February 2018

Let’s kick February off with Somebody to Love, an understated jam with a matter-of-fact tone. Now let’s get one thing straight right off the bat: Abhi the Nomad is an Indian rapper.

AN INDIAN RAPPER – THIS IS AWESOME. Diversity in music! For proof, I’ve included his music video for this song.

And with that, onwards to February 2018!

Opps is a gem produced by Sounwave and Ludwig Goransson. The track starts with Kendrick’s verse, then Vince Staples’s, then Yugen Blakrok’s. We all know Kendrick’s style, so we can close the chapter on his verse.

Vince Staples is a 24 year old product out of North Long Beach and he kills his verse, with lyrics about the state of being black in America today:

“They don’t wanna see me gettin’ to the check / They just wanna see me swimmin’ in the debt / Don’t drown on ground, wait until you hear / 9-1-1, freeze (zoom, zoom) dead”

So we agree that Kendrick’s verse was great and so was Vince’s, but oh my goodness, then they bring Yugen out of the bullpen to close. Yugen’s constant flow is just sick. I don’t know how else to explain it.

Her lyrics can be interpreted in the context of the movie Black Panther.

“Crushing any system that belittles us / Antidote to every poison they administer”

In which Killmonger wants to crush the system before, the world order before that subjected blacks to the childhood Killmonger had growing up in the streets of 1990’s California. And where the antidote to the poison can be viewed as the vibranium.

But Yugen’s lyrics also take direct aim at cops in our world:

“Brown bodies that the blues wanna shoot through”

Opps is incredibly well-produced, with verses that stack nicely on top of each other and culminate in Yugen crushing it.

K.Flay has been a brilliant discovery for me, big thanks to Brooke for this song recommendation. The 32 year old product hails from Wilmette, a Chicago suburb just north of Northwestern, and mixes EDM, indie, pop and hip hop in her songs.

In short, she is super interesting. In You Felt Right, K.Flay spins a story about a guy she met, someone that felt right in that moment, but someone that moved on and got a kid and a wife after her. She sings lamentably in the chorus:

“I’m always in the wrong place at the wrong time / Headed on a bad trip with the wrong high”

Woozy synths give her telling of the story these blurred edges – listening to this song feels like watching a lo-fi VHS tape. I love the poet motif she weaves in three times in the song –

“My heart it skipped and that was that / I should have known don’t trust a poet / ‘Cause they can’t do the math”

In the first verse, the motif serves as foreshadowing to the end of their relationship. The poet’s the guy she met and he can’t do the math, he can’t see how this’ll inevitably end.

In the second verse, the motif uncovers a crack, a turning point in their relationship.

“And it was torture for me / I should have known don’t trust a poet / ‘Cause they prefer to bleed”

The contrast in the preceding lines to the motif are revealing – in the first verse, there’s “my heart skipped and that was that” and in the second, there’s “and it was torture for me”. Here in this second verse, the poet is still the guy and he’s like all poets we know – moody, craving pain, everything you’ve ever read about Edgar Allen Poe and Sylvia Plath.

In the third verse, the motif makes its final transformation and the poet shifts from the guy to K.Flay.

“But I just have to say my piece / You should have known don’t trust a poet / ‘Cause we know how to speak”

K.Flay brings the song to closure on that note, the true poet in this story.

Thanks to Keely for this jam! I love Bleachers, I love this song and I’m definitely seeing Love, Simon when it comes out.

Blue October? Yes, you read that right. Blue October is, indeed, dropping an album in the year of our Lord 2018, 23 years after the band’s formation in 1995.

I Hope You’re Happy is an uptempo, Alt-rock song that feels new in its production but retains a very Blue October-y vibe at its core. It’s just so hard to divorce Justin Furstenfeld’s vocals in this song from their uber-popular 2006 album, Foiled.

This jam’s brought me back to the kid I was when I loved Into the Ocean, and almost as if Furstenfeld knew I’d listen to this song, he made this one’s message incredibly grown-up. That contrast parallels perfectly from the 11 year old I was listening to Foiled to the young adult I am now. This song’s a time machine for me and sweeps up all the nostalgia of my teenage years and folks whose backs I’ll always have:

“I’m always gonna have your back / You’ll always have a piece of me”

It’s also an incredibly mature song – Furstenfeld wishing an ex-lover all his best. This isn’t bubble gum pop talking about a crush or ranting about a terrible ex. It’s reflecting on a time in your life that was well-spent with someone you loved – a time that no longer continues to today but a time that still happened.

“I hope you’re happy / Even if you’re not mine / I remember when the world was ours to take / I remember you next to me / I remember you with every breath I take”

To quote The Fault in Our Stars, “some infinities are bigger than other infinities” – in I Hope You’re Happy, Furstenfeld commemorates an infinity in his life and he comes to closure on that chapter not with bitterness but with gratitude.

Thanks to Rachel for this jam! An obligatory song when in Chicago and if attending any of the following institutions: Northwestern, Loyola U of Chicago, UChicago, DePaul, UIC, etc.

There’s something frustrating about realizing Ansel Elgort is not Augustus Waters. The Fault in Our Stars has – ironically – already been referenced here but let’s do it again. Ansel Elgort is Augustus Waters and not this twenty-something, famous player.

In Thief, Elgort rolls through girls, stealing hearts:

“I left with her heart, tore it apart / Made no apologies / Taking love just to spill it on the parchment / Next page and I’m out again”

Not to make this an episode of Entertainment Tonight (ugh), but after some quick research, it appears Elgort is in a long-term relationship with girlfriend Violetta Komyshan. This song, then, is more hypothetical than actuality.

Perfect.

So this Elohim girl is super private. Her speaking voice hasn’t been heard publicly, and she’s never been photographed without something obfuscating her full face. This plus the fact that Elohim means God in Hebrew (see image below) gives Elohim these spooky mysterious vibes.

So she may not have a publicly-distributed face or voice, but she does have privacy and evidently, love:

“Cuz I got love instead of money / I got love, fuck your money”

F**k Your Money is electro-pop at its core, with a funky riff that makes you want to get out and do the sprinkler dance + the leg and a sweet little moment at 2:30:

“You can hit this part with a melody”

Besides that, it’s nice to see that this song affirms my lifestyle of lack of money. Fuck it! I got love!

Berenstein’s a great alt-rock jam. We’ve talked a bit in this month about infinities & time and that’s what Berenstein’s all about.

“At another place in time, you were infinitely mine / At another place in time, running parallel to mine / The universe was alright”

I really like the idea here of times that run parallel with each other. It’s an interesting concept to think of two people’s time spent together graphically. Imagine if you had a chart of everyone’s time, a subsect of that chart with time spent with others, and then you mapped everyone’s time spent with other folks out. You’d see two people’s time together run like a line with varying frequencies in a relationship and then, after a breakup, you’d see that heartbeat essentially go flat and new lines pop up between those two people and two other different people with new relationships. Data scientists, could you whip this up for me? 🙂

This song is destined to be played on a boat this summer. It contains pretty much all awesome moments in life: tubing down rivers, driving around wasting gas, coming home for Mom’s cooking, hitting the game winning shot, smelling the air after rain, being with the person you love, turning music up full blast, raising a lot of hell on a Friday night, loving where you’re at in life.

I don’t know about you but it don’t get better than that.

Gotta have some international flavor here and both Andrelli and Hearts & Colors deliver here. Andrelli’s a Swedish DJ and Hearts & Colors is a Swedish duo. The song is horribly spelled (Yung Luv? Are we 12?) but that’s the only glaringly terrible thing about this song 🙂

Yung Luv is a pure pop banger, with classic electronic-music structure and heavy bass and drums in the chorus. A car jam, to be sure.

Thanks Brooke for this rec!

It looks like Dua Lipa’s about to be huge if she isn’t already. Good for her! Born in London to Albanian parents, she started out in music by covering songs on YouTube at age 14. Big thanks to Kyle for the rec here.

IDGAF is, quite simply, a well-done pop song of the “middle-finger to ex” variety. The backup vocals accentuating the “So I cut you off” and at various other points in the song are super catchy. Eyes on Dua Lipa in the future.

Noah & the Whale’s strings will get me every time. And that’s exactly where Lifetime kicks off: strings first, then some bass, then the vocals. Lifetime’s central theme is all about time. If you listen hard, you’ll hear the bass line all the way through the song, pushing it along, steadfastly, never wavering in its forward progress. That bass line’s the clock here and a constant reminder of time’s passing.

The start of the song harkens back (yes, I used that verb) to adolescence and teenage summers where you’ve got all this time to kill and you spend it on things like getting high and talking, and not studying for the MCAT or preparing for an internship interview.

“We got high a thousand times in your brother’s room / Talked about how we’d break free / Guess it came too soon”

The last line there, “guess it came too soon” resonates with me. You talk and talk and talk about getting out there into the real world, doing all this stuff, and all of a sudden, boom, you’re there and it feels like what the heck, just a second ago I was slogging through boring and hot Nevada summers with no driver’s license and now all of a sudden, I’m filing my own taxes?

And now, some of my friends are thinking about getting married. What?

“We grew up, drifted apart, now you’re getting married / While I’m waiting for my life to start”

Lifetime takes on a dual meaning: one figurative and one literal in the lines that come next.

“Are you ready to make that call? / It’s gonna be a lifetime”

Here, the sense of lifetime is literal. Are you ready to get married? That’s gonna be a lifetime.

“It was only a few years ago, but it feels like a lifetime”

And here, the sense is obviously figurative. It was only a few years ago, but the gap is so wide, so immense – the change in maturity, in life views, in everything – makes it feel like a lifetime’s worth of years have passed by.

Our plot in this song revolves around our narrator and a childhood friend of his. His friend is getting married and our narrator’s moving through life’s stages slower, getting left behind in his friend’s lifestyle change from all this time he had before to spend with him to now getting married and settling down. The narrator deduces sadly:

“We were young, that was then / And I can’t help the feeling that it’s never coming back again”

And concludes on the desire for more time, for nothing but time. Time’s like someone that starts the first lap walking, then jogs, then runs, then sprints. It has a way of going faster and faster the older we are. Noah & the Whale conclude the song then on this note:

“And we used to pray… / And there’ll be nothing, nothing but time / And there’ll be nothing, nothing but time”

Thanks Kyle for this rec!