Some of these are things everyone's favourite video game plumber has said over the course of his storied career. Some of these things are shouted by Mark Morrison at the end of certain lines of his immortal 90s R&B hit “Return of the Mack.” Your job is to figure out which is which (and also imagine “Return of the Mack” with Mario ad libs instead). I'll say this: there's more overlap here than you think.
Memory's funny. I have forgotten key facts about the people I love and cherish the most, but somehow, I still remember the eight seconds of Canadian basic cable where the Beastie Boys dissed Al Di Meola. If memory serves, and it may well not, it was on MuchMusic (i.e. Canadian MTV). The context for this cross-genre drive-by has been lost to time, but I distinctly remember there being a cutaway from the Beasties to a dude who looked like a bad guy from RoboCop twiddling knobs while strip-mall martial artists and tech demo assets dance around him. It's a baffling cultural artifact from an era thick with them.
The video for “Sequencer,” and its parent album Scenario, were unleashed onto an unsuspecting public in 1983, the year jazz fusion broke on MTV. This wasn't because of Di Meola: the video for “Sequencer” is, charitably, the dorkiest thing I've ever seen. Di Meola is doing is best Rick Wakeman impression throughout, what with the capes and synthesizers and all. It is the visual equivalent of a katana hanging on an otherwise bare apartment wall (and not only because there are literal katanas in this video). No, jazz fusion broke on MTV because that same year, Herbie Hancock took over MTV with the funky avant-garde nightmare fuel of “Rockit.” This was not a fair fight. Hancock was filtering his sound through the nascent idiom of hip-hop; Di Meola filtered his through Miami Vice, which makes sense, since the credited songwriter is the smuggler himself, Jan Hammer. So while “Sequencer” isn't great jazz fusion, it is superlative arena-rock cheese.
I still don't know a ton about Di Meola or his work. I'm familiar with Friday Night in San Francisco, his landmark live album with fellow guitar wizards John McLaughlin and Paco de Lucía, because every used record store on Earth is legally required to have one copy of it in stock at all times (see also: August and Everything After, Pocket Full of Kryptonite, and that one ELO compilation, you know the one). I'm not a big Chick Corea/Return to Forever guy; my taste in jazz fusion runs funkier, towards Casiopea or, say, Herbie Hancock. But the main lick of “Sequencer” is catchy, the synthesized percussion in the middle reminds me of Hiroshi Sato's work (consider this my plus for his wonderful 1982 album Awakening, and the music video is an all-time piece of kitsch, memorable enough to appear on my brain's front door last month after literal decades of not thinking about it.
There's this cartoonist/animator from South Korea who goes by Ramdaram. If you've encountered any of her stuff in the wild, it's likely one of her animated music videos starring her OCs, one for Jack Stauber's “Two Time” (24 million views at time of writing), one for Tim Legend's “Soda City Funk”[1] (52 million views). The OC lore is extensive and cryptic in the way these self-contained universes tend to be (no doubt exacerbated here by my inability to speak Korean), but the videos are fun explosions of Gen Z webcore energy. “Poison” is a newer, moodier entry in Ramdaram's “Underfity Friends” story cycle[2], soundtracked by Evgeny Bardyuzha's “Tastes Like Poison.”
There isn't much online when you search Bardyuzha's name, which leads me to believe he's just a dude out in Chelyabinsk who likes making electronic music, sometimes for clients (those motivational business videos don't score themselves, shout out to the library music producers out there), sometimes for fun. “Tastes Like Poison” is indeed fun in a club-goth Drive-core kind of way. It sounds like the Weeknd and M83 trying to write a crossover EDM hit. Ramdaram seems to be doing well for herself as well: just south of a million YouTube subscribers, a handful of viral videos, a steady stream of new work on Instagram (movie dork bonus: her most recent piece at time of writing contains a nod to Chungking Express). There's something heartening about stumbling onto the work of people plugging away on the other side of the planet.
[2] Perhaps sensing there were a bunch of non-Korean goofballs like yours truly among her subscriber base, Ramdaram released an English-language lore explainer last year with the circuitous, oddly poetic title of “Story of a city where it's not strange for a person to go missing.”
Continuing from last time: “The Surfer” sounds like Vampire Weekend's version of a lo-fi hip hop song, down to the drum machine, leisurely tempo, and woozy processed piano. But “The Surfer” also has Ezra Koenig singing and some sick George Harrison-esque guitar, which, honestly, more lo-fi hip hop should have.
As indie-heads of a certain vintage shuffle towards middle age, one question lingers in their hearts: does Vampire Weekend pass the Five-Album Test? I couldn't hum you a single bar of anything on Father of the Bride right now, so I'll have to revisit it before I set my take in stone. But to hear father of the Five-Album Test Steven Hyden say it, the band has sailed over the crossbar with room to spare. This discusson can be heard on a recent episode of Hyden's Indiecast podcast, which he co-hosts with fellow music writer Ian Cohen. It's a banger of an episode: they talk about that one timePitchfork reviewed a Jet album with no text, just a video of a monkey pissing into its mouth, but they're dead wrong about Good News for People Who Love Bad News being overrated.
But there's at least one thing my fellow greying Xillennials and I can agree on: Only God Was Above Us is awesome! It rocks hard! The workrate has slowed down (Koenig was otherwise busy daisy-chaining hyphenates in the five years since Father of the Bride was released, just as he was in the six years between that album and Modern Vampires of the City) but the work, crucially, is still good.
I want to invoke a gentler version of Sturgeon's law: 90% of lo-fi hip hop sounds interchangeable. That's not a knock against the genre: I, along with tens of thousands of people this very second, have chosen lo-fi hip hop (or its hacker cousin, synthwave) as my ambient music of choice. It's what courses through my ears when I read on the couch in the wee small hours. The idiom is still in its infancy, still evolving out its clichés, making it reasonably easy for an artist to stick out. One of my favourites, the Finnish musician Kupla, sets himself apart with waltz times and free reeds. “just can't help it” by Vancouver-based producer Ngyn grabbed me with a simple, evocative vocal hook. Sometimes that's all it takes to end up on a playlist.
Lo-fi hip hop's fuel is nostalgia. Yours, someone else's, real, fictional, it doesn't matter. Now, if I were younger and more guileless, “just can't help it” would have 100% inspired me to make my own track, one sampling, say, Casey Affleck in Manchester by the Sea saying “I can't beat it,” so I understand the impulse to make of this kind of art. It's the same impulse that drives people to make AMVs soundtracked by “Somewhere Only We Know” or similar, nightcore versions of Rural Alberta Advantage singles, or sadboi moodboards set to the score of Minari (I believe the technical term is “webweaving,” which appears to be the Tumblr arm of the TikTok Sadposting Industrial Complex). People on the internet are often sad, so they create these digital pamphlets and readymades that are conduits for their own aches and lightning rods for those of others, all refracted through the lingua franca of a pop culture, if not the pop culture. The only difference between then and now is the tools used to perform these microcultural emotional exorcisms got easier to use.
In other words, lo-fi hip hop at its worst is kitsch, gunning for unearned pathos using trite shorthand. But at its best, it can evoke a whole world, not just your childhood bedroom. It can come by its resonance honestly like any other kind of music: through the alchemy of instrumentation, performance, arrangement, and production. Hell, even a good song title can help; “Rat Salad” kicks ass in no small part because it's called “Rat Salad.” The same is true for “Mist Beneath Your Apartment.”
I wanted to post my monthly mix for April (here it is, by the way) but decided I wanted to go long on each of the songs. So now you know what the next dozen of so posts are going to be about.
One of my absolute favourite bands got namechecked by the biggest pop star on the planet on her last album. Could this be the bump the Blue Nile needs to grace the world with their presence once again? Unlikely. I've written about the cult Scottish sophisti-pop group before, so I've definitely mentioned their slow workrate; their fourth and presumably final album came out two decades ago this August.
But bands with small outputs sometimes pad their discographies out with live records and odds-and-sods collections, catnip for the hardcore faithful. The Blue Nile have neither to their name, but deluxe versions of their four studio albums have been released with supplementary material. “The Second Act,” the b-side of the band's first single, was included in the new version of their great 1984 album A Walk Across the Rooftops. It's an unrepresentative track of the band's output, but the bare production and frail lead vocal by Paul Buchanan make it a perfect candidate to kick off any budding bootlegger's hypothetical Decade-esque career-spanning Blue Nile compilation.
Here's a take: things that sounded like shit 40 years ago can still be novel because the mid-to-late 1980s were the last monoculturally uncool era, but things that sounded like shit 20 years ago still sound like shit because culture is stuck in a tightening recursive loop. In sartorial terms, I'm not saying I wouldn't wear Crocs, I just never thought I'd see the day they'd become de rigeur.
Do not judge an album by its eight-minute second track, as I foolishly did with Wednesday's Rat Saw God.
If you're a band, and you're recording an album, and you have an eight-minute track with an extended coda where your lead singer sounds like they're getting sucked into a black hole made of tar, their shrieks and screams getting more and more muffled in the mix as the song reaches its conclusion, my advice is to make that song your closer. This has been Thoughts on Album Sequencing.
I now know approximately 1,500% more stuff about the Smashing Pumpkins than I did at any previous point in my life, stuff like “holy shit, Tommy Lee drummed on their 2014 album Monuments to an Elegy” (shout out to Sarah).
The best recommendation engines have always been and continue to be your cool friends and your own curiosity. Link-hopping can lead to some weird and beautiful places.
No not that Molly Lewis, the otherMolly Lewis, the Paganini of whistling.
Is “Susanne” the best Weezer song? Maybe!
Dude I spent hours trying to find the specific mix of “Smooth Operator” that I got off LimeWire in college, and I don't think it's on Spotify. It might be the 12” single mix.
Kiwi Jr. are the leaders in the clubhouse because I still believe in the 12-string electric guitar.
Jeremy Gaudet, if you see this, drop the Letterboxd, brother!
Last night, I was idly plugging things into the YouTube search bar when I stumbled upon the video above. It's footage from the 1953 Vincente Minnelli musical The Band Wagon cut to Spoon's “Let Me Be Mine,” from their 2014 album They Want My Soul.
It's a delightful piece of work (the channel, attributed to one Rapha Eumon, is chock full of similar edits), and I can't quite articulate why it moves me as much as it does. Maybe it's because it feels like this is just someone's hobby, and they're putting it out there for themselves rather than for anyone else, and other people crossing paths with it is just a welcome bonus. Most of these videos have under 500 views; the channel itself has under 600 subscribers. I will make that total go up by one.
Stumbling upon something organically like this is so refreshing. There's something Old Internet about it.
The Scottish band the Blue Nile has cropped here once or twice before. Their album Hats (1989) is an airy sophisti-pop masterpiece, and has quickly become one of my Desert Island Discs, but given their agonizingly slow work rate (four albums since 1984, zero since 2004), you can plough through their main studio output in an afternoon. So I made a Spotify playlist of what I called “stray songwriting credits, odd production jobs, and assorted collaborations” they've done between their main records.
These songs are all Blue Nile songs in spirit, melancholy songs of pained love and aching loneliness, but they vary in their genesis and interpretation. Robbie Robertson up and hired the band in 1991 to record a pretty convincing Blue Nile soundalike he wrote called “Breakin' the Rules” for his album Storyville. Paul Buchanan, the Glaswegian Sinatra who fronts the Blue Nile, spent a chunk of the 90s in L.A. and wrote the most early-90s-ass white-boy R&B song for Michael McDonald. Annie Lennox covered “The Downtown Lights,” and the Scotsmen co-wrote “The Gift” with her in return. I've even included a collaboration with American trumpeter Chris Botti called “Midnight Without You,” which is a Blue Nile song in all but name, which gives a glimpse at the sort of course correction that the band would undertake between the strummy, AOR-inflected material of their third album Peace at Last (1996) and the conscious throwback feel of their last album, High (2004).
The oddest song of the bunch might be the Buchanan-penned “Let's Face It” as performed by cult country singer Matraca Berg, who is perhaps better known as a songwriter than as a solo artist. It's strange to hear the Blue Nile-ness of the melodies and subject matter being filtered through rootsy guitar and rollicking organ lines.
As I wrote earlier, the Blue Nile work at a snail's pace, so this playlist is barely album-length, but there's a few gems here that demonstrate the singular skills of this band, chief among them Buchanan's facility with widescreen heartbreak.
“[...] You hope that some day in the future, some kid will be walking along the beach and find a little piece of green glass that has been worn down by the waves. He'll pick it up and put it in his pocket, take it home and love it. He won't necessarily know why he loves it, but he'll love it. Those are the kind of records that we try to make.”
The Blue Nile (Photo by Kerstin Rodgers/Redferns)