What song did you play the most in 2022?

How deep does my anti-disco antipathy go?

It was brought to my attention that, one week after the release of my broadside in opposition to disco and techno, Carly Rae Jepsen released a single entitled “Shy Boy,” and what do you know—it’s a disco record, with maybe a sprinkle of “Ain’t Nothin Goin On but the Rent.” The concept is cute (he might be shy but he rocks her world) but musically, I have trouble remembering it after it flows past my window. It reminded me, after last week’s polemic, that I wanted to suggest my arguments are not glib trend-chasing but reflect observations of patterns within my listening at its most intuitive and pre-examined.

I can see how after reading my post earlier this week, one might be tempted to accuse me of being a contrarian or not genuinely believing the words that I type. Doing it for the clicks. But here at ddrake dot substack, written in the rare free time after a day job I actually enjoy, I am nothing if not 100% genuine. I am not secretly listening to tons of disco or techno. Admittedly, a song will move me—on occasion—as an exception which proves the rule, typically by subverting in some way my expectations of the genre. Yet for the most part, my argument about the overall trend regarding disco and techno is not mere superficial trend reportage, but is supported by my own, personal, subjective experiences of what music feels especially effective in 2023.

However. This personal, subjective journey through music, though no doubt idiosyncratic and reflective of my own arbitrary whims and tastes, is nonetheless also in some symbiotic relationship with wider shifts of culture of which I am merely a sensitive cultural thermometer, one of many. This is evident in both a self-reported sense—I have lists of favorite songs from the last several years which proclaim this antipathy. But a cool thing about the way tech companies record our every keystroke is that there’s an Apple Music playlist that also shows what songs I listened to most in a given year—not, I think, the Truth of my taste, but A truth of the ways in which I shifted my attention in moments of least impulse control.

Let’s look, most recently, at the year 2022. At the top of the list, my most played song on Apple Music: Sky Ferreira’s panned single “Don’t Forget.” Here we are fully in Top Gun soundtrack territory. ‘80s pop, replete with gated drums and synthesizers. I don’t want to pick on the writer of the aforementioned Pitchfork review, but suffice to say I disagree with everything said in the blurb. I’m particularly mystified by the comparison to My Bloody Valentine’s drums, when the song sounds more influenced by Miami Vice. The narrator’s affect in the song is resentful, spiteful even—not a particularly “disco” tonal choice, at least with this level of venom. Spite in disco tends to leaven the acid with wittiness or humor. But here, the poetic charge of the lyrics—“tears of fire in the sky, makes me feel good to be alive”—are vivid, intended to glow like gasoline poured on someone’s yard—to lend the words poetic emphasis. These are threats, righteous anger towards someone who was “preying on my insecurities.” Incredible song of revenge which refuses to mediate itself through cleverness or irony—it’s just direct. It feels, tonally, like a post-MeToo record, loath as I am to write such a year-end-blurb cliche. But it does feel, in spite of how easily one can locate its creative inspirations in the mid-’80s, like it matches the emotion of the present, rather than performing an exercise of history.

Even if it were a retro exercise, it would still stand apart as a fairly singular piece of popular culture in 2023. With everyone else pursuing disco ad infinitum, Sky was one of the few who carved out a novel lane for herself. I wish she would keep releasing! Yet she is not the sole exemplar of a shift in the aesthetic ether:

Dreamcastmoe’s “Cloudy Weather, Wear Boots” (#4 most-listened record of 2022) might most legibly be described as “techno,” but its repeating synthesized bass motif and snare-forward drum machine-beat stagger—there’s no four-on-the-floor bounce to be found. The 1975’s “Looking For Somebody To Love” (#10, 2022) is a subversive record which transforms mid'-’80s pop-rock cliches of teenage love into an indictment of American culture through the lens of a school shooter; Nicola Cruz’s “Surface Tension” (#11) would again likely be described as techno, but its focused on a foregrounded, clearly-engineered funk break is more reminiscent of late’-70s bands like the Jimmy Castor Bunch, a foundational part of early hip-hop’s aesthetic. Windsurf’s 2009 song “Weird Energy” (#14) was an instrumental retro exercise from the late blog era inspired by the textures of the mid-’80s, which recently resurfaced on my personal mood board. And Effy’s “Not Yours,” (#41) a percussive, drum machine-driven klaxon alarm of a record not unlike more aggressive forms of industrial, is an unsettling canvas for gestures of immanent danger, a vocal sample making its sharply contemporary, relevant subtext crystal-clear.

There are other trends in my listening not even addressed here which nonethless show an overall retreated from certain staid aesthetic maneuvers—the arrival of Milwaukee’s “low end music”-influenced rap scene, the rise of cruise music via DJ YK Beats, et al. What do these seemingly disparate songs tell me about the rising tides of creativity in popular dance music? How can such seemingly unrelated artists and styles constitute a ‘trend,’ particularly when each has clear antecedents in the past? What makes these sounds any more relevant than “Ain’t Nothin Goin On But the Rent”? Do you want a shy boy? Some of these questions will be indirectly addressed in my next post…