Today in “songs from countries most Westerners don’t think about from a musical perspective…”
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Jessica Doyle: One of the unforeseen consequences of living standards rising globally is the end of the Anglo-American dominance of pop music, so taken for granted that Bob Stanley’s Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! has one chapter on music outside either of those two countries (it’s about Jamaica) and the argument for Johnny Hallyday in the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame goes ignored. You won’t know it from myopic American criticism–go ahead and count how many non-English songs show up on end-of-year lists–but all sorts of national, ethnic, and linguistic groups are now able to reach and learn from global audiences, and 2017’s best proof is Kazakh-language pop beginning to come into its own. There’s a long historical context, which I wrote about earlier this year, about why Kazakh-language pop has a limited audience even within Kazakhstan, and yes, the scene there has been to some degree financially backed by an authoritarian government. And yet: this year has seen the K-pop-inspired and gritty, the K-pop-inspired and gleefully goth, the glam and throaty, the laid-back earworm, the 100% certified bop, and that’s not even counting Ninety One throwing caution to the wind (and then again!) or “Sendei,” which is not indicative of a larger trend–no, Bayterek Tower does not contain a secret cauldron from which bubbles up mixes of ABC and The 1975 on a regular basis, more’s the pity–but is nonetheless magical, for AsSun’s delivery being simultaneously warm and restrained, and for the production trick of having him back up his own falsetto without the whole thing sounding like an awkwardly executed novelty. We are well past the point where English speakers can complacently assume “pop from a former Soviet country mocked in that one movie that’s aged very, very poorly” must automatically equal “awkwardly executed novelty.” Aren’t you glad? I sure am.
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Tim de Reuse: The most charming thing about this is the plasticky instrumental; each element is punchy and crisp and candy-sweet, and the heavy saturation on the drums makes the little hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. Outside of the sound design minutiae, well, it’s weaponizably catchy in its own right.
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Iain Mew: The vocals and backing track each follow their own path of foggy gloom, each in a way that’s intricate and sort of interesting but doesn’t quite fit together with the other. The house finale is better meshed together but loses a little of that individuality with it.
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Nortey Dowuona: Scattered, haphazard drums get plastic wrapped by slight synth bass and even thinner synths as AsSun coos, whines and hums along, which all tighten and squeeze out a slick, synth swashed house track.
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Juana Giaimo: “Sendei” has a great beat strategy: it gradually mutates from a simple synthpop beat to the rapid and subtle house beat. And with that change, the voices also get more complex playing with octaves and quiet backing vocals. The glossy production is never lost and, as a result, “Sendei” gets more gratifying with each second that passes.
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Brad Shoup: For the last three months, I’ve been assembling massive single-year playlists while my kid’s sleeping or whatever. I finished a 1982 playlist on my birthday; I have 3700 songs from the ’60s so far, and because I needed a break from bad mambo and rancid psych, I’m working on 1989 now. It’s been revelatory: freed from trying to assemble only bops, I’m instead trying to piece together what a year actually felt like. What would I pick up if I circled the planet with a radio 30 years ago? What were people actually listening to? What experiments did only a select few hear? (And, most crucially for a laregly streaming project: what’s been deemed worthy of remembrance?) The costs of these playlists are greater than I want to admit, but they’ve helped me to listen better: to use narrative as an inroad but not an excuse, to look for connection rather than transcendence, to find what I can think about, rather than talk about. So I’m super glad that Jessica has given us this icy-cool Kazakh club-pop track, with its sturdy bassline and heartburn synths. It’s neat to think about what this song means to people I’ll never meet.
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