Jewels of the Madonna

Lolly Scramble!

Pug Dogs Yard (1967) Philip Trusttum

My body was numbed and my mind paralyzed with fear
For a while I shined shoes downtown and sold the papers
Suddenly from heaven, the jewels have appeared on the ground

’The Jewels of the Madonna’, The Red Krayola (God Bless The Red Krayola And All Who Sail In Her, 1968)

These are dark, if colourful times. The men Jordan Peterson couldn’t help are in charge, and the people who’ve fumbled the easiest contest in history from a morbid fear of becoming unpopular with the smart set are blaming everyone but themselves and the smart set. Some things remain the same, we get the same magical thinking about the power of words and gestures (rename a sea you’d be afraid to swim in let alone explore, get a bit Hitlery, it worked for Prince Harry). I suppose it all brings the ultimate world triumph of Fully Automated Luxury Communism a bit closer but I’m not holding my breath. There’s only one area where words and gestures really hold magical power, and that’s pop music, as in music made by a person or people to be popular with a crowd of other people without too much hifalutin’ intervention.

I might have described Sophie Hunter before, as sounding like the offspring of Eminem and Amy Winehouse, well if that brat was raised by Dory Previn and Charles Bukowski it might make a noise like her latest single ‘2 Shots Of Patron’.
What I really appreciate in Sophie Hunter raps is the imagination it takes to create a convincingly transgressive femininity without reducing everything to sex and violence. I may not get every reference here, but that’s poetry for you. Hunter’s so smart in this game she could be English, but her raps are bigger and bolder because she’s not.

(The Other) Dave Moore is not only a trustworthy scout for new global pop trends and upcoming stars, but a devoted archeologist of pop history, and he recently dug up a lost treasure in Katy Rose’s 2007 album Candy Eyed. Dave describes Katy as one of the Avril Lavigne wannabes of that era, who had a minor hit (making the soundtrack of Mean Girls) with the smart, rocky single ‘Overdrive’, a song she wrote when she was 14.

Candy Eyed (a line from ‘Overdrive’) pitches her head-first into maximalist electronic pop, ahead of its time in a similar way to the Veronicas (please read Dave’s deep dive here) . Here’s the Beatlesque ‘Rosemary’ -

And the chopping-and-changing dance-pop of ‘Dancin’ For’. Apart from the voice, we’re well away from what I remember Lavigne (or the similarly influential Alanis Morrisette) sounding like, and it’s easier to believe Rose and producer Greg Kurtin were listening to Gwen Stefani and Yoko Ono (“waiting for war to end and love to win”).

On ‘Cool Whip’, produced and cowritten by Kim Bullard, we get what sounds like a ‘Sweet Jane’ groove, but may well be a ‘How Bizarre’ one, given how popular OMC’s 1996 hit was in the US, with a contemporary Ben Lee feel.¹ Again, it’s a perfect confection, both of and ahead of its time.

Katy Rose has a new album Fully Alive in the offing, it drops in April, and the single ‘Fall Like A Feather’ wouldn’t sound too out-of-place on Candy Eyes. Looking through the recent discography I find ‘Sour Lemon’, a 2021 sad trap duet with Kobenz (a remake of her 2004 song ‘Lemon’, which made the 13 soundtrack) and yet again, it’s a perfectly realized flirtation with a modern sound that doesn’t compromise her pop qualities.

Candy Eyes disappeared without trace in 2007, but wouldn’t it be lovely if Katy Rose gets to enjoy a meaningful second act, as the girl who saw the future coming and held on to it till it arrived.

Vũ Hà Anh’s Love Ampule arrived just in time for my end-of-year list, but I was overjoyed to find that there’s also a remix album, because the high harmonics in Flea’s lush production tended to obscure a special quality of her voice, the way she sometimes varies the usual portamento of R&B singing with a technique of microtonal adjustments, an acquired taste maybe, but one that’s well worth acquiring if you like fresh sounds.

I had wondered why there were chord changes on Love Ampule that reminded me of George Michael’s ‘Last Christmas’, and here the Xmas album intent is made explicit with her own remix, ‘MERRY XMAS BABY_120BPM’, which quotes Maria Carey’s ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’. What I still don’t know is whether ‘Pluto’, remixed here as ‘PLUT8_88BPM’, was a reference to Hà Anh’s tapetumlucidum<3 song ‘Inanna’, given the Persephone myth’s derivation from the Mesopotamian fertility goddess of that name, or “simply” the workings of astrological synchronicity.

Love Ampule was nice-to-have, but Love Ampule: The Remixes is essential.

Hayley’s had an exceptional Instagram story game for some time now, and she went through a phase recently of collaging and animating images extracted from another account’s AI-generated wizard memes.

These memes, and the music posted with them originally, proved traceable back to a producer (human or robot, who knows these days) called Glissey, whose music was described to me by Hayley as “the kind of shit you like”. She kindly sent me ‘Hexagon’, the most “shit I like” example she could find. The vocal tag may be by Young Mooski, a Glissey collaborator whose discography dates back to 2018, probably not a robot then.
Glissey, a name probably derived from the glissando option on an on-screen keyboard, makes wizardhouse Gamer beats. If they let me write the sequel to Todd Field’s film Tár, I’ll let disgraced conductor/composer Lydia Tár, reborn as a supervillain, take over the world making this music, wreaking revenge on the stuffy, inconveniently moral music establishment. Implanted with a Spotify-dominating chip by the maddest scientist going, and helped by a hand-picked, musically gifted, sidekick (controlled by her primary superpower, gaslighting) she’ll be unstoppable (for most of its runtime).²

Even that would be mild stuff compared with Poppy Playtime, a dark and twisted monster game popular with very little kids (I was introduced to it by the 6-year old daughter of a friend). There’s been a low-key moral panic about Poppy Playtime and some of its characters for a few years, with rumours of unhealthy playground games and “slenderman” type harms, and one more credibly creepy report: “In September 2022, El Observador reported that seven children at a school in Uruguay played a game based on Poppy Playtime that instructed them to commit self-harm using pencil sharpeners, with two being hospitalized as a result.”
Fan songs are mentioned in reports, and so far in my investigations these have been reliably terrible efforts, except for CG5’s ‘Mommy’s Here’, about the character Mommy Longlegs, which has the songcraft of a musical that I for one would find far more interesting than Wicked.
Parents of primary school-age kids take care, Metal fans take heart.

Joshua Minsoo Kim, the Pitchfork/Toneglow writer who turned me on to Mona Evie and V# + Larria, posted this screenshot last week with the comment “best new music”.

Now, JMK likes plenty of music, especially ambient and experimental music - slow music - much more than I do, but this ecumenical endorsement made his recommendation seem worth finding and checking out. And choke enough by Oklou does in fact combine a degree of ambient and experimental electronic slowness with pop texture and human content in a way that’s both new and pleasing.³

Imagine Camilla Cabello at her most Pink Pantheresque, produced by Brian Eno at his most Obscure. In fact, if Cabello (2024 pop’s AOTY here, don’t forget) cared about being a serious artist, she’d be Oklou.

Adolf Hitler, the poster child for indolent narcissism and the individual inferiority complex’s ability to ride to Hell in the mass superiority complex of ethnonationalism, made an appearance in a film Hayley and I rewatched recently, Jérôme Boivin’s Baxter (1989), the heartwarming disturbing story of a boy and his dog. 10/10 - the best films, the ones that never stop, are the ones that make perfect sense from their characters’ perspectives but which you the viewer, stuck in your individual human pointiness, can never fully understand.
The understated soundtrack (Marc Hillman, Patrick Roffé) caught my attention, especially the way the pan flutes and other surprise sounds in ‘Baxter’s Theme’ imitate Baxter’s ground-level world and the inferior creatures he shares it with.

Algorithmic Intermezzo - Jewels Of The Madonna, Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari (London Symphony Orchestra)

1. Kim Bullard, a LA session musician, is Katy Rose’s father - her mum sings some of those excellent BVs.

2. Tár fan-fiction originally inspired by Besomorph & Jurgaz’s ‘Barbarian’ remix, which plays over the film’s end credits. In the link, you’ll find the exact moment the track’s creator learned from some random’s comment that their music had been used in a very successful film.

3. There’s a song on choke enough called ‘Plague Dogs’, which also happens to be the name of this track from P.H.F.’s 2022 masterpiece Purest Hell. The reference is to the 1982 animated film The Plague Dogs, made by the team that made Watership Down. We’re watching it now. It’s good.