Mixtapemotions

  • “Say It Right” by Nelly Furtado ft. Timbaland, Saturday, May 21, 2022

    After a commercially-failed sophomore record, Folklore, which was more personal to the Portuguese-Canadian pop singer than her debut record, Whoa, Nelly!, Nelly Furtado worked with producer Timbaland to go big with Loose. Furtado had tried to take her listeners on an artistic journey into her Portuguese heritage on Folklore. Loose, however, brings back the hip-hop beats and sets the formerly ascendent star back into orbit, at least for one more album. This is not to say that Furtado wasn’t artistic on her third record.
     

    YOU DON’T MEAN NOTHING AT ALL TO ME. The artistic concept behind Loose is referred to in its double-entendre of a title. In Rolling Stone Furtado talked about how the production used in making the album was one of the reasons for titling it. The title also has to do with a celebration of female sexuality, Furtado bringing a sex-positive attitude in ‘06 when the noughties were heating up. Loose was an international hit, marketing different singles to different countries based on the genre of that track if it matched what was well-received in that country.  One of the biggest songs in the U.S., “Promiscuous,” wasn’t released in several countries in Europe where hip-hop tracks failed to chart. In Latin America and in Spain, “Te Basque” featuring international superstar Juanes topped the charts. In the song “No Hay Igual,” Furtado sings in Spanish and raps in Portuguese. Today’s song, “Say It Right,” though, was an international number one hit due to its rhythmic hip-hop beat, but sung, rather than rapped, lyrics. The song is based on Eurythmics’ “Here Comes the Rain Again.” Furtado, who wrote the song, claims she doesn’t know exactly what the lyrics mean to her, but rather they are based on her feeling about a time in her life.

    THERE’S A HOLE IN THE PLAN. Today an Instagram video—maybe a cat dancing or something stupid—sent me on a pop nostalgia trip back to the ‘00s. In 2006, I wasn’t listening to Nelly Furtado’s comeback. It was pretty much only rock and classical at that time, and my second pop phase started in about ‘09. I think I remember seeing Nelly Furtado had come back and I shook my head, like many of her critics, that she had sold out and had gone too sexual. Furtado had been part of my first pop phase. I kind of had a crush on her and thought her first album was interesting. The DJ disc scratching in “Turn Off the Lights” reminded me of “Drive” by Incubus. A few years ago, I revisited Whoa, Nelly!  and checked out Loose as well. I didn’t think much of it until I was listening to the Labeled podcast about Underoath’s Define the Great Line and learned that Loose beat that record for the number one spot on the Billboard album charts. Underoath’s debuting at number two was a shock and a testament to how many Christian and non-Christian heavy music buyers there were at the time. Still any big production, big promotion pop record probably would have beaten the Underoath record, in this case it happened to be Nelly Furtado, of whom the podcasters said, came out nowhere with an unexpected hit record. Today’s song reminds me that there have been parallel worlds happening throughout my life. Back in ‘06 I was watching Underoath on TVU, but in 2022 I’m enjoying Loose and Underoath. It’s always fun to discover something old and think about how old you were and what you were doing when that thing came out.

  • “You Are Familiar” by Secret & Whisper (update), Friday, May 20, 2022

    Formed after British Colombian Nu-metal band Stutterfly‘s lead singer left the band, Secret & Whisper incorporated the high-registering vocals of Charles Furney (then Finn) with their speed metal guitar riffs. Furney cites The Smashing Pumpkins as one of his influences, and the band is often compared to Saosin or Circa Survive. In fact, a rumor circulated that Charles had left Secret & Whisper and joined Saosin after their lead singer Cove Reber left the group. In 2008, Secret & Whisper released their album Great White Whale on Tooth & Nail Records, touring with Emery and Maylene and the Sons of Disaster. The band’s follow up album in 2010, Teenage Fantasy, was their final record, with three members starting the post-hardcore band, Shreddy Krueger. 

    A SILENT FIGURE, A VAPOR THAT LOOMS BEYOND. The lyrics of Great White Whale are inspired by Moby Dick combine with Furney’s dreams and experiences. While tapping into the motif of loneliness in Melville’s tome, Great White Whale explores the vast and mysterious world of the sea. The musical tone and lyrics paint pictures that you almost feel washed up on the shore like a nautilus’s shell. In an interview with Charles Furney, he explains the meanings behind his songs. Furney talks about his Christianity and the supernatural, including his family being haunted by the ghost of his deceased brother. Both Great White Whale and Teenage Fantasy rely on the supernatural, whether ghosts, sea monsters, or Native American spirits, and deal very little with the Christian tradition. Great White Whale opens with the short atmospheric “Blonde Monster” and leads into “You Are Familiar.” Both tracks were based on a recurring dream after a break up of a seven-year relationship, in which Furney meets a faceless figure. Furney’s reaction to the dream was fascination rather than fear. He interpreted the dream as he hadn’t met the love of his life yet and her face would eventually be filled in when he met her. To me, Great White Whale encapsulates the summer of 2008, the year I turned 21, bought my second used Toyota Corolla, went drove to Cornerstone, learned to appreciate the hilarious and misunderstood novel Moby Dick, and annoyed the passengers in my car with the screechy vocals of Charles Furney and Secret & Whisper.

    BOTH OF US ARE CURIOUS. In February of this year, Secret & Whisper’s Instragram account was resurrected. In the time since, the band has posted videos of rehearsing songs from their first two records. As a band with 21,000+ Spotify listeners despite only having two albums that are over ten years old, there are still fans that could make this speed metal guitar band big again. There is a theory that no bands ever really break up. In fact many of the bands that broke up due to financial hardships from the 2008 recession are getting back together. But fans have questions. Is the newly reformed Secret & Whisper only playing old music or is there a third record on the way? Will the band lean into their Christian or Shamanist roots, or both? How will their lyrical content mature? If they release music, will it be independent, through Tooth & Nail, or another label? Will they stick to their old speed metal guitar sound or incorporate new elements or will they lean into the screaming of Shreddy Krueger? I think all of the fans from the late ’00s and early ’10s are curious.

    “Blonde Monster” + “You Are Familiar”
    “You Are Familiar”



  • "Without You" by Lana Del Rey, Thursday, May 19, 2022 (Trigger Warning: Discussion of Domestic Abuse)

    In Lana Del Rey‘s first interview with Zane Lowe, she talked about her inspiration for the 2012 record, Born to Die. She talks about the collaboration between her, hip-hop producer Emile Haynie, and string arranger Larry Gold to create an album that sounds classic and fresh. Although Del Rey has moved away from the Brooklyn-style hip-hop beats in albums after Born to Die, the album still feels relevant ten years later. In fact, when Pitchfork re-examined the record last year, the review bumped the score from 5.5 to 7.8. While pop cynics may argue that music has gotten worse rather than being misunderstood at the time, the young adult escapism, the post-modern life she sings about makes more sense among the younger artists Del Rey influenced such as Lorde and Billie Eilish. 

    I EVEN THINK I FOUND GOD. “Without You” appears as the thirteenth track on the Target Bonus Tracks edition of Born to Die. The album’s standard edition ends with “This Is What Makes Us Girls,” a semi-autobiographical song about when Del Rey was sent off to boarding school to straighten up. Will all of the songs of Born to Die would eventually find a home on streaming services, Del Rey’s fandom started at the tail end of physical releases. Del Rey’s 2012 pop star persona was just gimmicky enough to thrust the singer into a cult level of fandom. While the indie scene obsesses over authenticity, Del Rey offers a carefully cultivated, manufactured image. Appearing on the scene like a highly-vetted industry plant, as people said of pop stars like Britney Spears, and Lana Del Rey in 2012 was a satire of what a pop star is. But this satire is more in the vein that some critics call The Great Gatsby a satire of the roaring ’20s. Del Rey’s use of satire is contemporary and often over-the-top. In this satirical world, she shows us that alcohol, drugs, sex, and a search for a deeper meaning link us to our grandparents’ time. 

    LIVED ON THE DARK SIDE OF THE AMERICAN DREAM. Today’s song, “Without You,” is a B-side from Born to Die, and if it were cut, most of the themes and motifs exist in the album without this additional chapter. But Born to Die is far from a cohesive concept record or a rock opera. What “Without You” does after “This Is What Makes Us Girls” reflects on the themes presented in Born to Die. Del Rey has spent the whole album talking about the “bad man” she falls in love with. He’s a type of unhealthy, often sexist, sometimes violent, virile man who makes a girl like Del Rey weak in the knees. This is one major point of contention with the singer-songwriter as many have called her music anti-feminist, glamorizing abusive relationships. The singer also has a slew of controversial statements from social media and interviews. In “Without You,” Del Rey also sings about being fragile “like a china doll.” She finds her worth through him and by being so beautiful that she is adored by “the lights of the camera” where she even thinks she “found God.” The speaker has become part of the old-time glitterati. The line that sticks out the most to me, though, is the commentary about “the dark side of the American Dream.” Del Rey was clearly influenced by American literature when novelists such as F. Scott Fitzgerald set out to write the definitive American novel and ultimately solidified American literature. What the American novel strives for is to define what the American Dream is. Fitzgerald shows that even with all of the wealth that Jay Gatsby acquires, he can’t have the one thing that he wants. And while not all Americans want a brutish hunk, as listeners may think that’s all that Del Rey wants, I can’t help but think that the superficial glamour of Del Rey’s lyrics which harken back to A Street Car Named Desire’s toxic masculinity and strict ’50s-gender roles is a Stepford Wives or Twilight Zone level of satire. But I could be wrong.

  • “Dead Weight” by Pvris, Wednesday, May 18, 2022

    Following the singles “Hallucinations” and “Death of Me” from the band’s EP Hallucinations, Pvris released the single “Dead Weight” from the third album Use Me. The band has talked extensively about their new sound, moving from a conventional female-fronted rock band to, well, how would you classify Pvris? Each song on Use Me could fit into the genre of Alternative, one of the loosest genre descriptions today. Whether it’s the programed drums, the pop hooks, the noisy guitars, or the throbbing bass, Pvris is now a rock-inspired dark pop band, or duo as of now.
    TAKING WINGS OFF A GODDESS. Of course music doesn’t need to be neatly classified. I spend a lot of time thinking about what gets classified as Alternative, though, and it makes me think that my definition that I coined back in the early ’00s was correct. At that time, I began to see rock bands that incorporating instruments and electronic programing that had not been in rock music before. There were groups like Linkin Park, Evanescence, and Incubus carrying the torch of a new sounds. Alternative music wasn’t driven by a heavy guitar, but rather the guitar was added as embellishment. I viewed P.O.D.‘s only Top 40 hit “Youth of the Nation” as an example of Alternative Rock. Rather than power chords driving the song, it’s a hip-hop influenced beat with a guitar picking single notes which are held over the measure. Sure, this definition didn’t explain the early ’90s grunge acts (Nirvana) that are Alternative Rock classics or the punk-rock influenced bands the genre (Weezer or Green Day), but the diversity of these bands and how they expand the Alternative genre with other musical genres is another component to my definition. Put simply, Alternative is rock-based music that has, in some cases, evolved beyond the guitar.

    DEAD WEIGHT HANGING OVER MY SHOULDER. “Dead Weight” is certainly one of the more straight-forward rock songs on Use Me. The song opens with a noisy guitar solo to which lead singer Lynn Gunn sings over. The song reminds me of the dreaded school assignment when the teacher says, “break up into groups,” and doesn’t monitor any of the students’ division of labor. Some of the students end up taking on the entire project, while the “dead weight” students do nothing. Like the “Hallucinations,” the video for “Dead Weight” was created by YHELLOW, a visual production company. In a typical Pvris fashion, the video for “Dead Weight” is trippy and even grotesque. It seems equal parts horror movie and redneck party song. The video depicts lead singer Lynn Gunn at the wheel of an old truck or possibly a hearse. Bassist Brian MacDonald sits, appearing wasted in the passenger seat and several women appear in the middle bench seat between Gunn and MacDonald, and these passengers seem quite inebriated. The video flashes to party sequences, dancing in a ghoulish ball, and eventually the guests, all members who were in the truck, begin snacking on Gunn’s brain, illustrating the lyric “All give, no take,” at its logical conclusion. What’s the dead weight you have to get off of your shoulder? 
     

    Lyric video:

    Lynn’s solo acoustic:

    Live:

    Official video:


  • “Winning It All” by The Outfield, Tuesday, May 17, 2022

    Signed to Columbia/CBS Records  in 1984 under the “tacky” and “tongue-in-cheek” moniker The Baseball Boys, the London-based band quickly changed their name to The Outfield. The band’s chief lyricist and guitarist John Spinks got the idea for a baseball-themed band when watched the movie The Warriors. The band’s American manager convinced the band to change their name. Spinks was a fan of both American sports, particularly baseball and football because those sports were “far more business, far more spectacle, than British sports.” The “American-sounding band” found their earliest success in America, not the U.K., starting with 1985’s hit “Your Love.”


    NO SECOND CHANCE, NO GIVING UP. The Outfield has a string of hits after “Your Love” between 1985 and 1990, but their popularity faded with the rest of the New Wavers. Most of their album titles are named after baseball references, starting with their debut Play Deep. However, there were a few notable exceptions. Today’s song Rockeye, named after the CBU-100 Cluster Bomb. Today’s song “Winning It All” was featured in NBC‘s NBA Finals from 1992-1996 and it was also heard in the end credits of Disney’s 1992 film The Mighty Ducks. Beyond those inclusions, no song was a hit from the album in America or the U.K. “Winning It All” opens the album. In 1992, the band had dwindled into a duo, with only bassist and lead vocalist Tony Lewis and John Spinks playing the guitars and keyboards on the record. There’s something beautifully cheesy as the late ’80s/early ’90s keyboard plays at the beginning of the song. It feels like a song in a sports film. The vocabulary in the song is simple: it’s about winners and losers. It sounds like a team rally when the game has been postponed for a rain shower, and the home team (The Outfield’s team) is down a few points, and as they meet in the locker room, in uniforms soaked in sweat and rainwater, the captain of the baseball team (the lead singer) gives a speech, persuading the players to do their best after the rain lets up.
    NO ONE REMEMBERS A LOSER. I’m not a big sports fan. I found playing sports when I was a kid to be humiliating. Being raised Seventh-day Adventist living among many non-Adventists meant playing sports conflicted with the Sabbath, so I never really tried. Very rarely do my musical tastes overlap with sports. The stereotype is that there are sports guys and music guys in high school, and they only mix when the hunky captain of the football team plays guitar. There are a few musicians like NEEDTOBREATHE and Tyler Ward who have football backgrounds. But we have to discuss baseball with today’s band. I remember discovering The Outfield because my dad said that Anberlin reminded him of that band. I began listening to the ’80s post punk and New Wavers to see how they influenced the music of my day. Two years ago, apart from thinking about how Trump’s rhetoric sounded like a sports team and this song reminded me of Trump from time to time, I also was taken by how much Acceptance‘s “Cold Air” sounds similar to The Outfield’s ’80s/’90s vocal production and harmonies. So, while jock-rock isn’t always to my liking, I can appreciate how The Outfield influenced my favorite bands. And that’s worth a cheesy sports cliché once in a while, right?

  • “The Wind” by The Fray, Monday, May 16, 2022

    After The Fray‘s eponymous second record, they recorded their third album, Scars & Stories with legendary producer Brenden O’Brien. Lead singer Isaac Slade stated that he admired O’Brien’s work with Pearl Jam and Bruce Springsteen, and hoped to create a record that was closer to their live show experience. The album was released in February of 2012, receiving mixed reviews. Critics praised O’Brian’s production, but they were getting tired of The Fray and mid-tempo pop-rock bands. 


    I SEE THE EMPIRE FALLING TO HER KNEES. Scars & Stories had a promising first week, selling 87,000 copies and debuting at #4 on Billboard’s 200 Album charts. The band promoted two singles: “Heartbeat” and “Run for Your Life.” The former barely missed the Top 40, charting only at #42, and the later only charted in Australia and on the Adult Pop Songs chart in America. While The Fray’s songs may come across as unoriginal, Scars & Stories perhaps suffered from music listeners’ shortening attention spans and the growing trend of flashy electronic pop music. What should have been recognized as songwriting growth instead was cast aside for the novel and the flashy. Personal conflicts are the backdrop of the lyrical content on this album. Over the course of their career both lead singer Isaac Slade and guitarist Joe King both dealt with marital conflicts, with the guitarist’s 12-year marriage ending in divorce before the release of the album. But rather than being a “divorce record,” Slade and King took inspiration from conflicts around the world to create a tension in the album reflecting personal matters. 

    WILL THE WIND EVER COME AGAIN?  Scars & Stories’ lead single “Heartbeat” takes inspiration from the band’s travels and stories they heard about The Rwanda Genocide in the ’90s. The follow-up single “Run for Your Life” tells a fictional story and deals the concept of survivor’s guilt. The song “1961” deals with two brothers in conflict and references the Berlin Wall. “The Wind,” today’s song,  deals directly with Joe King’s divorce directly. King married his high school sweetheart at 19, and raised two daughters. But after seven years, the couple divorced. The lyrics of “The Wind” deal with instability. King told the Toronto Sun that King began to write “The Wind” during his darkest moments. He said, “My marriage ended and it was the last day of everything. I just went home and had no answer and no clue where the hell I was in life.” However months later, he was able to gain some perspective on the situation. Today’s song isn’t the gloomiest The Fray song, and even has a bit of optimism. King goes on to say: “It was good to have that perspective a few months later on the emotion of it, going from that heavy of a place to seeing some light and the future.” I think today’s song and its parent album are great for dealing with turbulence. One, it’s good to look at others’ suffering to help us not feel alone and put our suffering in perspective and even offer empathy when we can. But two, it helps us to remember that it will get better. It won’t stay the same. The wind may toss you around, but it won’t last forever.

  • “Cannons” by The Hawk in Paris, Sunday, May 15, 2022

    When you’re the lead singer to one of the biggest Christian Rock acts of all time and you want to start a new, completely different musical project, what do you do? In 2009 Dan Haseltine came up with a new electronic pop concept. Unlike the beginning of their career, Haseltine’s other band Jars of Clay was becoming more and more boxed into the Contemporary Christian scene. The band played churches and had  a guaranteed income from fans. However, when Haseltine gathered together two of his friends, Nashville CCM/ Country producer and multi-instrumentalist Jeremey Bose and former Jars of Clay guitarist Matt Bronleewe forming the group The Hawk in Paris, Haseltine was free to go in whatever lyrical direction he wanted to. 

    IF YOU LEAVE ME NOW, YOU’LL LEAVE ME BETTER THAN I WAS BEFORE. Taking their name from a 1957 album by saxophonist Coleman Hawkins, The Hawk in Paris is Dan Haseltine’s experimentation with pop music. According to Halestine when he talked with Frank Jenks on the Listen In podcast, the singer-songwriter was reacting to what he thought was superficiality and over-sexualization in pop music, which arguably has gotten worse in 2022. The Hawk in Paris released their first EP in 2011 His + Hers and their only full length, Freaks, was released in 2013. The band released two more singles after Freaks, “Frozen Heart” in 2015 and “Dream with You” in 2016, and haven’t been heard from since. Although the head-scratching lyrics on the eponymous song “Freaks” (“Boys and the girls and the freaks in the middle”) may not have aged well, today’s song, “Cannons,” examines conflict that escalates between a loved one. It’s the conflicts that arise that turn love to hate. It’s the intelligence gathered when the loved one was most vulnerable. What used to be a tool for good, now is a weapon for harm. 

    MUST BE BITTERSWEET TO BELIEVE SOME HALF-HEARTED TRUCE. “Cannons” explores a war metaphor as both sides have come to a truce. The war may be over, but now the relationship can go one of two ways: it can heal or end. Haseltine admits, “If you leave me now, you leave me better than I was before,” acknowledging the good that person has left on the speaker. He leaves the decision up to the other party. As far as I know, Haseltine doesn’t cite a specific conflict that “Cannons” is about. It could be about a marriage or a business decision. The universality of music allows us to apply a song about a marriage to a business conflict and vice versa. Career musicians often have conflicts with people they trust the most, whether it’s bandmates, producers, label executives, or others who establish a longstanding relationship with a band and are invested in their success. But when those relationships go awry, the cannons come out. Everything that was said is used as a weapon. Sometimes the conflict goes to court and an outside party has to resolve the conflict. Does that solve the problem? Rarely. Today’s song talks about the merits of simply walking away from the conflict. Empty your cannons, spill your ammo. Surrender. You win. What’s next?


  • “Siren” by Taeyeon, Saturday, May 14, 2022

    Last summer, Taeyeon released her first single from the album she released on Valentine’s Day this year, INVU. The disco-infused lead single, “Weekend,” wasn’t completely indicative of the album’s style. With a variety of ballads, house, and dance songs, INVU is a solid third record from the now legendary former Girls’ Generation vocalist. Today’s song, “Siren,” is a power ballad located as track 6 of a 13-song album.

    It’s a song about an unhealthy relationship that beckons the speaker to stay in it. Ultimately does she dive in or get out of the water?

       


    An ancient painting of sirens in 
    The Odyssey. Source.

    CRUEL FANTASY. Today’s song, “Siren,” uses the image of a mythical creature from ancient Greek and Roman legends. Creatures with a beautiful song that lure sailors to perilous shallow, rocky waters appear in Homer’s The Odyssey. In book 12, Circe advises Odysseus not to listen to their “honey-sweet tones” that “bewitch everybody who approaches them.” But the cunning Greek epic hero takes the warning as a challenge. He asks his crew to cover plug their ears with wax and to tie him to the ship’s mast so that he won’t take the ship to land. From those lines in the epic poem and from the mythology itself, sirens seem to be a symbol for sexual pleasure that is the final step that took a “reasonably good man” into sexual depravity. In antiquity, sirens were depicted as either bird-like or mermaid-like creatures. Some have said that the myth of the sirens was really the low visibility at sea and the yelps of sea-lions, and a bit of hallucination, seeing a something on the rocks through the mists. 

    Starbucks logo depicts a double-tailed siren. 
    Image source.

    EVEN IF WE KISS EACH OTHER FOREVER. Siren myths appear in literature and culture throughout the ages. Starbucks’ logo is perhaps one of the most common examples in our everyday lives. Siren mythology appears in Anberlin’s “Take Me As You Found Me,” a song about a divorced couple who are still love each other. A siren (or mermaid) appears in Copeland’s video for “I Can Make You Feel Young Again,” dragging the fisherman to the bottom of the lake. But the word siren in English doesn’t usually bring the mythical creature to mind in everyday conversations. Instead, we think of the mournful, high-pitched sounds related to an emergency: a fire, a bank robbery, a tornado, missiles launched. Are the two words related? It seems that we started using siren to describe the sound of steam ships as late as 1879. The usage of the word migrated to land and it now sounds like the intro to Anberlin’s “Hello Alone.” Plugging the etymology back into today’s song, Taeyeon describes a magnetism to an unhealthy relationship. He’s a siren beckoning her to the dangerous rocks. She hears the warning siren, others can see that there’s danger. What happens? Is there an ambulance chase? Is it a fifty-car pileup that causes a collision in the other direction? Or does she sail away? 

    Read the Lyrics on Genius.

    Lyric video in Korean, Romanization, and English:

    Behind the scenes:

    Music Video:

  • “When I Grow Up” (The Pussycat Dolls cover) by Mayday Parade, Friday, May 13, 2022

    Fun, pretentious, novelty, inauthentic. Call it what you want, but Fearless Records‘ Punk Goes… series has been around for a while. Punk purists will point out that the compilations are made up of mid-tier Emo, Pop-Punk, and Post-Hardcore bands, rather than real punk bands. While music people may debate what is really punk, Fearless Records helped to solidify a punk-rock-inspired scene starting with their first release Punk Goes Metal in 2000. Punk Goes Pop followed in 2002. After releasing several other compilations, Punk Goes Pop 2 was released in 2009. 

    BOYS CALL YOU SEXY. Today’s song comes from the Los Angeles burlesque-turned-mainstream pop act  The Pussycat Dolls. Founded by choreographer Robin Antin in 1995, and performing at The Viper Room on Thursday nights in the ’90s, the group’s lineup fluctuated before Antin decided to take her group to the radio. Former Dolls included Christina Applegate, Christina Aguilera, and Carmen Electra. The original concept was simple: beautiful women singing standards from the ’50s and ’60s in lingerie. Playboy reported on the burlesque act in 1999 and several of the dancers posed semi-nude for that feature. But as a pop group, choreographer and manager Antin settled on a six-girl lineup and released their first single, “Sway,” for the 2005 film Shall We Dance?  The group released their full-length debut PCD the following year, which featured hits like “Don’t Cha” and “Stickwitu.” In 2008, The Dolls released their second album, Doll Domination,  which features today’s song “When I Grow Up,” a song about being young and craving fame. 

    WE ALL WANNA BE FAMOUS. Mayday Parade is a band from Tallahassee, Florida, founded in 2005. Today they are a staple in the Pop-Punk/Emo scene, cutting their teeth on Warped Tour and touring with the who’s who of that scene. With their mellower, at times piano-driven pop punk, the band is a frequent contributor to the Punk Goes… series. And while music critics pan the Punk Goes… series it’s certainly fun hipster music. It’s fun to hear how Alternative rockers interpret good and not-s0- good source material. Is there screaming on a Britney Spears song? Is there a gender-bender? Is there an interesting guitar or instrument? Or is it just a whacky way to interpret a pop song? I have to say that The Pussycat Dolls were totally off of my radar, and I didn’t even know the original version of this song until I heard Mayday Parade’s cover. Along with Weird Al‘s inclusion of “Don’t Cha” in his 2006 “Polkarama!” medley, Mayday Parade’s version of “When I Grow Up” gets stuck in my head from time to time. But unlike Weird Al’s bizarre take on “Don’t Cha,” Mayday Parade’s song can make sense–Motley Crüe level of rockstar decadence. Of course, Mayday Parade with its 2 million monthly listeners is far from being household names. Maybe the age of rock star rock stars is over, but this song is a fun reminder that if we wish it, it could come true. So be careful.

    Read the lyrics on Genius.

    Original version:

    Cover: 

  • “Watermelon Sugar,” by Harry Styles, Thursday, May 12, 2022

    Released as a single in May of 2020, the second track on Harry Styles‘ Fine Line, “Watermelon Sugar” was bound to be a hit. The song was saved as the fourth single from Fine Line after the more wintery singles, “Lights Up,” “Adore You,” and “Falling.” Fine Line was already massive before “Watermelon Sugar.” It currently holds the record for the biggest sales week of a solo male British singer. And while Styles’ rock-influenced eponymous first solo record also topped Billboard‘s album sales, Fine Line packs a more memorable punch. And it’s that sugary, sweet sound that landed the album in Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Albums of All Time.”
    TASTES LIKE STRAWBERRIES. If the world had been normal in 2020, “Watermelon Sugar” would have simply been a tasty treat. The pop charts would still have its TikTokers and Doja Cats. He’d still contend with Olivia Rodrigo, and maybe Sam Smith‘s dark pop album, To Die For, which was later changed to Life Goes, and Lady Gaga‘s Chromatica would have resinated with a non-Covid world. But “Watermelon Sugar” topped Billboard’s Hot 100 in August of 2021, the first Styles single to achieve that feat. The video was filmed in January of 2020 and released in May after being delayed because of the pandemic. The video opens with the words: “this video is dedicated to touching.” And there is a lot of touching in the video, starting with Styles touching a slice of watermelon provocatively. The video is highly stylized, mimicking ’60s colored film at times. Styles is wearing Gucci‘s Summer 2020 collection, and he is surrounded by bikini-clad models. Everyone looks like they’re having a good time in the summer sun on the beach, enjoying watermelon, getting sticky-wet. And with all of the touching that happens in the video dedicated to touching, the models expressed how careful Styles was to gain consent before touching them. 

    I JUST WANT TO TASTE IT. “Watermelon Sugar” is a sensuous song. Watching the video and listening to the song you can’t help but feel the dripping of sticky fruit juice petering on your chin and falling on your white shirt. I think I felt a strong discomfort to this song when it came out. Yuck. Be more discreet. Don’t eat like a child. Of course, no one didn’t see that this song was really about sex. But more than it is about sex or a specific act, I think it’s about liberation–feeling comfortable enough in your own skin to be seen as dirty without shame. It plays into the aesthetic ’60s era Styles is capturing in the sights and sounds of the single. Styles says that the song was partially inspired by the 1968 post-apocalyptic  novel In Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan. The novel is set around a narrator who escapes from a commune to collect “forbidden things.” Having not read the novel, I wonder if there are any deep connections with the ’60s psychedelic, counter culture movement as shown in the novel and Harry Styles’ Fine Line sundry aesthetic. But the theme of “forbidden things” is one that I explore a lot in my blog. Growing up pretty repressed and closeted, expressions of sexuality, both hetero- and homo- caused great embarrassment. I always felt that I was the only one like me and that I had to hide my true feelings about almost everything. But as we get older, we start to care much less about what other people think about us. Yes, we still use napkins, but when you’re at a beach party with your loved one(s), you can let the juices drip down your chin.

     Live at the Grammy’s:

    Official Video: