Just saying, we covered “Shooting Stars” all the way back in Two Thousand Fucking Nine. So, yeah.
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[6.43]
Aaron Bergstrom: The 2009 Jukebox got this one right the first time around: “Electronic dance that’s dressed in inexpensive pastels.” “For such a florid production, it’s surprisingly withdrawn.” “The mosquito riff and use of space find the right balance between serenity and obnoxiousness.””Great little processed twists on familiar riffs that nonetheless fail to excuse a middling chorus and dull hook.” If Troye didn’t really feel like adding anything to the original source material, I don’t see why I should have to.
[5]
Ian Mathers: There are specific risks to interpolating a meme song, and “Got Me Started” does so little with Bag Raiders that it’s just genuinely distracting. The rest of the song is pretty decent, and then every so often it just stops for me to picture a kid on a go kart flying through space.
[6]
Will Adams: Yes, “Shooting Stars” was a hit down under over a decade ago, well before Katy Perry used it in a a video; it’s conceivable that an Aussie would want to pay tribute. But for a lapsed YouTuber (and co-writer Leland, Drag Race fixture and MUNA collaborator as he is), there’s no way they didn’t consider the meme. And yes, it’s distracting. The rest of “Got Me Started” is polite, of-the-moment pop fluff, but when that reedy synth pops in, I’m taken out of everything.
[4]
Leah Isobel: The first time I heard that fucking sample, I cackled. Troye, my favorite emotionally vacant twink, just as allergic to genuine feeling as ever, just as unable to let something be without putting quotation marks around it. But where past Troye singles made that feel like a flaw he wanted to make up for, “Got Me Started” makes that resistance feel like part of its design. His voice is pitched up and around, part of the track’s silvered machinery, so that the feelings he’s expressing can separate from his body and throat; “we should experiment even to the detriment of whoever’s on the couch” is a perfect pop lyric, stupid and profound and precise. It’s the sound of desire entering from another dimension, like a half-remembered song heard on the radio, or in a meme.
[8]
Michael Hong: Troye’s music has always put well-manicured taste over everything else, so this stupid joke of a sample feels at odds with his approach, its piercing melody overpowers his quiet earnestness.
[3]
Oliver Maier: I don’t really object to the sample choice, but it’s deployed like an afterthought rather than a centerpiece, as if Sivan couldn’t write a riff and realised that “Shooting Stars” worked well enough over the chords. “Experiment/detriment” is an unconscionable rhyme.
[5]
Kayla Beardslee: I don’t know the sample well enough to have the Pavlovian reaction to it that I know some of the other writers do, so to me this song is just a crowning achievement in the possibilities of sensitive and sparkly synthpop. (Shoutout to Ian Kirkpatrick, this is one of the best things he’s ever produced.) I’m obsessed with the balance of textures in this track: it’s so vibrant and shimmery, but with a ton of depth and movement beneath the pretty surface, and the tasteful playing with vocal delivery grounds the song in little moments of honesty to keep it from sounding too perfect (the subtle crowd noise in the background of the first verse, the whispered “let’s go” before the chorus, the ever-so-slightly pitched-up hook, the background vocals echoing the title of the album at the end of the song). Yet there’s still enough empty space left between the gentle chords to sit, reflect, and look at at someone the way you would look at a sunset.
[8]
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: The ethos of Sivan’s recent work is the primary truth of the physical above all — yet he can’t quite seem to get there on “Got Me Started.” He says that he misses using his body, and everything here does feel slightly disembodied. The production is most of the problem: that sample, those nods to UK Garage, every single one of Ian Kirkpatrick’s Mura Masa-isms, all adding up to slightly less than what it should be. Troye himself does better; his default inclination of ecstatic, wan yearning continues to work just fine on the dancefloor, but he doesn’t quite achieve enough in the joyous lack of subtext here to overcome limpness of the production.
[6]
Thomas Inskeep: Sivan’s Something to Give Each Other is what I wanted Kylie’s Tension to be: sexy, groove-riding, not working overtime to be full of hits. You can hear Sivan smiling as he sings! The light 2-step rhythm on “Started” becomes him. Producer Ian Kirkpatrick worked on Dua Lipa’s first record, and of course, this has a similar smart & knowing vibe. This is a single that knows just what it’s doing.
[7]
Nortey Dowuona: I actually dig that having a terrible television show that praises immense abuse and violence doesn’t end your career anymore because we wouldn’t get this tender, vulnerable song from Xander towards the first man he’s met since getting out from under Mauricio and Jocelyn’s thumbs, who’s charismatic but warm, passionate but empathetic, funny but sensitive, someone you can lay your worries down on without worry about them weighting him down — wait, his name is Troye? Oh. Yeah, it is kinda weird all the YouTube I watched of him referring to him as Troye never mentioned Xander before this year. Gonna fix th- (gets up and dances, never actually finishes the blurb-
[8]
Wayne Weizhen Zhang: “Why does he have my psyche in a chokehold?” quipped SNL. It’s a good question. Shirt small as can be, pants as big as they come, Troye Sivan is finally commanding his position in culture, and “Got Me Started” is but one of the tools in his arsenal. If this song can get Timothée Chalamet, the moisturized Machine Gun Kelly he is, to do the choreography on SNL along with Lucy Dacus, Pheobe Bridgers, and Julien Baker; if this song can inspire local drag queens to lean the choreography in one night and perform it the next day at brunch; if this song can have me clamoring for my own Gucci glitter suit; if this song can take a meme and turn it into a supremely danceable sing; Troye might finally come the mainstream pop star he deserves to be.
[8]
Katherine St Asaph: A Y2K masterclass. The Bag Raiders sample is relatively modern but evokes the halcyon days of Venga; the “oh baby baby” tag evokes the ingenue days of Britney; the percussion obviously evokes the newly re-beloved days of garage. Everything is just so evocative, and tasteful, trading curated competence for feeling and immediacy. The lyrics actually do a pretty good job of describing the sort of lightning chemistry that yanks you away from propriety (“we should experiment to the detriment of whoever’s on the couch” — damn). But nowhere is that spark found in the song.
[6]
Anna Katrina Lockwood: This song sounds like being absolutely blitzed drunk at a pie shop in Collingwood at 2am, a very Australian experience I’d hazard a guess I share with Troye Sivan. I’d be totally on board with this song if this vibe matched the lyrics, but that’s not exactly the case here. Also, the Australian-ness of that Bag Raiders sample is completely subsumed by its meme-ness at this point, so it’s hard to think of this song as anything other than a minor failure, though a decently entertaining one.
[5]
Alfred Soto: That sample is a menace — couldn’t he have found a more complementary sound to play against that lovely electric piano? Maybe he thinks the voice distortion is that sound. Still, Sivan’s in fine fey form, and lines like “we can experiment to the detriment of whoever’s on the couch” will make Neil Tennant double check his relative pronouns.
[7]
Brad Shoup: I have no relationship with “Shooting Stars”, so I’m delighted by what Alfred delightfully calls a “mosquito riff”. I find it thoroughly agreeable, unlike Sivan’s mosquito voice on the chorus, which intrudes on an otherwise chill golden hour. (Blame Ian Kirkpatrick for that.) Otherwise, it’s tame fun, a sleepily flirty garage-pop track that suggests Zayn handing “Love Like This” to Harry.
[6]
Rachel Saywitz: Feel like one day this will be cited in an academic paper called “The Sexification of Mememology.” Also gotta give Troye credit for creating a new meme from the sexifying the old meme.
[7]
Josh Winters: If anxiety is the sensation of the desire of the other (as Lacan once theorized), it’s a dilemma Troye Sivan seems to run into regularly. It’s intriguing to hear the paradox in how he plays it cool while processing his arousal, laying down a level-headed vocal melody between the 2-step beat skittering about and the sample buzzing like a heart monitor on high alert. The bursts of excitement that initiate the choruses help to move the action forward, but it’s in the moments where the beat drops out, time hangs in the air for a second, and he taps into his vulnerability to offer it to the other. “Boy, can I be honest? I wanna tell you what’s on my mind.” Eventually, the many pulses of the present align, and Troye can surrender to the heat of the moment in all of its sexy glory. It’s hilarious and frustrating how navigating desire can feel like finding yourself in the same tired situation, but then each experience can provoke something unearthed in us with every new person we come into contact with. And yet, despite the discomfort, it’s a threshold I’m willing to push through time after time. After all, aren’t anxiety and excitement one and the same?
[9]
Alex Ostroff: This is where I hear Damita Jo not just in Troye’s lyrics, but also the music. The smooth glide of “SloLove” is all over this, albeit filtered through the current UKG and 2step revival. My ignorance of the sample can’t be chalked up to age – we apparently covered it on Jukebox five months after I started writing here – but I’m still protected from the intense meme-related reactions everyone else on the planet seemed to have. Instead, I’m captured by Troye’s whispered, “Let’s go”, as he finds a man in the corner of a crowded house, locks eyes, and confesses, “Boy, can I be honest? Kinda miss using my body”, then suggests experimenting to the detriment of the sofa’s current occupants. Or by his deep muttered “yeah” at 2:45. The brazen sample is also just tacky enough to disrupt the perpetually chill tastefulness that risks taking over other parts of the album. Neither track we’re covering today is the best single from this era – that honour belongs to Troye’s fascinating, thorny, pathetic, power tripping, horny, vaguely self-loathing exploration of the appeal of ostensibly straight boys, but “Got Me Started” is definitely the one most likely to get me on the dancefloor.
[9]
David Moore: If you’re going to pay to jack Bag Raiders so two thousand and late, why would you try to flatten it into atmospheric mush like this, like trying to roll gumballs into cookie dough? Either wrangle with what the thing is or at least chew it up and deface it; for god’s sake, Katy Perry was the last one to touch it. It’s not some hiding-in-plain-sight gem from a bygone era, it just sounds unfashionably old, like everything from 2008-2010 will sound forever (not sure why this is, some sort of world-historical demarcation point, but subtler than electrification or a world war). And this in turn makes Troye Sivan sound old, even though he’s only 28, which I guess must be 40 in Troye Sivan years. Anyway, I just went back to listen to “Whatever You Shoot” from Dirty South Dance 2 to see if that sounded old, too, and guess what! It did. But not as old as I thought it might, and certainly not as old as this one makes me feel.
[4]
Taylor Alatorre: Even in the best of cases where a recognizable sample is used as a song’s backbone, it’s hard to escape the feeling that a bit of cynicism was at work in its creation: they did it because it was easy, or because the label asked them to, or just to flex on us that they could, et cetera. I detect absolutely none of that cynicism here, as it’s clear that Sivan is approaching “Shooting Stars” from a place of wide-eyed reverence and awe, and a desire to extrapolate upon the dreamily familiar soundscape rather than crassly exploit it. The transitions between late-aughts indie dance and early-aughts garage aren’t totally seamless, but the implicit link that the song draws between online and offline forms of connection is compelling enough to smooth things over.
[7]
Joshua Minsoo Kim: The sample is an admirable choice, all silliness-turned-serious to match the way love and libido make all things new. Imagine if a celebrity sexted “kinda miss using my body” and a screenshot of that message went viral on Twitter. People would spout opinions about it being corny and cringe. They’re right, but isn’t that true of anything that involves our body?
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