Switched on Pop - Around The World With Drake

Episode Date: July 14, 2016

How do you create a hit that both breaks sound barriers and chart records? Drake has done this with a unique mix of international sounds from Africa, the Caribbean, the U.K. and Canada. But is his chart topping success musical appropriation or celebration? A deep listening reveals diverse influences and musical rhythms that have crossed oceans centuries before "One Dance" was even conceived. Plus, we debut Blinky Bill's "So Strong," his first single off his upcoming solo album. FEATURING - Drake - One Dance (feat. Whizkid & Kyla) - Ojuelegba Remix - Wizkid ft. Drake & Septa - 2Baba - Coded Tinz ft. Phyno, Chief Obi - DJ Maphorisa - Soweto Baby feat Wizkid & Dj Buckz - Crazy Cousinz - Do You Mind ft. Kyla - The Revolutionaries - General For General - Barrington Levy - Dance Are Changing  - Joh Thomas - Ghetto Dance - Papa Biggie - Youth Them Have To Grow - Yellowman - Adam & Eve - Mighty Diamonds - Love Me Girl - Drake - Hotline Bling - Timmy Thomas - Why Can’t We Live Together - D.R.A.M. - Cha Cha - Gil Scott-Heron and Jamie XX - Take Care Of You - Drake - Take Care ft. Rihanna - Drake - JunglePaul Simon - Graceland - Paul Simon - I Know What I Know - Moby - Natural Blues - Vera Hall - Trouble So Hard - David Guetta - Hey Mama (ft. Nicki Minaj) - Sangkala - Gamelan Degung - Joel Francisco Perri - Las llamas de Potosi - Habib Koité - Africa - Kwaa Mensah - Odo Me, Me Sum No DoChico O’farrell - Sin Titulo - Trio Matamoros - El Que Siembra Su Maíz  - Joseph Kabasele - Africa Bola Ngombi - E.T. Mensa & The Tempos - Fom Fom - Fela Kuti - Lagos Baby - Fela Kuti - Elbe Moi (Carry Me) - Fela Kuti - LadyWizkid - Show You The Money - Blinky Bill - So Strong Check out Blinky's music at www.soundcloud.com/blinkyb Supported by Casper and Amazon Prime Music's Song of Summer Playlist Amazon www.amazonsongsofsummer.com/pop Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's free for iOS users. Last year, one of our earliest episodes, I had made a trip to Africa, and together we made a prediction that we thought that we would hear more sounds from the African continent on the pop charts. Are you saying something we predicted might have actually come true? That's exactly right. It has come to pass. Drake's One Dance is featuring a bunch of producers,

actually from across the African continent, and in particular Nigerian producer, songwriter, WizKid. And it is breaking records on the charts. Such a hot track. Yeah, this is actually the Millennium's longest running number one single so far. Wait, are you serious? I'm not kidding. Yeah, I believe that's maybe in the UK, also doing extremely well in the U.S.

and completely all around the world. Wow. So today on Switched on Pop, we're going to go deep into this track and listen to see how it traverses across three different continents, while Sima, simultaneously defying the label of world music. And later on in the show, we're going to do one of our favorite segments off the charts where we uncover music that should be making it big. I'm excited. Let's go.

Welcome to Switched on Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. So Nate, about a few weeks back, I made another trip over to Kenya. And when I first arrived, I ended up in this Mexican burrito place. Yeah, I think it's, I'm pretty sure it's the only one. in Nairobi. I could be wrong. Maybe there's more. How was it? It's great. They make fresh-made tortillas, and it was really quite good.

So I was having my breakfast burrito, and I had hardly slept in, I don't know, like 36 hours. Right. And one of the first people I run into is Blinky Bill. Blinky. He's one of the number one music producers in Kenya. He's known for being a member of Just a Band, one of the biggest bands in Kenya. I've been listening to them non-stop since you introduced me to them last year. So I interviewed Blinky last year about the globalization of the... of dance music and the rise of sounds from the African continent in the charts.

And we were really excited to bump into each other because he had something he needed to show me. What did he have to show you? Well, he brought me back to his studio. And while we were talking about some of his music, he wanted to play me one of the biggest tracks which had just dropped, Drake's One Dance. Have you listened to the new Drake and Whiskey?

No, I haven't heard yet. All right. And so I go I have powers taking a hold on me I need a one dance Got a head and I see in my end One more time for I go Higher powers taking a hold on me

And so That is a great song And Whisket is probably One of the biggest artists in Africa right now So that's what I like about Drake Is that he's stepping into who's the best of the best from whichever different world.

I don't know if it's calculated in that sense, but he seems to me like someone who's definitely interested in stuff that's happening outside of his circles, which is probably one thing that's going to make him even way more successful. This track has got me so excited. I've been dancing to it for weeks now,

and I guess what I want to do, Nate, is to deconstruct what's happening on this track to see how Drake is expanding his musical vocabulary. Right on. I need a one to ask. Got an energy in my hand. One more time for I go. High up I was taking hold on me.

So the first thing that I notice on the track are the elements that Blinky was pointing out. A lot of the influence coming from the African continent. Yeah. Thinking about what Blinky said, this song becomes like so cosmopolitan in terms of its influences. I absolutely agree. Drake is expanding his palate and Globalizing his sound you can hear of the many producers on this track three of them are from the African continent We have two from Nigeria WizKid and SARS and a third from South Africa DJ Maforisa and when you listen to this track I don't know much you but I'm hearing a bunch of sounds that definitely are pulling from other traditions

Yeah and how refreshing it is not to hear produced by Max Martin and Shelbeck Yeah, for sure. And some of this is actually not totally new to Drake. He actually remixed one of WizKids' tracks a little while back, a song called Oju Legba, which I'm probably getting wrong, just a little bit. Really hot track, and it was a big deal to have Drake remixing what is very much a Nigerian sound. If you want to link, we can link right now. Scappy Wiss and Drake is a ting right now.

Are you feeling good tonight? This thing got me thanking up for life. So he's got his finger on the pulse of the global dance community right now. Yeah, that's exactly right. And some of the other sounds that we're hearing on this track are clearly influenced by these other producers from the African continent. We can hear the influence of SARS, for example. He produced a song that was released just a few weeks before one dance,

a track called Coded Tins featuring Fino by the artist Tubaba. And here you can hear a lot of this similar, piano, guitar, drum, mixture. Just take a listen. I think you'll see how there's definitely some one dance influence here. Whoa, that's cool. And I can totally see the similar sonic palette

in the Drake track compared to this. Certainly the drum beat and I think that that piano line is really familiar clearly there's some sort of sonic palette that's being shared from SARS to Drake here. Very cool. Yeah, and there's one other sound that I wanted to share with you, which is this guitar line that we hear in One Dance. And I've been trying to isolate who has contributed this guitar line because it feels very familiar. Oh, yeah, absolutely. It's so evocative.

So I've been trying to figure out where this guitar track comes from. I couldn't seem to find the credits for it. And so what I did is I went through all of the producers on this song and I tried to listen through their tracks and see if they were using a similar sound on one of their songs. And I think that it is this artist, DJ Maforisa, from South Africa. He's from the band Uluru, and he's got this track called Soato Baby. It's also featuring WizKids. So that's kind of how I isolated it.

At the end of the song, you're going to hear a similar sort of sound that we're hearing in Drake's One Dance on those guitar tracks. Whoa, nice forensic detective work there, Charlie. Yeah, and it's definitely not a totally unique style of guitar playing, but I couldn't find other producers on the track that had used other sounds similar to that. So I'm going to guess that it was DJ Mafraisa. In any case, such an iconic guitar sound and really helps transform this track. So those are sort of the African influences that I'm hearing upon first listen to One Dance, but there's so much more going on here.

I want to move to another continent and talk about the main sample on One Dance. Nice. This is like, where in the world is Carmen Sondon? San Diego for pop music. So the sample that we're hearing here is actually a track called Do You Mind by a UK artist named Kyla who's relatively unknown. Drake and his producers heard this track and called up Kyla and said, hey, do you mind if we sample this thing?

And I think that Kyla totally went nuts because she was like, wait a minute, how do you hear my track? And are you really Drake and why are you calling me? And absolutely. Yeah. So the first thing that we hear is a sample from Kyla. She says, baby, I like your style. And we hear this piano track.

But it sounds remarkably different from the original. So the original Kyla is significantly faster. And Drake has clearly pulled this back and given it really his own sound. Oh, yeah. I mean, for one, you can hear the vocal has been pitched way down. from its original. Yeah, the track has definitely been altered. It has its own sound now. And this production style that he's using is definitely drawing from Jamaican dance hall music. Ah, yeah. Are you familiar? A little bit. Yeah, so that's sort of the third continental shift that I'm hearing on this

track is he's moving us into the Caribbean. So dance hall music was basically all the rage in the late 80s in early 90s in Jamaica. And basically, artists would take popular beats. They'd call them rhythms, and they would rhyme over them. And people would actually produce multiple versions of the same song. This feels very similar in a way to, like, early hip-hop in terms of that culture of borrowing. Oh, yeah, absolutely. In fact, this idea of borrowing earlier tracks and remixing things all the way back

until like, I think like the 60s and early 70s, a Jamaican artist were inventing many of the techniques that we hear in modern hip-hop, sampling instrumental tracks, altering them, and rapping over them. Huh, so possibly Drake is sort of giving a nod to his hip-hop for bears by referencing this dance hall culture. Anytime that we're listening to Drake, you could say that we are hearing the roots of hip-hop through Jamaica because so many of the techniques were developed. there. And in this instance, he's referencing a very particular era of Jamaican music called

Dance Hall. He, not without some controversy, often uses these beats in the same way and puts his own stamp on them, but sort of recycles the original beat. That's true. And he has been criticized for this. And I think oftentimes without an understanding of how he is borrowing this technique of dance hall music, of reinterpreting these rhythms. Last year we talked about Hotline Bling, right? You used to call me on my cell phone Day night when you need my love

Right, because on this mega hit, Drake didn't come up with this rhythm himself. No, he didn't. In fact, the original track is by this guy, Timmy Thomas. It's why can't we live together. We talked about this on the episode about Drake and Adele, which is kind of ridiculous that we matched those

two up together. But the controversy around it was that this other artist, Dram, had released a song called Chacha, which used basically this same sample, and he was feeling not happy that Drake, according to him, sort of jacked that sound from him. Which I think is kind of funny because he had already borrowed the sound from Timmy Thomas, and Drake, I think, was saying, well, yeah,

but this is what we do in dance hall style music. Certainly it complicates maybe more Western notions of copyright. ownership. Oh, for sure. We should look, I don't even know how those licensing arrangements work because so many artists redo the same song. And I guess you could accuse Drake of, well, maybe he isn't really doing this and he's just making an excuse, but he's done the same style in other places. He did a song with Rihanna called Take Care, where he is, you could say, borrowing one of these rhythms from a, actually a remix of a Gil Scott Herron song by Jamie XX. So anyway, Drake is clearly familiar with this technique and is intentionally referencing it, or so I believe.

I find that very persuasive. Okay, so we've traversed three continents already. We've gone from the African continent. We've gone to Europe. We've gone back to North America and the Caribbean. And I want to move back up into Canada. Let's go to Toronto. Let's talk about Drake's sound and how he makes this his own track.

Very cool. This is actually something I don't really know much about. So as much as we're getting these. global influences on one dance. We're also getting a sound which is familiar to us. It has a certain drakness, if you will. And this is created by some of the producers that he works with frequently. One of them is his label co-owner, a producer called Noah 40 Shabeeb.

He's known for making a style that, well, I'll just let him say it in his own words. I'm notorious for this like, you know, very lo-fi, you know, underwater sound. I was carving out an entire space and frequencies So the artist occupies the top end Completely almost exclusively And the music sits in the bottom end These days I'm letting guy handle all things above

Whoa I feel like that explained so much about Drake's sound Exactly because he is able to sing on top of these rhythm tracks Which just don't have any high end And it makes him stand out and sound that much more bold Yeah, I think the sparseness of the track that these Toronto producers that he works with give one dance allows these global elements to like coexist in a way that doesn't feel forced or frantic but actually very natural. No, exactly, because they each sort of have their own place in the song. This track in many ways is actually very simple, right? there's not a whole lot of different things happening at the same time.

Yeah, he's neither taking this African Caribbean style whole cloth, nor is he imposing his own style onto it. It does feel like more of a natural, what's the word, blending of these different influences. Yeah, I find this super fascinating. And I want to come back to it after a quick break. When we return, I want to look more at this broader question of what happens. when pop musicians borrow from other cultures and ask the question,

is it appropriation or celebration or something else altogether? Convierte your passion in a business with Shopify and bathe records of ventas with the form of pay with a better conversion of the world. Has heard it? The best conversion of the world. The incredible system of Pago of Shopify

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Tuesday. We will begin the process of returning millions and millions

of criminals of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came. But what we want to do in this space is talk about America and politics beyond the current president.

So what do most Americans think about deportation and border security, period? I think that Americans are definitely against the kind of violent displays that we've seen in the street from ICE. When it comes to the question of deportation, the answer is more complicated. My sense is that people want border at the border. They don't like the idea of having no idea who's coming. into the United States at any given time. The view on immigration from the bottom up instead of the top down.

That's this week on America Actually. Every Saturday in your audio and video feeds. Okay, welcome back to Switchdown Pop. The first half, we looked at how Drake's track is drawing from multiple continents and is a worldwide smash because of it. Indeed. Now I want to go into a little bit of a thornier subject. Right, because borrowing influences from other parts of the globe is not just a benign act.

It's very loaded. I think we can look at both the appropriative side as well as the celebratory side of borrowing from other traditions. Let's start by looking at how could this be appropriating other cultures. Yeah, totally because appropriation is not necessarily a neutral act. Appropriation can be damaging and pop music has often been guilty of this, diluting, exploiting, exploiting through the appropriation of culture. pop music can take something local and original, whitewash it, flatten it, monetize it. And I guess this is also one of the main critiques of globalization in general.

Yeah, so one way that I think this happens is when a global artist borrows from a culture and doesn't necessarily give the proper credit. This can be important because artists on a track who might be fundamental to a sound may not get the royalties they deserve. They might not get the songwriting credit. And so the actual returns of that song financially may not go back to the people who really deserve the credit. I think one of the most famous cases is the controversy surrounding Paul Simon's Graceland. Ah, yes.

There's lots of controversies around this album, especially him not abiding by the sanctions against the apartheid state in South Africa. But the other thing is that he actually didn't give originally the credit to some of the songwriters on this album. Yeah, many of the South African musicians who took part in this massively successful record went uncredited for a long time. I mean, as much as I really do

adore this album because it has just amazing music and sounds, I listen to it differently when I think about it from an appropriate of mindset. If we go into the song, I know what I know, I feel less comfortable with this track now. She looked me over and I guess

you thought I was all right. All right in the sort of a limited way for an off night. She said, don't I know you from the cinematographer's party? I say, who am I to blow against the wind? I know what I know. Right, he's talking about being at a cinematographer's party in New York City, while the underlying music is clearly drawing from South Africa. It sort of feels like very elitist and unrelatable to the music,

which is happening underneath. Ah, interesting. You hear sort of a musical colonialism taking place here. Yeah, it makes me feel uneasy, especially given the lack of certain credit here. But Paul Simon is definitely by no means the only person who's been accused of appropriation. There are lots of other examples where local artists do not get the credit they deserve and may actually just be sort of completely taken off the record of popular music. Yeah, I can definitely think of a few examples of this. Yeah, I want to go back to 1999 with Moby's Play.

This was one of the biggest albums of that decade and really was pretty transformative in the way that it brought dance music into the mainstream. It also brought in a bunch of other sounds from other cultures that didn't really necessarily get the credit they deserve. Yeah, this record is a really interesting combination of like modern dance beats and these Alan. Lomax recordings which were made by an ethnographer traveling around the United States recording different indigenous musical practices for, you know, folkloric posterity.

So now Moby at the end of the century, taking those sounds and remixing them, it's a very powerful musical statement. And it gets a little complicated because Moby is definitely. capitalizing off of this sound, but a lot of those early recordings of those artists, those artists aren't necessarily being compensated, their families aren't getting royalties for those tracks. And we should mention that this continues because David Guetta just a few years ago sampled Alan Lomax recordings for his hit with Nicky Minaj, hey mama.

But in both these examples, we see that appropriation isn't just a musical act, It's an act of power. And when that power, in this case, you know, economic power is unequal, then appropriation isn't just something you can ignore. Yeah, and beyond the economic effects, I think it also has meaningful cultural effects. Even those Alan Lomax recordings, which maybe to our ears today might sound more homogenous,

as you were saying, he was pulling from local, specific heritage and sounds that were endemic to certain parts of the United States. And I think that this happens in the larger genre of world music to a really damaging effect. Yeah, it takes away its specificity and history and just makes it kind of this generic sound. Yeah, we take the localness and we make this global homogenous otherness that we can package and sell as a Starbucks compilation disc. Where you're listening to Gamelan from Indonesia, alongside Andy and Pan flute music. and West African guitar all on one album. I mean, it's taking away cultural inherited and cultural specificity and making it one thing.

But at the same time, we don't want to be these appropriation doomsayers who think that it's a purely destructive act. I mean, appropriation is also maybe an entirely natural part of making music and having a cultural conversation. Right. So I think we can also look at Drake's production style. as honoring different musical traditions. Honoring and crediting, it's worth noting as well. I mean, this track is featuring WizKid and Kyla. They're not being pushed to the margins.

I think that's a really important piece, especially, you know, as we mentioned on that financial side, hopefully that they are getting some royalties for this song. Yeah. And they're getting cultural credit. But I was saying that we can look at this from an appropriative way or a celebratory way or maybe a whole other way.

I think when we talk about musical appropriation, we can easily fall into this fallacy that culture is static. And I think when we look at musical traditions in a celebratory way, we can acknowledge both heritage, but also the way that that heritage changes over time and is in relationship to all sorts of other kinds of music. Musical exchange is just that. In exchange of conversation, developing through surprising vexed. of translation and rediscovery. Beautifully said. And I guess what I want to do next is think about how Drake's sound, his production technique of borrowing these rhythms from dance hall culture,

may actually be fundamental to the movement of all popular music over actually like a multi-century time frame. You're in a beautiful mind this discussion? I am, and I don't want to go too off the track. because we could go on and on and on forever. But I want to look at one of the most fundamental Caribbean rhythms and see how it traverses throughout time across the African continent into the Caribbean

around the world back and forth in a relationship again and again over centuries, creating much of modern music today. Let's do it. That's a big task. But I think we can simplify it. If we just take one rhythm, one rhythm, one of the most, fundamental rhythms, the clave. This rhythm is so ubiquitous in music as to be like part of the, one of the layers of

the earth or something. Right. And I believe in Spanish that clave translates to something like the keystone beat, it's the, like, it's the fundamental thing that holds it all together. Oh, interesting. I did not know that. Okay. And just to show that the clave is fundamental and still part of all modern music, I want to

take an example from the recent past, uh, soldier boys, crank that. Whoa, yeah, that's really cool. That's a 3-2 clave. That is the 3-2 clave. Do you want to share with us what the 3-2 clave is? Well, the clave divides measures into groups, and it's always highly syncopated like that,

and basically it comes into basic forms, a group of three beats, followed by a group of two beats, or a group of two beats, followed by a group of three beats. hence 3-2 clave or 2-3-clave This was one of the hardest things for me to learn as a musician I might be a little bit slow to picking up this rhythm but it's actually super fundamental

and there's evidence that it comes from Sub-Saharan Africa and certain bell patterns like the Ghanan Cliplenongo and that basically this this bell pattern move from the African continent and travel to the Caribbean through the slave trade right? Oh, okay, yeah, yeah. And then the rhythm, this rhythm was codified in Western theory and written down in sheet music

in the Afro-Cuban musical tradition. Whoa, so you can really trace this rhythm traveling around the world. Right, so it starts on the continent, moves over to the Caribbean, and it actually then goes back over to the African continent again when traders from the colonies are moving European instruments between all these different countries, introducing instruments like the guitar and bringing some of the styles

which are being evolved and developed in the Caribbean back to the African continent, we hear the creation of this new kind of music called Palm Wine Music, which is basically a blending of Portuguese guitar style with Trinidadian rhythms. Ooh, I love that. Yeah, so here's an example

of Palm Wine guitar playing from the so-called Godfather of the style, qua mensa on his track, Odomay, Misum, no, do. Do you hear what I'm hearing on that track? I do, yeah. What is it? It's the clave.

It's the clave, exactly. Whoa. Not that it necessarily ever left, but it is being played in this style that we hear from Afro-Cuban music with the actual clave instrument, those two sticks being hit together. That's wild.

Yeah, I didn't totally appreciate how in communication these two continents were across an ocean. That's wild. Right. So when we hear modern West African guitar today, it's actually not just endemic because the instrument in the sound has actually been moving around the world for centuries. So Quamanza is from Nigeria originally and moves to Ghana, but West Africa is not the only place that we're hearing this cross-cultural translation.

One of my favorites comes actually from the Belgian Congo. Okay, that surprises me a little. So back in the 40s and 50s, the local radio station, the Radio Congo, in the Congo, was playing Cuban music by bands like Trio Matamoros. And here you're going to hear, again, that clave. Whoa, okay, so Belgian Congo is hearing Cuban clave now. Yeah, so artists are hearing that Cuban sound, and they're imitating it. One of my favorites is Joseph Cabasili. He has a song called Africa, Bola, and Gombe.

and I think you're going to hear not just that clave, but a ton of other sonic elements that are really familiar to that Afro-Cuban music. It's uncanny. Yeah, this is fascinating, so you can hear now the African bands like incorporating this Cuban clave rhythm into their own music, it's wild.

Okay, here we are. We're still, like, stuck back in the, you know, middle part of the 20th century. I want to get us back to the modern era. Yeah, so where does this cross-cultural conversation go next? Well, one of the most popular kinds of music on the continent at the time was Ghanaiian high life, which is a blend of lots of different styles, including local Ghanian music, Cuban music. One of my favorites is Itimsa and his tempos band playing a song called Fompham,

where we're hearing a lot of those same sort of sounds that we're hearing in the Belgian Congo. And what's particularly interesting about this style of music is that here we're hearing the clock. again, but it ends up being one of the most fundamental influences to a very well-known Nigerian artist Falakuti. Vegas, baby, that's so-so-money. Falakuti is the father of Afrobeat, which in many ways is the descendant to what we're hearing from WizKid and other modern producers. Yeah, that's really interesting.

I did not expect this conversation to go to Falaw, but it does make so much sense. I mean, he's taking influences from Nigerian music and influences from American funk music and kind of updating that cross-Atlantic conversation for a late 20th century audience. That's right. His style of music, Afrobeat, was deeply influenced by his time studying in London, where he played in a band that was a fusion of jazz and high-life music. And when he came back to Nigeria, he intentionally made a style. of music that was going to be entirely his own, a sound that could be endemic to Nigeria.

So then can we bring this back to Drake's One Dance? Well, I think we can because just as the sounds of R&B have transformed in a radical way from the 50s and 60s, Afrobeat has made a similar sort of transition. In fact, many people categorize WizKids music, the producer on One Dance, as an Afrobeat artist. who is now having his own dialogue with an artist from North America. And we can even hear that clave sound on modern WizKid tracks like Show You the Money. Yeah, so WizKid is like continuing to engage with this tradition. That clave sound has started in West Africa, gone around the world, come back, continue to evolve.

And while we're not hearing exactly the clave in one dance, we are hearing these very distinct rhythms that come from this fundamental Afro-Caribbean sound. Wow. I mean, this gives me a whole new level of appreciation for this track. There's a lot going on here from the different musical influences to the way it interacts with larger issues of appropriation and credit. I mean, I definitely think about what you said at the top of this episode that this is like a record-breaking hit song. the fact that it's also kind of an unprecedented international cosmopolitan track may say something about the direction that music is headed in 2016 towards a more global encompassing kind of style.

Absolutely. It's really exciting to hear so much different kinds of music being celebrated in such a beautiful way and artists getting credit for it. I hope we see more of it. So before we close today, I want to do one more segment that we call off the charts, where we go deep into a track that we think should be on the charts but hasn't yet broken out. Awesome. It's been a while since we did this. I'm excited to hear what's new. Yeah, so I was telling you about how I was back in Blinky Studio listening to some of his new tracks. Yeah, I'm incredibly jealous.

Well, just like Drake, he's collaborating with some very cool producers from around the world, and he's putting out his own solo album very soon, and I'm really excited to get to debut one of his new songs. So strong. My name is Blinky Bill and I'm from Nairobi, Kenya. And Charlie is visiting my studio right now, so we're going to have fun with this. Will you tell me a little bit about where that song is coming from? The song is called So Strong.

I've lost a bunch of friends over the past few years. So it just felt like the right soundtrack for what I was feeling other day. What are you feeling? I was feeling super low and not really enjoying life. So even the lyrics, I feel like, man, it's too personal. Should I change it?

No. Then I'm like, yeah. Okay, so I'll leave it. That's the thing about sometimes when you write a lot of personal stuff is I say everything I want to say in the music. The line in it you say is I'm so strong. Like my sister,

brothers, no strong. The line in it you say is I'm so strong. Do you say a little bit about that? Actually, I think that line was written by my collaborator on the track. This guy in Paris, he's called French Kid. I think he's probably 22 years old or something. I think he listened to it. I didn't even tell him the story behind what I'm saying right now.

But he listened to it and interpreted it in his own way. I think it's a back and forth where it's like one person is feeling super isolated. And then he comes in and says, like, collectively we are strong and we need to take care of each other and stuff like that. I love the moment at the very end where he says, We are so strong. And on the production, what's happening at that moment? There's like a bunch of voices. It kind of reminds me of Michael Jackson, in a sense.

Like, what are those other sounds you're hearing on the track? So you heard it sits on Michael Jackson. What else do you hear on there? Kanye, then there's some form of, I don't even know what African vibe there is. Maybe it's in the percussion. Connect. with it strongly because there's something about it that just feels very African as well.

I look at it. It's both place-based but also can reach to anybody. Yeah. Yeah. So fingers crossed. It's so rare that I hear a track that like right off the bat, I'm like, oh, that's wonderful. full. I'm not trying to flatter you either. I mean, I wouldn't say that if I didn't mean it. This episode of Switched on Pop was produced by me, Charlie Harding. And me, Nate Sloan.

Our design, as always, is done by Luke Harris. Check out his work at Luke Harris.com. Big thanks to Blinky Bill for talking to us and spinning some of his upcoming music. You can check out more of his work at SoundCloud.com slash BlinkyB. You can also listen to more episodes of Switched on Pop on our website, Switchedonpop.com on Google Play or on iTunes where we would really appreciate it if you gave us a high five and left us a review. And you can chat with us on Twitter anytime at our handle Switched on Pop. We back in another two weeks with a very special episode where Nate will be

traveling around the world. And until then, thanks for listening. Attention Spotify. Has arrived on the new Google Jasmine Absurd of Carolina Herrera, a fragrance intense with carathe gourmet and addicciful. Imagine a jasmine emvolventy, A combination that seduce from the first instant and just means absolute, hypnotic irresistible. Discover it,

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