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But taken to its extreme, it can walk an untenable line, rejecting anything so corny as sincere engagement with the world in favor of the proudly frivolous. There’s a lot of merit to the latter camp's motives: it's important that street rap and party music receive the same critical focus as more supposedly "serious" works. Maybe it’s Twitter’s tendency to hyperbolize, but it often feels like rap fandoms have separated towards two extremes in recent years: stubborn classicism versus aggressive traptimism. I think it’s as simple as earnestness, a trait that’s become embarrassingly quaint in contemporary rap. Attempts at synopsis often point out the cognitive dissonance between subject and sound-DDS’s spun-silk beat almost approaches preciousness, a weird juxtaposition against Dej’s free-associative threats to those who mess with her "fomily"-but that’s what you say to sound smart, not why you fold a song into your life. Effectively detached from the dominant trends of the year, there’s something ineffable about the song’s appeal. There was no more effective A&R in 2014, no better diviner of "It" the abiding power of his co-sign made record deals seem as foregone as cassette tapes.Įver since a casual shout-out on Drake’s Instagram sent her career skyward, I’ve struggled to pinpoint exactly what Dej Loaf’s "It" factor entails, though the Detroit MC’s "Try Me" has become a part of my world. Still, Drake’s presence was felt, even as he hung back. But why would you? If anything, the dearth of great releases from rap’s heavy hitters leveled the playing field for newcomers, creating a space where the year’s most memorable songs bubbled up from the underground. Out with it: did rap suck in 2014? If you’re judging solely by major label retail albums, then yeah, kind of. There's nothing like hearing that freedom in her voice. With "Transgender Dysphoria Blues", she's finally screaming what she's been hinting at for years like she doesn't care who hears it.
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Over her career, she's slowly turned the lens in on herself, examining the crevices she used to try to ignore. Grace sang about her friends and family with poignancy and compassion then. "You want them to see you like they see any other girl/ They just see a faggot/ They hold their breath not to catch the sick."īehind her, Against Me! slams down the sort of cowpunk rhythm that crackled across the band's first album, Reinventing Axl Rose, more than 10 years ago. "Shoulders too broad for a girl." Addressing herself or someone like her in the second person, she goes down the roster of gender crimes: "You've got no cunt in your strut/ You've got no ass to shake," she sings in what must be the year's most biting couplet. "Your tells are so obvious," she shouts on the title track to Transgender Dysphoria Blues.
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Pink belongs to the first generation of musicians in a while whose work barely exists as physical artifacts can a song that can't be discovered on a battered old record preserve a legacy any more than another selfie in the cloud? -Douglas Wolkįrom her first words on her first album since she told the world she was a woman, Laura Jane Grace sings like she's unbottling years and years of stress. The key line might be one that switches from the first verse to the second, "when I was only 45." You can think of that 45 as middle age, but it might be more fruitful to think of it as the speed of a seven-inch single. But it's also surprisingly rich in subtext: this is a song about eradicating oneself from digital as well as corporeal memory, and Pink's lyrics keep slipping into the pervasive language of marketing. Ariel Pink's got a reputation for sonic anachronism, but it's still kind of wonderful that his most affecting song to date is aHoward Jones-style early-'80s new wave ballad whose lyric includes the terms "iCloud", "selfie" and "Find My iPhone." Sung from the perspective of a father who's telling his children that he has no physical images of his existence to leave them, it has a cute conceit and a melody that swoops and dives like a Polaroid caught in an updraft.