Switched on Pop - The Pure Pop of Charlie Puth + Carly Rae (ft Hanif Abdurraqib)

Episode Date: June 14, 2018

Part I: The Doctors Are In! We diagnose a listener's musical malady, namely: "why does Charlie Puth's new jam 'BOY' make us feel so weird?!" Part II: Guest Hanif Adburraqib, author of They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, helps break down Carly Rae Jepsen's epic "Cut to the Feeling" to understand why CRJ is a different kind of pop star. Featuring: •Charlie Puth - BOY •Ismael Miranda - Recordando •Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings - Nobody's Baby •The Beatles - She's a Woman •The Cars - Since You're Gone •Ludwig van Beethoven - Symphony No 5 in C Minor, I •Carly Rae Jepsen - Cut to the Feeling Check out more of Hanif's work at his website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switched On Pop. I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. And I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. Charlie today is very exciting. We have a two-part episode. In the first half, we're going to introduce a new segment called The Doctors Are In, where we diagnose listeners musical melodies.

Great. And in the second half, we are going to be. going to be joined by a very special guest, the brilliant author, Hanif Abdurikib, to talk about one of our favorite pop stars, Carly Ray Jepson. Oh, fantastic. So this is an episode of Pure Pop here, because for our first segment, the doctors are in. Wait, do we need some sort of, like, theme music? I think we could use some theme music, and I've cooked a little something up in the lab,

hopefully with the right amount of cheese and 80s to do this segment justice. Oh my gosh. You just, you tickle me. Thank you. Okay, so the doctors are in. Now, let's have a disclaimer first. I am a doctor of musicology. I'm not a doctor, but I pretend to be.

No, you're not. You're kind of a Dr. Nick type doc. You're like not, your certification is not totally above board. You're like the Michael Cohen of doctors. Armchair. But, you know, nevertheless, we trust you. Flo-blow. In this segment, you know, we get a lot of emails, tweets from listeners who are experiencing some kind of musicalological malady.

And I thought we could help them using our expertise here. Great. And two people are actually suffering from the same malady. And it has to do with a song by Charlie Puth called Boy. I'm not surprised. Let's just take a listen to the chorus of this infectious, literally, song. So before we give our diagnosis, let's hear the symptoms, okay? Sure.

And this was brought to our attention first by Sierra Tomlinson, who writes, quote, It would be awesome to hear your take on boy. It is the most mind-boggling song on the album for me. Because the first time I heard it, I wasn't sure if I liked it, because everything seemed either a second too long or too short. Yeah. But after the third or so listen, I am sold. Okay. And then another email from Kevin Welsh, he says, like all Puth songs, it's catchy as heck, but it's got a weird tempo going on. It starts with him singing in 4-4 over 3-4 beat. I think that's real music theory, but I don't know. It's boggling and sort of unprecedented in pop. So two people are boggled by this song.

as they should be. And I think in order to understand the boggling aspect of it, we need to listen to the very beginning of the track. Yes. This girl's trying to lock me down and I always up and leave. But for the first time in a while, I want to throw away the key. Good stuff. Yes.

I think I know why they are feeling so ill. Yes. Okay. Good. So you have a diagnosis for us, Charlie. I do. Why we're feeling so boggled by the song. I think we have a severe case of downbeat deception.

Whoa, that sounds dire. It's not dire, it's recoverable, but I think we have to at least understand what's going on in order to get ourselves back on the beat, if you will. Ooh, yes, yes, good, because I know what they mean. I feel something a little off when I'm listening to this, and I want to understand what it is. It's all about where the downbeat of the song is playing. You think that the downbeat of the song is happening in one place, but it's actually happening in another. We know the downbeat is the most emphasized beat of a measure of music. When you count out one, two, three, four, the downbeat is the one.

It's where you dance. It's where you step. It's where you clap, right? And usually the downbeat is unambiguous because you don't want people to be confused about where to jump up and down. That would be an unsuccessful pop song. Right. But when the song Boy starts, it sounds pretty obvious where the downbeat should be. Right.

We think. From the start, we hear this really great synth sound. And I'll add a beat with a clap on the downbeat to show you how the downbeat begins in the song, or at least as we think it does. Ah, okay. The deception. Then the vocal comes in, and I think you can hear that everything quickly starts to just feel off. Right. By the time the full drums come in, it's clear that something sounds unambiguously wrong.

Yeah, I don't like that. That's making me uncomfortable. Yeah, it's clear that something is wrong in the rhythm, and it's wrong because we started counting in the wrong place. But Puth isn't making some sort of mistake here. He's intentionally playing with us to grab our attention. And I have a whole theory about that that I'll share later. But for now, let's just focus on this downbeat deception. If we had been paying close attention, we should have noticed that we were counting the whole thing totally wrong. Did you catch the clue that he left for us?

The clue? There is a clue. No, no, I didn't see the clue. It's the high hat that enters into the song very early on. Oh, right, right, that subtle percussion in the background of this beginning verse. And you can hear that the high hat has an emphasis on beats two, and four, much like where the snare usually comes in. One, two, three, four. And so we can use this information to get a sense of where the downbeat should be. And it's not where we originally think it is.

Now, this clue is really, really subtle. So what I want to do is slow things down so that everyone can hear, really, really hear what's going on. Yeah, this is kind of a heady condition to deal with. I like that. Let's slow it down, take a sonogram. Yeah, let's get in deep. We want to be sure about our diagnosis. So the first time that we hear the synthesizer, it's all by itself and playing out a full measure of four notes. You can count it out.

One, two, three, four. So it would seem like each time that it comes in, the synth is playing on the downbeat, right on the one. But this is where we are wrong. Because when we add the high hat into our beat, The two aren't playing together. So we have to choose which one to trust. Is it the high hat or the synth that is establishing the downbeat?

Let's zoom in on this to hear the difference. To make it really audible, I'm going to put claps every time the synthesizer hits, a kick drum on the downbeat and quarter notes, and we'll keep the high hat in there as well. And I'll play it really slowly. So if it were the synth that we're establishing our downbeat, we would hear it like this. And that's how I think we hear it when the song starts.

We don't have any other information to tell us otherwise. Exactly. But if it's the high hat that's establishing the downbeat, we would hear the song like this. Ooh, that is a very small difference. Yeah, but which one sounds more natural? Without any other information, it would be the first. Right. And this is where things get tricky because the first does sound at a base level more appealing.

But if you know something about drums, you know that the high. hat is usually used in pop and rock drumming to count every single beat so that when the kick and the snare can kind of play around and syncopate and make things more interesting, the high hat always just counts one, two, three, four, or some division of that to keep things all in time. Right. So in this case, I think what we need to do is to trust the high hat. And really the only way to know if our diagnosis is correct, if the high hat is actually

where the beat is, we'd have to move forward into the song, as you said, to hear more material, I'll get more information, see if this actually makes sense in context to the larger piece. So let's again listen to Charlie Puth's first verse vocal with the beat established by the high hat. So I'm going to add in a beat here. Maybe you can hear that suddenly everything starts to align a little bit better, right? The first time we heard it was like things were kind of clashing and now things starting to come together. We can really hear it by the time we move forward and the rest of the

instruments start to come in, it just clicks. Yeah, I don't feel that same discomfort anymore. Right, I'll play the discomforting version. Yeah, not quite, not quite. The discomforting version is how we first hear that downbeat, the deceived downbeat, because we were counting to the synth, not to the hi-hat. What's happening here is a great trick. It's actually that the synthesizer is anticipating the downbeat of the song. It's being played just a fraction of a second before the downbeat, and that's what's confusing us. When the song starts, all we have is the synthesizer, right? We don't hear that anticipation in relationship to anything else, and the drums, the vocal, whatever.

And so we first start counting with the synthesizer, and then only when everything else comes in do we realize we're actually ahead of the beat. Yeah. Wow, Charlie, yes, that was some Sanjay Gupta-level medical analysis right there. Okay, it's starting to come together. At the beginning, we're fooled, essentially, into thinking the downbeat is in one place by having incomplete information. Yes. And then as we get more information, the high hat presents this alternate downbeat theory. Then our brain has to slowly transition. We have to catch up.

Right. And it's very disorienting. Yeah, I think this is exactly the issue that Sierra, our listener, is dealing with, which is that things just kind of feel off. There's this clashing that's happening because she's probably counting and feeling the natural rhythm of the song one way at the beginning. And by the time all the other instruments come in, you're now counting in the wrong spot because you were deceived from the beginning. Right. And of course, you're making me realize now how Charlie Puth isn't helping us because every kind of melodic choice he's making serves to further make this downbeat issue more ambiguous.

Yes, that's true. Because he's really leaning into those false downbeats to throw us off. Even just in the synthesizer itself, you feel that emphasis the first time it lands and you're like, it must be where it is. No, you're actually not. You're skipping ahead. You're literally jumping in a moment too soon. This is great.

Can we step back for a second now? Because that was very thorough. And I'm with you. And hopefully our listeners are too. I think we can see now that the issue here in this Charlie Puth track is not that things are too long or too short or that there's two different time signatures going on. It's that we have this deceptive downbeat that always leaves us kind of disoriented and catching up. Yes. And you know, it wouldn't have been a problem if you had listened to this song just starting right in on the chorus. You would have felt where the drums are sitting.

The problem is when you start the song from the very beginning. And so it's really the catching up, which is the problem. Right. This raises a question. Okay. Now that we've done our diagnosis, why does Charlie Puth use this deceptive downbeat technique in this track? Boy, I told you I had a theory. I'm all ears, Dr. Chuck.

I think in order to understand what's happening here, we must listen to the chorus. Puth says, you tell me I'm too young, but I gave you what you were. wanted, baby, how dare you treat me just like a boy? This song is all about someone is treating Charlie of Huth like a boy and he's trying to say, I'm not a boy. I am an adult. I'm a big boy. I'm a big boy. And I think that what he's doing here is that he is using all of his skillful songwriting techniques to demonstrate that he's actually behind the scenes really quite brilliant. He's not childish. He's not unintentional, rather every single choice is being laid out here to actually first deceive us and sort of show off his suave as a big boy. That's my theory. I see. So this deceptive downbeat is an

example of the musical sophistication. Yes. That proves to his lover that he is mature enough to be with them. Yeah, you said it better than I did. And if you think that this theory might be far flung, we get some more useful information later on when Charlie Puth decides that It's time to take an improvised jazz solo, which just shouldn't fit into any modern pop music. But we can hear that he is a real virtuoso on his instrument. He's not some little kid. It's an attractive theory, Charles. Sure.

I have a slightly different one. Oh, please. Which is that this deceptive downbeat creates this kind of tension and a kind of dissonance. like we were talking about, a sort of rhythmic dissonance. And you're sort of torn between these two downbeats, the one you heard at the beginning, that's a little too early,

and the one that you hear at the end that's a little too late, that could maybe be a metaphor for this May-December relationship. These downbeats don't line up for the listener just as these two people's lives don't line up in the song. Ooh, that's a great diagnosis.

Thank you. And I have to credit our listener, Kevin Welsh, for that idea. So regardless, there is, you know, more than meets the ear in this Charlie Puth song. You didn't just say that. Over and over this young man, this boy, continues to surprise us with his pop chops. But he is not alone in exploiting this technique. In fact, I think it's part of his fealty to the pop musicians that came before him that he's doing this at the beginning. of the song because the deceptive downbeat can be found fantastically, like in different

musics from all different times and all over the world. So I just have a couple examples of this that I want to play you and really put your diagnostic skills to the test here and see if you can tell where the downbeat belongs in these examples. Ooh, I'm going to be ashamed. Okay. I'm a guitarist. Guitarist are notoriously bad at rhythm. So I'm likely to count it wrong. Oh yeah, I mean, guitarists just, you know, stand up there and look good and make, you know, guitar faces. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. I appreciate that.

Let's start with a salsa track, actually. Salsa. From the great singer Ismail Miranda. This is one called recordando, and this is a kind of technique that you hear all the time in salsa music. They love to play with this deceptive downbeat. Let's just listen to the very beginning of recordando. Okay, Charlie, so now I think the question is, do you hear the downbeat on the very first note of this guitar lick, in which case I guess it would sound like this if we slow it down a little bit? Dada da da da da da da da da da da.

Or do you hear the guitar riff as coming in slightly after a downbeat? So we kind of have a phantom downbeat at the beginning. And then the guitar comes in. So that would sound like this. da-da-da-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-oh. That's a very subtle difference. I would have to say it's probably the second because I know that salsa music really likes to play with our sense of time.

I played bass in a Afro-Latin jazz band once, and what I learned is that I could never play on the downbeat. I had to play everything but the downbeat. So my guess is that they are moving it around to play with our sense of time. time. But it's entirely a guess. I don't hear it that way. It's totally an educated guess. Let's have the reveal. We'll listen to the song, except this time we won't stop it, and we'll see if your guess is born out. Okay, great. Congratulations, Charlie. You are exactly right. Ooh, it's subtle. Ready for round two? Round two. Okay. So this technique can also be found in classic

rock. Really? You might know this one, so I don't know. It might not be a fair, fight, but let's just listen to the very beginning of a song by a little band called The Beatles. Ooh. That's all you get. This is early stuff. Yeah, yeah. Is this, do you want to be my baby? No, this is, she's a woman.

Early tracks. Okay. So, here you have a few options as well. Okay. I think the most likely one is that the downbeat starts with the first guitar note you hear. That would make sense. Which would sound like, Bump, bap, bap.

That's John Lennon's angular, tense rhythm guitar. But maybe there's something else. It could be something like this, where the guitar happens after each downbeat, in which case it would sound like this. Duh, da, da, da, da, da. That makes sense. Oftentimes the Beatles would play

these sort of stab guitar lines on off beats. I don't know. Maybe you're trying to trick me. I'm going to say it's the first one. Okay. Let's have the reveal. We'll play the song and let it keep going. It was a dirty trick, Charlie.

The downbeat was not aligned with the guitars and was in between each of those guitar strokes, throwing you off kilter in a wonderful way. Can I also say that I'm not sure that those guitar hits were perfectly in time with each other? Were the Beatles ever perfectly in time with each other? Debatable. Okay. Now, let's move on to the world of soul. because this is another place where you'll find this deceptive downbeat technique quite often. And I think a nice example comes at the beginning of a song by the late Sharon Jones and the Dab Kings.

This is nobody's baby off their album, 100 Days, 100 Nights. Let's just listen to the very beginning of this track, which starts with a solo bass line. Great. Yeah, okay. That sounds like I'm right on the beat. Okay, so in that case, the downbeat would be in line with the very first note we hear and would sound like this. Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. So, sounds like you're very confident about that guess.

Let's reveal the rest of the song now and see if, in fact, the downbeat is exactly on the very first note of that baseline. Shea. Oh, man. Isn't that just wonderfully disorienting to listen to it? Oh, I feel like it takes five seconds to be like, wait, where am I? Right. Oh, it's so rewarding. We got a few more here, Charles, because, again, you can just find this everywhere.

Let's listen to some new wave now. Let's listen to the cars since you're gone. You have no idea. So, once again, I think we expect it to be on the very first note we hear, the downbeat, you know, just lined up perfectly with those kind of drum hits. Is that actually the case? Of course not. Of course not. At this point, I think you know exactly what's going to happen here.

It just, oh, it flips. It's amazing. Yes, they flip the beat right around and that brings us to the granddaddy of all downbeat deceptions. Are you ready, Chuck? Ludwig. I hear you, Ludwig. This is the original downbeat deception because Beethoven makes us think that the very first note we hear is the downbeat, right?

That it goes, bu, ba, but in fact, that first note we hear is not a downbeat. It comes right after the downbeat. Yes. Making this 1808 symphony

kind of the predecessor to all of these experiments from the Beatles to Charlie Puth to salsa to Seoul. There's no doubt that Beethoven was pretty Prague. Well, this has been the doctors are in

curing your musical maladies since 2018. Let's get that cheesy theme music to play us out. It sounds like this song was almost inspired by Boy, which is all these 90s references. I think you did a really nice job with this track. I'm excited to do more of these bits with you. This is fun. I want to hear more melodies.

Yes. Send them in. Whatever's affecting you. We will get to the bottom of it. Charlie, that was wonderful breakdown of a pop nugget. And in the second half of this episode, we are going to bring in guest Hanif Abdurikib to talk about another paragon of pop perfection. Carly Ray Jepson and her song, Cut to the Feeling. So stick around.

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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? 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. Welcome back to Switched on Pop. I am so excited for our guest today. Will you please introduce yourself?

Hi, yeah, I'm Hanif Abdur-A-Keeb, writer, poet, essayist from Columbus, Ohio. Hanif is one of the most exciting new voices in music journalism right now. And today what I want to do is take. your essay about Carly Ray Jepson called Carly Ray Jepson Loves You Back, which reports to your experiencing seeing the pop star at a Terminal 5 concert in New York. I want to take some of your insights into Carly Ray Jepson's unique pop persona and try and support them with music to understand how Carly Ray Jepson is a totally unique kind of pop star, one who relies more on unbridled enthusiasm and awkwardness than the kind of knowing distance that so many

pop stars have. And I'd love if we could begin, Hanif, by having you read from that essay. This is the difficult work. Convincing a room full of people to set their sadness aside and for a night bring out whatever joy remains underneath. In a world where there is so much grief to be had, leading the people to the water and letting them drink from your cupped hands. Inside Terminal 5, under the spell of Carly Ray Jepson, love is simply love. It is not war. It is not something you are thrown into and forced to survive. It is something you experience, and if you're lucky enough, time slows down.

It is not as fashionable as our precious American anguish, our feelings that eclipse all else. But then again, there is a time to throw all else aside and see if maybe dancing will bring us back to life, packed so tightly in a room of strangers that everyone becomes one whole body, shaking free whatever is holding it down. Sometime, around the third song of Jepsen's set, I started to notice the people kissing. One couple first, and then another, and then another. This continued for the remainder of the show. I never looked long, just a glance after nearby movement caught my eye.

A couple directly in front of me, occupying the small bit of wall that I was forced to Occupy, began kissing each other passionately during warm blood, while Jepson held the microphone, stand with both hands and whispered, I would throw in the towel for you, boy, because you lift me up and catch me when I'm falling, into the mic. The couple pushed back into me, one of them stepping on my shoes. They broke their embrace long enough for one of them to mouth the words, sorry, dude. I smiled and gave an understanding nod that was not seen as they were already falling back into each other. Wow, yes, thank you. It captures so well the experience you get listening to Carly Ray Jepson. Carly Ray Jepson is such an atypical pop star in a lot of ways, as you point out. She's

kind of occupies this role of the best friend, the avatar of breathless excitement, a certain kind of awkwardness that you capture so well and that makes people feel uninhibited when they listen to her. Yeah, absolutely. So Hanif, with this introduction you've given us, I want to listen to a song that I think captures this quality, this almost embarrassing enthusiasm. And the song I'd like us all to discuss is cut to the feeling. Let's start and just dive into the chorus of this Carly Wright-Jepson classic. My favorite part of the song. That pretty much says it all right there. How's everyone feeling after listening to that? I think that song is really great

because I think that song really encapsulates what she does well where she kind of hones in on some kind of sonic shovel and digs out the emotion she's arcing for and then keeps hitting at it. I think that song is better than almost everything on the album itself, on the album Emotion, because that song wasn't on the, it was on the soundtrack for some movie that she was in.

Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. Cut to the Feeling came out almost exactly a year ago to the day and was not part of her most recent album Emotion, but was for an animated film called Ballerina, I think. I can't imagine any of us have seen it, but this song is an indication. It must be worth watching. And I love that.

Excavating our emotions with a sonic shovel. Let's try and better understand how she does that. I think it's all about setting up a contrast between verse and chorus, where the verse is kind of impatient, it's bridled, it's contained, and the chorus is like pure liberation and freedom. And I think there's a lot of subtle ways that she creates this contrast. So let's start in the world of the verse, this more intense, close, contained world. This is the world where lyrically, she says, I had a dream or was it real.

I've been denying how I feel. Let's just take a listen to the very beginning of the song. Really, we crossed the line and it was on, and deny, and asfection, take me through the stars. Just like, oh. Really frenetic. Yeah.

In addition to that frenetic kind of rhythm that we hear, which my partner described as sounding like a middle school aerobics class, the sense, I think, is reinforced by a very low melody. This melody is very low in her range, very hesitant. very hesitant almost. Let's isolate that melody and hear it kind of in a vacuum. Not only is the melody

in a pretty low range, but I think we have this sense of stasis and containment because underneath that melody we have a harmony that doesn't do anything. It just sits there. We just have a single major chord that rings out

for the entirety of the verse from beginning to end. I can approach. approximate that just by throwing a big low slug of a a underneath this whole thing. Okay, interesting. It gives her room to have a bit more of a little dancing vocal, even though it's in a low register by keeping things so harmonically simple. Her melody is able to sort of dance around a bunch here. I hear that, but it's also like she's trapped. Maybe she can dance

around, but this harmony isn't going anywhere. This rhythm isn't going anywhere. It's inescapable. However, that all changes with this moment of transition where everything opens up as we move into the chorus. Carly Ray Jepsen sings, take me to the stars. And this moment is like the moment of apotheosis. We go up and up and up in every sense. There's this wordless vocal that kind of acts as our ladder, our stairway to heaven, I guess. Every time we hear that wordless ah, ah, ah, which I love in itself because it's almost like we've gone beyond words now. We're just like reaching for something.

And every time we hear that ah, ah, it's like our signal that we've changed, we've unleashed something. We've like freed ourselves. And I just isolated that ah, ah, ah, in case anyone needs it in their life just to have that little sound effect to take them to their better place. I love it. That's like the trigger. That just gets you there. And then all of the sudden we're in a new place. Our harmony is moving all over the place. Our melody has shot up into a higher range and we're kind of rhythmically free. We're not stuck in that same repeated syncopated rhythm. Let's listen again to the chorus of Cut to the Feeling Now. And all of a sudden we're in this new place where I feel like our narrator is not afraid to state her desire. She's no longer dreaming or denying she's okay. expressing everything she feels. Hopefully you're with me so far, Hanif, does this maybe correspond

to the feeling you got seeing her live? It does. So I think that I think that the main function of the Carly-Rae Jepson song is the same as the function of her live show, which is that it is reaching towards a type of freedom, but it's a slow build towards that freedom. I'm interested

in her music particularly because it feels like she presents a place where one has to kind of earn their joy or earn their catharsis. And I think this song builds to that, right? It's got that slow, churning, opening. Like, this song doesn't really come alive until the chorus. Yeah.

And then even after the chorus, it kind of goes back down. Right. It's great, you know what I mean? Because you know that on the other end of that next verse is another chorus. Yeah, right. So peaks and valleys. And I like that. She has to earn this sense of release.

Once we do get to the chorus, it opens up in all these ways. Remember that melody from the verse, we can just refresh really quickly. Now that low melody has just shot up to a much higher place. Some nice text painting there. Maybe like literally reaching for the ceiling

for the stars. And then also that that harmony we heard in the verse which was just totally static, unmoving, kind of trapped. We can hear that one more time as well. In the chorus, the harmony is constantly shifting.

There's this sense of movement and freedom. There's so many nice, contrasting details. Yeah. Totally. In every way, it's like Hanif was describing.

You have to go low to get high. I'm not sure if that's exactly what I meant to say, but hopefully you get the drift. I notice in listening to that that there's a real balance to the melody where in the first part, in the verse, the melody is sort of bouncing around

in the first half of it, in the second half, it just sort of declaratively lands on one note, while underneath it the harmony stays the same. And then it flips the script when it goes into the chorus. Everything flies up up, and instead of moving around on her melody, she just sings a single note over and over and over again in the first half of the chorus. And by the time she gets the second half of the chorus, then she starts to move around again.

So it's almost like it's flipped the script. Yeah, absolutely. No, I totally agree. There's so much subtle musical activity happening here. to kind of give you that sense of being trapped and then being released. And it's interesting, I think in talking about this song and thinking of it as a song that kind of earns its joy, it's, I guess, technically a romantic song, but it doesn't really seem to be about a relationship in a lot of ways.

It seems kind of more personal and introspective, I guess. Does that scan? Yeah, but I also think that most of Carly Ray Jepson's romantic songs are introspective and kind of singular. They're not often, the muse is not often that present in the song itself. The muse is often vague. And the muse is sometimes an actual emotion, right? So the muse is sometimes like desire or longing.

Wow, that's really born out in the bridge of this song, which goes, take me to emotion. I want to go all the way. Yeah, absolutely. That's it. That's the whole thing. I want to step back for a second because I appreciate this breakdown of the song. and you gave us such a great entry point, Hanif. But I have to ask you a question because in the larger context of your work,

it seems maybe surprising that Carly Ray Jepson would be a figure you're interested in. I was hoping you could tell us a little bit about your musical fandom as you were growing up and how you came to appreciate someone like Carly Ray Jepson. So my music fandom growing up was, yeah, it was really in a pop music, but I was also in the hip-hop and punk. I think my fascination with Carly Ray Jepson is born out of this idea of trying to figure out how does one become a pop star

while also not bowing to this idea of writing the perfect love story where at the end the person gets the person. Within her music, she doesn't always achieve the romantic goal she's setting out for, and therefore the desire of it is the muse. And so she's chasing after this feeling of wanting, which I think is great. That's so interesting, right.

That kind of puts her in a different sphere than a lot of other pop stars who I don't think can express that kind of desire or they have to be more knowing, more confident, more in control. I'm thinking of people from Taylor Swift to Beyonce. Whatever they're singing about, there's an assuredness there.

Carly Ray Jepsen doesn't necessarily have that. Yeah, no, I think I like the fact that she is like a bit uncomfortable in her own skin or riding towards a comfort in her own idea of what love can look like. And I think her uncertainty is what makes her endearing in a lot of ways. And I think her uncertainty is what makes her kind of touchable, but also what makes her probably unsellable as a big giant pop star. Interesting. Can you say more about that? I mean, it has to you said that we, you know, the pop machine demands more of women than men.

Sure. One of those things is that they demand a type of certainty, a certainty in something, be it their sexuality or their confidence or a certainty in this idea that they are, you know, they walk into a room and they're the center of attention. And I think Carlyne R. Jepson is telling that when she walks into a room, she feels as insecure as you or I might feel or a person down the street might feel. And it's hard to, it's, you can sell that for the person down the street. street that you can't always sell that to the charts.

Right. You refer to her indelibly at one point is your friend with two dance moves at her disposal, milking them so energetically to every beat that it becomes endearing until there is no such thing as a bad dancer or a good dancer, just a set of unchained limbs answering

a higher calling. Seeing her live, I think the best part is seeing her dancing is maybe the most entertaining thing. She's a very confident bad dancer. You have such diverse tastes. Your book ranges from Migos to Johnny Cash, Carly Ray Jepson to My Chemical Romance. I'm curious, do you think there's any commonality in the different music you gravitate

towards? So I think I like gravitating towards music where the musician is trying to complicate ideas of their own mythologies, which is why I'm very interested in Migos and Johnny Cash and why I could put them in the same sentence. There's an essay in there about the song, White Be Down, so I'm very fascinated with Boussey and like post-Katrina Baton Rouge. So I'm interested in artists who have mythologies that they are, whether they know it or not, working to unravel and doing it in a very public way.

And so that is kind of my, you know, sometimes I think that I'm into music. The music itself is secondary. What the artist can put of themselves in the music is what's most interesting. That makes sense to me. It's less about sound and more about this critique of, their own mythology. Very cool. I can't recommend this book enough. They can't kill us until they kill us. Where can people find more of your writing, Hanif? So my writing is online in several places. I was a columnist at MTV News for about 18 months. So a lot of my work is there. I've

written for the fader, the New York Times, a New Yorker. My website is abderakib.com. It's just my last name.com. That's where the hub for a lot of my stuff is. Yes, go check out more of Hanif's writing. I'd also recommend your profile of Julian Baker in the recent New York Times music magazine. That was an awesome piece. Before we go, though, Hanif, I was hoping you could take us out by reading the final paragraph of your Carly Rae Jepson piece. Absolutely. It picks up where I left off.

I smiled and gave an understanding nod that was not seen as they were already falling back into each other. I considered how often there is shame attached to loving anyone publicly. The shame, of course, comes on a sliding scale depending on who you are and whom you love. How often I hear people complain about things like engagement photos, or couples being tender with each other in public, or someone who can't stop talking about a person they love, how I often first think of who may be watching before I lean in to give my partner a really good kiss in a crowded store. Here, that shame falls to dust.

It is something beyond the smoke that lingers above our heads that does this, turning a person's face to the face of someone they love and kissing the way we do in our homes with the curtains drawn. It's beautiful. Awesome. Thank you so much, Hanif. Yeah, it's just so appreciate you joining us. I absolutely loved your book. It got me thinking about music in new ways, so I'm excited to keep reading you.

Thank you guys so much. I appreciate it. Switched on Pop was produced by me, Charlie Harding. And me, Nate Sloan. editor and mix engineer is Bill Lance. Our designer is Luke Harris and we are a proud member of the Panoply Network. And we are always looking to engage

on the Facebook, on the Twitter, reach out to us at Switched on Pop and let's continue the conversation. We'll be back again in two weeks with more episodes. And until then, thanks for listening.