Next up, Drew offers us friendship in the form of this song. We say: “it’s complicated”…
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Drew Haskins: Slayyyter’s evolution from Charli XCX fan Twitter page to full-fledged pop starlet is a perfect summation of the impact and reach stan culture has had in 2018. Outside of Charli herself, there weren’t a lot of artists making pop this high energy and joyful. “BFF” both pays homage to and surpasses its obvious PC Music influences. The synths sparkle, the lyrics entice, and Slayyyter and Ayesha Erotica’s nimble vocal performances combine to create a high water mark in 2018 digital pop.
[9]
Joshua Minsoo Kim: PC Music-era Charli XCX done with all the exact same signifiers but with none of the unassailable hooks. The way that Slayyyter’s vocals are mixed prevent the generic lyrics from sounding like anything beyond filler words. Which I guess is fine because the production is fun and the vocal melodies are halfway decent. Still, this approach has less longevity than what Charli did on Pop 2.
[5]
William John: I want to be overindulged with music like this — I want the vocal production, manipulated so that the artists themselves come to resemble androids, to spiral further and further out of control until those artists sound almost human; I want the rest of it to keep expanding and expanding until the hairs raise on the back of my neck and my eyebrows are forced to move upward. Sophie’s “Immaterial” induces these sensations with a thunder-and-lightning approach to production; Charli XCX’s Pop 2 does it too on occasion, in a way that’s as thrilling as it is desolately sad. Slayyyter and Ayesha Erotica are far more detached than those forebears, in spite of the fact that they’re pontificating about friendship. Sure, almost all friendships go through prosaic stages, and sometimes it’s worth documenting the ways in which boredom can coax a relationship, platonic or not, into action. But that still doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have liked the chorus to be sung an octave higher and with a shred of extra gusto.
[6]
Nortey Dowuona: Low, 2010 bass synths rumble as Slayyyter blandly drones all over while Ayesha gets tagged in, halfway too late.
[2]
Kat Stevens: It feels unfair to review this song with a mild hangover: my aching bones and squeezed-up sinuses are quietly mewling ‘nghhhhh’ as this frenetic, sprightly teenager of a song has me reaching for the close-tab shortcut. But hidden under the mess there’s a lovely soothing Boards of Canada bass synth, like discovering a blister pack of ibuprofen at the bottom of the drawer with two precious pellets left in it.
[6]
Tobi Tella: I hope people in real life don’t have friendships as vapid and empty as this song.
[1]
Katherine St Asaph: I was on board until sass turned to cruelty: “you know those lonely people hate this.” Because lonely people are the worst, amirite, and the epidemic number of people experiencing loneliness need more reasons to feel like shit? At least “Take My Hand” and “Applause” (the songs most clearly in the hopper) don’t mock their potential listeners.
[3]
Will Rivitz: I’ve just finished the first volume of Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie’s excellent comic series Phonogram. The comic is, effectively, a thinly-veiled collection of musings on how we consume, create and otherwise interact with music. It’s most centrally concerned with how we can engage with the artists we loved in the past while continuing to seek out the artists we’ll love in the present and future, making space for innovation instead of shameless retreads of what’s come before. I’m on board with most of the arguments the creators put forth, but disagree with one in particular: Midway through the book, the protagonist decries “retromancers,” who in-universe are sinister magicians/musicians who stay forever young by siphoning the life-force of their listeners by aging their music taste with mediocre tunes from days gone by, but who in general are a fairly obvious parable against music tastes exclusively living entrenched in the past. I agree with the criticism up to a point, but I also think there’s a time and place for uncritical nostalgia. It’s neither healthy nor fun to constantly examine your past tastes with the sharpest of blades, always carefully looking out for and denouncing what hasn’t aged particularly well. Where a listener’s musical appreciation has come from is ever-important, no matter what that appreciation may have consisted of, and there are times pure homage is appropriate. I’ll call out the gross, immature masculinity of the pop-punk I loved till I die, but I’ll also sing along to every word of “What’s My Age Again” if the time is right, which happens to be more often than I’ll usually admit online. Most critically, it’s the rare modern release that genuinely gets this uncritical nostalgia right, reverse-prismatically cohering all the best elements of the pop songs of yore into a focused beam of cosmic, transcendental perfection. Both capturing the immediate and visceral signifiers of the on-oldies-radio-in-ten-years music we love and presenting them using the structural and stylistic innovations of today (the best of both worlds, one might say) is a sticky wicket, so it’s always a joy to see such a merger done right. Hence, “BFF,” as perfect a backwards-looking pop song as is possible. Its rose-colored interpolation of the mid-2000s, both in terms of tossed-off lyrical invocations of white Jeeps with pink seats and Juicy lockets and a sonic sneer straight out of peak Avril or Britney, meshes effortlessly with the blaring synths of the PC Music that never was. It relishes the past, fiercely beats into the future, and traces the threads between the two with an artistry much more sophisticated and intricate than its three minutes and thirty-six seconds should allow. Transcendental in every sense of the word, “BFF” is everything I wanted the past to be and everything I hope for the future. If it’s the reason a retromancer steals my youth, I suppose it will have been worth it.
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Will Adams: I, like most others, was very surprised to hear that A.G. Cook had agreed to remix Sophia Grace’s 2015 song “Best Friends,” but after list- wait, what? That’s not…? Oh… oh. Okay, then.
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