"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!
Showing posts with label singles. Show all posts
Showing posts with label singles. Show all posts
Nov 3, 2009
Oct 14, 2009
singles
"Successful"
Drake, feat. Lil' Wayne and Trey Songz
Pillow played this track for me a few weeks ago. I downloaded it and proceeded to study it (in all of its heavy hotness) on my iPod, on the train and the street. Drake, as most of y'all been knowing, is Jimmy, wheelchair-bound Degrassi heartthrob, one of a team of wholesome and compelling Canadian daytime television teens (cult-status beloved Stateside). He rhymed occasionally on the show. But, for many this year, it came as a surprise that he was recording an album under Lil' Wayne's aegis, clurrrb "canoodling" with Rihanna, generally being a rapstar. His summer single "Best I Ever Had" was big, especially with Young World, but I was unconvinced. I found it irritating and puerile. This guy, "Successful," on the other hand, has soul and weight (an aforementioned "heavy hotness"), lyrical punch--"My girl love me but fuck it my heart beat slow." The first bars are dungeon-ous, casting one into hazy depths, a backward, basement church. Trey's refrain is apathetic to the max, slow and careless, a supposition, an expression of vague desire for a vague property. Half Memphian, half Great Northern Jew (bestill my heart), Drake's stories are lingually street (I mean, spoken in the manner of most hip hop), but the meat of them and his point of view are pretty privileged, at ease. He is not a "striver" or even a pretend "striver." He doesn't want to fail; he wants recognition, "success," but he needs for nothing. He has swagger, but he has indecision also, a kind of waffle-y quality that is more the rakish, gambling-indebted "profligate son" of Anthony Trollope novels than gangsta'. He was never in a gang (outside of the Screen Actors Guild), and he's not going to pretend such (certainly not when Wayne is around). Kanye is similarly middle class, but he's such an inaccessible asshole. Drake is relatable, and that second verse has a chilled morosity that I find quite moving (Kanye is NEVER moving, never more than a shallow hipster, who crafts fine beats and hooks). Drake seems like a sort we've been seeing and will see more of, a post-hip hop hip hop artist. Of course, that last verse laid down by Weezy ("best rapper alive," born of the Deep South and Birdman and "hot blocks," traditionally [?] hip hop), after a brilliant pause, like a hidden track for the MP3 generation, is miles ahead of Drake's, full of pleasure and mannerisms and wordart (not -play). Maybe this track is a fluke for our young man, buoyed up by his betters? I hope not....I think not.
addendum: I was being over-tough on Kanye. For rhetoric? For T. Swift? One day soon, his antics might become sympathetic...only the most insecure sort of person postures so. He has a habit of cutting off his nose to spite his face, sort of eroding his substantial catalogue with a whole mess of braggadocio...pretty human, pretty sweet, really.
Drake, feat. Lil' Wayne and Trey Songz
Pillow played this track for me a few weeks ago. I downloaded it and proceeded to study it (in all of its heavy hotness) on my iPod, on the train and the street. Drake, as most of y'all been knowing, is Jimmy, wheelchair-bound Degrassi heartthrob, one of a team of wholesome and compelling Canadian daytime television teens (cult-status beloved Stateside). He rhymed occasionally on the show. But, for many this year, it came as a surprise that he was recording an album under Lil' Wayne's aegis, clurrrb "canoodling" with Rihanna, generally being a rapstar. His summer single "Best I Ever Had" was big, especially with Young World, but I was unconvinced. I found it irritating and puerile. This guy, "Successful," on the other hand, has soul and weight (an aforementioned "heavy hotness"), lyrical punch--"My girl love me but fuck it my heart beat slow." The first bars are dungeon-ous, casting one into hazy depths, a backward, basement church. Trey's refrain is apathetic to the max, slow and careless, a supposition, an expression of vague desire for a vague property. Half Memphian, half Great Northern Jew (bestill my heart), Drake's stories are lingually street (I mean, spoken in the manner of most hip hop), but the meat of them and his point of view are pretty privileged, at ease. He is not a "striver" or even a pretend "striver." He doesn't want to fail; he wants recognition, "success," but he needs for nothing. He has swagger, but he has indecision also, a kind of waffle-y quality that is more the rakish, gambling-indebted "profligate son" of Anthony Trollope novels than gangsta'. He was never in a gang (outside of the Screen Actors Guild), and he's not going to pretend such (certainly not when Wayne is around). Kanye is similarly middle class, but he's such an inaccessible asshole. Drake is relatable, and that second verse has a chilled morosity that I find quite moving (Kanye is NEVER moving, never more than a shallow hipster, who crafts fine beats and hooks). Drake seems like a sort we've been seeing and will see more of, a post-hip hop hip hop artist. Of course, that last verse laid down by Weezy ("best rapper alive," born of the Deep South and Birdman and "hot blocks," traditionally [?] hip hop), after a brilliant pause, like a hidden track for the MP3 generation, is miles ahead of Drake's, full of pleasure and mannerisms and wordart (not -play). Maybe this track is a fluke for our young man, buoyed up by his betters? I hope not....I think not.
addendum: I was being over-tough on Kanye. For rhetoric? For T. Swift? One day soon, his antics might become sympathetic...only the most insecure sort of person postures so. He has a habit of cutting off his nose to spite his face, sort of eroding his substantial catalogue with a whole mess of braggadocio...pretty human, pretty sweet, really.
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