Five Obsessions (September 2024)
Five Obsessions covers five of my favorite songs each month. Some new, some old. Some new to me, some revisited. Published on the second Saturday of every month.
You can listen to the running list of Applied Science favorites in the Spotify playlist below and read about this week’s specific picks below that.
Brittany Howard - “Prove It To You”
Many great dance songs forge religion in miniature, spiking feverish devotion for minutes at a time, eyes-in-the-back-of-the-skull visions from another realm transmuted into writhing, sweating something on earth. Ecstasy, in any sense you choose. Often the best of these songs build on phrases that turn into mantras through repetition. “I Feel Love.” “Music Sounds Better With You.” “Feeling For You.” “My Love.” Verbal metronomes of the dance floor. Whispered epigraphs that bind people together, if just for a night.
Though my “party in an unmarked warehouse somewhere in South LA” days regrettably ended around the time my son took his first breaths, I can still appreciate a song that sounds like the right score for 3AM.
Brittany Howard’s “Prove It To You” intoxicates me because it hinges on a timeless, honest chorus: “All I wanna do is prove it to you.” It’s a set of words you could just as easily imagine from the mouth of Donna Summer in the ‘70s, or replicating themselves across French touch production in the ‘90s. It echoes a piece of James Baldwin writing advice, the directive to “write a sentence as clean as a bone.” The hook on “Prove It To You” embodies blunt longing without poetic fluff. It is a reminder of what a singular artist Howard is, how far a song of this nature seems from her breakthrough work as lead singer of the Alabama Shakes. Then again, white dance music has been mining Black voices and consigning them to anonymity since the dawn of disco. Why shouldn’t a powerhouse singer who embodies such a panoply of Black musical history be able to pull off a dance floor burner?
(While I love the album version of “Prove It To You,” something about Howard’s live performance on Fallon sends the songs message home even better to my mind.)
Asake - “uhh yeah”
As afrobeats and global music continues to morph, artists like Lagos’ Asake excite with creative risks that might prove frightening to American counterparts beset by the expectations of commerce. “Uhh Yeahh” is one such example of satisfying experimentation. Gritty. Pulsing. Hypnotic. Music better to be experienced than described.
producedbycpkshawn - “pop like this pt. 2”
For someone who spends so much time listening to music, consuming memes, and reading things on the internet, I also consider myself deeply “not online.” I have not had a Facebook or Instagram account for over half a decade. I have never had a TikTok account. I refuse the notion that a person needs to be terminally online in order to understand the ebbs and flows of cultural movements.
I found “pop like this pt. 2” (and its slowed and reverbed counterpart) because I was doing some Spotify “related artist” digging while obsessing over Cash Cobain’s “Problem.” I then started to see it pop up in a variety of YouTube shorts. Workout videos. Cooking videos. Then, ultimately, a variety of dance videos (often in the form of the full song “Yo Bunny” by Ugly Andz., a song which has had its own viral moment in the wake of “pop like this pt. 2” permeating corners of the audiovisual internet). I gathered from YouTube comments that a dance video by South African breakout artist Tyla either started (or, more likely, amplified), the track’s virality.
Typing the previous paragraph has made me feel impossibly old, but it’s easy to understand the appeal of a song that samples rapper Khia’s XXX-rated classic “My Neck My Back” to hypnotic effect, chopping its signature opening refrain to bits over a shotgun rhythm that has become typical of sexy drill, current Jersey Club, and various related subgenre mutations of hip-hop inflected dance music. It is as avant garde in its way as it is mesmerizing, jittery and exciting enough to inspire a tidal wave of home grown dance videos.
It is a reminder of the strange siloing power of the internet, turning bits of media new and old into the soundtracks of many people’s lives, wile other people hardly know such sounds even exist.
Cal Tjader - “Leyte”
My dad loved going places he wasn’t always supposed to be. He loved jetting uptown, far from the streets of Brownsville, Brooklyn where he grew up, to some of Harlem’s live music clubs. He loved dancing to Latin jazz. Tito Puente and Eddie Palmieri, Stan Getz and Celia Cruz. Most of all, he loved Cal Tjader.
I remember stumbling across “Leyte” on an old record of he’d saved in a collection that was not nearly as impressive as I hoped it would be when I dove head first into sampling as a 14 year old. Totally intoxicated by “Leyte” at the time, I hadn’t listened to it for years until a recent edition of Gino Sorcinelli’s excellent Micro-Chop newsletter. Tjader’s soulful, downtempo instrumental enchants me now as it did then, transporting me back to nights spent searching for the perfect loop, back further still to my father’s young years, spent god knows where doing who knows what, likely trying to impress a woman that wasn’t my mother with his dance moves.
Mustafa - “Old Life”
Some voices transmit the pain of lived experience in ways more powerful than word choice. Mustafa’s singular rasp has been one such voice for me since I first heard his 2020 single “Stay Alive,” but truly since its follow up “Air Forces” cemented his recitations of grief and love in my memory. While no other song in his catalog has hit me with the understated devastation of “Air Forces,” Mustafa continues to mold a style both definitively modern (particularly in lyrical choices that root most songs in the street life of modern Toronto) and curiously retro, as committed to folk sounds and folksy wisdom as the echoes of distant lands and teachings of ancient sages. On “Old Life,” Mustafa pulls off this blend once more, his voice the defining instrument.