#30DaySongChallenge

A few years ago the #30DaySongChallenge meme was a popular thing on Facebook. Here it's been resurrected as a starting point for some of my ideas about music.

[scottdoes30daysongchallenge]

this project is over

I did my thirty days - I might try it again in a year or beyond - but for now, my ideas and thoughts and feelings on non-specific projects can be found at http://scottjamesramage.tumblr.com/ so come follow me there and contribute or whatever it is we do on social media in the modern age

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DAY 30: YOUR FAVOURITE SONG AT THIS TIME LAST YEAR FUTURE ISLANDS - “SEASONS” Anyone who picked up a magazine in December or looked at lists online of 2014’s best moments has probably heard more than enough about how great “Seasons” is. It’s a critical darling, and with good reason too: existing at the exact midpoint between Bruce Springsteen and New Order, it’s the kind of anthemic synth-pop that feels like it could have come from any point in the last thirty years. It’s a pretty straightforward song about giving up on a relationship that isn’t going anywhere because of the differences between people – a common pop sentiment, blown up to stadium proportions through crunchy guitars and an insistent bassline. Pretty normal stuff for indie rock – except for one vital element: Samuel Herring’s vocals. A guttural growl that owes as much to country music as it does screamo and metal, his distinctive approach to singing is what makes “Seasons” so striking. To an unfamiliar audience, it can seem gimmicky in its unexpected rawness and jarring in its harshness. If Herring’s acquired voice seems gimmicky, then their live performance could be measured as theatrical. “Seasons” comes from Future Islands’ third album, but it’s their first glimpse of major success, the band spiralling into mainstream and critical vision after a performance from Late Show With David Letterman went viral online. In the clip, Future Islands look completely removed from ideas of what pop and rock stars should look like, with Herring wearing a black tee tucked into plain trousers while dancing unsophisticatedly and punching the air. His singing is even more aggressive than on record and the whole thing seems almost amateur – but Letterman is visibly moved by the performance. Herring’s snarl is powerful and natural. It’s the reason critics see “Seasons” as a brilliant song: the depth of feeling from his voice is so genuine that it gives the song its soul. It’s an authentic performance in the truest sense - there’s an earnestness in the performance that’s convincing, so that even the most deliberate of shouts and growls code as instinctive and honest. Of course, authenticity alone is not a reason to enjoy something - if that were the case then every three-chord busker would have enviable talent while there would never be any great songs as a result of studio production. But what “Seasons” does is take both the rules of pop and the rules of indie and adheres to both – so fans of indie hear it as sincere and heartfelt, while fans of pop hear it as a brilliant song delivered in an unfamiliar style. “Seasons” isn’t an argument for real music on real instruments sung by real men in the same way that so much contemporary rock and indie can feel like. It’s an example of how a song and a performance can be moving and affecting if the sentiment behind it is genuine and stirringly recognisable, and that’s why after the critics move on and the Letterman show becomes a forgotten Youtube moment, “Seasons” remains a great song.

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DAY 29: A SONG FROM YOUR CHILDHOOD SHAKESPEARE’S SISTER - “STAY” I’m a child of the 90s, who grew up with rave, hip-hop and grunge all part of the existing fabric of pop: to older generations, these genres may seem revolutionary, but for fresher audiences they’re part of the establishment, entrenched in the cultural capital. So “Stay”, with its slightly-dated production and classic tropes, might seem unremarkable by modern standards. But this is the first song I ever truly loved. It’s not so much that its mix of glam rock and power ballad was unlike anything I had ever heard before, as much as it was fused together and performed in a way that was unlike anything I had experienced before. “Performed” is the key word – “Stay” is theatrical melodrama, a song that feels so obvious in its construction and so contrived in its delivery. Marcella Detroit’s glassy melisma builds to operatic fireworks, while Siobhan Fahey hams up her verse with a knowing growl. It’s held together with a musical backing that starts with a slightly ersatz New Age shower of synths before erupting into moody stadium pop, all chiming guitars and doomy choir back-ups. There’s little touches in the production that jump out such as the organ arpeggio in the second chorus and the Phil Collins drum roll that ties up the piano solo, but this is all about the dual performance of Detroit and Fahey. Viewed through the eyes of adulthood and cynicism, it’s easy to see why “Stay” is ripe for ridicule. The song leaps from extreme to extreme, playing up archetypes of vamp and victim, and the single’s video lends itself to parody with its blatantly gothic overtones and sledgehammer metaphors of life, death and love.  But taken on its own terms, “Stay” is earnestly pure in its delivery. For something so easy to mock, “Stay” was a runaway success – two months atop the chart, while its legacy lives in on as a karaoke classic, its range appealing from reality TV stars to drag queens. That’s because while “Stay” might be lacking in subtlety, its meaning is ambiguous, leaving it open to interpretation and easy to ascribe meaning to. It’s not clear what the situation is but the sentiment of the chorus is universal enough to take relevance for anyone. The gothic undertones might be what makes this seem camp and absurd, but it’s also the song’s greatest asset – turning potential schmaltz into darkness. “Stay” is a power ballad that feels too personal to be mere karaoke fodder. It works on two different levels – it’s a cult classic of OTT symbolism in pop, but it knows its own ridiculousness, and that’s why it’s able to succeed as a proper ballad. This mix of surface-level effectiveness and fourth-wall-destroying self-awareness is something I’m very fond of – the art of low culture, in a way – and “Stay” feels like one of the totems of both pop’s successes and failures. It refuses to work by the defined metric of pop, instead opting to create a world of its own rules.

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DAY 28: A SONG THAT MAKES YOU FEEL GUILTY EL PERRO DEL MAR - “A BETTER LOVE” (N.B the original version of this is not on Youtube) “A Better Love” is the story of a break-up, but it could be the story of anyone who ever felt they weren’t worthy. It isn’t an angry break-up, or a bitter break-up, or a liberating break-up – it’s just the sound of someone accepting that they don’t love another the way that they used to. A straightforward song, but an extremely moving one. Its parent album Love Is Not Pop isn’t just a great album but great-sounding album: the arrangements are lush and rich, like 80s Fleetwood Mac via Phil Spector and The Cure. Producer Rasmus Hagg of lamented Swedish Balearic masters Studio works magic on Sarah Assbring’s understated song-writing, adding a pristine gloss of shiny plucked guitars, deep synth washes and dubby basslines. It sounds like a timeless, classic pop album – but if Love Is Not Pop, then pop is not love: this is the sound of failed relationships, its dejected sense of heartbreak and longing making for a sombre, sad affair. “A Better Love” goes for the jugular. Over an insistent beat and subtle morose piano chords, Assbring’s sweet vocal announces the death knell of a relationship. It’s a very bleak perspective - “I know we could have had it then,” she sings with all the resignation and lost hope she can summon. “Somehow I lost what I felt back then,” sounds like a stark admission of failure, rendered all the more brutal by the rich swirling orchestral strings. It’s all escalating to the killer line – “You deserve a better love than me.” It’s a devastating moment, a harsh truth that feels epic in its simplicity, cutting through a chiming and full arrangement. In lesser hands, it could seem trite and sentimental, but Assbring’s plain delivery is too introspective and too miserable to feel like anything other than an honest reflection. “I caused you so much pain,” goes the last chorus. That it’s so unambiguous is what makes it so harrowing: with no excuses, no blame to shift, no reasons to list, all that’s left is a sense of guilt. “A Better Love” is the sound of someone walking away, wanting the best for someone but unable to provide it for them. The easiest thing to do in the face of guilt is deny it. It’s instinctive to want to hold on to innocence since it’s what makes a person good. “A Better Love” doesn’t try. It offers a self-effacing promise – that the next situation and the next person will offer more happiness and cause no pain. It’s an all-encompassing take on guilt that relates to the one of the key struggles of being human: the battle with inferiority. The lack of specifics in “A Better Love” is what makes it so powerful: whether justified or imagined, it’s a type of guilt that everyone has felt. It’s a slight and unshowy song that nonetheless feels universal in its humble defeat, a muted anthem for anyone who has ever hurt someone.

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DAY 27: A SONG THAT YOU WISH YOU COULD PLAY MARIA MINERVA - “I DON’T WANNA BE DISCOVERED (WILL HAPPINESS FIND ME?)” Maria Minerva is a thoroughly modern artist. It isn’t so much that her music sounds futuristic: it’s damp and murky, with a sense of wilful lo-fi values and kitsch amateurism. It’s modern in the sense of the avant-garde, formed as a stylistically-diverse fusion of genres and sounds all anchored to her detached European purr. Drawing from techno, house, dub reggae and experimental music, her albums are introverted, smoky affairs, splicing straightforward themes of love and heartbreak with influence drawn from critical theory and academic perspectives. But Minerva knows a big chorus – her sonic palette might be warped and weird but her hooks are charming and classic.  “I Don't Wanna Be Discovered” could be considered the fundamental Maria Minerva song. Lyrically, it’s an examination of her fears of what it takes to achieve mainstream success and the consequences, and from its concept it is entirely laden with irony - after all, how can an artist make any worthwhile work if nobody is paying attention? “You’ve got to sell your soul to survive,” she warns, and there’s a strong resistance to that in verses that lay bare the struggle between introvert tendencies and artful creativity. “How do you explain to people that you don’t really care?” The best way isn’t to explain it, but to show it. Minerva does it by taking a brilliant chorus and insistently fun beat, then wrapping them up in self-aware meta-verses and unexpected samples of kitsch classical music. Further disguising her pop instincts, Minerva deflects attention from herself too with a smirking performance of gentle coos and knowing winks all smothered in reverb and haze. It is laptop pop, rudimentary Ableton work pushed to its audial limit yet maximising its creative energy. The main appeal of Maria Minerva isn’t the conceptual luggage or the pop hooks, but the way that the two interact within her music and song-writing. “I Don’t Wanna Be Discovered” is a clever and sophisticated reflection on identity as a construct defined by success, but it’s also endlessly listenable with its growling basslines and elastic melodies. Minerva belongs to a generation of artists who draw as much on the underground as the mainstream, interpreting both as a dissolving inter-zone of modern culture. This is designed for a contemporary audience – the mix of genre and sonic diffuseness will feel instantly familiar for music consumers who know how easy it is now to access even the most obscure of sounds. Minerva is a post-Internet idol, a musical dilettante whose peculiarity is softened by the relatability in her songs. “I Don't Wanna Be Discovered” is a perfect blend of form and content, mixing a push of weirdness and a pull of pop structures, illustrating the dilemma at the heart of what makes Minerva so interesting and so exciting as an artist.

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DAY 26: A SONG THAT YOU CAN PLAY ON AN INSTRUMENT ZOMBIE NATION - “KERNKRAFT 400″ Dance music can be so exciting. It moves as fast as sound technology evolves and the temporal nature of dancefloors mean that the most exciting moments can be just that: fleeting incidences of euphoric rush or thrilling groove, anonymous and generic yet anthemic and powerful. The best dance music is about doing expected things in an unexpected way: be it the rhythm, the bass, the tones, the tempo; whatever it is, if it’s going to drive a crowd wild then it has to do something different. But trance works by a different matrix. Its formula is the very thing that defines it. The subgenre was a commercial force at the turn of the millennium, although by then it had already taken on the worst elements of naff Europop while losing any of the grace and sophistication it had remaining, and even although its relative popularity has waxed and mostly waned since, for a certain generation the tinny snare-driven breakdowns, syncopated basslines and plink-plonk melodies are what springs to mind when thinking of dance music. Its legacy lives on in chart EDM too – where there once was a breakdown there is now a drop, and where there was once a jobbing vocalist there is now a proper pop star or rent-a-rapper in place. Trance is the most boring of all dance music to actually dance to. It’s easy to raise hands during the beatless parts and jump around like a loon when the beats kick back in, but the monotonous one-two bounce basslines don’t produce effective grooves. It is perfect workout music, all rigid beats and predictable structures, but it’s no fun to dance to – there’s no intricacies or unexpectedness, no sense of bump and flex, nothing to make clubbers contort their bodies into shapes. It’s not a style completely without merit: at its most pop, it can actually sound remarkably desolate and desperate; songs like Lasgo’s “Something”, Fragma’s “Toca’s Miracle” and Alice Deejay’s “Better Off Alone” have proper songs at their heart, painting big feelings with broad brushstrokes. It can be obvious but it can also be effective. “Kernkraft 400” is different though. It doesn’t accomplish anything. That monolithic riff might have been carved on the nation’s collective consciousness in the summer of 2000 but it’s basically an arpeggio that anyone can figure out with one hand on a piano keyboard. The beat is a punishing thud and there’s some odd synth percussion and sterile handclaps that practically draw themselves on an Ableton grid, but apart from that there’s nothing else going on. That the beat’s relentless charge is easier to jump to than to dance to is what marks it as a failure. “Kernkraft 400” is all energy and no movement, all drama and no twist, and painfully boring.

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DAY 25: A SONG THAT MAKES YOU LAUGH JENS LEKMAN - “AN ARGUMENT WITH MYSELF” Jens Lekman is one of the best lyricists in contemporary music. His songs are more like little vignettes or stories, and he understands that life isn’t simply “dramatic” or “depressing” or “funny” but actually all these things and more, often all at once. Lekman’s arrangements tend to be kitsch and retro, with full band arrangements and sounds from sampled records and unusual instruments, drawing from disco, lounge pop and exotica pop, all held together by his unfussy croon. “An Argument With Myself” is both Lekman’s most clever and most pop-reaching moment – the guitar riff is instantly recognisable from an iPod advert. But how many iPod advert soundtracks feature self-effacing monologues and lovelorn flashbacks? “An Argument With Myself” takes place in an unfamiliar city, where Lekman gets lost and debates with his thoughts about what to do, berating his own carelessness. The frustration is palpable – the way he describes the backpackers as a “tidal wave of vomit” is typical of the mindless rage of disgruntlement, but his impotent sense of defeat is funny – the way he turns on himself, “fuck you! No, you fuck you!” is goofy and absurd but remarkably honest. When he realises he doesn’t have the money for a taxi there’s a sigh, and his sense of resignation becomes a sense of recognition in us. But “An Argument With Myself” isn’t really about getting lost in the city – it’s about getting lost in memories. Lekman’s trying to forget what he’s ran away to this city to escape – the heartbreak of a failed relationship, “the way her shadow used to walk by your side in a different time, in a different city.” Suddenly what’s very funny and self-effacing becomes painful and real. Lekman writes songs which are honest and feel very true, but with a sense of humility in his modest voice, which makes his yearning feel three-dimensional. “An Argument With Myself” is a very specific song – the details are so precise it’s hard to question the reality of its situation. The art is in the way that such a specific experience feels so familiar and relatable: who hasn’t struggled to not beat themselves up over an inconsequential failure, and who hasn’t tried to not think about something only to find it a struggle to avoid? It’s an interior monologue that captures something a little too familiar - it’s comic, it’s bleak, it’s sentimental and so it becomes very true. Lekman makes the jokes at his own expense, but it is ourselves that we laugh at, and it is ourselves we have to confront.

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DAY 24: A SONG THAT YOU WANT TO PLAY AT YOUR FUNERAL PET SHOP BOYS - “BEING BORING” When people ask “what song do you want played at your funeral?” what they really mean is “how do you want to be remembered?” And it’s very easy to reply with a trite, novelty answer, because the alternative is imagining a world without ourselves, a bleak yet ego-centric perspective of misery and sadness. Grief defines not the person who is gone, but the person who remains: by taking away the one half of a dynamic, the other falters, and it’s that emptiness of existence that strikes the heart through the instinctive fear of death. “Being Boring” isn’t a song about death: it’s a celebration of being alive. Or rather, what keeps us alive: memories of pleasures. “Never being boring” is a common life goal – it’s the most natural thing, to crave fun and excitement, and in this song Pet Shop Boys trace the line from youthful idealism and thrills to aged acceptance of becoming the “creature I always meant to be.” Pet Shop Boys’ career – both as musicians, as much as pop stars – has often been framed in terms of gay experience, and “Being Boring” is commonly interpreted as an elegy of sorts to a victim of AIDS. But it’s vague enough to resist solid identification, instead the kind of open-ended song-writing that’s spacious enough to hang different meanings on to. What is concrete is how the song alludes to adventures: different faces and foreign places. Communal memories work the same way as grief: they rely on the presence of another to bask in the moments, to share the hilarity or horror or what happens to us. So when “Being Boring” finds itself alone, thinking “in spite of dreams you’d be sitting somewhere here with me” it reshapes nostalgia with sadness and regret. Musically it’s perfectly formed – deep moody chords and a chorus melody that coasts on melancholy rumination. “We were never holding back or worried that time would come to an end,” but when “we” becomes “I”, the reality of time ending comes to effect. To “rely on a friend” is to assume they will always be there, but of course that’s impossible. People grow and change and adapt and die. But what is always dependable is the hope found in our fondest thoughts. It’s not ambitious to want to bring happiness to other people, and “Being Boring” is a bittersweet recollection of happiness. In the first verse, Neil Tennant sings, “when you’re young you find inspiration in anyone who’s opened up a closing door” – so if death is the ultimate closed door, nostalgia is our inspiration. “Being Boring” acknowledges loss, but celebrates the way that memory lingers. 

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DAY 23: A SONG THAT YOU WANT TO PLAY AT YOUR WEDDING N-TRANCE - “SET YOU FREE” The 30 Day Song Challenge assumes that everybody would want a wedding. But I’m not convinced it’s the right option for me – as a self-defining LGBT man, my relationships are equal, but different, to heterosexuality, and so as such I would want something equally valid but recognising of the differences between what I would have and what my parents would have. But I’m not part of a church of any faith and I fully expect in my lifetime total equality in lifestyle recognition to happen, so it’s just a personal preference. But I have thought about the idea of a not-wedding playlist because basically, who doesn’t want a party? Weddings aren’t just about celebrating the love between two people: they’re for friends and family to share love (and gifts) and for the couple to thank those who have supported them. So, the best wedding song would be a love song that feels like a party song that everyone can relate to. “Set You Free” is a rave classic that works in so many contexts because at its heart there’s a simple, joyous love song. With its diva vocal, wistful piano and adrenalin-laden breakbeats, it’s a dancefloor weapon of the highest calibre, but its magic lies in the way it functions almost as an inverted ballad – its almost-shouted lyrics spurt out every cliché of the magic of love, but Kelly Llorenna delivers them with an innocence that makes them sound fresh and exciting. The piano melodies are formulaic and sweet to the point of saccharine, but that’s the point – it might be club-based in origin but it’s now a pop song, working in a way where the most pure and direct of emotions become a universal language. Even the chipmunk wordless chorus of ah-ah-yeahs feels euphoric, a struggle to find the words that sound as happy as the song itself. As a rave anthem, there’s always a drug subtext – if “want this night to last forever” is basically amphetamine talk, then “in a state of ecstasy” spells it out – but if love is a drug, then “Set You Free” is the perfect high, a comedown-free state of intertwined bliss. 

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DAY 22: A SONG THAT YOU LISTEN TO WHEN YOU’RE SAD RILO KILEY - “IT JUST IS” “Everybody dies.” It’s a really fundamental part of existing, yet death remains one of the last great taboos. It’s not something to talk about because to talk about it is to confront it, and who wants to confront it? “It Just Is” is a tribute to Elliot Smith, a singer-songwriter of great talent and cult following, who was found dead at the age of 34. There are doubts over the exact details of what happened, but it is generally accepted that Smith, a former alcoholic and drug addict, committed suicide. Rilo Kiley had contributed to Smith’s recordings, only a year before “It Just Is” was released. The context adds a layer to the song, but it isn’t essential to understanding “It Just Is.” It’s a song about death and the effect it has on those it leaves behind. “It’s such a loss for the good guys afraid of this life,” sings front-woman Jenny Lewis on the chorus, and it could just as easily be a reference to Smith’s troubled life as it could be about the way that the concept of death is so overwhelming, so monumental and scary. “This loss isn’t good enough for sorrow or inspiration” is the moment of bitter frustration, where the search for meaning in tragedy becomes futile. Sorrow or inspiration doesn’t justify a death, because no sorrow or inspiration can be worth the loss of a loved one. Death just is. On the surface, “It Just Is” is a particularly bleak song, whether it’s read as a knowing tribute to Smith or a eulogy without a subject. But it’s also a deceptively hopeful song. Lewis opens the song with a still delivery of, “Today’s the day I realised that I could be loved.” If this is a song about Smith, then it’s also a song about relating to Smith, and this first line is a rebuttal of Smith’s lack of self-worth – if his death can cause so much pain to so many (the family, the friends and the fans), and he didn’t realise, then maybe our own sense of worth is warped. “He belonged to everyone” - he was loved, he just didn’t realise it. Whether the he in question is specifically Smith or generically not, the point is the same – who isn’t loved in some way? It’s a bittersweet lesson, life-affirming in the face of death, and the band’s music is perfectly judged against that. It’s a wistful, delicate indie-rock ballad, with rich strings and melancholy piano chords that never leans too pretty or too dark, avoiding schmaltz through introverted reflection. “It Just Is” isn’t a showy, magnificent display of grief – the polar opposite of something like “Candle In The Wind” – and that is why it is so devastating. It isn’t a celebration of accomplishment and achievement, it’s the resigned disappointment of death that makes life seem more worthwhile. “Everybody dies,” but everybody lives too.

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DAY 21: A SONG THAT YOU LISTEN TO WHEN YOU’RE HAPPY SAINT ETIENNE - “NOTHING CAN STOP US NOW” Over a quarter of a century, Saint Etienne have explored the concept of pop using a variety of angles and approaches. They’ve covered Euro-disco and synth-pop, but also albums of almost-acoustic guitar pop and sterile electronica, all drawing influences from 60s girl-groups, 90s trip-hop, dub reggae and Balearic ambience. They’ve never really been a successful chart act, but they’re a band whose fans seem to adore them wholeheartedly, a cult in thrall to pop music that’s never actually been as popular as it ought to be. Their debut album Foxbase Alpha came in 1991 and was as wide a mix of style and influences as the group ever covered, and “Nothing Can Stop Us” is the album’s centrepiece. It’s a curious album: a modern listener would easily place it as a relic from two decades ago, but it feels timeless in its appropriation of pop’s history, a mix of swaggering breakbeats, movie-dialogue samples and chilled atmospherics. “Nothing Can Stop Us” starts with a sample of rapturous applause with an introduction of sorts, then falls into a breakbeat-led funk where Sarah Cracknell’s verses double-tracked so she can both sing with carefree gusto and whisper with inviting intimacy, building up to an explosive chorus based on a Dusty Springfield sample. That sample, taken from “I Can’t Wait To See My Baby’s Face,” might be the key to understanding the charms of “Nothing Can Stop Us.” It’s a flute melody that, in Springfield’s song, works as an instrumental intro setting the tone, but with Saint Etienne it becomes the centre of gravity, the vital moment of euphoria that gives the song its heart. What Saint Etienne manage to do on this song – on the whole of Foxbase Alpha, in fact – is take familiar elements and make them sound fresh. So the flute sample from an old record that sounds dated - it becomes new and exciting through its recontextualisation. The best pop music manages to take the most familiar tropes and make them seem exotic and alluring, and on this Saint Etienne treat pop music with a mix of fandom and irreverence that elevates commonplace, established elements into something modernly thrilling yet warm and welcoming. “I’ve never felt so good, I’ve never felt so strong, nothing can stop us now!” If that chorus feels a little obvious then it’s by design. “Nothing Can Stop Us” is clever cut-and-assembled pop by auteurs in love with the form - but more simply, it’s a snapshot of good times and romantic idealism. As the coda fades out back into the sampled applause, Cracknell softly coos the word “perfect,” and it’s believably about an ideal of pop music as much as an ideal moment. Pop music works best when it captures a moment or a feeling: “Nothing Can Stop Us” takes a sense of blissful contentment and figures out how that would sound for the moments it plays. 

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DAY 20: A SONG THAT YOU LISTEN TO WHEN YOU’RE ANGRY BRANDY - “WHAT ABOUT US?” “What About Us?” is the sound of confrontation. It’s a break-up song about the emotional fall-out of a dying relationship, so obviously it has to be aggressive and direct, but what’s immediately striking about “What About Us?” is how alien it sounds, even over a decade after it made impact. Producer Rodney Jerkins establishes a groove that sounds out of time with itself, going too slow to keep up with its own pace, but too fast to hold on to. Dead phone lines and smashing glass effects litter the track, acting almost as the detritus the bassline seems to be tripping over, while clipped string samples and harp strums float in and out. “What About Us” is a strange track, even just in its backing alone. It’s not just a backing track of ideas though: Brandy’s performance as the scorned woman is three-dimensional and believable, and Jerkin’s vocal processing animates her venom. Her multi-tracked voice is filtered, processed and phased to create a hall of mirrors, reflecting the different sides of the break-up being experienced: the clutching of memories; the incomprehension of the situation’s reality; the fury of such poor treatment – even those muted backing cries of “what?” in the background capture snapshots of exasperated rage and eye-rolling frustration. All of this would just be stern robotics without a solid diva at its core, but Brandy is more than up to the task. She doesn’t belt, but instead she builds in intensity and energy, crescendoing until she cracks and falters in a mess of bitterness and hurt. It’s a messy song that sees Brandy losing control quickly, jumping from defending her wounded pride to accusing her former love of the worst lies and heartbreak, all the while trying to remain poised but combative. As the song reaches its climax, she lets go of what little composure she has left, all but shouting while a processed male voice struggles to interject against Brandy’s ferocious finger-pointing. The beat begins to skip and glitch and the whole thing feels like Brandy has fallen apart in an overwhelming surge of merciless anger: it’s an arresting effect sonically, as well as on Brandy’s scorched-earth approach to a dead relationship, colouring her anger with empathy. She might be singing an angry song, but it’s a hurt performance. “What About Us?” deals in the kind of suffering and turmoil that can only come from a place of destroyed feelings. The hyper-synthetic beat is perfect to stomp along with, but it’s the way Brandy delivers such bloodlust in her attack is what gives this its bite – it might be an artificial-sounding digital production, but the anger is totally sincere and human.

[scottdoes30daysongchallenge]

DAY 19: A SONG FROM YOUR FAVOURITE ALBUM THE KNIFE - “SILENT SHOUT” The Knife were always destined to be critical darlings. The duo come from Sweden, a country that’s done almost as much for music as Britain and the USA combined, and make experimental, electronic music that’s imbued with as many choruses as concepts. Silent Shout was released in 2006 and was a slow-burning success, winning acclaim and cult appeal, and in the decade since release its influence on contemporary music has become massively obvious as bedroom popstars tackle synth-pop, experimental r&b and club music structures with the same punk attitude as Karin and Olaf Dreijir. On the surface, the title track is a neat trick of minimal techno and trance arpeggios, matched to some heavily manipulated vocals. Still a pop song, but a very strange one. But “Silent Shout” goes deeper: it’s a subversively feminist critique of power structures. “In my dream I lost my teeth again, calling me woman and half man” – portraying female gender identity as half worth, with the lack of body ability to speak out. Power is about who can be heard: with no teeth, how does one protest? The concept of “Silent Shout” hinges on an unexpressed fury, the lack of voice given to society’s marginalised gender. Is it a silent shout because nobody’s listening, or because no noise is coming? The rest of the album explores the idea thoroughly, using relatively avant-garde (at least, for pop music) production and sound design to draw attention to its ideas and challenge its audience, leaving enough hooks to work as more than academic exercise. The vocal manipulation is still one of the most striking, stunning aspects of the album: Karin’s voice is pitched upwards and downwards, distorted and artificial, all to toy with the notion of voice as gendered power. So “Silent Shout” is pitched down, taking on the role of man, silenced by losing teeth. It’s more of a dream than nightmare. In influential feminist text “A Cyborg Manifesto,” theorist Donna Haraway explores the boundary between technology and humanity, pointing to its erosion as an indication of a need for a new kind of feminism, that resists binaries and existing structures. The need for a “powerful infidel heteroglossia” – a new way of using language, essentially – comes to life in Silent Shout, as the Dreijir siblings deconstruct and reconstruct sound, lyric and identity to dissect and resist patriarchy. That they are able to do it with such inventiveness, while maintaining crossover appeal, is a mark of both subversive power and creative talent. Silent Shout was later repackaged as a multi-dimensional project: over 3CDs, featuring live performance and promotional videos. The live performance is a parody of authenticity, as they hide behind masks hitting drum machines, while the videos tell stories of solidarity and alienation, all framed within the experience of identity. So Silent Shout isn’t just an album, in the same way that “music” is never just music. Silent Shout is a tool for exploring ideas about the world around us, but it also happens to be a brilliant album.

[scottdoes30daysongchallenge]

DAY 18: A SONG THAT YOU WISH YOU HEARD ON THE RADIO TINASHE - “2 ON” “2 On” was easily the best single of last year. Its three-note bassline, Tinashe’s slinky vocal and mix of shuddering clicks and pings were irresistible, a minimal r&b club anthem reminiscent of Cassie’s “Me & U” that builds in tension over a rising haunted synth line before climaxing in an interpretation of Sean Paul’s “We Be Burnin.’” Its insatiable hedonism and immaculate production made it the perfect club jam, while its bright hooks and commanding presence were crossover-ready. Of course, “2 On” limped into #127 on the UK Singles charts. Obviously there’s all kinds of reasons why a song might flop. But “2 On” feels robbed, in a world where the Top Ten is a stagnant mess of whiney men and generic EDM-influenced pop that sounds designed for low-bitrate streaming on mobile phones. “2 On” isn’t head music, but it is better club music than the auto-generated pop of David Guetta imitators whose brand of bingeing and sexing nightlife feels unlived and unrealistic (that’s not to say all pop music of past few years has been complete wasteland – Kiesza’s “Hideaway” already feels like a classic and Mark Ronson’s “Uptown Funk” is brilliant because it completely eschews originality to imitate a legion of better records). “2 On” is a very traditional r&b song, and right now r&b is in a bit of a rut commercially. The majority of pop stars who code as “urban” (which is basically a patronising way of saying they come from a non-white background and embrace stereotypically associated signifiers) are etching away from the boom-bap of hip-hop and r&b – artists like Nicki Minaj, Rihanna and Chris Brown see bigger hits with four-to-the-floor beats. The chameleonic Usher has found relevance by adapting his sound, whereas Beyonce hasn’t and so struggled to hit big with a single for a few years. These successes of these are artists don’t really come from “urban” music, but pop music via house music. Ten years ago, the radio was dominated by the sound of hip-hop from the likes of Ja Rule and Outkast, while Ashanti and Jennifer Lopez were household names as r&b starlets. Now it seems like mainstream pop culture can only handle artists from minority backgrounds if they ditch the music traditionally attached to their roots. It’s telling that the two biggest r&b hits of last year were Ariana Grande’s collaboration with Iggy Azalea “Problem”, and Iggy’s own “Fancy” which features Charli XCX on the chorus. Both of these main artists are white, while Charli XCX is a British girl of mixed race. They were both brilliant singles, but would they have been as successful if the stars behind them were different? There are countless great r&b singers that could be great pop stars – not just Tinashe, but Dawn Richard, Sevyn Streeter, Jazmine Sullivan and K.Michelle to name a few – if the radio would give them a chance. It isn’t that the songs are lacking, it’s the diversity that’s missing from the mainstream culture. 

[scottdoes30daysongchallenge]

DAY 17: A SONG THAT YOU HEAR OFTEN ON THE RADIO TAYLOR SWIFT - “STYLE” Pop music hasn’t been so strong in years. This is partly because the distance between pop and not-pop has narrowed, to the point where synth-bands and radio versions of garage and house tracks code just as chart-friendly as disco strutters and glossy pop-rock hits – it’s a change in attitude where listeners understand the falseness of authentic values in recognising excellence, while artists who grew up in an era of pop at its most bubble-gum and frivolous find themselves as major players and bring their formative influences into their work. Acts like Haim and Sky Ferreira flirt with global success but remain relatively cult heroes, while acts like Tove Lo and Charli XCX arrive as fully-formed pop-stars but feel idiosyncratic, and even the most safe, reliable singers like Katy Perry and Arianna Grande still deliver excellent singles at a worthy strike rate. And then there’s Taylor Swift. The country sweetheart turned pop princess is probably the biggest star in the world right now, with an immense media profile and massive-selling albums. Swift gets a raw deal critically: for daring to appeal to young people and especially teenage girls and children; for daring to be pretty and successful as a woman; for daring to adapt and evolve as an artist, rather than stay making the same music her entire career; and perhaps most disappointingly, for daring to meet and date men with the same insouciance as any twenty-something. Or to put it another way: critics seem to love Adele because she’s a big girl who sings honestly about being dumped, but they hate Swift because she’s a pretty girl who sings honestly about being dumped. The attitudes to Swift say more about the dismal advancement of feminism than any qualities of her songs. It’s irrelevant that Swift has a personal life. A song like “Style” is too good for that to matter. With its dramatic disco bassline, chiming 80s guitars and perfectly brain-lodging chorus, it’s a cut above its radio peers, even just by virtue of how well-crafted it sounds. “Style” feels like a timeless classic with the kind of melody that fell straight from the clouds. But what it deals with is more complex than repeated clichés of doomed romance. Swift’s complicity in the downfall of her own emotions is what gives “Style” an edge, running back to the guy that’s no good for her, not because she cannot resist or she thinks she can change him – but simply because she enjoys the thrill. It’s a giddy, sexually-charged craving on Swift’s part as she revels in the glee of the moment of pleasure. There’s no sense of regret, just a celebration of the temporal nature of a failed fairy tale. Pop music is often disparaged as children’s music, but for a song to deal with such complicated, nuanced and realistic ideas about relationships, it has to be clever and mature, something that “Style” makes seem effortless.

[scottdoes30daysongchallenge]

DAY 16: A SONG THAT YOU USED TO LOVE BUT NOW HATE KRAFTWERK - “COMPUTER LOVE” It’s not the original of this that first charmed me. Glass Candy’s cover from their 2007 album Beatbox is my preferred version – I like the Kraftwerk version, but I love their take on it, where Ida No’s breathy lovelorn coo wraps its way around producer Johnny Jewel’s analogue, warm basslines and deep synth pads. Kraftwerk’s version is efficient, cold and clinical like the most direct of Tindr encounters, while Glass Candy’s version is lonely, the sound of a connection both online and literal desperately seeking to be formed. In either group’s hands, “Computer Love” sounds like the future of relationships, viewed from different perspectives - and a piece of clever song-writing that makes it seem relevant no matter how technology develops. Then one night I had the opportunity to attend a Kraftwerk tribute night, where local musicians attempted to cover the iconic Germans’ biggest hits. It was a night of the worst performances I have ever seen attempted. Pro tip: the appeal of Kraftwerk is their motorik efficiency and the way their music is so regimented and linear. It does not lend itself to being reinterpreted in a dub reggae style, with scattershot sound FX and off-tempo, off-beat improvisation and cavernous echo, despite one particular performer’s best attempts to convince otherwise. It wasn’t just the sheer awfulness of the performance, or even the idea that offended me. I’ve seen great bands struggle with live crowds, and as a fan of electronic music I do think that live music and musicianship is over-rated at best, a hang-up from rockist attitudes of authenticity at its core, so I can understand that it could easily have been something that went wrong between planning and execution. But I doubt it. And the reason I doubt it is because of the artist themselves. A young, white man, on stage surrounded by expensive equipment, chose to re-appropriate the musical language of a genre attached to racial and socio-economic roots. This wasn’t someone saying something new and creative while borrowing from otherised people. It was a wholesale lift of signifiers, right down to sampled MC toasting, with no attempt to engage with its place in relation to the surrounding dominant cultures, simply slapped on to a barely-recognisable facsimile of Kraftwerk that came across like a bad caricature in an act of structural theft. Why is it so easy for people to encounter influences and styles that would have remained foreign previously? The Internet. The hit-and-run, loveless approach to “Computer Love” taken by Kraftwerk reminds me now of the way that all it takes is a few clicks to infiltrate the private and divided world of subcultures which can then be easily co-opted and destroyed by those who lack the nuance and understanding. It’s not about defining who can and can’t appreciate something based on background and birth circumstances; it’s about accepting that marginalised voices struggle to be heard and they don’t need the mainstream to speak on their behalf. “I need a rendez-vous” goes the song but now all I is hear the need for a positive, lasting and deeper connection. 

[scottdoes30daysongchallenge]

DAY 15: A SONG THAT DESCRIBES YOU ARMAND VAN HELDEN - “YOU DON’T KNOW ME” Dance music is such an omnipresent force in contemporary culture that it can be easy to forget its roots. Born from the ashes of disco, it was originally the soundtrack to the escapist nightlife of the marginalised - non-white, non-hetero, non-privileged communities. With superstar DJs, big-room EDM and #brostep all massive forces of commercial success and financial reward, it’s a far remove from the early days of house music, which soundtracked a particular crowd comprised of a socioeconomic underclass reacting against the pervading cultures, dominated and dictated by white male affluence and its corresponding taste.“You Don’t Know Me” was a global hit in late 90s and it would be naïve to point to it as an example of dance music purism, but it does trace the line from these roots. The sampled strings are ripped wholesale from disco (specifically: Cheryl Lynn’s “Dance With You”), sounding lush and warm but creating drama. The drums are straight from early 90s tribal house (specifically Jaydee’s “Plastic Dreams”), with brittle rhythms that slam and stutter lending themselves the fiercest of dancing shapes. It’s all held together by Duane Harden’s diva vocal, strong and racked with urgency. Together, it’s all traditional signifiers of gay iconicity: camp culture as dance culture, hiding in a pop song. What the backing implies is made explicit by Harden’s vocal: a railing against the critics and the judgemental, a call of defiance and independence. Dismissing haters is familiar territory in pop, but Harden does it with such intensity, refusing to be a martyr while decrying those who take aim at him. It’s a song about pride, a concept that’s very much integral to the gay experience. “You say I’m not living right,” goes the chorus, but the conviction and strength in “You Don’t Know Me” removes any trace of self-doubt or fear: it’s a celebration of self-actualisation. It’s a victory, too. While Harden’s cry of “I’m tired and I’ve had enough” might read a statement of defeat, Helden’s neon-lit production pushes the energy and spirit hard enough that “You Don’t Know Me” sounds like a winner’s riposte. The song’s climax comes as Helden strips the track to its skeletal frame, leaving Harden’s impassioned wail of “I’m gonna move on” to hit hard, before the strings and drums rush back, enveloping Harden’s vocals in a mesh of ecstatic exhilaration, leaving no doubt against overcoming those cynics and critics. “You Don’t Know Me” isn’t just a song about gay experience. It’s a song about anyone who has ever had to overcome their own critics, and the reason it works so well is that bursts with joy in its own self-confidence. It’s a powerful song in its sense of inspiration and self-belief, and that’s why it’s able to transcend its own background to be a familiar success, defying detractors in a way that’s wholly relatable and ultimately inspiring.