The Weeknd became a star with melancholy confessions about his self-destructive tendencies.
#LIL UZI VERT XO TOUR LLIF3 OTHER RECORDINGS OF THIS SONG FULL#
Consider big-statement albums like Rihanna’s “Anti-” and Beyoncé’s “Lemonade” from 2016, with songs full of resentment, bitterness and ambivalence and music that deliberately sounded raw and unfinished. It had been gathering for some time, sonically and verbally. Pop’s turn toward glumness didn’t happen suddenly this year. When Post Malone sings about all the excesses and indulgences he’s enjoying in “rockstar” (545 million Spotify streams), he’s crooning a minor-key melody, and he doesn’t sound any more cheerful or hopeful than he does in “I Fall Apart,” an utterly desolate post-breakup song. But he’s accompanied by a lugubrious flute melody, and there’s no joy in his weary voice. In “Mask Off” by Future (520 million streams on Spotify, about 225 million YouTube views), he raps about escaping a childhood in poverty for a lavish current lifestyle of luxury cars, world tours and assorted drugs. So is “1-80” by Logic with Alessia Cara and Khalid - the telephone number for a suicide hotline “I don’t wanna be alive/I just wanna die,” Logic sings early in the song, though he changes his mind.Įven when the words carry more positive tidings, the musical settings stay gloomy. Sung in a tearful voice over an archly genteel string arrangement, it envisions romance as a chance to “bask in the glory of all our problems.” It’s a contender for the song of the year Grammy Award.
Julia Michaels, who has collaborated on many hit singles for others, went solo this year with an EP including “Issues,” which was streamed 462 million times on Spotify.
Lyrics also accentuate how low spirits can go. Plush, comforting sounds are in retreat instead, instruments are often sparse and brittle, electronically desiccated or sampled through static. The music favors doleful minor keys and skeletal harmonies. The voices are isolated in a cold electronic space, and with Auto-Tune and other effects, they become half-robotic, severed from physical breath and moisture, moaning from inside the machine. Often, percussion sounds are spattered intermittently around a bass line, or they tick steadily like a suspense-film soundtrack - more haunted house than dance floor.
Rhythm tracks are just as often hollowed-out and sporadic, with a beat that’s inferred rather than spelled out kick drums arrive as eruptions rather than foundations. Although DJ-producers are still busy, a big, happy thump is no longer inevitable. They’re awash in social media that nationalizes peer pressure, that expects intricately maintained self-branding and that shows - with photos - how just about everyone else is having a better life.
They’re making their way into an era of accelerating income inequality. Hit radio and popularity-driven algorithmic playlists lingered on bleak, bummed-out sounds and scenarios, stringing together music that shares the feeling of being alienated, unprotected and besieged.Īnd why not? Consider the pressures on the millennial and younger listeners who are clicking to choose a song. The tone of that song - mournful, dazed, sullen, traumatized, self-absorbed, defensive, remote, morbid - was pervasive in the pop of 2017. Since its release in February, it has been streamed half a billion times on Spotify alone, with more than 130 million views of its YouTube video. “XO TOUR Llif3” isn’t some avant-garde obscurity or oddball cult discovery it’s a major hit. The lyrics, rapped and sung in an assortment of scratchy voices, juggle the bitterness of a crumbling relationship alongside career boasts and druggy, suicidal ramblings. The backing track is a bass line going nowhere slowly, oozing to bind together twitches of electronic percussion and little tinkles and twangs that drift in and out. “Push me to the edge/All my friends are dead,” Lil Uzi Vert intones in “XO TOUR Llif3,” at first in a matter-of-fact chant and later in a slurred, raw singsong.
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