Screw Rock 'n' Roll

“Get Lucky”: The American Daft Punk song

One of the songs I’m hearing everywhere here in the US is Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky.” This is no surprise, since it is a top 20 hit and the most successful Daft Punk single to date in America.

It is also their most American single to date. Oh yes, it is unmistakably Daft Punk, in full French House vivant. But it also has Nile Rodgers’s real disco guitar instead of the reconstituted funk of prior Daft Punk euro-dance. And the lead vocal isn’t the faceless vocoderized sample of the duo’s previous singles, but Pharrell Williams’s familiar amateur soul croon. It would be misguided to pretend it isn’t a transatlantic tune, but with two of its most recognizable elements being distinctly American — at a time when America has wholeheartedly embraced electronic dance music — is it best understood as a primarily American song?

(On the other hand, this is the most successful Daft Punk single of all time pretty much everywhere — their first number one in a slew of markets and their second in France, following “One More Time.”)

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May 22

Weaver D’s is not automatic for the people on Sundays.

This is part two of two in a series of me visiting soul food restaurants referenced by Southern musical acts.

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music the south food america

May 20

Eat your lil ass up like a Chanterelle’s plate.

This is part one of two in a series of me visiting soul food restaurants referenced by Southern musical acts.

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music hip-hop food the south ATL america

May 20

Calvin Harris ft. Florence Welch, “Sweet Nothing,” 18 Months (2012)

This song seems to be absolutely everywhere in America right now. (Also Drake. Sigh.) Yes, the sound of this US visit appears to be a dance tune by two Brits.

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music america

May 06

magnificentruin:

manifesto

Ugh at 7.

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america music language

Apr 19

katherinestasaph asked: For me the key line in that is "Even more telling than the artists who get this cosign are the talented artists in the same ballpark who don’t - who tend to be the ones without influential PRs, canny positioning or contacts."

This line of argument really seems of limited use to me. There are thousands — millions — of great unheard artists out there that would benefit if they had a record deal, or a nicely shot video, or a smart PR rep working them, and theoretically every bad artist who has those resources is denying them to the unheard ones who don’t. But the music business isn’t a meritocracy and pointing out that you consider Jai Paul’s marketing to be gauche doesn’t re-apportion those resources. And Lex wasn’t, say, using the space at The Quietus to shine a light on those “talented artists in the same ballpark.”[*] He was trying to make media criticism do the work of musical criticism (note his original Tumblr post: “I go in on worthless hypescam Jai Paul,” with the unnamed poorly performing journalists only an afterthought).

I mean, I get the what about the artists you aren’t paying attention to? line when a writer is failing to tell a story properly due to such omission — for instance, articles about gay-positive rap that start and end with Macklemore — but there are untold quantities of new music out there. The idea that if only people would stop writing about Jai Paul they would select their subjects on the basis of merit seems extremely dubious.

*EDIT: Katherine responds

I mean, accusing Lex of “not shining a light on those talented artists in the same ballpark” is kind of ridiculous. I can’t think of many writers who do this more.

Yeah, that’s a fair point. And Lex has previously done exactly the thing I said he didn’t do here — I recall during the period where indie R&B was a hyped thing he wrote a “here are R&B acts you should check out” article that was well-written and valuable, for instance.

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question time music criticism

Apr 19

The Quietus | Opinion | Black Sky Thinking | Jai Paul: A Scam To Feed The Internet Sausage Machine

tomewing:

alexmacpherson:

In which I go in on worthless hypescam Jai Paul and his terrible music (and throw shade at lots of music journalists).

I missed this important news story on holiday. Still, there’s always D4ft Pvnk.

I think JP’s music is rubbish too, but even if it wasn’t the jigsaw piece approach to marketing which is so ubiquitous across pop culture is a real joy-killer for me. (And yet obviously I feed it by clicking on news sites, Twitter links et al) Down with F4 culture! No wait, there’s new posts on my dashboard…

I really don’t get this new (?) thing in music journalism of reviewing marketing campaigns — and no, I haven’t got around to reading that exposé of Justin’s 20/20 Experience — but the end result really seems like a nouveau form of “he doesn’t even write his own songs!” The aim always seems to be to prove the music is bad not because it sounds bad or isn’t enjoyable but because the process by which it reaches the listener is inauthentic. To which: who gives a shit?

(I also dislike it because it seems real inside baseball writing. If you’re a music journo receiving tons of PR emails in your inbox and watching your RSS feed fill up with breathless coverage of the same thing, your reaction is probably roll-eyes-at-the-hype, but if you’re not actually one of that very select group of people, you probably barely notice the existence of this kind of thing.)

I mean, check this out from the above:

Not so much a bewitching patchwork of samples as a My First Textiles home kit gone horribly wrong, it traded entirely on positioning: a KCi & JoJo sample here, a Jennifer Paige cover there, look! His taste is just like ours, with his admiration of ’90s pop and R&B! What a fascinating musical magpie of the internet generation! Aren’t we all fascinating musical magpies in 2013! How zeitgeisty, how very…now! Let’s give him a round of applause for being so similar to us!

Someone tried to fool very smart music journalist Alex Macpherson into thinking well of Jai Paul, but please notice that very smart music journalist Alex Macpherson saw right through their plot! What phonies these people are and how authentic v.s.m.j Alex Macpherson is for not being taken in by their phoniness!

I mean I don’t even remember what Jai Paul sounds like. (When did he first briefly matter? 2011? I dunno.) But I’m not exactly desperate for a new way to declare that certain artists aren’t real or to dismiss their fans as dupes.

EDIT: And I do appreciate the value of media criticism. But this isn’t media criticism — the coverage is a (very) peripheral target.

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music criticism

Apr 19

Tim McGraw ft. Taylor Swift & Keith Urban, “The Highway Don’t Care,” Two Lanes of Freedom (2013)

“Highway Don’t Care” is notable for having Tim McGraw on the same track (though not in the same studio) as Taylor Swift — she who named her debut single after McGraw. There’s nothing else particularly remarkable about the tune though — the McGraw-Swift connection is serviceable but there’s little chemistry — other than the fact that it’s a quite nice Tim McGraw tune. I like nice Tim McGraw tunes.

Keith Urban adds some guitar, and that’s… well… good for him.

Please note that a later pressing of Taylor’s eponymous debut album included a recording of a radio interview that captured the first time McGraw and Taylor spoke to one another. McGraw bemoans that he feels old; Taylor is awed. Now they work together!

The best part of that interview is this:

Taylor: And could you tell Faith Hill I said hello?

McGraw: I sure will. And she loves the song too, by the way.

Taylor (totally fangirling): Oh my gosh, she’s awesome.

(Source: Spotify)

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music country taylor swift

Apr 18

thesinglesjukebox:

AVRIL LAVIGNE - HERE’S TO NEVER GROWING UP
[4.67]

Jonathan Bradley: Once upon a time, while sitting in a dull high school assembly, a friend and I entertained one another by making a packet of chips dance as we imitated the horn riff from Radiohead’s “The National Anthem.” I mention this because, even if Radiohead songs aren’t exactly the stuff of sing-alongs, any music someone feels enthusiastically enough about can become the stuff of social experience. And yet Avril’s Radiohead reference on “Here’s to Never Growing Up” feels incongruous because Yorke’s band has become the quintessential example of self-consciously cerebral music specifically designed not to be shared. One listens to Radiohead seriously and in seclusion; one does not share or exult in the communal experience of Radiohead, and so Avril’s elated chorus about getting drunk and hollering along to “Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box” or whatever suggests that maybe she Just Doesn’t Get It. But meeting people is easy, y’know, and when Radiohead escapes the studio, people use this very popular band in the same way they use the music of loads of other popular bands: to form connections, to express shared joy, to celebrate and sing along to. Avril is about a year younger than I am, and Radiohead is in its own way as adolescent as Avril has so determinedly been throughout her career, which makes this hook a double felicitous absurdity. More than anything else though, “Never Growing Up” sounds much older — as distinct from more mature — than anything Lavigne’s done before; compared to the immediacy of the joie de vivre in Taylor Swift’s thematically identical “22,” this tune sounds like its youthful clamor is transitory — and all the more precious for it.
[9]

[Read and comment on The Singles Jukebox ]

Let’s all lol at how I’m almost thirty.

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music the singles jukebox

Apr 15

thesinglesjukebox:

BRAD PAISLEY FT. LL COOL J - ACCIDENTAL RACIST
[1.00]

Ebony and ivory…

Jonathan Bradley: Paisley is a canny performer who might be too canny here for his own good. The set-up works: a well-meaning audience surrogate starts to realize the ideas and icons he thinks innocuous actually aren’t, and all in the setting of the quintessentially country/not-country confines of a chain store coffee shop. The problem is that Paisley thinks he wants to talk about racism when what he actually wants to talk about is the South, which he frames as implicitly and exclusively white. He should know better; has he forgotten his “friend from school, a running back on the football team,” the one whose neighbors burned a cross on his front yard, from his Obama tribute “Welcome to the Future”? Paisley’s biggest mistake here is inviting LL aboard; the self-described “black Yankee” transforms the conflict underpinning “Accidental Racist” into one between African Americans and Southerners. “R.I.P., Robert E. Lee” he says, on a song penned by the son of a state that came into existence when it would not follow that Virginian general into treason. But as Georgian Shawn Jay had it: “When you see them Confederate flags, you know what it is/Your folks picked cotton here, that’s why we call it the fields.” Or T-Mo, of Atlanta, the fall of which enabled William Tecumseh Sherman to march to the sea and seal Lee up in Virginia in a siege of inevitable attrition: “In third grade this is what you told: you was bought, you was sold.” Paisley, who here calls himself “a son of the New South,” is, after all, a singer who extols the virtues of a pluralistic, inclusive America in the language of a part of the country more suspicious of such a thing than most, and in language that doesn’t suggest propaganda to his fans. Perhaps after his previous successes in expressing the duality of the Southern thing, he settled too easily into his Southern comfort zone.

[4]

Aight, I seen this from Ta-Nehisi Coates a whole bunch around the Internets:

I can understand why an artist like Paisley would be attracted to an artist like LL Cool J. I can’t for the life of me understand why he’d choose LL Cool J to begin “a conversation” to reconcile. Rap is overrun with artists who’ve spent some portion of their career attempting to have “a conversation.” There’s Chuck D. There’s Big Daddy Kane. There’s KRS-ONE. There’s Talib. There’s Mos Def. There’s Kendrick Lamar. There’s Black Thought. There’s Dead Prez. And so on.

And you notice how Baltimore/New Yorker TNC doesn’t mention a single Southern rapper? (Dead Prez’s Florida connect excepted.) Brad Paisley wants to have a Southern conversation? He should have one. But he, like TNC, doesn’t recognize there are rappers living next door to him who can do that. Quit hating the South — but It ain’t every Southerner who thinks that red flag is innocuous..

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music america hip-hop race the south country

Apr 13

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“Get Lucky”: The American Daft Punk song