Mixtapemotions

  • “Africa” by Toto, Thursday, June 27, 2024 (repost)

    My mom didn’t let me play video games unless they were educational. So I didn’t grow up on Mario or Donkey Kong at home. Instead, I got to play educational games like The Oregon Trail or Math Blaster. My favorite game, though, was Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? Despite the implausible premise of being a detective, tracking down a criminal who stole intangible cultural heritage, I loved flying around the world to fifty countries–some of which no longer exist–listening to strange music, and discovering the cultures that made the world so interesting. 


    IT’S GONNA TAKE A LOT TO DRAG ME AWAY FROM YOU. TOTO is often classified as a Yacht Rock band today, a somewhat pejorative term for the smooth-sounding light rock of the late ’70s and early ’80s. The term “Yacht Rock” actually comes from a YouTube mockumentary from the early age of YouTube. Music critic Chris Molanphey goes to great pains to define the imaginary genre in his episode of The Bridge called “Yacht or Nyacht.” Molanphey argues that Yacht Rock is, in its purest form, West Coast studio musicians who performed highly refined pop music. Artists like Christopher Crosse and bands like Steely Dan and the Michael McDonald  incarnation of The Doobie Brothers along with Los Angeles’ TOTO are some of the prime examples of Yacht Rock, according to Molanphey’s definition. Interestingly, one of the exceptions that Molanphey sites nyacht as Yacht Rock is Daryl Hall & John Oates only because they were East Coasters. Yacht Rock isn’t cool, but it’s made a resurgence on Spotify, particularly every summer. Furthermore, while not West Coasters, bands like The 1975 and Jonas Brothers certainly take influence from Yacht Rock. And while Hall & Oates and Michael MacDonald may not receive critical praise for their pop music, critics tend to love the musicality of Steely Dan and TOTO. 

    I BLESS THE RAINS DOWN IN AFRICA. Similar to my early interest in the world due to Where In the World Is Carmen Sandiego?, TOTO’s David Paich grew up reading National Geographic and watching UNICEF commercials, romanticizing the continent of Africa. The final track on Toto’s fourth album, “Africa,” is a generalization of a large continent. None of the members of the pop-rock group had been to Africa. Drummer Jeff Porcaro said of the song in an interview, “A white boy is trying to write a song on Africa, but since he’s never been there, he can only tell what he’s seen on TV or remembers in the past.” Having worked with coworkers from South Africa, I’m always fascinated to see how they view Americans. “So many of you think that Africa’s a country. A big one, but not as big as the U.S.” one coworker told me. Yet somehow, when Americans close their eyes we tend to think of everything: from the pyramids to the apartheid, from the Sahara to the Congo. And yet, while this land mass is more than three times the U.S., we shrink the world to make its problems seem small compared to my struggle to pay the mortgage. 

  • “Armageddon” by aespa, Wednesday, June 26, 2024

    Singles and EPs are nothing new to the music industry, though, in the ‘90s and ‘00s before iTunes, the long-play album became the preferred medium for selling music. You could buy each song from an album and some of the songs were released before the album’s release, but most singles found a home on an album. As for EPs, many of them were limited promotional releases that superfans of a band or artist could collect, often offering limited edition tracks or alternate versions of songs on an album. Sometimes EPs were only available to purchase at the artist’s show. Unlike the American pop and rock music business, Korean pop is meticulously strategic with releases in terms of regulating how much media fans can get from their idols. Singles to “Mini Albums” to full-length albums seems to be the winning formula for K-pop today.


    I’MMA BITE BACK. On May 27, aespa released their debut studio album, Armageddon. The SM Entertainment band is one of the leading active 4th-generation K-pop girl groups. Competing with groups like Ive, Le Sserafim, and NewJeans for listenership, aespa only just released a full album. Neither of the Hybe girl groups has a full album yet, and Ive released only one album, last year’s I’ve Ive. The release of Armageddon comes four years after aespa’s debut. Twenty years ago, American pop executives would release a full album from an obscure group, making a gamble on whether the group’s singles would be requested on the radio and cause fans to buy the group’s full album. Bands might record demos and singles due to low budgets, but these singles were nothing like K-pop debuts. K-pop is not the only genre today that follows the single to EP to LP trajectory. Many TikTok-famous artists follow this model, self-releasing singles and eventually releasing an EP and maybe someday releasing an LP. Conan Gray, Lizzy McAlpine, and many other artists I’ve written about have used this model. These artists, though usually start from DIY beginnings. K-pop on the other hand is maximalist, big budget, expensive studio production.

    BORN LIKE A QUEEN, BORN LIKE A KING. Unlike the bedroom pop I’ve written about, which slowly builds hype online as the listeners bond with the artist and the artist’s song, K-pop releases are a textbook example of manufacturing hype in a new group. When focusing on singles, the record label takes fewer risks of a flop. Furthermore, by only releasing a few songs at a time, each song is separately marketed and streamed heavily by both devoted fans and passive listeners. Singles by aespa, NewJeans, TWS, and many others often got stuck in my head long before I blogged about them. The potential for passive fandom is greater when a K-pop group starts dropping singles. So four years after their debut, aespa is ready for a full album on related concepts. Before releasing Armageddon, the group released the lead single “Supernova,” and the title track has now become a single. By the time a group releases their first album, they are one of the biggest acts in K-pop. This is by design.


     

  • “How to Save a Life” by The Fray, Tuesday, June 25, 2024

    In 2005, The Fray scored their first hit with “Over My Head” (Cable Car). The song peaked at number 8 on Billboard’s Hot 100 and topped several radio charts. While that song received critical acclaim from Billboard and Stylus Magazine, the piano-based pop-rock quartet band from Denver, Colorado, would be much less memorable today if it wasn’t for their second hit. After seeing the band live in Los Angeles, the music supervisor for the medical drama Grey’s Anatomy Alexandra Patsavas featured the song “How to Save a Life” in an episode in the massively popular ABC show. After the song’s feature in the episode, fans downloaded the ballad on iTunes.
     

    I PRAY TO GOD HE HEARS YOU. The kickstart to the success of “How to Save a Life” has been credited to Grey’s Anatomy. But before the song was a single, it was the title track to The Fray’s debut album. How to Save a Life is peak mid-’00 piano pop rock. Every track is inoffensive and could be played in any coffee shop or grocery store without editing the lyrics or mellowing the instrumentation. Likewise, every song could easily fit on adult contemporary radio, and, in 2006, Top 40 stations. Several songs stick out on the album as potential singles when much of it fades into the background of a coffee shop conversation. “Over My Head” is an obvious single with its piano and late ‘90s guitar on the chorus. “How to Save a Life” is the obvious follow-up. Lead singer Issac Slade talked about the writing process for the song with Sauce. Slade and the Fray’s guitarist Joe King volunteered at a faith-based camp in Denver called Shelterwood, volunteering to mentor teens on weekends. One particular teen’s story inspired Slade to write “How to Save a Life,” when the singer realized that “no one could write a manual on how to save him.”


    IF I STAYED UP WITH YOU ALL NIGHT.  Despite The Fray’s lead singer Issac Slade’s realization that there is no step-by-step process for saving a person from vices such as drug addiction, the lyrics to “How to Save a Life” sound instructive. These lyrics, according to Slade, refer to conversations the boy had with friends and family who offered the young addict an ultimatum: “Quit taking drugs and cutting yourself or I won’t talk to you again.” Slade claimed all the boy needed was support. While the verses show the attempts at tough love, the chorus of “How to Save a Life” shows the speaker’s earnest hopes to save a friend as he questions, “Where did I go wrong?” The specifics of the lyrics aren’t what made the song a number 3 hit on Billboard’s Hot 100, but rather the sentiment of saving a life. The placement in TV shows such as Grey’s Anatomy, One Tree Hill, and Scrubs solidified “How to Save a Life” in mid-’00s pop culture. The song touched many fans who faced or whose loved ones faced addiction, illness, or tragedy. Ultimately, “How to Save a Life” is about doing the best you can, which is caring for someone you love. 



    Read “How to Save a Life” by The Fray on Genius

  • “Atonement” by Anberlin, Monday, June 24, 2024


































    It was the beginning of a rough year. In January, my favorite band from when I was in high school announced they were breaking up by the end of the year. I was in the middle of a hellish teaching contract in South Korea, and it looked like I could never see Anberlin perform again live. Before disbanding, the band would release their seventh studio album, Lowborn. Of course, the break up didn’t last and Anberlin got back together only four years later to play a reunion show and began touring the year after that. Then in 2022, the band released Silverline, a 5-song EP; another EP, Convinced, last year; and will release their eighth studio record, Vega, on August 2nd, which will be a combination of Silverline and Convinced with two new songs featuring the band’s new touring vocalist, Matty Mullins.


    I FOUND PEACE IN A FOREIGN ATONEMENT.  At the end of 2013, lead singer Stephen Christian told his bandmates that he would give Anberlin a year to say farewell. Christian talks about the disappointment from that time on the Your Favorite Band Podcast. Christian talks about how their major label’s marketing team failed to promote their sixth studio album Vital and they were unable to launch a radio single as their previous records had. Christian talked to Michael Clark on the Caught on the Mike Podcast about the moment the decision to leave Anberlin solidified. He was in London, missing his wife and children, wishing to be with them rather than touring with Anberlin. Balancing a touring career with his marriage and raising his children, Stephen decided that his tenure as Anberlin’s lead singer was over. While band members had different feelings about Stephen’s decision, they ultimately decided that they couldn’t be Anberlin without Stephen Christian. The band came to a different conclusion ten years later when Stephen decided to take another hiatus from the re-formed group.
     

    I DON’T WANNA GO AT IT ALONE. Along with their exhaustive farewell tour, which included many dates on the 2014 Vans Warped Tour, Anberlin decided to release their final studio album, Lowborn, returning to Tooth & Nail Records. The album serves as part explanation for the band’s break up and part experimentation into sounds that the band hadn’t had a chance to explore. Vital had opened the band up to electronic elements, as drummer Nate Young, the youngest member of the band, was looking for new sounds to keep Anberlin’s formula fresh. But unlike Vital, the band’s seventh album wasn’t for touring. Not even the album’s lead single, “Stranger Ways,” was played live; only the opening track “We Are Destroyer” was a regular on the band’s farewell setlist. Instead, the band gave the time to the songs that Anberlin fans would have to do without live indefinitely. The band played today’s song, “Atonement” live at their final show at Orlando’s House of Blues. While the song wasn’t a single from the album, it serves as the heart of the album, offering the clearest explanation for the band’s breakup along with the final track, “Harbinger.” The band called Lowborn the “vibey-est” Anberlin album when discussing the tracks on their final Lockdown Livestream, partly because of Young’s musical direction. Besides the band-specific lyrics in which Christian talks about “skeleton keys” referencing the cover of the band’s B-sides project, Lost Songs, and finding “peace in a foreign atonement,” the song is one of the band’s most pop-radio-sounding tracks Anberlin has released. The song beautifully blends the album’s three producers--Aaron Marsh tracking instruments, Matt Goldman tracking drums, and Aaron Sprinkle tracking vocals. The song is beautiful with its New Age synth tones throughout the chorus to the gentle guitar solo reminiscent of “We Owe This to Ourselves” to the heavily auto-tuned outro as a siren song fades out. Somehow, though, I envision a veteran country artist covering the track, maybe changing some of the Anberlin-specific lyrics. Anberlin means so much to so many people that I wonder how their influence will show up in the future–maybe it won’t be in the form of a country song.

  • “Faint” by Linkin Park (repost), Sunday, June 23, 2024

    Twenty-one years ago, Linkin Park released their sophomore record, Meteora.   Throughout the band’s career, their sound would shift to various styles of rock music, but Meteora is not much of a departure from the band’s debut Hybrid Theory. The album did, however, embrace Asian musical instruments on several tracks. At the time of its release, Meteora not only debuted at number 1 on Billboard’s 200 Album charts but also set the record for the most units sold in a week beating Celine Dion‘s One Heart. In 2003, Nu Metal was the ruling dynasty and Linkin Park was the king of the music.


    I CAN’T FEEL THE WAY I DID BEFORE. Speaking of deluxe editions, you can stream Linkin Park’s 20th anniversary edition of Meteora–95 tracks of live performances, B-sides, and demos; some of which have been released like their Live in Texas record and some remastered tracks which had never left the vault. Personally, I don’t have fond memories of this record. I thought of it as a letdown. Hybrid Theory softened Nu Metal, making it more palatable with melody. The electronic elements, hip-hop, and aggression tested my stereo in ways music had never tested before. But the follow-up felt like B-sides of Hybrid Theory. I wasn’t a fan of the lead single “Somewhere I Belong,” which sounded like an exhausted fever dream of Theory, rehashing old themes without resolve and only getting more frustrated. The instrumentals on the record felt incidental rather than serving a purpose on the theme. “Breaking the Habit” and “Numb” were pop songs, with the former hardly reaching a climax and the latter feeling like the formula of “In the End.” I don’t completely agree with my initial reactions to this record, but at the time, I felt betrayed by the band I thought was the most innovative in music, a guiding light to where music was heading. In the end, I turned to Christian Linkin Park imitators like Falling Up and Red to give me aggressive melodic music.

    I WON’T BE IGNORED.  But then there was “Faint,” Meteora‘s third single. Beginning as a guitar track written by Linkin Park’s guitarist Brad Delson at less than a walking pace of  70-beat-per minute, the band’s rapper and co-vocalist Mike Shinoda sped the tempo up to 135 bpm and created one of the band’s most iconic concert tracks. While the lyrics deal with the common, early Linkin Park themes of anger, angst, and getting the courage to say exactly what is on your mind to whoever is causing your suffering, it’s the high-speed delivery–the hip hop and hard rock, the programmed beats, the feeling it makes you want to jump around your house if you’ve even had just one cup of coffee, and Chester Bennington‘s growling vocals on the bridge–that make this one of Linkin Park’s best tracks. It’s songs like that that make it feasible to believe that a band, on their first studio album continuing was able to tour their own music festival, Projekt Revolution, bridging the gap between rock and hip hop and continuing the festival from 2002 to 2008 and 2011 in Europe. Today’s song is hopefully the energy you need to get through the week. There’s a time when it feels like you just can’t take anymore and then a rage anthem comes on. Sure, it might make some violent, but I think that the music serves as a release. Others feel that the world is as messed up as you and Linkin Park can commiserate. Maybe they can give you the courage to say what you need to say to the person making your life miserable. 
     





    Read “Faint” by Linkin Park on Genius 

  • "Savior's Robes" by Yellowcard (repost), Saturday, June 22, 2024

    In 2016, Yellowcard called it quits, echoing many other bands in a changing music industry. Best known for their fourth album, Ocean Avenue, Yellowcard headlined Warped Tour and were at the top of the genre thanks to MTV‘s Total Request Live and placements in video games. But the band that had once been played on pop and rock radio, soon saw waning promotion, particularly in their later years. With albums underperforming and internal conflict in the band, they released their self-titled final album in 2016. They have only reunited in a controversial lawsuit against rapper Juice WRLD, which the band later dropped after the rapper died in 2020.

    YOU TOOK MY EDGE, SHARPENED IT IN CASE. My experience with Yellowcard was much like most of their fair-weather fans. Ocean Avenue was novel and fun. It was a time when bands could experiment with the format of a rock band to include something like, say, an electric violin on every track substituting for guitar leads. Their second album, Lights and Sounds, was slightly stronger but less impressive. Their third album, Paper Walls,  felt like a rehashing of everything they’ve ever done before and that was the end of my casual fandom. Turns out, that album was born out of inner conflict, and it caused the band to go on hiatus. But after that hiatus, Yellowcard returned to the music scene with more mature songwriting and a better use of the electric violin. For the most part, the Jacksonville-Florida natives stuck to their “Boys of Summer” formula: mostly major keys, bright guitar tones, energetic bass, and drums pumping through the mix. But occasionally, they broke with the formula, most notably on 2014’s title track “Lift a Sail” and today’s song, ““Savior’s Robes.”

    I WONDER IF YOU CAN RECALL MY NAME. The self-titled Yellowcard album is uncharacteristically un-summer-y in its stormy grey album cover. Some of the songs on the album match the cover art’s tone, but mostly it’s business as usual Yellowcard, and listeners wouldn’t feel that their final album is so far out of their typical musical reach. But then there’s track 9. Opening with a heavy distorted guitar and drums and an uncharacteristically angry-sounding lead singer Ryan Key, “Savior’s Robes,” sounds like it’s a dis-track to some bad blood in the band’s history. Yellowcard had a series of member shake-ups, some of which were bitter. The reference to “a devil in a savior’s robes” sounds eerily religious. Key had been a member of the Tooth & Nail band Craig’s Brother, and as a Florida band in punk/pop-punk had been around a lot of the early 2000s Tooth & Nail bands, according to Key’s interview on Lead Singer Syndrome. This song sounds more like it’s channeling that sound than the upbeat teens on Ocean Avenue. One line I found interesting: “You’re a devil in a savior’s robe / Made it easier to let you go / I never should have let you get so close.”  It’s easy to let a devil go once you realize they are one, but the savior’s robe allows that person to get close. Is this a metaphor for a friend who betrays or literally about an experience with someone who uses piety as a way to draw others in? Is it the music industry? Is it the “cool Christian” youth groups? Is it the festivals that the band played alongside Christian bands? It’s a very icky feeling when you’re swindled by the oily Bible salesman. It’s quite a common story, and I have quite a few from working for a church school. Still, it’s even icky when they try to swindle people who don’t believe it. It’s actually quite embarrassing, or at least it was. No wonder why people are so programmed against religion.
    Fan theories about the Yellowcard break-up:

    Read “Savior’s Robes” by Yellowcard on Genius. 

  • “This Is Our Time” by Fireflight, Friday, June 21, 2024

     

    Fireflight became a massive Christian Rock band in 2006 when their video for the single “You Decide,” which featured Josh Brown of the band Day of Fire, became the most-requested video on TVU that year. The band debuted on Flicker Records after touring for years after being founded by husband and wife Glenn and Wendy Drennen in 1999. Glenn was the guitarist and Wendy the bassist of the band, and she would become the backing vocalist when the band added Dawn Michele as the group’s lead singer. The band followed up the runaway success of their debut album The Healing of Harms with Unbreakable. While Unbreakable was a success for the band, the members talked about the difficulty of making their follow-up album. Dawn Michele told Stars & Stripes making the record was “one of the most difficult times in our lives.”


    IT STARTS TONIGHT. Just as ForeFront Records was in search of the “more Christian” alternative to successful Christian-adjacent acts, Flicker Records signed a band that was clearly influenced by Evanescence and Flyleaf. But with the Christian music industry being two to three years behind general market trends, girl-rock, and rock music in general wasn’t very successful on pop radio in 2015. Pop radio was shifting towards EDM with David Guetta and The Chainsmokers scoring hits in the middle of the decade. Amid the bleakest time to be in a band, Fireflight scrapped their original hard rock model and lead singer Dawn Michele entered the studio without her band to record Fireflight’s sixth album, Innova. Michele worked with three producers: Joshua Silverberg, Rusty Varenkamp, and Kipp Williams, all of whom, are primarily Contemporary Christian producers. Guitars are largely replaced with synthesizers. Dawn’s melodies sound lifted from Coldplay and Kesha at times. The sound of the album was polarizing to fans with little indication of stylistic change from their 2012 previous album, Now. 

    IT’S THE VOICE THAT CALLS YOU HOME. Fireflight released Innova on May 5, 2015. The project was crowdfunded and released independently after being released with their contract with Flicker Records. Innova sounds like an imitation of pop music without adding much in terms of lyrical content. One notable exception is the duet with Stephen Christian, “Safety.” Christian’s vocals add an earnest sound that the album seems to lack. All in all,  the album feels like what happens when an industry that is already behind is playing catch-up with a band that is the epitome of the Family Christian “If you like Halsey, then you’ll love Fireflight” would sound like. This isn’t a new problem though, think about how DC Talk transformed from a hip-hop trio to a hard rock Nirvana-style band. The result is that it creates safe, family-friendly music teenagers forget about as soon as they are out of mom’s watchful eye. When I write about these bands, it’s not the music I listen to every day, but there is a nostalgia for these records–even the ones that were released when I wasn’t listening to Christian music. The lyrics and the music felt so important at the time, like we were on the verge of something great, like today’s song, “This Is Our Time.” What a disappointment came when we realized that it just meant God using an adulterer to stack the Supreme Court against non-Christians.

  • “Be Sweet” by Japanese Breakfast, Thursday, June 20, 2024

    Michelle Chongmi Zauner was busy in 2021 promoting her band Japanese Breakfast’s third album, Jubilee, and her memoir Crying in H Mart, a heartbreaking work chronicling the illness and death of her mother. The book is far more than a music memoir–readers need not be familiar with Zauner’s band to appreciate the writing or the story–the singer does talk about her musical background and how she happened upon a music career after her mother’s death when she had mostly given up on the prospect of being known for her music. Before Zauner formed Japanese Breakfast, she had been the lead singer of the Emo rock band Little Big League. The band formed in 2011, recorded two studio albums, and dissolved in 2014 following Michelle’s mother’s cancer diagnosis as Zauner left the band’s home base of Philadelphia to be with her family in Eugene, Oregon.


    PACIFY HER RAGE. Japanese Breakfast was Michelle Zauner’s side project that she started in 2013 when still in Little Big League. She says that she chose the name because she wanted to make Americans wonder what Japanese people eat for breakfast. In her 2021 memoir, Zauner talks about the tastes she had growing up as the child of two foodies. Crying in H Mart was released at a time when Korean food had started to become popular outside of Asia as the popularity of K-pop and Korean dramas entered Western pop culture. Zauner describes the delectable, though often unfamiliar, tastes she experienced especially from her mother’s Korean–not Japanese–heritage. After her mother died in October 2014, Michelle took a job in advertising in New York. She found the corporate world unfulfilling and continued to write music as a hobby under her Japanese Breakfast side project. The songs she wrote helped her remember her mother and reconnect with her past and her heritage. In 2016, Zauner released Psychopomp, a collection of songs about her mother and the country she had fallen in love with. After being rejected by several other labels, the album was released on a small indie label, Yellow K. On the And the Writer Is… Podcast,  Michelle talked about the small label and a publicist who believed in the album, which ultimately led to the album being released on a bigger label later in 2016 and a breakout national tour with Mitski which helped Japanese Breakfast become a full-time project. 

    TELL THE MEN I’M COMING. The two Michelle Zauner projects from 2021 feel quite different in tone. The memoir is similar in tone to Psychopomp, but on Japanese Breakfast’s third album, Jubilee, Zauner writes fictional tales like on the songs “Kokomo, IN” and “Savage Good Boy.” She writes bright songs like the opener “Paprika.” But the album’s clearest shot at a radio single, “Be Sweet,” is a funky disco-infused confectionary.  Zauner co-wrote the song with Jack Tatum of the band Wild Nothing. Zauner typically writes lyrics alone. The song could be interpreted as fiction, though Michelle is married to bandmate Peter Bradley who plays bass on the band’s recordings and tours with his wife. Bradley had been in a Little Big League with Zauner and married Michelle just before her mother died in 2014. Zauner wrote of Peter that he “was the first person [she] ever dated that [her] mother liked.” As a character in Zauner’s memoir, he plays the role of a supportive partner during a time that no couple ever wants to experience–the death of a parent. Peter often fades into the background until she brings him back out again. She proposed to him as she wanted her mother to be a part of the wedding. Michelle is a charismatic personality who knows her worth and demands it from a partner, both in the memoir and in “Be Sweet.” The music video for the song is pure fun: a stylized X-Files knock-off, star Zauner and the lead singer to a band Little Big League toured with, Mannequin Pussy. Michelle and Marisa “Missy” Dabice look amazing in ‘80s hair and shoulder-padded suits. 


     

  • "Cynical" by Propaganda ft. Aaron Marsh & Sho Baraka, Wednesday, June 19, 2024 (reworked post)

    Jason Emmanuel Petty, known as Propaganda, is a poet, pastor, and spoken-word rapper whose 2017 album Crooked made a definitive turn into the discussion of where politics and Christianity intersect.  In the constant Fox News cycle of 2024, it’s hard to remember everything that was happening in 2017, although the politicians and the American people have only become more shameless. Much of the lyrics on Crooked come from a personal and political disappointment, particularly in how Christianity is used to oppress people of color in America. The album’s third single, “Cynical” encapsulates this disappointment succinctly.

    WHY DO YOU LOVE YOUR GUNS MORE THAN OUR SONS? “Cynical” starts with a morose electric guitar which plays the same chords throughout the song. Several of the tracks on Crooked use electric guitar, but the melodies are kept to a minimum, keeping the focus on Propagada’s words. “Cynical,” though has a chorus–albeit a simple one–sung by Copeland’s Aaron Marsh. The lyrics don’t hold back on the cynicism Petty feels. It’s a similar feeling that progressive and so-called ex-vangelicals feel, but Propaganda is addressing the concerns of black Americans and immigrants who are most vulnerable to the political policies that mainstream Christians are leveraging in politics. Propaganda specifically calls out Christians who are “flying to Trump rallies” while people who don’t look like them are dying. He asks the Christians why they will not get involved with racial justice, and why instead they “love [their] guns more than our sons.” The series of questions Propaganda asks in the song are not new or original–many of us have been asking these questions at various stages of the Christian Right, but the willful blindness by the other side leads the speaker to feel more cynical than ever before.

    PRAY TO MY SAVIOR, AND MIDDLE FINGER TO MY NEIGHBOR. Seven years later, what has changed? The polarization Propaganda raps about in “Cynical” is more pronounced. Voters are once again forced into choosing between Trump and Biden. Both candidates are more interested in wielding political power than addressing the needs of the nation, though Trump has promised a frightening Project 2025 which should scare anyone interested in a state with free democratic elections. We’re in the middle of maybe the hottest year on record and in the middle of two wars. Personal freedoms are constantly under fire as a stacked Supreme Court decides a theocratic future. And while it’s bad for me, I can’t even imagine what this level of cynicism feels like for an immigrant, a refugee, a person of color in America, or a member of the trans community. Today is Juneteenth, a day when we celebrate the end of slavery, specifically the end of slavery in the Confederate states. Why didn’t it become a federal holiday until 2021? And why is it a point of political contention? Why does racism feel so much more mainstream and more overt than ever? 





  • “My Universe” by Coldplay ft. BTS (repost), Tuesday, June 18, 2024

    I’ve written a bit about how I’m a  Coldplay apologist. I believe that the London-based band is very good at what they do. Though so many artists accomplish their sound, both musically and lyrically, better, there’s something uplifting about a new Coldplay album. Two years ago, I talked about the band’s first single from their ninth studio record, Music of the Spheres, “Higher Power.” The album was released on October 15, 2021. Before the release of the record and after releasing “Higher Power,” the band released the promotional single, the 10:17 track “Coloratura,” which was praised by critics for its composition and production. Then they released the second radio single “My Universe,” featuring the South Korean boy band, BTS. The song shot straight to number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, becoming the second Coldplay single to top the Hot 100, the first being “Viva la Vida.”

    I JUST WANT TO PUT YOU FIRST.  The reviews for Music of the Spheres were quite low. Metacritic, a database that averages the scores by major publications, scores the album as 55/100. Most critics agreed that Coldplay’s venture into Max Martin-produced pop music was shameless, even for a band that was instrumental for inventing the late ’00/’10 pop-rock sound. “My Universe” in particular is viewed as a “cash-grab.” Recently, due to BTS’s enormous ARMY of fans, every recent single the boy band has released has headed straight to the top of the Billboard Hot 100. Music of the Spheres aimed to be a comeback album for the British pop-rockers. In 2017, Coldplay was a band with a large fan base. Only Linkin Park had more  YouTube  subscribers, and Coldplay was the most streamed “rock band.” However, being the top rock band, even if your definition is loose enough to call Coldplay a rock band, made Coldplay a “big fish in a little pond.” The pond of rock music continues to dry up, and the 100 Million+ selling band would be competing with streams and sales by pop and R&B acts like Drake and The Weeknd. A collaboration with one of the highest-selling groups of recent years would promote the now middle-aged rock band as cool and hip. Maybe the kids would dig back into their earlier discography and maybe Music of the Spheres would sell well.

    THAT BRIGHT INFINITY INSIDE YOUR EYES. Cynicism about the “cash-grab” aside, the Coldplay-BTS collaboration may have come from a place of sincerity. Originally, Coldplay wrote the song for BTS, as many non-Korean composers have written for K-pop. Coldplay performed in South Korea in 2017 during their A Head Full of Dreams Tour. The band has been evolving into a pop act steadily over the course of their career. Their 2011 Mylo Xyloto included a collaboration with Rihanna on “Princess of China,” and much less guitar focus. Head Full of Dreams included backing vocals by Beyoncé; however, “Hymn for the Weekend” wasn’t marketed as Coldplay ft. Beyoncé, thus the song ran on the momentum of Coldplay fans, not Beyoncé fans. The message of “My Universe” is that love transcends distance, language, and misunderstandings. Produced in and out of quarantine, Music of the Spheres aims to bridge fans around the world together. The band began touring again, after swearing off touring during the release of their 2019 record Everyday Life until they could find a way to tour more eco-friendly. Recently, the band has embarked on a carbon-neutral tour, which aims to revolutionize the music industry. The musical concept album Music of the Spheres may have been inspired by Star Wars in “a galaxy far, far away,” but the themes of connection, love, and the human experience are truly not out of this world.
     
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