Fifth Harmony seem to have settled on a sound, and that sound is tropical-house&B bangers. It’s a bit like when The Saturdays were all “why have different sounds on our albums when we could just make massive rave bangers?” and they were right to make that choice. Tropical house isn’t as good a sound as generic rave, but it’s a good sound and works well for Fifth Harmony. Leads singles “Work from Home” and “The Life” are both breezy and summery, as is Vybz Kartel cover “Gonna Get Better.” There’s also a note-perfect Prince pastiche (with sadly #problematic lyrics and a slightly underwhelming Missy Elliott verse), “Not that Kinda Girl.” I think my favourite track, though, is a departure from their tropical house sound, the lovestoned “Dope,” that kind of reminds me of Kehlani. Read more↴
Supposedly, statistical studies of areas that have introduced abstinence-only sex education show that one of the most consistent effects is a marked increase in the numbers of teenagers having anal sex. I don’t know if this is true, but I hope it is, because it would be a great instance of the heteronormativity of these abstinence programs rebounding on itself. These programs involve saying “no” to a sex which is cast as necessarily involving a penis and a vagina, but the result of this obsessive negative focus on a heteronormative conception of sex might not be a rejection of sex, but a rejection of heteronormativity; a diffusion of sex into diverse and queerer forms. Read more↴
ANOHNI’s new album, Hopelessness, is absolutely staggering. I’m not very familiar with her previous work; I’m most familiar with her as an occasional collaborator with Björk, and indeed Hopelessness has some similarity to Björk, the combination of beautiful and challenging vocals with emotionally overwhelming beats and, for want of a better term, a great reach of conceptual ambition. I don’t think it’s controversial to say that most music that foregrounds its politics is rubbish, often because of bad politics, but overwhelmingly because of a lack of interest in the politics of aesthetics, that is, a lack of thought about what kind of political world might be created by the aesthetic effects of music. It’s in this aesthetic dimension that Hopelessness is so impressive. Take “4 degrees” as a case in point: a song about climate change in which the music conjures up the terrifying and awe-inspiring reality of the destruction being wrought by climate change. But more than that, the song is aware that this effect is, specifically, an aesthetic effect; that we can take pleasure in this apparition of self-destruction. The political effect of making us feel that ambivalence is devastating. Read more↴
New Charli XCX! And it’s fabulous, the kind of insouciant pop banger Charli XCX does so well. Most importantly, it’s a hell of a lot better than her last track, “Vroom Vroom,” which was fucking garbage. Her last EP was produced by Sophie, and was the kind of half-assed lazy shit that has come to characterize him and his PC Music mates. It’s instructive to compare PC Music’s slapdash product with the genuine insouciance of Charli XCX’s work, or, even more so, Rihanna’s Anti. Just as making sad music doesn’t just involve the unmediated recording of sadness, so the perfect representation of Rihanna’s no-fucks-given instagram attitude on Anti isn’t achieved by just not giving a fuck: it requires some sort of thought, craft, or practice that adds up to the sublation of not giving a fuck. The problem with PC Music’s artless recycling of 90s post-modern cliches about pop music is that it pays no attention to this dialectic. To be fair, some of the tracks on Vroom Vroom were better than the title track; “Paradise” suggests that if Sophie stopped dicking about and put in a bit of effort, he could make fair-to-middling happy hardcore. Read more↴
