The British Guardians is in a major article stating what making music really means for younger artists today: creating assets for social media corporations. Bitter truth. It is no longer possible without the nerve-wracking constant maintenance and equipment of the social media presence. Precisely because pop music through streaming services is less of a means of establishing identity than it used to be than an anonymous soundtrack of life. If you still want to attract attention, you have to give everything, every day. This is in line with the latest reports that considerably less new music is now being listened to (i.e. songs that are less than 18 months old) than just a few years ago. That doesn’t mean, however, that nothing new is happening at all. It’s just not that common anymore and it doesn’t necessarily fall right in front of your feet anymore, especially when you’re not that young anymore. It’s sometimes not easy, especially for aging hipsters and other pop noses to admit that. But it is so. Take the test with the good old question: Is the world so boring – or have I become a Buddhist? Instead, of course, you can just go to the new album “Meeting With The King” by DJ Lag listen in. South African DJ and producer Lwazi Asanda Gwala aka DJ Lag pioneered gqom, the latest new pop music to emerge in the mid-1980s, electronic dance music so abstract, nervously jerky, yet irresistibly rolling.
Speaking of the new kings, Liverpool singer Hannah Merrick and guitarist Craig Whittle are the band King Hannah and their debut album I’m Not Sorry, I Was Just Being Me (City Slang) is a wonderfully daydreamy, windblown slice of indie pop. Conceivably far away from the completely new, of course. Less a proof, however, that the old pop is killing the new than – in the best sense – of how fruitful the new makes the old. Just listen to “A Well-Made Woman” or “All Being Fine” or “Big Big Baby”. Darkly whispered through various tough, distorted guitar clouds, and yet not without swing. Like the soundtrack to a David Lynch neo-noir film, in which the horror of the suppressed and irrational of our existence is not driven to despair, but asked to dance.
Very few people in pop are given anything more than dignified aging. And that’s already difficult enough in an art in which it’s all about heating up the venerable and meanwhile doing so in front of the whole world with full force as if you don’t trust anyone over 30. What should you do when you is beyond 80 and doesn’t have to or doesn’t want to stop? Well, let’s put it this way: For example, just what the American soul singer Jerry Williams Jr., born in 1942, alias Swamp Dogg so tut: In the sixty-eighth year of his career, he recorded an album entitled “I Need a Job… So I Can Buy More Auto-Tune” (Don Giovanni Records) – and then didn’t mean it so critically as a grand seigneur, but really with all his heart sing with Auto-Tune, that devilish pitch correction program. The scourge of modern pop. It was originally invented to make people who can’t sing sound like they could without them noticing. But then of course everything was happily exaggerated and the vocals suddenly fluttered spooky, robot-like, crystalline in all directions. Cher made the effect world famous with her hit “Believe” in the late 1990s. Kanye West even managed to turn it into great pop art on his 2008 album “808s & Heartbreak”. In classic old-school soul, the over-the-top use of auto-tune never caught on, after all, no pop art reveres the voice so much as a medium of the heart. In 2018, Swamp Dogg took on the matter congenially on “Love, Loss & Autotune”. So again, and no less good. Just listen to the single “I Need A Job”. Eternal magic of pop: Taking something very ridiculous so seriously that you can laugh at yourself along with it. In a better world, that would already be the biggest new summer hit of all time.
And one more recommendation at the end, also because this rapper is certainly the one among the few really important German pop artists of the present who submits to the new production conditions most consistently and releases new songs into the world with a frequency as if there were no tomorrow or no, rather as if there were always just one more morning: You should definitely have heard the new one these days Haiyti-Single “Before It Ends”. Famos dystopian trap rap art, depri megalomania deluxe, music at the time: “Give me your hand, otherwise I’ll fall low/So much has burned up here in paradise/Feel how the sun blinds me/Tell me when is it over?”