A NEVER-ENDING DANCE. Today I chose a bunch of ancillary songs to soundtrack the experience as I recover from jet lag and catch up with friends and family members. These songs are meaningful to me. While most of them are old a few are new because they remind me of times with my people. What songs would make your list?
In 2007, Falling Up released their third studio record, Captiva, returning to the production of Aaron Sprinkle. Unlike their debut album Crashings, also recorded with Sprinkle, on Captiva, Sprinkle plays the role as songwriter alongside lead singer Jessy Ribordy. Captiva also marked the end of four years of a daunting release schedule. Their debut album and follow-up Dawn Escapes were released within just 20 months of each other. They then released their remix album, Exit Lights a year later. Captiva attempted to keep hype in the Christian Rock and pop market, releasing four singles, the first of which is today’s song, “Hotel Aquarium.”
Read “Rabbit Holes” by Paper Route on Genius
MUNA’s third and self-titled album was released on June 24th. Their album gives the single from September 2021, “Silk Chiffon,” a home. The band also released three other singles from the 11-track album prior to its release. But in early June last year, MUNA released a non-album track–a cover of Britney Spears’ 1999 bubblegum ballad “Sometimes”–for the Hulu original film Fire Island, also released on the same day. The film was written by and stars comedian Joel Kim Booster and co-stars the Saturday Night Live openly gay comedian Bowan Yang in a modern queer retelling of Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice set in New York’s legendary LGBTQ+ haven.
BABY, ALL I NEED IS TIME. “Sometimes” is Britney Spears’ second single from her debut record, …baby one more time. Following her smash #1 hit “…Baby One More Time,” “Sometimes” takes a more laidback adult contemporary sound. Like many of the songs on Britney’s debut record, “Sometimes” was produced by Max Martin and written by another Swedish songwriter, Jörgen Elofsson and recorded the track at Cheiron Studios in Stockholm. MUNA’s cover plays into the ’90s but takes an alternative girl-rock take on the Britney classic. As a band of LGBTQ+ musicians, Fire Island isn’t the first film to which MUNA has contributed. The band also contributed to the 2018 Netflix film Alex Strangelove, a film about a high school student who comes to terms with his sexuality. The band performs the song “I Know a Place” in the film. In Fire Island, MUNA’s version of “Sometimes” reprises the song, which the cast sang along to in an earlier scene.
Coming to the end of the year, it’s time to remember some of the musical highlights of 2022. I listened to a lot of music this year and maybe more new music than last year. But there certainly were albums that slipped under the radar. I had every intention of digging into The Weeknd‘s Dawn FM , but somehow I was never in that dark of a mood to resonate with the characteristics of that record. Today, I’m going to reveal my controversial list. Enjoy!
#10. The Loneliest Time by Carly Rae Jepsen. The latest from the “Call Me Maybe” singer is a record that isn’t immediately catchy and could easily fall between the cracks because of all the big releases of this year. The diverse singles showed different camera angles of a maturing pop singer who has solidified her status in music nerd-dom and gay music listeners alike. And with her first explicit labeled song, Jepsen is distancing herself from former tween-friendly aesthetic. I’m sure next year I’ll be digging into songs like “Surrender My Heart” and “Joshua Tree” and writing a blog post about the hilarious “Beach House.” Maybe next year, the art pop vibe of this record will hit at just the right time.
#9 INVU by Taeyeon. I didn’t listen to much K-pop this year, but one record that I did listen to a few times was Taeyeon’s latest LP. Last year, she released the single “Weekend,” which became hugely popular and that single was also included on the LP. The title track, “INVU,” was her biggest song of the year and people are still signing as Taeyeon does in the music video. My favorite track has to be “Siren” because of the emotion Taeyeon brings to the song.
#8 Midnights by Taylor Swift. I was expecting more from Taylor, ngl, especially after the journey she brought us on with folklore and evermore. Mic the Snare summed up an opinion on the record that I felt when the album came out and struggled to get into it: that it feels like a repeat album cycle of reputation. Despite the lyrics of “Anti-Hero,” though, Swift has become wiser in her lyric writing making Midnights a much more tolerable record with some genuinely good tracks–“Maroon,” “Snow on the Beach,” “Lavender Haze” are interesting lyrically with Jack Antonoff‘s ’80s-inspired production. I’ll keep giving it a try, but as of writing this post, I’m not convinced this is best Swift’s got.
#7 I Blame the World by Sasha Alex Sloan. The self-identified sad-girl made a “mad record” in 2022. There was a podcast I listened to reacting to Sloan’s EP Self-Portrait. While the podcasters enjoyed the EP, they hoped that Sloan would never make a full-length record. She did. Only Child is a heartbreaking masterpiece, but it pulls back from the gut-wrenching, sometimes mean-spirited lyricism of her EPs. On this year’s I Blame the World, Sloan is caustic as ever. So, this record may not resonate with you. The title track “I Blame the World” is probably the most catchy, but the other songs are worth a listen. Emo surely is alive in 2022.
#6 MUNA. The June release of MUNA‘s self-titled record came after the group released several singles starting with last October’s duet with Phoebe Bridgers “Silk Chiffon.” The full album was solid. “Anything but Me” was a beautiful break up song wishing the best for an ex. The group also had an interesting post-album release single, the ’00s sounding shock pop song “What I Want,” a song about getting back out in the world after a break up, doubling as an anthem for the once cooped up quarantined listeners. Unfortunately, the album was released the same weekend as Roe was overturned, and that didn’t make for fun listening, and I haven’t really gotten into the album since. The record was really hyped before its release and then kind of forgotten in my other music circles. Maybe we can bring it back next year.
#5 Voyeurist by Underoath. I didn’t listen to this record a lot. It was too dark. I thought that the band had summed up what they wanted to say on 2018’s Erase Me. “Religion is a means of control,” the band continues to argue, wrestling with an evolving spirituality and atheism in the former Christian band. But listening to the documentary mini-series of Labeled: Deep Dive, the band got into the deeper personal issues they had which shaped this record. Voyeurist is a hard record to get into unless you love hard music. Some of the tracks feel bereft of all hope and blasphemous, particularly “Pneumonia,” the album’s closer. Other tracks are just creepy like “I’m Pretty Sure I’m Out of Luck and Have No Friends.” But the most accessible track has to be “Hallelujah,” which blends melody and screaming in a way similar to tracks on Define the Great Line.
#4 Dawn FM by The Weeknd. I listened to Dawn FM through once. Similar to the Underoath record, but in a different way, Dawn FM is a depressing record. The ’80s/’90s RnB sounds of the record make the album fun, but the eerie impending doom of the record–death–freaked me out. “Out of Time” and “Take My Breath” are the stand out tracks for me, as well as the voice of Jim Carrey as a radio DJ.
#3 Harry’s House by Harry Styles. This album has received a lot of hate, and I’m not sure that it’s warranted. Harry’s House is an interesting ride, though it certainly is a little disjointed. Haters say that the songs like “Music for a Sushi Restaurant” are soulless as a Target commercial, but from listening to Styles talk about the album, it seems that he and his team are adding something unique to top 40 pop music. Yes, “As It Was” feels like a less original “Take on Me,” but the album shines in the middle with slow tracks like “Little Freak,” “Matilda,” and ’70s disco fun tracks like “Cinema” and “Daydreaming.”
#2 People Like People by Watshi Wa. I admire what the band did with production on this record. It’s a punk rock record refined by 2022 technology. It’s collaborative, featuring friends of the veteran band. I chose “Let Me Prepare You” as today’s song and the song to represent the album. “Let Me Prepare You” features Gasoline Heart–a band that certainly needs their own post. People Like People may not age well given its reaction to the pandemic and as I sat with the album throughout the year, I wrestled more and more with the themes of government control and reliance on technology. The record seems to fall on the more conservative side of the pandemic, and lead singer Seth Roberts points out the toll that the pandemic had on his corner of the music industry. The album makes a few covert statements on tracks like “Land of the Free” and “Who Who Hu (Man)” comes off as subtly racist. But tracks like “Trust Me,” “Like You Mean It,” “Some Time,” as well as today’s song and the Stephen Christian-featuring track “Zombie” all make the record ridiculously catchy. 
We’ve been through several emanations of Lady Gaga. Her debut album, The Fame, was both a satire and a full embrace of the decadence of pop music. Critics were quick to draw comparisons to Madonna–though Gaga despises this comparison–: both singers celebrate female sexuality and both artists are of Catholic Italian-American families which cause several similarities in themes throughout their discographies, and hence, both singers faced a hell of a lot of controversy. But just when critics said “enough” to Gaga’s avant-garde Artpop, the singer switched things up. She recorded a Country-inspired album Joanne. She recorded with musical legend Tony Bennett, singing mid-twentieth century standards. She won an Oscar for the song “Shallow” from the movie she also received a nomination for her acting, A Star Is Born.
I LOST MY LOVE AND NO ONE CARED. Lady Gaga’s 2020 record, Chromatica, was originally planned for April, but delayed due to the pandemic. It is the return to Lady Gaga house music that her earliest fans had been waiting for. The album was well reviewed, holding a 79% on Metacritic. It debuted at #1 on Billboard’s 200 album charts. While the album did release singles, Gaga’s intention was to make a cohesive collection of songs that were meant to be listened to in the sequence they were released. The three “Chromatica” interludes divide the album into three distinctive parts. The album was received by many LGBTQ+ fans as the album they hoped to hear in the clubs and at Pride, though lockdowns made gathering impossible. The podcast Switched On Pop points out the lyrical content of the record hinting at Gaga’s personal life, dancing to distract herself from the tears. The album also makes allusions to earlier Lady Gaga albums, but the critics at Switched On Pop argue that Chromatica is in stark contrast to The Fame in that early in Gaga’s career, the singer merely wanted fame but now she is craving “Stupid Love” from someone special. Fame now means little without love.
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| Sine wavelength measurement source: Wikipedia Commons. |
WHEN I WAS YOUNG, I PRAYED FOR LIGHTNING. Chromatica begins its final act with Lady Gaga’s duet with Elton John in the song “Sine from Above.” This is the third feature on the record, the others being Ariana Grande on the second single “Rain On Me” and K-pop group BLACKPINK on “Sour Candy.” Elton John’s contribution to the record seems perfect to me. It reminds us that Gaga is an heir to the pop-rock extravagance started in the ’60s and ’70s by singers like David Bowie, Elton John, and Freddie Mercury. The inclusion also celebrate the queer energy of decadent pop stars. “Sine from Above” is a pun, playing on the mathematical term for the measurement of the opposite divided by the hypotenuse of a right triangle, if high school math still serves me well. The image on the cover art of Chromatica has a “sine wave.” Someone who receives a “sign from above” receives confirmation that they are on the right path. Gaga prays for “lightning,” which is something that most people want to avoid. Nobody wants to be struck by Zeus’s bolt. Many also attribute lighting to the Judaeo-Christian God, though the Old Testament usually depicts other methods of God exacting vengeance. Some critics have said that Gaga really means to call the song “Sin from Above” meaning that she questions her existence outside of what she has been told is God’s will for humanity. In some ways the song is campy and laughable. Elton John and Lady Gaga can sometimes be a meme of themselves, and Elton John’s over-the-top vocals make some listeners cringe. But I find this song compelling. I was certainly not in the mood from Chromatica when it dropped. I was getting chubby and not thinking at all about getting ready for a “hot boy summer.” I was dealing with depression and existential dread. I didn’t want to dance. I wanted to process my life and my decisions. Now that things feel a little more normal, dance music is okay again. But an introspective dance song potentially about religious trauma from childhood? Sine me up!
Audio:
Read “Sine from Above” by Lady Gaga & Elton John on Genius
New Order formed in 1980 after the three remaining members of the post-punk band Joy Division lost their lead singer Ian Curtis to suicide. Success wasn’t instant for New Order with the start of the new band. New Order’s sound was distinct from Joy Division’s with the inclusion of keyboardist Gillian Gilbert and a growing penchant for synthesizers and electronic dance music. The band’s breakthrough success came prior to the release of their second record, Power, Lies & Corruption with the release of their long-play (12″) single “Blue Monday,” which took dance clubs around the world by storm, and even helped to fund the band’s own dance club in Manchester called The Haçienda, a dance club named after the word for a Spanish plantation.
Single version (1983):
Mixtapemotions 