Radio Rant: Ed Sheeran – Shape of You

Posted on February 23, 2017 by bgibs122

Hello, and welcome to Radio Rants. Time to shape up for today.

Ed Sheeran always seems like he could do more. He’s a fairly smart, genre diverse songwriter who’s charismatic to a fault, and, because he cut his teeth on years of busking, he has core self-possession that you won’t find in the Shawn Mendeses (Mendesi?) of the world. Hate or love his material–I’ve done some version of both–you can never accuse him of sounding hapless or incompetent. I feel like he knows this, since in public, he carries himself with a low heat “I am a talented singer-songwriter; I write my own songs and use my own loop pedal” seriousness that stems from aspirations of being the most successful. Put it this way: if he were a Weasley, even though he dresses like Bill, he’d be Percy.

Yet, for his goal of being number one, Sheeran, at least so far in a pop context, lacks the intangible “next level”ness needed to get him to the A-list. Sure, he’s top-tier: he’s got a number one song, Divide will debut and stay atop the charts for a long time, he can fill Madison Square Garden with adoring fans, and he has a Song of the Year Grammy; but he won’t do something to seize the moment. Like, look at Sheeran’s friendo Taylor Swift. Swift followed a linear pattern of escalation until 2012’s Red, where she made songs with superproducers that went all the way into pop, but did so on her terms, and tried her hand at every genre possible (including “featuring Ed Sheeran”). Then, she took Red‘s breakthrough, multi-genre success, and consolidated it all into a pop and pop culture takeover with 1989. Sheeran, though he’ll work with guys like Pharrell and Steve Mac, won’t have a move like that. He won’t have a move like The Weeknd gatecrashing the charts with Max Martin’s help. He won’t adopt a trend and make one of its biggest songs like Drake or Bieber. He won’t creatively one-up himself like Beyonce.

I don’t say all of that to beat up on Sheeran (much), just that, if you want to be the guy, you’ve gotta fucking be the guy. You’ve gotta be the guy who will read the room, and see what doesn’t just get by, but what does best. You’ve gotta be the guy that tries a switch up. And it takes more than working hard on a song; you can’t be above playing the pop game. You can’t keep halfassing your lead singles.

Which finally brings us to “Shape Of You.” The shortest way to describe “Shape of You” is “‘Sing’ updated for 2017.” Like “Sing,” it’s deftly performed while being dispassionate enough that it can’t quite mask that Sheeran thinks he’s too good to write for radio, only this time, he’s showing up late to dancehall pop instead of trebley Pharrell-core funk. Sheeran’s take on danceh–okay, I can’t do this. After “Work,” “One Dance,” “Cheap Thrills,” “Don’t Let Me Down,” “What Do You Mean,” “Don’t Wanna Know,” and the rest, I cannot do a blow-by-blow of dancehall pop descriptions. You know what it is (“Black and Yellow” is not what it is despite being “you know what it is”).

Sheeran played “Shape of You” live at the Grammys a few weeks ago, and, per usual, he brought the loop pedal out with him. It’s a cool trick, don’t get me wrong, but it has the side effect of laying the Ed Sheeran Single Formula bare: dead strums as percussion, a nimble guitar part or two, wordless post-chorus that he stacks on-top of itself, and live strumming/singing to finish. And, particularly with “Shape of You,” using the loop pedal feels like a smoke and mirrors tactic to hide what a thin song this is; you watch him perform this mediocrity, and your attention is drawn to him doing a spinning plate act with different channel loops while playing/singing live instead of, you know, the song being dull as shit.

And “Shape of You” is dull. The whole thing stays on repeat musically, and in terms of lyrics, it’s closer to “Fuck me, I’m Ed fucking Sheeran” wish-fulfillment than “Sing” ever was. To wit:

“The club isn’t the best place to find a lover/So the bar is where I go” Ed Sheeran doesn’t go to da club, he goes to bars where he can find people to talk to about Hemingway and Monet, and all the very smart things he knows about. Sure.

“Me and my friends at the table doing shots” Dude, if you’re pounding shots are you sure you aren’t at a club or at a bar with a dancefloor? Otherwise, why get smashed right away?

“Take my hand, stop, put Van the Man on the jukebox/And then we start to dance, and now I’m singing” Ed Sheeran’s really out here saying he was just hanging at a bar, chatted this girl who came up, and whisked her away with “Brown Eyed Girl” like it’s a Thing That Really Happened.

“Girl, you know I want your love/Your love was handmade for somebody like me/Come on now, follow my lead/I may be crazy, don’t mind me” I sort of respect it when artists string as many filler lines together as possible like this. At least he doesn’t say “baby” anywhere.

“I’m in love with you body” I need a favor: I need someone to say this exact line to a person they’re trying to bed, and I need you to tell me how quickly it took things to go south.

“I’m in love with the shape of you” This is the perfect answer for when your SO asks you what’s your favorite feature of theirs, and you don’t have an answer ready. You’re welcome.

“You and me are thrifty, so go all you can eat/Fill up your bag, I’ll fill up a plate” Dude, you’ve had “Opened for Taylor Swift” money for the last 4 years, you’re fine. You wouldn’t have to release an album again after opening for T.Swift. Just ask HAIM.

“Shape of You” is a bust, but it might not mean all is doomed for Divide as a whole. Sheeran’s albums tend to be pretty stylistically diverse. At the same time, “Shape of You” just blithely adapting last year’s trends for down the middle pop isn’t encouraging. It reminds me most of Maroon 5’s recent output, but at least Maroon 5 wrote “Sunday Morning” before giving up, and Ed hasn’t even made it that far. “Shape of You” has fought against “Bad and Boujee” for number one over the last month, and while “Shape of You” might have won on the charts, it’s a foregone conclusion that Migos have already won the culture.

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Album Review: The xx – I See You

Posted on February 21, 2017 by bgibs122

A funny thing happens on The xx’s new album: there is a song entitled “A Violet Noise.”

For anyone even passingly familiar with The xx, this almost registers as a joke, a very rare thing in indie-dom. This band has made a name for itself over the last 8 years by specializing in hushed, minimalist indie pop that plays with negative space and lush beats; to describe the texture of any given xx song is to see how many synonyms you can find for “delicate.” “A Violent Noise” is very much an xx song in this regard, with its clean, reverberating guitars and soft synths. Its namedrop comes in Oliver Sim’s muted lament that “But every beat is a violent noise,” so it fits the song, but taken against the band’s work as a whole, it’s akin to naming a line of feather pillows “Brick.”

I See You is The xx’s third album, and the first to roll back the luxe cover their insular sound, albeit only slightly and likely by necessity. Their 2009 debut was a sleeper hit that eventually became an influencer, but recent years have also made it a victim of other people’s success, as the band’s signature moves–sparse instrumentation + electronic atmospherics + romantic complication + introversion–have gone mainstream while they as a unit have not. On one hand, this gives them cachet (in fact, band producer Jamie xx coproduced the title track of Drake’s close-enough-to-landmark Take Care, indirectly putting him near the epicenter of his band’s sound going mainstream) but at the same time, their once cutting edge work seems somewhat outmodded by artists who have pushed it in different directions since their debut and 2012’s Coexist. Jamie xx himself experimented with their template on his breezy, more overtly electronic 2015 solo album In Colour, which itself colors I See You.

As indicated on lead single “On Hold” and album opener “Dangerous,” I See You‘s new trick is swapping out a significant part of the band’s introversion for something dance-friendly. “Dangerous” announces a newer, looser xx with blasts of processed horns, a syncopated head-nod friendly beat, and house bass for a track that’s more outgoing than most of what the band’s done before, but whose excitement wouldn’t overpower you at the clearance rack of Express (and I swear that’s meant as a compliment). “On Hold” owes its expanse, meanwhile, to the festival-friendly build up to a cozy drop with a Hall and Oates sample, as addition to a solid instrumental overall that compliments Sims and Romy Croft’s vocals. Elsewhere on “Replica,” a violin loop is incorporated into the band’s blend of indie rock with dreamy synths, and Croft’s backing vocals are a highlight for a song that quietly reveals when it could just be a puff of smoke.

At the same time, though, there are a few things holding I See You back. Like any act who succeeds at doing one thing really well, every xx album sounds redundant at some point: here, Romy excels on “Brave For You” which handily beats her other glacial, pained confessional “Performance,” and there’s little making “Lips” or “I Dare You” required listening. And sometimes, Jamie’s DJ retool robs the outfit of their best weapons. They could be vocally/sonically be cold and aloof, sure, but they also wrote tightly wound songs that played to those strengths. The band loses a lot of that insulation by going slightly more vibrant, but everyone involved isn’t quite dynamic enough to make the change stick, and so you’re left with songs like “Say Something Loving” and “A Violent Noise” that don’t sound lighter as much as they do flimsier. That’s arguably, if not likely, by design: The xx are a shy group. At their most outgoing, they’re not going to overcome like, Purity Ring. No matter how well-made the dance-heavy or poppier material is, The xx are only going to be able to do it so well.

Whenever my mind wandered while listening to I See You, it came back to how fastidious this album is when it comes to taste, and how that affects the music itself. At times, it feels like the album’s more concerned with showing its impeccable credentials, and making correct song choices than creating arresting music. And I think upper-tier indie has been like this for a while. For my part, it really kicked in with Currents, which, at release, I said “might be the year [2015]’s least adventurous, and most curated album.” “Least adventurous” is unfair in hindsight, but I’d still say that the curating of indie is an ongoing problem. The xx fell victim to it, as have acts like late day Dirty Projectors, Future Islands, Vampire Weekend, and occasionally Bon Iver. I like music done by those groups, but too often they come off as using disparate or passe influences/samples for sake of proving you can without actually making something interesting; it’s the musical equivalent of crashing a conversation with “Well, I think that Bread’s work has gone under appreciated as a whole.” I’m not saying there’s anything inherently wrong with focusing on taste or using obscure influences–Grimes does both, and I still love Art Angels to death–but there has to be a point to it, and it has to work for your audience. Otherwise, you’re playing Coachella today, but who will see you tomorrow?

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Let’s Fix the Grammys

Posted on February 13, 2017 by bgibs122

Does anyone out there truly enjoy watching the Grammys?

No, seriously: I know that I’ve come to regard it as a chore, and I’m not alone in calling it a wailing and grinding of teeth. Truth is, it’s an overlong, tedious ceremony that’s frustrating when it isn’t baffling, and tempers its highs (Chance the Rapper gets everything!) with lows (Twenty One Pilots accepted an award in their underwear!) with a final balance that’s never weighted in your favor, unless your name is Adele. So, I can either grumble about how awful they are again, or I could offer up my suggestions to fix the Grammys. Either way, I’m not being original; “how to fix the Grammys” is the music writers’ equivalent of a break-up album or collaborating with Danger Mouse: everyone does one eventually. All the same, I’m ready to try.

So first, a tacit admission: we’re not “fixing” the Grammys, per se. “Fixing” implies that we’re taking something that’s broken or fallen into disrepair, and making it whole again, whereas the Grammys have seemingly always been pretty lame. Instead, this is more a look at how to make the Grammys at least as tolerable as any other awards show.

Fire Whoever Hired James Corden: Whatever else you could say about previous lackluster Grammy host LL Cool J, he was effectively a 10 second YouTube preroll ad: unskippable, a little grating, but ultimately knew when to get out of the way. Corden, meanwhile, thought he hosting a ceremony people actually like, and performed accordingly. He’d be solid on any other awards show (his turn hosting last year’s Tonys went well enough), but on the blandy Grammys, showbiz bits about the folding chairs in the audience or rapped opening monologues just read as filler. He wasn’t bad, but for the love of God, don’t let Corden and his cardboard Carpool Karaoke prop become a recurring #GrammyMoment.

Build the Difference Between Record of the Year and Song of the Year Somewhere Into the Telecast: “Record of the Year vs Song of the Year” is a piece of standby Grammy content only behind the “The Grammys Fucked It Up” piece and “How to Fix the Grammys” piece in terms of popularity. Hell, even I have to look up the difference every year or two (short answer: “Record” is for “best recorded music of the year”), and I have to care about this shit. So run a disclaimer with the difference at the bottom of the screen, include it with the President of the Recording Academy’s annual “fuck you, pay me” speech, or just give Record of the Year to whichever artist can explain it first on stage. Any option will be an improvement. Speaking of arcane rules.

Set Eligibility to “Came Out Last Year:” All awards shows are bad at this; the Grammys are just the worst. Eligibility for this year’s ceremony was from October 1st 2015 to September 30th last year, which is how you get 25 nominated for Album of the Year for 2017 despite coming out two Star Wars movies ago. The Oscars strategy of releasing a movie to like, six theaters in LA in early December, and only doing a wide release after Christmas is probably more dishonest, but at least it’s logical.

Decide How Important the Awards Actually Are: Did you know that, shit you not, 84 Grammy awards were given out yesterday? That’s a lot! And while I imagine there isn’t demand to see who takes home the coveted Best Surround Sound Album gramophone (a real award with a real winner), last night handed out 9 awards over a glacially paced 3 hour and 40 minute ceremony. On average, that means the Recording Academy issued 2 awards in the same time it’d take you to listen to Lemonade once, while the rest were doled out in the pre-show.

This puts all the emphasis on the performances (more on that in a moment), but it also means that most of the awards–the things we’ve known about since early December–are dealt with out of sight and out of mind. This means you broadly lose things like Bowie’s victory lap from beyond the grave, or the sheer WTF-ness of “Hotline Bling,” a song with less rapping than “Tik Tok” or “Poker Face,” picking up two awards in the Rap category, or walking warcrime Pentatonix winning a country award for their cover of “Jolene.” There’s a lot left on the table. And the non-Big Four (Song/Recording/Album of the Year, Best New Artist) hand outs that make the telecast come without rhyme or reason because the ceremony doesn’t tell us anything about them beforehand.

So play around with it. Try more awards. Try fewer. Do a bunch at once, or do a ceremony and then a big concert blowout. Let the winner of Best New Age Album introduce a performer. Just do something different.

Put the Performances on YouTube: I mean, there is no reason to not do this. Lady Gaga’s entire Super Bowl performance went up on an official NFL YouTube account by the game’s end in HD. Meanwhile, I’m trawling Beyhive Twitter (also known as “just Twitter”) for decent rips of Music’s Biggest Night that’ll probably get taken down this week.

Do Joint Performances That Make Sense: We got one of these this year! Mic issues aside, Lady Gaga and Metallica’s “Moth Into Flame” duet worked because “Moth Into Flame” is solid late day Metallica, and because Gaga and James Hetfield share the same brash vocal style (sidenote: glam metal won’t move a lot of radio units, but damn if Gaga didn’t look more engaged doing that than she did on anything for Joanne). I’d throw John Legend and Cynthia Erivo’s cover of “God Only Knows” in this pile, too; she’s on Broadway, he’ll be there inevitably.

Don’t Do Joint Performances “Just Because”: Lukas Graham and Kelsea Ballerini performing on their own is barely going to register with most viewers, so trying to cut her song into the still awful “7 Years” isn’t doing anyone any favors. Nor is putting established star Alicia Keys next to [Google check] Maren Morris. I’d try to lobby against something like Andra Day, Demi Lovato, Tori Kelly, and Little Big Town’s collaborative Bee Gees tribute, but ill-advised tributes are too intrinsic to the Grammy brand.

Exciting Performers to the Front: No matter how you feel about Adele, opening the 220 minute telecast with “Hello,” the mid-tempoest of mid-tempo ballads, isn’t exactly charging out of the gate. Nor was following it up with The Weeknd and Daft Punk’s great but chill “I Feel It Coming.” And, while he’s a talented guy, Sturgill Simpson appearing around the 3 hour mark isn’t exactly a shot in the arm. We had a surprising number of engaging performers last night between Beyonce, MetalliGa, Bruno Mars as Bruno Mars and cosplaying as Prince, A Tribe Called Quest, and Chance the Rapper, but these far and away came in the second half, where they had to fight the show’s bloat.

Book Performers Who Will Try Something: The Grammys are, for better or worse, one of those “the world’s stage” moments, so why not swing as big or as hard as possible? Why not do a heady meditation on motherhood and spirituality that also screams “I’ve gotten really into fka twigs and/or art history recently?” Why not smash two of your professions of faith into each other as joyously as possible? Why not be A Tribe Called Quest and bring the politics of your music all the way to the forefront? It makes for better viewing than Daft Punk dipping their robo toes into another Alive setup, or Ed Sheeran doing his latest “Look ma, no hands” looping bullshit. Hell, Katy Perry might have done the most hamfisted #wokepop #protest performance possible, but it still left an impression.

And last, but not least…

Give Beyonce the Damn Album of the Year Award: I mean, come on. Even if you set aside the merits of Lemonade as a cultural landmark, a powerful statement about aching and affirmation in black womanhood, and a declaration of self-love, and ignore its context as an artistic step forward for Beyonce, and brush away the importance–tangible or imagined– of its AOTY nod in light of three years of escalating bullshit in the category; if you just appraise it at base level “Which of these has the most songs I like hearing” appraisal…it’s still better than 25 by a considerable stretch. And I’m not saying that 25‘s bad. I listened to it again while writing this piece, and it’s good. In some parts, it’s really good. But it’s not the album of the year in this bunch. Let’s be honest, though, the Grammys ducking the actual album of the year in favor for a safe bet can’t be fixed because it’s not a bug: it’s a feature.

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Radio Rant: Ariana Grande feat. Nicki Minaj – Side to Side

Posted on January 8, 2017 by bgibs122

Hello, and welcome to Radio Rants! New year, new Rant, let’s jump on.

A quiet but triumphant thing happened last year: Ariana Grande became an actual, solidified pop star. While true that she’s in her second major album cycle (discounting “The Way,” Yours Truly was basically a Selena Gomez and the Scene album), everything Grande did in the My Everything era had that self-conscious “I do adult pop music now, please do not mention my old kids show” slant that Gomez and Miley had in 2013. She was wobbly at Dangerous Woman‘s release too, for different reasons, but that seemed to work itself out by summer’s end. As a result, Grande ended last year as the newest pop star with an established base. Now, to be clear, part of it is also the field; anyone bigger than Grande seems either too disinterested in the pop idol game (Rihanna, The Weeknd) or has transcended it (Beyonce, Drake), while her competitors who haven’t imploded already (Charli XCX, Iggy Azalea) lack the right songs to personality ratio (Meghan Trainor, The Chainsmokers). She’s pretty much alone in her lane as the industry backed, personable, good but never singular, pop star. Welcome to the new age.

But, nothing feels as convincing of Grande’s newly minted stardom as “Side To Side,” which consists of exactly one entendre tucked inside a nothingburger of a song. If this is Grande’s biggest single off of Dangerous Woman (it’s already her highest charting), and not the a-okay title track or the fantastic “Into You,” then she’s clearly hit the point of pop entrenchment where she’s rewarded more for showing up than bringing her best material. I’ll say this for “Side To Side:” it’s the most unhurried she’s ever sounded on record, which is good for Grande’s long-term career prospects, but doesn’t add much to a song that’s already low energy. It comfortably sounds like a third single, which is to say, kind of conservative. Regardless of quality, the third single is the one that’s just kind of there. It’s not as attention grabbing as the lead single, nor designed for maximum airplay like the second one, but doesn’t have that “why the fuck not?” edge that comes with batting clean-up (Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream and T.Swift’s 1989 exemplify this order).

And musically, “Side to Side” is the epitome of “just kinda there.” It has that incorrigible reggae/tropical bounce to it that pop ran into the ground a year ago, and that just sounds bizarre next to single degree temperatures outside. The heavy bassline in the verses adds a little texture, but it’s not enough to give the song any kind of life beyond Max Martin-led pop song #1138. What’s weird about “Side to Side” is how the pre-chorus and chorus both hint at this release that never comes; the pre-chorus (“These friends keep talkin’ way too much”) raises the drama, and the first two lines of the chorus (“I’ve been here all night/I’ve been here all day”) hint at a climax, but when it comes to the actual delivery of “You’ve got me walking side to side,” the song shoots a blank. While it splashes around in the same vaguely tropical waters as “Cheap Thrills” and others, “Side to Side” comes up dry.

But I’ve jerked around as long as I can, it’s time to get to the thrust of what people talk about when it comes to “Side to Side:” did you know that this song is about getting dick? In fact–ahem, I don’t know if you know this yet–but it’s about getting dicked so hard you can’t walk straight the next day. Scandalous. It’s compulsive to hint that you know this whenever “Side to Side” comes up; even yesterday, I heard the song on the radio, and the DJ followed it up with “That was Ariana Grande’s ‘Side to Side,’ I’ll let you figure out what it’s about” like the meaning is some Dan Brown Illuminati shit to be decoded, and not immediately where your mind goes after hearing “I’ve been here all night/I’ve been here all day/And boy, you got me walking side to side” for the first time.

Two things with this. First of all, y’all, this is not a secret. The only reason the “You Won’t Believe What ‘Side to Side’ is Actually About” narrative exists is because Grande and her team framed the song that way. Grande copped to the meaning as soon as the song started getting promotional push before playing coy about it on twitter, at which point Buzzfeed ran a piece on Pop Twitter’s wild overreaction, and we all agreed to just go with it. No one who took more than a glance at this song or its video thought it was actually about bicycles (speaking of the workout video: Kanye did it first, Best Coast did it better). Second of all, I don’t know how much sex Ariana Grande does or doesn’t have, but I do know that “Love Me Harder,” a song of hers that’s just barely not about rough sex, already exists, so the sexual nature of “Side to Side” barely registers. The shock behind “dick bicycle” exists just so this song can sell.

Otherwise, there’s not much to “Side to Side.” Grande sounds fine, the beat’s unremarkable, and Nicki does one of those solid pop verses that I feel like we take for granted, but I also don’t have much to say about (aside from “Rappers in they feelings cuz they feelin’ me” getting a lot funnier now that she’s broken up with Meek Mill). I want to say that I’m surprised this has been Grande’s big hit off Dangerous Woman, but I get how it’s ridden the charts so long. It’s so slight that you don’t notice it chafes.

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