#gnjsoty2k22

[groovesnjams]

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..................number47 ....................of50

“Looking at Your Pager” by KH

DV:

What if Crazy Frog but not annoying? is not a formula I expected to be a winning one in 2022, and yet here we are. Four Tet, a name that has apparently never even appeared as a reference point on this blog, made one of the best songs of the year out of the cheap ringtone synths and what sounds like mp3 compression artifacts, a chirpy sample from 3LW (pitch shifted and chopped enough that it’s wild to realize it lifts basically an entire verse), and a squelchy synth bass. It sounds almost academic, but the result is insistently catchy and active, an effervescent delight that lingers in the air far longer than its short runtime would suggest.

MG:

What a fucking year for Keiran Hebden -- he knows it, too. From his legal victory over Domino Records to the (re) discovery of his super-massive playlist, a surreal treasure chest that feels like being able to look through someone’s notebook of thoughts (or diary, or dream journal, or whatever, but I will keep pretentiously calling it a notebook of thoughts), to his non-stop release schedule which encompassed established projects like Four Tet and relative mysteries like this one, KH, which is credited with only two songs: “Looking at Your Pager” and 2019′s “Only Human.” Perhaps because of the song’s real-life context or perhaps because it was released at the dawn of summer, it’s always sounded like pure and total joy to me. The 3LW sample hints at minor distress (an unreachable other, people as distractions) but as the complaints crest, a wobbling bass drops like a meteor or a string of synth notes clears the air and their affect renders all other emotion meaningless. Fed through the KH filter, our modern problems sound silly and happiness feels inevitable. It’s a sort of Rainbow Road of imagination but its unreality doesn’t diminish its portent.

[groovesnjams]

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..................number1 ....................of50

“American Teenager” by Ethel Cain

DV:

Really the only question was whether it’d be this or “Sun Bleached Flies” in the top spot, and then the video interpolated the intro to that song - including lyric of the year “God loves you, but not enough to save you” - and it was a simple choice. But it’s not just that, of course. It’s the way “American Teenager” is a microcosm, an intensely compressed synecdoche for the complicated world Ethel Cain is building, hitting all her notes at once like the arena-sized rock song it is. I’ve seen so many comparisons to Springsteen, and okay, but coming out of the bridge there’s a guitar bit straight out of “Don’t Stop Believin” which is a more telling reference. I’ve never seen Springsteen live - who can afford it? - but there are probably dozens of Journey cover bands roaming this country’s local festivals and I’ve definitely run into them before. “American Teenager” could slot right into a county fair setlist and at first no one would blink an eye: this is a bildungsroman that sits alongside the best that classic rock can offer, a tale of small town drama and exhilaration and of the confusion and desperation of youth. And of course it’s a tragedy by implication, coming early on an album about its protagonist’s murder. But it’s also a pop song that sounds tailor-made for radio and arena play, if only Ethel Cain didn’t decide to set the scene by implying American soldiers deserve to die if they choose to go to war. Or question whether Jesus existed when she drank too much whiskey. There’s this push and pull woven throughout the song, this tension between the layers she’s weaving together, a perverse dedication to never being just one thing when three or more could apply. This is about loneliness and getting too drunk and how the young always bear the brunt of violence, wherever it happens, and it also throws a sly “I do it for my daddy and I do it for Dale“ into its climax. The video tosses in references to Christina’s World and American Football; they fit just as neatly, half silly but half serious. I went to four concerts this year, and Ethel Cain was two of them. This feels right - if everything she does is overwhelming, is too much all at once, why shouldn’t she be half of where I spent my time? More than once, I thought she was the only artist who actually mattered.

MG:

In many ways, “American Teenager” is not representative of Ethel Cain; the cheerful, colorful swirl of pop is not one of her true interests, it’s more something she can do than something she loves. The rest of Preacher’s Daughter, her dimly lit, creeping debut album, takes place entirely within the confines of her imagination, there’s no need for cultural criticism in her murderous fantasia and in that way, “American Teenager” serves to ground her made-up world as one born out of the surreality we all inhabit. There is no Ethel, no Willoughby, no Hayden without the context of a country that sends its kids to fight wars the vast majority of the population don’t understand. On “American Teenager,” Ethel simply tells it like it is, like it felt at the dawn of this century, when I was a high schooler, and like it probably still feels today because nothing in the intervening two decades has slowed the churn of war, prison, and persistent, untreated mental illness that fosters the environment where a girl runs away from home and is murdered by a cannibalistic serial killer and all the sex work, condemned buildings, and fraught relationships with God in between.

The sky is still blue, the football field still green, the street lights are still yellow, and the hearts are still red in “American Teenager,” but already the kids are coming home in boxes, the brown sludge of denial and decay are creeping in at the edges and taking over. If it’s not that box with a dead kid instead, maybe it’s the brown liquor which touches our narrator directly -- she’s drunk at the pep rally, again. She can dress up her song with a major key and big, chunky chords, but Ethel Cain can’t resist collapsing in honesty: It’s just not my year, she laments. There’s no room for happiness in this world, the closest thing she can approximate is crying under the bleachers and insisting she liked it, refusing to let her sadness be sad, bundling up whatever she’s got and announcing “damn, I’m doing it well/ For me.” This is the closest she gets to exaltation, her best effort at resolving all the pain and suffering at the center of her world. She’s dead, right on schedule, by the dawn of the third act. “American Teenager” doesn’t just betray the hopelessness at the center of the Ethel Cain universe, it’s the crux of all that darkness, the Oz that begs us to remember “there’s no place like home.” If you know, you know, as the kids say. If you were lucky enough to get a taste of that Freezer Bride wafer, you chewed on its implications all year.

[groovesnjams]

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..................number9 ....................of50

“Somewhere Near Marseilles” by Hikaru Utada

DV:

So far, I’ve resisted watching Succession and The White Lotus and what feels like 3000 other shows or films about how rich people, they’re just like us! This is not to say that I haven’t enjoyed art about the wealthy before and won’t ever again, but the sheer volume of in in recent years seems somehow like it must be a trick. Unfortunately, as much as I try not to say anything positive about the rich on this blog, I feel compelled to admit that “We could find a place with easy access/ Maybe somewhere near Marseilles” is the most luxurious sentiment I heard all year and unfortunately now an unachievable goal for me, maybe the only time I’ve wanted to be rich rich for a reason other than health care. Imagine: being able to tell your lover “let’s go to a new city just so we can fuck in a random hotelroom.” An entirely new level of decadence, one previously unknown to me. One that Hikaru Utada makes lush and gorgeous, as they coo the song’s few lyrics over a bubbling house beat. “Somewhere Near Marseilles” evokes Dawn Richard in the way Utada turns their phrases over again and again, chopping up and rearranging the same parts, revealing meaning in repetition and variation. It’s aspirational and yet subtle, almost effortless in its seeming simplicity. A twelve minute song that makes a long-distance hookup sound glamorous: part of me hates it, but mostly I feel like, “Good for them.” We all deserve our own somewhere, whether it’s near Marseilles or not.

MG:

Letting “Somewhere Near Marseilles” run for nearly twelve minutes is the secret to its success. Hikaru Utada’s lyrics are as skeletal as the co-production from Floating Points, little more than ambient blips and gurgles to sketch out a mood. It begins to feel literally redundant when the song starts over again in Japanese, but after eight or so minutes, we finally get that promised “room with a view.” The song opens up like a night sky beyond floor to ceiling windows, sterile, stock, and the ideal background for dispassionate evening activities. It’s all so crisp and upscale it invites a degree of paranoia -- who could possibly feel comfortable on sheets this white? But it’s that tension that the song thrives on, not love or lust.

[groovesnjams]

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..................number17 ....................of50

“doomspiral” by Black Dresses

MG:

The good: Black Dresses, though formally disbanded, have continued to make and release music. The bad: we don’t have a complex enough vocabulary to make sense of the emotion behind “doomspiral.” We need new words, better words. Devi McCallion sings “In my heart, it’s over/ Feels like it never was” and Ada Rook matches her with “At the end of time, did I do anything?” Maybe they’re singing about the band, but the language is so big, paired with smothering autotune on Rook’s voice that flattens and compresses but can’t drown her intensity. It feels bigger than the band, as big as life itself. Around them fuzzed out synths glimmer and glow, strangled melodies and off-kilter beats. “doomspiral” sounds like giving up but still being there, both. It’s depressed, resigned, but inescapably vibrant. Rook may try but those stars won’t snuff out so easy.

DV:

At times I try to picture a future for trans people and struggle. I saw someone say the objective for trans art in our current era should be to show who we are for the benefit of future generations trying to understand what happened before our genocide, and the concept stuck with me even though I can’t find the exact quote. I want to think they were wrong. But leave it to Black Dresses, a pair that have never found an excess that they couldn’t outdo, to write the most gonzo future possible for us. “Meet you at the end of time,” Ada Rook chants, “And we will shine forever.” Here in the year 2022, I’d settle for just a future, the very least we all deserve, but Black Dresses don’t know how to go by halves. This song is a vision and a promise, the most optimistic thing I’ve heard all year, a dream for a better tomorrow and on and on. Black Dresses conjure a mantra of not just a future but of outlasting the future, of an existence together past the stars, of a trans heaven beyond the universe itself.  "Doomspiral” is bigger and bolder than anything, an explosion of hope in the face of an existential threat.

[groovesnjams]

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..................number11 ....................of50

“The Linden Trees Are Still in Blossom” by Jens Lekman

DV:

Unfortunately I may have said everything I had to say about “The Linden Trees Are Still in Blossom” back when we initially covered it, and I stand by all those ideas: this is still the rare sequel that deepens and enriches the original, and one of the most complicated songs I heard all year. It’s also art about itself, which puts it into a weird sort of conversation with the year’s most prominent piece of self-critiquing art, Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal. Where The Rehearsal is a work of art about how works of art like it should simply never exist, “The Linden Trees Are Still in Blossom” is a work of art about how art binds us together, connects us, gives meaning and purpose and value to our lives. It makes me cry every time I hear it, which is probably because I’m getting old but whatever I’m leaning into it, and enjoying hearing Jens lean into the emotion and vulnerability of it too. It’s fundamentally optimistic and hopeful, in the way that only a message in a bottle can be.

MG:

I have a very long list of “drafts” on my personal blog, a sort of shadow portal of myself that only I can see, and in there was something I rage wrote and decided better of, but I think it fits with “The Linden Trees Are Still in Blossom.” I despise in memoriams when people die. I hated them when I did them at The Singles Jukebox and I hated every last Mimi Parker public eulogy. I don’t mean to disparage the people who write these things (myself included) because they are grieving and well meaning and trying to communicate something about the importance of a life lived. What I hate is their note of finality. We will not have more Mimi Parker public eulogies next year though her contributions to music will still be just as vital, her loved ones will still be mourning fiercely, and her life and her death will still be meaningful. One day, one week, of outpouring is not enough and it makes these people feel very dead in a way that they would not if we could still talk about them from time to time.

“The Linden Trees Are Still in Blossom” kind of steps back over a line Jens Lekman crossed when he inserted Nina into his art but since she’s there forever I’m extremely heartened to hear him return to her, to share her story with us again, as bittersweet as it will always be. Nina is a complicated figure; in both stories she wants, as much as possible, to be unobserved and unseen, to hide herself first from her father and then from her old friend, Jens. Whether he succeeds is up for debate, but Jens is attempting understanding and failing that, he’s offering to listen. Ultimately, my sense is that Nina probably does not want to be the centerpiece to another Jens Lekman masterwork but it’s already much too late to undo that brush stroke. For the rest of us, and for Jens, it feels necessary that she remain vital -- never left behind or forgotten.

[groovesnjams]

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..................number40 ....................of50

“The Mainline Song” by Spiritualized

DV:

In a good year for trains, Jason Pierce reminds us that he’s a Brian Wilson acolyte as much as anything else: “The Mainline Song” is propulsive and unmistakably his, but the clanging train bells evoke “Caroline No” as surely as the chugging squelch of the production conjures SMiLE-era masterworks like “Cabinessence.” This is a dense song, from that layered instrumentation to the way Pierce references his earlier Sweet Heart, Sweet Light to the way it evokes cities as a site of possibility, apparently as a reference to the 2020 George Floyd uprisings in the US. It’s a song that seems to continually reach higher, further, a series of escalating climaxes. In some sense this is familiar territory for Pierce, but in another it clarifies his particular genius: it takes a hell of a craftsman to keep telling us the same story while making it feel new each time.

MG:

Amazingly, “The Mainline Song” isn’t even the first time we’ve put a Christmas song on our SOTY list. Oh? Sure, there’s no explicit mention of the holiday but between the (sleigh) bells, the choo-choo of the Polar Express, lines like “hush, keep your voices down/ everyone is asleep uptown” and “there’s a change in the air ‘round here” (snow, obviously!), and the whole sustained, jubilant affect of the song -- what else could it be? I’ve long felt that Christmas songs suffer from their season-specific purpose, limiting -- even dooming -- them to a narrow period of relevance, so perhaps it’s better that the sin isn’t named. J Spaceman is rarely humorous, but “The Mainline Song” with all its ascension and swoop is (also) about the glory of potential, so maybe some of that potential is for levity, too.

[groovesnjams]

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..................number49 ....................of50

“Karma” by Taylor Swift

MG:

After promising an album dedicated to under-lit rooms and under-slept decisions, another refreshingly honest reinvention of Taylor Swift, she delivered instead a return to the compressed maximalism of 1989 and another swipe through the same handful of axes to grind. Nowhere is this more obnoxious than “Karma,” a soup of clipped, flat snares with watery, plinking synths, accented with thinly veiled threats directed at Scooter Braun. Swift understands karma about as well as Alanis Morrissette understood irony and that’s what makes this song such a triumph. She’s unrelatable and unaccessible here, cutting off her nose to spite her face when she delivers lines like “ask me what I earned for all those tears” as though suffering is only redeemed through lots and lots of zeroes. Suffering is the human condition, but Taylor Swift has no use for her humanity anymore. Midnights sees her villain arc crest to its peak, and it’s that villainy -- not karma -- that brings her friends along for the ride and rewards her with a bland, blond supporting actor to wear on her arm. I much prefer this version of her; her unsubtle rage is intoxicating.

DV:

Part of Taylor Swift’s alleged appeal is her relatability, but in fact she’s at her best when she’s embodying a melodramatic version of reality that no one before or after her will experience, a world where she’s a demigod free to play but where no one else quite as real as her ever exists. “Karma” is the best example of this since “Blank Space”: it’s three and a half minutes of gloating, confident and just allusive enough to seem like a puzzle waiting to be solved. “Karma” invites us to share in Taylor’s success, as if we all have movie star boyfriends (as if we all have cats! but my allergies aren’t the point here.)  It’s a song that contains the seeds of its own defeat, a celebration that rings hollow even as it insists on its triumph. Does she know she’s in villain mode? In the end it doesn’t matter either way.

[groovesnjams]

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..................number13 ....................of50

“Casual” by Chappell Roan

MG:

I am, frankly, disgusted we were deprived a present, a reality, where Chappell Roan headlines Lilith Fair and holds court over thousands of women gathered together, peacefully, in a field all chanting along “We’re knee deep in the passenger seat/ and you’re eating me out/ is it casual now?” “Casual” is positively blistering in its specificity, but also, more importantly, in its carnal knowledge. Her lyrics wield a candidness that can only be experienced two ways: the first, as delivered by Chappell herself, a disaffected deadpan that is ultimately betrayed by its underlying rage and the second, en masse, with everyone who has every been through this dumb wringer letting it all out at the same time in the ultimate cathartic experience. Her “anger issues” are so expressly feminine, the direct result of some dumb loser who closes himself off but expects her to be available to his mom and his sister. I guess she could play Lolla or something but it’s just not the same.

DV:

I love the idea that Chappell Roan, who spent a previous single begging a girl “touch me touch me touch me touch me” might consider herself the cool girl in another relationship, and I hate the idea that of all the toxic mid-2000s concepts to cycle back through the zeitgeist we might have to live through a resurrection of the “cool girl” concept itself. The cool girl isn’t a real person, it’s a torture instrument for women who don’t know to resist, a stock character that dissolves at the slightest poke. I knew plenty of cool girls during the height of the trope, and not one of them was a Cool Girl but plenty of them felt pressure to put up some kind of front. A cool girl works in the sense that a wacky neighbor or sarcastic sibling might: functional as a lazy narrative construct but impossible to sustain beyond the boundaries of the format. And sometimes not even within it! Most sitcoms wind up shading in their characters eventually (even if they then broaden them again by the end of the series.) Most movies have a second act escalation that can lend some depth. And in “Casual”, Chappell Roan says she’s trying to be the chill girl while casually revealing that she’s already deeply embedded in the family of the guy she’s fucking. She’s giving so much of herself! She’s just not giving herself the credit she deserves, which I suppose is very emblematic of the cool girl. When you’re spending your energy trying hard to be cool it’s easy to miss the things that actually make you cool.

[groovesnjams]

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..................number2 ....................of50

“Go Find Yourself or Whatever” by Carly Rae Jepsen

DV:

If there’s one thing Carly Rae Jepsen will do when she’s heartbroken, it’s destroy a ton of roses. “Go Find Yourself or Whatever” is a major sonic and structural evolution for her - a twangy ballad with a detailed, delicate production from Rostam - but it’s also a piece of an ever-growing world she’s building, of repeated images and complicated emotions and personal quirks. We know that Carly’s “no good at goodbyes” because of “Store”. We know she’s “no good tellin' lies“ because her there’s a decade of songs about how she can’t hide what she’s feeling. It’s a decade since “Call Me Maybe” and somehow we’ve got Carly Jepsen continuity, less a source of easter eggs than a rich trove of thematic concerns. Ambivalence being one: “Go Find Yourself or Whatever” has Carly caught between saying she’ll wait for the guy who’s leaving, and doubting she could ever forgive him - or treat him any better. Maybe he’s better off not coming back; maybe anyone you can sing “You feel safe in sorrow/ You feel safe on an open road“ about needs to find themselves before they’re enough of a person to be around anyone else for more than a few minutes at a time. Carly leaves the conclusions to us: the song is packed with complication, with hope and sorrow and resignation and maybe all of them are valid, even if maybe all of them are contradictory. In the sentence, “She was attempting to control her emotions,” attempting is the key word, after all.

MG:

Quite contrary to the big saxophone and pounding heartbeats of “Run Away With Me,” quite contrary, as well, to the speed and abbreviation of a TikTok hit, “Go Find Yourself or Whatever” sounds both like a relic of Adult Contemporary’s heyday and too impossibly specific to be anything other than modern pop. Rostam’s production is slow, patient, and gorgeous. He layers gentle, strummed acoustic guitars with subtle string swells and soft, brushed percussion with plucky keys. There are handclaps and a guitar solo that recalls “Champagne Supernova.” The effect is like a fancy campfire on the beach or yearning your way up the Pacific Coast Highway -- so much bleached white and distant crackle, warmth and closeness. But ultimately, this is Carly Rae Jepsen’s song and her tender flourishes from “you made me vulnerable” to “every time the red moon rises/ I’ll stay up and keep some hope inside” make the song so overwhelmingly, so piercingly sad. Whether she’s turning a moment into eternity or she’s searching for the upper bounds of emotion, we never hear the corners of her eyes fall, we never hear her pause to consider. “Go Find Yourself or Whatever” is full of those touches, the echoes of loss and defeat.

[groovesnjams]

gRººv333S,,,n,,,J▲M§ ▬|s|!|O|!| ❤︎|!|t|!|y|▬{{mmxxii}}  

..................number3 ....................of50

“Crimson” by Dawn Richard and Spencer Zahn

DV:

The heartbreak in “Crimson” comes not just from the lyrics themselves but from the metatext around them. Dawn Richard has built a solo career out of songs that could as easily relate to her relationship to art as they could to a romance; Blackheart in particular is populated entirely by songs where partnership and commerce and Art are commingled and conflated. And she’s built a career of sounding iconoclastic, streets ahead, in an league entirely her own. So to hear her lamenting “Can you wait for me? I'm not where I need to be,” is to hear a multi-layered tragedy. If Dawn can’t figure out where she belongs, what hope do the rest of us have? This bold explorer, begging someone or something or like, the concept of music itself for an indulgence. “Crimson” is the year’s most striking tragedy, a brilliant encapsulation of Dawn Richard’s ability to turn a handful of precisely-written lines into an epic narrative, and a new step in the bold, unmatched saga of her life’s ongoing art project.

MG:

We’re almost a decade into Dawn Richard’s sustained peak, one that has seen her work flex from EDM-tinged dance pop to New Orleans’ funk, and yet it’s still surprising to hear her strip away all pretense of a past and deliver a radically different prism for her creativity. On “Crimson” she’s without vocal trills and bouncy melodies, nearly the whole song passes without a beat. She’s unrecognizable here, which makes it yet another quintessential entry in her catalog. Spencer Zahn provides a smoky, earthy production with instruments close-miked and hushed. The whole of “Crimson” is intimate and vulnerable and when the beat finally does drop, it feels like those emotional risks are paid off.  

[groovesnjams]

gRººv333S,,,n,,,J▲M§ ▬|s|!|O|!| ❤︎|!|t|!|y|▬{{mmxxii}}  

..................number5 ....................of50

“Modern Love Stories” by Beach House

MG:

Lyrically, “Modern Love Stories” closes with Victoria LeGrand softly sliding the line “I reach into the darkness/ The universe collects us” through the space between a closed door and the hardwood floor, from one side of infinity, defined by her sparse and evocative lyrics, to the other, the song’s wordless outro. While her words sound like death, Alex Scally’s guitars, both the casually strummed acoustic that reaches back from LeGrand’s darkness and the fervently sustained slide that serves as the song and album’s closing bracket, feel like longing, longing, longing. Longing to go on, longing for more, longing for the sound of beauty itself. The slide guitar in particular dares to get more beautiful with every repetition, wrenching a little more luminosity with each pass around the ear drums. There is nothing so wrong with desiring and enjoying beauty, it is, in fact, a human need. Though the sense that our needs should be painful to meet persists, though the idea of hard truths dismisses beauty as, at worst, facile in its beguiling, or, at best, only available to us after we have thoroughly exhausted ourselves of every other preceding struggle, it remains essential to joy, the bright twin of suffering. There is no such thing as too beautiful, the harder your heart scorches itself, the brighter the energy released.

DV:

Maybe it’s death, maybe it’s just a particularly memorable trip at the end of a night out. I agree that the production, glorious and lush, doesn’t suggest finality - but I’m not sure LeGrand’s lyrics do either. Lines like “Carousel ascending” or “I reach into the darkness” are no more at home in an end-of-the-universe scenario (though they fit into one) than they are in a night where you’re waiting in line to use a bar bathroom, taking an escalator and riding the train back home, and sprawled in bed with a lover having a conversation you’re both too stoned or drunk to fully understand. Both can be true, as both can be beautiful. “Modern Love Stories” is evocative - and allusive - enough to bear multiple interpretations. Beach House lend them an epic grandeur, whichever path you choose.

[groovesnjams]

gRººv333S,,,n,,,J▲M§ ▬|s|!|O|!| ❤︎|!|t|!|y|▬{{mmxxii}}  

..................number6 ....................of50

“Supergabber” by TORIENA

DV:

With trance resurgent and an EDM revival simmering, it seems inevitable that I’ll hear the new age x house bangers (I’m calling this ”Adiemus”-core) I really want. In the meantime, TORIENA has done better than I ever dreamed, taking some massed choirs and slamming a fucked up gabber beat into them like a mad scientist. “Supergabber” is chaos incarnate, a track that feels unpredictable and dangerous no matter how often you’ve heard it. It shouldn’t work, or rather seems like it shouldn’t work, but TORIENA melds these disparate parts into one of the year’s most propulsive and intense experiences. It’s structured vaguely like a pop song, while lacking the other key conventions of pop music (e.g. vocals, predictability.) It’s built from dance music tropes, while lacking key conventions of dance music (e.g. the ability to move to a beat without injuring yourself.) At one point there’s a sample that says “We do not seek to understand right from wrong anymore” and on one hand, who is we? But on the other it’s correct, ironically so: “Supergabber” is beyond right and wrong, beyond good and evil. TORIENA is making music for a far-flung future. When aliens need to kick back after conquering the planet, maybe they’ll be able to find sense in it. For now it just sounds intensely sensational.

MG:

On the other hand, I love “Supergabber” because it sounds like a fucked up jock jam, like TORIENA took the holy choir from Madonna’s “Like A Prayer” and the synths from 2 Unlimited’s “Get Ready For This” and blended them. But not strictly in the sense of combination -- more importantly, they’re now at the speed of the blender. A siren, of course, appears early on to warn us all of assault, emergency, and to gently suggest that things will only get more intense after their already surreal beginnings. Importantly, “Supergabber” never goes anywhere. As propulsive and unleashed as it is, the song simply ricochets around in a cylinder. Maybe it’s a mosh pit, maybe it’s a rabid dog chasing its tail, but it’s never representative or indicative of progress. This is a song for being totally stuck and absorbing a brutal beating, a song that demands you take it, that extracts your submission. It’s beautiful, I cower with pleasure. 

[groovesnjams]

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..................number12 ....................of50

“Driponomics” by Soul Glo

MG:

Part scorching, white-hot indictment and part sober, resigned acceptance, “Driponomics” endorses doing what you must to get by. Soul Glo’s Pierce Jordan dispenses with the hand holding and visions of betterment (much less utopia) instead recognizing that capitalism is a shackle and that all we can do in this particular lifetime is fend for ourselves and maybe, maybe, maybe a loved one or two by making money however we can. If drip culture sells then peddle drip. He opens the song with a spoken word interlude: They wanna persecute me because I get money responsibly? Ethically? and then he laughs because what about this country is responsible or ethical. Black-owned, created, and loved brands litter the hook and Mother Maryrose delivers a charismatic verse about the connection between desire and wealth. Between the profound lack of workers’ rights and the school to prison pipeline, there’s no space to dream of a better tomorrow. As for today, whatever you can do to make the most money while exchanging the least amount of labor, whatever you can do to earn a fair or living wage, should be free from judgment.

DV:

Honestly I don’t think anything is really free from judgment, like there is no shortage of reprehensible things a person can do to make an incredible amount of money (and arguably no way to make an incredible amount of money without doing reprehensible things.) But I also don’t think that the judgments enforced in this country by the so-called justice system have anything to do with right and wrong, so. Who decides? Mother Maryrose is popping tags and that mostly hurts the company’s bottom line, but I’ve worked enough retail to know it sucks to be in a store that decides to start caring about “product shrink.” There’s no ethical consumption, we’ve all heard this, but there’s also no ethical living - no way to work, no way to exist, without propping up those in positions of power, from the district manager to the billionaire owner. You can lift and flip, but where do you put the money you make? Back with someone who doesn’t deserve it, ultimately. “Driponomics” is morally a little confusing to me, celebrating theft as much as the brands worth stealing, but sonically it’s crystal clear: this song is fucking furious. It’s chaos and violence and passion. “Forty years of Reagonomics!” Jordan bellows. We deserve a world that doesn’t punish us for living.

[groovesnjams]

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..................number14 ....................of50

“Happy Girl” by Katie Dey

DV:

There’s an unmatched intensity to “Happy Girl”, like staring at the sun or holding your hand over an open flame. Each word feels like an electric charge, like it’s a monumental struggle for Katie Dey to deliver. This is a song built of aphorisms, each line encapsulating a world of compressed emotion. “The words burn up as I type them,” she trills; they’re too much for the concepts they contain; the song outlines and thereby transcends the boundaries of language itself. “Eventually I hope we can rest/ Eventually the fear comes out,” hangs in the air when she sings it: it’s so basic, it’s so complicated, it’s constellations of meaning in a couplet. “Baby shoes” but with a couple more words and a lot more existential dread. That impossible longing suffuses “Happy Girl,” the year’s most painful crush song, maybe the only one ever to fixate on handholding, but be angry about it. Ultimately that’s because the song exists “Even in a world like this". That’s Katie Dey’s punchline, that’s the payoff to the fear. In a world like this, even being a happy girl feels like an insurmountable task.

MG:

Much like my misguided notions around the endurance of organized religion, another belief I’d held uninterrupted since childhood that has since fallen to pieces is that the world I was raised in was so profoundly different from all the worlds that created it that there was no comparison between the past and all my presents. Some of this can be attributed to really poor public school education, especially where history was concerned. Most of my teachers struggled to make their subject engaging at all, the ones that succeeded made it all sound like mythology or fables, mistakes that we would, of course, never repeat. But most of this is owed to my own enduring naivete, my lack of experience with people and groups, my unwillingness to connect my own past to my own present and thus every past to every present. One positive consequence of finally engaging with all the piled up “ok, that did happen” stored in my brain under “trash deletedeletedelte” is that I can better see the connection between, say, the extreme moral chastity of the Victorian era and the way our own current conservative movement is so focused on the bodies of trans women. It’s not a new thing, it’s a very old thing, it’s a very old virus that is always in the human body and mutating and destroying.

I also finally put together that “Happy Girl” is a Gertrude Stein song! Before it felt like this was happening on the internet and they didn’t have the internet at the turn of the 20th century, so, no comparison. I guess you can add internet to humanity but humanity will keep doing what it does. The suppressed intensity, the impossibility of happiness, the way “simulcra catfight” feels like “tender buttons” put through one of those font modifiers to make it look glitchy -- this is what Stein did with her work. I don’t make this comparison to suggest it’s all been done before, but rather to say that Stein’s work was clearly unfinished and the dropped stitches have been picked up by Katie Dey. And also that maybe changing the circumstances around our lives isn’t enough to undo the hell we’ve wrought. Anyway, “Happy Girl” is a really beautiful song, one that luxuriates in its subtleties and invites the listener to witness where communication fails but meaning persists.

[groovesnjams]

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..................number16 ....................of50

“Carbon Dioxide” by Fever Ray

MG:

There is nothing more beautiful or more terrifying than a goth in love. “Sucking on what’s mine/ Love’s carbon dioxide,” Karin Dreijer opens the song, framing ownership of their desire with the air we exhale. While it’s more common to think of oxygen as our breath, it’s in fact high CO2 that prompts us to inhale. The two compounds are synergistic in our bodies and your exhales are my inhales, Dreijer seems to suggest; it’s them at their most human. The rest of the song is an extended metaphor for orgasm. “Holding my hand (holding my heart)/ While falling” is spectral and supernatural, Dreijer’s soul leaving their body in tandem with the subject of their love. It reminds me of Brontë’s line: “Whatever souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” I’ve recently discovered that some people hate Wuthering Heights because all the people in the book are terrible. Well, that doesn’t mean it’s not a love story. If, in all your horror and abjection, your doom to haunt the moors forever, the ruin your bring upon your whole cursed family line you can still find a soulmate, then perhaps in a couple hundred years you can evolve enough to announce “There’s resounding gongs and clanging bowls/ There’s cats guiding my soul” at climax.

DV:

In the eleven years of Grooves N Jams there’s literally never been a song about sex that MG and I have agreed was actually sexy. I’m happy to announce that this trend continues with “Carbon Dioxide,” a song that I’m willing to admit has words that imply orgasm but otherwise sounds like a nightmare populated by clowns with instruments and microphones. To be clear: this is exactly everything that I want from Fever Ray. Their insistence on the glories of weird dark monster worlds is inseparable from their embrace of pleasure and joy; I don’t live there but it’s a place I want to know exists. Here’s hoping that Dreijer continues to build a catalog of the most off-kilter love songs possible, and MG and I can go on trading off which of us thinks they’re sensual and which thinks they’re just brilliant.

[groovesnjams]

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..................number18 ....................of50

“Happy New Year” by Let’s Eat Grandma

MG:

After an adulthood of insisting that lyrics are ancillary and I don’t listen to them, it’s time to reverse my position, especially where “Happy New Year” is concerned. It’s perfectly fine to enjoy the song as a big banger in the spirit of the partiest holiday on the calendar, but you’d also be missing the story of Let’s Eat Grandma, carefully nestled in the glitter and explosives. The two were original best friends, their relationship dating back to young childhood, until they weren’t, until they’d “grown in different ways.” Specifically, Jenny Hollingworth’s boyfriend died of cancer and Rosa Walton’s, well, didn’t. Without the spectre of grief they’d still be making propulsive, jubilant synthpop but “Happy New Year” rests alongside “Smalltown Boy” and “Running Up That Hill” in the cannon of songs that are as tender as they are massive.

DV:

Part of the thrill of “Happy New Year” is that it’s a massive banger and part is the way it situates itself in the story and relationship of the duo, but part is also the incredible detail and complexity of the lyric. You don’t have to be aware of the backstory to hear an exchange like, “Knew that neither of us were going away/ That’s what made it harder” and understand that there’s an iceberg of emotion lying underneath it. And the song is simply packed with this, from tangible details like “had a bubble bath in our swimsuits“ to the chorus’s assertion “And nothing that was broken/ Can touch how much I care for you.” It’s one of the year’s densest songs, rich enough to burrow into and pick apart in order to understand exactly what is going on but lushly produced enough that if you want to focus on the nightlong fireworks show and the joy of seeing another year, you can do that too. Because along with the grief and the growth, “Happy New Year” is still a celebration: the kind that comes after loss, that comes from realizing how fragile our lives and our relationships can be. If we’re seeing the new year, we know that we were the lucky ones. We made it through.