Switched on Pop - Steve Lacy brings bedroom pop to the Billboard top

Episode Date: October 18, 2022

It’s the song that launched a thousand TikTok videos – or over 500,000 to be exact: Steve Lacy’s “Bad Habit.”  The track is a smooth, psychedelia tinged ode to yearning, currently spending its third week on the top of the Billboard Hot 100. Lacy is an artist dedicated to shifting form and convention, from his records with alternative R&B band The Internet to his productions for artists like Mac Miller and Vampire Weekend. Even in his solo work, his songs are unpredictable, deftly moving through genre in the vein of artists like Prince and Stevie Wonder.  “Bad Habit” specifically, though, is rooted in the genre of bedroom pop, a scene slowly gaining mainstream traction. With this track, Lacy is taking the sound that’s seeped through TikTok and Spotify to the top of the charts. On this episode of Switched On Pop, we dig deep into Lacy's career and his ability to craft immaculate melodies. Songs Discussed: Steve Lacy, “Bad Habit” Sam Smith, Kim Petras, “Unholy” The Internet, “Dontcha” The Internet, “Special Affair” The Internet, “Palace/Curse (feat. Tyler, The Creator & Steve Lacy) Steve Lacy, “C U Girl” Steve Lacy, “Dark Red” Steve Lacy, “Only If” Steve Lacy, “Like Me” Steve Lacy, “Playground” Steve Lacy, “Static” Stevie Wonder, “Signed, Sealed, Delivered” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Discover it now and let you move over your sensual. Welcome to Switch on Pop. I'm producer Rianna Cruz. I'm songwriter

Charlie Harding and I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. So guys, something really interesting is happening on Billboard right now, the top two songs on the charts are both by queer artists. So Unholy by Sam Smith featuring Kim Petrus is currently at number two. One of the best songs about auto detailing that I've encountered.

I think I'm not missing anything there, right? That is what the song's about. I mean, I think that Unholy is maybe the worst song to hit the charts in years, but that's a personal opinion. Yeah. It's definitely a little bit of a can we do Montero Call Me By Your Name by Lil Nas X again? She got married to a boy like you. Because it's a very similar chord progression. Right. It's a very kind of similar vibe. It's a queer anthem.

Right. I think it's fun, though. I love competitors. For me, though, the song is lacking. The melody does not hook me. the lyrics are garbled metaphorical nonsense in my eyes, but I digress. I mean, I think it's pretty cool because it's the highest charting song ever by trans people. Sam Smith is non-binary, competitors as trans women, so that's pretty dope. But at number one, we currently have the song Bad Habit by Steve Lacey. Such a different vibe.

Such a different vibe. For many people, this is their first introduction to Steve. Eve Lacey. He's a multi-genre musician that has been nominated for several Grammys across multiple projects, written and produced for artists like Kendrick Lamar and Mac Miller, and has been one of Gen Z's main success stories considering he's only 24 years old. Dang. Wow. Isn't that wild? I know it's like I got to catch up. Bad Habit, though, is also a baffling song to hit number one. I don't know if you guys agree, but it's like three different songs, there's an a cappella section, seem to organically sprout out of nowhere. And to me,

this song is miles better than unholy. So I think we got to understand and explore why this track is hitting number one over the studio produced, probably more likely to hit number one song unholy. First of all, we have to understand the big question that's probably on a lot of people's minds. Who is Steve Lacey? We want you, Steve. We want you. We want you. I see what you did there, and I like it. So to understand Steve, we got to go back a few years. Honestly, a decade at this point, Steve's first big project was the band, The Internet. It's formed by former odd future members,

Matt Martians, and Sid. They're an alternative R&B band that blends everything from hip hop, jazz, funk, and electronica. This is Don'tcha off of 2013's Feel Good. Ooh, that bass. Can we put that at number one, please? Right. Just nine years later, don'tcha goes number one. The internet is a musical collective that makes me feel very optimistic about the future of music.

Yes, and Steve Lacey is in an innate part of the group. He started producing for them in 2013 and became officially listed as a member of the group in 2015. He produced seven tracks on the record Ego Death, which came out that same year, which was nominated for the best urban contemporary album at the Grammys. Here's special affair off of that record. So loose and spacey. So great. Steve Lacey produced this track.

He played bass and guitar on it. And I think honestly a highlight is the production, right? There's even sound effects of birds and animals and running water in there. And a lot of the Internet's music to me feels like you're sort of immersed in like a terrarium or like an ethereal dream about nature. There's so much happening and it gives you a certain time and place.

Maybe the metaphor is you're actually watching a nature webcam on the computer on the internet. So true. It all circles back. No, no, I like terrarium funk. That sounds like a playlist that would do very well. Right? Like listen to the back half. of this. Like, I think I even heard like a frog in there or something, you know.

So you're saying that's all Steve Lacey's doing? Yeah, I mean, I think it is. You can see it on other songs of the internet. The big song of theirs is called Palace Curse. It features Steve Lacey and Tyler the creators featured artists. And similar to special affair, there's subtle layers in the production that create a scene rather than a song, which I think is very important to understanding the internet's work and Steve Lacey's work as So the song opens by Tyler the Creator.

And y'all ain't never been to a party before? And then after Tyler the Creator intros the song, we have a drum machine, then a simple bass line. And then what I think is an electric piano, backed up by a layered group of talking voices. It's like you're hearing this in the middle of a party, right? Like Tyler the Creator is opening the door to a function. you just entered, and this song is playing over the speaker. It's pretty dope.

That's the internet. Steve Lacey's a member. The group is still releasing music. Their last record came out in 2018, called Hive Mind. Steve also has his own solo work, as evidenced by Bad Habit. And his work, contrary to the work of the internet, is a blend of indie, alternative, even psychedelia. And something that has emerged over the past few years, this sort of subgenre of, bedroom pop. Yeah, when I first heard bad habit by Steve Lacey, I was like, the Lorham playlist is

having its moment. And if you don't know what the Loram playlist is, the very popular Spotify playlist of bedroom poppy, lofi music that has been slow burning for a long time now, but has never really had breakout hits that have like really taken over in the way that his song has. It's the bedroom pop vibe. You can hear it in bad habit. It starts with a very delicate almost, like poorly recorded falsetto at the beginning. You can also hear in the production there are some choices that are almost amateurish. Like at the beginning of the second verse, the voice just kind of pans from left to right in a very strange and unnecessary way.

And then when the bridge comes in, there's just a slow, gradual fade of all of the music leaving into an acapella. There's no kind of elegant transition, like pop really produced kind of thing. And it goes into a totally different kind of sound that also feels like, yeah, it was just recorded in a home closet. Right. And that's the sort of goal of bedroom pop, right, is to sound like it was recorded in a bedroom. You didn't even try. It just like, this is the first thing we did. It's fun. Right, like it just, oh, I just threw this together. Yeah, exactly.

Like, I didn't even think about the transition. I just put a long fade. Right, like simple. Another element that communicates that bedroom pop sound to me is the main guitar line itself, which sounds kind of rough. It's not quantized. It's not perfectly played. It kind of feels like it might be the first take. With bedroom pop, there's a sense of spontaneity and intimacy.

and leaving some of the rough edges that are shaved off of your unholeys. Right. Exactly. I love the idea of comparing the two because it's like bad habit, a song that I love and unholy, a song that I despise. It's fascinating to encounter them both at the top of the Billboard charts because they seem to represent such different approaches to music making. Unholy feels like it was made in an anodonic chamber. with every detail perfectly massaged and finessed

and bad habit kind of feels like Steve Lacey was like, yeah, let's like throw some stuff down on tape, print it, and I'm going to go take a bath. Yeah, it's kind of like the death of the Max Martin melodic math style of songwriting that there's like, you've got to get the formula lined up just right. All the hooks have to respond to each other in the perfect way. All the space has to be filled and,

and polished. And with Steve Lacey, it's like just hook here, dangling hook over there, a melody that is its own hook but there's not the chorus that doesn't come back or respond to other melodies. It's all very sort of hodgepodge. These sort of vibes have always been in Steve Lacey's career from his first single. His first single is called C-U girl. That's the letter C and the letter you. Obviously.

Obviously. The only way to spell it. Right. And it came out in 2015. Well, that slaps. I love that song. It's a very simple track. Comes in at like two minutes. It's a verse sandwich between two hooks, followed by nearly a minute of outro.

Two-minute song, that's one minute of outro. It's crazy. This guy does not give any F's about form and convention. No, not at all. And the outro is actually where it gets funky. Lacey actually reverses the song for the minute of outro and just plays the song backwards but slower in the back half. Psychedelic.

Truly psychedelic. And so if you play that the right way, this is what you get. The secret track is alive and well in the work of Steve Lacey. That's really fun. Yeah, very kind of 60s 70s thing. Yeah, and it actually sets a precedent for these multi-part deconstructed songs that happen in the solo. That's basically what bad habit is. It's a several-part song that could function as three separate

songs, and they're kind of sandwiched together with a very long outro. His other big single came out in 2017. This is Dark Red. And if you could believe it, this song has more plays on Spotify than Bad Habit. It has over 600 million plays. Wow. Huh. It really shows us that while the charts might make us think that there is a monolith of music, that there are so many people listening to so many different scenes. Like, I never heard the song, which is ridiculous.

Right. Hundreds of millions people have. It's crazy. And the crazier thing is that after Bad Habit was shooting up the charts, this actually charted, the song from 2017. It charted on October 1st of this year, went up 16 spots to 79 when Bad Habit. hit number one and held that spot for a second week, which is crazy because the song is five years old at this point and also on his demo, which was recorded entirely on his iPhone.

That's not even bedroom pop. It's like sidewalk pop. Prior to Bad Habit, this is the song that he was known for. It went viral on TikTok. It has over 100,000 videos on there. Everything from a Spanish-dubed Gray's Anatomy fan cam with 3.4 million likes. There were several of those, by the way, all over a million likes with this song soundtracking it. There's just something about that song that's like conducive to TikTok. It speaks to the youth and Gray's Anatomy fans. Gray's Anatomy fans love Steve Lacey.

So his debut record, Apollo 21, came out in 2019 and was Grammy nominated for the best urban contemporary album. Again, we have the same lo-fi, yet layered and inventive production. and this is the first track on the album only if. He's like quoting early New York hip-hop and Ravi Shankar. No, Stevie Wonder. That's like electric guitar sitar that you would have heard on Stevie Wonder tracks.

You can hear it on like Sign Sealed Delivered, I'm yours. Steve Lacey's doing that, but with like an old drum machine. Yeah, that's dope. It's that over a simple drum machine beat with these supplemental percussion in these woohing sound effects that like feel like you're hitting one of those like child soundboards, you know, that you like give like a four-year-old and they just like hit the buttons and it's like whoosh. A lot of those in my house right now. It's a lot of sound effects all the time. The thing is it works and it's fitting because Steve Lacey describes his own music as quote unquote plaid, like the fabric plaid. With there being loads going on, but none of it clashes.

Ooh, powerful sartorial metaphor. My music is like tweed because it all sounds the same. And after a while, it's really uncomfortable. That's a good one, date. And Sam Smith's unholy is like polyester, you know? I was thinking the exact same thing, kind of gross and slimy and uncomfortable. Well, Rihanna, I was going to say it's flawless to look at, but it might make you break out in a rash. Exactly.

And there's no natural fibers. Maybe that's the better analogy. Okay, okay. I think we've taken this train to the end of the line. Sorry, Rihanna. What were you saying? Nate, you mean to say we've pulled that thread too far. No, don't encourage him, Rihanna.

Don't even just pretend like you didn't hear anything. That's the only way to deal with him. Anyway, going back to the plaid metaphor, Steve Lacey's solo music works because there's different textures, instruments, and layers. The song, Like Me, on Apollo 21, is like a nine-minute song with several different aspects to it.

It's a crazy song. It sounds fundamentally out of tune. It has loud boom-bap drums. A twangy good song. guitar tone. There's angelic background harmonies. And the discordance fits a song like, like me, which I interpret it personally to be about struggling under labels and figuring out who you are. It's one of those songs where it's like you make it sound uncomfortable because it's supposed to make you feel as uncomfortable as the artist's feeling. Exactly. And over its nine minutes,

it becomes three different songs. And I'm getting the feeling that that's his staple. There's the discordant section that is in the beginning. Then it slows down around the four minute mark. Then it changes to a whole different song entirely around six minutes and 30 seconds. It's got that vibe from the internet that we heard earlier. And then if you thought that we were done with the changes, the outro is a whole different thing entirely. So like me, honestly, is very similar to the structure and the tone of bad habit. If Steve Lacey's been doing this for so long and these songs have these similarities, what makes bad habit the number one?

We'll get to that in the second half of the episode. MESS in Shopify.s bar records. Immigration may be Donald Trump's signature issue. President Trump is now targeting predominantly democratic cities for ice raids and deportations. Dozens of protesters clashing with immigration and customs enforcement agents in Minneapolis Tuesday. We will begin the process of returning millions and millions 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?

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It debuted at 100 on the Billboard charts and hit number one after 12 weeks. Currently, the song has soundtracked nearly half a million videos on TikTok alone. Isn't that wild? I can't entirely wrap my head around that. The way that Dark Red has over 100K videos on TikTok and Bad Habit has nearly 500K videos on TikTok, it's truly wild to me. It kind of makes sense. I mean, if you're going to be making videos in your bedroom, you want to soundtrack it to music that sounds like you could have made it in your bedroom. Right, right. And the instrumentals of Bad Habit falls into the rest of the Steve Lacey catalog because it's this sort of bedroom pop-oriented track. It's described by Slay, and I love the way to describe it, as charmingly lackadaisical.

which I think is very apt and honestly the most aggier description I could personally come up with but just because it's relaxed just because it's lo-fi it does not mean it is boring by any means the vocals on the track

are highly expressive and my personal highlight of the song they tell a story Steve uses several different intonations at several points in the song we have the beginning whispered falsetto to confident chess voice.

It's kind of like a pleading in a way. It feels very, very childlike, very innocent. Almost like a cry, though. It's like, oh, I wish I knew. Because he's singing in that place where it's like, I wish I. At the very beginning. Right, right. Super vulnerable.

Very unfiltered. But that's not the only vocal tone or trick he uses around 42 seconds into the song. The vocals become very unpredictable. I thought two or two good for me, my dear. Never gave me time of day, my dear. It's okay things happen for. Bedroom pop yodeling. I think we invented a new genre, or Steve invented a new genre.

This is one of the parts in the song that really stands out to me because he places those high notes in such unexpected locations in the middle of a single word. Like reason. Reason. It's like jumping your voice from one octave to another. There's nothing new about that. Doing it in the middle between the two syllables of a word, it's very unusual to me. It's like artificial voice cracking. Yeah.

When you put it that way, it increases that sense of vulnerability. It's like, you know, makes me think of reading my Torah portion at my bar mitzvah and going through puberty and my voice being all over the place. It's a very vulnerable feeling. No auto tune. No auto tune. It sort of contributes to like that youthfulness that we're feeling, the putting his emotions to the forefront, in the lyrics, kind of making him sound like he's on the verge of tears.

It's kind of him reckoning with grieving, whatever that may be a relationship, a lover. Reasons. It's also very hard to do, by the way. Then right after that, he goes into his gorgeous upper register. This higher range maybe marks a return to that Prince sound. heard earlier, but here it's a lot gentler. There's more vibrato in the tone. It feels a little more sensitive, less brash than the version of that voice we heard earlier. So it seems like yet another

one of the characters that he's playing over the course of this song. I like you call it characters. I think that's a really cool way of describing the structure of the song because there's like five or more hooks that are smashed together. But these different characters kind of bring it together under one bad habit banner. I think we could probably have a two hour long debate about what part of this song is the chorus. Right, right. Is it, I wish I knew you wanted me? Is it kind of bite your tongue like a bad habit?

Is it any other of the many hooks that just go throughout the song? And speaking of those hooks, a new one comes in around two minutes into the song. There's a new melody carried on harmonies and it becomes Acapella. This whole sequence stunned me the first time I heard it. First of all, you have this almost classical technique going on called Counterpoint, where Steve Lacey sings two melodies simultaneously that interact with one another. And then that transitions into this moment where all the instruments, dropout except Steve Lacey's voice.

And it's new the way to wow me. Fuck around, get tongue-tidded. I turn it on. I make it round even. And it's one of the most naked, candid sounds that I've ever heard on a number one pop song. Yeah, because during the counterpoint section, there's reverberation, a sense of space. But once everything fades out, it's just Steve Lacey, close on the mic.

completely unprocessed. Returning to that theme of vulnerability and what people might connect with in this music, it seems to me a musical analog. First, you have all these different voices that seems to represent his lack of mental clarity or something. And then all of a sudden it zeroes into just his voice. And it's like this moment of transcendent truth and vision. It feels like a very human song to me.

Yeah, I thought it was crazy when I heard it on the radio for the first time. time and I was under the presumption that there would be like a radio edit, you know, like they cut it off at the a cappella part, but they played the song in its entirety, which I thought was really cool because I'm like, when's the last time I heard a song like that on the radio where everything cuts out and it's just unprocessed vocals? I don't think I ever have. Yeah, it's like it feels like it's designed to work in a stadium where everyone sings along at that moment and it would actually be really huge. I'm sure that's what's going to happen when this is played live. But over the way to wow me, fuck around, get tongue-tided.

But over the radio and you're in your car by yourself, what happened? Where'd the music go? And just when you thought we were done with the song shifting, there's one more part. So revisiting his plat, I think it works because there's a lot going on, but it all seamlessly flows and comes together in the best way. Might be like three different variations of plaid that are power clashing in a way that totally works. So this is classic Steve Lacey. Think of like me, the song we played in the first half.

There's a discordant boom bap section. There's the slowed down part. And then there's the emotional layering in the back half that coalesces into a chill, smooth, R&B, quiet storm, outro. On Bad Habit, we're seeing the same thing. And it actually harkens back to the name of the record, Gemini writes, because Gemini is sort of two sides. And this song is sort of a manifestation of this sort of flipped different sides of his personality, characters, as we said before. And it kind of shows these multiple facets of Steve Lacey's personality through the song. So he's really kind of the king of bedroom pop right now.

And in some ways, the top of pop, which I'm kind of excited about. about because usually when one trend has been around for a long time, the thing which pops up after it isn't necessarily birth from that same idea, but rather from a totally different lineage. And this feels like a totally different lineage than the Kim Petrus Sam Smith song, which is like, yeah, I've heard that sound before. Bad habit, you know, if you've been paying attention to the billboard, this feels really out of another galaxy. And I feel like Michael question at the end of this is, is this the first example of what might become a new trend of these bedroom pop songs reaching the highest echelons of mainstream success? Or will this end up being something of an outlier? Yeah. I mean, I have the big question of like, why is this number one? Because I think that's the question on everybody's minds. I think part of it is like, Gen Z has short attention spans. Obviously, this is a song that is propelled by TikTok and Instagram. It's algorithm-driven music, and I mean that in the best way. But it did slowly make its way up the charts

over 12 weeks, right? Yeah, so it's both organic and algorithmically powered at the same time. I mean, Bad Habit even has an official sped-up release, most certainly for the exact purpose of soundtracking TikTok videos. It's the Helium remix. I think it's also the fact that this year has come to be known as the year of vibes, a term that I saw in an article by Slate that sums it up really well. The hits to excel this year have been moody songs where the purpose isn't necessarily to be good, but to capture like an atmosphere and aesthetic, right? Like think like heat waves by glass animals. Wait for you by future Drake and Thames.

These are songs that exist in a vibe. It goes back to what we were saying about vibe snatching a few weeks ago. It's the sort of trend of 2022 that it is the year of the vibe. And I'll be the first to say, for a while I didn't get Steve Lacey. I think, like, I heard him a lot as somebody that's in Gen Z. And I vocalized this to my partner yesterday. And they were like, honestly, sometimes a song is just meant to have a very particular and specific vibe. That's it. And I was like, wow, like something about that really spoke to me. And as we exist in the

year of the vibes, maybe it's true that no artist has made a better or more concentrated or more accomplished effort to capture the goal of a vibe than Steve Lacey. It's a testament to the songs he makes, which are catchy and inventive and can soundtrack everything, whether it's in your bedroom or thousands of people in an arena singing that habit. Switch on Pop is produced by Rihanna Cruz, engineered by Brandon McFarie. Arlen, edited by Jolie Myers-Gottlieb, Community Management by Abby Barr. Our executive producers are Deshaq Keroua and Hanna Rosen and are a member of the Vox Media Podcast Network and a production of Vulture.

You can find more episodes of Switched on Pop on Spotify, the Apple Podcast app, virtually any other podcast player you might use, as well as our website, www.w.w.com. You can find us at Switched on Pop on Twitter and Instagram, and we want to hear from you. What is the artist that you think makes plaid music, much like Steve Lacey describes himself. I need to discover more of these. I love this clothing metaphor, and I want to know what the people think. Oh, I got to make car heart music. Plaid playlist, terrarium funk, vulnerability vibes.

I think we've coined a number of powerful aesthetics. Yeah, we're coming up with things. Trucker hat trap. Ooh, that's a good one. Where did that come from? I'm just doing it right now. No, that's, I'm so done with you, Charlie. You're out of pocket.

We'll be back next Tuesday. Maybe. And until then, thanks for listening.