On new pop music: reviewing tracks by Charli XCX and Camila Cabello/Playboi Carti
Supernormal stimuli in "B2b" and "I LUV IT."
Charli XCX - “B2b”
The internal clock of Charli XCX’s new song “B2b” runs at a different speed than a lot of her recent music. While there is a decent amount of angular motion on the surface, the heart of its rhythmic architecture is, for her, relatively languid: it sort of glides, not completely unlike something you’d hear on Lovefingers around 2008. Charli has been on a remarkable artistic run since 2017’s Number One Angel, and her work in this period has generally been preoccupied with velocity. She tests out different configurations of the relationship between speed and desire, and this holds true regardless of a given song’s tempo or stylistic positioning. “B2b” feels a bit more comfortable its own unfolding, in less of a hurry.
The larger high-speed tendency of her work results in the sensation of the “sugar rush” that also adheres to most PC Music material. Compared to her contemporaries, though, Charli generally accelerates things with a bit more impatience. A speed drive, in a few different senses. There’s this sense in Charli’s music that she’s trying to make things happen more quickly than they would otherwise, whether it’s having fun or sex, doing drugs, ruining your own life for fun, whatever. The tendency is more than a suggestion that things could transpire at a faster pace – it’s an insistence that they need to.
The sensation of velocity becomes a supernormal stimulus, following Maya B. Kronic’s essay on the figure of the “Hyperplastic-Supernormal.” The concept was originally developed by biologist Nikolaas Tinbergen in the 1950s, and it describes objects which hijack evolutionary drives and action-patterns by presenting abnormally exaggerated perceptual triggers. Fast food, for example, supplies consumers with supernormally powerful doses of salt, fat, sugar at the expense of the nutrients necessary for survival; beetles in the Australian desert copulate with beer bottles because their golden-brown color is more exaggerated (and therefore attractive) than actually-existing potential mates.
Kronic traces a generalization of this tendency whereby “the correlation of phenotypic response and reproductive success is broken,” and humans increasingly find themselves surrounded with supernormal stimuli. They note the ways in which the technical artifacts resulting from various forms of cultural activity, ranging from the culinary arts to software engineering and beyond, have the ability to “feel out and unfurl undiscovered regions of the phase space of human affect, often discovering novel responses to combinations unprecedented in the evolutionary environment.” The production of supernormal stimuli can lead to very interesting outcomes.
As Kronic’s essay makes clear, pop music like Charli’s is able to uncover new regions of this phase space of human affect by essentially treating normative listening-drives as opportunities for various species of Trojan horse. As identified above, the speed drive is one of the primary stimuli within her repertoire for manipulating these affordances. There’s a tension at the heart of this speed-desire complex which sustains it, manifesting in this sense that Charli is simultaneously always in the process of getting what she wants – “No Angel”: “I party, get naughty / Always tellin' myself I'll never do this again” – and never quite securing or attaching herself to the desired sensation or experience. Musical time moves in both directions at once, rapidly, and these contradictory pressures centrifugally intensify the sugar rush-charge of the accelerated present, which is in itself specious, not really there, always in the midst of evaporating so it can be replaced by new iteration of itself, until forever. (“Forever”: “You’re not a ghost / You’re in my head.”) Desire becomes uncompelling if it is satisfied, and Charli has seemed generally uninterested in letting that happen, so time moves supernormally.
If you listen closely to the cadence of her delivery and where she sits in the vocal pocket, you’ll notice that she really tends to urge things along, not unlike how a punk vocalist might. I can’t think of a song of hers where she really lingers in one part more than any other. To illustrate this, consider Sarah Vaughan’s performances on After Hours: you get the sense that she never wants these songs to end, that the catharsis she gets out of rumination is more stabilizing or even pleasurable than the silence waiting for her at the end of the take. (Vaughan has an album called Linger Awhile.) In contrast, Charli generally regards every beat within a measure and every section in a song as an occasion to proceed to the next one; this works because she is an extremely good songwriter and performer and it all sounds good anyway. The distribution of sensation throughout Charli’s songs often feel very even for this reason – it’s a lot at once for the whole time, not just in certain sections – which adds to their sense of being sophisticated industrial artifacts, like an F1 sportscar or something. (In a weird way, this recalls a quote from Bresson where he castigates normative approaches to storytelling: “I try more and more in my films to suppress what people call plot. Plot is a novelist’s trick.”)
Anyways. I like this song. It sees her moving through time with a different set of techniques than usual. I’m curious to see where this goes with the album.
Camila Cabello - “I LUV IT” featuring Playboi Carti
This song is very odd. The first time I heard it, I really did not like it. I would even say I was affronted by it. Why? For the same reason that draws me to it now, why I’m listening to it every day: the sensation of listening to it is strange and interesting, largely because of the sense that it is the product of either A) a boardroom of deeply cynical analysts who don’t really know what they’re doing, merely conceiving of culture as an investment to be maximized; or B) a neural network.
“I LUV IT” synthesizes a number of components which do not quite mesh. These are:
The core synthesizer motif, which sounds like it was made in Garageband – it has this distinct preset quality. Usher’s “Love in this Club” was famously made with an out-of-the-box Garageband loop: the bright chords at the heart of “I LUV IT” sound like that. They are a bit more texturally interesting than the synths in that Usher song, there’s a bit more frisson, but they are undeniably dead-sounding. This isn’t a “bad” thing, but it is very specific in terms of what it communicates. A dispassionate and calculated evocation of catharsis.
The most stripped-down Jersey club-NY drill-hybrid rhythm section imaginable. Cabello makes no effort to use any of the vocal flows associated with this style, which is to the song’s benefit. Her performance only minimally interacts with the rhythmic underpinning of the instrumental. At the same time, the vocal track is compressed and EQ’d in such a way that Cabello’s plosive clicks feel slightly more foregrounded than the durationally extended vowels actually making up the melody. If you talk to a real-life person, they generally don’t sound like that. The effect is cool. The song’s “Lemonade” sample definitely doesn’t have this output programmed into its vocal chain. The rhythmic homogeneity of her overall performance heightens the effect of these more irruptive, expressive sounds. The result is compelling; simultaneously milquetoast and over-the-top.
A Playboi Carti feature. Not even really sure what to say about this. I saw that No Bells tweeted something suggesting that he is trolling Cabello – I don’t hear that, really. His verse is definitely a bit phoned-in compared to his recent string of singles, which are very good, but it’s also heartfelt at times. He finds a couple nice melodic lines. Carti and Cabello have no chemistry, though, which makes him an unintuitive choice; this is also a song about romance, and Carti’s music is overridingly sexless.
The Gucci Mane sample, “Lemonade,” from 2009. The vibe of “Lemonade” has remarkably little in common with the vibe of every other part of “I LUV IT” besides the section with the sample. Their superimposition is kind of cool for that reason. There is almost minimum-viable musical or semiotic resonance between the “Lemons on the chain with the V-cuts / Lemons on their face, watch 'em freeze up” snippet and anything Cabello or Carti have to say. Cabello riffs on the sample a little bit in the phrasing and melody of her delivery, but it is pretty subtle. The sample doesn’t even sound that cool in the context of this song, but it works, again, because it doesn’t really work. I love Gucci’s original track, especially the line, “AK hit your dog and you can’t bring ol’ yeller back.” I don’t really like dogs in general but yeah.
If these different components fail to cohere successfully according to normative formal benchmarks for evaluating popular music, how did they end up on the same song? The major label-industrial-complex is a likely answer: a boardroom of people with good business sense and horrible aesthetic sense, forcing a bunch of dissonant moodboards onto the same track.
“I LUV IT” also evokes some of the more counterintuitive or outright nonsensical kinds of outputs that can be drawn out of a neural network. Especially the kind you get 20 queries deep in a ChatGPT thread, asking it to generate endless variations on a text or image, where it starts ignoring requests and giving you things you didn’t ask for, recursively insisting on reproducing characteristics of outputs you rejected 10 minutes ago.
Neural networks are able to make connections between things that humans would not make. Their inputs – collections of data that a person would recognize as “having meaning” – are sliced and diced in n-dimensional vector space according to machinic transformations that are incredibly challenging to make human-friendly sense of from a holistic, end-to-end perspective; their outputs – in the case of commercially accessible products such as Chat GPT – are deemed acceptable for public consumption because they tend to have what end-users recognize as meaning. “I LUV IT” feels like a misfit artifact of this slicing and dicing, one which failed to smooth over the user-unfriendly process whereby qualitative content is broken down into quantitative, statistically-determined component parts that do not map onto categorical distinctions a human might use to conceptualize the construction of a piece of music. I LUV IT!