Mixtapemotions

  • “Firestone” by Kygo ft. Conrad Sewell, Thursday, July 11, 2024

    Tropical House is a subgenre of electronic dance music (EDM) that is characterized by its laid-back, feel-good vibes and tropical-inspired melodies. It often incorporates elements of house music, deep house, and chillwave, and is typically characterized by a tempo of around 100-120 beats per minute. Instruments often played or sampled in the genre included steel drums, marimbas, ukuleles, other tropical instruments, synths, and drum machines. The lyrics are often about love, relationships, and the beach. The genre can be traced back to the ‘00s but became extremely popular in the ‘10s. Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of You” has been called the biggest song in the genre.  Avicii and Martin Garrix were early popularizers of the subgenre.


    SPARKS WILL FLY, THEY WILL IGNITE OUR BONES. Norwegian DJ Kyrre Gørvell-Dahll, or Kygo, was influenced by Avicci’s music and started emulating the late DJ’s sound in his created music. Kygo both wrote new music and remixed existing tracks, many of which were rock or disco tracks. In 2013, Kygo remixed Ed Sheeran’s “I See Fire,” sparking the DJ’s career as a go-to remix artist for groups like The xx, Ellie Goulding, and Kylie Minogue, among others. But it was the original song “Firestone” in 2014 that established Kygo as not just a remix DJ but as a collaborator and producer of original songs. Kygo doesn’t sing on his own tracks, so every song he produces features another artist. For his first hit, “Firestone,” Kygo teamed up with Australian pop singer Conrad Sewell. The song was a massive hit in Europe, Australia, Mexico, and Lebanon. It got some radio airplay in America, peaking at #35 on Billboard’s Pop Airplay chart and #8 on Billboard’s club chart. The song has proven to be a lasting hit with over a billion streams on Spotify. 


    WE LIGHT UP THE WORLD. “Firestone” would eventually appear on Kygo’s 2016 debut album, Cloud Nine. The DJ gathered other famous names for this record including John Legend, Kodaline, Julia Michaels, Tom Odell, and others.  The subgenre that Kygo helped popularize essentially replaced the former most popular form of EDM–Dubstep, a far more aggressive, chaotic-sounding style. Besides Ed Sheeran’s venture into Tropical House music, the genre was highly embraced by K-pop with major Tropical House hits by Winner, SHINee, Taeyeon, Chungha, and many others. It’s still prevalent in (non-K-) pop music today, though pop producers seem to be embracing a larger sound pallet rather than completely replacing the sound on the radio waves. The genre even appears in rock and alternative, which is no accident given Kygo’s work with Kodaline, U2, and OneRepublic. The genre is perfect for the summer and makes clubs feel like summer. And as the world is warming up due to climate change, those summers seem to be getting longer and longer. It’s a pleasant genre that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere soon. 



     

  • “Supposed to Be a Love Song” by Anson Seabra, Wednesday, July 10, 2024

     

    The summer rainy season kicked off about a week ago and the music of Anson Seabra is my soundtrack for a rainy summer day. Getting into the 29-year-old singer-songwriter’s music has taken me some time. In my opinion, the melancholy piano and overly clear voice front and center in the production on the recordings that brought him to Internet fame are a slowly acquired taste. This is particularly true of his breakthrough, 2020’s Songs I Wrote in My Bedroom on songs like “Hindenburg Lover” and his follow-up EP 2021’s Feeling for My Life on songs like “Walked Through Hell.” Last year, however, Seabra released A Heart Is a Terrible Thing to Break. Seabra’s sound seemed to evolve after releasing Feeling for My Life, leading to a truly great indie rock 2023 record with instantly catchy melodies.

    TWO HOPELESS STRANGERS IN A LOVE-DRUNK HAZE. What makes A Heart Is a Terrible Thing to Break different from Anson Seabra’s previous work is that this album is guitar-based rather than piano-based. Seabra’s voice is unique with guitar and it rests in a sweet register blending seamlessly with the electric and acoustic strings, whereas sometimes pianos make his voice seem glaringly eccentric, standing out above the pressed keys. The album mixes up Seabra’s musical styles from acoustic ballads to the R&B radio-friendly “Broken Boy” to the adult contemporary “Heartbreak Souvenirs.” The album’s variety also seems to form a cohesive sound, never giving listeners too much of one particular sound, but never straying wildly into musical or lyrical experimentation. Seabra’s songwriting voice is also part of the reason for the cohesion. Songs touch on similar themes, especially heartbreak and falling in love, without recycling phrases. Besides guitar, Seabra’s inclusion of drums on several songs makes A Heart Is a Terrible Thing to Break stand out in his discography. Most notable is today’s song, “Supposed to Be Love Song.” The drums add a disco flare to the song from the verse and make Seabra’s most catchy chorus.

    THEY ALL SEEM TO SOUND THE SAME. Lyrically, “Supposed to Be a Love Song” is relatable. The lyrics paint lyrics of a picturesque romance, heading to Paris, meeting in Amsterdam, the hype that others put into the speaker, and the listener’s love story in “We were teenage dreams, we were movie stars.” It reminds me of every time it seemed the stars were aligning and sunshine and rainbows were ahead. How many movies with a perfect cast seem to fall apart? I remember watching Zoolander 2 and remarking, “It feels like the actors shot every scene at gunpoint.” There was no passion in the performance. It’s also happened in situations when I was planning the perfect vacation or the perfect rooming situation in college or the perfect work environment. And let’s not forget the time when America allowed same-sex couples to wed and it looked like we were set for a liberal future in 2016. I can’t say that all of the situations I’ve listed have a silver lining. Sure, work and college turned out okay and maybe it was for the better. “Supposed to Be a Love Song,” however, rewards the listener with an earworm. The speaker even admits in the bridge: “That’s okay / Too many love songs anyway / And they all seem to sound the same.” “Supposed to Be a Love Song” wouldn’t be as fun as a love song; it would be a cliche and the listener would have a harder time relating to it. “Supposed to Be a Love Song” expresses a complex emotion that is harder to capture in a song. And rather than a love song, it builds a community of listeners who can relate to it.



  • “Goddess of the Dayspring, Am I” by Falling Up, Tuesday, July 9, 2024 (repost)

    There had been hints and tendencies listeners could pick up on from earlier Falling Up records. There was the occasional strange word choice on Crashings. There was esoteric storytelling on Dawn Escapes. There were the made-up words on Exit Lights, the remix record. And for the band’s third studio record on BEC Recordings,    Captiva, Falling Up delved into Greek mythology and science fiction. But for the band’s fourth record, Fangs! Falling Up presented a full concept record without Bible verses in the album notes. This time fully indulging in world-building.

    SOME OF US HAVE SEEN GOLDEN ARROWS POISED. Working with frontman Casey Crescenzo of cult-status progressive indie band The Dear Hunter, the sound on Fangs! steers the band away from the electronic and Nu Metal influence Falling Up had previously embraced. Before releasing the record, lead singer Jessy Ribordy shared the story behind the concept record. Ribordy explained that the story is a prologue to the album, and the album is about what a traveler from another planet encounters. The record’s lyrical content, even being tuned into the backstory, is obscured with new vocabulary, almost coded like an Elon Hubbard novel, not that Falling Up will start a new religion. Fangs! was a polarizing record, signaling a mass exodus of fans who had witnessed Falling Up’s change in status from a massive mainstream Christian Rock band to a niche sound of sci-fi/fantasy, even stoner rock. 


    Ophelia by John Everett Millais. Source:
    Wikipedia Commons.

    HAVE YOU FORGOTTEN ME FOR FLOWERS IN YOUR HAIR? In this C. S. Lewis/ Greek mythology/ Hamlet space opera of Fangs!, we come to one of the catchiest tracks on the record, “Goddess of the Dayspring, Am I,” the ninth track on the record. In the verse, the song is kind of an Odyssey retelling of the story up until this point, with the traveler recalling the adventure accompanied by an up-tempo guitar tremolo. But the chorus slows down; it’s a lament because the Goddess of the Dayspring has died. The traveler runs his hands over her dress; his hands touching her lifeless body, pleading with her to come back to life. The goddess is partially inspired by Shakespeare’s Ophelia, Hamlet’s lover who takes her life by drowning in a river after losing her sanity. When I was listening to this record in college, I always pictured Sir John Everett Millais’s painting depicting Ophelia’s corpse floating in a calm stream with flowers surrounding the body. Jessy Ribordy’s delivery of this loss feels authentic, despite the song being a complete work of fiction. But there’s no time for the grief to last; the song picks up with rapid drumming as if the traveler runs off past the mourning courtiers to investigate. 




     

  • “Beautiful Things” by Benson Boone, Monday, July 8, 2024

    Last year, it seemed that Billboard’s Hot 100 was gridlocked by legacy acts. Besides K-pop groups, two artists were able to break through last year: David Kushner and Noah Kahan, folksy singer-songwriters known for their hits “Stick Season” and “Daylight.” Pop critics were divided on the singer-songwriter trends. The New York Times Popcast critics complained about the monotony of “Daylight,” especially considering the Indie Pop and Alternative acts on the fringes of the Hot 100. YouTuber Rick Beato, however, praised the “Stick Season,” saying something to the effect that these songs were making music “sound like music again” when he counted them down on one of his countdowns of the most popular song countdowns. A few months later, rock guitars seem to be making a comeback on the pop charts. 


    BUT I THANK GOD EVERY DAY FOR THE GIRL HE SENT MY WAY. Noah Kahan’s music out-charted David Kushner’s on the Hot 100. Their breakthrough success certainly wasn’t out of nowhere with the massive country chart-toppers last year. While neither Kahan nor Kushner was associated with Country music, their folk-driven white, presumably straight, young man sound countered years of flamboyant electro-pop and trap-beat Hip-Hop reigning atop Billboard’s flagship chart. This year’s Hot 100 looks like a course correction in the first half of the year—female pop stars, male and female rappers, and a Christmas song in January as the chart numbers are always a few weeks behind. But two number-one hits and one number-two hit feel like they owe at least a nod to Kushner and Kahan for paving the re-emergent singer-songwriter trend in pop music. Number one hits: “Lose Control” and “Too Sweet”— bluesy, non-Country associated songs by Teddy Swims and Hozier topped the Hot 100, and newcomer Benson Boone reached number 2 with his international hit “Beautiful Things.”


    I FOUND MY MIND; I’M FEELING SANE. After dropping out of Brigham Young University-Idaho, Benson Boone focused on building his career as a singer. In 2021, he auditioned for American Idol, making it to the top 24 on Season 19 before dropping out of the show. Later in 2021, Boone signed to Night Street Records, a label owned by Imagine Dragons frontman Dan Reynolds. Benson released several singles, seeing some domestic and international success with his debut single, the JT Daly-produced “Ghost Town.” Boone’s biggest song, so far, is a song about mental health, love, and possibly a transactional God. “Beautiful Things” reached number 2 on Billboard’s Hot 100. Similar to Hozier’s “Too Sweet,” “Beautiful Things” is a rock-based ballad, almost a throwback to the ‘90s or ‘00s when pop-rock was a viable genre. The song touches on Boone’s presumable faith background, partially quoting the book of Job with “the Lord gives and takes away.” Today’s song is riddled with anxiety and the belief that the good things in life don’t last. The “girl [his] parents love” could reject him. However, the anxiety feels like it’s on a grander, more biblical scale, such as a car accident, cancer, or the earth swallowing her up. In the second verse, Benson asks “If everything’s good and it’s great, why do I sit and wait till it’s gone?” The catastrophizing doesn’t seem to be limited just to the girl. With a career trajectory seemingly on the up and up a #2 Hot 100 single and opening for Taylor Swift on the Eras Tour in the UK, few singer-songwriters, particularly non-country male singer-songwriters today, stay on the pop charts for very long in the 2020s. Any singer’s fifteen minutes of fame can be up with no guarantees of a follow-up hit. But because we’re always rewriting the guidebook for how to be a pop star, these observations may be moot. 


     Read the lyrics on Genius.

  • “Walk Alone” Anberlin ft. Matty Mullins, Sunday, July 7, 2024

    In August, Anberlin will release their eighth studio album, Vega. This is probably the least I’ve been excited about an Anberlin release, mainly because most fans have heard most of it already. Vega is a compilation album of the band’s last two years work, the two EPs Silverline and Convinced plus two additional songs, the first of which, “Walk Alone,” was released as a single last month. This leaves just one more song, “Seven,” for fans to yet to hear, but this is only partially true because the band has played the show at their “Farewell to lead singer Stephen Christian” show last year, and fans can easily find the live version on YouTube. 


    IF YOU EVER FEEL YOU’VE GONE TOO FAR. Two years ago, Stephen Christian talked with Shane Told on the Lead Singer Syndrome Podcast that he felt unsure about the current music industry, so the band decided to release their album in two parts. He expressed how he felt that he felt that music listeners wanted singles and shorter forms of media. Prior to their hiatus, Anberlin had been an album band, with every single the band released being part of a cohesive album. It turns out that Silverline and Convinced would be part of an album, but I’m still concerned about the project’s cohesion. Furthermore, I felt what Stephen said on the podcast was more true of the 2010s than this decade in which the biggest pop stars make albums, sometimes long albums. The re-formed Anberlin was ready to take risks from the format that they released music to the change in their sound—harder, more electronic and technology-based, now blending more voices with Stephen Christian’s to create a sometimes eerie sound.


    CRY WITH YOU, HURT WITH YOU, BLEED WITH YOU. The most polarizing decision Anberlin has made with their latest era is Stephen Christians’ indefinite hiatus from live shows. Rather than breaking up the band, Stephen asked Matty Mullins, lead singer of metal-core band Memphis May Fire, to take over lead vocalist duties while the band toured in 2024. Mullins listened to Anberlin in high school and had taken some of Anberlin’s influence into his own band. Currently, Anberlin is on tour with Hawthorne Heights and playing the summer festival circuits. Their touring schedule is similar to their peak in 2014’s farewell tour. The hope I had was that Mullins could help Anberlin perform the heavier songs in the band’s catalog, particularly their new songs and maybe even “Dissenter,” but it seems that the band is playing a shortened “Eras Tour” of legacy hits for their set lists. As for the band’s latest single, “Walk Alone,” the song improves with listening to it, but it doesn’t sound like Anberlin. It sounds like so many Punk Goes… bands on Rise Records that have no distinguishing songs. The music video is pretty funny though. Stephen Christian said that he will continue to record with the band, but somehow it feels like the beginning of an unhealthy break up. Stephen is telling the fans, “I’ll see you around” but he never calls and doesn’t respond to messages. I hope that I’m wrong. 


    Read the lyrics on Genius.



  • “Mulberry Street” by twenty one pilots, Saturday, July 6, 2024 (repost)

    I was wrong about twenty one pilots, and the reason I’m willing to admit that is after I spent time with their album released last year, Scaled and Icy, I realized that this duo was much more than who I thought they were. Mostly gone–but not entirely–are the emo rapping and trap beats that turned me off of the group when they debuted. The lyrics on Scaled and Icy, though, are emotional, and singer Tyler Joseph masterfully weaves clichés, esoteric messages for fans, current lingo, and new turns of phrase all to a funky piano/guitar groove. Scaled and Icy is in the vein of Paramore‘s After Laughter, on the surface it’s fun and light-hearted, but when you spend a little time with the lyrics, you’re bound to discover a surprising depth.


    THERE’S NOTHING WRONG WITH THIS. In 2019 I was obsessed with Mike Mains & the Branches‘ When We Were in Love. And although I didn’t listen to it a lot in 2020, I would have to crown folklore as the album of the year for Taylor Swift‘s songwriting and the vibe that helped create pristine moments when listening to the album. For me, 2021 was a year of old music and it seemed that was the case for a lot of bands as well, whether it was livestream concerts or re-recordings of records. Sure there were a few good records, Adele‘s 30, Ed Sheeran‘s =, Nick Jonas‘ Spaceman, and IU‘s Lilac, but none of them screamed album of the year like Scaled and Icy. My approach to this record comes after enjoying a nice shower to “Saturday” and a few of the other tracks last year and only listening to “Mulberry Street” two days in a row before deciding to check out the rest of the record. As I began research for today’s song, I realized that I really don’t have the proper licensure to discuss a band that has such a cult following that they incessantly comment on the band’s Genius pages about the fiction woven into the band’s songs, about a race on another world, a religion called Vialism that has something to do with social media, apathy, and suicide. 

    KEEP YOUR SUNNY DAYS; LEAVE US  IN THE RAIN. Much of twenty one pilots’ lyrics have to do with mental health, and “Mulberry Street” is no exception. Named after the street in New York City that fellow piano man Billy Joel sang about, “Mulberry Street” is a seemingly upbeat track that’s a fun listen. In a concert video (see below), the duo performs “Mulberry Street” in the middle of a cover of Elton John‘s “Benny and the Jets.” The Elton John cover feels fitting given twenty one pilots’ flamboyant style. But the happiness of the music covers the melancholy of the track. An episode of What About Therapy broke down the lyrics of the track from a mental health perspective. The podcasters pointed out that this track is sometimes criticized because lead singer Tyler Joseph is possibly saying not to medicate depression. The podcasters don’t think that’s what Joseph is actually advocating, but rather discussing that drugs, alcohol, vices, and temporal distractions can make us not actually process our feelings. Joseph reminds us that it’s okay to feel sad sometimes, that it’s okay to live in the weekdays not only for the weekends, and that it’s okay to move sideways because moving ahead may be too hard. So let’s live in that weekday for just a little bit longer.

    Lyric video:


    Live stream version:

    Live concert featuring “Chlorine” and a mash up of “Benny and the Jets” and “Mulberry Street.”

  • “Happy” by NF, Friday, July 5, 2024 (Repost)

     Nathan Feuerstein is one of the most successful Christian hip-hop artists today. Born and raised in a tiny town in central Michigan, Nate, better known by his moniker, NF, had a hard home life as a child. After his parents divorced, he was raised by his mother until he and one of his sisters were abused by his mother’s boyfriend. After that, he returned to live with his father. NF channeled his struggles with anxiety and mental health in his music.

    DEAR GOD, PLEASE HEAR ME OUT. Last year, NF released his fifth studio album, Hope, and the single “Happy” enjoyed heavy rotation on Spotify playlists. While NF does not claim to be a Christian Rapper but rather a hip-hop artist who happens to be a Christian, his music is played on both secular and Christian radio, especially due to his clean (though often brutally honest) lyrics. Currently, NF has amassed over 18 million monthly streams on Spotify, making him a highly successful artist, especially for a Christian artist. And while NF’s career may have started out signed to a Christian label, slowly but surely, the rapper started branching into secular hip hop early in his career. His music became so popular that in 2018, Eminem even squeezed NF’s name into the song “The Ringer,” a dis-track about other rappers whom Eminem perceived to be imitating “The Real Slim Shady.” Of course, NF had always listed Eminem as one of his biggest influences, but the fact that a clean Christian rapper was even on Eminem’s radar is a testament to how popular he had become in the late ’10s. That’s more than KJ-52 ever got with his attempts to get Shady’s attention in “Dear Slim” and “Dear Slim, Pt. II,” unless you really read into Eminem’s lyrics. 

    I CAN’T IMAGINE WHO I’D BE IF I WAS HAPPY. “Happy,” though, isn’t a rap track in the traditional sense of hip-hop. It’s rhythmic but sung in a way that much ’10s and ’20s hip-hop has become less distinguishable as rap. The song deals with NF’s OCD, which he was diagnosed with in 2018, and his other mental health struggles. The song is a prayer to God, and the chorus asks the question about what happiness would look like for the speaker. No matter how much money and fame the speaker receives, he will always self-sabotage his happiness. And this is what keeps NF relevant to both Christian and non-Christian audiences. Typical Christian music fixes everything. The problems are all past tense and glory hallelujah I can keep talking about that one time I was delivered from depression. But you don’t have to be a medical professional to realize that struggles are often ongoing. We all have crappy days that can turn into crappy years. Some have had traumatic experiences like when NF witnessed his mother getting addicted to opioids and overdosing in 2009. It’s about messed up home lives that cause issues later in life prayer is not enough to set the mind at ease. After all, no person would get into a car accident and refuse medical help but rather go directly to church to pray away the injuries! Sometimes it takes years of therapy and that only reduces the pain. There’s no happy solution, but listeners can find solace. We can know that we’re not that abnormal. And that’s the hope.
     

  • "Fire and Rain" (repost) by Acceptance, Thursday, July 4, 2024

     

    Acceptance‘s story about the band that called it quits before they realized made the band a legend. In 2014, Jesusfreakhideout  posted their top “One Album Wonders,” and Acceptance’s Phantoms topped the list. According to lead singer Jason Vena, when he sat down with Billy Power on Urban Achiever Podcast in 2015, the lead singer recounted about how he had no idea the cult status the band then had in the scene. In various other interviews, Vena talked about how other bands, namely A Loss for Words and All Time Low inspired him to consider an Acceptance reunion. 

    LAST SEASON OF THIS MASQUERADE. In 2005, Acceptance after their failed attempt at major label stardom, Vena took a job in Seattle outside of music. The band dissolved, and some formed side projects with other musicians. Lead guitarist Christian McAlhaney talked with Josh Coats on Your PUSH Coach Podcast in 2020, talking about what made him successful in three bands and other projects. These projects include Acceptance, Anberlin, and Loose Talk, a band he started with Anberlin’s bassist Deon Rexroat. McAlhaney talks about working with two of the other musicians from Acceptance and working as a touring musician for the runner-up of a musical reality show, Rockstar: Supernova, Dilana, before receiving a call to tour with Anberlin and ultimately becoming the band’s integral fifth member. Once Anberlin broke up at the end of 2014, McAlhaney and Rexroat formed Loose Talk and he sent the boys in Acceptance an email putting the band members back into contact after ten years. The band met and slowly started to write new music which would become Colliding by Design, released in February of 2017.

    WILL YOU LOOK IN MY EYES AS I STARE AT THE SUN? So did Colliding By Design cure the itch that Phantoms left fans? Was Jesusfreakhideout.com right to rank the band as the #1 One Album Wonder? Signing to Rise Records, the band received a lot of promotion–billboards, online marketing–anything to show that the band was back. Pop singers Nick Jonas and Demi Lovato even tweeted about the band’s new album. The production team was the same: Acceptance and Aaron Sprinkle, this time in Nashville, not Seattle. But Colliding by Design was not Phantoms. It was a much more current-sounding pop-rock album. For me, it’s taken a few years to sit with Acceptance’s sophomore record. I realized that whatever they did would be the wrong record. They could write Phantoms II, and it wouldn’t show any growth. They released Colliding which sounded like where the band would be had they stayed in the scene for twelve years. Listening to the two records back to back is a bit jarring. But in the five years since Colliding’s release, I’ve come to appreciate the dark Acceptance, post-Cities Anberlin effects on the album. It’s that dark, humid Northwest sound that makes Phantoms so mysteriously beautiful and that sound is present on tracks like “Come Closer,” “Goodbye,” “Fire and Rain,” and other places on the record as well. Seriously, how could we have gone twelve years (except for a few guest vocalist spots) without hearing Jason’s vocals?

     

  • “Asking for a Friend” by Chvrches, Wednesday, July 3, 2024

     

    Every year, people get more connected as more and more of the world joins the Internet. Now we have the world in a box in our pockets, and we can’t get enough screen time. Our parents and grandparents may have been scolded for watching too much broadcast TV after school, but now we can constantly look at a screen curating whatever content we want to watch at school if we’re careful not to get caught. Whereas many parents guarded their dial-up Internet passwords to protect young eyes from violence and pornography on the Internet, now lightning-fast data allows anyone to see some of the most shocking things online. The pervasive use of screen addiction, particularly to violence and pornography, inspired the Scottish band Chvrches to write their 2021 concept album, Screen Violence. 


    I FILLED MY BED WITH REGRETS. Each track on Chvrches’ Screen Violence deals with aspects of a seemingly dystopian technologically-driven world. The opening track “Asking for a Friend” deals with the irony of isolation despite everyone being connected. The lyrics feel more stream-of-conscious than a typical song structure. The speaker bears her soul to what seems to be like an anonymous Internet forum. She can further distance herself from her shame by simply saying that the advice she’s seeking is not for herself, but “for a friend.” Of course, “asking for a friend” is not something that was invented by the Internet. You could make a doctor’s appointment across town, dress up in a trench coat and dark sunglasses, and bring up the most perverse acts your “friend” told you about the other day at tea or you could write to Abby or Ann Landers, but at some point you have to follow the advice.  

    THE MESS WE MADE ON FRIDAYS GAVE ME SUNDAYS ON MY KNEES. While there is a plethora of misinformation and the potential for danger, in the information age, we don’t actually want to get rid of it. We certainly don’t want to have to carry around bulky Rand McNally atlases to plot out our trip or take a trip to the library to browse the latest encyclopedia with information that was outdated by the time it went to print. Some legislators claim that children can access adult material or that it even exists or that “fake news” misleads individuals to make harmful decisions is proof that the Internet should be censored. But before trying blanket censorship, what education have you offered the public about dealing with harmful information? Instead, public schools in America are forcing teachers to teach the Bible. I had a conversation with a colleague about the importance of the Internet for students, particularly when they feel different from their peers. She said that being able to ask questions anonymously gives students language to understand themselves. This is true from something like music enthusiasts who like a particular style of music their peers don’t like to students understanding that their sexualities are normal and that thousands or millions of other teenagers have asked these questions since at least the advent of the Internet. No longer do you need to sit in health class and “ask on behalf of a friend.” 


  • “Take on Me” by A-ha (repost), Tuesday, July 2, 2024

    The music, the legend, the meme. Today we take on A-ha’s 1985 summer classic, “Take on Me.”A-ha is a Norwegian band. Their dream was to get famous in the UK before sweeping the world. To do this, like other European bands and musicians, the band decided to record all of their songs in English. However, getting a massive hit like “Take on Me” took persistent marketing. The song went to #3 in Norway before the band re-recorded it and released the single internationally. But the band’s iconic music video is the reason the song topped the Billboard Hot 100 and went to #1 in 12 other countries.


    TODAY’S ANOTHER DAY TO FIND YOU. The guitar riff on “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” is perhaps a close second to the synth and drum opening of “Take on Me” for emerging the listener in the ‘80s. What I didn’t realize today when I was enjoying this song was how young the band was. I often think of bands that existed before my time as being forever old. And with today’s song’s heyday two years before my birth, I had some idea that the boys in A-ha were just a bunch of proper Europeans who played music to be enjoyed in the grocery store and influenced The Weeknd. “Take on Me,” though, was the band’s first hit, whereas I had assumed that the band had tried to make it years before in Norway. The original hit lacks the production that producer Alan Tarney brought to the single that would become the international hit. The original music video could be described as a typical cheesy ‘80s video, the band giving off a youthful, subtle sexuality with lead singer Morten Harket in ripped jeans and a ripped shirt. So many of the ‘80s classics have a “so bad, it’s good” music video. However, the band’s re-shot music video, directed by Steve Barron, sets A-ha apart from the cringy days of MTV and puts them on the same level s Michael Jackson.

    I’LL BE STUMBLING AWAY. Years ago, I was surprised to find out that A-ha had a large discography. On an episode of Hit Parade, host Chris Molanphy explained the debate as to whether or not A-ha can be classified as a one-hit-wonder. The band had other singles released in the US, but few remember them and they don’t receive much radio play on Classic Rock or Oldies stations. But in their large discography, besides the first track on their debut record Hunting High and Low, was their 2005 record Analogue. I was impressed with how the band could continue to reinvent themselves and make music that sounded modern and relevant without being gimmicky. Back in 1985, though, I realized today that “Take on Me” is practically teen pop. The synth wave in 1985 was cool when everyone was doing it, whether New Wave-post punkers or Wham! Even Bruce Springsteen’s music started to incorporate synths. But A-ha certainly fits in with teen pop. A-ha certainly had their 15 minutes of fame, and the trio seems to appreciate that their music got as far as it did. There’s a three-part video series I watched on YouTube to get much of the information for this post. I was impressed by how young the band still looks considering that this song was released thirty-nine years ago. Maybe because the band wasn’t huge for a long time preserved the members from a prolonged rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle. Maybe it’s those good Norwegian genes. But either way, don’t let “Take on Me” be the only A-ha song stuck in your head. It’s an excellent song, but they have others!

    Read “Take on Me” on Genius.