Tag: Lady Gaga

Back on Team Bruno

Every year, my Spotify Wrapped lands and reminds me how out of touch I am with contemporary pop music. I’m not usually bothered by this – songs like “Just What I Needed” and “What I Like About You” and “In the Air Tonight” are great tunes, and it shouldn’t really matter that they are all 40-plus years old. And it isn’t like I don’t listen to a lot of current music; in fact, I go out of my way to do this, and have been rewarded for my effort with younger artists who I love, like Sobs and Lily Konigsberg and BLACKSTARKIDS. But the nostalgia train definitely takes up a disproportionate share of my listening space, a situation not made any better by my commitment to farming the music of the past for content.

Since I don’t really listen to Top 40-style music, I was late to Sabrina Carpenter, despite the ubiquity of (and my absolute love for) “Espresso”, and I let my (old person alert here) irritation with Chappell Roan’s public persona delay my checking out her gobsmackingly delightful album “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess”. As I contemplated my stick-in-the-mudness and considered my listening future, I resolved to pay closer attention to pop – as in popular – music over the year to come. And that’s when Bruno Mars popped up.

I used to love Bruno Mars. His first two albums were magnificent blends of old school Motown, modern pop and gentle hiphop, and his guest vocal on a tune was a guarantee of musical bliss. But at some point – maybe it was the over-saturation of “Uptown Funk”, but more likely it was the utter sameness of his third album, “24K Magic” – I lost interest, and even at times felt actively hostile towards his records. His Silk Sonic collaboration with Anderson .Paak did not move the needle for me.

So, here we are at the beginning of 2025, and I am solidly back on Team Bruno. Just at the moment I start paying attention to this kind of music again, he hits with the double whammy of a pair of Top 10 hits with female partners. His team-up with K-Pop superstar Rosé on “APT.” is demented fun, a completely non-intellectual and, frankly, often unintelligible mess of noise that is irresistible and guaranteed to get people dancing, though also about 99% likely to wear out its welcome long before it makes enough of a dent to land on my 2025 Wrapped.

On the other hand, I’m calling it right now that it will be a completely unexpected event if “Die With A Smile”, his duet with Lady Gaga, doesn’t make the cut for Wrapped. 

I don’t remember how I felt the first time I heard this song, or even why I heard it, but somehow it stuck in my head, so when it showed up on a random Spotify playlist, my wife wondered how I knew it well enough already to start singing along. All I know is that almost from the opening lines I feel chills, and while I have no understanding of the science that leads to such a physiological response, I do know enough not to ignore it. The lyrics aren’t subtle – “If the world was ending, I’d wanna be next to you” – but how many love songs are? Love songs shouldn’t be subtle, the way falling in love isn’t subtle: they should be a punch to the gut, a wind-sucking assault on your soul that makes you question everything you ever believed. Any song that hits all the buttons to make me feel even a smidgen of that sensation is going into heavy rotation. I have no idea what my great pop experiment of 2025 will bring, but Bruno and Gaga (and Sabrina and Chappell) have set a high bar.

Favourite “New” Music – March 2023


My favourite movie, without question, of 2022 was “Everything Everywhere All At Once”. Not only was it a great science fiction/action/sort-of superhero movie, but it was funny and visually distinctive and a very heartwarming story that ultimately was really about family, and love, and finding your place in the world. So, when it dominated the Oscars last month, I took an unusual amount of joy out of an awards show (a thing I usually don’t give a crap about).

Heading into the awards, I knew one category it had no chance of winning: best original song for “This Is A Life”. I was rooting for it – my Mitski stanning has not yet reached its limit – but even I didn’t think it was anything special, and it was definitely odd by the usual standards of the Academy. It did occur to me, however, that I really didn’t know the other four nominated songs very well, so I set out to change that.

The eventual winner, “Naatu Naatu” from “RRR”, is a fun tune that’ll get your blood racing, but I question whether it is that much better than the literally thousands of other songs that are in Bollywood movies every year, none of which were ever even nominated. And I understood from the outset that “Applause” from “Tell It Like A Woman” wouldn’t win, because losing at the Oscars for writing a song from a film that almost no one has seen seems to just be Diane Warren’s fate. (They have now given her a special Oscar, so a competitive win could be close at hand. Stay the course, Diane.)

Had I been given a vote, it would have been between the two pop queens: Lady Gaga (“Hold My Hand” from “Top Gun: Maverick”) or Rihanna (“Lift Me Up” from “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”) and their various co-writers. “Hold My Hand” is a power ballad that definitely taps into a kind of mid-‘80s vibe that makes it a worthy successor to the original film’s Oscar-winning “Take My Breath Away”. The song is very stirring, but it’s also pretty one-note, all large gestures and epic booms. It needs a big voice to match the sonic weaponry that backs it, and Gaga qualifies. It’s a song that will have couples swaying side by side at the Daytona 500 a decade from now, one arm wrapped around their partner’s waist, the other raising up a beer in celebration.

“Lift Me Up” is more subtle: with humming, single strike piano keys and gentle strings, the song generates an emotional response from Rihanna’s compelling vocal performance. The movie was weighed down by its need to mourn Chadwick Boseman, but the song feels free and unburdened. It’s just as emotional as “Hold My Hand”, but it doesn’t seem to be working quite so hard to get there, and that just feels like a bigger accomplishment, and one that’s more worthy of recognition with, as Dustin Hoffman said of the Oscar, a little gold man with no genitalia who is holding a sword.

In the end, it was a pretty good year for movie songs (Drake, Taylor Swift, The Weeknd, Jazmine Sullivan and Selena Gomez all made the 15-song shortlist, and I would’ve loved to see one of the tunes from “Spirited” get nominated), and “Naatu Naatu” is really growing on me. It’s a fun song from another year that needed levity wherever it could be found.

Here’s some other music that I loved last month:

  • The Rolling Stones – Out of Our Heads (1965) (I never played the whole thing before, though I was halfway through side two before that became clear to me)
  • Bob Weir – Ace (1972) (I’ve never much cared for the Grateful Dead, but Weir, separated from the jam band artifice, is a different animal)
  • Shigeru Suzuki – Band Wagon (1975)
  • The Jam – In the City (1977)
  • Van Halen – Van Halen II (1979) (I always like the DLR-era albums, so I can’t figure out why I don’t play them more often)
  • Television Personalities – And Don’t the Kids Just Love It (1981)
  • Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians – Globe of Frogs (1988)
  • Pixies – Doolittle (1989) (this 30 years overdue play is proof that I’ve never been a very serious music listener)
  • Green Day – Kerplunk! (1991) (yes, they were great before “Dookie”)
  • Jay-Z – The Blueprint (2001) (okay, so there are gaps in my hip hop knowledge, too – but I’m working on it)
  • The Format – Interventions and Lullabies (2003) (Nate Reuss’ former band before fun. was his former band)
  • Eddie Vedder – Into the Wild (2007)
  • Setting Sun – Be Here When You Get There (2013)
  • Ducks Ltd. – Modern Fiction (2021)
  • EarthGang – Ghetto Gods (2022)
  • The Beths – Expert In A Dying Field (2022) (one of my favourite indie pop bands right now)
  • Paramore – This Is Why (2023)
  • Pearla – Oh Glistening Onion, the Nighttime is Coming (2023)
  • Yves Tumor – Praise a Lord Who Chews but Which Does Not Consume; (Or Simply, Hot Between Worlds) (2023) (a close winner over Pearla for most pretentious album name of the month)
  • Depeche Mode – Memento Mori (2023)