seekingferret | Entries tagged with music

This Jane Wickline sketch from a few months ago is my favorite SNL sketch since Mirror Workout, I keep coming back to it. The joke is just to the left of where you expect it in a way I find kind of unexpectedly moving? Wickline's Carpenter sings "Help me" with a sincere desperation; this is not about queerbaiting as some sort of calculated move to get more downloads or even more attention, it's about how a pop star's sense of self gets tangled up in the way other people think about them. Compare to how Taylor Swift is seen not merely as a talented musician, but as someone who has taken control of her own narrative. "It's lonely", Wickline's Carpenter sings in between desperate rationalizations about why her performances are not being dissected in the way she wants them to be. Which seems like it should just be a marketing concern, why is our promotional campaign not working as intended? But Carpenter and Carpenter's marketing campaign are one and the same, the marketing campaign is scribed on Carpenter's body and on her self in a way that Wickline surgically hones in on. "Why can't you see me for who I really easily could be in secret" is such a knotty, thorny mess of an identity crisis that it feels sneakily profound. And yet the sketch is also funny, as it needs to be work in its context. "I leave a trail of bread crumbs and then I leave a trail of loaves of bread" is a terrific one liner, one of several inspired pieces of language that anchor the sketch.

I haven't posted much, I've been busy. I live in Boston now!

Happy Purim! Last night I went to a party at a Jewish bar in Somerville called Lehrhaus, they had Purim themed cocktails and I ate a samosa hamantaschen, which definitely makes this the most hipster Purim I've ever had. But Frank London's Klezmer Brass All-Stars played and even though I didn't know anyone at the party, it was so much fun to dance to their music in a crowd of enthusiastic Jews who refused to stop singing "Mishenichnas Adar" even after the band stopped. FLKBA is such a great band, they play fusion that, er, fuses so relentlessly that it almost feels like parody, but the common denominator is playfulness and fun and joy. I treasure that joy.

Anyway, Purimgifts went live! I didn't sign up this year because life is chaos but it's still pretty exciting.

Frank London, of Klezmatics fame, is one of my favorite musicians. In the mid-2000s, he had a band called Frank London's Klezmer Brass All-Stars and their album "Carnival Conspiracy" is still one of my favorite albums of all time. But they haven't released any music in over a decade. So imagine my surprise to get an email saying a new album is coming out in a few weeks!

https://borschtbeat.bandcamp.com/album/chronika

I'm not clear on the chronology, but it kind of seems like maybe this is 15 year old music finally being released? The notes on the bandcamp page say Recorded 2008, Mixed 2023. There's also an unusual credit for guitar legend Yossi Piamenta, who passed away in 2015, suggesting an earlier recording time. I dunno, even if it's just repackaging outtakes from a past album, more FLKBA is a good thing in my book!

9 Languages by Karolina Cicha

I bought this album like a decade ago, and I definitely listened to it a few times back when I bought it, but for some reason I pulled it out and have been listening to it pretty constantly for the past month and it is so fucking great. The title is descriptive: The thirteen songs on the album are in 9 languages of Eastern Europe: Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Russian, Romani, Belarusian, Yiddish, Polish and Tatarian. Cicha and her bandmates are extraordinarily versatile multi-instrumentalists, the songs have consistently interesting and gripping arrangement and production that pull in all the weird sounds into a consistent and delightfully surprising whole, and Cicha's voice is astoundingly expressive even in spite of the distance created by the languages I don't speak.

Watch on YouTube

The Washington Street Sessions by Jacob's Ladder

Profoundly grateful to the Almighty Algorithm for introducing me to Jacob's Ladder (formerly Kol Kahol) on youtube. They play fantastic Jewgrass, I love it so much. Apparently they have a full length album coming out soon. Can't wait to hear it.

Watch on YouTube

From the Depths by Aryeh Kunstler

Discovered while searching for A Serious Man vidsongs, the music has Blue Fringe-y vibes, but with an earnestness that I always found a little lacking in Blue Fringe. Even a goofy, clearly Blue Fringe-y joke song about breaking up with your chavrusa has a little of that heartbreaking earnestness. (And also is probably about 50X as queer as he intended it to be?)

Watch on YouTube

There were two new versions of Adam Sandler's Hanukkah Song this year, one by pop band Haim and one by Israeli rappers Nissim Black and Kosha Dillz.

Sandler we love you pic.twitter.com/QGBAwqOZld
— HAIM (@HAIMtheband) December 3, 2021

Watch on YouTube

As a reminder, my critique of Sandler's song from a couple years ago:

Certainly, it's not melodically very good, but that's sort of the point and hardly a point of critique. It's a bit of more or less off-the-cuff shtick, though like most Sandler jokes it's been pushed too far over the years. More positively, I appreciate part of the song's sentiment. It is true that it can be lonely being a Jew in a Christian country, particularly at moments when Christian activity is at a peak. It is also true that for this reason and others, Jews take comfort in the success and prominence of other Jews. I value "the Hanukah Song" for taking a step back to appreciate that success and appreciate its context: that there are a number of Jews in Hollywood, but they are still outliers and we as a nation are still outliers. That in fact, there are so few Jews in Hollywood that one can sing a couple of songs and name them all.

On the other hand, while I think Sandler grasps that subtlety, I don't think much of his audience does. I worry that "The Hanukah Song" reinforces anti-semitic lies about Jews and the media. I don't worry a lot, but I do worry. And more seriously, I worry that "The Hanukah Song" positions Chanukah so strongly in opposition to Christmas- "the only kid in town without a Christmas tree" etc... Chanukah as an observance has very little connection to Christmas as an observance except calendar compatibility. I don't want my Chanukah music to be anti-Christmas music, I want Chanukah music that is about the Jewish significance of Chanukah.

My subtler complaint about about the song is that it conflates Judaism and observance in subtly erroneous ways. Most of the show business Jews Sandler sings about are not in any meaningful sense observant Jews, but Sandler uses observances as synecdochic allusions to tribal affiliation. Rather than just saying that David Lee Roth is Jewish, Sandler says that Roth "lights the menorah". Rather than saying that Jon Bauman and Henry Winkler are Jewish, he says that they "eat together at the Carnegie Deli". I take it as assumed that Sandler isn't actually asserting these things as statements of facts. I don't think he is claiming that David Lee Roth makes a point to light a menorah all eight days of Chanukah. Rather he is asserting that these are things that Jews do, and therefore as Jews, they are things that Roth, Bauman, and Winkler might do.

Of course, the Carnegie Deli is not a kosher deli, but that doesn't bother Sandler because he's not actually talking about Jewish observance, and he's talking about people who don't much care about Jewish observance. "The Hannukah Song" is a song about being Jewish, it's not a song about living Jewish lives.

Okay, that gotten out of the way, it's obvious which one of these two covers I like more, right? I don't have anything against the Haim version saying look, there are more successful Jews in the media in the past few years we can add to the song, so let's celebrate them! It's a lovely sentiment and Haim are great performers. But boy do I love what Nissim Black and Kosha Dillz do with this song.

I want to make a perhaps subtle point, which is that they don't substantially change the theme or message of Sandler's song with their lyrics. And they could have, there are many approaches to what Chanukah means and for observant Jews, celebrating the idea abstract idea of Being a Jew is not usually particularly central to our observance of Chanukah. They could have taken the tack that the Maccabeats frequently do, of emphasizing the significance of the miracles performed by God on Chanukah and connecting to the history and the significance of marking the anniversary of those historical miracles. That would've been one way of taking Sandler's sentiment and adding something deeper to it. In fact, they instead explicitly disclaim in the lyrics the idea of commemorating the history in this song. Rather, their song is about Jews getting together on Chanukah to feel like Jews together- the same thing Sandler's song is about. The only difference is that instead of trying to do it by listing a bunch of mostly non-observant Jews who happen to be famous, they do it by showing a bunch of Jews rocking out on the streets of New York. It's not Tom Cruise's Agent that makes Judaism meaningful, the song says; Rather, it's normal Jews celebrating together. And to that end, the beat they sample from Sandler's song is transformed into a danceable beat.

I know there's a degree to which this song is inherently a novelty song, but I hope it makes it into our Chanukah canon anyway.

Watch on YouTube

The usual playlist for

bookherd of my favorite new songs from 2020, or 2019 but I only discovered them in 2020 because I am not hip at all.

Download from my GDrive here

I didn't really listen to that much new music this year, and a lot of what was new to me was even older than that and thus not eligible, but here we go.

"The Last Great American Dynasty" by Taylor Swift has been hands down my favorite song of the year. It is just utterly brilliant storytelling about class and aspirations and growing into yourself, and it's also just hilariously petty and I love it so much. I also liked some other stuff on the two (2!) Swift albums we were gifted this year, especially "Exiles" and "No Body, No Crime", but "The Last Great American Dynasty" is a masterpiece.

"Keter Melucha" by Yishai Ribo is the best song I've listened to this year about coping with 2020. I already wrote a bit about it when I included it in a playlist for

lannamichaels, so I'll just steal the writeup. "He wrote and released this song a few months ago [back in April/May], as a way to grapple with the pandemic. It used the annual cycle of Torah readings as a way to measure time at a moment when we many of us were overcome trying to reckon a new way of understanding time. It seems to say that even as we seem to stand suspended and frozen by the pandemic, God's universe marches forward, hard as that can be to live with."

"Someday (Work in Progress)" by Josh Ritter. Released as part of an election fundraiser, I obviously used this song in my MCU vid, and I think it also captures in a different way than Ribo the 2020 sense of helplessness but also seeing a way forward beyond the helplessness.

"Roanoke" by Lisa Stein. Actually the whole album "Sonic Salve" was my favorite top to bottom new album this year, full of soaring vocal harmonies and meditative rhythms. It's one of those albums you inhabit more than you just listen to, it seeps into you.

"Puppy for Hanukkah" by Daveed Diggs. The most delightful Chanukah song we've had in ages.

Also at some point in 2021 I will probably listen to that Fiona Apple album everyone was talking about in the spring, because I am not hip at all. I did finally start listening to Phoebe Bridgers last month.

Happy Chanukah!

I have days off to be taken by the end of the year, so I took off Friday even though taking off for Chanukah isn't really a thing. I drove up to go see my sister (outdoors, masked and distanced) and dropped off Chanukah gifts for my nieces. We hadn't seen each other in person since shortly pre-pandemic and I hadn't met my younger niece who was born in June in person yet, so I was very excited.

My younger niece is very cute, and she growls, it's adorable. My older niece is somehow two and a half and she played tea party with me and waved various sticks while shouting "Abra kedabra" and mostly just ran around, and I was so grateful to have the chance to spend time with them, and to catch up with my sister.

Apparently this is the Chanukah of awesome Chanukah music by members of the original Hamilton cast.

Watch on YouTube

More playlists, I promise I will get to the people I still haven't made one for yet. Eventually.

For

primeideal, A playlist of songs with interesting lyrics (I am choosing to interpret this as lyrics I absolutely do not understand)

"No Fish, No Meat" by Tsarew

- because if anything is 'interesting', this is it

"Pac-Man Lunchbox" by LisaLovesMilhouse

- A song that literally stops to ask what the hell is happening midway through

"259,000" by Two Five Nine

-A song I once sent to

cahn to figure out if there were secret Mormon numerologies I wasn't aware of

"A Fey Well Canorous" by Iron Steel

-A song about a magic well? I guess?

Playlist for Primeideal

For

angledge, Middle Eastern sounds blended with rap, or at least, a set of Hebrew hip hop

"T'ni Li" by Subliminal

- Subliminal, who tried to come across as street by acting aggressively pro-government. Look, the '00s were a weird time.

"Adon Olam" by Jewdyssee

- German Jewish hip hop band performing a familiar Jewish prayer, with a Yiddish coda.

"Killer" by Noa Kirel

- One of the biggest names in Israeli pop music at the moment, with a brag track punning on her last name

"22 Otiyot" by Victoria Hanna

- Rap about Jewish mystical ideas about the alphabet

Playlist for Angledge

My email tells me that Frank London and Jon Madof just released a recording of Kol Nidre (three repetitions) and I won't be able to listen to it until tonight and I cannot wait.

For

makamu, A Playlist with "narrative lyrics (for lack of a better word)"

"Estelle" by Dan Bern, just this amazing shaggy dog story of coping with depression and loss and figuring out how to find joy again

"Harrisburg" by Josh Ritter, the best railroad ballad written in the 21st century

"Jedi Drinking Test" by the Dust Rhinos, a little Star Wars fic in Irish musical guise

"Elevator Operator" by Courtney Barnett, full of rich details and surprising twists and clever language

"Bridges and Balloons" by Joanna Newsom, a narrative song about the magic of narrative to take us on journeys

"Hold On" by The Cottars, my favorite Tom Waits cover

"Railroad Bill" by Andy Breckman, the tale of the time the character fought back against his creator

Download here from my Gdrive

For

snippy, A Playlist "for the new year and elul."

Throughout the high holiday season we add a prayer after the Shemoneh Esrei called Avinu Malkeinu, "Our Father, our King". it envisions this dual relationship between the Jewish people and God, where we are able to supplicate in front of God both in the intimate role of children, and in the prostrate role as subjects, and because of this dual relationship we are able to call for both God to be merciful and to be just.

There have been a lot of musical takes on this prayer. Here's a handful from my collection. There's a particular melody that is commonly sung for the final verse of the prayer, and that is the most common melody but not the only melody used in these songs.

- by Chazan Sawel Kwartin, in the traditional 'chazzanus style' of Eastern Europe

- by Chazan Andrei Zweig, an Israeli chazan who

ambyr and I met when he gave a tour of Helsinki's synagogue

- by Jewish jazz musicians Mark Feldman, Uri Caine, Greg Cohen, and Joey Baron, as a meditative instrumental

- by the Afro-Semitic Experience, starting off in the chazzanus style and then adding other musical influences

- by the jam band Phish, a 5/4 staple of their live sets

Download it off my Gdrive here

for

lannamichaels, A playlist of "more of the type of Seder Ha'avodah"

(n.b. "Seder Ha'avodah" by Ishai Ribo is an Israeli song released last year before the chagim that uses an piece of the liturgy from the Yom Kippur Musaf prayer and works around it to tell this complicated and modern story about faith.)

So here's some more music that uses the language of Jewish liturgy and then adapts it into something different.

"Keter Melucha" by Ishai Ribo - Let's start with more by Ribo. He wrote and released this song a few months ago, as a way to grapple with the pandemic. It used the annual cycle of Torah readings as a way to measure time at a moment when we many of us were overcome trying to reckon a new way of understanding time. It seems to say that even as we seem to stand suspended and frozen by the pandemic, God's universe marches forward, hard as that can be to live with.

"Mi Ba'eish" by Shany Kedar, covering Leonard Cohen- Cohen translated and then adapted a passage from the medieval piyut Unetaneh Tokef, recited on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, in his song "Who By Fire". Kedar translates the whole thing back into Hebrew, both restoring the original parts that Cohen merely translated, and translating Cohen's new additions. It is a startlingly sly piece of musical reinterpretation.

"Genesis 30:3" by the Mountain Goats- off an album where each song is inspired by a Bible verse, John Darnielle looks at the story of Leah and Rachel and wonders how Rachel could give up her claim on the man she loved in favor of her sister, who she also loved. "I will do what you asked me to do/ Because of how I feel about you."

"Beresheet" by Idan Raichel - I don't think

lannamichaels really needs me to be sharing Idan Raichel songs, but I don't care, I'm doing it anyway. It reads into the first Perek of Genesis a process that we can learn from in our lives. This is how Creation works, so this is how creation works: this is how you build a relationship, this is how you build anything you want to care about the way God cares about God's Creation.

"Mi'maakim" by Idan Raichel - Again Raichel does a similar thing, this time doing an exegesis on Psalm 130 (also commonly recited between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur) to explore the idea of a failing relationship. Just as David is feeling far away from God and yearns to reconnect because of his belief that there is still something that links them, Raichel's narrator wants to bring his romance back to where it was.

Download the playlist from my GDrive

I haven't done this in a few years, and I had fun the last time...

Comment on this post and I'll make you a playlist. If you want to specify things you are looking for musically, you can, otherwise I'll just surprise you.

As usual, for

bookherd, my list of my favorite new music from 2019, or from 2018 but I didn't discover it until 2019, because I am not hip at all.

"Seder Ha'Avodah" by Yishai Ribo- I already talked about it in this post a few months ago, it's a beautiful reinterpretation of the long poem in the Yom Kippur service describing the ritual of the High Priest's Yom Kippur service in the Temple in Jerusalem.

"The Torch Committee" by Josh Ritter- TW: This song is about what it feels like to live in America in 2019, the slippery slope of what our country is poised to become in the name of making the privileged feel safe. It has the shape to make a stunning MCU vid, too, but it's a vid I'm a little scared to attempt.

"All Some Kind of Dream" by Josh Ritter- The other breathtakingly and heartbreakingly political song on Ritter's album this year, this one splits the difference between optimism and pessimism with exacting and aching precision.

"Sicilian Crest" by the Mountain Goats- is John Darnielle's attempt to cover some of the same ground as "The Torch Committee". It's a song that one can dance to... but should one?

"Ain't Technology Grand" by Gaye Adegbalola- is a pretty great blues about the ways in which technology ain't grand.

"Rokdim Tzmudim" by Jane Bordeaux- I discovered Israeli folk-rockers Jane Bordeaux this summer when I was hunting through covers of "Erev Shel Shoshanim" this summer for my Equinox vid, and I was delighted when Youtube pointed me to their new album that came out this fall. This is such a lovely, bright, wistful torch song.

"Begin Again" by Norah Jones- Jones's new album is a weird album full of experimentation, and it's hard to wrap your head around its structure, but it's full of great musical ideas and great singing, and I love the way Jones interacts with her musicians on the title track. I love the way she vocalizes the title, a different meaning every time she sings it, in search of a new beginning.

"Tik Tok" by Anna Zak- I do not pretend to understand Anna Zak as a cultural phenomenon, but this song is pretty fun to dance to, and it made for a great Fiddler vid.

2019 Playlist here

New song release for the season, that I've been listening to a lot the past couple days. I don't know if it'll have the same kick if you're not familiar with the Yom Kippur liturgy, but wow does it hit me. It's based on the passage in the Yom Kippur Mussaf where the High Priest's worship service on Yom Kippur in the Temple is described, and it moves from the technical to the numinous in such powerful ways.

Seder Ha'Avodah by Yishai Ribo

I have eight to ten hours of highway driving ahead of me this weekend as I travel to and from Hunt. Some fraction of that will be listening to daf yomi podcasts. For the rest I'd like to listen to some new music.

Recommend an album you think I'll like and I'll review what I get to after I'm back from Hunt.

Only request: I like Duckworth's "Time Curve Preludes" as much as the next guy, but try not to recommend me music that's too droney and repetitive or I run the risk of falling asleep on the road.

The annual playlist for

bookherd of my favorite songs from 2018, or 2017 but I didn't discover them until 2018 because I'm not hip at all

"Golden Goat" by Chimney Swift- The accordionist from the band is a CTY friend- this song was on repeat in my car for about a month after their album came out. So catchy.

"We Are Gonna Be Okay" by Dan Whitener- The singer is also a CTY friend, though somebody I haven't been in touch with since a year or two after we left CTY. Apparently this is a year of my CTY friends putting out awesome music.

"Ben Franklin's Song" by the Decemberists- from the Hamildrops, with lyrics by Lin Manuel Miranda. Unused lyric from Hamilton set to music and sung by Colin Meloy. I love this in general as a history song, as it gives Franklin such a wonderful edge, but I particularly love it as a potential Walter Bishop vidsong.

"My Queen Is Ada Eastman" by Sons of Kemet - is by far not the first time I have placed a band with Seb Rochford drumming on a playlist, and I'm sure it will not be the last. But actually the most important driver of this album is bandleader Shabaka Hutchings on saxophone, not Rochford. This whole album is great, Afro-Caribbean jazz you can dance to, and I want everyone to listen to it and if I'd had my jazz panel at VVC this year instead of last, it's entirely possible the whole panel would've consisted of me playing "Your Queen is a Reptile" start to finish and then shouting "VID THIS MUSIC". I particularly want all the Black Panther vids to this album. [It was also the subject of a terrible NYTimes article about how surprisingly black people are making jazz music. Because the NYTimes is terrible.]

"Hurricane Birds by the Bad Plus -Jury's still out on the new Iverson-less version of the Bad Plus. I have mixed but mostly positive feelings about their 2018 album, which feels like a very conscious renegotiation of the band's identity. But I'm seeing them at LPR in a month and I am so excited. "Hurricane Birds" opens that new album and it starts with several bars of just Anderson and King before Orrin Davis joins in, and it feels very much like Anderson and King have to work to open up a space to let Davis in, but it's neat to listen to that musical conversation because all three are so open to experiencing the struggle.

"Reactor" by GoGo Penguin- A sort of smoother version of the Bad Plus, jazz meets rock meets Philip Glassian minimalism. A lot of the reviews of it talk about the ways in which the band is consciously trying to do an acoustic version of electronica idiom, but I don't know enough about EDM to recognize it.

"DNA' by Kendrick Lamar- Yes, I'm sorry, I didn't listen to Kendrick until 2018. I already mentioned that I'm not hip at all. This is exactly as brilliant as everyone said it would be. I had a couple week period in the spring where this album was almost the only thing I listened to in the car. Man, the poetry of his verse...

"Hi" composed by Caroline Shaw as performed on Mozart in the Jungle- I already wrote about this when the episode of "Mozart in the Jungle" it was written for aired.

"The Old Favorite/ Dweller on the Threshold" by Countercurrent- Mashup of an Irish jig and a Van Morrison classic that seems to make both parts of the mashup better

"You Are Searching in Vain for a Bright-Line Solution" by Patrice Michaels & Kuang-Hao Huang (composed by Derrick Wang) - new recording of this aria from "Scalia/Ginsburg", from an album of songs about RBG. Have I mentioned lately how psyched I am to finally see "Scalia/Ginsburg" next year? I AM VERY PSYCHED

Download link here:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1YUTpNUB-zQdo2drEmY1qVh3dzYuB-IFd

"The Chris Gethard Show - Atom and His Package (Live Performance)" (Watch on YouTube)

This gives me so much joy, though I'm a little sad I didn't learn it was happening until a year later. Atom mostly stopped touring when I was in high school, but his music still means a lot to me, and it's so evident watching the crowd that I'm not alone in feeling that. It's an audience heterogeneously mixed between people who know every single word and are so delighted to get to dance and sing along to "Punk Rock Academy" and people who have no idea who Atom is and can't figure out the joke, and I love it.

I think I need to get into the Chris Gethard show, too.

Nobody's commented yet, but let me say what struck me in listening to the songs in the playlist I posted last post, and what connected them for me.

I called the playlist a Poe's Law Playlist, after the internet culture observation, as summarized by wikipedia: "Poe's law is an adage of Internet culture stating that, without a clear indicator of the author's intent, it is impossible to create a parody of extreme views so obviously exaggerated that it cannot be mistaken by some readers or viewers as a sincere expression of the parodied views."

These four songs are all about dating culture and pickup culture, two sung by men and two sung by women, that in different ways evoke Poe's Law uncertainty for me.

"Gorgeous", off Taylor Swift's newest album, features a woman singing to her crush about her inability to win him. The genius article takes it seriously- analyzing the clues in the lyrics to identify if Swift is talking about current boyfriend Joe Alwyn, or previous boyfriends like Tom Hiddleston or Calvin Harris. This interpretation says that these are her genuine feelings about the guy, that this song is confessional in the classic Swiftian vein. Yet this seems impossible to credit. The lyrics of the song strike me as obviously satirical. The opening line is "You should take it as a compliment/ That I got drunk and made fun of the way you talk" The chorus is "You're so gorgeous/ I can't say anything to your face/ 'Cause look at your face/ And I'm so furious/ At you for making me feel this way". This is straightforwardly MRA/PUA language, being used by Taylor Swift! There is nothing genuine in this song, you're supposed to laugh at the narrator and her negging, and to think about how we excuse men who use language like this. Or maybe not?

Owl City's "Deer in the Headlights" confronts the inability of men to grapple with the consequences of using this kind of language: "Met a girl in the parking lot/ And all I did was say, "Hello"/ Her pepper spray made it rather hard/ For me to walk her home/But I guess that's the way it goes." Then the chorus goes "Tell me again, was it love at first sight/ When I walked by and you caught my eye?/ Didn't you know love could shine this bright?/ Well, smile because you're a deer in the headlights" Here, genius identifies the song as satire. Genius agrees that we're supposed to think of the narrator as a creep and a predator, who walks up to random strangers in a parking lot and then tries to act innocent. What's different about this song that genius recognizes the satire this time? Have we reached the point where culture has described male nice guy creepiness enough, in the wake of #metoo, that a male satire does not raise Poe's Law issues, but the female satire still is interpreted within the misogynistic norms of patriarchal ideas about romance?

Norah Jones and El Madmo present a revenge fantasy against this sort of PUA in "GGW". She responds individually to each of his oh-so-innocent nice guy lines: "I'm not lonely/ I just wanted a drink/ You don't need to understand." As the creep escalates, Jones escalates back "I guess you want to lose your eye//Cuz I got nails/ You will bleed." Jones posits that the appropriate response to negging and gaslighting is to make the implicit manipulation explicit and reveal the patheticness of the pickup artist.

And Shael Riley's "Less than Three" is the one that most flummoxes me with its ambiguity. Its chorus is super adorable geek love- "Together we are two/ Two is less than three/ I <3 you." At first that was what drew me to the song, but I became uncomfortable as I listened to the lyrics closer, which move from "Would you go out with me" to an unexpected and inappropriate "Would you have sex with me?" It's unclear to me if this song is apologetics for an awkward geek who acts creepily because of his nervousness, or if it's critique of a more intentional creep who eventually screws up and blurts out his true designs on the girl, which have nothing at all to do with less than three. It skates that Poe's Law line so hard it's impossible for me to know how to understand it.

And there's a deeper question all these songs make me ask, about the purpose of music in these circumstances. Why produce a song like "Deer in the Headlights", with its hooky, sunny pop disguising a sharp critique of its narrator? If you're going to critique pickup culture, should it be danceable? Who wants to dance to a song with lyrics like this? Are these songs Le Tigre-style sugar pilling? Or are they just broken love songs in a society full of broken love songs?

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