Music & Films for
Common People
cut to the feeling
carly rae jepsen
10
In a surprising turn of the events, this thirty-something Canadian went from being the most annoying one-hit-wonder in 2012 to a cult indie pop sensation five years later. Cut to the Feeling only came to fulfill the promises set by Emotion: a cheerful singer that embraces the elation of catchy bubblegum tunes, but that is far more interested in the music she makes than in her own celebrity status.
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It is the purest form of retro pop, not only on how much it takes from 80's synthpop, but also in the way that it celebrates the emotions instead of the persons. When 2017 popstars address their tracks to their romance or feud in turn, Jepsen aims for the sensations awoken, in the same way that the old-school Madonna and Cyndi Lauper did. In an alternative world where pop stardom has a correlation with talent (you know, where Robyn would be doing Super Bowls and MTV Awards shows), Cut to the Feeling would have been as big and as overplayed as Call Me Maybe was.
tonite
lcd soundsystem
9
LCD Soundsytem creates another smart track that one can dance to, and by doing it they also take the opportunity to question exactly how the whole music industry exploits this idea of immediate gratification through a dance tune. As the wise experienced übercool man that he is, James Murphy is telling us how much anxiety and manipulation we're receiving from all this tracks that demand us to live and party as if tonight was your last night and that is only boosting the culture of fake Internet lives composed of several "tonights".
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There are a lot of deep thoughts over that obsessive bass, that is, of course, a meta-comment by using vintage synths; and the keyboard has a great effect to grow the track to a party for the cool people that fancy shaking their bodies to songs that preach that the fact of all of us dying eventually is "the best news you're getting all week".
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everything now
arcade fire
8
Arcade Fire gives us another deep insight on mass consumption, immediate gratification and alienation in the actual moment of the digital society, with its pros (all the information is available for everyone and everywhere) and its cons (our online persona has become much more important than our real self).
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But Everything Now is not just brilliant in its lyrics. They get social irony in the construction of the melody as they borrow a pan flute from a Cameroonian song from the 70s, emphasizing the point that now you can have access to all the history of music from anywhere in the world (and yet the same songs are the ones that get played again and again in the media). A track that is coated with the uplifting strings of ABBA's Dancing Queen and glides to a peak euphoric moment in order to make much more attractive the real misery that it is exposing.
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j-boy
phoenix
7
Phoenix is back in form with a song that is the soundtrack of our love fantasies. Full of dreamy textures, J-Boy is the band playing with calm and certitude, just like in their beautiful ballad Love Like a Sunset, but adding shiny synths and a soft base that are like the lights reflecting on a disco ball.
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But no matter how slow is the dance, Thomas Mars keeps spitting verses at a machine-gun speed, talking about a love story set in a dystopian background where people steal money of homeless girls. It's the account on how we found ourselves doing strange things for love, our main character becomes a shoplifter just because he "was excited to be part of your world, to belong, to be lost, to be mostly the two of us".
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HUMBLE.
kendricl lamar
6
With Humble., Kendrick Lamar puts to shame every single rapper in this planet (specially those who behave and speak as if they were God incarnated, but get into feuds with teenager popstars) not only with mocking them in his lyrics, but also by creating music that is so fine and avant-garde that make any other effort look childish and primitive. He demands them to "sit down" to teach them a lesson on how to make sophisticated rap music.
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The mad piano keys, courtesy of Mike Will Made-It, accompany scattered verses that go from his modest times, to comparing sex to a Tetris game and demand the media showing asses with stretch marks. It's three minutes of pure lunacy, he keeps showing us that he can combine his social consciousness with having (and giving us) a good time, because what he is doing it's totally out of this planet.
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new york
st. vincent
5
New York contrast sharply with the rest of Annie Clark's catalogue, she has never sounded this intimate before. We might not be treated for her amazing guitar skills, but the accompanying piano and the crescendo synths give it a beautiful elegance that is able to keep the track very simple, but make it sound grandiloquent.
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It is the isolation paradox of being in the most agitated city on the world but feeling empty and alone. But even there, she uses her wit to call for the "only motherfucker in this city that can handle me/stand me/forgive me". Like in a Woody Allen movie located in this same city, the song is not only about a lover, it might be an important part of it, but it is about oneself and the relationships that we carry with all the people that, from the 8.5 millions of people that inhabit New York, form our selected circle and are the ones who shape our experience of what one city means to us.
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SAY SOMETHING LOVING
the xx
4
Say Something Loving achieves what On Hold didn't, showing an evolution in the sound of the band, while remaining true to themselves and letting the three parts of the equation shine in the same measure. This one is undoubtedly a song by The XX, it has its imprint in every single part, the dark minimal electronic, the sparse guitars and the clever lyrics about young love (or the lack of it), but it also shows how much the band has evolved and how they are able to offer new things that are not just a repetition of their highly acclaimed debut.
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Jamie's sample of a 70's pop song is a subtle remark on the volatile nature of love, at times just a brief moment that slips away. Romy Croft's goes slightly wilder in her use of guitar, but still in her trademark sparse style; she manages to imprint density to every single riff, even when they are delivered at a much faster pace.
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SLIP AWAY
Perfume Genius
3
After 3 albums of brilliant exploration of queerness, one would have thought that Mike Hadreas would have exhausted the subject, but here he is again, breaking free in a way that we never saw him before, if in Queen he was upfront confrontational, in Slip Away he reaches a point where the hate is not even capable to touch him. He has created something huge out of what made him different, and now he is letting it explode. It's the first time that we see his shiny side, and it is as rich and interesting as his gloomy dark side was.
For a track that sounds so brilliant and positive, it has a really unusual selection of the individual components. It opens and grows from an almost feral and raw playing of the instruments; not your average pop track about growing strong to shut the bullies. Slip Away is pure poetic glittery magic.
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Green LIGHT
Lorde
2
Green Light is the song that nobody expected from gloomy Lorde: a dance tune about a break-up; but Ella Yellich O'Connor is decided to shatter every expectation on her. With brilliant lyrics that acknowledge how the details (the lover making believe the new girlfriend that he likes the beach) are the ones that hurt more than the actual separation. She is also very aware of her new position of pop superstar, so when she pens "I whisper things, the city sings 'em back to you", she wants to make sure that whenever this guy goes to a bar, he won't be able to escape what he did, because the DJs will have this track playing for a long time.
But there's a sense of new possibilities floating all along the song, when she sings about hearing brand new sounds in her mind, the song shifts and we listen how a house piano starts building the tension that only explodes when she cries about waiting for the Green Light, a synesthetic symbol for freedom and redemption.
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LOVE
lana del rey
1
This is a song that could possibly speak for a whole generation, an hymn for Millennials as Smells Like Teen Spirit was for Gen X. Love embodies the sentiment of a void generation that lives in the immediacy, one that experienced a digital revolution that changed every single aspect of their life: it's an exciting time to be alive, to be young and in love... but it's also a frightening time for all of that since the future for all of us, living in 140 characters and stories that vanishes in 24 hours is pure uncertainty.
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It is also the first time that Lana forgets about her tragic Laura Pamer-ish persona, and instead here she appears as an omniscient and ethereal nymph with an eye on the future but the other one set in our nostalgia for a past that seemed warmer and more predictable. Now she doesn't approach love as a passion of the flesh, instead she embraces it as something wider and deeper.
In the big picture of her new album, Love also gains a political side: in the dark times of the resurgence of fascist bigotry, the answer will always be to Love.
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