Among my favorite Eighties sounds is that sunny, chic, stuttering, funky, four-on-the-floor Italo sound, godfathered by, among others, the disco greats Giorgio Moroder and Cerrone.
Producers and remixers Initial Talk construct, in my opinion, a new Italo classic with their remix of Dua Lipa's cheeky "New Rules." PLEASE take the time to check out another DL/IT collaboration, a remix of "IDGAF." It was hard to leave that one off this list. It scratches that New Jack Swing itchy handily.
A few months ago, "Listen to Your Heart came on the radio, and my first thought that the chorus was being used for some G-Eazy/Halsey-esque duet à la "Him & I" or NF's "Let You Down."
When a new artist uses a sample, it's often because that snippet itself is so powerful that the artist thinks it's worth building a new song around. As I listened to "LTYH," thinking of it as a powerful piece of pop history, something beyond a passing fad, something future generations could refer to as a touchstone, its power struck me.
It may seem tacked on to this list, but my effort here is to give weight to the preceding songs. This sort of dancy pop music can seem to be fluffy, disposable. Not to me. To me, it's heavy stuff, ladened with melancholy and tension that only that bright simplicity in the melody can keep it afloat.
Roxette's Marie Fredriksson died two weeks ago from brain cancer. Billboard Magazine took a deep look at this and their other Hot 100 Number One's in their "Forever No.1" feature, which honors recently deceased artists. From the article:
Producers and remixers Initial Talk construct, in my opinion, a new Italo classic with their remix of Dua Lipa's cheeky "New Rules." PLEASE take the time to check out another DL/IT collaboration, a remix of "IDGAF." It was hard to leave that one off this list. It scratches that New Jack Swing itchy handily.
A few months ago, "Listen to Your Heart came on the radio, and my first thought that the chorus was being used for some G-Eazy/Halsey-esque duet à la "Him & I" or NF's "Let You Down."
When a new artist uses a sample, it's often because that snippet itself is so powerful that the artist thinks it's worth building a new song around. As I listened to "LTYH," thinking of it as a powerful piece of pop history, something beyond a passing fad, something future generations could refer to as a touchstone, its power struck me.
It may seem tacked on to this list, but my effort here is to give weight to the preceding songs. This sort of dancy pop music can seem to be fluffy, disposable. Not to me. To me, it's heavy stuff, ladened with melancholy and tension that only that bright simplicity in the melody can keep it afloat.
Roxette's Marie Fredriksson died two weeks ago from brain cancer. Billboard Magazine took a deep look at this and their other Hot 100 Number One's in their "Forever No.1" feature, which honors recently deceased artists. From the article:
“This is us trying to recreate that overblown American FM-rock sound,” [bandmate] [Per] Gessle wrote, “to the point where it almost becomes absurd. We really wanted to see how far we could take it.” Quite a ways, it turned out: the song includes four mini-solos, nipping at each other’s heels like it was the end of Abbey Road. Fredriksson herself split into a multitude, tracking earnest backing vocals to match the liturgic synthesized organ.
[...]
The song was loaded with layered detail: the bongo taps in the intro; the grim synthesized horns at the end; the color combination of Per and Marie’s timbres, deployed judiciously; the way that Marie’s topline and countermelodies perform a sort of overlapping dance at the song’s emotional apex.Pop music can pander to the lowest common denominator. It can also appeal to our rawest emotions, our basic human experiences, the ones that unite us across distance, ideology, and time.
- Matt
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