” are the answers some listeners are looking for.

The song that blends in least is the least good. Signaling its ominousness with a switch to a minor key, the beats and keyboards meeting each other halfway in a muffled percussive blend, “Vigilante Shit” is a wronged-woman revenge fantasy along the lines of the more artful “No Body No Crime” and the far kitschier “I Did Something Bad”. Rather than laying out a careful narrative like the former, it suggests a more complicated situation through errant details (“she had the envelope/where you think she got it from?”) – we know he’s in finance, or elite enough to merit schadenfreude, but Swift means for you to inhabit the feeling rather than the situation. If you came up with “draw the cat eye, sharp enough to kill a man”, you’d have to finish the rest, and you couldn’t be blamed for not living up to your opening line.

That lengthy mellow stretch pristinely sets up one of the LP’s richest, most ebullient tracks. Festooned with a fun surfeit of glittering little touches, “Bejeweled” could be the most unambiguously positive song on the entire record. “Lavender Haze” locates its triumph in the righteous flip of a finger, and in a way so does this. In its least generous interpretation, this is an anthem for people who get off a little on strategically dangling the prospect of infidelity in front of a lover who may be doing no worse than being neglectful (“when I meet the band/they ask, ‘do you have a man?’/I can still say, ‘I don’t remember’”). But the victory here isn’t laced with sarcasm; it’s still icily playful, but at heart it’s sweet and necessary, especially in the aftermath of a pandemic whose madness, if not virus, no one was immune to. The song captures the thrill of unearthing yourself from ancient layers of trauma, and loving what you discover.

What is that noise at the start of “Labyrinth” (not the tremelo organ or the heartbeat beat)? It sounds like a voice, but also like one of those toy cows you turn over (Google informs me that these are called “moo boxes”, and now I’m terrified none of you have any idea at all what I’m talking about) – coupled with what sounds like a ping-pong ball slingshot against a thigh. It’s deeply unnatural, and not precisely musical either. But it’s also ideal, because it’s important to Swift that “Labyrinth” convey both an unnerving sense of mystery and the tranquil euphoria of new love: “uh-oh, I’m falling in love again.” Her voice is so fragile at the top of her range, which she’s never pushed higher on record before. But the sheer emotional intensity of the choice beats any of the tricks she favors in her midrange. The most scarcely discussed interesting thing about Swift is that she’s been deeply and mutually in love for six years. But a song like this makes you wonder if she spent all those years unpacking love’s travails because of some innate discomfort with the idea of good love.

“Karma” carries forth “Bejeweled”’s momentum at just the right moment, clipping along at Midnights’ version of a fast tempo, which is a light and steady march. For a person who makes fairly selective public statements, Swift truly doesn’t seem to realize she doesn’t need to subtweet the media (or her business enemies or Kanye) on every album. Here the closest thing to a tell is “my pennies made your crown” (I first heard “panties”, which was confusing), so it’s presumed to be about whoever made her mad enough to rerecord all her albums. But it’s loose enough to function as “Bejeweled” with an enemy. “Karma is a cat, purring in my lap ‘cause it loves me” may be the greatest-ever example of her strange gift for lines that are simultaneously stupid and genius. And when she gives in to that exultant “ask me why so many fade/when I’m still here”, the subjectivity of her self-celebration is so clear – this is that millionaire pop star – yet so honest and so earned, you feel like crying on her unfazeable behalf.

And then another swift switch back to quiet. “Sweet Nothings” really is this album’s secret weapon, and not only did Joe Alwyn cowrite it, it’s as explicitly a song about their relationship as we’ve ever heard from her. “I spy with my little tired eye/tiny as a firefly/a pebble that we picked up last July” may be as cute and curated a detail as she’s ever come up with, but with this song you have no doubt that these things actually happened. Its slight childishness is flawlessly outweighed by something slyer later: “on the way home/I wrote a poem/you say, ‘what a mind’/this happens all the time”. And the spare electric piano counterpart is perfect, and those later “ooh”s and  brassy echoed swells as the song builds a fucking master class in minimalist production. I owe you, dear reader, a pinpoint of a line that always makes my tears flow:

industry disruptors and soul deconstructors and smooth-talking hucksters out gladhanding each other and the voices that implore, “you should be doing more” to you I can admit, that I’m just too soft for all of it

I know you couldn’t hear how I just exhaled but I’m really hoping you could feel it.

“Mastermind” sneaks up on you, true to its word. This fascinating song, an ironic confession over a galloping burble of synths, is potentially this artist’s most direct confrontation with the question so often imposed on her – the question of how much of her artwork and art life is calculation, and how much of that is our problem. Even at its most vulnerable –

no one wanted to play with me as a little kid so I’ve been scheming like a criminal ever since to make them love me and make it seem effortless this is the first time I’ve felt the need to confess

– it feels a little ruthless. But its ruthlessness is played as a joke, albeit one capable of containing cruelty. It’s a parody of her own alleged Machiavellianism that both asserts her power and unravels its myth, in that masterful way she does sometimes. Imagine pondering the dualities of your life in your own head if you had this woman’s life: absolutely nobody believes you’re the best one for the job of interviewing Martin McDonagh, but there you are in that chair. “Mastermind” works as a fun, semi-serious self-pep talk, like “Bejeweled”, like “Karma”. But absorb it as a love song, and let yourself wonder which side of united these lovers are on, and it takes on an ache that can really rip your heart out if it catches you off guard.

And Swift has never, ever been too bad at catching us off guard.

–

For instance. Three hours after its social debut, Midnights was a double album, with a clean 20 songs, a perfect length for living and brooding in for an hour (like Tusk, which is also a soothing yet cathartic space for working out weird heartache). In certain ways, these songs are set apart in more than just their delayed delivery. Much was made of those lowercase albums’ – which were also delightful surprises – mostly deft exploration of other personas. The “3am edition” songs throw light on how much of Midnights feels like a single persona – Swift herself. Only the one where she’s on her vigilante shit abandons this choice, and it’s just cosplay anyway. She relaxes a bit on these bonus tracks, and creative writing is one of her eccentric versions of relaxing.

She’s also often chided by her zealously devoted fans for leaving good songs off Albums Proper, and while some of the 3am songs are superior to their elders, generally their excision feels considered. A few of them are conceivable violations to the main show’s overall feel – and feel is what that show is all about. The tracks with Aaron Dessner bear dinstinctly un-Antonoff but definitely folkloric traces of the National, a band whose organic content meets the cottagecore standard. “The Great War” is sedate and ambitious, revealing itself at a slow but gripping rate each listen. “Hi Infidelity” (as in “hello,”) grounds its own flippancy in solemn piano chords, calling to mind 2020 songs like “Champagne Problems”, where the high drama feels adult and a little patrician. And the soft assassination (of John Mayer) “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve” tempers its perfectly scathing pointed moments with self-reflection, honest confusion, and even flashes of serenity, in a roiling keyboard sea.

Other songs could’ve passed unnoticed on the main record. “Glitch”, like “Labyrinth” is another total surrender of energy. But rather than letting love scare it into bewilderment, the song luxuriates in the bafflement of never wanting to end things. It’s her subtlest and fondest joke about her public persona on the record, if not a real contender against “Sweet Nothings” in the songs-about-Joe category. “Paris” sports the champagne effervescence of her reveries about the rich and infamous, your “Starlight”s and “Long Live”s. And “Dear Reader”, a furnished alone-at-the-piano-after-the-show song a la “New Year’s Day”, resists simple interpretation, but it does feel like a fitting end to the whole affair. If we take that this album is her most direct and least curated, its self-referential warning is as acute as ever: listen, public and media, it’s better for both of us if we all stop puzzling so much over me.

But who knows. Maybe she’ll find it feels better – more relaxing – to leave those walls down for good. You’re tasked with a lot more self-defense when you’re the world’s biggest girl next door, and putting it all out there is less advisable than usual. But the truth has that troublesome habit of setting you free.

I told you about my dead friend but I didn’t tell you about my divorce. Two decades ago I met both that treasured friend – sweet yet thorny, effortlessly gifted in ways I wasn’t, the same distance from the rest of the world as me – and an equally treasured girl, a fetching, covertly brilliant little redhead in thick glasses with an irresistible fashion sense lodged nonchalantly between skate-punk and Winnie the Pooh. Her own aesthetic was hardly confused – I’d never met anyone with a sharper eye, or who got angrier when beauty or order were violated in art or life. But she was arrestingly shy; something brittle yet so sweet inside her drew me away from my usual impulse to chaos and defensive irreverence. My enthusiasm for verbal communication was challenged by her skepticism toward it, but we made it work – at least at first. After all those terrified, clumsy or simply nonexistent first tries, I finally felt the enlightening embrace of young love, where daring to hold someone’s hand leads to a dazzling florescence of heart-to-heart dialogue. This was what life was about.

I loved that boy and that girl so immoderately because they enchanted me more than most people. At sixteen I felt the luminous ideals of platonic and romantic love protecting me from a world I’d in no way begun to experience, much less understand. It was the sort of real-life fantasy where the glow off the pavement after it rains makes you want to burst into impromptu dance, or run home and write a song. But waking dreams are all too easy to dispel, and how can you know at sixteen that you stand to lose the good things that feel so irrevocably woven into your world? Her part of my book is its least open, only fair for someone whose lips no ship ever had to worry about. But without giving you a play-by-play, suffice it to say that I spoiled our easy fantasy with a self-protective dishonesty rooted in my insecurity. By the time I was 21, I’d learned all too well the wanton recklessness of which I was capable, and its terrible price – among other valuables, I’d lost both the boy and the girl.

But the girl had stuck around. And those subsequent years were marked by the agony of trying to love someone through the walls you’ve built, and the moss that grows as they endure, no cracks or tunnels or punched-out bricks. You lose years learning that some damage is irreversible, and that there’s no balancing out a scar in the bigger picture. If you’re lucky, you reach the inconvenient epiphany that loving someone for years is the only way to learn how in the first place. We shared no completely comfortable communicative space, the ghosts of those unheld conversations haunting our friendliest and most intimate moments. We moved away and back, we took trips and ate out, we drank, we fought, we wasted time. We hid from our memories and took our best new ones for granted. We got married, and all records of the ceremony attest to it as one of the most gorgeous. I know we felt the blissful sum of our love, in the clearest, hardest nonverbal beam we’d ever aimed at each other, together there at our proverbial altar. We spent the next five years exploring new worlds of misery and mutual destruction, before a haphazard separation, and a divorce that had all the grace and ease of holding a beloved old dog underwater until it stops moving.

The trouble with trying to commit to a love for whose damage you yourself are responsible is that your own needs survive blazing and unattended in the background. But while I felt starved for a certain kind of free-flowing companionship, I had songs to speak my truth, to talk about it with in a process that felt so much more productive – and by which I felt so much more seen – than actual therapy. The effects of a brilliant chorus are immediate, the side effects no harsher than a healing bout of tears, and the risk of addiction can never be mortal. In the ballad of my long first love, Taylor Swift comes along at gratifyingly regular intervals to help me stagger back up and refill my soul. But the black cloud left little untouched, and in addition to our deepest, most obvious issues, I felt troubled by my ex-wife’s hatred for Taylor Swift – an almost unaccountable disgust for someone whose effect on me felt genuinely restorative.

When Midnights’ release and my friend’s death roughly coincided, they inevitably triggered a desire to find potential connections. “Bigger Than the Whole Sky”, a gossamer, almost wrenchingly beautiful lament for a ”you” who seems irretrievably gone, had a mournfulness to its resignation that some online connected to women who’ve miscarried. Its softly strengthening “goodbye, goodbye, goodbye” clearly keys it to loss. And though “you were bigger than the whole sky” is an alluringly curious way to bid a loved one your farewell, it’s not a bad way to describe how I felt about my friend.

no words appear before me in the aftermath salt streams out my eyes and into my ears every single thing I touch becomes sick with sadness ‘cause it’s all over now, all out to sea

goodbye, goodbye, goodbye you were bigger than the whole sky you were more than just a short time

and I’ve got a lot to pine about I’ve got a lot to figure out I’m never gonna meet what could’ve been, would’ve been, what should’ve been you

Swift uses those contractions as a hook just a few songs later, throwing light on how important their specific placement is (the “should’ve” is always the one to land on). Like “All Too Well”, “Would’ve Could’ve Should’ve” could’ve stood editing, though not stanzas’ worth. But its messiness bolsters its sentiments, not all of which agree with one another. “If I was some paint did it splatter/on a promising grown man?/and if it was a child, did it matter/if you got to wash your hands?” Swift is really quite fair in this song, giving credit to the placid spaces in the dramatic whirlwind of ambiguity any relationship between legal adults is apt to invite. “All I used to do was pray… I would’ve stayed on my knees/and I damn sure never would’ve danced with the devil/at nineteen”. Yet she nails her points about power dynamics with a force that’s invigorating and sad at once, the chilly victory of a victim casually pinning their aggressor down in small, vicious strokes. “Give me back my girlhood – it was mine first.”

Anyway, all I was ever gonna get from “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve” (I thought) was a quick flash of tabloid curiosity or guilt, and because it’s not as melodically assertive as most of the other songs, I was initially glad it wasn’t on the album proper. Most of the 3am songs took longer to reach me, and my perception that they were genuinely weaker probably dulled me to the impact of something as powerful as “Bigger Than the Whole Sky”. But I admit difficulty crying over my friend in the wake of his passing. At first I felt a shock muffled by something like inconvenience – like a prank you’re irritated with before it’s finished happening to you. Then something so overwhelming all you can do is be quiet. Words and sense desert you, but the rest of the world is exactly the same. We lived apart, so although he was my favorite voice on the phone for hours each weekend, I never saw him. He was in the world, and then he wasn’t.

Then, months later, hovering around midnight, there came an errant email from my former beloved. From her, the occasional poison dart by carrier pigeon is only fair, though my relationship with my own boundaries is still under construction (& more or less on schedule). But the text of the message was the most unexpected possible. It wasn’t even ____’s words – it was her old archnemesis Taylor Swift’s.

My ex had singled out “Bigger Than the Whole Sky”, “Would’ve, Could’ve Should’ve”, and “Mastermind”, presenting each lyric without comment. The sympathetic, wounded plaint; the unforgiving, unwelcome indictment; and a stab at self-empowerment that, however ironically desperate, had the same effect on me as Swift describes in the song (“I laid the groundwork and then saw a wide smirk…”). It’s so bizarre what stays with you and what gradually deserts you when you’ve loved somebody so long you’ve left permanent marks on each other. I respect her intentions and do not invite you to speculate – you don’t have enough information – but I concede that in some way, my receipt of these lyrics in this fashion had a manipulative, unhelpful quality. Particularly because they’ve stuck with me ever since. Now these three songs hit in that sometimes uncomfortably bittersweet way Swift’s most potent material can get you. But my strong and broken wife also brought me into them. Now I can't listen to “Mastermind” without smiling and shaking my head (and feeling a pang of sorrow), and I feel edified about “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve”, more attuned to how complexly and vulnerably Swift had captured her complicated but undeniably valid victimhood. And “Bigger Than the Whole Sky” – well. Now that song breaks me in fucking half.

Did some bird flap its wings over in Asia? Did some force take you because I didn’t pray? Every single thing to come has turned to ashes ‘Cause it’s all over – it’s not meant to be So I’ll say words I don’t believe…

before midnights

let's talk about her new one – but first,

Taylor Swift has reached a level of ubiquity where objections to her are not only broadly shared and commonly understood, they no longer even threaten her popularity. More than most extremely famous people, she’s a lightning rod for speculation and commentary. Does she undermine women, with her excessively curated public persona (see: Hillary Clinton) and the prolific, oft-cited dating history she’s never commented on herself? (As a Very Famous Woman, she of course represents all of them.) Is her prior hesitation to express herself politically ultimately as destructive as the Aryan Nation that once embraced her as an avatar? (With great power comes great etc. – she could win this thing for us!)

You likely have to contain multitudes to pull off what she has, so why this urge to boil her down to black and white? She’s rife with contradictions, and certain dualities are key to her deal – the girl who seems like she still lives next door posed against the relentlessly calculated self-made millionaire, the pointedly private public figure posed against the living songwriter most famous for mining her own heartache for material. Sometimes I admire how unconcerned she appears with reconciling the parts of herself that don’t add up, especially because unconcern is not her vibe. More often, she’s as strenuously self-aware as someone with a compromised self-awareness can be (see: Hillary Clinton). It’s true, she seems a little awkward or a little aloof most of the time. But she can strike a balance like an Olympic gymnast.

For instance, when she was sexually harassed by a grabby asshole of a small-time DJ, she sued him for a flashily principled $1, yet it was so unflashily reported you wondered if that was her call. While one should never render subtle a cry for justice, Swift recognized that her sincerity, so often called into public question, was more in doubt than usual. The incident occurred months into her withdrawal from a swiftly heating spotlight – you may recall a video leaked by one K. Kardashian, followed by belabored fields of snake emojis. As for her apparent political neutrality, most would agree that Swift’s power was secure enough, and her reach large enough, not to warrant caution. Yet buried but not hidden in her possible vanity project of a Netflix documentary is a scene in which Swift does seem to be emphatically telling scared-shitless record executives that she refuses to stay disengaged from the national conversation.

I think it’s a mistake to assume either guilelessness or ruthlessness, but there’s definitely a shrewdness to Swift that sometimes feels superhuman. She’s clearly dialed into the dialogue surrounding her, and when millions decide she’s earned their darts, not only does she usually find the sort of solutions (or careful evasions) that win PR firms awards, she seems to very much be the CEO of her own operation. Occasionally her solutions are so unusual (if never outlandish) that all you can do is shake your head in a mixture of admiration and bafflement. Few pop stars have reached Swift’s sphere of popularity, and only in said sphere can you afford high-profile rerecords of great, recent albums – due to a business spat to which Heartland America may not easily relate – that your fans may not just purchase but prefer.

I can only tip my hat, because I used to write her off too. Swift had millions of fans right when she hit, but as I think back on the beguilingly sincere, almost cautious babyface staring off of the very bad cover for her just-fine first album – a babyface that’s barely weathered – I see more of the underdog than she probably ever was. Taylor Swift is the album where she exaggerates a Southern accent throughout (in an outdatedly comic threat to spread a rumor that a guy is “gay”, she leans so yokel-deep into the vowel it sounds like “guy”). It’s also the one where the title of the opener signals her unusual high-riser savvy – if you’re an unsure shot a record label’s taking a stab at, calling your first single “Tim McGraw” is gonna get at least one celebrity’s attention – and the first line signals an enduring refrain: damn, she can write.

He said the way my blue eyes shined Put those Georgia stars to shame that night I said “that’s a lie”

In 2006 I was a manic depressive 20-year-old in a go-nowhere bedroom-pop band with his best friend and no one else. Besotted by old things, I was more cynical about modern pop than ever, though in my defense 2006 was an especially valid year to feel that way. It’s true, the visual marketing of that debut has a Mary Kay cloy not helped by Swift’s naturally cloying face. (The 2010 film Valentine’s Day is known as having made no good choices, but it did make one: casting Swift opposite Taylor Lautner. Two young Taylors who absolutely cannot act, with strangely vacant faces which also seem formed in a lab). But my writing her off on sight as a country-pop Disney princess was a dumb insult to both those things and her.

Two years and change later, the follow-up, Fearless, was getting noticeably generous year-end praise from critics I trusted – critics who hadn’t, unlike me, written off an entire wildly popular genre of music or a first-timer from her vibe alone, but also hadn’t thought Taylor Swift (the album) was too special – so I put it on and took a long walk. I wasn’t taken in by the soft rush of those first songs, which I now hear as sun-dappled and splendorous. The rippling guitars, immaculately recorded; the so-sincere-you’re-not-sure unfurl of lines about dancing with boys in parking lots. Swift has relied on vivid details from the start (“the way the street looks when it’s just rained/there’s a glow off the pavement…”) but wasn’t yet finessing her lines into doubling as poetry.

I was taken in by an incredible moment that lurched out of the end of the fifth song, “White Horse”, a natural deep cut that ended up as one of Swift’s many perplexing choices for singles. It’s a slow build about a bad boy, a boy who broke her heart, one of only two kinds of boys (the other kind makes her want to dance around parking lots) who appear in most of her earlier songs. The melody is solid and stalwart – Swift uses an extremely limited and dependable chord palette, rarely venturing into minor keys, and sometimes I wonder if she knows about 7ths – the lyric a sad reflection heading toward a resigned kiss off. But all of a sudden the vocal heats up around a sole shoved-in polysyllabic word, the meter subtly tripled: “…someone who might actuallytreat me well.”

That one petulant “actually”, a simple strategic choice so good you can practically hear Swift geeking out in her room as she comes up with it, sparked a permanent curiosity. That’s good writing, I thought, and not only that, that’s good pop. I had graciously noticed that not only did Ms. Swift have a brain, she had one that worked with a palpable intelligence, with a legible joy in her own craft. I began to hear her as a fellow traveler; this girl doesn’t know a lot of chords, but she knows how the least complex ones go together, knows from hit-song structure, and apparently finds a great hook every time she checks her pockets.

Then Kanye West made that [girl] famous and she became someone else’s concern again. Kanye did indeed behave like a “jackass”, in President Obama’s unkind but apt parlance, going on to make the greatest album ever made about being one. But I also remember watching Swift describe her reaction to his infamous interruption on a morning show, and her threatening to squander away easy sympathy with the unmistakably affected way she real-time recalled the incident (“Oh. Hi Kanye. Cool hair… Oh. Now I guess I don’t get to thank the fans”). She didn’t need it to capitalize on, but it probably did lurch Swift more quickly into a higher sphere. On 2010’s Speak Now she put a starry eye on the world outside of Nashville. Its sound was tooled for rock arenas, and that accent had vanished without a trace.

That loud record is stuffed with fun, clever songs and songs that put a small tear in certain hearts every time they come on. But it has a nagging superficiality which I find sometimes undermines its most emotionally resonant lyrics, though it helps that said lyrics are often married to melodies you can hear Bach’s bones rattle with approval over (“I was en-chan-ted to meet you…”). But once again she had to slap my face directly to get my personal attention, and once again it took two years in which I accomplished a great deal less than her. Picture it: summer 2012. Somewhere Jake Gyllenhall is on a film set thinking, “well, at least my image is inviolably likable” (if probably not in those words), Max Martin is cashing a check, and the soul-swelling hard candy of “We Are Never Getting Back Together” is hooking me on this pop star for good.

It was in this last decade that her transformation from a country- and folk-adjacent pop artist to a simply pop artist went into proper effect. When the blockbusting Speak Now came out, the all-prefab ethic of modern pop was still in development; it was so much more common to hear a guitar on the radio. Not only were Red’s “I Knew You Were Trouble” and “22” beefed up with inorganic noise, they represented one of multiple approaches. “State of Grace” was revved up, but in more of a U2 way, all cavernous and teary-eyed, a live band drenched in echo. The little stuttered vocal sample on the title track signaled an openness to artifice. But Swift publicly pointed out that Joni Mitchell’s fourth album was also named after a color, signaling an aspiration with typical subtlety; acoustic guitar was still her weapon of choice.

In retrospect, Red sounds like a person working out their next direction, but though Swift has a habit of including four too many songs and was not yet so skillful at sequencing them, it isn’t a confused album. In fact, her songwriting is consistent and ambitious and mature. “All Too Well” is now seen as a sacred text, a master class in matching music to an aching crescendo of a lyric. Other pearls you pick out can be effortlessly poetic (“twin fire signs/four blue eyes”) or earthbound (“this morning I said we should talk about it/’cause I read you should never leave a fight unresolved/that’s when you came in wearing a football helmet/and said ‘okay, let’s talk’”). It’s the first one where she doesn’t play at innocence, where she drops the veil and reveals the inquisitive adult underneath – an adult who really isn’t that different from the previous edition, but who definitely feels a lot less like she’s pretending.

I suspect that Swift’s flirtation with the mainstream she was born to inhabit was her first crisis (pre-politics) about the country audience – an audience that, culturally speaking, is uniquely unfriendly to transgressions against tradition. But Red’s massive success compelled her to go whole hog with 1989 – the guitars slept in their cases as Swift sang through filters from a cathedral of synths. I have a taste for techno-flirtatious pop, and after a moment of contending with the suspicion that the songs weren’t as immediate or deep as Red’s, I couldn’t stop playing it. A handful of albums in the middle 2010s had this hold on me, all statements of pop liberation by female artists from non-radio milieus: Tegan & Sara’s Heartthrob, Jenny Lewis’ The Voyager, Grimes’ Art Angels. The slick production techniques never dulled their emotional impact – they strengthened it, their melodies illuminated, their settings atmospheric.

What’s important to note here is perhaps the most widely understood thing about Taylor Swift, but a trait that doesn’t get trotted out nearly as much as her foibles. So few working artists, especially insanely popular artists, write songs whose emotional inhabitability is so reliable. She could speak your heartache (or fairy-tale fall) in any edition – the frenetic tension of “Out of the Woods” (“are we in the clear yet – GOOD”), the doleful sarcasm of “Bad Blood”, the citynight lust of “Style” and “Your Wildest Dreams”, the bittersweet self-parody of “Blank Space”, the gentle recovery of “Clean”. I’ve yet to clarify my one lingering problem with Ms. Swift, and that’s her insistence on occupying and then murdering my soul. Even in moments of constricted grief, Swift never fails to repair my tear faucet, at least in the moments she’s on. Few can bullseye the heart of an emotion with such facility.

Again, I don’t think that 1989 is her best-constructed album – some arrangements are unwieldy, some lyrics are tossed off. She had been so careful before. But with that care came the calculation, and on 1989 that stops at the choice of sonic profile. You can hear an excitement in her voice throughout the album that feels like liberation, the sound of an artist’s music having an effect on her in real time – actual kid-in-a-candy-store stuff. She’d of course brought on a well-curated shipload of collaborators, including fun. and Bleachers’ mastermind Jack Antonoff. Antonoff’s music has all the pungence of a vanilla Frappucino, but there’s a modesty and homegrown inventiveness to his sounds, technopop with a clear burning soul. His cuts weren’t 1989’s best, but it was the beginning of a truly heavenly match.

Swift rode 1989’s triumph for two years, during which she won a second Album of the Year Grammy. Finally, she was too culturally pervasive for the pendulum not to swing viciously back at her, Anne Hathaway-style. In the wake of the snake stuff, I imagined Swift coming back, cold-eyed and brittly bitter, with a hip-hop inflected, bleak-hued kissoff album. (I even recorded a track called “Song from Taylor Swift’s Next Album”, which sounds like Young Thug and goes “surprise, motherfuckers” – but I never finished the lyric). And it came to pass: just as three years before it had been time for her open-armed synthpop album, now it was time for her “yeah I’m hard and fuck you too” album, Reputation. Like Red, it led with an attitude it didn’t stick with; many of the songs are sweet, startled love letters to the actor she was falling in love with, an actor this putative jezebel has been with ever since.

By virtue of the pandemic, 2019 – the year of Lover, whose pink and bright imagery was a deliberate course correction to Reputation’s monochromatic warning – feels like a hundred years ago. In a way, that version of Swift (sometimes she seems Bowie-r than Gaga, every new record a careful shift in image), feels long gone. Lover was the first album she released after acrimoniously leaving her record label, but it still had the feel of capitulation – that sunny reversal felt forced when the first single, the genuinely bad “Me!”, came bearing its banner. But as usual, entirely too many of its entirely too many songs hit, and all in different ways. The sugar rush of “Cruel Summer” melted quickly into the hearth-and-home folk of “Lover”, into the sly polemic “The Man”, into the broken prayer “The Archer”. Flighty fun cuts (“Paper Rings”, “I Think He Knows”) interspersed with increasingly vivid grand drama (“Miss Americana”, “Soon You’ll Get Better”). And she could still toss off a great breakup song and hide it in the filler (“Death by a Thousand Cuts”).

You know what happened next. COVID shoved us inside, and Swift decided to be everybody’s hero. She recorded and released 34 songs in 2020, over two albums which introduced many to something called “cottagecore”. The aesthetic this time was “deliberately indie” – no foregrounded famous face, no text on the cover or capital letters, and an almost full banishment of electronic instruments. She pressed the button rich people have installed to summon things in front of them and used it on Bon Iver and Aaron Dessner; Swift is an indiscriminate and unguarded collaborator with any type. For the first time, her new songs were extremely downbeat: hooks that never pulled you into a bear hug, melodies that didn’t even show off. But all of it was good, and some of it was good beyond prior expectations. You don’t start from the level of talent she did and not reach something like mastery after fourteen very well-funded years.

At first, folklore and evermore didn’t really reach me – I wanted my soul enlivened with some factory-grade pop, and I wasn’t alone in feeling a little chastened by Swift’s pandemic productivity. But playing them over and over in the wake of this new one, the one we’re here to talk about, I realized she’d pulled off one last trick: proving she could write like Joni. Well OK, no, nobody can write like Joni. But Swift’s songs had always been marked by cowboy-chord changes and clunky lyrics, albeit counterbalanced by her brilliant melodies and sometimes accidental-seeming great lines. In 2020, her awareness won out over her lack thereof – here were songs of heroic poise and grace, deep imagistic detail, complex emotional sentiments, and no bad lyrics at all.

pop report #4 (2/4/23)

new beginnings and the same old songs – pop is art & art is pop

How’s your week going? Mine’s alright. A new week of American chart action is coming to a close, with another shuffle of the cards due tomorrow. What does it all mean? Perhaps nothing. But locating the beauty and excitement and innovation and empowerment and restoration in apparent meaninglessness is why we love pop music in the first place. Though I guess “meaninglessness” is for the old days, when men in suits decried the slide from Johnnie Ray to Fabian – yearning for the more contained, prudent noise of, oh, Mitch Miller, another tie-throttled hater who did more to trivialize music than Elvis ever did.

Well. It isn’t the ‘50s, it’s the ‘20s (christ): pop music is artistic expression, & it sounds better than ever.

It may not be better than ever. What has our ever-polarized country enjoyed most this week? Miley Cyrus finally appears atop the country’s slowest and most significant chart, keeping “Kill Bill” down, though SZA can take historical solace in how many great songs stalled at #2. The Cyrus hit sounds better with each play – its music groovy and juicy, its self-love anthem lyrics as vital as those kinds of things always are. As I opined last week, however, for a woman who seems to flock to extremes, MC’s songs always feel so hedged – the chaos and lunacy she deploys more naturally than most pop stars are often difficult to find in her actual music. As art for money’s sake goes, “Flowers” feels fresh enough. But SZA’s hit, and its parent album, really are great art: formally inventive, emotionally raw yet nuanced, musically dreamy without disappearing into the ether, her specialty. That it’s selling is a credit to us (U.S.).

“Anti-Hero” settles into a respectable #3. I wish someone would explain to me, in concise and exciting fashion, why the turnarounds on these entries are so slow. How many different experiences an hour is TikTok? 150? We obviously have a voracious appetite for different shit. But this is how it’s always been, and anyway, Swift’s hit has yet to lose its luster for me. “Creepin” hangs in high; recall that the Weeknd is the guy who finally unseated “The Twist” as the bestselling song in Billboard’s entire history. The thing about the Weeknd, which seems to have been buried by a decade’s passage, is that when he first appeared, with the genuinely underground House of Balloons, he really seemed like a creep. That whole “when I’m fucked up, that’s the real me” shit – his music his almost always about sex, but also always sounds ominous and tortured, and I don’t know how to reconcile those things. But this is a fucked-up country, so honestly if he helps people exorcise lust and pain at once, great. Mope on, Week.

His albums are all over the charts too, reminding me that in terms of pure sales, the Weeknd and Drake are the Elton John and Paul McCartney (& Wings) of their era. SZA, at least, reigns supreme over in that top 10, with Midnights once again right up there too. While both albums are the kind you could live in comfortably for months on end – they draw your worst feelings out, subject them to a full spa treatment and six-session therapy course, and put them right back where they belong – it does seem like SZA’s is decisively better. Taylor’s chronic if inconsistent ungainliness, her ability to settle on the silliest and most awkward couplet in the world and match it to a judiciously sincere vocal and gloriously predictable melody, is part of her charm. But SOS’s lyrical wisdom and musical efficacy are a level above.

We’ll get back to #s 3 and 4 on the album charts – which are NEW ENTRIES – briefly noting that 5-10 are Metro Boomin’s Gloomiest Hits, Drake & 21 Savage Present: Women! Am I Right?, Bad Bunny es Jodidamente Sexy, Offensive: That Very Long Country Album, Zach Bryan’s record (which is still a real joy on contact, so I hope there’s nothing MAGA in the lyrics), and Growing Up Baby (by L. Baby). But because this isn’t readily available information, I should go back to running down the top singles. “Unholy” lives! People still think “I’m Good” is good! They’d die for “Die for You”! They think “Rich Flex” is a flex, Rich! “As it Was” is still there, as it was! “Golden Hour” is having its (OK OK. I’ll apologize later)

Getting back to #3 and #4 on the album charts: Trippie Redd – there’s a pair of words I’ve never seen, but this is his fifth album – is #3, a fairly conventional-sounding hard trap record whose track list is full of pairs of words I have seen, like “Chief” and “Keef”, “Juice” and “WRLD”. (The latter deserves the work he’s still getting four years after his death.) As for #4, if you saw how the artist’s name (HARDY) and the song titles (“beer”), not to mention the album title (the mockingbird & THE CROW), are styled (like THIS), well you wouldn’t know what to think. But though I’m not exactly sure what HARDY stands for (Hey! A Real Damn Yokel, maybe? “ain’t talkin politics, I’m talkin small towns, and if you’re FRUM WON you know what I’m TALKIN BAHOUT”), he’s a country act produced like a pop metal act – like Trippie, solid but unimaginative.

Look: part of why I want to examine these charts is that I have Boomer’s Kid Syndrome. I try to trick my ears into thinking it’s decades ago. But I wanna know what’s happening now, and since the monoculture is decomposing, I feel like this is the closest I can get to a consensus. Of course, this leaves out a wealth of brilliant indie music – not a genre, I remind you, but a classification based on distribution and, consequently, the expected reach of the musical product in question. Indie’s broken into our charts many times, and there was a minute between the aughts & the teens where pure pop actually began to feel like the underdog.

Though power is power, privilege is privilege and good old capitalism is shitty old capitalism, I don’t like to draw these distinctions between pop and art – it’s all pop art, man. It’s like people I remember from school who used to insist that “movies” and “films” are different things, a misguided stance exemplified by the annual kerfuffle in which a thing like Top Gun: Maverick gets nominated for Best Picture and roughly equal portions of people flip their shit (positive and negative). But art is good or bad, and there isn’t even a science to prove which, or how much. Pure enjoyment and undeniable profundity can coexist; can even be melded into the same moment.

So yeah: there’s so much more music to write about than whatever will take these top slots throughout the year, and because this is my brand new blog on fucking Tumblr which at the moment nobody reads (I’m talkin to YOU, reader), I can write something like this: I don’t know what this blog is going to be yet, exactly. For a little over a decade I’ve been writing freelance very casually and with a regrettable dearth of ambition, with little victories and lengthy droughts. I used to write a lot more and a lot worse, but then and now I only ever seem to write about pop music. I have a real thing for the now-octogenarian Dean of American Rock Critics Robert Christgau, who can get away with unwieldier sentences and more absurdly obscure words than anybody should ever try. But in the spirit of finding the momentum in the core of a new beginning, I figured I’d give myself a place to write with no rules, save for the ones I set.

I knew quickly on that writing a piece at a rough rate of one per week could burn me out fast, and have discovered that these Billboard redundancies don’t make for very fresh content. But as I was going down the latest list, recognizing that this piece is nearly a week late by my own arbitrary deadline, I realized something. I missed a week! I didn’t bug you at all about the week of January 28th! So now, not only do you not know what happened, you don’t even know how I feel about it. While I feel true, deep regret for this act of deprival, it’s useful in that it proves to me that the world won’t end if I skip a week. Or two. Or six. But that’s these chart beats. I have plenty to say about all kinds of shit that happened long before.

pop report #3 (1/21/23)

only some of our stars are problematic, but all of them are a little upset

It’s a new reshuffle for our rotation of shadowy, spacey hits, many of them familiar company by now.

“Anti-Hero” leads the pack as usual, followed by “Kill Bill”, “Unholy”, “I’m Good (Blue)”, “Creepin”, “Die for You”, “Rich Flex”, “As It Was”, “Bad Habit”, and “Something in the Orange” – each one a good song of some sort, each one deliberately on the downbeat side. “Orange”, by Zach Bryan, is striking. The title metaphor (the vermillion of a new-dawn sun) feels overstated as it goes on. But Bryan wrenches the lyric out of his throat with such a gritty, wounded passion that you’re wrapped up in the drama of the scenario even as the author doesn’t lay it out detail for detail. It’s the only song of the ten that doesn’t happily submit to the prefab trends of our time. America’s top-selling songs sound fake and spectacular.

The superstars lingering in our charts share an underdog edge. SZA toils in the shadow of Rihanna and Beyoncé. SOS may not be her breakout among Black women making artful statements in a vague genre often pigeonholed as “R&B”. Not unlike her labelmate Kendrick Lamar, she’s boldly inventive, but doesn’t foreground her ethereality the way Solange, Janelle Monae or Charlotte Adigéry do. Her music is more street and soulful, but its edge is tempered; lyrically, melodically and sonically it prefers a suggestive path, its strength its insouciance.

Taylor Swift could buy Luxemborg, but I think she’s underrated too, as the nitpicky response to Midnights demonstrates. No pop star resembles Hillary Clinton more – her deficiencies are her caution, and the pushy sincerity with which she undermines her best ideas. I admire aspects of Midnights others can’t agree on. I think Jack Antonoff’s production is fun, its overall tone of luminous gloom offset by cute little sonic surprises in the arrangements. It’s been accused of sounding soullessly synthetic, but in fact the technology purposefully emulates cheapness. And  her choice to curse in nearly every song, while contrived (and as such weirdly enjoyable), has the same insufficient-progress impact as, say, a president voicing support for gay marriage in 2012.

You probably haven’t guessed that I’m running down Billboard’s Top 10 albums, because I didn’t tell you, but Metro Boomin’s album follows at #3. I’m not that familiar with his work, but he does have friends – John Legend, the ever-resilient Chris Brown, Travis Scott, Young Thug, the late Takeoff, A$AP Rocky, and Lakeith Stanfield, who starred in the trailer, to name seven. His music emanates an indigo mood, often darkly attractive in arrangement and tune. And the uniformly macho-minded contributors explore angles of their own angst that at times yield uniquely compelling results. Still, you can imagine falling asleep to this album, and the resulting dreams wouldn’t be very much fun.

I struggle with Drake, as I’ve said, because I’m just not convinced his instincts are sharp enough for great art. He makes perfect sense when he finds a terrific hook (“Best I Ever Had”) or groove (“Passionfruit”). But as befits a performer who made his name (well, real name) on the charmingly soapy Degrassi: the Next Generation, some of his public acts have felt not just forced but unselfaware. And when he tries to catapult off his commercial primacy into playing at swagger, you simply don’t believe him – you get annoyed. That the album is reported to be quite bitchy about the artists’ ex-girlfriends has kept from me from exploring it, but at the same time it’s a valid resistance for any listener to have. Judging from its tenacity on the charts, this doesn’t seem to be too widespread a problem.

It’s conceivable that a collective American fatigue, a weariness at having been roughed by current events, explains the evidently en vogue wave of tonally sullen and slightly ominous-sounding bangers. Bad Bunny has the aura of a Casanova-rapscallion hybrid, but like Post Malone, his music is luxuriously atmospheric (at least by the evidence of his most recent album, Un Verano Sin Ti). The pulse of his beats is dependable and insistent, but his tracks are never monotonous; they’re consistently playful even when moroseness perfumes the proceedings. My girlfriend says she admires Bad Bunny’s work because “he’s fuckin’ sexy and I love his voice”; she emphasizes, though, that songs from the last record hung around in her head more than these seem to, with an air of disappointment in her inflection.

If Drake is skirting the problematic with relative impunity, who knows what you call Morgan Wallen’s 105th week on the chart. His album, conveniently titled Dangerous: the Double Album, is still selling in the long wake of Wallen’s collision with the sort of controversy that permanently stains you. Taken for what it was*, without proselytizing, his offense seems even more unthinking and less racially targeted than Elvis Costello’s 1979 barstool faux-pas, for which EC is still living off the hook. But it’s hard not to see Wallen’s persistent sales as reflecting the wokeness-contrarian impulse coursing through society.

It doesn’t help that Wallen’s general vibe is smug and shallow; he prefers to plow past deeper emotions. Most country pop works the way disco works – the way it sounds is sometimes silly, but the tone and tempo can be enough of a kick to counteract that. But it rarely feels as commanding or texturally interesting as whatever Zach Bryan is up to. The very title of his album, American Heartbreak, reflects his interest in humanity’s ragged diversity. A more civilized-sounding Tyler Childers, Bryan elevates every lyric with his plaintive, shopworn delivery. But even if he sang as insincerely as Wallen, or as weakly as, say, Kris Kristofferson, you’d still instantly sense that those lyrics are worth returning to.

Another hip-hop artist whose vibe is generically masculine, Lil Baby favors producers similar to Metro Boomin, those inclined to mine the line between dreamy and dreary. Baby has a strangely captivating flow – tuneful, viscous and casual across the consonants. And while his lyrics don’t skimp on the usual hardnosed hustler act, that flow is full of feelings unsuffocated by his swagger. That said, there’s a repetitiveness to this music that starts to feel oppressive over 23 tracks, and it makes you wonder how much fun the artist is having.

By contrast, YoungBoy Never Broke Again (good name – manifest that shit) doesn’t want you to relax. His music is chaotic, assertive, taut with tension. These boisterous collages of sound are creative enough to stay riveting, even when the cumulative effect is claustrophobic or unpleasant. YB N B A raps, through a sizzling autotune, even more loosely and woundedly than Lil Baby. There’s almost always something interesting going on, and 19 songs in 39 minutes isn’t going to try anyone’s patience. But once again it’s a seemingly-not-so-lovable-guy unloading his problems line by line without repaying your attention with hooks.

T-Swift’s ex Harry ‘Will Never Go Out of’ Styles is another multimillionaire I’ll defend as awaiting some due. Savvy beams off his every move, and he’s turned himself into a true fashion icon. But I suspect that his reserved demeanor, plus the usual indulgent hate boy bands attract like bug zappers, has compelled certain people to assume there’s less behind those bedroom eyes than the sleek intelligence Harry’s House exhibits. Truly, he should not be allowed to wax about cinema without a set of notecards, but the pop he’s bringing these days isn’t exactly lacking scope and vision. Like the best directors, Harry is an earth angel fascinated by the sweet nuance of human behavior, and the thrill of trying to evoke it.

I’ve long appreciated that modern pop seems to have shaken off a certain kitschy artifice. The prevailing aural trends, forged in a world of limitless technology, favor heady and challenging atmospherics. Thus the corniest hits are at least pacifying, and the best profound and genuinely transportive. But evolved as the status quo feels, I’m feeling a hunger pang for the shock of the new – for a disorienting shake of the frame. Or, as with “Running Up That Hill”’s fluke success, a resurgence of the old in service of the same surprise.

pop report #2 (1/14/23 & TTH 1/17/23)

get thee behind us, Santa — the public is having a blue post-Christmas

My late best friend and creative partner had a [reaches briefly around for a euphemism for "obsession"] fixation [ugh, no. sorry] with the charts. For a person of a certain age, physical or spiritual, this is the sensitive, creative, indoor equivalent of being preoccupied with baseball stats, another thing that come to think of it I don't know if any young people still care about. It transmits a love of something human and occasionally chaotic into something mathematical, something with a fun competitive element, something you can give the right brain a break over from time to time.

My friend didn't exclusively derive pleasure from the charts. In fact, in the pieces of our hours-long conversations devoted to his impressions of current Billboard action, he was often a little rattled. Though sweeter and more patient than the majority of people, my friend had a natural tight wind he sometimes played up for comic effect, and sometimes succumbed to in the throes of a petty (or regular-strength) stressor. I can't elaborate easily on why his relationship with the charts was so complicated, but they're a fickle point of focus for sure. Their vagaries are best explained by authorities like Chris Molanphy, and my friend's carefully plotted counter-methods for measurement went with him to his grave, so I have my own barriers to comprehending the nitty gritty of it all. But I like the pithy way his ex put it as we reminisced about him: "He wanted to make sense of them".

To me, it was a beautiful idiosyncrasy — I'm not blogging about the subject to sate some OCD impulse or, God knows, indulge any math skills. I want to surmise things about American democracy from a weekly election that comes with no negative consequences: a pop music election. Still, my friend would speak of message boards full of ardent, number-crunching chart-watchers, where he was able to get his more impassioned objections affirmed. It's become common knowledge (for people who think about it, anyway) that streaming has affected the way single sales are calculated on the charts. Molanphy has many great blogs about this over at Slate — it's how Taylor Swift can casually fill all ten slots one week.

The Billboard chart's perpetual awkwardness in adapting out of the days when a hit song hit because people went to the store and bought it is I think why my boy came to prefer Spotify's daily tracker, Today's Top Hits. Even with my general ignorance about the calculation process (and my unwillingness to bore myself learning about it [sorry again]), I can conceive of how the all-streaming model is a more direct reflection of public taste. Not everyone uses Spotify, of course, but enough of everyone does for their most-played songs to give a fair picture of what's stuck in people's heads.

I see today [editor's note: due to technical difficulties and also the regular passage of time, you are reading this one or more days in the future] that the ten winners are the same set as Saturday's, reshuffled. By my casual perception, the TTH turnaround is akin to Billboard's — glacially slow but for whims, inevitabilities and flashes-in-the-pan. But there are key differences between the two singles lists — for instance, Miley Cyrus' new single is #1 on Spotify and absent on Billboard, since they need time to catch up, which bolsters the notion that the Spotify list is more representative. On both lists, the Christmas spirit has left without a trace, and on Billboard a number of hits have returned from being shoved down under a heap of presents, brushing the pine needles off their sweaters, which are perhaps red or green but not both.

Per Billboard, "Anti-Hero" is back on top, and "Unholy" once again its fiercest rival, with SZA's probably #1-destined "Kill Bill" in show. Then David Guetta's moderately off-putting "Blue" thing, and Drake's latest invitation to wonder how he sells so many records when he could not sound more indifferent. Then Metro Boomin's moving "Creepin" and the irrepressible "As it Was". The Weeknd's sensibly seductive "Die for You" is a special curiosity — six years old, online traction finally put it on the chart, the Glass Animals effect. It's not on the Top Hits chart, where in 2022 Kate Bush made waves well before she earned Billboard's "real hit" credit.

Anyway, then it's "Bad Habit" and "Cuff It", but cuff it — today we'll be talking about Today's Top Hits.

Today's Top Hit is the aforementioned new Miley Cyrus song. I have to admit an ignorance over much of Ms. Cyrus nee Montana's music, and if I took the time to sufficiently acquaint myself with it I would be publishing this next Friday. But I do subscribe to the (often passionately stated) theory that "Party in the USA" deserves a slot among the great American records, a banger and a lifter of the highest order, its confectioner's glaze and credulous way of coming on beguiling and not exactly untrue to life, respectively. I do think Cyrus was shrewd enough at that point to be playing up the hey! I'm just a kid! angle for her audience. My issue is that I'm not so sure she's gotten more shrewd since.

Since I could never hope to put it better than one of the world's greatest poets, I consider it a social responsibility to leave you with this in lieu of a complete next paragraph:

(please forgive the rest of this post for not being as good as that)

Any artist who can inspire something like this is worth respecting on some level, even a singles artist who only hits every so often. "Flowers" certainly doesn't hit like a mistake. Its groove is funky, sensuous and insistent, and like most of the MiCy singles that make it to a regular radio rotation it's clean enough to slip on. There's internet burble about its being a swipe of some sort at a Hemsworth of some sort, and as standard-bearers for female liberation go Cyrus certainly never hedges. But it's a friendly, inhabitable little battle cry, like "Malibu", literally the last of her hits I recall, emanating a certain peace that feels both healthy and contagious.

Today's next-top hit hits me harder and harder each time, though like the entry above, it comes on slinky, sidling into your soul with unveiled but unamplified intentions. "I might kill my ex... not the best idea..." "I did it all for love..." "Kill Bill" is an instant phrasemaker, armed with a set of hooks bound to leave marks the closer you get to them. The lyric captures well and recognizably the state of being in that fresh hurt, the one where the resentment simmers the hottest and you want to lash out at every hint of instigation. But it really moves, rolling and rocking like the waves on that striking cover art, and the song's eerie slow open would hitch you hard to any subsequent rhythm or atmosphere.

"Unholy" continues its unholy reign everywhere, widening my grin every time it accosts me. I decided to Google the lyrics, because I realized I knew almost none of them. "At the body shop". The obvious next phrase. Oh yeah, "daddy's getting hot", before those two. "Oh, we oh we oh." I appreciate that the lyrics begin with "Mummy". Some cultures are different, and none is better than the other, and equitable representation of all weird pet names we use for our m(u)ms is ideal in culture and society at large. I, personally, have always had an affection for the Irish "mam", and I don't even necessarily want to tell you what I have my own mom saved as in my phone (it's "Mamaloma"). Anyway, the lyrics are OK. They fill space, incisively.

"Creepin" is a dour song that nevertheless begins discordantly with "Metro Boomin want some more!" But otherwise it's the type of sad-with-a-sinister-element pop the Weeknd made his name laying claim to. It picks up, of course, and the lyric is interesting, a plea to an unproven-unfaithful lover to keep their affairs, such as they exist, a secret for his sanity. The anguish is kind of overstated, which makes the proceedings hard to take totally seriously, while 21 Savage's mean-mug verse feels a bit humorless. But yet again it's a catchy, well-produced song illustrating an emotion a lot of folks could really lean into in a bedroom or car in the wee small hours.

Heartache is hitting hard in the charts around these parts, with Shakira and Bizarrap's "Bzrp" (excuse me) session. The song's novel titlelessness (well, not novel I guess — it's #53) invites questions as to what the song would be called if it were called something. "Fuck You Pique" seems the standing consensus, and surely Loba would be more artful if she cared to find titling time. Either way, the song is a hoot, the sort of combo of chords and beat and soothing-to-rousing electronic sounds that make you go, "yeah, he definitely deserves this". In any case, I can't speak Spanish, so I have no idea how pointed it is. I did read about some of its lyrical puns, and admired them.

RAYE is a British (you knew that, you can heart it) singer of whom I've never heard. What does this say about me? Did you know about RAYE? I'm a white, male, 35-year-old New Jerseyan in Texas. I know a great deal — I think I can safely say great deal — about pop, but I spend too much time in its past and not half enough in its futuristic present. I don't know what RAYE is doing for the world at this particular moment. But her doomy banger "Escapism" (sorry, "Escapism.") is a real good time, and between its polysyllabic lyric, punk-ass vocal and dramatic-yet-kinetic overall mood, it takes you places some of these sedate higher-charting hits don't seem especially interested in. We're all tired, sure. But can't we be less tired yet?

Ms. Swift takes #7, incidentally my favorite # and also said to be lucky if you happened not to know that. Her fuckup anthem continues to soothe this and probably a zillion other souls. Next in line comes a title that reflects what "Anti-Hero" does, "Calm[s you] Down", a song by Rema featuring Selena Gomez. The rhythm is steadfast, the setting is elegant (possibly-real plucked guitars and bowed strings), and the hustling vocal is softly invigorating. Selena Gomez, as usual, sounds broken, projecting storms of emotion through a veil of china-doll indifference. The shrewd and always understated performer that she is, she pulls the song to an emotional level Rema leaves entirely to her.

Central Cee's "Let Go" is a highly affecting, piano-dominated track, the sort of brokenhearted confession that flips from resigned, drumless chorus to fast-trap patterns under a frantic rap. Once again, open-wound regret is the vibe, and it makes one wonder if America is sending an SOS or if it's just all the superstars who are feeling moody. Even the upbeat songs in this lineup enjoy their fill of minor keys, and the ones that don't aren't exactly easygoing. Maybe that's why "Flowers" is sprouting through the ash of grief and the... uh... mulch of heartbreak. Maybe the sweet momentum of healing and realizing it, the new and overwhelming rush of self-empowerment, is still more of what we want than what we've got.

pop report #1 (1/7/23)

a glance at the US charts as we dance backwards dazed into a brand new year

The Christmas hangover – that vague viral thing where, still disoriented from January’s quick sideways punch, everyone agrees it’s OK to stay festive for a second – is one of the holiday’s loveliest gifts. That it comes with a mutual agreement not to continue certain seasonal obligations, like stressing over cooking or the exchanging of gifts, makes it all the sweeter. It feels in that stupid fun way like we’re all getting away with something. That, even as the calendar gives us its greatest opportunity to feel fresh and absolved – here you go, a whole new year you haven’t fucked up yet – we’ve still put one over on it, by not moving on from something frivolous.

In any case, I don’t know how long it takes the Billboard elves to tabulate whatever it is they tabulate, so it makes sense that the first week of January on the Hot 100 is very late December, though it purports to depict the most popular songs in the country in the exact first seven days of the month (one of which is still happening as the list is published). Most of the new top ten is residual Christmasness; it’s comforting in its way, like looking outside and seeing that the Statue of Liberty is still there (depending). The democracy reflected by these charts so rarely suggests the cynical things about humanity our leaders often do. We like joyful, familiar, apropos things.

Back in the very earliest album chart days, Bing Crosby’s White Christmas used to take the top slot every December. But then there was a long spell where the biggest sellers around the change of the year weren’t thematic. Yet these days, we basically vote on a Greatest Xmas Hits. We bow down to certain idols with a scary (if often explicable) lack of second thought, and Mariah’s “All I Want for Christmas is You”, #1 this week, is one of the most hallowed. The song is a made-to-order rush, retro and timeless at once, with Carey exuberant and irrepressible and commanding the way she is at her best – which is when she’s having a lot of fun, rather than being allowed to emote as indulgently as the contours of her dexterous voice will accommodate.

In a way, the very way she sings – the willful all-melisma approach – has dated, though that voice is so athletic and flexible it also depends a great deal on how it’s recorded. And of course, when the tempo picks up a certain amount she doesn’t have time to lean into that stuff so aggressively. So you forgive her the single’s intro, which is also impressive and soulful and silly and lovely (or some selection of those things) if you have no beef with it. The song has a bit of that tinny, glitzy sonic profile from a certain era of misguided trends. But it mostly just sounds good – it has a force, a brightness and arresting forward motion, and it glistens when the backup chorus spills out around the effortlessly powerful lead vocal.

#2, Brenda Lee’s reliably sexy “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree”, is from late ’58 – Brenda is the “uh-huh honey” of “Sweet Nothin’s”, so perfectly robbed and repurposed by a pre-fall Kanye for “Bound 2”, and the sheer conceivability that she does indeed say “fuckin’ pie” – she doesn’t, she says pumpkin pie – is tantalizing. The corny backup singers are a sign of the creeping corruption of pop pap into rock ‘n’ roll, but the salacious sax solo counterbalances it with a healthy dose of lusty hostility. This is the best kind of easy listening: a low simmer, pleasant for the lovers and leapers, lonely-hearts and lazyboneses alike. Half a century ago, this was shocking; now it soothes nerves while moving things along in the kitchen.

#3, Bobby Helms’ “Jingle Bell Rock”, is less threatening, but it still has that soupçon of swagger – just enough sultry swing not to ruin the mood the way, say, a sudden switch to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir would. The band is good, especially the guitar, and while the chorus in this case is especially preppy-sounding, if you listen closely, you can tell they’re down to unwind. The message in theholiday trinity occupying win, place and show this week is that we do like even our most sentimental days to rock a little, to shake and move us, to take us on a ride – something other than hitched to poor reined-up horses in the cold for too much money.  We’re here for good times, and whatever the occasion – however we feel about Christianity – we’re ready to dance about, or around, it.

#4 is the ubiquitous “Last Christmas”, another nouveau standard (though I dunno, it’s forty years old). George Michael is an angel now, so we forgive him his sillier capitulations to the epoch at which he peaked. He really made them work – he was alluring and intelligent beyond his haircut, his drum machines, his bolder fashion choices, his partner. The grit and drama he peppers this wounded early valentine with aren’t the instincts of some vapid cherub. He sings like a Freddie Mercury with restraint, ductile and actorly. The holiday song is shockingly universal, even easier to befriend than the love song (both holidays and love reward and cost us), and this song is both kinds!

#5, Burl Ives, “A Holly Jolly Christmas” – we’re verging into corn, but still not there yet. This 1965 smash features a very good acoustic guitar player whose name I can’t find, though I’m admittedly not looking hard enough. Ives’ tone is naturally grandfatherly – unprovocative, but rough enough to go down right. He voices (and looks like) the snowman narrator in the Rankin-Bass Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, an admirably quirky special which I don’t think is very good. I have a small soft spot for the company’s Year Without a Santa Claus, but a much softer spot for the Chuck Jones Grinch and the flawless A Charlie Brown Christmas. I like my Xmas art a little dry, but welcome well-wielded sincerity. I’m no SCROOGE…

#6, “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year”, feels like a bit of a sleeper for a standard. It’s one of those pleasant, detail-rich ones that gets lost among the others, e.g. “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas”, “Mistletoe and Holly”, “Silver Bells”. When it echoed in my mind I thought it was by Frank Sinatra, and it turns out it is in fact a 1963 recording by Boring Frank Sinatra, Andy Williams. The easy-listening flavor of a protracted moment, Andy Williams is best remembered (this is my suggestion) for a joke in one of the peak seasons of The Simpsons where Bart and his friends are on a road trip and bully Nelson violently demands they stop for a Williams concert. That’s the joke. It’s the juxtaposition of the—

One thing you can say for Williams’ (admittedly peppy) song is it increases the relief of #7, “Feliz Navidad”, a cliché that in the wrong mood can certainly exacerbate some ill will. But it’s usually another sugar rush. Jose Feliciano’s lilting acoustic guitar is always welcome at this velocity, and there’s a lot else happening, down to sweet secret strings sneaking through and tickling the corners of a track one might describe as “tastefully lush” if one were being a little kind. Feliciano could be super silly – listen to his live cover of the Doors’ “Light My Fire”, where he briefly imitates an Irish priest for no reason. But he was also witty, seductive, compelling, a delight. And it’s nice when we break the English barrier the littlest damn bit.

(Spotify keeps switching to “Little Saint Nick”, and while I love the Beach Boys, I want to break a plate.)

Smashing through ceilings as ever, veteran juggernaut Taylor Swift bursts through the Christmas barrier at #8 with, talk about presents, my pick hit of the year, “Anti-Hero”. I consider it the shrewdest melody on her new collection of characteristically good ones, as well as her most interesting vocal on an album that could perhaps use more of that. The lyric is the coup, though, one of those simultaneous self-effacement/fuck yous she flirts with; it could be another tiresome kiss-off to the press or an honest, introspective missive to a lover (or a close circle of friends), and it toes that line like an advanced ballet student. Most of us could at some point stand to call ourselves out, and singing that this way makes it a lot easier to swallow.

Nat ‘King’ Cole was the very first artist with a number one on the Billboard album charts, back in 1945, and his presence at #9 in this week’s list of mostly vintage ornaments is a fair honor. His song (Robert Wells and Mel Tormé’s “The Christmas Song”, the chestnuts-roasting-on-an-open-fire one in the unlikely event that you needed a memory jog) is luxurious and not a little amorous, never over-orchestrated and crooned in that masterfully velvety way that earned this ‘King’ his crown. I think it’s also appropriate to herald here the persistent presence and frequent dominance of Black performers in our culture, going to back to the start of these little charts. Though this ten is color-lite – save for the #1 performer, Carey (depending on how Feliciano identifies).

I can also confirm Mr. Cole’s “Deck the Halls” – track 2 on his Christmas album – is a cringey, frosting-suffocated mess. But I should admit, it evoked a similar reaction to the first time I heard #10, Sam Smith and Kim Petras’ “Unholy”, with its campy introductory choir. When someone means such choices sincerely, as Cole seems to with his “Deck the Halls”, it compounds an offense. But when it’s a bold choice in the name of camp, you have to open your heart and mind past a little reflex revulsion. “Unholy” is a treat, a great deal more fun than Smith usually is; they feed off of Petras’ vibrant sense of outrage. Good for the both of them: a landmark statistic (first out trans and nonbinary performers to hit #1) and a car banger.

The next ten hits are Christmas all the way down, save two – including #11, SZA’s slow-sinking “Kill Bill”, one of those downtempo-insistent hits that sticks with you before you understand why it’s hanging in there. Then it’s the often underrated Ariana Grande’s magic faux-soul up “Santa Tell Me”, and two Phil Spector (boo) triumphs for the Ronettes and Darlene Love (yay) respectively, “Sleigh Ride” and “Christmas”, which is the one, you know the one, the one that keeps going “CHRISTMAAAAAAAS” (“snow’s comin’ down…”). Those songs sandwich Kelly Clarkson’s feebler “Underneath the Tree”. Then there’s yuletide stuff from Bing, Nat (“Deck the Halls”, ugh), Dean, and Frank, plus David Guetta’s melodramatic “Blue” mistake.

The lights have already been taken down for the better part of the album chart. I think the SZA is a slow-grower, but America doesn’t – #1 all three of its charting weeks. However good SOS is, it’s nice when a smart and interesting artist who’s hung in there at just over the radar makes this kind of left-field splash, and with a record you can tell she’s really worked on. Next is Taylor, then the celebrated Michael Bublé’s Christmas album, Metro Boomin’s Heroes and Villains, which I’ve only played once (moody, macho hip-hop), a Nat ‘King’ Cole Xmas (so-so), that Drake/21 Savage album that seems sexist, Bad Bunny’s latest blockbuster, a Phil Spector’s Xmas (classic), a Mariah Xmas (classic?), and Vince Guaraldi/Charlie Brown (absolute classic).