Beach House, Teen Dream

Okay so the actual cover is a bunch of zebras, which makes sense since the first track is called “Zebra.” But given the album’s title and my decision to use it as a lens through which to interpret the songs, I wish the cover looked more like this:

(This is a screen shot from The Virgin Suicides, because Tripp is maybe my favorite depiction of a Teen Dream ever.)

(Granted I think “Teen Dream” is a phrase that has multiple meanings, but can anyone argue that the best one is not that which refers to The Golden Boy? Let us proceed:)

There are so many things to think about when considering adolescence, but my favorite is the relationship between real life and fantasy life, and my favorite object specific to this relationship is the stereotypical Teen Dream. I LOVE THE TEEN DREAM. There will never be a time in my life, I imagine, when I am not outrageously attracted to The Golden Boy. Our conceptions and beliefs about what the Teen Dream is and should be have evolved, but the core principles remain, the most important being that he is the most terrifying and most comforting thing your 15 year old self has ever seen. He is sex and safety at the same time, and his seemingly slow motion walks down the hallways are your personal pornography. You know it’s silly, you know you’re idealizing, but you cannot stop, because he makes it all seem so easy – he makes your LIFE seem like it would be so easy, if only he’d do something as painfully epic as hold your hand.

Do I think this way now? No, obviously not, and that is why I love that I used to. Such sentiments and fantasies are fleeting, unique and attributive to the developmental phase in which more simultaneous biological, cognitive, and social changes occur than at any other stage of life. The steadfast presence of the Teen Dream is a product of the universality of our teenage emotions – we are all confused, but the Teen Dream is always there, a buoy of hard abs to grab onto. Recent pop-psych criticisms of Taylor Swift have lambasted her for her “romantic fantasy” lyrics, as though the naivete of her expectations both invalidates them and makes her an anti-feminist icon. But my god, if Taylor Swift isn’t the most touching, perfect example of our most gloriously base adolescent wishes, I don’t know who is. I am 99% certain her audience holds such a wide range of ages because of this – you feel it at 15 and remember feeling it for the rest of your life. Maybe you didn’t sit there, specifically, on the bleachers, staring longingly at the cheer section not only because you hated that they got what they wanted but because some horrible, shallow part of you wanted to BE them, just to see what it would be like – but you did spend time wishing for SOMETHING that you didn’t quite understand, something that made you feel desperate. You just had to, right? And then most of it went away, but not all of it.

I think I have more of that “not all of it” than most, because I feel unnaturally attached to this phase of life. Perhaps I feel like I did not live it out the way I wanted (though I think I did a pretty good job), or perhaps I just love the unique, confusing complexity of it. Whatever it is, I am obsessed, and so I love this album for both its absolutely astonishing display of pure sonic beauty and its representation of the interplay between fantasy and reality with respect to the Teen Dream.

Teen Dream is a deep haze of longing and the space that uncertainty creates around the person feeling it. This space plays out in the background of every song, lifting notes up to float on their own and creating a blurry landscape for seemingly simple melodies to unfurl onto. And unfurl they do, ever so slowly – I find myself unable to tell if the pace represents to me an insecurity of feeling or the exact opposite: a knowledge so deeply held that it can only be delivered in the most deliberate of fashions, slow and steady. Such is the 15 year old staring wistfully at the golden boy, that conflict of feeling, yes? There is a near-literal dreamlike quality to this album, but there is also the idea that it represents either a Teen Dream himself or someone’s interpretation of and feelings toward him. When listened to from this perspective the whole thing has the effect of making me want to cry, because it does what the mind alone cannot do: prove, in the purest, most painful of ways, that the Teen Dream is both the most perfect and most tragic of naive fantasies. In the end he is a construct, your projection of simple ideals and desire. When your fantasy is held up to the light of reality, oh is it ever transparent! And this is as it should be, for the Teen Dream, in the end, is merely a placeholder, the idea before the real thing. I hear this in every second of Teen Dream, the maturity that accompanies such a realization, and how, though you are moving away from the safety of objects, the knowledge that you are not so confused and eager as to need them anymore brings a new and deeper kind of comfort. And yet parts of the initial dream remain, floating – just as these songs do – in the ether of your imagination.

An astonishing, unforgettable album that sets up 2010 to be a most remarkable year. Hold tight, for Interpol is coming!!

25. David Guetta feat. Novel – Missing You
I discovered Novel this year and I think he’s the best in his field. What that field is called exactly, I am not sure – contemporary soul? I’d link him to Trey Songz and the like, but he is so vastly superior in both talent and intelligence that it seems silly to make comparisons. He has one of those ridiculously strong voices that makes controlling a melody as he does seem effortless. On “Missing You,” and perhaps more clearly on his unforgettable cover of Kid Cudi’s “Sky Might Fall,” I get the sense that he understands the technicalities behind crafting a memorable track as much as he feels the emotional components necessary to making it a personal triumph for both creator and listener. This is a piece of the What It Is About Justin Timberlake puzzle, the main reason why I think he is the greatest. True pop artists believe in manipulation – of both sound and emotion – as much as they believe in purity. They are not mutually exclusive, a pure sound can come from the twisting of something organic, and this is what I think Novel does perfectly. His voice is the most natural of gifts, but on a track like “Missing You,” he runs it through varying forms of anger, arrogance, and detachment to produce a pop song that creates as much technical texture as it does emotional depth: emotions are not just expressed through the music, they are seemingly purposely chosen to create rhythm and texture.

24. Thom Yorke – Hearing Damage
I didn’t like the New Moon soundtrack, which this song was written for. I think it’s dumb and completely missing the point of your film to contract all of these fantastic artists into composing songs that, although dreary, certainly display a level of emotionality entirely absent from your accompanying narrative. Instead of adding legitimacy to the project, it takes it away, because using songs like this presupposes a kind of organic quality that is the ANTITHESIS of the entire Twilight saga.

“Hearing Damage” is so good, my god this man cannot make something that is not entirely perfect. It is defined by its urgency and anxiety, heard in the skittery rhythm that darts across the bassline, and the remarkably plaintive confession that is the refrain: you can do no wrong in my eyes. This song is so nervous, so romantic – Bravo, Yorke.

23. Monsters of Folk – Whole Lotta Losin’
NGHHHHHHHH – it builds and builds and builds and builds and builds and ARE YOU JUMPING ON YOUR BED BY THE TIME IT’S DONE OR NOT?!?!?!?!? I am. That or burying my head in my pillow to keep from screaming with extreme joy. Look at me, I’m leaning out apartment windows singing ‘I still miss someone.’

22. Deadmau5 – Ghosts N Stuff
There is something so irresistible about the melding of badass club worthy techno with that kind of really naked emotionality present in the hook. The drawn out “Iiiiiiii” every time it comes around is killer – if you’re lying down while listening your back might arch. Also, when some of the instrumentation drops out towards the end and it’s just him wailing (2:08) – LORD HAVE MERCY ON MY HEART, there is nothing I could want but that.

21. Fabolous feat. Keri Hilson – Everything, Everyday, Everywhere
aldkjglaskg staccato rhythms and cadences!!! There’s something about them that make whoever’s rapping sound infinitely more amused and self-aware than they otherwise would. Fabolous is smart and creative anyway, but with a fluttery beat like this and the help of the incomparably self-assured and smooth-voiced Keri Hilson, this becomes the kind of rap song that is as full of lightness and beauty as it is packed with swagger. An unbeatable combination – the softening of the genre at the hands of collaborations like this (and the entire catalogues of artists like Drake and Cudi) is making the most coherent argument I’ve heard for rap being the superior form of pop.

20. Chiddy Bang – Kids
I don’t think it’s possible to stuff more pure FUN into a song than the amount Chiddy Bang injected into this three minute piece of candy. Tell mama I’m sorry / this life is a party / I’m never growing up. An unrelenting bright pink and blue carnival ride (and the cheap country fair kind – this isn’t some smooth overproduced headtrip) that has exactly what it says it has: the kind of flow to make a bitch do a cartwheel.

19. La Roux – I’m Not Your Toy (DatA Remix)
No artist this year excited me more in terms of releasing a steady stream of fiercely focused bursts of pure pop. Christ, LISTEN to this. It’s a remix, but it does what a remix should do – tease out the genius parts of the original and supplement it with things that make it even better, call even more attention to its wonder. It twists, it sparkles, it creates a vortex of synths for itself to fall into and expand within.

18. Ellie Goulding – Starry Eyed (Jakwob Remix)
Ellie Goulding is one of my favorite discoveries of 2009 – she is maybe the best artist to emerge from the year’s trend of British female electro-pop singers (or is that La Roux? Hmmm…). There is a melancholy whimsy to her delivery that makes her take on the genre entirely unique. Her voice has an ethereal quality that is wonderfully juxtaposed with the more electronic elements of her music – a fairy in industrialized wonderland. Future epic (and epically famous) artist, I’m calling it.

17. The Temper Trap – Fader
!!!!!!!!!!!!!! So standardly fantastic it almost hurts. This kind of song is timeless – can you imagine ever feeling unhappy to hear it? It sounds completely contemporary and yet entirely independent of this era’s trends. Euphoria. Pop wins, again.

16. 50 Cent – Baby By Me (Remix feat. Ne-Yo)
THIS SONG HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH 50 CENT AND EVERYTHING TO DO WITH THE HOOK BY NE-YO, HOLY MOTHER OF EVERYTHING THAT HAS EVER BEEN AND EVER WILL BE GORGEOUS, DO NOT MISS THIS SONG. Why does Ne-Yo not make more stuff that sounds like this? I swear all I’ve ever heard by him are boring ballads. Though that could be my bias against R&B speaking.

15. Wild Light – California On My Mind
This is like Frightened Rabbit with brighter colors. It’s so alive.

14. Kid Cudi – CuDi Zone
I talked about Cudi a lot last spring, to the point where I expected his debut album to be very high on my Top Albums Of The Year list. It’s not anywhere close to that, but I ain’t mad, just kind of confused, because he kept saying he was going to do something totally different and then he just made an album that sounds relatively similar to a lot of other stuff going on in his field lately. It also sounds unsure of itself, and is lacking in energy – sometimes he mistakes lethargy for steadiness.

But this. OH THIS SONG. This is the acted on potential I heard the first time I ever heard him. It is a love letter to the most abstract and deeply felt of emotions, the kind that reduces you to a lyric like this: In my mind, it sounds like ooooooooooooh. It soars and keens, an oceanographer could study it as if it were a pattern of waves. This song is an accompaniment to Cudi’s early message: It’s okay to like spending time by yourself and turn your confusion and insecurity into rap. The genre isn’t limited to posturing, it’s also a perfect form of the medium of music with which to shape your fears and failures. Cudi seemed to understand this, but it was pushed to the backburner in favor of the vaguer sentiments that populate the rest of the album. Oh well, we have Drake.

13. Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Hysteric
This is my favorite song on one of my favorite albums, and it feels to me like a near direct lifting of the unlocking that occurs in the moment that you realize love is TOTALLY a real thing that doesn’t just happen to other people. How it manages to sound both innocent and wise is beyond me. This is one of the most romantic, beautiful songs I’ve ever heard. A shimmering love letter to love itself.

12. Ke$ha – Tik Tok
I listen to this song at least once a day, and sometimes I put it on repeat for like 25 times. IT. DOES. NOT. GET. OLD. It is the pioneer of a new, awesomely tacky genre of pop: minimalist trash (term is my own, I don’t know what other people are calling it). The spareness of her songs makes it impossible to ignore both how much fun she’s having and how debauched that fun probably is. But Ke$ha should succeed more than her peers because she is smart enough to know that this kind of sound can’t succeed unless the artist laughs while she makes it. Where Uffie sounds insufferably bored, Ke$ha sounds like she’s having a blast, and it turns the song from just a flash in the pan to one of 2009’s most explosively riotous downright JAMS. This is an absolutely fantastic song, I cannot believe there are people who think she is the bane of pop’s existence. A++++

11. Major Lazer – Hold The Line (LehtMoJoe Remix)
This remix makes me feel infinite. It almost feels like it’s happening in slow motion, if only so you can savor every second that much more. How incredibly COOL do you feel while it’s playing?! God damn. It’s actually a mashup of some old 80s song I forget the name of and then this new stuff from Diplo and Switch, two of my favorite DJs (though I actually hate the original of this, it’s too ska). Beware though, the last 30 seconds are just a telephone tone, I apologize, it is awful.

10. MSTRKRFT feat. John Legend – Heartbreaker (Three Fingers Remix)
I have this really complex and detailed AU universe where Dan, Serena, and Nate are the three main and only characters on Gossip Girl and the whole show is a chronicle of their weird and awesome tri-dependent relationship. This is the song that is used for the promo for the second or third season. I like the way this remix draws circles around the song – doesn’t the background sound swirly? It turns John’s “Oh Oh”s into punches and draws out his verses into thick-like-taffy strings of elastic that alternately hold the song back and throttle it forward.

09. The Hood Internet – Cult Logic Forever (Drake Vs. Miike Snow)
The Hood Internet is so god damn sick, how do they even do stuff like this. They take this great Miike Snow song and use it to COMPLETELY revolutionize what was otherwise a totally slow and boring, inexplicably hit song from Drake. Seriously, this is so. genius. The Snow song emphasize’s Drake’s talent for melodic restraint – his cadence is musical and yet feels casual in the way usually only spoken word can. He is an unrivaled storyteller and, I’ve come to believe, the most naturally talented new rapper this year (and last year, whatever, timelines are shaky). Anyway with “Cult Logic” as the background, as I said, his cadence is sped up and becomes the driving force of the track instead of the thing holding it back (the original “Forever” is so unbearably slow, ugh it’s awful). And Kanye’s best line: I used to want this thing forever but y’all can have it back sounds here as though it is THROWN at the listener, sometimes I feel like I should pull back for fear of getting hit with it. Brilliant.

08. Say Hi – Maurine
I like this song because of its gentle earnestness and the simple, yearning beauty of its chorus. I like how his voice cracks over and over, and I like how the floaty quality of it is grounded by the steady guitar in the background. I like that it sounds sweet. I especially like this lyric: I hope it goes well and I hope you dance good, I hope you got presents that make you pretty happy, and I hope you grow old and I hope that you find…somebody nice, which feels infinitely more poignant when he’s singing it.

07. Freelance Whales – Generator ^ First Floor
The best opening track of the year. So pure, so optimistic, this song is the sonic equivalent of one or all of these things:
1) The brief yet endless lean in before a first kiss, that strange brew of certainty and potential, conclusion and introduction
2) A sunrise seen across a vast field, golds and greens that seep into and crawl across it.
3) The most perfect moment of your life, which could be 1 or 2 itself. Moments simple yet dramatic, sprawling yet perfect. Everything that is the simplest and truest form of the word “good.”

Seriously: perfect.

6. The-Dream – Love Vs. Money (Pts. 1 & 2)
UM. Most of what I have to say about The-Dream I want to say in reference to his entire album, but this is a symphony. This is the most stunning piece of R&B I’ve ever heard. It is ASTOUNDING. It’s in the cosmos, twisting constellations into the DNA that form its backbone and mining the infinite space that defines vast universes: it is its own galaxy. My god, listening to this is akin to floating in the most colorful, texturally complex sonic landscape that is so logic-defyingly awesome that I CANNOT EVEN FATHOM IT, only know that it must exist because how else could this song be here. WHAT. THE. EVERLIVING. FUCK. A new word must be invented to convey to you how genius I think this is.

The other thing I want to say about it is in regards to a comparison of its tone and message to that of Justin’s “What Goes Around…/…Comes Around,” another two part symphony. They are similarly brilliant and epic, but where one trades on anger and resentment (”What Goes Around”), the other employs resignation and acceptance to make its point. “Love Vs. Money” is about how the protagonist allowed his financial goals to overshadow his relationship, and his girlfriend left him for another man because of it. The song concedes that the other man is the better man in this situation, and deserves the girl because he cares more about her than he does money. Find another R&B opus that reveals such vulnerability and willingness to concede to the competition. I don’t think it exists. Not only is this song sonically superior to basically anything else, its MESSAGE is so admirable and odd that I find myself in awe of The-Dream in ways I never thought I would be with an R&B artist (it is my least favorite genre after all). The anger driving “What Goes Around” makes it suspenseful – that song is genius because you’re not sure how far he’s going to take it. “Love Vs. Money” establishes its meaning in the opening minute, ensuring that for the entire duration you will understand that you are listening to a man who knows he is in the wrong. Always startling, never less than entirely gripping.

05. Zero 7 – Swing
When I first posted this song (on another blog) all I did was spell “Romantic” backwards as an explanation, and I still feel like that epitomizes it perfectly. C I T N A M O R

04. Mike Jones – Next To You
HOW do I explain how much I love this song. I think all I can really do is quote the best, most romantic lyric of the year for me (oh god, haha): that’s why I’m outside her house at 7:45 / that’s why I take pride when I slide up in her thighs

GUYS, HE WAITS OUTSIDE HER HOUSE FOR A DATE ON TIME AND USES REALLY FANTASTIC EUPHEMISMS FOR SEX THAT MAKE ME THINK OF THE INTIMACY INHERENT IN EASE AND COMFORT. I melt over this song, it is 3 minutes and 42 seconds of joyful romance, I mean christ, the hook’s lyric is cause I gotta be next to you. WHAT SENTIMENT IS MORE WONDERFUL, MORE GLORIOUSLY SIMPLE, THAN THAT. Rap songs about girlfriends are where it’s at, in part because the typical misogyny of the genre have trained me not to expect them.

<3 <3 <3, hearts in my eyes for this song.

03. Florence + The Machine – Howl
I love this song in such a way that my feelings on it feel oddly private, perhaps because I’ve tied it to my ideas about Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows and I never talk about how much I love that series with other people.

02. Henok Achido feat. Sophia Somajo – Pusher
This is my most played song ever, I think. You know that Photoshop filter, Gaussian Blur? It’s like blur but more advanced, like if you personified the idea of blurring and it decided to make itself more complex. This song is a Gaussian Blur – filtered through something soft that makes it expand and turn almost into an echo of itself. I am the ultimate high / I am the rush you’ve been waiting for your whole life. Oh indeed.

01. Mike Posner & The Brain Trust feat. Big Sean – Who Knows?
I have loved this song since February and never posted about it and I don’t know why. It’s not like it’s the kind of song that feels private. It does feel personal though, in the sense that this is what I most want from rap and so rarely receive. Perhaps even from this list it is obvious that one of the things I find most exciting in music is the juxtaposition of soft and hard, electronic and organic. Things that seem opposite but work so well together and make each other better. I have always loved rap and found the toughness of it, the self-assuredness and posturing, extremely appealing. Yet I have also always wished desperately that someone would realize that employing vulnerability and anti-social tendencies within a genre almost dependent on self-mythologizing would completely revolutionize the field and pull out of it hidden layers of sonic meaning no one thought were there before. I thought Kid Cudi was going to be the leader of this, instead I am certain now that it is Drake, who has, in an odd way, enough confidence to display his lack of it.

But nothing Drake has ever done even comes close to the perfection of this song, in which Big Sean tells the story of his mediocre middle class life, full of abstract big dreams that ultimately stagnate, even as he asserts that all he and his peers need is a real opportunity. Dreamlike in its instrumentation, “Who Knows” floats behind Big Sean as he explains that “sometimes my mind wanders away from me,” a refrain that anchors his anecdotes of parental disapproval (and this here is so nuanced – he talks about how his mom avoids talking about him to others because he’s not doing anything that makes her proud!) and lack-of-finance-influenced failed romantic exploits. I wish that I could be what I want to / I wish that I would do what I don’t do, he laments, with a cadence so light and irreverent that when I first heard it I thought I was listening to the one who would change the game, because THIS is what the new age should sound like.

Sadly, this track is not even remotely indicative of the rest of Big Sean’s work, which is as mired in rap cliches – materialism, delusions of grandeur, etc. – as the next guy. But for these three minutes, every time I hear them, it seems like the entirety of rap is shifting towards something so honest and vulnerable that none of us can hardly be ready for what is to come, so revolutionary is its intent. Drake, Cudi, Charles Hamilton, Wale, and B.o.B. will do their part, but I wonder if anything they ever make will match this.

(The generalizations about rap that I am making aren’t in reference to the kind of politically-driven/socially conscious music people like Mos Def et. al make – that’s a different field that isn’t really in line with the points I’m making here, I think. But there are people subverting rap tropes already, and there always have been – I know this.)

Jeremih – Imma Star (Everywhere We Are)

Jeremih gets melodies that are too good for him and every time I hear either of these two songs I think “why are YOU the person who got something that sounds so awesome?”  Not that he’s not talented, because he kind of is I guess, but in that amusingly generic R&B dude way where they could all say they were the same person and it would take people a while to figure out that they were joking.  This is why it’s so bothersome that Chris Brown is still pulling good producers – Chris Brown isn’t some one in a million talent with original ideas.  Once the situation got out last spring Trey Songz should have taken over.

Every time I hear “Imma Star (Everywhere You Are)” I get forced into this weird state of conflicting emotions: 1) AH AH AH THIS IS SO AWESOME 2) UGH WHY IS THIS A JEREMIH SONG, it’s perfect for Timberlake.  The hook is so incredible, guys.  It’s SO. INCREDIBLE.  It goes up instead of down when you least expect it, on (caps indicate upswing in pitch) “I thought I told you, I’m a star, you see that ICE?, you see the cars, flashing LIGHTS, everywhere we are, live TONIGHT, like there’s no tomorrow.”  There is nothing more satisfying to me in the sonic realm than going up instead of down is.  Well, maybe glockenspiel.  Actually they’re tied.

But the rest of the song is so stupid, and even though Timberlake usually has dumb lyrics, they’re not THIS dumb, and they’re not so fixated on money and personal glory in such a narcissistic way.  It devalues the melody when it could have been a masterpiece in more talented and experienced hands.  BOOOOO.

“Birthday Sex” is more successful with respect to Jeremih’s talents because it’s the kind of silly song that garners immediate notice, and that was what he needed to stand out from the pack.  But still, the melody on “girl you know I –” is so GORGEOUS, I wish it were part of a less comical song.

Yesterday I was listening to Rihanna’s new album and I was so pissed about it I shouted the same incoherent BUT THIS IS ALL WRONG argument at upwards of six real life non-internet people, which is probably five too many.  But seriously, THIS IS ALL WRONG, which, whatever, do what you want Ri, I will just sit in the corner and cry over the fact that I was WAITING for this album for EIGHTY YEARS, pre-dating my birth, and instead of adhering to the guidelines set forth for you by your robot cyborg alien overlord, someone in your camp (or you yourself) decided it would be totally cool to try to sound like an actual human.  You know what no, let’s save this bit for a later post, because I am still in the rage stage, which promotes incomplete arguments.

But anyway I was sitting around doing spins in my spinny chair feeling sorry for myself because my best friend Rihanna let me down and I have nothing left in this world, when LO, this band that put out a shitty second album decided to give TOTAL MEANING to my worthless existence by releasing this piece of pop magic into the wild.  There is this thing where I imagine it’s really hard if you’re a band to figure out how to evolve while staying true to your original sound.  That sentence just before this one is the poorly worded quasi-definition of El Sophomoro Slumpo.  GUESS WHO HAD THAT: COLD WAR KIDS.  So, so badly.  There was one good song on Loyalty To Loyalty, and coincidentally enough it was titled “I’ve Seen Enough.”  Oh indeed.  WAIT THOUGH, BUT THIS IS SO GOOD, THIS NEW ONE.  Can you imagine if their second album had opened with this?  It’s everything that you labeled as potential in “Hospital Beds” but was never acted upon until now.  Seriously man, the flutter-light cadence of the “drop the needle” line is all I need in life, and it’s that type of buoyancy that floats this song on a river of SUCK IT RIHANNA, I AM CURED.

Jenny Owen Youngs – Led To The Sea

Eisley – Ambulance

Conversely, an oddity of lightness falls from the Ellie Goulding camp.  It is a welcome one!  Listening to this makes me think I’ve outgrown the type of cutesy lyrics that go with this whipped cloud of a melody, because I giggled at them instead of sighed.  But I guess even so, Ellie Goulding is going to be one of those artists who can’t make something I dislike (or, I’m crossing my fingers about that).  Instead of trite and twee, thanks to the unique combination of humor and plaintiveness in Ellie’s voice, the story of this song seems matter of fact in its confession.  I’ve found myself coming over to my computer when I’m supposed to be off reading just so I can listen to it again.

Ellie Goulding – Not Following You