But carnivals themselves are a form of trickery: youthful joy on the surface, covering a shadowy underbelly. In the video, Beyoncé is at a carnival, flashing us one gorgeous smile after another. (Turns out she had a sinus infection during the recording.) Meanwhile, Beyoncé’s voice is raw, almost growling, a sound we have never heard from her before. On the surface, the slow-building track is an airy breather after the erotic, liberatory journey of the rest of Beyoncé’s self-titled 2013 album the synth drops, and so does the snare drum, creating a soundscape that draws from rock, reggae, and EDM. It begins with a clip of the crew of the Challenger realizing the malfunction on their spaceship, giving the love story that follows an undercurrent of mortality. “XO” is about more than the saccharine simplicity of dreamy hugs and kisses. This is Frank’s gift, the ability to build worlds of meaning and emotion into a song that has the casual grace of a freestyle. Beneath it all, there’s a romantic ripple, too, as a relationship that seemed casual and disposable is revealed, almost shyly, to mean something more. Listen closely, and “Chanel” also reveals itself to be a meditation on masculinity, one that alternately embraces it, subverts it, and points out its absurdity. It’s all about Frank and the places his words can take you: a heated swimming pool in the hills, a Tokyo back alley, the first-class lounge at the Delta terminal. The piano chords are simple and translucent the beat ambles casually. There isn’t much to it in terms of melody or structure. “Chanel” is the first and best of them, capturing an artist in total command of his faculties as a singer, writer, and rapper.
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Listen: J Balvin / Willy William, “Mi Gente (Remix)” Īfter releasing Blonde in 2016, Frank Ocean spent the next year trickling out a series of singles that built upon that album’s fluid confidence. It remains a testament to pop music’s ability to push back against growing neo-nationalist fervor-there was no border, no wall, that could keep people from coming together and loving this song. Aided on the remix by Beyoncé, who audaciously tackles Spanish and ups the diva ante, “Mi Gente” became the first all-Spanish song to reach the top of Spotify’s Global Top 50 chart. His lines like “el mundo nos quiere” (“the world wants us”) transform the song into a universal call to the dancefloor, an embrace of solidarity and unification at a time of enormous worldwide polarization. No wonder “Mi Gente” was such a global, cross-culture sensation.īalvin worked with William to reinvent the source material, adding Spanish lyrics, chants, and ferocious Latin percussion. Much of what makes Colombian singer J Balvin’s “Mi Gente” sizzle-that audacious drumbeat, that insistent five-note vocal melody-is lifted from Mauritian-French singer Willy William’s 2017 track “Voodoo Song,” which itself reinterprets a sample from the Indian composer Akassh.
J Balvin / Willy William: “Mi Gente (Remix)” (2017) But his actual relationship to such sources could be hard to read: Was Maus poking fun at music’s power to manufacture an emotional response, like when we find ourselves crying in the middle of a commercial, or celebrating its potential to offer us a fleeting moment of ecstasy, a glimpse of a world that is better than our own? Arriving at the end of 2011’s We Must Be the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves with the cathartic finality of perfectly curated exit music, this song-with its glittering harpsichord arpeggios, briskly pulsing bass, and grandiose allusions to borderless love-is the closest Maus has ever come to being a true believer. Like many of his lo-fi pop contemporaries in the early ’10s, reclusive Midwesterner John Maus pushed underground music forward by looking backward-rejecting digital studio techniques in favor of old drum machines and wonky synths, excavating the dramatic excesses of ’80s stadium pop and sentimental radio jingles as though they held clues to some hard-to-pinpoint generational subconscious.
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