The Only Thing About Music That Everyone Who's Anyone Is Talking About Right Now
is the FP: SF music spectacular, The Dare, Sabrina Carpenter, Charli XCX, Chappell Roan, Boiler Room and more. Always and forever, ooh baby FOSTERTALK Presents: Summer Fridays sounds better with you.
Today is Thursday, August 29th, 2024.
Tomorrow the 15th Summer Friday of the year, zero to go until Labor Day.
Little River Band’s “It’s A Long Way There” is on the radio.
New in theaters this weekend is—
—wait, sorry, I know what you’re thinking: A Thursday?! No weather report? How am I dry? How are you dry? Am I having a minor neurological event? What’s with today, today? Yes, no, you’re not, I’m not, you’re not, and in the immortal words of The The, this is the day. This is real, and it’s not even the final issue of FOSTERTALK Presents: Summer Fridays, just one stop on the way there (that’ll be in your inbox tomorrow).
Meanwhile, the readers of this august August newsletter have come to learn, music is a primary concern of Summer Fridays, in spirit and in practice. As such, behold: The FOSTERTALK Presents: Summer Fridays End-of-Summer Music Spectacular! For the people who are new here, and rightfully have no idea what the actual fuck is going on: Sorry, can’t help you, neither does anyone else. Measured logic and coherence, not exactly this newsletter’s strong suit. This may also explain its cult following, and how you got here.
But what matters is that you’re here, and thus, you are a golden god. We’ve got news! And some items that have been cooking all summer, a coming-of-age tale involving rock and roll, some dance, some rock, some love, and the aural textures of nothing less than pure fun in the sun, weather be goddamned. Turn the radio up, for that sweet sound, yes?
And we’re off:
A Pressing, Non-Rhetorical Question About The Dare
Ahem:
Is it possible to write about The Dare without using the words “indie sleaze”? Recent history would suggest, no, it is apparently not possible.1 Who will be the first to do it?!?!?!?
This has haunted my Notes app for the last year and change. The answer, as it turns out?
Yours truly!!! SURPRISE! YES, MY BABIES: Let waft the white smoke, pop bottles and break bread, let bells ring out! Much to the relief of the obviously brilliant and culturally-attuned subscribers to this newsletter, the readers of one of New York City’s local daily periodicals, and anyone who lived in New York City in 2005, I’ve done the impossible, clocking 1600 words without the aforementioned cursed affectation! Marjorie Miller, you know my number!
It’s a profile that features quotes from Dylan Brady of 100 Gecs and (an absolute stamp of a line from) Charli XCX, along with a parenthetical surely conveying more than the vast majority of parenthetical in the New York Times today:
Three things, here:
Doing this kind of thing, I try almost exclusively to write about people playing a key part in a larger narrative about what they do, changing it in some way. And approach it through the lens of: What’s their most human form? Through what prism can other humans best understand this — and glean something — from?2 So: What’s up The Dare, sonically and otherwise? It’s a story about committing to the bit.
It was also not the next piece I thought I’d be doing for the Times, or ever. “Girls” is a song precision-engineered to share the qualities of caustic inhalants — a euphoric high, short as it is bold enough to leave users compelled to immediate repeat usage, despite potentially deleterious effects on the brain. And (ahem clearly) I rinsed it. But contributing to the cultural discourse around someone like The Dare — detailed in the story — ain’t really my bag. But when the idea was floated, I started finding more than my initial kneejerk reaction would’ve suggested I would. The new album is a whole thing. It’s a great Rorschach test for your idea of fun. Also, it’s just funny. I laughed out loud, several times, on the first few listens.
The one thing I wish we had room for in the story, but didn’t: Just how accomplished of a producer and DJ he is (as you can tell by the reaction on Charli XCX’s face here, this man can cook). One bit that didn’t make the story: The Dare told me he's considering releasing a series of instrumentals he's got in the hopper as 12" vinyl singles, and played some for me. Much as his sole instrumental "Bloodwork” is among his best pieces, they were phenomenal, the kind of thing even the Resident Advisor Industrial Complex would solemnly nod in approval at. Also, I cannot emphasize enough: He knows more about music than the vast, vast, vast majority of people (and musicians) on this planet.
Something I found that had no place in the story, yet is revealing and wonderful: The Dare covering The Magnetic Fields’ “Take Ecstasy With Me” on an old Soundcloud page he probably forgot was even there. It’s really, really lovely — as perfect a near-end-of-summer cover as you’ll find — and I’ve already ripped it off Soundcloud before it’s inevitably deleted once he remembers that account’s still public. :)
The Four Hardest Bars On That New Sabrina Carpenter Album
“Try to come off like you're soft and well-spoken / Jack off to lyrics by Leonard Cohen” - “Dumb & Poetic”
“A boy who's jacked and kind / Can't find his ass to save my life” - “Slim Pickens”
“You're so empathetic / you'd make a great wife / And I promise the mushrooms aren't changing your life” - “Dumb & Poetic”
“Jesus, what's a girl to do? / This boy doesn't even know / The difference between "there," "their" and "they are" / Yet he's naked in my room” - “Slim Pickens”
Father John Misty, eat your goddamn heart out.
[Bonus, non-album: “BBC said I should keep it PG / BBC I wish I had it in me / There's a double meaning if you dig deep.” - One of her many extraordinary live “Nonsense” outros from this summer. Pop music is rarely both this horny and funny.]
PREVIOUSLY, IN CURRENTLY INTENSELY FAMOUS PEOPLE: A Short Exchange I Recently Had with a Currently Intensely Famous Person, at a Rooftop Party, Regarding the Occasionally Delicate Matter of Retrieving Your Belongings and How to Leave a Party
How to Explain the Biggest Thing in Pop Music Right Now, Chappell Roan, to Someone Who Has No Idea What Those Two Words Mean, In Exactly 100 Words, Attempted In One Take:
Queer pop artist who grew up conservative Christian in a Missouri trailer park scored a YouTube hit at 17, signed to Atlantic, moved to LA, struggled attracting audiences, got dumped by her label and boyfriend, left LA, moved home, almost quit music, eventually independently released an album critics loved (audiences still didn’t show). A single this year and TikToks of her drag-influenced concert theatrics slowly caught fire. Artists love her (really!) — Sabrina Carpenter and Blink 182 are covering her — and, now at fever pitch, she draws (inspired!) historic crowds with fun horny vibey pop perfection. [That took 97.]
Related:
The One Thing I Want To Know About Chappell Roan Isn’t Actually About Chappell Roan, Which is
…the name of the person at Atlantic responsible for dropping her from the label. Can you even imagine?!
[Finally, go back and that footage of her performing to those record-breaking crowds and then, watch, from six years ago — before her label dropped her, and before she’d move home, almost give up music, and somehow persist to end up where she is — this video of her covering The Cranberries’ “Dreams,” seemingly, an entire universe of space and time and possibility away from her present situation, but as it turned out, not. Really, though: People are amazing, music is rapturous.]
MORE IN CHARLI + CHAPPELL Every single Charli XCX song “sounds like this” and every single Chappell Roan song “sounds like this.” // It’s so confusing to be a gull. // There’s one more Charli XCX remix coming and the speculation on what it could be is wild. // A perfectly absurd but accurate non-sequitur take on the New York mag photo shoot.
PREVIOUSLY: The Last Thing You’ll Ever Need To Read About “Brat Summer”
The High Art That Is Four Tet Playing Autreche’s “Sim Gishel” to End His Lollapalooza Set
is maybe the best Ari Aster movie that didn’t come out this summer, or maybe it’s more Harmony Korine. What’s happening up there: Four Tet — the critically-heralded electronic musician who also closed Coachella last year as part of an unlikely trio with Fred, Again.. and Skrillex — has seen his career go off in the last few years in a way few people familiar with his oeuvre probably expected (himself likely among them). And so, when he played Lollapalooza this summer, those recently-arrived to Four Tet’s body of work may have been, uh, surprised at his Lollapalooza set, which was, to use a word, unrelenting. Some days, you get Vanessa Carlton and Ariana Grande’s “Into You” mixed into a potentially life-changing mix of Donna Lewis’s “I Love You Always Forever.”
Other days — like at Lollapalooza this year — you get….Four Tet, closing his set with experimental electronic duo Autreche’s “Sim Gishel,” a dense, heady track that, um, probably doesn’t fit so neatly into the average Lolla-civillian’s understanding of a “song” (it was once described as sounding like “when you roll your head back and it clicks your neck and you can feel like nerves and shit sort of slithery crunching between bone,” so there’s that).
There’s no crowdpleasing here, there is no big finish, this is a dad in his mid-40s wearing a safari hat playing whatever the absolute fuck he feels like in a borderline sadistic fashion. And yet, credit to the crowd at Lollapalooza — or maybe not as much them as whatever it is they’re on — they keep bopping. The footage is hilarious, wild, weird, maybe dark, easily among the strangest concert footage I’ve ever seen, but above all, glorious. This man is a menace and he knows it.
The One Boiler Room Thing (Instead Of The Other Boiler Room Thing)
Floating Points — who, in the last four years, has produced a Best-of-Year song with Japanese pop legends, composed the swan song of jazz legend Pharaoh Sanders, composed a critically-heralded new ballet, has a new album coming out next month, and who has played, bar none, the best collection of shows I’ve seen over the past two years — has his first true Boiler Room set coming out soon, and it might be the longest they’ve ever produced, filming all five hours. I know because I was there, for all five hours of it.
And here, I was gonna annotate it, in the great tradition of previously annotated Boiler Room performances, and the on-camera madness which ensues, but unfortunately, it has yet to drop as of this writing. All I can tell you about it for now is:
How to Recreate the Most Fun Night of New York City Nightlife in Summer 2024, at Home
Find the hottest sauna you can, fill to capacity with other people on the hottest day of the year, and run in place fully-clothed in it for three hours as music plays at a volume just below the threshold at which you incur permanent hearing loss. After having willingly just spent the last five and a half minutes enduring the sound of being screamed at by a bunch of Japanese kids — who are either having a parade in your honor or on their way to send you to a miserably painful death between fourth period and recess — imaging secreting out the fumes of your last endorphins through your pores as the break hits on the new Floating Points single, the room going insane, and your memory blacking out for the next hour and fifty-five minutes, before kicking back in just as you pull a Roberto Duran, “no mas,” with only five minutes to go, and almost collapsing on the street outside in a sweat-soaked, exhausted mess.
So there’s that. Replacing what was scheduled to be the annotation? Service content!!!!
A Beginners Guide to Boiler Room!
WHAT? Videos of DJs playing music at parties, the OG brand, which that’s launched legions of video series like it, the primary innovation of which was placing the camera under and in front of the DJ, with vantages of the crowd behind them and later on, in front of and around them.
WHY? Well, hadn’t really been done before! It’s arguably one of the most recognizable live music performance video brand in the world, putting it in a league with Take Away Shows and Tiny Desk Concerts, and into a longer historical conversation that goes from MTV Unplugged and The Grind all the way back to the Ed Sullivan Show.
WHOMST? What used to be a relatively underground and independent launchpad to popularity for artists like Carl Cox and Solomun and (see below) has since become owned by $100M ticketing app company DICE.FM, and an essential stop for everyone from Thom Yorke to 100 Gecs to Charli XCX.
SO BOILER ROOM IS “OVER” THEN, YES? I’ve thought about this a lot, and yeah sure there’s some unfortunate upshot, like artists feeling the need to present “big” personalities and movements (instead of letting the people around them demonstrate how hard their music goes off). But: Nah, I don’t think so. Because at the end of the day, given that you can actually watch the DJs at work, you can see who’s actually putting in work, and who’s just twiddling knobs. Also, without Boiler Room getting to where it is, we might not have a chance to experience things like this, this, and especially, this.
WHICH ONES SHOULD I START WITH? As a gateway drug to other Boiler Rooms, there is:
Global superstar hip-hop producer Kaytranada’s pre-fame 2011 Boiler Room, a classic of the genre, has rightfully elicited comparisons to the Divine Comedy. Key moment here.
For pure energy, house DJ (and environmental scientist!) Jayda G’s Boiler Room will heal what ails you.
Journeyman DJ (and 6,000 word New Yorker profile subject!) Solomun’s Boiler Room has been compared to a Shakespearean tragedy. Beyond the theatricts, it, too, is incredible.
Fred, Again’s.. Boiler Room is basically the thing that catapulted him to the echelon of fame he occupies now. Key moment in Boiler Room history: What happens when a guy partying too hard accidentally shuts the music off.
And yes, Charli XCX’s Boiler Room in Ibiza is, you should know, really quite good. And yes, DJing while wearing a full suit in Amnesia, arguably the hottest club in Ibiza, I asked, and yes: The Dare was, in fact, sweating balls.
And finally:
A Brief, Horny, Formative Summer Bildungsroman.
June 1999, Las Vegas, and just 14, I’ve managed to get my parents to let me go to a Fatboy Slim gig — on my own — for my eighth grade “graduation” present, something absolutely insane in retrospect, that I likely had to stretch the truth of the nature of (at one point, someone asked if I had any acid, which scared me). But thank god they did, because that man cooked through five hours of vinyl like nothing I’d ever seen, which altered how I listen to music…forever. But that, somehow, was not the most significant thing to happen that night. Here’s what was:
A runner from the office my Dad worked at came by the house to drop off some paperwork, and she offered to drop me off at the show: Andrea. She was 17, on her way to college after a summer of lifeguarding somewhere on the Strip, brilliant, funny, cool, confident, a laugh like an ice-cold can of Coke snapping open on a scorching hot day, and of course, beautiful.
On the way to the gig, we talked about what we were listening to, and she turned up her radio, with an and obviously, this. I recognized the voice, but didn’t know the song. “Whole Lotta Love,” are you kidding me?! I confessed, at that point, my knowledge of Led Zeppelin was limited to “Black Dog” and “Stairway.” She held her hand up to my face, turned the radio up, with a, Okay, just — just, wait, listen to this. Robert Plant was wailing and moaning through the song’s midsection, spacey, shambolic and weird. I raised an eyebrow. Ready? she asked? You ready? I laughed, and then: BANG, BANG, that famous guitar lick comes screaming in, and she’s pounding the top of the steering wheel to it, both hands, headbanging, grinning, laughing like a madwoman, the last strands of the June desert sun blasting through the car, shimmering through the hair covering her freckled face, when finally, she howls: YOU NEED COOLING…
I was terrified, in awe, in love, and didn’t stand a goddamn chance in front of any of it. The old gods were dead, and music had officially taken their place. No idea what came of her, but she lives in my head forever: That joy, that moment, that rapture, that release. So many people have had that experience, the first time you share a moment with someone, of seeing someone wholly enraptured in a song, not sure where the demarcation line between love for them and love for the music begins and ends. Somewhere in America, or somewhere else, someone’s had or will have this experience with someone else, with some other song — or maybe, even that one — before this summer’s over. And while, after so many summers, the thrill can diminish, and — even as the resplendence of the cannon of music grows at an exponential rate, even as, in many ways, there is no better time to be a fan of music than this very moment — you can become immune to their transformative properties.
Don’t. That’s it, that’s the whole thing. Just don’t.
Folks, that’ll do it. Thanks for entertaining me. And, as reminder, yes: For the final week of FOSTERTALK Presents: Summer Fridays, there is very much more on the way.
Stay tuned, see you tomorrow, and if you’re ever in need saving, I know a good place to start. As ever, -f.
“Indie sleaze” is a Mandela Effect neologism TikTok trendbait mainstreamed via lazy writing mostly used to describe a cultural moment which never really existed as described (see: “indie sleaze revival”) nor does it still. The word the people using “indie sleaze” are dancing around is a word nobody wants to say in 2024 — which nobody wanted to say in 2003, either — and that’s “hipster.” I know. Sorry, but also, it’s at least somewhat historically accurate, because hey, people actually used it! But nobody has ever sounded cool or intelligent (let alone, described something accurately) using the word “hipster,” then or now. Look, as a society, we owe it to ourselves to not be the linguistic monkeys before the monolith, but to use the poetry we’ve bestowed on ourselves Shortcuts to describing all but the broadest movements of culture or art through genre and subgenre are, if you look closely enough, occasionally a demarcation line between art and artlessness. Anyway, you hereby have license to view anyone earnestly using the words “indie sleaze” unironically from this point forward (but especially writers) as inarticulate sheeple who should be given the Michael Fay special and thrown in cultural jail while forced to memorize the history of Studio B and share a cell with Tha Pumpsta, PEACE.
No, really: The profile about Fred, Again.. was a story about artistic industriousness, finding inspiration everywhere, and what an openness to collaboration can yield. The one about Romy Madley Croft was a story about the pressure/gravitational pull we feel to be the versions of ourselves we and others have come to expect, and what it takes to break away from that, dig deeper, find and articulate our most essential being.
Happy Fred Again 10 days release day to all who celebrate - wheeee!!!
Did not expect to see VERRACO referenced in a NYT profile of The Dare!