Ca7riel & Paco Amoroso, PinkPantheress, Fred again.. & Etienne de Crécy – Sexy Magic

We got video games day at the Singles Jukebox before Grand Theft Auto VI…

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[4.82]Iain Mew: Decades ago, before Scottish Lemmings developers DMA Design became today’s behemoth union-busting Rockstar, they put car radio stations in the original Grand Theft Auto as a way of organising the varied music they’d come up with. They saw a future of using this approach to break new music, which went slightly awry when Grand Theft Auto: London 1969 got contracted out to Canada and its developers put licensed music in. Crate-digging would go on to be a big part of the series’ musical identity, but they also carried on commissioning their own music in breakthrough game Grand Theft Auto III. Adjacent to Rockstar’s overall vision for a distorted, exaggerated world with “radio that sounds very right until you listen to the words, and then it sounds very wrong”, they included songs like “Forever” by Lucy which sounded somewhat, but not entirely, like they might be actual pop hits. Twenty-five years later, they’re still doing much the same thing, except now by commissioning famous musicians to sing songs with in-universe references. Only Morgan Wallen’s contribution is threatening to cross the streams by becoming an actual hit. Given PinkPantheress’s recent modus operandi has been stitching together familiar bits of music into alternate universe pop hits, she is a particularly perfect fit. Here a snatch of “Love Sex Magic”, a Ciara song we reviewed in the first month of this website’s existence, is the main ingredient. The assembled producers and vocalists take out any question of love, shift the focus of the sex and magic to a car, and make something that can easily pass parallel world radio muster, if little more.
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Charlotte Gaze: The original song was fine as is. Not sure what’s to be gained by pasting my favorite British girl and my least favorite Argentinian guys on top of it.
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Lichelle: The soundtracks for the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series were instrumental in shaping the lanes my music taste would travel down, so when I say this is a perfectly fine track for a video game, I mean it. It has that same propulsive, slightly synthetic, violet sunset quality that makes you feel like you should be doing something at high speed while listening to it. I can imagine committing various pixel crimes while this plays in the background. I’m more of a RollerCoaster Tycoon and Cities: Skylines girly, but I’d happily build a coaster or fix traffic issues with this as accompanying background music. Who doesn’t love a utilitarian dance track?
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Tom Feckerdt: Nearly every encounter I’ve had with Argentine duo Ca7riel & Paco Amoroso has been worse than the last. I find them to be a couple of smug, upper-class try-hard eccentrics, admittedly with a lot of technical chops, but using said chops in service of shallow, dated “commentary” on issues they know nothing about. Their look into the apparent vapidity of rap music is to simply…spit out AAVE slang in a cartoonish manner underneath jazzy chords. Their first-hand insights on the record being industry being out of touch with the youth boils down to intentionally referencing passé trends like hashtags and dabbing. Their comedic way to explore their fear of aging consists of talking like a baby and working with Jack Black. There’s no wit or lingering punchline to their supposed satire; there’s only the impression of wit, delivered with a cool, knowing wink to let you know that the joke not being very funny is also part of the joke. And it’s the combination of that wink and the aforementioned chops that’s helped them grow their audience internationally, as no one wants to be left out of the joke, and gain access to bigger names. This song in particular, however, isn’t really representative of their whole thing, as they do next to nothing, with most of the heavy lifting going to the fairly chill sample. But with PinkPantheress understandably checked out, it’s up for the duo to fill in the blanks with some dreadful “hey, hey”s that Empire of the Sun would’ve used 15 years ago. I guess I prefer these two as generic background music for an aesthetic-driven video game over their usual crap, but the end product reads as what it most likely is: a franchise mired in bad press looking for new, “hip” acts to help increase their clout. As disposable, cynical, and careerist as the rest of their work.
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David Allun Jones: For all the diverse big deal players involved in crafting this contribution to Grand Theft Auto VI’s music universe, it’s amazing how non-essential their combined efforts land in service of a future phenomenon sure to have many of your loved ones on video game lockdown over the next year. Perhaps the intent of “Sexy Magic” being nothing more than lowercase aural wallpaper is to express a vibe of laidback camaraderie amongst musician friends, but that doesn’t even track as they don’t even sound like they were in the same studio recording it, let alone the same continent. Very little sexy or magic to be found here (a first PinkPantheress/ Fred again.. team up deserves better!!), though I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t tap a toe or two to its sunny, disco-kissed shuffle while nonchalantly mowing down NPC’s during a high-speed car chase.
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Nortey Dowuona: Wild that longtime coproducer Benji Gibson of this, this and especially this is credited as a producer alongside Fred but not Etienne, despite Etienne having made this, this and yes, this. But maybe Etienne just wanted a credit but no blowback once people heard the song. Never have I heard a group of otherwise intersting and vibrant vocalists sound so bored and tired over beatwork this dull.
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Julian Axelrod: Successfully translates the feeling of flipping through GTA radio stations into a semi-cohesive song, even if I’d rather hear a collaboration between any two of these artists instead of all of them together. Points deducted because I can’t imagine listening to this while driving a stolen car into the ocean and shooting a police helicopter with a rocket launcher, which is the metric I use for every blurb.
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Jel Bugle: Kinda mangled and a bit dreary – I can’t say this was enjoyable at all. Could hear Pink Pantheress and she did her best, but everyone else let her down
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James M Errington: As music intended for driving around in GTA6 I’m sure it’s absolutely fine, but my expectations for a collaborative track from these five people were obviously significantly higher than some smooth vibes.
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Anna Katrina Lockwood: “Sexy Magic” is a great argument against the pejorative “songwriting by committee”–as in most artistic expressions, the mode of authorship is not the determining factor in quality. This is both a fun song on its own merits and perfectly evocative of its placement as a soundtrack to a GTA game. Ca7riel et al have truly captured the musical mien of drifting through a coastal city with the windows rolled down, scanning the radio waves for the right song to enhance the vibe, hazy sunset, hot nights, restlessness. Perhaps even a song that could only be written by a committee? The context is important and I will say, I’m not sure this would be so successful were it not for the place that the GTA series occupies culturally.
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Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: A bit of a sonic casserole; but, for better or for worse, I love a good casserole.
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