ON REPEAT: Implaccable, KNOWER, Olivia Rodrigo, Trit95, Modjo

I just tripped and fell into his bed.

In case you missed these, I helped book some of these acts on The Best Show recently and the performances are up on YouTube in full. I’m very happy how these performances turned out (and how different they are). Props to engineer Andrew Gleason and director Wes Knapp for making these look and sound so cool:

Now onto some newish music picks. Here’s a link to a playlist where I keep all of this stuff.

KNOWER “The Abyss”

What if Kero Kero Bonito went to Berklee? That’s kinda how I view Knower (the duo of Genevieve Artadi & Louis Cole), a group I’m not terribly familiar with. However I am familiar with one of their many collaborators, MonoNeon (the most colorful guy in the video), for his perfectly-named song, “I'm a Raggedy Bitch, But My Heart Is Amazing.” This video is really fun as Genevieve sings in a Guitar Center shirt, while the others rock (funk?) out in what looks like a hallway.

Olivia Rodrigo “bad idea right?”

I have a teenage niece who I trade mixes with. It started a few years ago, when she showed me an Aldous Harding video. I asked, “You like this?” To my knowledge, she liked generic teenage white girl stuff, whatever that is, but this was weird and interesting and I was surprised a 13-year-old was showing it to me. In my family, I am youngest and the black sheep. My more peculiar tastes are not shared by anyone—so to find out a fellow cool person might be emerging from the bloodline was revelatory.

I tested the waters with a few songs that I thought she might be into, some I was hoping would stick. Maybe she’ll dig Screaming Females, and then I can show her the music video we made! Maybe she’ll discover a good weirdo role model, like Karen O. Maybe she’ll think that I…am…cool?

In my few remaining years of being a hip young person, I am doing what I can to show her spongey teen brain some “cool stuff” so that I’ll have some well-informed youngster to vampirically seek out “cool stuff” from when I’m inevitably out of touch—maybe it’s happened already! It’s a cultural literacy exchange. I show her some millennial deep-cut and she plugs me into something a cool gen-z girl likes. She has good taste overall and it’s an insight I don’t get elsewhere and I cherish it.

As for music she’s into that she’ll pass along back to me, it’s hit or miss, often with some interesting surprises. But as for the stuff that comes naturally to her age bracket, I generally approve of Olivia Rodrigo. I was unfamiliar with Olivia’s early work on um, High School Musical The Musical The Series The Soundtrack. I think she’s “cool” as opposed to T****r S***t or some other acts she might get compared to. Maybe that’s manufactured, but idc.

I’ll also point out that I HATED this sketch that references her song “Driver’s License” (which, for the record, is not a song for me) by having a bunch of ‘dudes’ talking about it in a bar. Like, shut the fuck up—what’s the point of this?

Look, I’m an adult man. I have my limits to how much stuff like this I can stomach. But, I also think you should like what you like—but here I am providing caveats for recommending this song, which I have listened to every day for a month or so (by choice). This might be all over the radio right now, I do not know. But I do know this is so catchy, has killer Cars-like guitars, and the tongue-in-cheek tone of Le Tigre. This song was supposedly made as a joke, but it stuck. I hope she makes more joke music because it’s catchy and interesting.

Trit95 “Chain of Events”

It’s like you put The Cure and Cyndi Lauper in the wash and it came out all warped with the colors bleeding into each other.

Implaccable - “D Bla m'a accueilli à PSO (feat. Black D)”

This song samples “Lady” by the other Y2K french house duo, Modjo, aka the perfect “oh that song!” That song samples this Chic song, “Soup For One”!

I previously featured Implaccable’s “2.6M” on my best-of list last year, and a lot of that has to do with this flipped Mac Demarco sample (which is a sample of a Shigeo Sekito’s “The Word 2” itself.)

THE GOLD STANDARD

Modjo “Lady”

Oh that song!