Week 18: 26 February 2024 – “Sei gegrüsset” and Lent 2
Plus: W.F. Bach and the organ, K-pop goes Afrobeats, a Marxist analysis of Spotify, and more!
As always, we recognize that Bond Chapel is situated in the traditional homeland and native territory of the Three Fires Confederacy—the Potawatomi, Odawa, and Ojibwe Nations—as well as other groups including the Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Miami, Peoria, and Sac and Fox. We remember their forced removal and dispossession, but also remember to speak of these groups in the present tense, as Chicago continues to be resound with tens of thousands of Native voices.
This week, again on the broader theme of “indigenous musics in Chicago,” I’ve been diving into the activities of Kichwa Runa, an organization promoting Andean music and culture (focusing on, but not limited to, Kichwa). You can get a sense of their stylistic range from this nicely chunky concert clip:
I always love the incredibly subtle rhythmic nuances that can show up in the backings for Andean music—I’m incredibly jealous of the groove they set up around 12:45 in that video, with strumming patterns falling somewhere between triplets and eighth+two sixteenths. It’s a lot of fun. And both the singing and the flute/plucked string playing are fabulous. Of you’re in Chicago, see them live on 19 March!
Week 18: 26 February 2024 – “Sei gegrüsset” and Lent 2
Please save applause for the end of each set
Prelude and Fugue in F minor, BWV 534
Nun laßt uns den Leib begraben, BWV 1111
Ich hab mein Sach Gott heimgestellt, BWV 1113
Partite diverse sopra “Sei gegrüsset, Jesu gütig,” BWV 768
So. The F-minor Prelude and Fugue might not be by J.S. Bach. A number of scholars, from David Humphreys to Pieter Dirksen, have suggested that too many things about it are “wrong” or atypical for its attribution to stand. Evaluating those claims is a good a way into the piece—and then we can decide if we care about the authorship or not.
The fugue is the more suspect of the two halves. Here’s one of the most “egregious” spots in the piece:
The left hand at the beginning of this measure has a deadly obvious set of parallel fifths, a notorious no-no in contrapuntal music like this. The editors of the older Bach-Gesellschaft edition even tried to spare Bach’s honor by simply deleting one of those notes:
I think it’s fair to dub such passages as actual mistakes: there are instances where Bach actually tried to correct such things, with no obvious musical motivation other than fixing parallels.1 But even leaving aside lapses like that, a lot of the other counterpoint in this fugue is weird or clunky:
Here, the left hand comes in after a rest with a thunking series of parallel thirds, something that J.S. Bach tends not to do in fugues (especially at a point of entry). And similarly, he tends not to write music like the following, both jumpy in the tenor and awkwardly distributed for the hands:
So it’s a weird, somewhat poorly executed fugue—at least from the perspective of counterpoint. Obviously, for a piece of strict counterpoint, that perspective should matter somewhat: it’s not the greatest fugue “as a fugue.” And yet I think it’s still a pretty effective piece of music. Many of these mistakes spring from the composer’s efforts to get a grand, massive-sounding texture, which is suitably interspersed with sparser and less intense moments. All in all, the piece is a nice combination of harmonic crunchiness, jagged melodic lines, propulsive rhythms, and great dramatic pacing. To risk an analogy: even if you scramble the eggs, you can still make something very tasty out of your attempt at spaghetti carbonara, as long as the ingredients were right.
For that matter, the prelude doesn’t scramble its eggs: if we’re guessing at attribution here, I’m compelled by the possibility that the fugue was tacked on by another composer to a prelude by J.S. Bach. Either that, or this other composer really internalized a lot of J.S. Bach’s stylistic tendencies, and compositional tics. I don’t mean that to sound like a ridiculous possibility: this prelude sometimes sounds like a pastiche of the E-minor prelude BWV 548/i,2 to the extent that it might just be a knock-off. But even if that’s true, it’s a remarkably well-made fake, in ways that the fugue isn’t. Maybe this prelude isn’t Bach, but it’s at the very least pretty great “Bach.” I’m not sure I care too much about the difference, and I’d take it over many of the verifiable originals.
Two more settings from the Neumeister Chorales, and these two really illustrate why pre-1980 scholars may have been hesitant to believe these pieces’ attributions to J.S. Bach. “Nun laßt” in particular is a fascinating piece, because its approach to harmony sounds somewhere between old-fashioned and amateurish: chords are ordered at random, with relatively little attention paid to tonal trajectories. The result is music that sounds incredibly weird, and occasionally very cool. If it’s not actually by a young Bach (a lot of the figuration and structure of the piece does match Bach pretty well), it at the very least shows how foreign the music he grew up with can sound to us. (“Ich hab mein Sach” is pretty “normal”-sounding by comparison.)
“Isn’t this week’s program a bit short?”
Well, truth be told, it is a tiny bit shorter, after I deleted a couple of stray spreadsheet entries at the last minute (pieces with BWV numbers that are neither likely to be by Bach nor musically engaging). But it’s not as short as it looks. “Sei gegrüsset” is massive, often clocking in at 20 minutes by itself.
Maybe you knew that, but I don’t blame you if you didn’t. This is obviously somewhat subjective, and it’s hard to be sure, but I suspect that “Sei gegrüsset” is the “top-shelf” Bach organ work that is least known outside of organ circles. It took me until about three years into my organ studies to really pay attention to it (prompted by a pair of wonderful performances, including by Ton Koopman, at the Haarlem International Organ Festival). What gives?
On the whole, I think the “free” Bach organ pieces—ones not based on chorale tunes—have tended to fare better in terms of general fame. Maybe it’s because they fit better with other canonical works in the classical music world: Sonatas are an easy sell, and Preludes and Fugues at least match a type familiar from the Well-Tempered Clavier. Maybe there’s some hesitancy among secular or non-Christian listeners about “churchy” music; at the very least, it can feel like chorale preludes have some barrier to entry if you don’t know the hymn tune. Or maybe learning long German names is just hard.
For chorale-based works, the ones that have achieved some level of fame come almost exclusively from “name-brand” collections assembled by Bach or published in his lifetime: the Orgelbüchlein (“Durch Adams Fall,” “O Mensch bewein”), the Schübler Chorales (“Wachet auf”), the “Great Eighteen” (“Schmücke dich,” “An Wasserflüssen Babylon”), Clavierübung III, or the Canonic Variations. Of course, being published or collected like that is a sign that Bach thought these were important works; but it also helps audiences to have an “opus” to associate a piece with.
Sei gegrüsset has neither of these traits going for it. It also, for the first half of the piece anyway, doesn’t call for the pedals at all, which can make it feel like less of an “organ piece.” And its genre—chorale partitas—is typically associated both with “Early Bach” (that can’t be good!) and “organ music for beginners” (because of the absence of pedals). This isn’t showy music; it’s not as easy to wow audiences with it.
That’s not fair to chorale partitas in general (by Bach, Böhm, or anyone else), but it’s especially not fair to Sei gegrüsset. Unless you count the big chorale compilations as single pieces, this is by far Bach’s longest and most ambitious organ piece: it’s twice as long, for instance, as “Herr Gott, dich loben alle wir.” And it’s even overlong for what you might imagine to be its intended purpose. It’s often proposed that chorale partitas have all those variations to match or illustrate the verses of the hymn. But Sei gegrüsset has eleven variations,3 corresponding to twelve verses. The longest extant version of the hymn-text only has seven.
In case there were any doubt about this piece’s relation to the hymn, consider the first pedal variation:
Those natural signs ♮ in the pedal don’t correspond to how the tune is actually played. So the goal of this variation at least can’t be to “introduce” the tune: the congregation would sing it with a wrong note. Other variations (eg. III) don’t even give the tune at all, just using it as a musical framework. The point of this piece must be something more abstract than simple liturgical function. Clearly Bach saw a lot of musical possibilities in these notes, and was enthusiastic about writing variations on them.
To put it schematically, here’s the layout of the piece:
Chorale (four-part setting)
Variation 1: two-part bicinium with heavy ornamentation of the tune
Variation 2: three/four-part setting based on a repeated accompaniment pattern that moves between the parts
Variation 3: perpetuum mobile in two parts
Variation 4: perpetuum mobile in three/four parts with the tune on top
Variation 5: tune on top with a rhythmically distinctive line jumping around in the bass
Variation 6: jig
Variation 7: tune in the pedals with running notes swapped between the hands
Variation 8: jig, but now with running sixteenths and a part for the pedals
Variation 9: trio, with the pedals playing the tune in the middle of the texture
Variation 10: full-fledged chorale fantasy à la “Schmücke dich” or “An Wasserflüssen”
Variation 11: five-part chorale setting in Organo pleno. Very loud, with a thick, thick texture.
Most of those are pretty self-explanatory (although it’s hard to convey in words how delightful Variation 5 is, or how grand Variation 11 sounds). But I’d especially like to highlight Variation 10:
(Sorry for both the rhythmic awkwardness and the unfortunate mic placement.)
By itself, this variation is almost five minutes long, and written with the same exquisite care as several of his most famous chorale preludes; each of the parts is gorgeous by itself. And then there’s this moment, about ⅔ of the way through the variation (about 3:20 in that recording):
Suddenly, and yet imperceptibly at first, the solo line splits in two. The effect, especially on a nice reed like this one, is pure magic.
It’s only after this variation, five minutes that keep you listening with bated breath, that Bach then knocks the wind out of you with the final chorale. It’s an epic one-two punch, perfect to close a monumental piece.
Wilhelm Friedemann Bach: an Appreciation
It may be an open secret that the F-minor Prelude and Fugue is probably not entirely by J.S. Bach, but that doesn’t mean that everybody’s in on the secret. I remember hearing a fairly prominent organist audibly gasp and give a “NO!” when being told (not by me) that the piece is more likely by Wilhelm Friedemann Bach.
Obviously, that reaction is a bit of a shame: if you like a piece enough to really want it to be by J.S. Bach, you should still like it when it’s been reattributed. “Absalon, fili mi” shouldn’t lose anything from being attributed to Pierre de la Rue instead of Josquin. Or if you like the “Albinoni” Adagio, it shouldn’t matter too much that it’s a 20th-century forgery. (Sorry Albinoni, I’m one of the people who prefer this piece to anything you actually wrote.)
Still, it’s understandable to be a bit shocked. And I have to wonder if part of the shock was the name of the new composer. Wilhelm Friedemann Bach?
Even if the revival of music by the Bach sons has been pretty successful (especially in Germany) W.F. Bach feels like the odd one out. That partly fits his reputation during his lifetime: J.C. Bach was one of the most famous composers in Europe, and C.P.E. was both well-known and at the center of literary circles that helped craft the modern aesthetic ideology of classical music. C.P.E. appeared on the cover of Volume 3 of the tastemaking Allegemeine Musikalische Zeitung (his father was on volume 1). W.F., by comparison, barely gets mentioned.
Perhaps relatedly, it’s easy for even modern audiences to get into the music of J.C. and C.P.E. It’s true that J.C. can sound a little bland, the kind of unmemorable and inoffensive stuff that clutters up classical music radio, but he also has some really tuneful and appealing music. It’s easy to hear how his graceful sense of proportion influenced the young Mozart. Meanwhile, C.P.E. really learned from his father’s Vivaldian side how to write thrilling orchestral music, leaning heavily on compelling harmonic formulas. (It probably doesn’t hurt either J.C. or C.P.E. that they were among the first really good composers of symphonies.) And C.P.E. published oodles of keyboard sonatas and other pieces that are still commonly used as teaching pieces.
Wilhelm Friedemann has, well, none of that going for him. He certainly had fewer publications than his younger brothers, and what he did put out (e.g. the Twelve Polonaises) don’t have the same obvious drama or singing appeal as his brothers’ music. Plenty of people have psychoanalyzed his refusal to write “modern” or “popular” music: the expectations J.S. Bach placed on his eldest son were surely crushing, and it’s not hard to understand why Wilhelm Friedemann sank into alcoholism.
Still, even if we explain his lack of career success like that, I think it does a bit of a disservice to the music; it’s sort of like (albeit not nearly as egregious as) when hand-wringing about what Fanny Hensel could have written gets in the way of appreciating the incredible music she did write. If W.F. Bach did write the F-minor prelude and fugue, maybe we should reconsider our opinion of him, not of the piece.
So let’s take a moment to appreciate some of his music; and since we’re talking about organ music, let’s stick to that. Friedhelm Flamme, in his seeming quest to record every note a German person ever wrote for the organ, has given us a pretty good recording to work with:
It’s hard to know if the fantasies that open and close the album were actually written for organ, but they work quite well on it. Meanwhile, the chorale preludes are definitely organ music, and compare favorably to much of Dad’s output. They show that Wilhelm Friedemann had excellent pedal technique—potentially the best in Europe after his father’s death—and knew how to use it to great effect. “Wir Christenleut” (mislabelled on Spotify as “Was mein Gott will”) shows this especially well.
Then there are the fugues. All somewhat quirky, and written in much more “keyboard” (harpsichord) style than “organ” style, these pieces are an odd combination of super up-to-date rhythmic and notational practices with harmonies that are sometimes just plain eccentric. The D-minor fugue (No.4 from the Eight Fugues) sounds nothing like Bach, nothing like the music that was popular in the 1770s when they were compiled, and really nothing like anything else I’ve ever heard. Yet he follows it up with the quirky, but charming E-flat fugue No.5: he knew how to do both.
One style that doesn’t show up anywhere in these pieces is…well, the style of the F-minor prelude and fugue. Dirksen and other scholars have a number of decent reasons to suspect W.F. Bach as the composer, but if that’s true, this piece reveals a side of him that doesn’t show up anywhere in the surviving organ works. (Part of the speculation is that he was a fearsome improviser, and perhaps the F minor is more indicative of that.)
One thing that’s especially notable in its absence from W.F. Bach’s surviving organ works: obvious counterpoint mistakes, our biggest reason for “suspecting” the F-minor fugue to begin with. Maybe he was super young when he wrote the F minor. Maybe it was transcribed wrong. Maybe it reflects stuff he did when improvising but rarely wrote down. Or maybe we need to keep looking for the piece’s composer.4 Don’t let that stop you from trying out W.F. Bach’s organ works though.
What I’m Listening To
Théotime Langlois de Swarte and Le Consort – Vivaldi: Concerti per una vita
I guess it’s fitting that Théotime Langlois de Swarte paired with Tanguy de Williencourt to debut with A Concert at the Time of Proust in 2021: for two musicians with such preposterously aristocratic French names, Proust was really the only sensible theme to pick. And they played like they were born for that music: the Fauré sonata especially is suave and refined, skipping right through the terrifying difficulties of the first movement and scherzo with utter nonchalance. Their fourth movement sounds like pure honey. It’s one of my favorite violin recordings, full stop.
Langlois de Swarte is back again, but this time with Vivaldi, who’s pretty close to the opposite of Fauré. Yet he carries some of that same aristocratic insouciance with him here. If you want to get some sense of the playing, you could start with the most familiar pieces on the record, “Summer” from The Four Seasons and the A-minor solo concerto from L’estro armonico. There’s virtuosity aplenty in these recordings, but the playing is also unbelievably casual, managing to sound both impassioned and understated. The tempi are very fast, but it feels nothing like Giuliano Carmignola posing with his motorcycle for Vivaldi con moto.
Really, there’s kind of a glut of excellent Vivaldi recordings now, the best of which (Amandine Beyer, Shunske Sato, Il giardino armonico) typically match Carmignola’s take-no-prisoners style. As I’ve made clear numerous times, I like that thundering, rock-and-roll approach a whole lot, and I wish it had more American exponents. (Elizabeth Blumenstock aside.) But I also appreciate Langlois de Swarte’s approach. It’s not so different really, when you actually try to account for the tempi, articulations, and other choices. But the overall vibe is completely changed, sounding utterly controlled where the “rock and roll” school can sound manic. I’m glad to have both options, and I find both utterly convincing. (No promises to play like a French aristocrat though.)
Björn Schmelzer and Graindelavoix – Antoine Brumel: Earthquake Mass
If Björn Schmelzer and Graindelavoix haven’t rubbed you the wrong way at some point, you either don’t know about them or you’ve totally drunk their Kool-aid. To their credit, they have a very original approach to singing premodern and early modern European vocal repertoires, shattering the “English choir”-dominated way of singing Renaissance polyphony with a raw vocal technique that gives some grit back to the music. I like their tempi and shaping, and even some of the vocal choices.
It’s really the rhetoric that brings Graindelavoix down—Schmelzer’s claims to be taking an “anthropological” approach to choral singing. His talking points always sound more than a bit inflated, especially coupled with their use of ethnographic film (to accompany this very project). If you stop to think about what they mean—well, their singing style is certainly “anthropological” in the sense that it traffics in the image of the other. Singing in a style based on stereotypes of Balkan, West Asian, and lower-class musicians in general is not a guarantee of “historical” accuracy. At its worst, it can sound vaguely like a kind of Renaissance minstrel show.5
But it can also produce startlingly fresh and musical results. That’s especially true when Graindelavoix throw away all claims to historicity and just try something new with Renaissance music. Luckily, this Brumel project is in that vein: sure, the mass is based on an Easter chant about earthquakes, but framing this project as being about “music in a time of natural disaster” is obviously and transparently ahistorical. That anachronism is enhanced here by the addition of experimental drone-y guitar music from Manuel Mota. It’s both an excellent tone-setter and a clever way to cover up for the fact that the end of the Brumel is lost to the mold that ate away at its primary manuscript source. This piece is a musical ruin, and Graindelavoix came up with an effective way to present it as such. Other recordings are much less honest about the surviving state of this piece. If only Graindelavoix had been a bit more honest themselves about what their singing style really is.
Thank you, Shinsadong Tiger
TRI.BE – “Diamond”
Shinsadong Tiger, deceased today at the age of 40, was K-pop’s greatest producer, which is to say among the best producers in the history of pop music. I don’t think that’s a particularly controversial claim (the first part; feel how you want about the second), given not only his record of smash, mega-ear-worm dance hits, but also his record of mentoring legendary producers B.E.P. and budding songwriter LE. But if there’s any doubt, his discography with T-ARA alone should seal the deal:
The potential source of that doubt, or the reason some people may have forgotten about Shinsadong Tiger’s hitmaking abilities, might be because of his time in the charts wilderness after deciding to form his own groups. He did eventually hit with EXID, but newer group TRI.BE hasn’t quite made it yet. Forget about the quality of the songs (which sometimes also dipped); it’s hard to maintain a reputation as a top-notch producer if your main collaborations aren’t storming the charts. (Plenty of people thought Max Martin was cooked before “I Kissed a Girl,” and they thought so again in the late 2010s.)
Aside from the general difficulties of making it as a group from outside the Big 4 agencies, I don’t think it’s helped TRI.BE that their musical direction was never quite clear. Starting out with a “Latin-esque” sound that was trendy before their debut, TRI.BE was never quite set up for success, and some of their singles since then have felt like Shinsadong Tiger was flailing around a little bit for ideas. (Though even the worst of his songs still have their catchy moments and cool sonic choices.)
It’s even more of a shame, then, that “Diamond” seems to represent the potential start of TRI.BE and Shinsadong Tiger building a more robust musical identity. Although he was clearly working with sounds also used in TRI.BE’s previous singles, Shinsadong Tiger here did a better job of picking a lane: as they announced, this song is much more distinctly marked by its use of sounds from Afrobeats. And in retrospect, those statements also help to clarify what was going on with some of the sounds in their older music.6
Ironically, I don’t think the shift was that obvious to anybody who wasn’t attending TRI.BE’s press conferences. Reviewers (even somebody as knowledgeable about global pop music as Nick) and commenters—all but one of the ones I saw on any platform—continued to identify the sounds as “quasi-Latin.” And they kind of have a point.
Part of the problem is that Afrobeats, in the form that’s become a global chart sensation in the past few years, is, well…it’s become a lot more generically “global pop” than it was even when Burna Boy first grabbed everybody’s attention in 2019. A big part of what’s made the biggest songs from Rema and Tyla hit is that they “repatriate” Afro-diasporic sounds that are now globally marked as “Latin” or “American.” If you dilute things any further—if you make K-pop songs that “draw on” Afrobeats—it’s hardly a wonder that it might be hard for audiences to tell which influence is which.
Unless you’re really obvious about it:7
I actually really like this song, but it sure does match parts of “Water” pretty closely, in addition to lifting elements from Doja Cat’s “Woman.” In their usual grouchy fashion, the reviewer for IZM has lambasted LE SSERAFIM for mimicking these songs—and yes, for rewriting SZA’s “Kill Bill” on “Swan Song” and the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s “Date With the Night” on “Good Bones”—just as they complained that “Antifragile” “reeks” of ROSALÍA.
All of that’s true, but I find it incredibly hard to care. All of these musicians were ripping somebody off, and especially when we’re talking about Tyla, Doja Cat, and ROSALÍA, their songs are as derivative as anything in K-pop. If you have a complaint, it should be that the current song isn’t good on its own terms. The comparison may point up the song’s failings: I now find myself wishing LE SSERAFIM were capable of Karen O’s manic energy (hardly a problem unique to them). But otherwise it’s more “merely interesting” than anything else to note the similarities.
Shinsadong Tiger himself surely would have thought so. If you listened to “Roly Poly” above (if you didn’t and you don’t know the song, do it now; it’ll be stuck in your head for the rest of time), you probably noticed that it recycles a hell of a lot from “Staying Alive.” Everybody knows that song (including in Korea), and they did the opposite of trying to hide the resemblance:
We all know that some covers and remakes are vastly better than the originals. To me, that’s all that matters here: “Swan Song” is just as much of a snoozefest as SZA’s song (and without its mordant lyrics), while “Smart” is a big improvement on both “Water” and “Woman,” taking the best parts from each song. Rampant stealing with great musical results: that’s as fitting a tribute to Shinsadong Tiger as you could ask for.
Moonbyul – Starlit of Muse
I already wrote an obnoxious amount about this album’s prerelease, and I stand by it: “Think About” is a pretty fun song that was a relatively weak week of releases. The music video still makes me giggle and the song still makes me wiggle my shoulders.
That said, just as I tried not to oversell “Think About” then (“good clean fun”), it still doesn’t blow me away. I was looking forward to this album, but given that one of its two singles was only “pretty good,” my expectations weren’t super high.
Boy was I wrong. “TOUCHIN&MOVIN” is the kind of song they just don’t make anymore, in K-pop, the US, anywhere at all.8 It’s a Quincy Jones-inflected brass+disco goshdarn pop song, complete with groovy instrumental breaks throughout and a capstone modulation at the end. It’s a hell of a follow-up to “Think About,” especially in a musical environment full of muted, mellow songs.
The crazy thing is that Moonbyul keeps going with attention-getting, upbeat, groovy, and otherwise pop-y songs throughout the tracklist. Pop-punk anthem “Attention Seeker” could have been a single for YENA; Latin-pop groove “Timeline” stacks up pretty well against MAMAMOO’s own recent singles; high-energy rap showcase “Dark Romance” manages to escape the worst tendencies of trap, and leads directly into midtempo groover “Gold” and straight-up rocker “Memories.” Forget about songs: they don’t make pop albums like this, ones that just keep coming at you with high-energy, memorable music throughout the whole tracklist. Even the ballads aren’t formulaic trash for once; if it means anything, in the Moomoo fandom spaces I know, “Like a Fool” is the runaway favorite track.
It’s entirely possible that Moonbyul just got lucky, that the songs RBW commissioned as candidates for singles all turned out to be pretty good, and so the album has a lot of quality tracks by sheer luck. (I strongly suspect that’s how TAEYEON’s debut full-length got so many great songs.) She didn’t write most of what’s on here, so it’s hard to expect this success to be repeatable.
Still, I think Byul deserves some credit. Partly for picking a musical direction, especially one as counter-trend as “upbeat pop-rock.” And partly for investing so much (and campaigning for RBW to invest so much) in Starlit of Muse as an album. After all, there’s no financial incentive to worry about much more than the lead single: all the diehards will buy the album anyway, and casuals will buy it if they like the brand-name songs enough. There are vanishingly few people only buying K-pop albums if they like the listening experience as a whole. Good on Moonbyul for trying her hardest anyway.
IU – The Winning
I may stand by how much I wrote about Moonbyul’s “Think About,” but maybe 1500 words on “Holssi” was excessive. At least on a relative basis. If I were to write a proportional amount about the three newly-released songs—all far, far, far better—we’d be here until next Monday.
Let me defend myself. I don’t think I ever said that “Holssi” is the world’s greatest song, more that I was surprised that it’s any good at all considering what it’s working with musically. In some ways, that takes a lot more explaining than just gesturing to a fantastic song like “Shopper” and saying “listen to it!” There might be some more convincing required with “Holssi.”
Anyway: “Shopper.” A fantastic song. Basically everybody seems to agree that it’s a throwback to Carly Rae Jepsen’s E·MO·TION era: big, spacious pop with pulsing synths and massive tunes. It’s a great choice. This style is a good fit with K-pop, but hasn’t been mined too much there. It also presents a natural “evolution” from the slow dance-pop of “Celebrity” and the citypop/disco of “LILAC.” IU may not be a Pokémon, but she’s continuing to catch ‘em all.
The choice of 2015 Carly Rae Jepsen is also interesting to me since it represents something of an inflection point in American popular music. (I’ll bring it back to IU soon enough, don’t worry.) I’m not trying to write some grand thesis about this album à la Jason Farago’s interpretation of Back to Black; rather, this album just symbolizes, for me personally, the convergence of two trends. One would be the gradual “de-poppification” of the Billboard charts; the other would be the poptimist embrace of synthesizers and upbeat songs by the “alternative crowd.”
The latter is more obviously relevant: even though it was the follow-up to massive pop smash “Call Me Maybe,”9 and despite featuring literally Justin Bieber and Tom Hanks in the music video for its lead single, E·MO·TION was embraced a lot more by the college-educated post-hipster crowd. Released just as Pitchfork (RIP) was opening itself up to pop (it got a 7.4, and probably would have scored a lot higher if it had been reviewed more recently), the album became much more of an indie darling than a mainstream hit. Sure, Jepsen put E·MO·TION together with an eye toward that kind of reaction (that’s probably the main reason why you’d want to collaborate with the Cardigans’ guitarist), but it’s still a surprise that her music was embraced by that crowd.
Maybe that was only possible because it wasn’t huge on the charts. “I Really Like You” barely cracked the Top 40 and the album as a whole didn’t make the top 10. I remember being really surprised that something as pop-y and enjoyable as “Run Away With Me” couldn’t blow up the charts. But the Top 40 was already starting to move away from that kind of thing. Obviously there were plenty of big pop hits in 2015, but “I Really Like You” doesn’t really match the vibe of “Uptown Funk,” “Bad Blood,” or “Hello.” (To say nothing of what currently hits the top 10.)
But, like I said, this sound is a great fit for K-pop. And 2015 is basically exactly the time when large numbers of “alternative” listeners that would formerly have become scene kids started listening to K-pop instead of the Billboard charts. I don’t mean to say that Carly Rae Jepsen was necessarily listening to Shinsadong Tiger’s songs (although more recent pop artists like PinkPantheress literally do), but I do think that her turn to “indie pop”—the very possibility of this kind of pop being “indie” at all—was a reaction to exactly the same conditions that got many Americans listening to K-pop. And specifically Americans in her target audience. I’m not sure if IU or her label know it, but E·MO·TION-style pop is a pretty canny choice for American success.
The other tracks. I still don’t have much to say about the Disneyfied ballad “Love Wins All,” but it makes for an interesting pair with IU’s latest video for the album:
Obviously, IU is by now almost equally famous as an actress and a singer, but I don’t think she’s ever quite thrust that in our faces to this extent. I swear more thought went into the emotional heft and plotting of the “Love Wins All” video (great!) than went into the actual song (meh). And I think the same may even be true of “Shh…,” a slow rocker that I really like, and which was apparently a nightmare to put together musically. (That’s what she gets for having three features, including both a member of the most in-demand group in South Korea and the legendary, but now 85-year-old Patti Kim.)
Still, even after all the work the actual song must have taken, IU still managed to rope in Tang Wei (!) and get this Lynchian psychodrama of a music video made. I wish I were exaggerating: it really does address some of the same topics (the subconscious, doubles, potentially queer [self]-identifications) as Mulholland Drive, and even matches some of the color-coding from that movie. And as that comparison would suggest, it’s beyond open-ended. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a video that does this much to open up possible interpretations of a song. Needless to say, there are no scenes of singing and no appearances from any of the featured artists.
So: four music videos, two of which in the “short film” style. Maybe it’s a hint at IU’s next evolution. Now that she’s done with 2015 in American pop, it’s time to move on to 2016. It’s visual album time. Can’t wait for IU’s take on Lemonade.
Also liked…
Akini Jing 朱婧汐 – VILLAIN
IDLES – TANGK
London Afrobeat Collective – Esengo
Levon Eskenian and The Gurdjieff Ensemble – Zartir
Adriana Calcanhotto – Errante
What I’m Reading
Like every other music scholar you know (bless you if that’s zero people), I picked up Eric Drott’s Streaming Music, Streaming Capital as soon as it came out, and I got through it this week. Given the quality of Drott’s prior writing on streaming, and the timely nature of the topic, I think it’s safe to say this is one of the more widely anticipated books in our field that I can remember.
It lives up to the hype, more or less. This book’s biggest achievement is drawing together most of the different strands of discourse about streaming: how it underpays musicians, its affect on music and listening habits, how it makes us change our relationship to music as a good, its environmental impact, its manipulation by corporations and artists, its use as a tool of corporate surveillance, its use as substitute therapy, etc. etc. It’s hard enough to do justice to any one of these topics, and Drott handles them all adroitly. If you don’t spend a lot of your time reading industry and financial news articles about streaming, I imagine that you’ll learn a ton, or at least have your worst fears confirmed.
That said, the book does stay quite zoomed-in: if you do spend your time reading such articles—first of all my condolences, but also you may not pick up too much new in terms of factual information from this book. The overall framework of analysis is (duh, the title) Marxist, but while it’s definitely more sophisticated than the “Left-flavored” approach of the endless thinkpieces about streaming, it also doesn’t come to radically different conclusions. A lot of Drott’s analytic energy is focused on worrying over terminological niceties (e.g. the first chapter’s nitpicking over goods vs. services and streams vs. downloads), and the results often made me wish he’d taken a broader view. (Although the literalist dissection of the phrase that streaming makes music “like water” in the second chapter does eventually pay off in his framing of streamed music as a partially enclosed public good.)
I also wish that the focus weren’t quite so narrow in terms of subject matter. This is really a book about Spotify, and while it does includes some historical comparisons to radio and Napster, I often found myself wanting a lot more of that kind of perspective. Sure, Spotify takes a full download and pretends that it’s an evanescent “stream”: but that ideology is building on millennia of thinking about music as inherently “temporary.” And sure, music can be ubiquitous (in the shower, on the run, in the car) in ways that video can’t—but it’s still pretty shocking to see so little of Netflix or Youtube (Twitch doesn’t even make an appearance in the index), if only as a form of comparison. Can their business models and relationship to legacy media really tell us nothing about music streaming? CD rentals may never have been a big business, but movie rentals sure were, and taking even a glance at the digital platforms that took over from that business model would surely be illuminating.
Of course, that’s asking Drott to write a different book. There are lots of different books you could write about music streaming—there’s nothing here about competitive streaming among fandoms, or among Last.FM users on social media. There’s nothing about TikTok. Fine. Even as a book just about Spotify as a business, this is valuable. Drott is a sharp thinker and a good writer (as long as you’re fine going slow through academic Marxist terminology). If you’re interested in the business of how music is distributed now, you simply have to read this book.
A few others:
NY Times – The Endangered Languages of New York
Serious Eats – Why Is Cottage Cheese So Bad Sometimes?
Harper’s Bazaar – Solange Knowles on A Seat at the Table, Her Next Project, and Her Legacy
The Hunger (Michael Nagrant) – No Such Thing As a Free Meal
NOEMA – A Country Shaped By Poetry
Smithsonian Magazine – How to Separate Fact From Myth in the Extraordinary Story of Sojourner Truth
Thanks for reading, and for listening if you can make it on Monday!
The most notorious is probably a passage in Brandenburg 5 where his attempt to get rid of parallel octaves—bad—accidentally resulted in parallel fifths—worse. Incidentally, a young Felix Mendelssohn noticed the mistake from just looking at the separate parts.
Come back next week to make the comparison!
Yes, this one goes to eleven.
I look forward to being proven totally wrong when you all send in glaring examples of parallels in W.F. Bach’s music that I missed.
To be fair, instrumental ensembles, especially specialists in Medieval music, have been doing similar things with Islamicate music for decades. That includes ensembles I very much like and respect.
Though they make me worry a bit about what their name was intended to convey—I know it’s “Triangle+Being,” but still.
The classic(al) music station plays soft/but there’s nothing, really nothing to turn off…
You can distill a (a few) program(s) of the greatest Bach organ music no one ever plays out of this series…