Call It What You Want: 5 Songs on Poptimism
This week's songs are from SZA, Lola Young, Sam Fender, Ian SWEET, and Post Malone
In Memoriam
Michael Hurley - “I Stole the Right to Live”
Michael Hurley was part of the Greenwich Village folk scene that produced Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Judy Collins. He continued recording and performing up until he passed on last Thursday. As a counterpoint to today’s theme, Hurley remained a cult figure in the music world, proceeding with an indifference to changes in trends, tastes, and technology. He recorded at home. He painted his own album covers. Instead of getting someone to play the trumpet, he would make the pretend trumpet sound with his mouth. Something of an itinerant, he performed in small cafes and bars across the country. Indifferent to fame, popularity, or any music or technical innovations, he made music for the sake of making music and connecting with people, cobbling together a very consistent, unique body of work over 60 years.
He’s not someone you’d hear on the radio, or stumble upon in passing. If you did hear him there, his music is not striking—it rests in the background. Michael Hurley is an artist that someone with taste you trust puts in front of you and insists is great. It will take you a while to realize that person was right; it seems simple, and unassuming but its depth seeps into your brain over time. You’ll hum along to his melodies, take them with you in your head all day, and occasionally whistle. Then one day a song of his will come on a playlist you made and you’ll stop whatever you’re doing and just stand there listening close like you should’ve been all along. Maybe it’ll happen with “When I Get Back Home,” or “Be Kind to Me,” or his deeply beautiful cover of Roger Miller’s “River in the Rain.” At least, that’s what happened to me.
May you be lucky enough to have it happen to you, too.
There’s an anecdote about Thelonious Monk being asked if there was music he didn’t like and he replied, “I like all music.” The person then said, “Even country music?” and Monk shot back, “What part of what I said did you not understand?”
I like all music. But I also apparently give off the impression that I’m a music snob. I made a comment recently about a pop song being awful and my wife replied, “It can’t always be broccoli and carrots.” I took some exception to that. As wide as my palette is, I like to think that I have standards. I do like some modern pop, but there’s wide swath of it that is terrible and intentionally dumb. Some of the people that make it even admit it. Terius Nash aka “The Dream,” who wrote hits like “Umbrella” by Rihanna and “Baby” by Justin Bieber” has a technical term for “that part of the song that sticks in your brain and pulls your antenna and makes you notice,” (the “-ella, -ella, -ella, ay, ay”). He calls it “the dumb part.” And every song he writes has one.
Not liking something doesn’t make me or anyone else a contrarian or a snob. Hearing something you don’t like, and articulating why is another route to defining what you do like, and then being able to explain why. Bad music can be a learning experience, so I unfortunately I can’t dismiss it all as “trash.”
To keep it as simple as possible: I like music that asks more of the listener than just their attention; it tells me something about the person performing it, or even about myself. Take me somewhere. Tell me a story. Put me in a mood.
All of the songs here are meant to provide as many people as possible with instantly memorable melodies. However, all are doing something interesting that set them apart from the pack. Instead of appearing as the latest pre-fabricated pop star with an album full of some super producer’s latest “dumb parts,” these artists are using the conventions of highly popular genres to communicate something about, or unique to, themselves.
Here are 5 songs from artists that make pop music I can get behind.
“I like original music. I like to listen to people who are playing themselves, not somebody else or who they think they should be. I like raw truth. I like to celebrate the hilarity of life. The whole deal.” - Michael Hurley
SZA - “Anything”
Hip Hop and R&B pretty much is pop music nowadays. SZA is inverting the genre by taking a singer-songwriter approach to her music. She counts Bjork, Billie Holiday, and the Wu-Tang Clan among her influences. Unlike modern rappers, there is no character, or put-on. She’s not “fronting” or hiding. I’ve never seen a video or performance of hers, but you can hear it in the music. This is me and this is how it comes out from me. The SZA moniker is more like a superhero’s mask, enabling her to reach self-actualization with the benefit of some level of protection.
I saw enough glowing reviews of 2022’s SOS to check it out despite not liking the lead single (“Kill Bill”). It was strong enough for me to go back further and Ctrl is what hooked me. “Drew Barrymore,” “Prom,” “Go Gina",” and “Anything” being standouts. There’s a fluidity and adventurousness that keeps her many steps ahead of the listener. Like Bon Iver, she seems indifferent to typical song structures. While there are familiar elements that she cycles back to, there’s rarely a recurring chorus. Anything catchy or hook-like that most performers will come back to 3-5 times, SZA will drop once and move along. The stream-of-conscious melodies wind and weave around glitchy, stuttering, and minimalist beats; it’s more about what she’s got on her mind rather than follow a set path.
Back when I played in a band, we got pretty good at engineering a part of each song that might make a listener’s ears perk up. Not an opening riff or a chorus, but a transition or pivot point in the middle of the song where someone might go, “Wait…How’d we get here?” “Anything” has an excellent one of those moments, and then it’s just as quickly gone. I’m down for the ride.
Lola Young - “Messy”
Remember like 15 years ago when everyone marveled at the gap between how polished Adele sang and presented herself and then how she talked and acted? Lola Young doesn’t have that dissonance. Both women went to the BRIT School and were signed by the same A&R person (Nick Huggett).
A friend recently shared “Messy” and “Wish You Were Dead,” calling attention to just how damn good the bass sounds on them. He was absolutely right. The bass player definitely understands the assignment, but is still able to drop in some subtle variations while keeping the groove. Very much like SZA, Young’s melodies meander and flow at their own discretion. Rather than constraining their ideas to a tight 8 bars before kicking to a big chorus, they bend the song to their will. Young keeps it fairly low-key throughout “Messy.” Another differentiator for Young is that the song never rises too high in the chorus. A blanket criticism of modern pop is that it is objectively all too loud, with big bellowing choruses (Sam Fender, for example). “Messy” doesn’t seem to play the game; Young’s approach is like a speaker talking quietly to draw people’s attention in, rather than shouting for it. Young’s voice is just the right kind of raspy to be distinct, and judging by the subject matter and vocabulary in “Messy,” you know she’s singing about exactly what she wants, begging the question of who exactly in this relationship is the “messy” one.
“Ambition is not a point of view” - Marc Maron
Sam Fender - “People Watching”
I heard Sam Fenders “17 Going Under” on XRT and immediately made the connection to Springsteen. In addition to the 90 mph forward thrust in a song that’s looking backwards, I always enjoy hearing someone sing in their true accent. Fender’s Northern brogue shines through. Not just sonically, but thematically, Fender aligns himself to Springsteen by singing about the working class struggles of his home town, in this case North Shields. His music is intentionally open-hearted, big, anthemic (one could argue to a fault). It’s about bringing people and their struggles together in order to transcend them; in doing so, it gives visibility to just how many people connect with those struggles, and creates a collective catharsis. Judging by his success, it’s working for him.
On his most recent album, he’s working with Adam Granduciel of the War on Drugs. As a producer, Granduciel’s gift is to simultaneously create space and fill it with light-touches and textures deep in the mix that expand the scope of the song.
When I hear Fender singing about watching people on treadmills “Under billboards and out of the heat” from outside, I think of central image third-shift workers and night hawks in “Don’t Stop Believin’”—“streetlight people”— but this song is from their perspective, which makes for an interesting reversal. The image of the people on treadmills (florescent, hermetic) sounds more alienating than might be intended, but the point is made—they’re in a bubble onto themselves, where having time and energy for self-care is a luxury. Like Springsteen, Fender captures the struggle to understand whether you’re chasing something, or running away from it, and if that even matters if all you feel is stuck.
Ian SWEET - “Bloody Knees”
There’s more than a handful of Indie Pop successes, particularly within the last 4-5 years. Acts like Mitski, Japanese Breakfast, Rex Orange County, and Boygenius created success for themselves, either through years of organic growth, or hitting the SoundCloud lottery. There are artists out there embracing the catchy melodies and sparkling up-front vocals in anthemic songs designed for mass appeal. There sound has a lot in common with anything on Top 40 radio. The lone difference seems to be they don’t have major labels pushing the song on radio stations, in commercials, TV, or movies.
Jilian Medford has been recording as Ian SWEET for over a decade. While her older records are more guitar-forward, 2021’s Show Me How You Disappear and 2023’s Sucker reduced the distortion, brought in a slicker drum sound, and added atmospheric production. Sucker has a lot in common with the Cure. Medford has spoken of her unabashed Coldplay fandom, particularly their penchant for build-ups and big finishes. “Bloody Knees” has both of those and they are executed in a satisfying way. It’s a breezy banger that wouldn’t sound out of place in the catalogues of Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, Miley Cyrus, or any of the aforementioned indie pop success stories. It’s a song I’d like to get sick of hearing against my will.
“Today people don’t write songs. They’re a lot of sounds, a lot of repetition. That happened when producers tool over.” - Prince (1987)
Post Malone - “A Thousand Bad Time”
A few summers ago, my daughter came home from camp singing the same three lines from “I Like You.” Before that I avoided Post Malone as I would anyone else with face tattoos. I didn’t particularly like that song, but checked around a few others to try and understand the appeal. I sort of get it now. He’s incredibly polite. He is a very generous tipper around the holidays. He jams out to Fleet Foxes in the kitchen just like the rest of us. So relatable!
What’s actually intriguing about his music—aside from being intentionally ridiculous—is his ability to obliterate genre in a way that doesn’t sound like a total mess, or like he’s stretching himself. Unlike Sam Fender, he can modulate his voice in a few different registers to shift around styles. Taylor Swift does something similar. Especially in a post American Idol, full-compression world, deploying a few different voices is underappreciated skill. They don’t have to shout or bellow to keep the listener’s attention; they do that by layering in hooks on top of hooks. You’ve got multiple earworms fighting each other on tracks like “I’m Gonna Be,” “Enough is Enough,” and the dumb-funny “A Thousand Bad Times.” I’m no super-fan, but with some due diligence I found myself fully understanding the appeal. That happens rare enough to be a welcome surprise.
Thanks for reading. Enjoy listening.
Full playlists of songs featured in 5 Songs:
“Hog of the Forsaken” is another great Michael Hurley track. RIP
I would love to know which daughter came home singing Posty. ❤️