#FearOfMu21c
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FearOfMu21c #3
The Killers - When You Were Young
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Released - Sept 18 2006
Highest chart position - #2
Spotify streams to date - 548,257,626
One of the things that I like about The Killers is that, while they’re undeniably a rock band, their sound is much more frothy than their image suggests; rooted in hooks and glamour, they come across as a kind of Duran Duran for the 00s. While their biggest pop bangers date from earlier on, When You Were Young remains for me their best single and a strong memory from 2006 is feeling the kind of ownership of it that you only get when yr fave is coming out of every radio speaker going. That said, I wasn’t so much in a rock mood when we did the Uncool50 last year and so surprisingly it ended up on the cutting room floor. But now we’re back, things are different and its time has finally come.
The lyrics follow a kind of idealised American romance and the song follows suit, mapping it out as a road trip of epic (and slightly ridiculous) proportions. It’s full of Springsteenesque imagery - “burning down the highway skyline on the back of a hurricane” indeed - and the song itself has a similar momentum, each verse kicking on with ever greater intensity, each repetition of that indelible guitar hook hitting harder than before.
But the real ace here is Brandon Flowers, with his swaggering vocal harnessing a kind of star power that perhaps didn’t see out the decade but felt very real to me at the time (yes I know). There’s a kind of melodrama in him that’s always reminded me of Meatloaf, something slightly silly but also entirely in earnest, and When You Were Young is a better song for the way that he captures that. Whereas so many American rock bands would have turned it into something quite gritty and boring, it’s this flamboyance built into The Kilers’ DNA that makes this a truly great record.
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"Summer girl" and "Turn off the light"
Another pair for the #FearOfMu21c project, crowdsourcing the greatest singles of the 21st century. An index post.
Summer girl - Haim
Trying to conjure up a bit of hope on a dark day, this soft jazz number features "doo-doo"s and a calm vocal. There's a lazy bassline, perhaps a bit too close to the wild side, and eventually a sax solo.
"Summer girl" was inspired by the time Danielle Haim's lover had a cancer diagnosis. She wrote, "I wanted to be his hope when he was feeling hopeless, so I kept singing these lines." But the song works without the back story, it's a light sorbet, the musical equivalent of a refreshing glass of Pimms in the heatwave.
The song's a bit different from earlier Haim work, less polished, more skittish, but keeping the harmonies and emotional intimacy that had become Haim's trademark. Written by Danielle, Alana, and Este Haim, their producers Ariel Rechtshaid and Rostam Batmanglij, and Lou Reed gets royalties for the fraction of "Walk on the wild side".
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Turn off the light - Nelly Furtado
I could have picked any of a dozen singles by Nelly Furtado. The debut, "I'm like a bird", with soaring vocals. The whole "Loose" album, "Maneater" and "Promiscuous" and many more. "Big hoops" from the forgotten album Spirit Indestructible. Even "Forza" from Folklore - in retrospect, it sounds great next to other great fado and Portuguese songs.
"Turn off the light" gets my nod. Second single from "Whoa, Nelly!", it's a well-written song with a strong dance beat. Nelly had already turned ears for the mixture of sounds and textures; here, Nelly uses her lyrical prowess to make poetry from the mundane. The video features Nelly around the world, colourful and dark, wet and warm. Sounds a bit like a song by Edie Brickell? Not hearing it myself, but maybe that's swamp mud in my ears…
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#haim#nelly furtado#hope#justice#cross-cultural#harmonies#wonderfully talented people#Youtube#fear of mu21c#fear of music#FearOfMu21c#fearofmu21c#pop music#21st century
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FearOfMu21c #13
The Mountain Goats - This Year (from Dilaudid EP)
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Released - March 21 2005
Highest uk chart position - Did not chart
Spotify streams to date - 38,517,436
The Mountain Goats are a pick-up from the Peoples Pop polls, an artist who I kept hearing in small doses and thinking “that’s good, who’s that?” until eventually I brought myself listen to them at length and found out that yes, they are in fact very good indeed. Sadly, we have yet to put This Year to a vote and now - in the twilight of the polls - it’s starting to look like that may never happen. Which would be a great shame in my opinion, cos it’s one of their most popular tunes and with excellent reason.
Like many of the best TMG songs, John Darnielle takes an unsettling scene (a drunken date followed by a family blow up) and turns it into something to draw strength from. There’s tension in the lyric, even through its more cheerful passages, but the general feeling of the song remains one of warmth and good spirits. The acoustic guitar has a dashing vibe to it; the tapped percussion recalls girl group handclaps; all of this emphasises a kind of joy rescued from the jaws of chaos, marked most clearly by its singalong chorus: “I am gonna make it thru this year if it kills me”. While “the scene ends badly as you might imagine” it’s almost impossible for me to listen to This Year without a broad smile on my face: if the sheer defiance of its mood doesn’t get to me then the wit of the lyrics never fails.
But perhaps the real mark of its greatness is the universality with which it connects to its audience. The YouTube comments on This Year contains long tributes to how the song pulled listeners thru divorce, grief, life threatening illness and severe depression, while the chorus becomes a mantra in itself, allowing us to focus on the feasting and dancing in Jerusalem and be ready for the bad things to come. While my own life tends towards perpetual low-key discomfort these days rather than that kind of acute crisis, This Year taps into the strain and dark humour of just about hanging on in a way that still feels extremely evocative. If I ever fall back into full on panic then I guess I’ll know where to go.
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FearOfMu21c #48 Olivia Rodrigo - Vampire
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Released - June 30, 2023
Highest chart position - #1
Spotify streams to date - 546,650,197
As anyone who’s familiar with my bluesky account will know, I’ve started listening to the charts this year for the first time in an age. Vampire hit #1 in the week that I came back and, quite apart from it just being a cracking song, that event in itself opened up a sentimental vein in me which it’s been feeding off of ever since (does that make me a vampire too? I guess it probably does). It’s a bit of an anomaly on Olivia’s excellent Guts LP., a strange but compelling hybrid between a melodramatic ballad and a full-on pop banger. The earlier chart topper it reminds me of most is by another Olivia - Olivia Newton-John's Xanadu - with its wailed vocals and pulsing electronic unreality seating it comfortably within the traditions of early 80s disco drama.
The lyric is one of ultimate betrayal - the story of an older lover who was only interested in what her fame could do for him - but the key to Vampire is that yr never not having fun. Olivia squares these competing elements remarkably well, with every drop of performative emotion wrung out in such a way that surely only a former High School Musical star could ever truly nail. Her vocal is full of wonderfully hammy gestures (the groaned “oooooh” in the middle of the second verse, the remarkable hollering step into the final “the way you sold me for parts!”) which feel almost pantomime-like in the way they play to the crowd but which never once compromise the powerful hurt at the song’s centre.
Vampire takes its place here as my favourite single of the year, but it’s also a bit of a stand-in for everything else I’ve loved on the chart. As well as the similarly theatrical pop grunge of Get Him Back (Olivia’s other inescapable hit), I’m thinking of Kenya Grace’s brittle Strangers, the holiday sunset vibes of Water by Tyla, the icy thump of Cassö, Raye + D Block Europe’s Prada, and a dozen or more others that have floored me repeatedly over the past few months. With regard to this challenge, I think the thing that I’ve learned most clearly in 2023 is that the modern single is still in remarkably good shape. Anyone who thinks otherwise would do well to tune in on Friday afternoons.
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FearOfMu21c #5
Lady Gaga - Bad Romance
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Released - Oct 19 2009
Highest Chart Position - #1
Spotify streams to date - 1,031,224,746
Lady Gaga’s big era was completely swallowed up by illness for me so I can’t say for sure if I’d have liked her or not first time around, but I picked up The Fame Monster for a pound last year and since then I’ve been consistently drawn back to it. I think what struck me first about Bad Romance was the sheer violence with which it’s perpetrated. If you listen to it thru tinny headphones on an mp3 player (and as a 2009 release this is surely where it belongs), it is a punishing experience, much like being hit solidly around the head with a club for well over 4 minutes. But while some might think that’s a bad thing, they would in fact be wrong, because that unmitigated beating is actually central to its appeal (to me at least).
Gaga sings about being “caught in a bad romance” but it’s clear from the start that she’s desperate to ensnare herself, going beyond desire into something wholly deranged. It is, I guess, a kind of emotional (and less off-putting) corollary to “I Like It Rough”, where the pain and the drama, rather than being an unpleasant byproduct, become the goal of the relationship itself. As she dementedly wails at the high point of the song, she really doesn’t want to be friends.
And while to some degree it’s being played for laughs - the sheer scale with which she’s hamming it up is pretty obvious - the darkness of it all is the thing that powers everything along. You hear it in the relentlessness of those beats, the distorted EDM hooks, the sense of sleaze that runs thru its veins. But like all the best Gaga songs, it channels that spirit into something much more like a celebration than it should ever be able to. If there’s a record that truly captures the feeling of really enjoying being torn to pieces, then surely it is Bad Romance.
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"If you love someone" and "Sk8er boi"
Another two for the #FearOfMu21c project, crowdsourcing the greatest singles of the 21st century. Here’s an index post.
"If you love someone" - The Veronicas
Gothpop twins Jessica and Lisa Origliasso have been making great music for most of the century. They've gone from power pop (4ever, All about us) through synth-dance (Untouched), and then into an era of molten Barbie poured into a crucible with black eyeliner. Or something like that.
"If you love someone" comes from The Veronicas' 2014 eponymous album, itself following five years of development hell and a transfer from Warner Brothers to Sony. There's anger on the album, most notably on the sarcastic "Did you miss me". The song's co-written by Lisa and Jessica, their regular collaborator Josh Katz, and songwriting powerhouse DNA Music.
And it's happy, upbeat, inclusive. A big giant hug for all the queers, all the misfits, all the people who don't quite fit into Normal Bread Society. Yes, it's a simple and universal emotion, expressed in an uncomplicated way. And sometimes, the simple stuff is just right.
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"Sk8er boi" - Avril Lavigne
Speaking of simple concepts: "He was a boy. She was a girl. Can I make it any more obvious?"
Avril Lavigne splashed onto the scene in summer 2002, and snotty bratty mall-punks around the world found their eyes popping out on stalks. "Complicated" had an interesting video; "Sk8er boi" was the soundtrack to rebellion. A youthful, limited, acting out against the system rebellion.
Written by Avril with powerpop trio The Matrix, "Sk8er boi" tells of a doomed romance between a posh ballet superstar who spurns the advances of a snotty bratty skater boy. By concluding with the news that Avril gets with the skater, we're spared the problem of explaining a genderbent Mary Sue to 2002.
The song is a blast. Literally: it begins at high volume and doesn't stop. The lyric starts as simple, staccatto phrases - until it gets complex. There's plenty of music to be had - power pop chords, hook after hook, and Avril shows she can sing. But it's the energy that impresses - "Sk8er boi" sees the line between "milquetoast" and "too loud", dances along it, turns a few cartwheels, and ends by making an iconic hand gesture in our face.
It's one of Avril's signature songs, alongside "Complicated" and 2007's "Girlfriend" - all three made my longlist for this project.
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#the veronicas#lisa veronica#jessica veronica#queer#pride#avril lavigne#pop#punk pop#goth pop#perky goth#skate pop#snotty bratty punk#Youtube#fear of mu21c#fear of music#FearOfMu21c#fearofmu21c#pop music#21st century
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FearOfMu21c #18
The Ophelias - Lunar Rover
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Released - July 2 2018
Ofc it didn't chart
Spotify streams to date - 116,732
One of the recurring features in this list has been to hear the opening bars of a song and suddenly find myself on the verge of bursting into tears. Sometimes it’s to do with nostalgia: Lunar Rover reminds me of the summer of 2018, a time when my life appeared to have changed for the better, and that’s definitely part of how charged it is for me. But a lot of it comes from hearing a song that’s already destroyed me time and again. Again, that is something that I get from Lunar Rover.
In essence it’s a bittersweet love song, where regret after a break up can’t mask the oppressive nature of the relationship. But despite the depth of feeling at its heart, Lunar Rover always sounds cool and deliberate: from Spencer Peppet’s immaculately precise phrasing to the clipped swirl of violins that runs thru the chorus, there’s a crisp commercial vibe here that masks some of the more uncomfortable contents. Lyrically, the song’s ambiguity is tied up in a number of striking lines - “you are a light to me and I keep you around” is one of my favourites in the entire list - as it moves from romance to desperation and back again in little more than the blink of an eye.
More than anything tho, it’s a ride. From the emerging swell of the introduction through its swooping strings and clattering cymbals, Lunar Rover feels endlessly kinetic: a dreamy emotional rollercoaster that veers around wildly but never runs out of control. But even with so much to unpack, the joy that it brings is instant and intuitive, laced with the sweetness of a lullaby and a little broken glass too.
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FearOfMu21c Index Page
It never occurred to me before I started that it might be handy to have a place where you could access all the #FearOfMu21c pieces individually. But given how confusing it's been in terms of bringing back posts from last year (which ofc are now incorrectly labelled), i thought it would be a good idea to have everything in one post, where anyone interested can find whatever they might want to look at. So:
Introductory notes
Day one: Lana Del Rey - Mariners Apartment Complex
Day two: MGMT - Flash Delirium
Day three: The Killers - When You Were Young
Day four: Tullycraft - Lost In Light Rotation
Day five: Lady Gaga - Bad Romance (11 pts)
Day six: Deerhunter - Memory Boy
Day seven: Trust Fund/Joanna Gruesome - Split 12" EP
Day eight: Dua Lipa - Don't Start Now
Day nine: The Soundcarriers - Boiling Point
Day ten: Magdalena Bay - Chaeri (11 pts)
Day eleven: Grouper - Holding
Day twelve: Little Mix - Black Magic
Day thirteen: The Mountain Goats - This Year (from Dilaudid EP)
Day fourteen: Kendrick Lamar - King Kunta (11 pts)
Day fifteen: The Strokes - Juicebox
Day sixteen: Estelle ft Kanye West - American Boy
Day seventeen: The Juan Maclean - A Simple Design
Day eighteen: The Ophelias - Lunar Rover
Day nineteen: Solange - Cranes In the Sky
Day twenty: Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Zero
Day twenty one: Rina Sawayama - Catch Me In the Air
Day twenty two: Electrelane - To The East
Day twenty three: Self Esteem - You Forever
Day twenty four: Warpaint - Undertow
Day twenty five: Mercury Girls - Ariana
Day twenty six: Sleater-Kinney - You're No Rock n Roll Fun
Day twenty seven: Shunkan - Our Names
Day twenty eight: Amerie - 1 Thing
Day twenty nine: Julia Holter - Feel You (11 pts)
Day thirty: The Go! Team - Doing It Right
Day thirty one: Kero Kero Bonito - Time Today
Day thirty two : Mattiel - Keep The Change
Day thirty three: Fred Thomas - Voiceover
Day thirty four: Cate Le Bon - Puts Me To Work
Day thirty five: Scott Walker - Epizootics!
Day thirty six: U.S. Girls - 4 American Dollars
Day thirty seven: Florence + The Machine - Dog Days Are Over
Day thirty eight: The Orielles - Come Down On Jupiter
Day thirty nine: Jeanines - Things Change EP
Day forty: Janelle Monáe - Make Me Feel
Day forty one: The Hidden Cameras - The Day I Left Home
Day forty two: The Clientele - On A Summer Trail
Day forty three: St Vincent - Digital Witness
Day forty four: Faith Healer - Again
Day forty five: Grimes - REALiTi
Day forty six: Juniore - Difficile
Day forty seven: Public Enemy - Harder Than You Think
Day forty eight: Olivia Rodrigo - Vampire
Day forty nine: Muna - I Know A Place (12 points)
Day fifty: Weyes Blood - It's Not Just Me, It's Everybody
#fearofmu21c#indie rock#DiY music#pop#indiepop#definitely not indiepop#dont call it indiepop#they didn't get mad#don't put that in the paper#00s music#10s music#rock#Altpop#Hyperpop#Hip Hop#Avant Garde#Soul#Chamber Pop#RnB#Ambient#Lana Del Rey#MGMT#The Killers#Tullycraft#Lady Gaga#Deerhunter#Trust Fund#Joanna Gruesome#Dua Lipa#The Soundcarriers
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FearOfMu21c #50
Weyes Blood - It's Not Just Me, It's Everybody
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Released - Sept 12, 2022
Did not chart
Spotfiy streams to date - 8,734,782
Weyes Blood is someone who’s worked hard to define the 21st century experience using the sounds of the 1970s, so it’s perhaps ironic to bring things to a rest here. But in another sense, she’s maybe just more straightforward than most about working in an older idiom. I can’t honestly say that much of my list sounds genuinely modern and I often feel that - aside from things like grime and drill, which i tend to admire more for their abrasiveness than how much I can really enjoy them at length - most current artists are simply replaying the first 40 years of the pop era with minor updated tweaks here and there.
But Natalie still excels in how well she summarises living in the world today; the isolation of being always on; the nagging doom of endless crises. It’s Not Just Me is only about a year old but already it feels like her definitive statement on the subject and is comfortably one of my favourite singles of recent years. While the format of the warm, melancholy piano ballad is a familiar Weyes Blood trope, there’s something more distinctive in the low grade psychedelia which colours the background, the swirling voices and harps which butterfly between the speakers. This Disneyfication of her aesthetic is reminiscent of someone like Mercury Rev but, instead of descending into tweeness, Natalie uses that dreamscape to deal with hard truths about loneliness in a tone that’s somehow both comforting and painfully sad.
And while it’s fair to say that Weyes Blood’s sound is a product of an earlier era, some people will always do it better than others. Evolving slowly over 6 minutes, It’s Not Just Me is exploratory, moving across comfortable territory before twisting a minor chord here and there to turn its softness into something more foreboding. The chorus, with its soaring, looping melody, makes you wait for just long enough and then hits with a melodramatic power that’s unmistakably hers, for all she draws on those ladies of the canyon.
And so, after 50 songs and 7 weeks, I finally understood that the secret of music from the 21st century was that it wasn’t really so different from the 20th century after all.
I had finally conquered my #FearOfMu21c.
FIN
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"Closer" and "Year 3000"
Two to go in the #FearOfMu21c project, part of an effort to crowdsource the greatest singles of the 21st century. Here’s an index post.
Closer - Tegan & Sara
No space for the Indigo Girls on #FearOfMu21c, for the simple reason they didn't release many singles at all this century. Instead, we look to the north, where Tegan and Sara Quin are everyone's heartthrobs.
The lead single from "Heartthrob", "Closer" confirmed the duo's transition from folksy-singer-songwriters into a sleek disco machine. A late-70s synth riff announces the song, it cuts through clutter on the dancefloor and on the radio.
And then we're into a dreamlike space, playful and energetic and with a wistful romance. Tegan said, "I intended to write something sweet that reminded the listener of a time before sex, complicated relationships, drama and heartbreak. I was writing about my youth -- a time when we got closer by linking arms and walking down our school hallway, or talked all night on the telephone about every thought or experience we'd ever had."
Some would describe it as a song about, um, more physical intimacy, with the unsubtle couplet "All you think of lately is getting underneath me / All I’m dreaming lately is how to get you underneath me". Tegan acknowledges the thought, "I do imagine that this would be an okay song to make out to". Tegan's the lead writer on the song, finished by twin sister Sara and their producer Greg Kurstin.
"Closer" travels with great precision, locked into its target. It tells us about the small moments to make affairs of the heart both so specific and so universal. It won the Juno award as Single of the Year for 2013. Tegan and Sara continue to make awesome music, and a memoir, and tv show "High School" with a lesbian-not-particularly-binary queer overtext; their one hit over here is from The Lego Movie, "Everything is AWESOME!"
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Year 3000 - Busted
A projection of the future, one of the great singalong songs from the start of the century. "Year 3000" put Busted on the map, proved they were more than one-hit wonders.
We can't dissect the song too deeply. Songwriters Matt, Charlie, and James with producer Steve Robson were inspired by "Back to the Future" and "Under the Sea with Willy Fog", by the group's anticipated seventh album, and the long-lasting celebrity of Michael Jackson. Ah well, two out of three ain't bad.
"Year 3000" is completely disposable pop, and it's wormed its way into everyone's heads. Boy bands, and another one, and another, and another one.
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#tegan and sara#busted#closer#year 3000#power pop#shared moments#predictions#2012#2003#fear of mu21c#fear of music#FearOfMu21c#fearofmu21c#pop music#21st century#Youtube
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Eleven points to "New Americana"
Last of the bonuses - the top five - in the #FearOfMu21c project, crowdsourcing the greatest singles of the 21st century. Here’s an index post.
New Americana - Halsey
The fifth and final bonus point goes here, the second single from Halsey's album "Badlands". An anthem for the millennial generation, Halsey rejects the values of her parents, as all teenagers through history have done.
Halsey's generation takes diversity to heart, because diversity comes from the heart. They explained further, "It's this idea of these kids who are part of a generation where pop culture is so heavily influential that diversity doesn't scare them the way it scared our parents and their parents. We're more accepting of different walks of life. So I think the New Americana is racially ambiguous, people who are proud of their culture and they own it, possibly not from a binary of gender."
She sings of a generation that mocks itself, doesn't take itself too seriously. A pointed satire, to the point where stupid people stop understanding it. "I made it as click-bait-y, nursery rhyme-y as I could. I was making this comment on how we have this click-bait culture, but a lot of people took it seriously, like, 'Wow, she's being so buzzword-y!' Ding, ding, ding - that's on purpose!"
Comparisons have been made with Halsey's peers - Lorde, Taylor Swift from a step-generation above, Alanis Morissette and Fiona Apple from her parents' time. Halsey is angry, mean, troubled, and supremely talented. "New Americana" was written by Halsey with Larzz Principato and Kalkutta. It demands to be played twice, just as Zane Lowe did when premiering it on {Broomsticks} 1. It's a tremendous zeitgeisty rush, a foundational text for a generation younger than me…
…and that's what gives Halsey problems. Halsey's breakout hit is the one they got bored of. Having to perform one track over and over and over again could bore the brightest talent: just ask Francesco Gabbiani, who got cheesed off when he performed "Occidentali's karma" for months on end. I respect Halsey's position, and while my heart says this is the Song of the Century (So Far), my head says "no".
"New americana" is a perfect document of the cultural zeitgeist. It captures and explains what it's like to be young in the early years of the twenty-first century.
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#halsey#new americana#generation songs#generation zed#millennial#2017#diversity#songs the performer got bored playing#anthems#fear of mu21c#fear of music#FearOfMu21c#fearofmu21c#pop music#21st century#Youtube
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FearOfMu21c #47
Public Enemy - Harder Than You Think
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Released - August 13, 2007, RE - August 18, 2012
Highest Chart Position - #4
Spotify streams to date - 89,293,762
This is another song that I remember from 6 music but, having been cut off from most things back in 2012, I mistook it at first for something from their classic era rather than the (nearly) new track that it actually was. While it blew me away at the time, I hadn’t really been feeling it so much this year and in fact came very close to leaving it out altogether. But having given it another listen today, the brass is sounding more forceful than it’s felt, Chuck’s rhymes are hitting a little harder (harder than I thought ho ho) and Flav’s runaround is just that bit more endearing. There was a time when I wouldn’t have had to think twice about it but I’m glad I got there in the end.
As is so often the case with Public Enemy’s best songs, Harder Than You Think has a steamroller quality to it: the chorus sample is such a gut punch that you have to brace yourself for its impact, while Chuck and Flav run circles around each other and sound better than they had in years. Flav is at his most beguiling here, dancing thru a series of good natured prods while repeatedly prepping the ground for what remains one of the most powerful deliveries in pop music. Quite aside from the content, just the timbre of Chuck’s voice is astonishing, something so authoritative and punchy that his words take on weight simply from their being spoken.
The idea behind the song - still in the game after 20 years - is the perfect foundation for what feels like a victory lap, as the blaring horns act as a fanfare for all that they’ve achieved and everything that they still believe in. Chuck’s lyrics are defiantly iconoclastic, lashing out both at the system of exploitation and the rap game that he feels was co-opted by it. But the most powerful moments are where he reduces his principles down to their most basic elements. - “my sole intention is to save my brothers and sisters”; “You don’t stand for something you fall for anything”. We might be here for PE’s triumph but, as befits a group who’ve always existed to change the world, we’re here for those values too: you can’t have one without the other.
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FearOfMu21c #46
Juniore - Difficile
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Released - Feb 3 2017
Did not chart
Spotify streams to date - 801,043
I remember vividly when Difficile was released: I was in the middle of a kind of mini-breakdown and every time I put it on it seemed to reflect the grotesquely comic position in which I found myself. The way that the riff lurches up and down like it’s soundtracking some kind of sinister circus trick was something I always took to heart, a kind of mirror to my moodswings and panics, whilst the way that the beat smacks with all the self-satisfaction of an open hand to the face has a cartoonishly aggressive vibe which served to rouse me from my more self-absorbed torpors.
Taken on its own merits, it’s still a hell of a song. Anna Jean’s vocal basically lists all of her many personality faults (“Insatisfaite, caustique et volatile…mal lunée…désagréable”: for the benefit of non-French speakers these words mean exactly what they sound like) but as the organ wails thru the chorus, she promises that in the arms of her lover she’ll simply fall “docile” and never be difficult again. The music tells its own story of course - all those lurches and slaps act as reflections of Anna’s personal abrasiveness - and to be honest I remain unconvinced that she’s truly a reformed character: her deadpan tone is hardly one of pleading, more a mocking sneer towards someone who neither believes her nor cares.
It all adds to the noirish tone, with the band’s trademark garage yéyé vibes doing a lot of the work here, especially the spooky harmonies which sound like they’ve been lifted from the music for a ghost train. I could have picked a bunch of Juniore singles for this list, particularly the frenetic, careening Paniquefrom the same era. But none mean quite so much to me as Difficile, are able to catch me in lockstep with the beat in quite the same way or take me back to a moment in time when this was one of the few things that could make me smile.
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FearOfMu21c #45
Grimes - REALiTi
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Released - March 8 2015
Did not chart (#30 US Dance/Electronic)
Spotify streams to date - 19,515,831 (37 million Youtube hits)
REAliTi was the first Grimes single that I really loved and as such marks a shift in the way that I viewed music, which leads on to a lot more pop ladies from 2019 onwards. I guess she was an easy way in for me, someone who’s music was indistinguishable from the 90s pop I was already familiar with but which could be more comfortably digested as the work of a pioneering female producer. It’s important sometimes to take the first steps so you can look back to see how far you’ve come, but I do cringe slightly at the kind of cred signifiers that it took just to get me to take an interest in pop music back then.
REALiTi itself is perhaps more 80s than 90s: this demo version has fewer bells and whistles than the mix that would emerge before the end of the year, but those limitations help to form an aesthetic that’s all of its own. It’s perhaps the most glacial she got during her Art Angels era, a song that looks back to the more abstract creations of the past but which marries that to something far more commercial than she’d been doing up until that point. Sleek and driven, the effect is similar to Kate Bush’s revived behemoth Running Up That Hill, but with its more portentous elements stripped out and replaced with an eerie melancholy. The chugging rhythms give the sense of an arduous journey but Grimes manages to float serenely above it all with a vocal full of elegant swoops and glides.
The lyrics have always had something to say to me but that’s really to do with how I’ve turned fleeting lines to my purpose. “There were moments when it seemed ok” was particularly apt for a time when my illness seemed to be gradually retreating, only to reimpose itself with renewed force, while the “mountains to climb” chorus was self explanatory in my dilapidated state. Tho I find it increasingly difficult to be comfortable with her life choices these days - I tend to think Grimes far more fool than knave but a prize idiot she remains - REALiTi is such a harbinger to where my tastes were heading that I just can’t let it go. But more than that, it’s a song that still resonates: tho I wasn’t feeling it this time last year, the instant rushes of emotion it’s so often provoked have returned now and I’m happy to be able to list it here, not just as a song that feels important but as one that can still floor me completely.
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"Baby shark"
Into the final week in the #FearOfMu21c project, crowdsourcing the greatest singles of the 21st century. Here’s an index post. And here's one with as many nominations (1) as the entire Ed Sheeran catalogue.
Baby shark - Pinkfong
Throughout this list, I've commented on the techniques of song writing. A good pop song is catchy and memorable and has hooks. A great pop song will use its limited time to go somewhere unexpected. A good song will convey its message; a great song will leave us in no doubt about its meaning. A good song will want to be heard; a great song demands to be heard again.
"Baby shark" is a great song.
"Baby shark" grew out of a campfire song, popular amongst the young people of Korea. The original writers have been lost to time, we do know that versions of the song were around in the late 20th century. Alemuel had a decent hit in 2007 with "Kleiner Hai", a German-language tale of a small shark that grew up and ate a diver. Other translations were made and released in the following years.
Back in Seoul, SmartStudy was founded in 2010. The media company released classic nursery and playground songs from their culture, crafts, puppet videos, and a collection of animations for children. With a pink fox mascot, the Pinkfong brand of animations and phone apps was successful in south-east Asia.
And then the Pinkfong company recorded "Baby Shark". It was successful in the original version, and a "dance version" of the video turned into a phenomenal success, the original clip has been seen an average of one-and-a-half times by every person on the planet.
"Baby shark" is remarkable in many other ways. For instance, it uses a tremendously restricted vocabulary. Eighteen words would be an unremarkable clause in a Lorde song, or a short album title for Fiona Apple. "Baby shark" uses precisely 18 words. Total. Across the entire song, just 18 words.
The song is written in G-major, with a change to C-major for the final stanza - two of the most common musical keys in pop music. To sing "Baby shark", you need a range of just half an octave, so even the worst voice can sing it reasonably (compare with other well-known tunes with minimal range: "Too many broken hearts", "G'd save the queen").
Lyrically, the song tells a story and circles back upon itself: it introduces the participants, encourages us care about them, takes them on a literal journey, and resolves it, imploring us to set out again.
Whether we like it or not, "Baby shark" has become an absolute staple of the pop charts. It's in the top 60 most-streamed music tracks almost every week of the year, and has gone from utter obscurity to something everyone knows.
"Baby shark" is the biggest cultural moment of the past ten years, and fully deserving a nomination for the century's Best 50 Songs. (But just the one.)
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#pinkfong#baby shark#one of the best songs of the century so far#seriously#stop giggling at the back#no seriously#shut it#unexpected german cover version#minimalist lyric#limited singing range#singalong#it's still number 1#2016#ubiquitous#fear of mu21c#fear of music#FearOfMu21c#fearofmu21c#pop music#21st century#Youtube
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FearOfMu21c #43
St Vincent - Digital Witness
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Released - Jan 6 2014
Did not chart (#40 with a bullet on the Mexican Ingles airplay chart!)
Spotify streams to date - 36,840,813
I went with Cruel for the Uncool 50 last year cos I wasn’t feeling this one so much but in truth Digital Witness has always been St Vincent’s designated banger. In a way, it provides the perfect basis for a St Vincent song: her sound has always had a machine-like quality but, when you look beneath the surface, there’s a real humanity desperately trying to scratch its way out. The world of social media - where we’re all trying to make ourselves heard above the grind of the algorithms - seems like a fairly obvious place for her to wash up and that it’s become her defining single is probably not a surprise.
That sense of strangled automation is as present in Digital Witness as in anything she’s ever done. It’s a song that captures St Vincent at her most pop but it still gives off a slightly malevolent vibe, a feeling that it’s being pushed relentlessly forward by an unseen and malign influence. There’s something very tight and processed about it that recalls the likes of XTC and Talking Heads, but the way in which its all cut and diced makes this feel like a genuinely modern update of the kind which other post punk revivalists haven’t really gone anywhere near.
Annie’s words veer close to being clumsy - it’s not an easy task to write a song about social media without getting all “how d’ya do fellow kids?” - but it’s the wit that she brings to them which makes it work. Rather than just pursuing the obvious political line, she exaggerates to the point of hilarity - “watch me jump right off the London Bridge” breaks character in such a brilliantly disarming way - and the lyric builds with an intensity that’s perfectly in character with the tense, febrile nature of the track. And as I sit here procrastinating on the internet once more, it feels fitting to note that “won’t somebody sell me back to me” is one of the sharpest closing lines of this whole miserable century.
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