singles

"Sweet Dreams"
Beyoncé

Last week, my co-worker was playing a video linked from FB, some throaty, grey shoegazer with a haircut covering "Single Ladies." It was 'ick. He said, "Why is everybody raving about this?" I said, "...because they're racist." And then I watched the for-real "Single Ladies" video a few times--still good, still a call to arms not a snooze, not even a little bit. Occasionally I wonder if, we spectators get lazy about newness and give the establishment too much credit/obeisance (that "...to be pleased means to say yes" business). Sure. But Be is never not working. She works to make our lives easy, to provide us with half-familiar/half-fresh treats, soundtrackings, jams--21st Century POP MUSIC, red-blooded, healthy post-Modernism. This guy, "Sweet Dreams," the most recent single drawn from I am...Sasha Fierce (the 6th or 7th off the record since last autumn?), is Be's Gothic number, as Industrial as our bright Aughts R&B gets (cousin to Rihanna's "Disturbia") and with lyrics like, "Tattoo your name across my heart so it will remain/Not even death can make us part/What kind of dream is this?" and "Clouds filled with stars cover the skies/And I hope it rains/You're the perfect lullaby." I really dig her invocation of dreamstates. Dreams are--as soon as we become aware of them, waking--histories, passages, memories, inaccessible. This angle lends the song a deal of regret, glances backward. She opens with a loosely cast phrase, "turn the lights on," that is applied as a portion of the driving beat throughout the song. In the track's present tense, Be is no longer falling into soupy, dark love, but attempting to reconstruct and measure it 'in the light'...after.

"Sally"
Sam Sparro

I picked up this dude's album because...um...a gay teen played it for me at an American Apparel, saying, "You wouldn't believe how he looks: cute white boy with a side bang, wearing our shit." Whatever. Ain't no shame. This and the U.K. hit, "Black and Gold," are supreme and smart dance songs, despite their hipster cheese (Sparro is an Aussie living in El Lay....so....). And "Sally." I mapped out something like five music videos (starring me?) for it as I rode the train into Manhattan this morning. My favorite was a tour of the Financial District, dead at night with Christmas decorations on the lamposts, dancing in and out of empty dives and office tower porticoes in a 91/2 Weeks, off the shoulder, creamy Irish cable knit sweater and nothing else (shoes?). The lyrical take on stripper dadsums-issues is a touch ham-handed. But Sam's throwback politics are in the right place (I loathe the fourth-wave approach to sex industry-as-empowerment).

Pure redux--tragic heroines/social issues+gay soul singing+slap-happy synths, a track to get riled up to, to dance yr emotions to. Bless our hearts. Disco isn't ever gonna die again!