The Chainsmokers’ ‘Closer’ — already featured here — sits at Billboard’s #2 spot this week. At #3 is The Weeknd with ‘Starboy,’ the first single from his upcoming album of the same name.
‘Starboy’ (as the video makes crystal clear) is about The Weeknd coming to terms with his fame and moving past the persona he inhabited on his previous chart-toppers. At the beginning of the video, he literally kills the crazy-haired version of himself that fans came to know and love on ‘Can’t Feel My Face.’
Welcome to the final 2016 installment of ‘What the Kids Are Listening To.’ Over the next two weeks I’ll take one last spin through Billboard’s Hot 100 to take the pop culture pulse.
In the #1 spot this week is ‘Black Beatles’ by Rae Sremmurd. What is a Rae Sremmurd, you ask (or at least I do)? It’s a hip-hop duo from Tupelo, Mississippi, whose stage name is their label — EarDrummers — spelled backward.
Beck’s 1998 album Mutations remains one of my favorites. It’s a ramshackle, melancholy collection that proved to be a precursor to the lovely, sad-sack classics, Sea Change and Morning Phase, to come in the decades that followed.
Mutations isn’t as polished as those albums but it’s beautifully produced, sustaining an uneasy, almost post-apocalyptic, mood. It’s the soundtrack of the Earth depicted in the first half of WALL-E.
I don’t know much about Wings and I’ve never listened to Band On the Run — the only album of theirs I own — all the way through. So today’s Random iTunes selection was new to me.
Listening to it, it struck me as very much a cousin to late-era Beatles, something that would have felt at home on Abbey Road. Which makes sense, because it was presumably written by Paul McCartney.
Maddie & Tae are a pair of 21-year-old singer-songwriters who met during vocal classes in Dallas and son began performing together. Their debut album, Start Here, was released a year ago and climbed to #2 on the U.S. Country chart (and #7 on the Billboard 200).
The album was well-received by critics, who compared the duo to the Dixie Chicks and praised their combination of “sweetness and swagger.”
Meet Me In Montauk 