#fluxblog

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Fluxblog: Ask Michael Stipe

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Hemme Fatale | Animal Lover 

Fluxblog: 16 Years Of Unpopular Pop

[perpetua]

I made a collection of 10 extended playlists designed to provide a panoramic view of the music of each year of the 1970s across all major genres, and as much as possible, around the world. Each playlist is available on both Spotify and Apple Music, and you can find them all here! All of the artwork for the surveys is taken from old issues of After Dark, an arts magazine from the era that was intended for a mostly queer audience. 

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Mirror Mirror on the Wall

On marketing viral content, by former Buzzfeed quiz creator Matthew Perpetua

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One of the reasons BuzzFeed has been extremely successful over the past decade comes down to focusing on the utility of content, particularly in how sharing a list, quiz, news article, essay, or video can express someone’s identity or start a conversation with friends and family. This was the basis of editorial philosophy before I started working there in 2012, and more recently was codified into something that was referred to internally as “cultural cartography.” The cultural cartography system existed both to catalog the utilities of pieces of content as well as encourage creators to fully consider what the potential use of their work could be before they even started making anything.

This is the essence of viral content – the work that succeeds on the grandest scale does so because it has clear objective utility. If you’re chasing this, you learn to make yourself useful. In social media, people are always looking for ways to talk about themselves or thorny personal issues in a way that softens it slightly through humor and allows a bit of distance in that the person sharing is understood not to be the author. Quizzes in particular thrive on giving readers results that allow them to share a boast with a shield of irony and plausible deniability – oh, it’s just a silly quiz!

Once you start seeing this pattern in people’s behavior it’s hard not to notice it in everything that becomes popular. It’s the key to really connecting with an audience, and when this is done organically, it’s fabulous. But it’s also something that can result in outrageously crass content, and somehow becomes more cringeworthy when it’s done with very good intentions. There’s not much room for ambiguity or abstraction in this – the work that will resonate most deeply is an emphatic statement of self and everything runs on a generalized sort of specificity intended to create relatable moments. Everything is crafted to invite you to go “it me!” and then share it with other people as either “I am ____” or “we are ____.”

Pop songs have worked in this mode forever, and the music with real staying power is typically the stuff with the most utility. The songs that end up being most heavily licensed to television, film, and advertisements are nearly always the ones that either offer a lyrical declaration that overtly states something in the narrative or has a mood that signals particular contextual connotations. Music is a tool in these things, it’s all a shorthand that uses the strengths of one art form to in many cases compensate for the flaws of another.

This bleeds into how people make playlists in the era of iPods and streaming. People will make playlists for specific moods, for specific settings, for specific sentiments, or seek out pre-existing playlists with these utilities on Spotify and Apple Music. Utility is a large part of how anyone engages with music, and the emergence of platforms with observable data and potential for virality – as well as a commercial dependence on the money that comes from licensing – has pushed many people in the music industry to approach creating songs with the same “cultural cartography” goals as anyone making content for BuzzFeed.

So, Lizzo. Lizzo is a perfect example of an artist who is thriving on creating content about identity that is highly relatable and has a clear objective utility in playlists and licensing. The odds are very good that your first exposure to Lizzo’s music was in a television show or movie, or failing that, a video or song that came your way when someone shared it to your feed. Maybe it was served to you algorithmically on YouTube or in an automated “discovery” playlist. Lizzo’s music is perfectly engineered for all of this, to the point that it can seem like it’s already gone through extensive A/B testing and optimization. It’s glossy and immediately accessible, but signals some degree of authenticity and soulfulness. It’s aggressively sincere and every song is clearly about a particular statement or relatable situation. It’s all geared towards feelings of empowerment, and given how many ads, shows, and movies want to sell that feeling, her songs are extremely effective and valuable, especially since up until recently she was not famous and thus not weighed down in the cultural baggage of celebrity. (If you used a Beyoncé or Rihanna song instead, your “girl boss” moment would in some way become about Beyoncé or Rihanna rather than your characters.)

I can’t hear Lizzo’s music without recognizing her cultural cartography savvy. A lot of music can achieve these goals without contrivance, often just as a natural side effect of an artist intuitively making resonant work, but Lizzo’s songs all sound very calculated to me. This is not such a bad thing – her skill in expressing herself in relatable ways is a major talent, and I’ve worked with many people who have this natural skill and hold them in very high regard. (I’m much better at telling people who they are rather than asking you to identify with who I am.) Lizzo has a good voice, and her songs range from “pretty good” to “undeniable banger” but I have mixed feelings about all of it because I know the game being played rather well, and because I’m uncomfortable with this self-consciously audience-pleasing approach to content creation becoming the primary mode of pop culture. I appreciate the value of empowering art – and as someone who has spent his entire adult life as a fat man, I am particularly sympathetic to Lizzo’s fat-positivity – but fear mainstream culture further devolving into nothing but shallow exclamations of self-affirmation. We’re more than halfway there already, especially when you factor in YouTube.

This music makes me want to rebel against it. I never ask that any music be “for me” – I prefer art to offer a window into other lives and ways of thinking – but Lizzo’s songs are often so transparent in their intended use as a way for square, insecure people to feel empowered and cool that I can’t help but hear it and think “but I don’t actually want or need this!” She reminds me a lot of Macklemore, whose big hits “Same Love” and “Thrift Shop” had a similar quasi-cool accessibility and cultural cartography value at the time. In both cases, making fun of them feels cheap and churlish, or like a sideways attack on fat women, LGBT rights, or uh, value shopping. But for me, it’s really just developing an allergy. I hear too much of music like this, or see too many shows and movies that are obviously designed with cultural cartography in mind, and I just run screaming back towards artsy ambiguity.

[boiledleather]

16 Years of Unpopular Pop

from Matthew Perpetua’s fluxblog.org:

This is a collection of the finest non-hit pop songs from the 16 year history of this site. (Well, actually, one legit hit made it through because it fit in nicely.) It’s basically nothing but world-class bangers.

You can experience it as an Apple Music playlist, a Spotify playlist, or as an expanded download version featuring 16 extra songs that are not available on streaming platforms. I’ve marked the bonus songs in the track listing for the download set below.

DOWNLOAD PART 1

Scissor Sisters “Paul McCartney” / In Flagranti “Genital Blue Room” / Spektrum “Don’t Be Shy” / Goldfrapp “Ride A White Horse” / The Silures “21 Ghosts” / Basement Jaxx “Cish Cash” / Rachel Stevens “Some Girls” / Klanguage “Never Over” / Kylie Minogue “Sweet Music” / Annie “Chewing Gum” / Pleasure “Out of Love” * / Architecture in Helsinki “That Beep” / Out Hud “It’s For You” * / Matthew Dear “Don and Sherri” / Bossanova “Rare Brazil” / Enon “Daughter in the House of Fools” / Katy Rose “Rosemary” * / Fox N’ Wolf “Youth Alcoholic” / The Knife “Heartbeats” / Revl9n “Walking Machine” / AG Cook feat. Hannah Diamond “Keri Baby” / GFOTY “Don’t Wanna/Let’s Do It” / Poppy “My Style” / Grimes “Artangels” / White Hinterland “Chill and Natural” / Von Sudenfed “Fledermaus Can’t Get It” / Björk “Innocence” / Justice “DVNO” / Kate Nash “Pumpkin Soup” / Yelle “Tristesse/Joie” / Girls Aloud “Black Jacks” / Veronica Maggio “Gammal Sång” * / Kimbra “Madhouse” / Hemme Fatale “Animal Lover” * / Alphabeat “Heatwave” / Ellie Goulding “Anything Could Happen” / Sissy Wish “Float” / Fight Like Apes “Pop Itch” / Carly Rae Jepsen “Tiny Little Bows” / Brown Eyed Girls “날아갈래” / Junior Senior “We R the Handclaps” / Gameboy/Gamegirl “Sweaty Wet/Dirty Damp” / Muscles “Chocolate, Raspberry, Lemon, and Lime” / Crossover “Extensive Care”

DOWNLOAD PART 2

Sleigh Bells “Crown on the Ground” / Maria Magdalena “CVMC (Cada Vez Mas Cerca)” / Friendly Fires “Hurting” / The Rapture “Whoo! Alright – Yeah… Uh-Huh” / M.I.A. “URAQT” / Ce’cile “Rude Bwoy Thug Life” / Redinho “Playing with Fire” / CSS “Let’s Make Love and Listen to Death From Above” / Spank Rock “Sweet Talk” / Stazi “Love Is Lethal” * / Yellow Note vs. Pukka “Naked, Drunk, and Horny” / Armand Van Helden feat. Spalding Rockwell “Hear My Name” / Cut Copy “Saturdays” / Quarks “I Walk” + / QT “Hey QT” / Peaches “Dumb Fuck” / Heloise and the Savoir Faire Dancers “Odyle” / Tracy and the Plastics “Henrietta” * / Junesex “Gets Close to Mine” / Mouse on Mars “Mine Is In Yours” / LCD Soundsystem “Yeah (Crass Version)” / Ladytron “Destroy Everything You Touch” / Of Montreal “The Party’s Crashing Us (I Am the World Trade Center Remix)” / Futon “Gay Boy” + / Dog Ruff “Jon E Storm” * / Chicks on Speed “Shick Shaving” * / Avenue D feat. Cazwell “The Sex That I Need” / Gene Serene “Electric Dreams” / Vanessinha & Alessandra “Gira” * / United State of Electronica “La Discoteca” * / Planningtorock “I Wanna Bite Ya” / Nouveau Riche “Take Me Home” * / Hilary Duff “Danger” / SEVENTEEN “Change Up” / Britney Spears “How I Roll” / MNDR “Cut Me Out” / Skrillex “Stranger” / Sophie “Lemonade” / Saint Pepsi “Better” / Sky Ferreira “I Blame Myself” / Lolita Storm “Dancing with the Ibiza Dogs” * / Chairlift “I Belong In Your Arms” / Au Revoir Simone “Through the Backyards” / La Big Vic “All That Heaven Allows” / Rework “Not Quite Like Any Other”

* = Not on either Spotify or Apple + = On Apple, but not Spotify

My friend Matthew pioneered music blogging waaaaaaaaay back when, and for over a decade and a half he’s brought his vision of pop music to the masses. This two-disc retrospective is Matthew’s Mirror Mirror II, basically — it sums up the Fluxblog aesthetic and declares it worthy of consideration the same way me and Julia’s anthology did for our aesthetic. I think you’re going to see more and more of these kinds of efforts from people with singular visions (or double visions in our case, I guess), as a combination of factors — media contraction, layoffs and job insecurity, and the ongoing transformation of entertainment journalism and criticism into boosterism for the products of the world’s largest corporations — drives veteran critics and writers toward the same kinds of independent expression that helped them get their start in the first place. It’s a bit like what our mutual friend Chris Ott encouraged in one of his very earliest Shallow Rewards video podcasts/jeremiads: “Declare victory and leave the playing field.” When the work you value can’t find purchase, be confident in what it and you have to offer and plant your flag on your own.

(FWIW those playlists really are full of bangers. That opening run on Disc 1 will kick your ass)

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Matthew Perpetua’s survey mixes compile the songs that he thinks are the most noteworthy each year. This is the mix I most look forward to, because it highlights some really cool, lesser known artists, especially from the smaller labels. This year I was expecting a few of the solo 1D hits, and I saw all of them, except Louis’ music. I was really prepared for a let down when... disc 9 (of 9) comes through... Louis makes it. Harry: Sign of the Times Niall: Slow Hands Liam: Strip That Down Zayn: Dawn to Dusk Louis: Miss You Give some kudos to Matthew. The survey mix can be downloaded above.

[ssfoc]

Harry Styles “Sign of the Times” “Sign of the Times,” Harry Styles from One Direction’s first solo single, starts off in a tasteful but sorta dull place that sounds like someone trying to hack the piano part from John Lennon’s “Imagine” the way Noel Gallagher did for “Don’t Look Back In Anger” without also plagiarizing that song. And then it shifts into something a little more Coldplay-ish. But then the drums kick in, and it evolves into a full-on rock power ballad. It’s an incredibly effective song, and I felt like I needed to wave a lighter around and scream along by the fourth minute of it the first time I heard it. It helps that this song is full of fabulous drum fills that ramp up the drama at every opportunity. Styles is wearing his influences on his sleeve here, big time – in addition to the aforementioned artists, there’s traces of The Verve, Queen, David Bowie, and Guns N’ Roses in its melody and structure. Styles is making it very clear that he intends to be a rock star, and a very theatrical one at that. This is a wise move: He looks the part, he was always good in this mode in One Direction (a rock band more often than not), and he’s emotive and vulnerable enough to make the cheesiest power ballad moves feel completely sincere. People love rock power ballads, and since more “legit” rock acts seem generally uninterested in going there out of fear of appearing soft and pandering to women, it makes sense that a guy like Harry Styles who has no hang ups whatsoever about pleasing a mostly female audience would embrace the form.

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