365 Days of Song Recommendations: Oct 28
Wolf Like Me — TV On the Radio
It’s easy to exclude 21st century jams from any historically considered list of greatness. One one hand, they’re new — on the other, listenership has become so fractured that great songs may never be granted such status again. “Great” will become the ravings of niche audiences.
Consider the ramifications of that for a moment. What does “pop culture” even mean when nothing is actually all that popular anymore? (Does The Squid Game count? And, if so, can someone explain why the 1980s had Michael Jackson and 2021 has a Korean-language TV series about death and red light / green light?)
Speaking of Michael Jackson. 500 million people watched the premiere of his “Black or White” video. 500 million people in 27 countries watched one music video, for a meh song, all at the same time.
Today it’s based on clicks and views and it all amounts to frog whispers in a maelstrom. What are clicks and views? You want to know the most viewed music video on YouTube?
No — wait. Guess first.
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It’s the fucking “Baby Shark Dance” by a South Korean education company. #2 is fucking “Despacito.” I dropped two fucks in the same paragraph because I’m also listening to the Astros take an early lead in Game 2 of the World Series. The world is going to shit.
But if you’re still reading this particular piece of writing you already knew that. You’re plainly hip to this doomsday perspective.
My point isn’t that music used to be a meritocracy, but once upon a time we rallied around common cultural flashpoints. Some good music used to be popular. And some popular music used to be good.
Brooklyn’s TV On the Radio has been a great band, producing indie-minded and radio-friendly songs for more than 15 years — and I’ll bet you that most people who consider themselves “music listeners” don’t know their name.
Which is fine —band members Tunde Adebimpe, David Sitek, Kyp Malone, Jaleel Bunton, and the late Gerard Smith might think it’s fine, too. Most great artists didn’t get in the business to be famous. Money’s good, though. Maybe they have some.
But fuck. FUCK.
“Wolf Like Me” should be celebrated. It should be known. It should be one of those singles we hear twenty years from now and all know, innately, in our souls, because it was everywhere that it needed to me. It should have “Despacito” views on the Interwebs.
Listen to that relentless opening drum cadence-backed driving synth. The song’s a Shinkansen bullet train coming to blow through your PFC.
Say, say, my playmate
Won’t you lay hands on me
Mirror my malady
Transfer my tragedy?
It’s also soulful with a measured tempo, a multi-layered indie rock symphony. And the best we — the collective “we,” of course — could do is put it on the Triple J Hottest 100 songs of 2006. Whatever the fuck that is. (Does Medium have a fuck limit? Asking for a friend.)
On top of everything else, the video mingles silent, scratchy-film aesthetic with 1980’s Lynchian B-movie footage and features a Next Top Model winner Naima Mora. If you want to do it right, you do it right. You make music, visual art, performance art — and people will appreciate it. Somewhere out there in the vast wilderness, people will find it and love it.
Just not very many and they might not remember its name next week when the second season of The Squid Game comes out.
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Also, fuck “Despacito” for crawling out of the fifth circle of hell and dying on all of our front porches. I shouldn’t need to scrape that maggoty carcass off my stoop.
“Wolf like Me” is the 301st song on the #365Songs playlist!
