I first heard Lorde’s Royals in July 2013. Without knowing anything of its origins, I was in its thrall and wanted to hear it repeatedly. Upon learning that Lorde was a teenaged Kiwi, I started tracking the charts, rooting for the song to spread; at that time its only impact was in the mid-40s on the Billboard Alternative Songs chart. Released as a single the next month, it reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the first week of October, spent nine weeks there, and the time since has seen Lorde rack up another #1 and two more top 5s. She has curated the soundtrack for the latest Hunger Games blockbuster and if she doesn’t straight rule the world she certainly has the Midas touch. Featuring Lorde in a mix of interesting new music is natural.
Janis Joplin’s Mercedes Benz touches on similar themes as Royals, and is a natural fit to bring us in. [Guest calls of ‘Oh Lord’ courtesy of Parliament, Drake, and Phil Collins] The song Royals itself was begging for some laid back Barry White on the verses and Big Poppa on the chorus. Biggie’s classic crystallized and made dominant the opulence Lorde is commenting on, though neither she nor I are denigrating the B.I.G.’s right to celebrate. If Lorde is an unlikely star, Sia is even less likely. She’s written hits for Rihanna and others, painfully shy and preferring to stay in the background. But nobody was going to do justice performing Chandelier except for her, and it had to be in this mix. Charli XCX solo on Boom Clap shows out a lot better than when she was just the Gwen to Iggy’s Eve on Fancy. American Authors’ Best Day Of My Life and Maroon 5’s Animals keep the stomp going until the classic beat from U2’s Numb (produced by Brian Eno) brings us back to Lorde…
…This time for Yellow Flicker Beat, from the film Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1. I know nothing of Hunger Games, but the empowerment of this song’s protagonist works for me. Ed Sheeran’s Don’t and Nick Jonas’s Jealous are as poppy as it gets here, so I hope you can endure it. I had no idea Rick Rubin was involved in the production of Don’t–it’s sure not apparent, but it’s a good track. Jealous sits in that same tempo as everything we’ve heard thus far, and stuttering its beat makes a great foundation for Alt-J’s Hunger Of The Pine. Alt-J is stylistically as unlikely as Lorde, but they’re coming. Their 2014 second album This Is All Yours hit #4 on the U.S. chart, and both of their albums get plenty of play in my house. Hunger Of The Pine generally captures their off-kilter style which can’t be generalized.
…From here we go a little further out for a short time with Jai Paul’s BTSTFU, a sparse piece of falsetto that here serves as a launching point for Beyonce’s amazing Partition: “I sneezed on the beat and the beat got sicker”. Her December 2013 Beyonce album—her 5th solo album and 5th to hit #1—has a lot of the raw intimacy combined with great beats that we haven’t seen outside of Prince. Partition even has a breakdown with a lady speaking French, a la Prince’s Girls And Boys from 1986. Anyway, Beyonce’s 808-heavy beat, which I make sicker by adding Elle by Sophie (have you heard the ridiculous trip that Lemonade is?), feeds perfectly into Rae Sremmurd’s We. I don’t know what it is about Rae Sremmurd. They have one of the most unconventional delivery styles, strange meters, and a definite IDGAF attitude that captures a lot of the essence of the most vital hip-hop, like for instance Old Dirty Bastard.
Sticking with the stuttery feel we get Eye’s On Fire (Zed’s Dead Remix) by Blue Foundation. The original is pretty mellow, but this mix gives it the electro-life to fit in here. That juxtaposition between a heavy and twitchy beat under mellow vocals makes a good match for Daddy’s Car by Jamie Lidell. Here’s where I have to admit that I found more than a few of the tracks used here on a Spotify-curated playlist of “alternative R&B”. I haven’t kept aware of the charts in many years because the lack of variety and sound innovation leaves me cold. Tracks I’ve discovered through Spotify, including Daddy’s Car from 2000 gave me a whole new set of tracks I want to hear. Lidell has a brief breakdown I loop to put under acapella vocals from You’re The Best by Wet…
…which takes us in another direction, away from the nervous beats into a more classic direction. Wet’s song features acoustic instruments but quickly enjoys the classically funky beat from Lady Luck by Jamie Woon in 2011. Syncopation and finger snaps gives us a jaunty entree into the next chapter of the mix. But when (again via Spotify) I first heard this song and its chord changes I immediately thought of Aaliyah’s timeless Try Again, knowing they just had to get put together. Agreed? Okay, so we bring the original synth bridge back in, add in Pharrell’s beat from Clipse’s Grindin with bass, synth, and guitar from Prince’s Erotic City to go under the naked intro of Lorde’s Team. Team has the same basic beat as Grindin—less crunchy though. Lorde is good, but what I’ve added provides a big boost. Another song riding that same feel is Coffee by Sylvan Esso, which takes us out of Team. This is a nice track—acoustic, sparse, drums plus synth strings with a touch of glockenspiel, featuring unadorned vocals. Bring back that Grindin beat for the muted 2 On by Tinashe, real quick before leaving it with another downtempo Tinashe track, Aquarius.
From there it’s time for Drop The Game, with some help from Aphex Twin. When I mix, I like to use what I call “glue”—wordless pieces that attach one piece to the next. When you’re making a physical collage, glue is not the foundation of the artistic statement, but it’s essential. In my sound collage, the glue is not invisible to the ear, but it serves the same purpose. Aphex Twin, with its long history of innovative instrumental sounds, is a great source for glue. I’m discussing it here, but this philosophy is behind my frequent use of Grindin. I’ve got a huge library of instrumental music, and using it gives me flexibility in the nature of tracks I want to feature. So, Aphex Twin’s track s950tx16wasr10 [163.97] plays that role backing up and spicing up Chet Faker here. It gives Drop The Game enough flavor to feed into another Alt-J track, Every Other Freckle. Another tribute to their weirdness—”Turn you inside and lick you like a crisp packet”—the sound behind the first verse gets darker and more dense until they “let the cover girls sing”, and the sound opens up into a sunny falsetto. I use this as an opportunity to move on to Mangrove by Young & Sick, and their twisted brightness: “I feel the best I have all my life; something must be wrong”. We follow these lyrics back into a somber sound for a brief taste of Jhene Aiko’s spacey To Love & Die. I add a layer of heaviness at the end with more glue: the open drums from Led Zeppelin’s When The Levee Breaks. This segues into a truly great call-and-response gospel-blues song, Bottom Of The River by Delta Rae. Brittany Holljes can really belt, and this sibling group out of North Carolina brings the soul. The mix then closes with Hozier’s giant Take Me To Church mainly as a concession to its popularity and its commandeering of the beat that Lorde used so successfully in the track that birthed this construction of mine.
This mix was inspired by the prevalence of the Royals drum pattern throughout a year in its wake. Checking the most-listened tracks on Spotify showed me that beat over and over, from Sia to Maroon 5 to Hozier. Exploring more obscure music on Spotify fed me tracks that gave me hope in new music, or at least in my ability to find stuff I would want to hear. It’s tough sometimes, pitting everything I hear against my records full of the pinnacle of 20th-century songwriting and production, and most doesn’t stand up. But when I hear innovation, clever uses of technology or competent vocals that come from a new perspective, I tune in and I’m totally willing to give it space and time. My creation from these tracks still gets a prominent berth on my space-time continuum.
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