Girls Are Famous
New Trap, Rap, Pop + further op shop lessons from history
If you’ve even noticed, within the hectic tumble of Substack ephemera, that I haven’t written a piece like this in a while, that’s because I’ve been On The Road. To play one gig (as good as a “tour” for The New Existentialists!), to visit my Dad, and, in hospital and quite possibly for the last time, my Mum, from whom I learned a life lesson or two about gratitude and acceptance, love and imagination. Driving up and down the South Island with Hayley, to visit Invercargill, Geraldine, and the op shops at points in between. In the op shops old music was rediscovered, on the internet new music continued to drop, and this is that story. But first, some good news - music journalism still exists in Dunedin! I was interviewed by Tom McInlay for the Otago Daily Times’ weekend edition, here. Informed questions, with some extra details extracted from the press release, rather than just quoting it verbatim. I was also interviewed on air at Radio One 91FM by Lotte and Hansini in a similarly informed way; available online here. These rare events are the equivalent of my artist’s statements, and I don’t know how musicians in other places cope without them.
Anyway the gig went swimmingly, despite Jamey staying at home with a remix of 2019’s viral hit ‘Covid’. Playing in Dunedin always feels like becoming part of a larger team focused on the same goal of creating mad sounds and good times, and Jamey’s last minute stand-ins, Poppy (synth) and Chris (guitar and effects), made the New Existentialists sound wild.
I got to see Wet Specimen and Pearly and Children’s Letters to God at their best, and earlier I’d hung out and recorded a little with Frog Power, one of my dreams.
Meanwhile, Doorag introduced me over the line to rapper Sophie Hunter. Logos rapping, by which I mean extended rapping deeply coding and ordering existence, tends to be a male-dominated occupation but Hunter’s flow is as good as the best, her beats varied and strong. ‘I Am The Problem’ comes from a brand new EP, Wail.
And also, new trap from Fakeperks3x, who only has a few tracks on YouTube and Soundcloud and a couple of guest spots on recent albums by prolific Sacramento trapper Pthuggin.1
DÖSÜM is easily the purest trap I’ve heard this year, with its falling melody in high rotate in my brain, reconnecting me with the spiritual essence of the genre, which I described thus in this 2023 post on Songs From Insane Times -
”Trap at its best, the fancy-funeral drumming, the easy, but inverted-so-not-so-obvious, changes, the sing-song autotune chorus, and the bass that gives under its own weight, whatever the lyrics are doing to you, empathically feels your pain and pours the balm of radical acceptance over it. Making it the music of our zeitgeist, the soundtrack to our existential limitations of work, area code, class, addictions, internet hate, media manipulation, climate change and the other apocalypse riders, mental health, mortality… this aspect of trap music gives its manifold other pleasures a Masque Of The Red Death quality that feels right for 2023.”
On the road between Invercargill and Geraldine, Hayley and I stopped at uncounted op shops, where she bought beautiful expensive shoes for a few bucks and I bought once-expensive, now almost useless CDs for less. These included Shock Value, a 2007 showcase album for producer Timbaland. Nothing on this strikes me yet as sounding as essential as his 2006 duet ‘Promiscuous’ with Nelly Furtado, but then not much is. Chris Philpott, reviewing Furtado’s new album 7, makes a convincing case:
”Furtado does feel like the right legacy pop artist to succeed in the current climate: she has a genre-forward way of approaching her music, and uses that knack here to modernise the sounds she was making back in the 2000s.”
He highlights “the trap-tinged "Better For Worse" (maybe the best song here)”, and it’s well worth hearing. Akriila, in a Rolling Stone profile of new Chilean sounds that’s unfortunately paywalled now, said true words to the effect that a trap song can’t be a love song, though ‘Better For Worse’ does come close to being one, and it’s not Nelly’s fault it isn’t.
I also bought, for 50 cents, a Serge Gainsbourg compilation, with rather too much of his unconvincing (unless perhaps you’re French) reggae and disco material, but with 4 great duets - ‘Bonny and Clyde’ with Brigitte Bardot, ‘Je T’Aime (moi Non Plus)’ and ‘Melody Nelson’ with Jane Birkin, and ‘Lemon Incest’ with Charlotte Gainsbourg, a deliberate provocation that she still plays live. The best of Serge’s disco numbers, the pulse of ‘Lemon Incest’ reminds me of the German disco influence in Fat White Family songs, while its melody feels like a folk chanson. I found, in Mataura, 3 more samplers from 20-year old metal magazines - Hammer, Terrorizer, and, the best of all, Noise Annoys 2, a compilation given away with Kerrang! containing some good examples of nu-metal and rap metal, including Insane Clown Posse’s ‘It’s Time’ and ‘Pessimy & the Devil’ by 28 Days, which spends its first minute in a punk-metal frenzy, has a rap metal bridge with faux-scratching, then brings back the punk with the scratching. Some say the nu-metal revival is fueled by nostalgia, but I was too old for that; to me nu-metal sounds like unfinished business - a “genre” that took so many of its thrills from so many different genres still has a lot to give, and ways to evolve yet.
I felt blessed when I found, also for 50 cents, Gabriel Yared’s soundtrack from Kiwi director Vincent Ward’s doomed romance Map of the Human Heart (1993), in which Jason Lee plays Avik, an Inuit boy who becomes obsessed with flying and later, as a bombardier in the Royal Canadian Air Force, becomes involved in the firebombing of Dresden, because I knew this would please Hayley, who has a story about this film that isn’t mine to tell.2
Here’s the film’s song, ‘Ma Métisse’ (‘My Map’), sung by Marie Pelissier (and an uncredited Anne Parillaud, who played Avik’s love Albertine) in a breathy style that, also being French, reminds me of some of Brigitte Bardot’s 60’s pop songs.
One of the first second hand CDs played in our rental car was the 2001 soundtrack album to the Australian reality show Search for a Supermodel, the first trial of what became the America’s Next Top Model franchise (reality show ideas in the early 2000s being so dangerous that they were often tested, like atomic bombs, in America’s overseas colonies). Hayley, who had watched it at the time, even remembered the winner’s name (Sophie Barton). I thought this might have cool sounds on it because such shows like to give a party vibe, but most of it sounds generic; perhaps the best dance track is ‘Superstar’ by Urban Sound Project, but the very name of both track and band indicate its unapologetically generic nature (I suspect that more than one track here is by the same person under different names) and ‘Superstar’ isn’t on YouTube.3 There’s a decent R&B pop track, ‘That Girl’, by Hayley(!), who now writes K-Pop hits. Hayley (Aitken) was an Australian artist, and much or all of this album might be Australian, because the only rock song, ‘Take Me Away’ - note the nu-metal style breakdown and synth effects - is by Perth all-girl band Lash, and also featured in the film Freaky Friday (2003), where it’s sung by Christina Vidal with a guitar part by Lindsay Lohan.4
The song’s placement in Freaky Friday came too late to save the band, who were seen as failures by the music industry (despite several Promising New Artist-type awards and nominations in Australia, and representing their country at the 2002 Golden Stag Festival in Romania). and Lash broke up in 2003 after recording one perfect pop-rock album, The Beautiful and the Damned (2002). It seems impossible that Lash wouldn’t be a bigger success today - indeed they probably are, thanks to Tik-Tok exposure by new fans.
Dave Graney and Clare Moore’s latest song, ‘Girls Are Famous’, within an intricate Gainsbourg-esque loop arrangement, makes a wry comment on the relatively recent visibility of female artists -
Girls have been famous for quite a while now
I’m sure you’ve heard of them and they can hear you talkin’
its a new thing you knowing
they also talk together and have an inner voice and mind
girls are famous
everybody knows their business
everybody knows what they should do
If a new female pop artist has a better chance of success than a male one today, and we feel the need to explain this, we could say the culture has changed, because activism, but as Marx might say, cherchez la tech. It was washing machines and vacuum cleaners that made a politically effective women’s movement inevitable. In the 21st century, laptops and iPhones have democratized the means of musical production (Fakeperks3x created ‘DÖSÜM’ using BandLab, an app that’s free in its basic version), just as the robber barons behind streaming have, however imperfectly, democratized its distribution, but it’s perhaps even more relevant that social media has finally exposed a defenseless world to unfiltered, unprofessional feminine thought and expression, overcoming gendered resistance to points of view once limited to women’s and girls’ magazines, if expressed at all.
Thus, Tara Angell’s 2005 album Come Down, released to favourable reviews, but probably not much airplay nor great sales, and thus new to me. Anyone still not generally okay with the pop trap and metal I’ve been pushing here might feel at home with these Stonesy country-rock doomer grooves and Angell’s appealing voice (it’s on Rykodisc, who’ve released some of Big Star’s music), and I can’t help feeling that if Tara Angell was starting out today she’d be another Phoebe Bridgers. ‘Bitch Please’ is a sound collage over a scrap of a song, like Lou Reed’s ‘Kicks’, and ‘Uneven’ is typical of the depth of arrangement and emotion this fine album often swims in.
I disabled Spotify’s algorithmic playlists long ago because they always reverted to the mean of whatever songs I actually liked, demeaning them with a parade of increasingly inauthentic clones, always modern, and stuck in the same demographic - it could never make the kind of connections I like to make here. But the YouTube algorithm has improved, or learned, or something. If I only play the one song, Kim Deal’s ‘Crystal Breath’, the algorithm will follow up with songs that sound like ‘Crystal Breath’ (i.e. with similar bass and drum patterns and vocal timbre, e.g. tracks by MGMT or Brian Jonestown Massacre), other recent songs by ‘90’s indie rockers (e.g. some latest Pixies song, an oddly tame thing with a whiff of pastel synth about it, and new Cure, that is, I think it is, ‘cos it’s much like the old Cure), or very new music that’s liked by people who like ‘Crystal Breath’ and sounds a little bit like it (Mannequin Pussy’s ‘I Don’t Know You’), all of it music that’s firmly on the “indie” and experimental side of pop. And always, there’s some Rasputina, because ‘State Fair’ is on Hayley’s favourites playlist, and there are many Rasputina songs that fit most of the above criteria. None more so than the intricate, layered rhythmic pulsing of ‘Sweet Water Kill (The Ocean Song)’ (2002), which rhapsody5 sounds exactly like the missing link between Kate Bush and Grimes, even before we get to its two excellent remixes.
Algorithmic suggestion - ‘Aloha Mr Hand’ by Lash
Fake fentanyl-based prescription pills, produced in Mexico in imitation of popular opiates such as Percodan, are becoming a public health problem in the USA.
Avik should really have been made a navigator, given the ‘map’ concept but I suppose Ward had already made a film called The Navigator.
Though generically ‘soundalike” by intent, the soundtracks to recent Australian reality shows like MRK and MAFS have occasionally contained some mind-blowingly good, stylistically ahead-of-the-curve compositions.
Freaky Friday also featured, inaudibly according to YouTube comments, another great Lash song, ‘Beauty Queen’.
“A rhapsody in music is a one-movement work that is episodic yet integrated, free-flowing in structure, featuring a range of highly contrasted moods, colour, and tonality. An air of spontaneous inspiration and a sense of improvisation make it freer in form than a set of variations.” (Wikipedia)