Dirty Projectors - “Lose Your Love”
David Longstreth has spent the past two decades inching his way toward being a pop musician. Dirty Projectors began a twisted, tortile creature, wrestling beauty from its spinous convolution. But with every release, that creature sheds another layer of skin, getting closer and closer to unrestrained joy. In my view, the peak of this progression came with 2009’s Bitte Orca. However, mountain ranges have more than one summit. “Lose Your Love” is pure bliss, the kind of song that has you feeling the sun on your face, the summer breeze in which your clothes ripple. The bass plants its feet firm on the ground; the drums roll effortlessly along, and the background vocals have that glottal vibrance characteristic of DPz. Flourishes of synth and piano fill instrumental crevices and concavities so seamlessly that one barely notices their impeccable placement. Felicia Douglass’ lead vocals are voluptuous, and Maia Friedman and Kristin Slipp back her up in perfect consonance. “Consonance” is my one-word review of this song—all stitches are invisible, every surface has been polished to a shine. It’s all the more brilliant when considering the jagged contours upon which the beauty of DPz’s 00’s work rested.
The lyrics are written in Longstreth’s romantic shorthand, which draws its plain and archetypal imagery primarily from nature. While a bit abstract, it’s written in a clear vernacular that’s used to express unmediated delight, rather than tell a story. This is something he’s always aimed for; pop music (hip hop, especially) has tended toward self-defined message and narrative for some time now. A lot of it can be great, but it doesn’t always lend itself to being sung along to by all. This is how things should be, and nostalgia for pop’s (purportedly) lost universality is intrinsically tied up with the homogeneity that’s persisted in the industry for so long. Longstreth both pokes at and acknowledges that nostalgia in his lyrics. His individual phrases are familiar, but their collective abstraction demonstrates the illusion that the concrete could exist without reference to particulars of experience, which is always colored, identified, orientative, etc. At the same time, these words unmoored in time and space flow so pleasantly that no matter who you are, you can’t help but sing along. In other words, Dirty Projectors actualize the pop music that nostalgists misremember. Show this to your parents—see if they like it.
Yungster Jack & David Shawty - “GREEN”
These kids just don’t give a fuck, do they? That’s why they’re brilliant: there’s so much detail in this song and this video, such creative variation. A lot of work went into this—they give a lot of fucks about what they do, but as the old adage goes, they make it seem like the opposite. It’s one thing to conceive of the most Gen-Z phenom ever; it’s another to actually bring it into being. Those more meme-savvy than I can pick apart the visuals. As for the soundplay: the strobing glitch is part of the vocals’ DNA, and it occasionally leaves the beat sputtering in its wake. The deific heights that this digital fuckery attains speak for themselves. It’s tempting to assume that Yungster Jack and David Shawty’s performances are disposable, easy to replace with other voices caked in Auto-Tune. However, they have individual eccentricities. Y. Jack leans hard on his long U’s and E’s, the two vowels that best underscore the frankness of American English; whenever he does, you can hear the pitch correction refracting under the stress. By contrast, D. Shawty’s delivery is less nasal and relies upon half of Jack’s lung capacity, making his vocals more gaseous and intoxicating. But it all hits so hard and fast that you’re not thinking about any of it—it just bops.
Similarly, while you could pause the video every two seconds and try to catch all its references, that’s not the point. For Gen-Z, distortion isn’t a static occurrence. It’s temporal, a manifestation of excess in motion. A lot of art works toward an end product, which is why it has such a difficult time representing the digital landscape on its own terms: how can an object evoke the motion of its subject while resting outside that motion? Artists are finding out (often the hard way) that the Internet, social media, etc. form more of an experiential medium in their own right than a subject for other media. That’s why the art that succeeds in overcoming this hurdle tends to emerge as an object fully integrable with its surrounding landscape (i.e. TikTok, in the case of Yungster Jack). But even someone for whom that landscape is rather alien (i.e. me) can easily intuit a sense of the territory from “GREEN.” That’s no small feat, and it shouldn’t be taken as such.
Playboi Carti - “@ MEH”
I can’t top the blurb by Sunik Kim for “@ MEH” over at Tone Glow, so I won’t try to. Instead, I’ll just reiterate how much of a visionary iconoclast Playboi Carti is. It’s been two years since Die Lit came out, and I can say with confidence that nothing’s sounded anything like it yet. Of course, we need to thank Pi’erre Bourne for that, too. However, the beat crafted for “@ MEH” by Neeko Baby, Deskhop, and jetsonmade does away with the grime that marks Pi’erre’s production. It’s nimble and melodic, never touching the ground for more than a split second. It also leaves a lot of space for Carti’s candied one-liners to pierce through, reliably arriving with a dose of pure energy at the end of every bar; the rapidity of his delivery gives the impression that he’s cramming two bars into one. What makes many of his songs so exhilirating is the density of the ad-libs that fill the mix to the brim. But here, their relative absence illuminates the irresistible forward pull of Carti’s music and demonstrates his basic strengths as a vocalist. While his “baby voice” may rule people’s memetic imaginations, the comments they leave on YouTube reveal their sheer awe at its sublimity. They compare his syllabic utterances to physics formulae, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and magical incantations; they transcribe them with Unicode and heaps of diacritics so over the top as to make any metalhead salivate instantly. There appears to be a common understanding that Carti doesn’t just spurn conventional language—he transcends it, frees it from its earthbound shackles.
Charli XCX - “forever”
I watched/listened to the music video for “forever” for the nth time just now to write about it, and I nearly cried. In Sam Goldner’s blurb on it (also from Tone Glow), he writes about the sadness underlying the lyrics, pointing to the line where Charli “admit[s] that she’s finally driven the car off the road.” This image seized me, and its specter, besides bringing me close to tears, gave me a foothold on what BJ Burton’s incredible production brings to the table. His work on Low’s Double Negative makes that record the monument that it is; there, he takes the motif of aural distortion as communicative disconnect and pushes it toward its logical end. On “forever,” disintegration gnaws at the edges, growing in ferocity with time before receding in the track’s final moments. Charli’s saying goodbye, and as she drifts away, her connection to the people she’s saying it to gets fuzzier, disrupted by static. When she’s done waving at them, she lets the connection go quiet. Throughout the song, waves of noise wash back and forth in the background. They ebb, flow, and roar, and then, you can’t hear them anymore. Call me crazy, but all I can do is imagine where the car went after it veered off the road: into the water, then further and further below the waves.