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jackalsinthekitchen · 1 year

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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:

youtube

(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.

"You know, it's not the same as it was." Got that right, Harry. Inescapable change continues to, if not get us down, throw us off somewhat, like sun-dazed Styles, dreamily sashaying around his house. But it doesn't mean we can't make the most of riding out the new waves.

#Youtube #mileycyrus #sza #samsmith #kimpetras #metroboomin #shakira #bizarrap #raye #taylorswift #rema #selenagomez #centralcee #harrystyles

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