There's Nothing Here

My name is Crystal, and I live in New York.You can email me at crystalleww at gmail dot com.

[crystalleww]

The last couple of weeks have been a blur of the office and the airport and it’s not really hit me that I’m physically back in Chicago, the city that was home for almost eight years, where I spent the most time growing up. I left a little over a year ago. I’ve noticed that things have changed: there’s a renovated ‘riverwalk’ now, new buildings, new office layouts -- all with their newness and shininess. I haven’t left the downtown area, and after tonight I don’t know if I will. Even in the area that I spent the least amount of time, I see ghosts everywhere -- of freezing hands shoved into each other’s pockets, of kissing scruffy cheeks, of openness and newness, of touching knees on bar stools. They are ghosts of them, but I think they are mostly ghosts of me. I don’t know if I’m scared of them, but I don’t think I can go back to them. 

[crystalleww]

Anna Lunoe - “Blaze of Glory”

It feels like nostalgia cycles are getting shorter or maybe I’m just getting older.  Anna Lunoe’s best known as an EDM producer and DJ, though her Beats 1 radio show HYPERHOUSE demonstrates week to week just how wide that range can span. It’s evolved through the years, but a lot of established artists in the scene today were at least partially influenced by the bloghouse era. “Blaze of Glory” sounds so much like a Ting Tings song to me, especially that chorus, which sounds is made to be half shouted with a dumb attitude about it.

But everything old can be updated while retaining some spirit of it. To me, one of the most immediate elements of that era is the aesthetic, which, retrospectively, so wild how we all got on board with wearing all that neon. I love that the video for this goes with consistent, recognizable color palette, but updates it for 2018. The millennial pink family pastels are visually consistent with what I would associate with the bloghouse kids -- growing up and ‘settling down,’ but hey, we were once young, we once partied, and we still care about our looks.

[thesinglesjukebox]

[crystalleww]

MNEK - TONGUE

Crystal Leww: One of the most underrated voices in dance music and pop writing gets a single that’s probably supposed to represent a new, sexy direction. “Tongue” feels too cut and paste for me, like an assortment of “moments” that never quite come together to form a whole. I know that songs like “Deeper” weren’t making him into a huge star, but they were good! They had feeling! They sounded like MNEK in his groove as the pop-house star. “Tongue” feels too much like a child playing dress up as a pop star. [4]

I admittedly wrote my blurb without spending enough time really crystalizing my thoughts, but I’ve spent a lot of the last couple of days listening to MNEK’s own discography, his featuring credits, and his songwriting credits. I think he’s one of the most talented voices in pop today, so it’s disappointing to hear something like “Tongue,” which doesn’t do a good job capitalizing on what makes him special. 

MNEK has spent half a decade now penning and singing songs that sound like open-hearted, dumb youth, shouldn’t-feel-this-much-this-soon earnestness. It’s probably partially a function of his actual age; he’s only 23, and he started penning songs about falling in dumb love in his teens. That kind of vulnerability contrasted with big sounding pop is endlessly appealing -- it explains Zedd’s enduring career or for the more sophisticated crowd, Carly Rae Jepsen’s popularity with critics ‘too old’ for pop music. MNEK has written a lot of these songs over the years, but rarely got the credit, royalties, or the accolades. 

And so, "Tongue” is a concerted effort pivot to something more overtly sexy. That’s fine! Plenty of female pop stars have deployed basically the same move,  it’s clear that he wasn’t getting much from his current strategy, and your mid-20s are a good time to feel less anyway. It’s just disappointing that it comes right after “Deeper,” which sounded like classically, stupidly earnest MNEK. 

[crystalleww]

Kacey Musgraves - “Space Cowboy”

It’s hard to believe that I’ve been in New York officially for almost a year now. I’ve had a lot of time to think the last couple of weeks, as I’ve immediately gone from working way too much to something that is probably normal but feels like nothing. To say that I know exactly who I am at 25 is absurd, but there are parts of myself that I am sure of.

I left home a month after I turned seventeen. I’ve lived alone since I was twenty one. I am very good at taking care of myself. I am stubbornly, stupidly independent. 

I’ve felt like Kacey before, but truthfully, I think I am more often the cowboy of this story. Sometimes I wonder if I had made different choices about being alone, but then I wonder if I’d have had dancing on the bar in Hong Kong, iceskating in palaces, tall strangers in London, stumbling out of the warehouse to the sun rising over the East River, speedboats in Thailand. I made choices, and they are parts of who I am. I belong here for now, I know. It’s surprising to me, too.

[crystalleww]

The Myth of the Male Star Maker

Over the last couple of days, The FADER has published two profiles of artists that at some point in the earlier half of this decade were Up Next: CL and Tink. Both are well worth a read -- especially for anyone who is interested in what happened to these super talented artists.

There is a running thread that sticks out in both of these stories though, and it’s how both CL and Tink’s narratives during their rise and stagnation have been so closely intertwined with two industry men in their lives. 

CL’s supposed ‘America Whisperer’ has always been Scooter Braun. There’s plenty of fawning press coverage of Braun. He’s the manager of Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande, sure, but he’s also the manager of PSY, Carly Rae Jepsen, Vic Mensa, and CL. These are all artists that at some point were Up Next, buoyed by massive memes and / or pre-existing fanbases that Braun just...never managed to capitalize on. Credit for the success of Bieber and Grande always felt odd to me, too; Bieber was already huge from his YouTube fanbase (wild to think about now, I know) and Grande was a star on a Nick show. I’m shocked that not more people talk about how CL was a huge miss. 2NE1 at their height were so good that they could make you believe that EDM-pop could be shiny again, even in 2011 when the Americans had largely run the sound to the ground for the first time. And CL felt like the star there.

When Tink signed a deal with Timbaland, it was largely touted as a sign that she had Made It, despite the fact that 2014 was faaaaar removed from the days of Timbo as a hitmaker. I mean this was post-Luger! This was post-Mike WiLL! We were on the tail end of Mustardwave! Timbaland had no idea what to do with her -- I saw her at heavily sponsored, mostly empty show that they put on at the Metro in Chicago which was a venue too big to build any momentum at and absolutely not in the right part of town for her. There, they made her premiere her big single with...Charlamagne tha God? What? The anecdote about Timbaland comparing her to Aaliyah in the FADER piece is heartbreaking. Aaliyah comparisons are okay (she was already getting them after all) but being anointed the next Aaliyah by Timbo himself probably destroyed any hopes that she could ever emerge from that as herself. 

There’s also a parallel that can be drawn to the continued, fawning coverage of Jack Antonoff, Boy Genius -- something that’s been been nagging at me all year. These dudes have dominated the narratives of young female up-and-comers, and in retrospect, they proved to be massive distractions at best, actively destroying potential value at worst. I hope that CL and Tink get their albums back. They deserve the right to release their music if they want, on their own terms and without the heavy burdens of dudes who got credit for personalities they never deserved.

[crystalleww]

I’ve just finished up my second stint in Toronto in the last three years. This time, a short one, only 10 weeks avoiding the winds and cold in the tunnels beneath the downtown area. This time was much tougher -- driven by responsibility and age -- with many weeks not seeing much at all besides the office, those tunnels, and the hotel. 

I’m worried about you. 

Those are the words that everyone from my mother to my friends to my baby brother tell me. And sometimes I am awake staring at the ceiling of that sterile hotel room and I’m worried for me, too. 

But then I pull myself out of bed and drag myself down to the hotel gym where a treadmill facing that freezing Toronto lake and hit go. For ten weeks, three times a week, I watched the sun rise during my morning run, staring at that lake, and slowly the prop planes landing at that small airport on the lake become visible, too. It’s not much, but for twenty minutes a day, to be reminded how lucky that I am to be able see something like that is beautiful to me. 

It’s a blessing.

[crystalleww]

moments in music 2k17

charly bliss’s album is full of hooks, but nothing felt better than screaming ‘i always get dumped on my birthday’ when they played ‘dq’ live

the horns that bring in ‘mi gente,’ which always set off a dance floor

‘i’m from the city of the 915 where all the girls are pretty and they’re down for the hype’ khalid on ‘american teen’ made me think about my soft spot for texan boys. don’t introduce me to texan boys; i will develop a crush immediately

the most punk rock thing i heard all year showed up on lauren alaina’s ‘doin’ fine’, surprisingly, but alas, ‘daddy got sober; momma got his best friend. i’ve cut down my crying to every other weekend’ is quite the intro to an album

the entire pre-drop of ‘stay awake’ by anna lunoe and sleepy tom: ‘i used to believe in lots of things but i’m too old now. too old to believe there’s a plan. to believe in things that keep me off balance, bloated. not letting my hair curl or my freckles show. i believe in people and what they can create.’

everything that charli xcx did but especially ‘1 night’

 ‘the louvre’ by lorde, which reminded me of being 22 and running around paris with *not* my boyfriend, which is a terrible idea because paris is very very VERY romantic for someone who you care a lot about but doesn’t quite reciprocate

‘only bought this dress so you could take it off’ from ‘dress’ by taylor swift. the song is definitely about karlie kloss, but this line reminds me of the red dress i wore to dinner by the water in singapore and realizing that paris was a dream and he didn’t love me after all

[crystalleww]

I was just back home in Texas, and I saw the boy I loved when I was sixteen years old. That was nearly ten years ago. He still has long eyelashes, something that I could not understand that I loved at sixteen, but something that I remember so clearly now, at twenty-five, in every memory that I have of sneaking glances at his face backlit by highway lights while sitting shotgun in his car. He can still make me laugh, and we still talk about the same people. Like when I was sixteen, he has a very serious girlfriend. He’s always had one, but I like this one the most because she seems to make him happier than the girls before. I am single, as I was when I was sixteen, but so much else has changed. I look a lot more tired now than I did at sixteen, worn down by long nights studying quantum mechanics at the university library, long Chicago winters worrying about my career, and boys less kind than him. He no longer has boyishly long hair, the kind boys get because they don’t want to go to the barber, and seems quieter than he was before, something I never would have guessed. I live in New York City now, the city I foolishly dreamed of escape to when I was sixteen, and now the city I live in because I actually needed to learn new things about myself.

And I am not in love with him anymore. 

[crystalleww]

help (2017)

[crystalleww]

Mura Masa x Charli XCX - “1 Night”

That pre-chorus gets to me every time I hear it (standing in the Pre-Check lane at O’Hare, on subways, walking down Broad St., etc.). First, “But I’m not that type of girl who wants serious affection. It doesn’t belong in my world.” Inevitably shifting to in the second pre-chorus: “But you, you are an exception.” I am the girl who feels deeply but only for boys who aren’t available. I am the girl who gets lonely but has not looked for a relationship or cared to look for one. I am the girl who is literally always running away. The boys I've liked lately I’ve known by city, by place, a result of many frequent flyer miles and my knack for kissing boys in far off places and feeling way too much.

My best friends remind me, again, that to feel so much in these short, impossible bursts is a defense mechanism, a way to feel with very low stakes at the end of the day. They’re right -- they always are -- and this is usually how it feels: a twinkle, a hoodie and hands shoved in pockets, the sparsest of Charli XCX vocals punctuated by bursts of “woah-oh-ohs” and pleading, and shuffling down Broad Street alone towards the C at 9pm 

[crystalleww]

I moved from Chicago nearly two weeks ago. I packed up my belongings, hailed a Lyft to the airport, and hopped into it like it was any normal week headed to client site. I'd been so busy that weekend saying goodbyes to friends, dealing with movers, hosting my best friend at my apartment, and cleaning that I hadn't had time to process what it meant until that moment heading to the airport. Then I cried the whole ride to the airport like some sort of lunatic, like the sad girl who had gotten dumped, like someone who had lost someone significant to them.

I lived in Chicago for nearly eight years, longer than I'd lived anywhere else continuously and yet, the decision to move away was the easiest I made in my life. People will ask me why I moved and I'll give a number of reasons: oh, my group at work is mostly in New York; oh, it was just time to move on; oh, I wasn't in a serious relationship there and just didn't want to lay down roots; oh, I wanted to try out New York before it was too late. The reality is that Chicago, as much as I loved it, was suffocating me. I was so, unbelievably, overwhelmingly unhappy, so lonely and tired, so ready to leave that I'm realizing now that I stayed too long.

---

The night of goodnight drinks, my favorite broworker, the last surviving broworker, the exceedingly sweet one who I realized that I had more in common with than I originally thought, leaned in and asked, "Why are you leaving? Is it because you didn't think you would find someone to marry here?"

And I get it. We've talked about this a lot. About cornfed boys who love blonde girls who wouldn't give either one of us the time of day and how lonely it really could get in Chicago.

I told him yes, and in that moment, I really did believe it to be true.

But I've been thinking a lot since I've moved and work has been slow and I've had a lot of time to think about Chicago, and it's been so long since I've cared about someone there in a real way.

The truth is that I found someone to care about a lot in Chicago, someone who I really did see myself building a life with, someone who really, honestly, truly broke my heart. He didn't love me the way I needed him to, but he was so decent and kind, made me realize that I didn't want to settle for anyone less than him. Someone who made me really feel like I belonged there, belonged anywhere. Jeana came to visit and we took an Uber home from Alex's place in Evanston. We drove past his old apartment and the basketball courts by the water where he would lean down to kiss me before getting the dudes on the court to let me play point.

I just think I stopped trying at some point, and that's okay, too. I was too busy looking for other things in life and it was okay to be a little bit lonely. At some point, it became too easy to be lonely, much more difficult to try. Chicago was all right after all, but I was suffocating through no fault of anyone but my own. I needed a kick in the ass. I needed to leave.

I feel like I can breathe again.

[crystalleww]

Charli XCX ft. MØ - “3am (Pull Up)”

What’s your favorite version of Charli XCX? She was the earnest teen popstar on True Romance. She played the rebellious teenager who smashed shit up on Sucker. She played the disaffected, cool, all shiny, totally fake teen on Vroom Vroom. Number 1 Angel is a little bit of all of the above, combining the production flourishes of Vroom Vroom with a little of the attitude of Sucker and the vulnerability of True Romance.

My favorite production trick here is that jangling bell buried in the mix in that first verse that sounds so much like an incoming train. I have waited for boys to meet me on train platforms. I have kissed them goodbye on those windy platforms. I have held their rough, freezing hands in the cold. They probably didn’t deserve it either but hearing this through my headphones while walking in that same windy, freezing cold on Saturday morning felt made it easy to recall those most vivid, most relatable, most tangible of memories.

[crystalleww]

DANCEFLOORS 2K16 (2/2)

Part 1 here. 

Here are three more dancefloor moments that made me lose my shit in 2016:

Mija plays her remix of “Here in Your Arms” by Hellogoodbye at Webster Hall in NYC

My favorite storyline of 2016 has been millennial nostalgia manifesting itself in EDM. For a genre often derided for its bro-ness, mainstream EDM was extremely emotional with tracks by The Chainsmokers and DJ Snake climbing and staying atop the charts. At almost every EDM set I saw, DJs dropped some sort of ~throwback~ jam, from Panic! at the Disco to The Killers to Yellowcard to Linkin Park. EDM in 2016 was basically Dashboard Confessional with synths. Still, my favorite was seeing Mija dropping her nxc remix of “Here in Your Arms.” I was out with one of my best friends from high school and poor David, who got punched very hard when I realized what was happening and got really excited. I couldn’t stop jumping! I felt like an actual teen again.

The Chainsmokers play “Closer” at Electric Zoo in NYC

“Closer” just hit #1 and they still chose to end their set with “Don’t Let Me Down.” The Chainsmokers are not good dudes, but I cried when this happened anyway. 

Onra plays “Let’s Dance” at Studio Lam in Bangkok

I am extremely bad at unplugging, but I usually somewhat succeed at staying off the internet when I’m on vacation. David Bowie died right before I left for Asia, and I largely managed to avoid seeing people process their feelings about his death. Hearing “Let’s Dance” in such a public but physical space on the other side of the world felt right. It was like Bowie didn’t want me to process behind a computer screen but rather out in public on a dance floor. We lost so many immortal legends this year, and I tried my best to have a moment with their music either on a dance floor or at a concert out in public surrounded by and connected with people after they were gone. It’s where their music made the most sense, anyway. 

[crystalleww]

DANCEFLOORS 2K16 (1/2)

For me, the best music is enjoyed not just sitting at a laptop but on radios, on trains, and especially on dancefloors. Here are three dancefloor moments that made me lose my shit in 2016 (with three more to come):

Anna Lunoe plays Crazy Cousinz x Kyla “Do You Mind” into Drake’s “One Dance” at Concord Music Hall in Chicago

In the end, no one cared about Views, but “One Dance” was everywhere. Lots of handwringing from olds that the UK funky original was better, all the while ignoring that the best artists are curators as much as they are creators (h/t Fanta for that one). Anna Lunoe knows that well; her Hyperhouse show on Apple Music Beats 1 was monstrous for another year, and she interviewed everyone from dance legends like Moby to teenaged up-and-comers like Louis the Child because music is a continuum.

Honestly, blending the original into Drake was such an obvious trick I’m surprised more people didn’t try it, but I saw Lunoe do it twice. The second time I was with Melanie, and we ran out onto the dance floor and I danced with tongues out, like the hell of a time that Drake would have wanted all women to have to his little bop. Right after Lunoe’s set, I ran into a boy that I’ve been hooking up and he smelled really good, like he always does, and said that her set was incredible. There was no caveat there -- no ‘good for a girl’ or ‘she’s really hot’ -- and I was quietly happy about that. Mel said that I should make something happen there and I sheepishly said that I already had.

Joe plays “Don’t Hurt Yourself” at The Burlington in Chicago

Lemonade is a whole work of art, an album, a film, and an experience, but honestly the songs banged pretty hard, too. Shortly after it came out, I was out on a Thursday night to see Joe DJ, and he closed his set with “Don’t Hurt Yourself,” the best rock song of the year. Britt and I yelled along to “Who the fuck do you think I is?” And that’s it, isn’t it? Too much of the initial discussion of the album focused on Jay Z. Too much of the end-of-year discussion focused on how Beyonce was reinventing the album (which was somehow invented by The Beatles and The Beach Boys? Nah.) Not enough of the discussion emphasized and re-emphasized that Beyonce makes music for no one but women and specifically for Black women.

UNIIQU3 plays “The Box” at Studio Live in Dallas

Anna Lunoe and Mija combined their Hyperhouse and FKAGENRE tours for a Texas Takeover, and had a full lineup of B2B sets for each of the dates. It was a dream -- UNIIQU3 B2B Ducky, Wuki B2B Rickysan, and Lunoe B2B Mija. They quietly went and made a lineup with plenty of women without making a scene about it because no one wants that anyway. In a year chock full of thinkpieces about the broiness of The Chainsmokers, rarely did critics want to do the work to find the spaces where this weird, cool shit happens.

The end of the night was a B2B with the whole lineup. Young UNIIQU3, the Black girl who rules Jersey club dropped “The Box,” and I watched everyone on the bill get up and jump. I was with my baby brother, who, like me, was drenched with sweat by the time we made it to the B2B, and we were jumping, too. The whole thing was so god damn joyful and I was living in the past, present, and future of dance music. Dance music was made by the weirdos and the girls and the non-white kids and thrives under them, too.

[crystalleww]

Work has been wild the last week and a half, and while it’s been a few months since it’s been this, it’s so easy to slip into these habits. Some things year-end didn’t shake out the way that I wanted them to, and that’s fine, but it’s also bothered me more than I’d like. I don’t love that I have become a model of the behavior that I hated from my parents when I was a kid, but I also don’t think I’m putting someone else through this.

Still, Ma and Rocky worry about me. i can hear it in their voices when we talk on the phone and see it on their faces. Ma, in particular, is so proud of me but so scared of the person that I have become. I don’t know how to change the inertia. I don’t know if I even want to. What a millennial cliche, I guess.

[crystalleww]

Lady Gaga - “Million Reasons”

Lady Gaga’s new single “Million Reasons” is like the anti-1989: pop lyricism wrapped up deceptively in country production. The campaign for Joanne has been a serious attempt to rebrand Lady Gaga as a Serious Musician That Makes Real Art. She works with Mark Ronson and Tame Impala dude now! She is doing raw, gritty shows in dive bars across America now! She loves guitars and real instruments now! She wears soft pink cowboy hats now! Contrast this with ARTPOP, which was the total opposite side of the spectrum and felt like a “everything is art nothing is art”, Jeff Koons-influenced (in a bad way), blue shiny orb covering up the vagina pop emergency nightmare. The only reason why this move doesn’t feel like Gaga is flailing as an artist is the three-year gap between albums.

I don’t like this move. Country lyricism is what drives great country songs, and “Million Reasons” is very exposed by how bare it is. The synths were never the problem with Lady Gaga. As if Lady Gaga ever should have needed any credibility boost from music industry bros! The producer most prominently featured across The Fame and The Fame Monster is RedOne, who has since completely disappeared off the pop radar. Lady Gaga is a good pop song writer, completely capable of making great pop songs by herself with a cohesive visual image to complement. Yet, everything she has done since her debut has felt like everyone throwing too many influences (men, all men) on her. Let Gaga live. Stop this faux-country nightmare from an artist that it doesn’t work on.

[crystalleww]

I woke up crying after I dreamed that you had a baby with your new girl.