Five Obsessions (November 2024)
Five Obsessions covers five of my favorite songs each month. Some new, some old. Some new to me, some revisited. Published in the middle of every month (typically on the second Saturday).
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.
Quadry - “My Little Revolution…Ms Lucy”
Quadry is the rare rapper with an ability to match technical process with evocative turns of phrase, the processing of trauma and lived experience coursing through every tightly wound bar. The evidence of things not seen haunts his voice. “My Little Revolution…Ms Lucy,” the opener on his new album Ask A Magnolia, compacts the greatest hits of his style into two and a half minutes.
Elmiene / Dijon - “Big Mike’s”
Sometimes we speak of covers as a kind of cheating. Less resonant. Less important. As if authorship and performance deserve different premiums. We prize singer songwriters. “True” auteurs. The soul-bearing types whose lyrics and voices intertwine in service of something higher. It can be easy to write off covers and famous interpolations. They pose safe bets, music’s equivalent to Hollywood’s famous IP fetish.
Bold faced economic incentives and perceived creative bankruptcy tend to obscure the emotional value that reinterpretation can bring to an existing composition. A great voice delivering another’s words can cut deeper when they’re truly felt. What’s more, a great cover can serve as an entry point to an unfamiliar original, each version highlighting different aspects of a great song.
Rihanna and Tame Impala. The Fugees and Roberta Flack. D’Angelo and Prince. Aretha and Otis. The greatest covers elevate the original and new recording in one motion.
While listening to a set of live recordings by emerging British singer Elmiene, I encountered “Big Mike’s” for the first time. I’d missed Dijon’s original when it came out during the pandemic. Elmiene’s live cover is unlikely to become a charting hit like some of the other songs mentioned above. Both versions are absolutely brilliant. While Dijon’s mushroom soul makes “Big Mike’s” pop and distort with the energy of the slowest part of a radioactive L.A. summer day, Elmiene imbues the same source with a confessional tone, melting the world away from him and his love. Elmiene’s more direct delivery highlights the honest beauty of Dijon’s words, setting previously muted details authored by one of this generation’s best songwriters in high relief.
(Worth noting as well that Elmiene has proven a serious knack for special covers early in his career, with last year’s cover of Jeff Buckley’s “Lover You Should Have Come Over” giving a previous example of his eclecticism.)
Tyler, the Creator - “NOID”
In last month’s Numbers on the Board, I marked Tyler’s steady rise from internet rap sensation to chart topper. With his most recent album CHROMAKOPIA, he has completed a rare ascent, achieving traditional stardom without bending to convention. No big radio hits. No catering to safe commerciality in his musical choices. No ill-advised features or ill-fitting brand collaborations. With the exception of his fourth album Cherry Bomb, Tyler has grown in popularity and esteem with each project, expanding his production palette, maturing lyrically, exploring new visual aesthetics, and conquering conventional media platforms few rappers of his generation have accessed.
With such success comes greater notoriety. Notoriety breeds unwanted attention. Paranoia breeds in the festering heat of unwanted attention.
CHROMAKOPIA’s lead single “NOID” echoes Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” (from classic album Paranoid) in its sparse, fuzzy guitar-driven track. Its lyrics feel like an addition to a great canon of paranoiac pop. A worthy entry point to an album about figuring out how to grow up now that you have little left to prove to the public.
A related tangent. Years ago, I noticed a thread running through Michael Jackson’s music. A spine of different sorts of paranoia. Distrust of lovers (“This Place Hotel,” “Billie Jean,” “Chicago,” “Dangerous”). Distrust of friends, acquaintances, and onlookers (“Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin”). Distrust of self (“Man in the Mirror”). Distrust of the media (“Scream,” “Leave Me Alone,” “Tabloid Junkie,” “Xscape”). Distrust of the very fabric of reality (“Thriller,” “Stranger In Moscow”). Many of these forms of fear intersect and overlap, spinning up a web of suspicion that inextricably tangled Jackson’s life and art.
As this particular strain evolves over Jackson’s catalog, one could map its changes to the evolution of surveillance technology, the rapid multiplication of 24-hour-media sources, the politicization of everything, and, ultimately, the elevation of fame to the central religion of American life. There is at least an essay and perhaps more in charting these historical shifts from the late ‘70s through the early 2000s against the course of Jackson’s music. For now, there is at very least this playlist I made.
Phoenix James - “digital” / “contact high”
Though singer/producer Phoenix James’ available catalog is limited, her recent singles “Digital” and “Contact High” point to the polarities of her soulful continuum. “Digital” channels Prince at his high pitched, alter ego-embodying oddity. “Contact High” hews traditional, emitting a warmth that calls back to artists like India Arie.
Of “Digital,” James told me it was “originally a writing exercise.”
“Oftentimes when I find myself a little stuck, I’ll give myself a prompt, and about an hour and a half on a timer to write a song,” she said via a text message relayed by her manager. “When I started the beat on ‘Digital’ I had no idea what it was going to be.”
“I started reflecting on relationships I’d seen in Miami with social media obsessed people using the portrayal of their relationships and friendships as social currency,” she continues “and the way it feels to be on the receiving end of that experience.”
“Contact High” bears none of the automatist quirks of “Digital.” It feels far more the product of low lit studios smoked with incense, expanding and contracting with the flow of a late night jam. Both songs show the remarkable potential of a 21-year-old talent already in motion.
Empty Shell Casing - “charlatan”
I imagine 95% of the people reading this newsletter are probably going to hate self-proclaimed “fort worth thug metal” band Empty Shell Casing and turn off “Charlatan” after a few seconds. For those of us that spend significant portions of our teens (also our thirties) listening to Korn, Rage Against the Machine, and Slipknot, the punishing, full throated, drop D tuned rage of “Charlatan” should feel like a well worn, favorite outfit.
Bonus: “This Is Halloween”
The spooky season has come and gone for most of the world. Not so in the Shaughnessy-Tanners household, where “This Is Halloween” remains my two year old’s most requested song (in spite of the fact that he has never seen The Nightmare Before Christmas).