Pandemic Playlist: "Bad Decisions"

Margo Price, by Bobbi Rich

This week’s Spotify playlist flows from new Margo Price and old UK hardcore.

My playlists these days have some continuities. Club music from other times and other countries simply work for me these days, and this week’s Pandemic Playlist has some of those. There’s more Japanese city pop (Rie Murakami, Yuri Tanaka) , disco from Lagos (Kiki Gyan), Haitian blues rock (Moonlight Benjamin), and Prince (Prince). Still, this week’s playlist came from two starting points: Margo Price’s “That’s How Rumors Get Started,” and an issue of Wire that I read while on vacation. As I ran across reviews of albums and artists I didn’t know, I checked them on Spotify and pulled the most interesting into this playlist. I didn’t connect to Jackie Lynn’s Jaqueline as much as I hoped, but I’m interested, and I was completely engaged by The Most Famous Unknown, a compilation of electronic hardcore tracks released by Marc Acardipane under a variety of pseudonyms. Producers used so many aliases when they released electronic dance music that keeping track of the major players and defining songs challenges anyone who didn’t pay attention at the time. The brutal textures connect “Acid Bitch”—recorded under the name Dusty Angel—with dubstep, but the raw sounds and pounding beat connect the track to punk as well. 

The rest of the playlist falls in behind those tracks. My affection for the Price track and Waxahatchee’s “Ruby Falls” surprised me a bit because I’ve been off of Americana recently. Music that obscures the role of technology often seems anachronistic to me, but the right song and/or the right artist cuts through doubts like that. Price is surrounded by songs primarily by women who are trying to sort out the byproducts of their self-destructive tendencies, and Ren Harvieu’s “Tomorrow’s Girl Today” stands out as a few effortless, cascading melodic moments connect the song and 2020 to the women who sang Burt Bacharach and Hal David songs in 1960s and decodes those more mannered lyrics. I’m entertained by “I Don’t Belong” by Fontaines D.C. at the end of that sequence because it’s hard to imagine a more dude statement than “I don’t belong to anyone” and because they do it well enough for me to buy in, again, despite my skepticism for that kind of posturing. 

The Dusty Angel track led to more Prince from the upcoming Sign O’ The Times reissue, more Germanic electronic music including the faux-krautrock of Fujiya & Miyagi, and a couple of tracks from Lianne LaHavas’ recent, self-titled album. I’ve been fascinated by LaHavas since she played Essence Festival in 2014. Her music implies that somewhere there’s a stylish club scene that values soul, pop, and funk from around the world, and I want to go there. Her most recent reinforces the idea that these eclectic spaces exist as she covers Radiohead on an album that tells the story of a relationship and borrows knowingly and intentionally from music from three or four continents on the same song. 

… and if somehow you lose interest before you get to Victoria Monet’s “Moment,” buck up or fast forward. Don’t finish without hearing one of my favorite songs on the playlist.