roma★
Not today Justin
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@theartofmadeline
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
NASA
cherry valley forever
Today's Document
Origami Around
trying on a metaphor
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
dirt enthusiast
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
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#extradirty
Mike Driver
KIROKAZE
祝日 / Permanent Vacation
seen from United States
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seen from United States
seen from United States
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seen from United States
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seen from United States
seen from India
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@culturenosh
At the Human + Tech conference, a movement to meld AI to personhood that ended up feeling more machine than humankind.
I worked really hard on this piece and I’m glad it’s out! It’s a first-person recounting of a day I spent at a tech conference founded by a former Activision executive, where I saw VR meditations, AI rituals, and a rather dismaying sense of fatalism.
A talk with video artist Morry Kolman, who forces viewers to gaze beyond the YouTuber's vapid philanthropism.
LMAO and such
Video game creators on the pleasures and pitfalls of pushing boundaries.
My last GDC piece is up! This was mostly an excuse to play a bunch of cool games and talk to interesting people. But I guess that’s what game journalism is anyhow.
Amid an industry downturn, the labor movement is racking up major points.
Another GDC piece in the bag! This one is about labor organizing in video games. I think I did a pretty solid job on this.
Can video games help to educate and empathize?
I’m covering GDC this week, and my first piece about the conference just got published! Got to see some cool games and talk to interesting people about whether or not games can contribute to social change.
'Singing together is an ancient, true, human thing, and it’s so powerful' says up-and-coming star of irresistible tunes.
Damn I like never update this blog anymore, lmao. Anyway, I interviewed Maude Latour. This was fun!
In an industry that’s incessantly reaching for new benchmarks, the developer explores what's been left behind.
Got a new piece up! This one is about a talk I went to given by Dan Salvato (developer of Doki Doki Literature Club) about developing games for retro consoles. This was fun to do, and I hope that I get to do more video game writing in the future.
With 1993's 'P.U.N.K. Girl' all over TikTok, the recently reunited UK indie-pop band shares West Coast memories and future plans.
Sometimes I'm like "Damn I'm really doing this for real." This is one of those times.
Rising Bay Area producer talks new album 'I Want to Be,' her West Oakland Music Festival, and realities as a trans person.
New interview up! Tomu has been one of my favorite artists for years, so this was really exciting to do. I was honored that she was so open with me.
At 924 Gilman, Militarie Gun set off an all-ages mosh frenzy to thrashy punk glazed with pop hooks.
Got a new piece up! I went to see Militarie Gun play at 924 Gilman along with Gouge Away, Heart To Gold, and Caveman. Had a fun time, wrote about it, took a few photos.
While none of the members of Los Campesinos! are openly LGBTQ+, their music offered a way for queer listeners to project themselves into it.
Well, the piece I've been doing research for since I was 14 is out. This is so close to my heart that I don't really know what I'm feeling about it. But I'm really honored that so many incredible people were willing to talk to me about this, that Lefto was interested in publishing it, that Los Campesinos! exist, that I get to be alive.
We love her again
Charli XCX is pop's foremost wannabe troll (not pop's foremost actual troll - that's Selena Gomez). So of course she would use the occasion of her most irritating album rollout to soft reboot the plainspoken vulnerability that animated her early work.
The part about "So I" that gets me is the first verse - how it touches on the ways that well-meaning cis people dehumanize trans people via idolization ("You're a hero/ and a human"), and how her consequent inability to recognize SOPHIE's genuine care compromised the relationship they could have had ("You would say, 'Come on, stay for dinner'/ I'd say, 'No, I'm fine'"). It's so simple, but the step-by-step pace of her melody makes it feel like she's putting in so much effort just to hold onto the bare facts of her words, surrendering to grief when the countermelodies squeeze in at the end of each stanza ("nowIreallywishIdid"). It's the same kind of tactic she used in the True Romance days, using pauses and rhythm to imply worlds of meaning in between the things that are actually said.
Crash strained to balance its conceptual narrative about fame with the personal narrative of her relationship with her boyfriend and her fans, as well as the actual reality of Charli's place within the pop ecosystem. It felt strongest as a series of love songs in which Charli roleplayed as a personification of the industry's vampiric cynicism, but that framework fell apart when she took swings at radio-bait. I felt like, perhaps, she was no longer for me. It's still possible that I won't love Brat, her upcoming album; "Von Dutch," the lead single, is fun but lightweight, and her public persona has become increasingly caustic and humorless since Pop 2. But I'll take any evidence that her earnest femininity is still intact, somewhere beneath her brittle bravado.
Turning from digicore to coruscating rock, she balances destructive tendencies with luxurious spaciousness
First piece of the new year! I wrote about Jane Remover’s album Census Designated and tour for 48 Hills. There was more I wanted to say here - she’s in an interesting place as an artist, where she’s still developing her style independent of her influences and she’s not quite there yet - but this record is very good and it’s fun watching her evolve.
YEAH THAT'S RIGHT WE'RE BACK WE WEREN'T JOKING AROUND NOW GET IN THE CAR BEEP BEEP LET'S RIDE
CHARLI XCX - SPEED DRIVE [5.07]
Oliver Maier: A dark cloud seems to hang over Charli XCX as of late. Last year's perfectly passable Crash was touted by her as her "sellout" album, and while it charted impressively, it didn't demonstrate the effortless hitmaking that Charli sometimes implies she could pull off any time, if she only felt like it. That success instead has rather randomly gone to the risible "Speed Drive," her first UK top 10 since 2015 and first Billboard entry since a year prior. There's a lot I don't like about it, but enumerating its faults feels futile when it has the baked-in defense of just being a cute song for the Barbie movie!(!!!) Put simply, though, it's lazy to the point of feeling contemptuous. I have far fewer reservations about switching my brain off and having fun with pop when it feels like the artist is laughing with me, not at me. [2]
Alex Ostroff: On Crash, Charli started leaning into obvious interpolations to try to hit the charts. Hopefully, "Speed Drive" is the tail end of that tendency and not her new normal. The mashup of "Hey Mickey" and "Cobrastyle" works significantly better for me than the way she lifted from September and Robin S. for Crash singles, and there are a few excellent line deliveries, but this still feels like Charli on autopilot. The album's worth of unreleased songs with SOPHIE do more exciting and interesting things sonically than this PC-XCX retread, and if she isn't pushing the boundaries of pop music in weird and abrasive new directions, I'd much rather have the hooks and big choruses of "New Shapes" and "Lightning" than an under-two-minute sketch of an idea. The problem, of course, is that Charli on autopilot mashing up Robyn and Toni Basil, but fully committing to the performance and vocal delivery, still ends up giving us a: [6]
Alfred Soto: Charli XCX's reputation as a unsung pop master crumbles every time she releases another middling single. From the "Mickey" lift to the perfunctory rhythm track, "Speed Drive" is closer to assembly line than a Barbie factory. [4]
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: The best Charli XCX songs in this lane are cleverly stupid ("Hot in It", "Yuck") or stupidly clever ("No Angel", "Vroom Vroom"), but this is just normal, garden-variety dumb -- less a song and more a collection of Pavlovian cues for stans to go wild over. All points here should be allocated to Easyfun, who at least does his job competently. [3]
Will Rivitz: Crash was Charli's worst release in nearly a decade for more reasons than I can fit in these few sentences, but most salient to "Speed Drive" was the record's uncharacteristically smooth polish. Her music achieves transcendence when it leans into its unsanded edges and hungover hedonism, channeling self-destruction and snottiness into bombast and excess. If it sounds like a first or second draft slapped onto Spotify before it's had the chance to hit a mastering studio, it's succeeded. Crash was too careful to hit those same highs, and as a result, its attempted mess felt lethargic and flat, indulgence as a single drunk cigarette instead of half an Adderall chased with absinthe. So, since "Speed Drive" sounds like it was mastered on a 2015 MacBook speaker and plays its two main interpolations as insouciantly straight as possible, it represents a return to form. Mess is more. [7]
Aaron Bergstrom: A perfectly acceptable Charli-by-numbers exercise: shiny, metallic PC Music production smeared over otherwise kitchy sonic references (and "Cobrastyle," which rules in any context); lyrics referencing cars, Japan, or cars in Japan; halfhearted attempt to tie it all back to Barbie somehow. [5]
Rachel Saywitz: Sonically, "Speed Drive" is one of the more interesting songs from this year's Barbie soundtrack -- unfortunately, that isn't saying much. A flurry of bubbling synth patterns echo the song's title, but what should be an exhilarating digital rush is overset by drab lyrics that sound like they came out of a Mattel exec's secret poetry diary (+ charm bracelet which unlocks the diary + a copy of the 2006 hit Barbie mocap film, The Barbie Diaries): "She my best friend in the whole world / On the mood board, she's the inspo / and she dressed in really cute clothes." Charli is in on the joke, but the joke isn't actually a joke -- it's a corporate branded major studio movie that was made to sell more toys, unable to subvert its maker no matter how many jokes it makes about male CEOs, discontinued toys, and "tax evasion issues." Can we just get Charli to soundtrack one of those poorly animated Barbie movies that know exactly what they are? Can we get a Barbie: The Princess and the Pauper remix album? Oh my god wait that would be incredible Mattel please call me I'll revoke my DSA membership please [5]
Hannah Jocelyn: I am a Barbie movie defender; you take your $100 million toy commercial and make the best possible trans allegory a cis woman can make, you have my respect. (Just as Little Women is the best queer movie a straight woman can make, love ya Greta!) I feel like mainstream feminism-attempting films, Barbie included, are so preoccupied with being Statements they'll sacrifice any momentum to get a message across. This is much less messy and complex than the movie it soundtracks, content to get in and out with its endearingly obvious samples. Charli's attitude makes the song sound more chaotic than it really is, but that effortlessness is a neat contrast to a movie that tries really fucking hard. Suddenly, I want to buy a 2024 Chevy Blazer EV. [7]
Brad Shoup: Like the vast majority of thinkpieces this movie elicited, this isn't really about Barbie, is it? It leaps into a gear and holds; there's nothing to distract you while the motor hums. It ends with Charli chanting "red lights," like she's desperate to pull over. [4]
Andrew Karpan: Perhaps the most important of the pop hits salvaged from an '80s nite at a club near you, "Speed Drive" is already a Greatest Hit among the stans, and justifiably so. Charli boils down what these nostalgia grabs are all about: misrememberences of a more understandable past, the fantasy of driving cars, the mood board stretched infinitely into the promise of a new century, the crux of Barbie itself. [10]
Jonathan Bradley: [A whiteboard with "Charli XCX Barbie soundtrack????" written on it and nothing else.] [3]
Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Even on this throwaway soundtrack cut where Charli sounds like she's putting in 25%, her pop flourishes and mannerisms are undeniably powerful. It's the way she rhymes "whole world" with "inspo", knowing it doesn't work; the way she races through the chorus like she's bored and speed-reading random words on a page; the way she robotically drones "Li-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-ghts," unbothered at the laziness of the hook. This can't even clock in at two minutes. Give us nothing, queen! [7]
Kayla Beardslee: Charli understands how to craft a hook better than 99.99% of all musicians that have ever existed. [7]
Dorian Sinclair: I would not have thought to combine "Hey Mickey" with Robyn's "Cobrastyle" at all, let alone as part of a massive Mattel movie. Perhaps this is why Charli XCX is a pop star and I decidedly am not. The result mostly works, though it feels a bit less than the sum of its parts. And while I don't entirely get the focus on the car, maybe it's so she can run it back for the Hot Wheels film? [6]
Peter Ryan: Pop's foremost interpolator doubles down for a truly inspired how-hasn't-this-been-done moment. As a chase scene backdrop it's an [8], but on its own it's not even her third-best car tune. [5]
Katherine St Asaph: Brainless, reckless fun utterly unfit for purpose. The song is called "Speed Drive" and is perfect in tempo and stupidity for racing down the highway faster than God intended. And Charli still interjects "hah!" like no one else. But when do you go on the highway? When you're planning on driving for more than 2 minutes! [6]
Jeffrey Brister: Sleekly built, moves quick without fuss, pushes up a bit, but never really crests into high gear. I'm not asking for transcendence, but maybe an acknowledgement of a higher power while you lightly tap the gas pedal? [5]
Edward Okulicz: Having stopped writing good Charli XCX songs years ago, Charli XCX has, with this, ceased to even sound like Charli XCX. The only good bit about this is the "Mickey" interpolation. Driving around with this would give me a headache within about two miles. [2]
Vikram Joseph: In which Charli decides to write an AI version of a Charli song before the machines get there first. [4]
Will Adams: I will own up to being one of those who were WRONG and DUMB about "Vroom Vroom" when it first came out; I still wouldn't rate it highly, but I recognize its importance and impact on pop music. Special thanks to "Speed Drive" for helping me through that process by demonstrating what "Vroom Vroom" would sound like if there were significantly less effort. [3]
Jibril Yassin: Sucker needed this more than we did, but I'll take any new Charli songs that use actual choruses again. [8]
Joshua Minsoo Kim: I applaud Charli for staying faithful to "Hey Mickey": the only good thing here is the hook. [3]
Crystal Leww: Funniest thing about this song is that one of my best friends in the whole world made an edit of it, and once we were out, the original played and I was like, "man this is so slow." And then she told me that the BPMs are actually exactly the same. Good song for Charli in her popstar elder era, but I'd always rather be listening to the edit. [5]
Michelle Myers: This would have been a fine addition to my 2009 pre-gaming playlist. I can taste the Smirnoff Ice and MAC Lip Gloss. [6]
Samson Savill de Jong: This is a banger that resists much discussion, just pounding you with being really really good and fun and HOT (but not, funnily, at all sexy). It needs a third verse, as it's over just as it really gets going, but ultimately probably better to leave you wanting more than wishing it was over -- though I find it hard to imagine this couldn't have stretched all the way to 3 minutes. [8]
Ian Mathers: It's good, but I've gotta knock it for three things (all possibly totally unfair, but that's the Jukebox babey!!!!!): 1. "Mickey" is a fine song but I am so sick of this kind of interpolation; 2. it reminds me at least by implication of "Vroom Vroom," and you, ma'am, are no "Vroom Vroom"; 3. it's only my second favourite 2023 soundtrack Charli XCX is featured on. [6]
Leah Isobel: Enough time has passed that we can admit Crash was mid, right? That in marking the moment in which Charli finally, actually committed to being a pop star, it also signaled her turn from real emotion to two-dimensional shtick? That her fanbase not only enabled this particular turn, but made it her only viable option? That her career is now defined by the need to please a group of people who treat her work as impersonal meme-bait instead of creative output from a real person? That, viewed in this light, the fact that "Speed Drive" has become her biggest hit in a decade makes perfect sense, even though it's the unsatisfying sonic equivalent of a single leftover french fry, drenched in grease? That pop stardom is, in itself, the reduction of a real personality and perspective into a flat and marketable image; that the aching, sincere heart of True Romance is actually dead and buried; that my youth is never coming back; that all I have left is this shitty, misogynistic world? And that, despite everything, I am physically and emotionally incapable of scoring a Charli XCX song that samples fucking "Cobrastyle" lower than this? [4]
Tara Hillegeist: It says a great deal about Charli's grasp on how to make hedonistic abandon actually catchy, even after the multiple ways that particular approach to imperial phases has shown their ass, that she can nearly faceplant on a still-mangled enunciation of "kawaii" and yet almost get away scot-free with her brazen interpolation of "Hey Mickey." I can yet imagine this scoring a campily villainous dance number in a Russel T. Davies SFnal dramedy on BBC Three and working. Sadly, Rusty's currently on contract to Disney instead, so an entirely different sort of Toymaker seems to have run off with the obvious bait for tiresome queens at present, and I'm not sure the vibe quite comes together as the prophecy was meant to foresee. Too bad. It'd be an [8] if it did, but only hypothetically. [3]
Nortey Dowuona: The problem with "Speed Drive" isn't the flat, pedestrian drum programming, even though that roots the song to the ground and never lets it become the exciting driving song it's meant to be. The problem is Charli constantly pushing forward in her music to embrace the more compelling and vivid music of the late '10s, only to be over-praised for a competent rehash of already marked territory by her elders. The same happened to Earl Sweatshirt, who doubled back to play in more conventional positions then, after the praise, re-doubled down on his direction. The way to engage with their music is to stop jumping up to beg them to pander to our changing taste and the industry's desire to cling to conventional wisdom. Let the Charli XCX of 2014 go -- she doesn't exist anymore, Charli's competent Toni Basil cover notwithstanding. Maybe actually trust them to chart their own paths -- you crafted your own, right? [6]
Frank Falisi: The streamlining of Charli's glitch-heat into soundtrack-ready radio-licking songs is good! PC Music was always a project about products, caring and careful as it was. Pop is a product about the project of being alive -- it's its own experimentation, it doesn't require archness. But to be alive is to seek out live wires and hearts to plug into, to give shape to. The pastiche that has haunted Charli's work in recent years takes as its engine dead objects: nostalgia (Crash), flippancy ("Hot Girl", Bottoms), and now, incorporation (Barbie). Can you feel a song begin to think of itself as servicing an occasion instead of a feeling? But you don't have to rope in career tea-leafing to know "Speed Drive" is plain boring. More like a treatment for a song than a composition moving through ideas, it cannibalizes the occasion of "Vroom Vroom" for a compensatory GM tie-in, settling for chorus as brand shoutout and production that's nearly apologizing for itself. Haters -- Lovers? Likers? I can't imagine a human being loving this song -- will tell me it's a fun, short song written for a fun movie that's been over-think-pieced and that doesn't deserve the hyper-scrutiny it received. I still think we deserve better than just "just" as far as the product-as-art future Barbie takes to be inevitable. I also think -- whatever their occasion -- all the song sequences in the film felt disposably-conceived, thinking a little of partnering with the image and thinking a lot about servicing the partner, which is the brand. Maybe pop music in cinematic space has always been product placement of a kind. Or worse, once it was a way to show love through intertextuality and now it's the moving image as Tumblr page, a cloud of association, a hungry rolodex of fits. And the suggestion of a pleasurable essence isn't the presence of pleasure. I know there's no purity, I don't want purity. But you have to let "want" in, have to want "want" to mean more than "get." Otherwise it's the experimental rendered in a language we already know. What I mean is: every day the inclusion of "Boom Clap" in The Fault in Our Stars feels surer. [2]
[Read, comment and vote on The Singles Jukebox ]
We 🥲
The PC Music star talks about new beginnings with album 'Perfect Picture'—and dishes on Kesha deep cuts
I interviewed Hannah Diamond for 48Hills! This feels like a big milestone for me. I still remember listening to "Attachment" in my dorm room in 2014. I didn't quite get it, but I've followed her career since then and she's quietly become one of the most interesting pop artists working - with a real, deep awareness of what pop is and how it works. I’m very honored that she shared so much with me, and kind of in awe that this happened at all.
Pop should be stupid
I once described Troye Sivan as emotionally vacant. I stand by that. While his music uses the signifiers of the Emotional Pop industrial-complex - the misty synths and pealing guitar tones, the explosive choruses, the Allie X and Noonie Bao cowrites - his vocal delivery tends toward the soft and whispery, never achieving the kind of cathartic release that this particular strain of pop music tends to reach for. His version of total surrender is synonymous with absence; he needs his inhibitions in order to remind himself that he exists.
In the past, this has made the sexuality in his music feel strangely limp. "Bloom" is supposed to be a bottoming anthem, but its jumbled metaphors leave the impression that he's reaching out for something, anything, to keep from losing himself in pleasure; the chorus' giggly euphemism comes across not as sexy and playful, but solemn, serious, tightly wound. It's the clean and beautiful fantasy of sex, not the weird and goofy reality.
This Troye era seems to be about correcting those faults; the wink-wink nod to poppers on "Rush" felt a little glib, but his straight-to-camera delivery of the line "Man, this shit is so much fun" was right on. He's stepped back far enough from himself to see that two (or more) bodies together means twice (or more) as much insecurity, awkwardness, silliness.
"Got Me Started" goes further, frontloading its silliness with a sample of "Shooting Stars" by Bag Raiders - a song that might be best known to modern audiences (or, at least, to me) as the soundtrack to a Nicki Minaj meme. Looked at cynically, it reads as pandering and tasteless, spoiling the hushed intimacy of the song.
But upon closer inspection, the sample's puppydog goofiness is actually reflected throughout: check the dance move where Troye briefly drops his pants and wiggles his butt for the camera, the whispered "let's go!" before the chorus, the chipmunked vocals, the jittery rhythm. The song is intimate, but it's not serious, and its joy is featherlight. If you laugh at the sample - as I did on my first listen - that's intentional. Sex is funny; it's weird; it's stupid. So is pop.
Are the VMAs irrelevant?
For many years, The Grammys were built around the "Grammy Moment" - a cross-generational, cross-genre ideal that was meant to celebrate recorded music as an art form in all of its permutations. They were intended to illustrate the broad appeal of the American music industry's products, and to point out the connections between, for instance, Macklemore and Madonna. These performances were artificial and self-congratulatory, but the logic isn't terrible: take two seemingly contrasting musicians, build a bridge between their styles and themes, earn buzz and profit for advertisers.
We can say something similar about the VMAs, except the prototypical "VMAs Moment" isn't about music at all. The artists featured at the VMAs might have important and resonant things to say in their work (I will always go to bat for Britney Spears' artistic bona fides, for instance), but that's not the show's value proposition. It's about the art form of celebrity - or the promise of such. We're promised a platform to watch famous people be famous, to demonstrate the value of fame to society. When celebrities who practice the art of fame differently collide in MTV's pop-culture coliseum, the narrative result can echo for decades.
And yet every year the VMAs seem to be fighting for their existence. The original VMAs ceremony in 1984 was slated as empty, meaningless, and invalid; since at least the mid-2000s, the show has battled accusations that it's old-fashioned and irrelevant. In any given year, the VMAs are the worst that they've ever been, a sure sign that the show can't go on. And then, a few years pass, and what was once the nadir of pop culture becomes nostalgia-bait, held up as an example of when celebrities mattered.
In the moment, I think, we're always hyper-aware that celebrity is a function of marketing, and that MTV itself is a compromised platform to sell "youth culture" back to us. During the ceremony, we see all the interstitial moments that remind us that our favorite celebrities are essentially just theatre kids who go lucky, that pop culture's gatekeepers are corny and desperate. Then, as time passes and the music industry creeps closer to total collapse, we forget all that. What we remember is that the show went on, and that for a few minutes, we were entertained.
