Mixtapemotions

  • “Heather” by Conan Gray, Wednesday, October 11, 2023

     

    Conan Gray released his debut album, Kid Krow, in 2020. The album entered Billboard’s 200 Album chart at number 5, the highest position for a debut artist in 2020. But artists with such a successful debut rarely come out of nowhere. Gray began uploading his songs to YouTube in 2013 when he was 15. His channel gained many followers for his vlogs about everyday life growing up in Texas; however, eventually he began writing and recording music in 2017.


    I STILL REMEMBER THE THIRD OF DECEMBER. California-born and Texas-raised on a musical diet of Taylor Swift, Lorde, and Lana Del Rey, Teen Vogue called Conan Gray “the pop prince for sad internet teens.” Republic Records signed Gray based on his online presence and the streaming success of his early singles. The singer performed on Late Night with Seth Meyers in 2019 and later opened for Panic! at the Disco’ Pray for the Wicked Tour on a few dates. Kid Krow was promoted by two singles: “Maniac,” which “bubbled under the Hot 100” at 125. The song was a top 100 hit internationally in Europe, Australia, and Korea. But the single “Heather” was Gray’s first, and so far only, Hot 100 single. The song is Gray’s most-streamed song with over 1 Billion plays since its 2020 release. 

    IT’S JUST POLYESTER. Born to an American father in the U.S. military and a Japanese mother, Conan Gray moved nine times in his early childhood due to his father’s job and his parents divorce when he was three. Gray says that he was bullied when he was in school for being “girlish.” Gray hasn’t disclosed his sexuality and has even used both men and women as love interests in his music videos. He tweeted, calling out listeners who speculated about his sexuality: “If labels on sexuality and gender and beliefs and all that great stuff are helpful for [yo]u, I’m all for it. But the second you start trying to shove everyone else into a neat little easy to understand box, I get mad. Stop!” Today’s song, “Heather,” deals with the speaker, a male, falling in love with a girl, who seems to like the speaker. But ultimately, the speaker loses his interest to the perfect girl, Heather. According to Gray, the song is based on a real-life experience of losing someone to a girl named Heather.  He explains to Genius: “I hated Heather with all of my heart and soul. I had no reason to hate Heather. Heather is a perfectly nice girl. She’s sweet and she’s pure and she smells like daisies—she’s perfect, but I hate her.” He also made the comment: “I think everyone has a Heather.” Today’s song is interesting because it’s so open with gender/sexual fluidity, and everyone knows the feeling of being rejected, whether in a gay/straight/bi/pan/etc. situation by someone who is literally you in an upgraded form.

  • "Dead Flowers (Resurrected)" by Demon Hunter, Tuesday, October 10, 2023 + Alternate Versions Playlist

    Today we’re listening to a few alternate versions of some groups we have heard in this blog. It’s short and eclectic, but will serve as a list to grow for later. Acoustic for the meaning of this playlist is loose. The instrumentation may be altered, re-recorded. In the case of the Demon Hunter song, “Dead Flowers” (Resurrected), the band recorded the ’80s-styled power metal ballad with strings, without an electric guitar solo, and with bagpipes at the end. Enjoy the mix!



  • “Walking in My Shoes” by Depeche Mode, Monday, October 9, 2023

    In 1985, Depeche Mode called their sound industrial pop. The group had similar pop aspirations as synth-pop groups that littered the ’80s music scene, but there is certainly a difference between the band’s early and later discography. This is partly due to the departure of keyboardist Vince Clark who left the band after their first album to form the electronic group Erasure. When the band from  Basildon, England, debuted in 1980, they started in the new wave scene that was breaking worldwide, including in America. Their earlier albums are often classified as synth-pop and garnered modest hits in Britain and America. 


    FORBIDDEN FRUITS FOR ME TO EAT. The dark sounds of later Depeche Mode gave the band their biggest hits. The band’s minor hit career in America started with 1984’s “People Are People,” the band’s first entry to Billboard’s Hot 100. The song became an anti-war Soviet-era anthem as well as an LGBTQ+ pride song. The band got darker on a single later in 1985 with “Master and Servant,” a song alluding to a BDSM relationship. After “People Are People” until 1990, Depeche Mode’s singles fared better on Billboard’s newly introduced Modern Rock chart, later renamed Alternative Airplay. It was the dark sound in the band’s music and lyrics that pushed them to stand out from contemporaries in synth-pop like Pet Shop Boys and Duran Duran. Depeche Mode took their place in a pantheon of mostly British bands that dominated the Modern Rock sound of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s before grunge and post-grunge took over in the early to mid-90s.


    I’M NOT LOOKING FOR ABSOLUTION. Depeche Mode’s peak was in 1990 with the release of their seventh album, Violator, which brought the band back to the Top 40 with the album’s lead single “Personal Jesus,” released several months before the album’s release. The band then beat their peak of 13 for “People Are People” with the 1990 number 8 hit, “Enjoy the Silence.” The band’s next album, Songs of Faith and Devotion, released in 1993, also produced hits with the lead single “I Feel You” topped Alternative Airplay for three weeks, and today’s song “Walking in My Shoes” topped the chart for a week. The band’s impact on the Top 40 had started to wane with “Walking in My Shoes” only reaching number 69 and the lead singles from subsequent albums reaching only the lower rungs of the Top 40.  Depeche Mode’s lyrics have been called blasphemous as the band often takes religious imagery to repurpose it for social and political messaging. But listening back to Depeche Mode, especially after hearing Anberlin’s cover of “Enjoy the Silence,” it seems that the tension between the religious and the secular is a major part of Anberlin’s lyrics. Whereas U2 may be called the band that brought faith mainstream, I think that Depeche Mode’s lyrics introduce a nuance that has us challenging our deep-seated biases.






     


    Read the lyrics on Genius. 

     

  • “Substance” by Demi Lovato, Sunday, October 8, 2023

     

    To say that Demi Lovato has been on a journey is an understatement. Following the singer’s 2018 overdose and rehab, the singer has been deconstructing the meaning of fame and sexual identity and where her/their story fits into those themes. Along the way the singer came out as non-binary, using they/them pronouns, but earlier this year, the singer decided to use she/her pronouns after feeling exhausted trying to educate others about the singer’s identity. But last year the signer released an album on which she processes  this journey. And of course, HOLY FVCK had its own dose of controversy.


    IS ANYBODY DRIVING? A cover depicting the singer lying tied up on a bed shaped like a cross and a title called HOLY FVCK caused the UK’s Advertising Standards Agency to ban the poster promoting the album and the tour. The cover of the album harkens back to ‘80s “satanic panic” metal album covers and gives listeners a preview of the musical styles the album would contain. The album cycle began in January 2022 when Demi Lovato announced on Instagram that the singer had performed a “funeral” for her old pop music. The post included Lovato giving two middle fingers. The songs on HOLY FVCK are all in the style of pop punk or hard rock, and the darker music serves as a vehicle to express the singer’s anger towards a religious upbringing, being taken advantage of by the industry, and processing sexual identity. Lavoto had gone into explicit detail in two documentaries, 2017’s Simply Complicated and 2021’s Dancing with the Devil, but HOLY FVCK is a processing of those themes in musical form.

    DON’T WANNA END UP IN A CASKET, HEAD FULL OF MAGGOTS. “Substance” was the second single from HOLY FVCK. The song didn’t chart on Billboard’s Hot 100, only on the Alternative charts. Demi Lovato had been a rock adjacent artist even early in her career, but a collaboration with Fall Out Boy in 2015 on the single “Irresistible” seemed to set the singer on a path towards her current trajectory. In the song “Substance,” Lavato employs the double meaning of the word substance. The primary meaning of the word in the song is the search for something real. But in her search for substance, Lovato turned to drugs, another substance that  “only left [her] high, lonely and loveless.” The music video is influenced by anarchist punk rock. The focus on breaking feels purely emotional in the video, rather than a planned attack on the system. This is not to say that Lovato is incapable or hasn’t even already organized some kind revenge on the system. I will be interested to see what Lovato comes up with in the future. But for now let’s watch it all break!


  • “Wildest Dreams” (Taylor’s Version) by Taylor Swift, Saturday, October 7, 2023 (Updated Repost)

    In 2021 the 2015 hit “Wildest Dreams” became a TikTok  trend. Of course this was in the middle of Swift’s massive project to release re-recordings of her studio records due to her inability to buy the rights to her original recordings. In the spring of last year, she released a massive re-recording of Fearless, the album that propelled the then teen singer to being one of the biggest internationally-recognized music stars. Responding to the TikTok trend, Swift posted her own take on it with the re-recorded version, despite the fact that the singer had stated that she would release her version of Red, 1989’s predecessor and the album that transitioned the singer’s style from Country to Pop, before any of her versions of songs from 1989 would be released. 

    SAY YOU’LL REMEMBER ME. We’re still a few weeks away from the release of the Taylor’s Version of 1989. The album officially marked Taylor Swift leaving Country music in full pursuit of a pop stardom that had been growing since Fearless and had become a bit of a split identity personality on Red with half of the songs sounding organic and the other half synthetic. We don’t know what to expect from 1989 (Taylor’s Version)—Perhaps Jack Antonoff interpretations of Max Martin/Shellback productions? I wrote last year that I thought that Swift would release 1989 as the last of her re-recordings because it was her biggest album. The album, with its seemingly infinite merchandising options, has already been projected to outsell the massive 2014 record. The critics at Switched on Pop, when reviewing Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) wondered about the future of Taylor Swift re-recording, particularly in light that 1989  had already been announced at the time of the review and that the remaining albums in the re-recording series Reputation and the eponymous debut record, feel the least relevant today.  What does a teenage Taylor and a dated EDM record have for a 2024 audience?

    HIS CLOTHES ARE IN MY ROOM. “Wildest Dreams” wasn’t immediately a standout track from 1989, particularly on a Max Martin/Shellback-produced album calculated for the maximum amount of bangers. But just as a good perfume has three notes—top, middle, and base—Taylor Swift’s 2014 record has immediate catchiness and a lingering effect. More specifically, I’m pretty sure that I’ve been humming both songs “Wildest Dreams” and “This Love” for years without actually identifying them as Taylor Swift songs. You know when you’re walking and you get an ear worm from out of nowhere and you might even thing it’s an original melody? That’s what some Taylor Swift songs do. Another thing that makes “Wildest Dreams” familiar is that it sounds similar to Lana Del Rey’s 2012 song “Without You” from Born to Die.  Songs like “Wildest Dreams” introduce more sexual innuendo than her previous work, and 1989 and Reputation seem to have some similar influences with Lana Del Rey’s earlier work.   I’m interested in reading more about Kutter Callaway’s theory about Taylor Swift’s music’s influence on evangelicals and non-evangelicals in America. In a way, 1989 is the album that Taylor Swift declared that she was an adult and that she was more in charge of her destiny. I just wonder what effect this newly grown-up Taylor had on her  fans who were raised more conservatively? Personally being two and a half years older than Swift and raised in a conservative context, it was just prior to 1989’s release that I started taking charge of my destiny outside of my conservative context. My wildest dreams were no longer so far off.

    Read the lyrics on Genius.
    Original video:
    Taylor’s version:

  • “Two Graves,” by Anberlin+ Anberlin Fall Songs Playlist, Friday, October 6, 2023

    Sticking with my theme this year of breaking Anberlin’s discography into seasonal listening, I should have started last month with “Breaking,” the song that, for me, announced that fall is here. Yes, I first heard the song at Cornerstone when the band performed it, and I got a demo version of it on the New Surrender USB bracelet preorder, but when the album was released in September I had left for college, and I associated the new energy of the fall with that album.  The band played a recorded version of “Two Graves” during their August 2021 livestream Under a Dying Sun in which they performed Lowborn in its entirety. The single was released in late September that year, and the heavy rock sound gave me Halloween vibes. I decided to design the fall Anberlin playlist with the contrasting beautiful autumn days, spooky nights, and becoming more and more bleak as we approach winter. Happy listening!

    Listen on Spotify.


  • “Chapstick” by COIN, Thursday, October 5, 2023

    COIN has been hard at work even before the COVID-19 pandemic. Releasing the album their third studio record Dreamland in late February of 2020, the band had plans for a world tour that was quickly canceled as live music came to a halt. During this pause, the band recorded and released a three EP series based on the color spectrum, starting in September of 2020. Combined, the EPs formed the Rainbow Mixtape, released in April of 2021. But the band wasn’t finished in 2021. In September, they released the lead single to their 2022 album Uncanny Valley, “Chapstick,” which had been called the band’s most experimental track up to the release of its parent album.


    HEY CHERRY BLOSSOM, WHAT’S YOUR PROBLEM? In 1970, Japanese robotics professor Masahiro Mori came up with the hypothesis of The Uncanny Valley. He proposed that as robotics developed to create more and more humanlike robots, even to the point of constructing humanlike imperfections on the robot, the more likely that people would perceive the robots as eerie. He even created a formula for calculating the point for calculating the creepiness of the uncanny valley. Since 1970, robotic technology has only increased the number of robots. But today, we’re not so concerned with a Twilight Zone episode of an automaton impersonating or even replacing our physical bodies. Instead, the “robots” we fear today are body-less, for the most part.  These days, it’s eerie to see what artificial intelligence can write. It’s eerie to hear A.I. impersonating celebrities or even hearing music created in the likeness of a famous artist. Sometimes these impersonations are so realistic, we are fooled by the delivery. But mostly, we’re left with a sinking feeling about the likelihood that we may all be replaced by computers that can create content. 

    I DON’T WANT YOUR LEATHER JACKET.  COIN creates a concept album about a robot learning how to love on their latest record, Uncanny Valley. The lead single, “Chapstick,” the band talked about being inspired by a 2017 documentary called AlphaGo about Google’s successful attempt to create Artificial Intelligence to dominate the game of Go–a game similar to chess, only most popular in East Asia. The music and the lyrics of the song feel like they have been developed by A.I. Not in the way that anyone can type into ChatGPT with a prompt: “Write a song about … .” Instead, it feels like earlier iterations of the program. The lines make analogies and create metaphors that don’t land. “I wanna taste your chapstick” feels creepy, but it also seems like it’s almost a line from a pop song–it probably is. But when the surrounding words make little sense, the line is especially uncanny. Today’s song is actually not creepy at all. The robot voice in music has been around since the ‘80s. Nonsense lyrics have been around since a two-year-old started babbling along to his dad’s record collection, singing what he thought he heard. But the implication of what’s to come in art should give us all an uncanny feeling.

     

  • “Over” by Chvrches, Wednesday, October 4, 2023

    The state of the album–a collection of tracks, unusually at least 30 minutes in length, often a minimum of 9 tracks (though that idea has certainly been challenged)–is constantly being questioned. The structure that dates back to vinyl and solidified in the CD era. Singles are nothing new, dating back to the phonograph at the end of the 19th century. In the vinyl age, singles fit on a seven–, ten-, or twelve-inch record. But in the 1960s, music markets started to focus on LPs or long-playing albums. The concept of buying a single song was foreign to me in high school when most of the music I consumed was on full-length albums and the occasional EP, a format between the length of a single and an LP.
     

    TELL MYSELF THAT BOYS WILL BE BOYS.  Chvrches is an album-oriented band. They have released four full-length records, with the most recent being the deluxe edition of Screen Violence, the so-called Director’s Cut of their concept album. The band finally was able to tour the album in 2022. Lead singer Lauren Mayberry told Consequence Sound that the band usually “gather[s] songs over months and years and then make[s] a full record.” But she explained that “Over” was part of a “mini era” between, not connected with Screen Violence.  Chvrches is certainly not alone in preferring the album format. Adele and Taylor Swift have expressed their fondness for the format, even releasing few to no promotional singles before an album is released. I’m too a fan of albums, but I wonder if it stems from the physical music age when it was a pain in the ass to change CDs. I would rather listen to ten tracks by one artist than constantly change CDs. Of course, iTunes brought back the single along with the iPod.


    TELL ME IT WAS ALL A DREAM. While Chvrches may claim that “Over” is a mini era, detached from their previous work, I feel that the song is a post-album single that could easily fit on another deluxe edition of Screen Violence. Musically, the song isn’t much different from the band’s electronic post-punk sound. Lyrically, the song touches on similar themes of trauma and sexism like “He Said, She Said” and “Good Girls..” but unlike the tracks on Screen Violence, “Over” is a song about trying to erase trauma rather than confront it. Lauren Mayberry begins the song by saying “Sometimes I just drive / Till the night turns off my mind.” By the chorus, she tells the listener to “Wake me up when it’s over.” Dealing with trauma is hard work that we don’t always feel up to. We are constantly told that we need to fight as hard as we can, but when the world is burning we can’t deal with it all the time. Sometimes it’s healthy to forget about it. We want to hit the snooze button until the nightmare ends. Unfortunately, September has ended, and at some point, we have to face it. Just five more minutes…

    Music video:

    Lyric video:

    Live on Jimmy Fallon:

    Live in São Palo:


  • “I Touch Myself” by Divinyls, Tuesday, October 3, 2023 + Sexy Singles Apple Music Edition

    We’re going back to Australia to visit the one hit wonder, Divinyls and their sexy single about masturbation, “I Touch Myself.” Rather than going in depth about the 1991 Alternative Pop-Rock hit or embarrassing myself with masturbation stories, I thought YouTuber Todd in the Shadows covered the hit on his One Hit Wonderland series and it was time to build an Apple Music version of my Sexy Singles Playlist. Whether it’s campy or hot and dripping, listen responsibly! 

  • “1000 Doves” by Lady Gaga, Monday, October 2, 2023

    Ten years ago, Lady Gaga released her most avant-garde record, Artpop, an album that polarized both fans and critics alike. To be fair, the album was a statement of a pop star’s artistic vision. To illustrate that vision, Lady Gaga channels ‘60s pastiche in the way that Andy Warhol blended the popular and the artistic. But with the critical pushback of Artpop, Lady Gaga took note and didn’t make another dance-pop record until Chromatica in 2020, instead venturing into acting, singing standards with Tony Bennett, a folk-rock album Joanne, and the Oscar-winning soundtrack to the film she starred in A Star Is Born. In 2020, the Lady Gaga persona could have done anything, and yet she graced fans with a return trip to the dance floor. 


    LIFT ME UP, GIVE ME A START. I’ve been thinking a lot about pop music lately. When I was a  hipster high school and college student, I thought of pop music as a kind of opioid. It puts you into a trance, makes you dance, and makes you not think about the lyrics because they are trivial and don’t matter. But then Lady Gaga released The Fame. I didn’t listen to it right away, but something about the “opioid” of Ke$ha, Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, and Lady Gaga made me start listening to pop, and I realized I wasn’t turning off my brain to lyrics. Of course, as a devout Christian at the time, I had a moralistic take on songs, but I couldn’t help but look at these four singers as artists, and I felt that The Fame and The Fame Monster were a codex on pop stars as personas rather than who the actual singer is. Excluding Taylor Swift from this conversation, as she was the primary songwriter on her albums and she wasn’t making club anthems at the time, Lady Gaga was an artist who seemed in control of her artistic direction. At first, it looked like her message was all about sexual liberation and hedonism. But looking at her early songs as brushstrokes, it seemed that she was making a statement about what fame does to an individual and possibly how to divorce oneself from the fame monster.

    I’VE BEEN FLYING WITH SOME BROKEN ARMS. Most critics and listeners alike wouldn’t consider Lady Gaga’s first three records to be personal. Sure, “Born This Way” is an anthem of self-acceptance just as much for Gaga as it is for her listeners. The same album deals with culturally and family-held religious ideas and pushback on those ideas. There are some personal songs on The Fame that no one listens to. But we really didn’t get to know Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta until Joanne. So wouldn’t return to dance-pop make Lady Gaga less lyrically authentic? Chromatica is surprisingly introspective for a dance record. The mirror that Gaga once held to her audience now examines the artist from the first track “Alice” to the penultimate song “1000 Doves.” There are certainly some “turn off my anxiety and just dance” tracks. Today’s song, “1000 Doves” isn’t loved by diehard Lady Gaga fans, and is even considered one of the weakest tracks on the album. I always thought that the criticism wasn’t fair.  It’s a slow night musically at the discotheque on a rainy Monday night in October. Lyrically, it’s a clear day with Broadway theatrics.  It’s a personal track that would have been impossible before Lady Gaga became a person carved out of the persona. Today’s song may not be the track that you remember from a dynamic album, but it’s worth separating it from the record and reflecting on it by itself.

    Chromatica ball live:

    Remix: