I haven’t forgotten you, imaginary internet pals. I’ve just been Januarying away from bed to couch and back again, overthinking and underdoing. But I’ve arrived at a format and a publication date (Tuesdays), and I’m also “unveiling” (as the PR emails put it) several hopefully recurring features. Let’s make this a regular thing.
In this issue:
Do adults need to have an opinion about Olivia Rodrigo?
How much Morgan Wallen is too much?
Plus 3 new features: GO SLOW NO, 7 Things, and The Uselist
‘drivers license’: The Song: The Review
It’s a tale as old as time—if time began the week TRL debuted. Disney girl meets Disney boy. Disney girl loses Disney boy. Disney girl gets adult pop career.
As you’ve maybe heard, Olivia Rodrigo is a newly famous Actual Teen, an alumna of High School Musical: The Musical: The Series, which is a meta reboot of a property that became immensely popular in the mid-aughts without much creasing the consciousness of childless adults or arousing their curiosity.
No one can say as little for the 17-year-old’s first official single. From the cheesy way the door-ajar beep dissipates into the electronic wash to the casually yet climactically deployed “fucking” (you can practically see all the nervous yet defiant tween glances at mom), “drivers license” is a carefully staged theater kid showcase that swells with the assurance of a smash hit, an aced audition, a pop inevitability. As Rodrigo’s murmur crests to a wail, anyone can hear why listeners still seeking a learner’s permit for love might think they’ve found a map through the inchoate feels newly churning within.
Personally, the melodrama’s not chewy enough for this irrelevant codger’s tastes—fergit teen verisimilitude, send Jim Steinman in there with some sleigh bells and explosions, accentuate the overindulgence in heartbreak till it reaches a suitable karaoke wattage. Or at least sharpen the sense of betrayal to a more spiteful point—having delved diligently post hoc into Rodrigo’s HSM:TH:TS tracks, I slightly prefer the slightly more edged “All I Want,” (not a Joni Mitchell cover, though Rodrigo nicely handles “The River,” which is).
But I won’t pretend “All I Want” is as massive or savvy or just plain of-its-moment as “drivers license,” a hit so huge (three weeks and running at number one) you could mistake it for a seismic shift in pop taste. For starters there’s the roman a clef element—HSM co-star Joshua Barrett is reportedly the faithless suitor called out here, Sabrina Carpenter “that blonde girl” (a phrase that’s surprisingly still coded in all sorts of malevolent ways in 2021), and both have replied with forgettable tracks of their own, which comes off as pathetic as if Warren, James, and Mick had recorded an answer song to “You’re So Vain.”
Without feeling contrived (which is not the same as without feeling stagey), Rodrigo’s delivery crosses teen and grown genres, building Bridgers between Pasek and Paul and fashionable indie sulk. It’s a sound that can unite kids aching for the mature misery of driving past a crush’s house and adults nostalgic for the time when they could pin their unhappiness on such a single, definite cause.
If this all speaks to your sad inner teen, no shame (there never is) in weeping along. But unlike (c’mon) Lorde or (come on) Billie Eilish or (COME ON) Taylor Swift, “drivers license” isn’t telling adults anything about adolescence we don’t already know (except maybe that Zoomers are killing apostrophes). (If anyone, Roderigo reminds me of Tate McRae, and no one writes think pieces about her.) Nor is she telling adults something we know in a way we’ve never heard, though she might help to remind us that sometimes a sad piano ballad is just a sad piano ballad.
GO SLOW NO
Go Slow No is a weekly survey of new, new-to-me, and overlooked album releases. The rating system is pretty simple: GO means listen to this now, SLOW means check it out when you get a chance, and NO means run screaming from the room if you hear so much as a note of it.
There’s a quality rootsy singer-songwriter for every predilection, and Justin Townes Earle was never quite mine. So as sad as his death at 38 was, and much as I’ve appreciated his pa’s talents, I expected to keep respectfully silent about this unprecedented personal tribute. But if the younger Earle’s recordings were always a bit too mannered to fit their tales of ramblin’, the elder roughs up his boy’s songs till they sound not just lived in but barely survived. “Far Away In Another Town” is far more sympathetic than a bitter she-done-me-wrong song should be, “Harlem River Blues” far too seductive for a song about suicide. Steve convinces me that both are classics, and accomplishes a feat even the best tributes rarely do—he’s made me return to its subject with renewed curiosity.
GO
Cheekface: Emphatically No. (New Professor)
Indie bands don’t pop up with fully formed worldviews much these days, so please excuse the lyric-heavy review. “It’s your best life if it’s the life that you’re living right now.” “Some personal news: Everything is OK.” “I wanna overthrow the government—or at least the bad part.” “I come from a long line of people/Who procreated” (but also “who were problematic”). Building off a sharp 2019 debut, Therapy Island, this L.A. trio lobs skewed aphorisms at everyday absurdities to render their cruelty endurable, and the music matches that chipper but wary non-pessimism, with a wiry guitar that sproings from the beat at odd angles. Still, let me close with one more quote: “Just because it’s funny doesn’t make it a joke.”
GO
Palberta: Palberta5000 (Wharf Cat)
Nothing “new” here, if novelty is your bag—postpunk may have once fragged rock tradition into ill-fitting components with revelatory abandon, but why shouldn’t time has rendered that parallel play a tradition of its own for smart newcomers to toy with? This trio of Bard grads (oh relax) sings sweet rather than raw, though they’re quickly distracted from their most tuneful moments: “In Again” approximates Pat Benatar for a coda then dies out, and the 18 mere seconds of “I’m Z’Done” threatens to turn into the Jeopardy theme. But they thrive on repetition, often with minimalist variation in one instrument while the others stick in their groove. When they chant "yeah I can't pretend what I want" over and over for almost four minutes on “Big Bad Want,” it feels like almost 14, and I almost wish it went on for 40.
GO
Jazmine Sullivan: Heaux Tales (RCA)
In the six years since the brilliant Reality Show, Sullivan has gathered up less than a half-hour of music—eight songs that focus almost exclusively on sex, cut with six spoken “tales” from other Black women for padding (or context) (or both). These tales and tunes explore more complex sexual power dynamics than “WAP” pride, but though there’s documentary value to the spoken interludes, Sullivan embraces their generalities rather than shaping them into stories. Compare a truism like “that money keeps the pussy wet” to the fully embodied characters who populated her earlier songs. There’s still a thrill when she rises above her conversational midrange to frayed and fraught moments of epiphany in her serrated upper register, and keeping it simple pays off on my favorite track, “On It,” which enacts the drama of holding back your thirst for the D long enough to get yours.
SLOW
Your grandma was right: Only boring people get bored. Trapped at home like the rest of us, Rivers Cuomo sings about his dumb little life in his dumb little voice, with some dumb big orchestrations thrown on top so you don’t mistake these sketches for demos. Songs about eating the same old Indian entree, listening to Steinbeck on Audible, and playing his piano while North Korea launches a first strike are recommended to anyone who wishes Mike Love had written “Vegetables.” The banal anti-tech screed “Screens” (“Now the real world is dying/As everybody moves into the cloud/ Can you tell me where we're going?/Where will we be twenty-one years from now?/Everyone stares at the screens”) is a good argument for letting the machines rule us.
NO
Morgan Wallen: Not nostrums, but normalcy
Morgan Wallen would like to have it both ways, if you don’t mind.
With its 30 tracks divided into two equal portions, Dangerous: The Double Album presents itself as an old-school artistic statement, its supposed display of range and stamina the hallmark of a mature artist. But of course, it’s also a very modern data dump, designed to juke streaming stats that land Wallen atop the Billboard album charts, where he’s now kicked his boots up for three weeks and counting.
If there’s an organizing principle to Dangerous, it’s that age-old question “Why do redneck guys go out with city girls?” The first “album” here begins with Wallen failing to sweet talk a beachfront fling into relocating to Tennessee on “Sand in My Boots,” and ends with another long-distance romance ending because he’ll never love her “More Than My Hometown.” (Matters turn out more happily on “Whatcha Think of Country Now.” Dare to struggle, dare to win.)
The answer to the above q, of course, is “Because that’s how you grow your audience.” As often with commercially ambitious country music, the star is a stand-in for his genre, and the potential listener us that girl who looks great in those jeans, girl, and never thought she’d be riding down this old dirt road in a country boy’s truck, did you, girl? Girl? Girl?
Not that Wallen ever comes on that strong. If he doesn’t wear out his welcome over 97 minutes, that’s because you don’t always notice him. His pleasant drawl subtracts nothing from his material, which rarely makes you hate it. If someone else sang any of these songs, they would either be better or worse—don’t ask me which. (Does “Blame It On Me” call for a little more swagger or a little more cool or neither or both?) In other words, Wallen is the perfectly frictionless streaming country star for the WFH era, and maybe for the naptime from history many hope Biden’s America will be.
Though Dangerous is more consistent than Wallen’s debut, If I Know Me, it’s also less charming: There’ s nothing as undeniable as “Whiskey Glasses” or as shameless as “Girl, I know a breakup ain't supposed to be fun/But I'm here at happy hour, happy ours is done,” though I chuckled urbanely at “Losing my Dodge Ram mind.” It doesn’t help that of the 42 writers here, only Hillary Lindsey is a woman, and she has to work on the song about the boat.
Instead, Wallen and his boys rely on generalities, which is often just fine: “This Bar” should be about any bar, “Me on Whiskey” belongs on a “Country Music to Get Naked to” playlist. Still, ‘round about the time I realized “Somebody’s Problem” was one of my favorites here, I also noticed this was the second album in a row where he mentions how a tank-top strap falling off her shoulder turns him on. (Guess he has a type, or, comment-dit-on, a motif.) And after sketching out a cliché small town on “Going Down,” he dares slickers like me to “call it cliché,” as though viewing the lives of everyday people through the narrowest lens does them justice.
Musically, Wallen has Goldilocksed his sound too, with Florida-Georgia Line producer Joey Moi staking a middle ground between impeccably arranged pop Americana and post-bro drop-it-down for what I suppose passes for neotraditionalism these days, even if eight mostly discreet participants are credited with “programming.” For a show of taste, there’s Chris Stapleton rumbling harmonies. an adequate Jason Isbell cover, and Shane McAnally adding his expert touch to a shimmer of AM gold called “Seven Summers”—and all in a row.
Those aren’t necessarily my favorites, or yours, In fact, 30 listeners might rank these thirty tracks 30 different ways. Whether you think that’s an achievement or not might say more about you than it does about Morgan Wallen.
7 Things
Named for a song from back when Miley Cyrus was good, 7 Things is a grab bag where I dump uncategorizable thoughts too long for a tweet and too short for an essay. (Though unlike Miley I don’t hate ’em. Well, not all of them.)
In April 1967, this gothic soap became a daytime hit with the appearance of its undead hero, Barnabas Collins. But for ten long vampire-less months before that, its cast stumbled, stammered, and shouted through some of the dullest TV melodrama I’ve glanced past my phone at. There’s at best one plot-forwarding incident in each 20-minute episode, the rest of which is fluffed out with scene after scene of *spooky voice* "Terrible things happen in that old house." "What sorts of—" *spookier voice* "Ter-ri-ble! Thi-i-ings!" If weed or meditation aren’t doing the trick anymore, try one dose of soothing, uneventful suspense at bedtime.
Luster, Raven Leilani
Well, nobody’s been lying about this book. Most of my conversations about it have gone something like: “Isn’t is so good?” “It’s so good!” but let me at least try to go a little deeper. Continually surprising as both writing (word to word, clause to clause, sentence to sentence) and plot (without ever seeming like an arbitrary accumulation of events), Luster tosses a 23-year-old Black Alice named Edie into a white suburban Wonderland, a journey she narrates in a unique perceptive voice that’s strikingly contemporary, at home in the world of social media and our moment’s peculiar flavor of economic precarity and bad sex, without feeling like sounding up-to-date is the sole goal. Also… it’s so good!
Kim Bora’s first feature length is a slow heart-crusher, following a 14-year-old girl as she passes through calamities large and small in 1994 South Korea. As Eun-hee, Park Ji-hoo hides behind one of those “please don’t notice me” expressions with which cautious teens shield themselves, every moment of joy or sadness or anger she allows herself materializing as a risky flicker of her features. If you could die of too much empathy I’d be writing this from beyond the grave.
Twin Cities Area Community College campuses
My pal Andy and I have a longstanding Saturday brunch tradition we weren’t about to let a global pandemic sidetrack despite our justifiable fear of eating indoors. The nearest open space nearest to one week’s takeout joint happened to be North Hennepin Community College, and after stomping around its grounds we decided to visit each of its kin within a quick car trip. Over the following weeks, we learned that from their mild architectural flourishes to their non-representational public art to their community gardens, each campus expressed that turn of the ’70s egalitarian optimism about community education it might be easier to sense when the campuses are deserted.
@RealHeathcliffs (actual heathcliff comics)
When does phoning it in start to feel avant-garde? The less effort Peter Gallagher puts into his outdated cat comic the weirder it grows, and this account captures the process vividly. Yes, it’s 2021 and the two strips I get the most out of are Heathcliff and Nancy.
THX1312, “Shooting Down Police Helicopters”
This time last year, I probably held not one single opinion about helicopters. Then, in response to last summer’s unrest, they descended from the sky and never went away. Now, whether they’re piloted by some rubbernecking TV station beaming disaster tourism out to its fretful exurban audience or the uniformed thugs my city seems incapable or restraining or removing, that whirring chuff inspires Hulk-smash fantasies. Damn have I needed this Simpsons-quoting blare of aggression, from the excellently titled album Intentionally Decapitated Police Officer. It’s time, Homer. It’s time.
Why-MCA
Symbolic gestures must mean something right? So when the outgoing President of the United States waves farewell as the world’s most popular gay cruising anthem blares overhead, what are we to think? A smug dig at cruelly rolled-back LGBTQ gains? “I think the guy just really likes ‘YMCA,’” I tweeted at the time, but that, like most tweets, was wrong. Trump doesn’t really “like” anything, aside from pomp and attention. As with 90 percent of what Trump does and says, he tried it on a crowd once and it aroused the desired effect. In other words, It’s market-tested and has succeeded. What a way to live.
The Uselist
Welcome to my running playlist of the year’s best songs, along with a few sentences that try to get at what makes ’em work. It’s called the Uselist, because it has to be called something, and if you can’t go high, go as low as you can.
Billie Eilish with Rosalia, “Lo Vas a Olvidar”
Perched at the wobbliest moment in any pop star’s career, Eilish has followed up her unfollowupable breakthrough album with the-same-but-new (“Therefore I Am”), torchy I-choose-me disco (“My Future”), Bond-by-numbers (“No Time to Die”), and ah-the-regrets-of-fame (“Everything I Wanted”). Though mostly in the can for over a year, this duet feels the freshest of the lot, winnowing two idiosyncratic voices down to an airy prettiness that never feels willfully waifish or fragile, their harmonies brandishing a depth of melancholy as a form of revenge. Cause ya can’t you won’t Enya don’t stop.
Would this leftover from the Product years (recycled belatedly as the b-side to a new Autechre mix of “BIPP”) have hit as hard if I’d listened before I heard the news of this avant-pop visionary’s death on Saturday? Maybe not, but though a half-decade-plus old, it’d have sounded as fresh, as suffused with SOPHIE’s utopian faith that pop is everyone’s inheritance to manipulate en route to expanding their protean sense of self. I can only imagine what it must have been like to have found yourself discovered by this music at a moment when your identity is in full flux. It’s a testament to SOPHIE’s open-hearted ingenuity that I can imagine it.
Willie Jones, “American Dream”
If this Shreveport country hopeful couldn’t get the bachelorettes on Broadway dancing to “Down For It,” even after two remixes and a T.I. feature, I have lower hopes for the solid party jams on his first full-length, Right Now, than they deserve. But this gritty, thoughtful anthem shoots over the head of programmers to white libs and maybe even a Black audience that might be tougher to convince that America remains in any way dream-worthy.
Ho, Why Is You Here? was such a stripped-down thrill, driven almost solely by Flo’s trebly sharp voice, that the Fiddler on the Roof sample here leaps out like a guitar solo on Ramones song. Not only does this Mobile rhymer jack Tevye better than Gwen Stefani ever did, but one of her boasts is that she’d wear the same clothes four days in a row. Biddy-biddy-bum, motherfuckers.
It’s not an opportune moment for well-meaning white ladies to share their perspectives, and one-time indie hero Merrill Garbus won’t win any strays back to her fold with this endearingly awkward argument for learning to be your own caregiver. Beginning with a watery guitar tone that’s kinda “Purple Rain” and a declaration of “Parents are children” that’s very Free to Be You and Me (a comparison we do not make insultingly in my house), a kind, talented person expresses vulnerability creatively in hopes of becoming kinder and more talented. I’m game.