Lively accelerated: Kaytranada
The album of the week is the new EP “Intimidated” by the Canadian DJ and R’n’B and house producer Louis Kevin Celestin alias Kaytranada. There are only three songs on it, “Intimidated” with the singer Her, “$ payforhaiti” with the rapper Mach Hommy and “Be Careful” with the bassist Thundercat, but one is more famous than the other. Music, when you need to be accelerated lively and want to have the feeling of walking on cotton wool. And isn’t that necessary every single day right now?
Very, very nervous: 100 gecs
If, despite everything, at some point you feel the absolute urge for the cold breath of the avant-garde pop madness of the absolute present, then go to the new single (and the corresponding video) by the American hyperpop duo 100 gecs advised: “Mememe”. But be careful, the music by Dylan Brady and Laura Les sounds like a horror clown on feel-good drugs has come up with the soundtrack for his own brainwashing. Fast-forward fair techno with scratchy-punk synth pads and cartoon-like, high-pitched bubblegum pop vocals. Catchy, garish, and very, very nervous
Moods and vibrations: Adele
Pop superstar Adele aka Laurie Blue Adkins Adelewhose new album “30” has just been released and is already breaking sales records, managed to get Spotify to hide the shuffle button on their album. “We don’t just think about our albums and the order of the songs for no reason. Our art tells a story and our stories should be heard as they were intended,” she said in an interview. This is of course a touching lost battle for the pop album as an art form that we absolutely appreciate here in the features section. Fortunately, it is still not forbidden to hear and experience albums exactly as their creators intended them to be. With a wider audience, the battle has of course been lost since 2005 at the latest, when Steve Jobs explicitly presented his iPod shuffle with the note that shuffling, i.e. the randomness of the order in which the songs are played, is statistically the most popular form of Music consumption is. Curse and blessing of the digital revolution. By the way, the term technicus in the music industry is skip rate, i.e. the likelihood that the listener will not hear the end of a song. The American Rolling Stone quotes music manager Barry Johnson, the label manager once presented an album with a sophisticated song dramaturgy that included some of the best songs at the end. They just replied, “What if people don’t get to the end of the album? The attention spans are so short. How about we put the hits at the beginning?” The most successful pop musician of the decade, the Canadian rapper Drake, has therefore been going one step further for years: hits are released as singles, while albums are designed according to the playlist principle, i.e. not as a sequence of individual song works of art, but as curated emo soundtracks where the individual parts merge almost imperceptibly, as in a DJ mix, and moods and vibrations are much more important than unmistakably pointed compositions.
Music at the moment: grief
You can hardly get much closer to the status of a German indie pop superstar than Felix Kummer. The singer and rapper, born in 1989, became famous as the head of the Chemnitz band Kraftklub. With his solo project Grief and his new – and supposedly really last – release “The Last Song (Everything will be fine)” with co-singer Fred Rabe has now managed to do something even a little more improbable: a number one hit! But because that’s still not surprising enough, “The Last Song” is also the most unlikely pop hit you can ever imagine: a jagged, driving sardonic hymn, the great rejection of confidence and optimism. The devastating refrain goes like this: “Everything will be fine / The people are bad and the world is screwed / But everything is going to be fine / The system is broken, society is failing / But everything is going to be fine / Your life is in tatters and the house is standing on fire / But everything will be fine / Does not feel like it / But everything will be fine “. Has it ever been more accurate to say that a song is the music of the moment?