My friend (going back to 1965) Chris Brewster sent me an item from The New York Times Magazine of 3/15/20: 25 Songs That Matter Now. After listening to all 25, he offered a few comments and suggested I give the Times’ selection a try.
You might find this exercise interesting, as I did. Just trying to identify 25 current songs that matter seems ambitious.
This was an overdue cultural update for me. After turning off most popular music in the late 1970s, I’ve learned almost nothing about performers who’ve emerged over the past 40 years, except for that guy, you know, that guy who sang that song — was it the ‘80s, the ‘90s? — anyway, I think it was that guy, unless it wasn’t a guy.
All but one of the YouTube links below display the lyrics. Most seem to me the work of writers with little to say, but that’s just me, someone so antique he knows lyrics by Ira Gershwin.
Writing that, I guessed that familiarity with Ira Gershwin would serve as something of a divide in generations, as well as taste. Then I showed my “25 Songs” review to my millennial daughter Holly. Creative literate that she is, Holly noted that she also favors Gershwin over all the selections in the article.
Anyway, here are my takes on these currently popular songs. Your results will differ, but if you care to write your own review, I’d like to read it.
An “X” indicates a track whose “matter now” status I couldn’t grasp. I used Brewster’s “•” notation for tracks I liked a little and his “—“ for ones I liked more.
- X Prophet is about moody obsessive love. The verse is tiresome and the chorus is tiresome. It goes on for four tired minutes.
- X What would you suppose #2 is about? Moody obsessive love. But for additional passion, Earfquake includes a touching appeal to the artist’s “bitch.” I heard an eerie strong resemblance to another song of soulful romance, a genre parody aired over a decade earlier on Saturday Night Live. Someone at SNL seems to have the gift of prescience.
- • Not bad. After those first two tracks, listening to Adore You was for me like switching from Linda McCartney to Aretha Franklin. If you’ve never heard the former singer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoH9zP_n_g0
- ? Dangote stumped me. First gave it a half-hearted X, then half-agreed with Brewster’s admiration of its energy and marked it •. Then I listened along with the English-translated lyrics, which were weird-funny, but I found the single-minded interest in money uninteresting. Gave up and gave it a question mark.
- X Goat Head features the most tedious song intro ever, over a minute-long ode to narcolepsy.
- — My second hearing of Harmony Hall was with lyrics, which persuaded me to upgrade from a dot to a dash. Compared to most of these other lyricists, this guy is Sondheim.
- X Ricky Hip Hop croop crap.
- X El Beso Que No Le Di My Spanish being as proficient as my Nigerian Pidgin, I was stuck again. Changed my ? to an X when further listening reminded me of the soundtracks for a couple Netflix series I tried to watch about South American drug runners.
- X Truth Hurts You have to give Lizzo credit for being tough, though I prefer the old-school musical tough of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. Also, how ‘bout a woman using the invaluable “bitch” lyric? Equal opportunity.
- X Doin’ Time Young Person Angst is a musical tradition even pre-dating the Neo-Paleolithic Period anthropologists trace back to Brian Wilson. This is certainly updated Y.P.A., but whined through the nose, it only goes so far. At least she knows enough to quote one line of Gershwin.
- • Everything I Wanted Well, if you do Y.P.A., preferable to do catchy Y.P.A.
- X Motivation is 3:13. I’d guess the time required to write these lyrics was 3:13.
- X Jellicle Songs for Jellicle Cats T.S. Eliot has been my favorite poet since I was 14. Critics generally consider his work a landmark 20th century reinvention of poetry. Through the 1930s, under the pseudonym Old Possum, Eliot wrote occasional light verse about cats, by some accounts for children, by others to amuse his friends. They were collected and published in 1939 as Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. Of course, Eliot never could have imagined the postmortem fate of this whimsical stuff: that it would be adulterated into a huge, glitzy, smash hit production, a litter box of a musical. Yuck, Andrew Lloyd Webber. Yuck, furballs.
- X The Man is a slickly produced Woman Pride song. (See #22 for a WP song I heard as much better, though maybe we Y chromosome lugs shouldn’t comment here.) Note to lyricist: Your “. . . if I was a man” means something different from what you intended to say: “. . . if I were a man.”
- 10% Through the 1960s, Motown Records produced a parade of hit records using pretty much the same rhythm track, with various catchy melodies played over it. But those hits did have catchy melodies. This song is just a rhythm track.
- X 953. This is like The Who if, instead of being brilliant, The Who was lousy.
- X Old Town Road Country & Western Bad.
- — Stupid Horse A winner! You could call this fun dumb: happily dumb and lotsa fun. Check out the YouTube video below, 100 gecs – stupid horse (Official Lyric Video). A two-person costume horse trots up to a traffic intersection and . . . well, just watch!
- X Jogging Once upon a time, England exported popular music acts to the U.S. that were talented and entertaining. Now they send us this.
- X Hot Girl Summer Though some think the episode apocryphal, acclaimed theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli, shown the inept paper of a young student, is said to have remarked (translated from the German), “That is not only not right; it is not even wrong.” This song is not only not good . . . .
- X I never evangelize my own religious preferences, but after listening to Follow God, I feel like writing my own song: Follow Humanism.
- X Brewster’s general comment on most of the 25 tracks seems especially relevant for Playing Games: “. . . how thin they feel, and how slapdash the lyrics . . . .” Thin and slapdash, yep.
- — Redesigning Women Most country music in recent decades has struck me as twangy rock with maybe a steel guitar. And I’d have expected any Woman’s Pride anthem to strike me as #14 above did. But nice surprise: a country song about Woman Pride with savvy humor and good music. (For some reason, I expect everyone reading how much I liked Redesigning Women not to like it.)
- • Everybody Wants You seems a competent popular song. But if you tell me that it’s sucky sensitivity and I’m grading on the curve here, eh, you’re probably right. Maybe I was just grateful to be close to the end of the list.
- X The Center Won’t Hold Yet another expression of Young Person Angst, also strangely sounding like the theme song of some lame, big-budget science fiction movie.
My review: three •, three —, eighteen X , one ?
Ten of these songs had some merit for Brewster (who also wondered whether he was “grading on the curve”), but only six for me. He’s a year older than I, yet apparently younger at heart.
Feel free to fire away at my review, younger people, that is, almost everyone.