shakahislop
Well-known member
had nothing downloaded on my phone before a longish flight today and coz I just switched from tidal to apple music coz I wanted to reset the algorithm, apple music hasn’t figured me out yet and recommends generic things, so it was suggesting that I might like to listen to the top 100 tunes played by people in the UK in 2022 (including old tunes released before 2022 but I think most of it was made in the last couple of years). so I’m stuck with that on the plane and listened through which is quite a nice way to pass the time.
Basically there was a lot of mostly wet emoting, with a bit of boasting and some party tunes. Weird how grime echoes on in the charts. A few skittery hi hats from 2010s hiphop still being passed on as well. People playing instruments are almost entirely absent, everything sounds more like a DAW. There’s that kind of plastic production to everything, that thing of the infinite possibilities of computer produced music finally becoming really easy to do. There’s nothing that sounds like a drumkit but there a quite a few rhythms I didn’t expect, some knotty breakbeats here and there and not much 4 to the floor. There are quite a few tunes with the same fast snarey beat that reminds me of a lot of pop-punk, like that harry styles tune luka made a thread about or that weekend tune that was massive last year. Claps as beats seem to be in vogue. People seem to be open to weirder rhythms than I’d expected.
It is genuinely a bit weird to hear how much of the production is the same across the whole top 100, there’s a certain thing people are doing to drums and vocal production that obviously I have no idea how to explain. Loads of reverb as well. Vocals sound very perfect to me, quite grainless, they sound like those minimalist coffee shops where everything is white and looks like an old iPod to me.
There’s a fair amount of tunes that relate to I guess the concerns and needs of teenage girls, a kind of expressive confessional thing, and also at least one George Ezra that must presumably be played at children’s birthday parties, it really is children’s music. Guitar tunes are totally absent, except in how some of the teenage girl tunes basically sound like an even more watered down version of pop-punk. The most compelling bit of the teenage girls tunes is a bit in an Olivia rodrigo tune where she starts talking instead of singing, which is something I hear all over the place now, the podcast-music crossover is coming I think. All this stuff is American, UK doesn’t seem to make this stuff domestically.
There’s a whole strain of upbeat music for cheesy clubs and I guess the evocation of the clubbing experience through the radio, celebratory party music, David Guetta and Tiesto which I had assumed must have been over by now. There are still a few sounds in that stuff evoke an Ibiza beach to me, or at least some kind of foreign beach, which is again a long-lived resonance by this point. Male falsetto, or at least men singing quite high, which is the single most offputting thing for me, is everywhere, and so is autotune. Was happy to hear a d&b tune with a cheesy sample (down under), it’s still the thing that makes me feel the most home in England, glad that the lineage lives on, and there were a couple of decent house tunes as well. Nice to hear that someone sampled In For The Kill as well coz in my mind that’s a Skream tune.
Euphoria is all over the top 100 actually, it’s generally happy and upbeat. A lot of the sad tunes are made by UK rappers surprisingly, it’s either that or it’s like tom odell and that kind of thing doing a kind of hangdog lovesick falsetto. There’s a Dave tune on there and he sounds totally despondent, it’s weird to hear the usually upbeat or at least rowdy grime/UK hiphop thing used to fill an emotional hole that used to be filled by acoustic guitar music. Jack Harlow isn’t UK I think but is more or less the same kind of thing, although he’s a lot more in the early Drake template, silky smooth R&B production, and that boasting vs dissatisfaction dynamic that Drake used to pull off. Apparently Future is still making tunes that people listen to en masse, I’ve never got the appeal even though mainstream us hiphop is right up my street, there just doesn’t seem to be anything of interest going on with him. Someone I’ve never heard of called ArrDee has a pop-drill tune in there, which is pretty interesting firstly coz it also has a garage thing going on and secondly coz it shows that even something as malevolent and mean as UK drill eventually gets chucked into the pop pot. AJ Tracey is in there, obviously he hasn’t made anything good for a long time but have a soft spot for him coz his first tunes sounded so much like wiley.
Absolutely none of the tunes in the top 100 were funny, I don’t think I caught one joke. I keep telling people that afrobeats are taking over the world – I heard a lad djing amapiano to sunbathers at a hotel pool in Morocco the other day – and they’re around in this, mostly on tunes involving ed sheeran – there were literally three of them - and doja cat.
Unsurprisingly the best thing on there was Running Up That Hill. I got a lot out of the re-emergence of that tune over the summer, it felt like something weird was happening with time, the sense of the past and the future being so connected. I’ve never been into her but I think I have some deep memory somewhere of hearing her on the radio when I was very little.
Basically there was a lot of mostly wet emoting, with a bit of boasting and some party tunes. Weird how grime echoes on in the charts. A few skittery hi hats from 2010s hiphop still being passed on as well. People playing instruments are almost entirely absent, everything sounds more like a DAW. There’s that kind of plastic production to everything, that thing of the infinite possibilities of computer produced music finally becoming really easy to do. There’s nothing that sounds like a drumkit but there a quite a few rhythms I didn’t expect, some knotty breakbeats here and there and not much 4 to the floor. There are quite a few tunes with the same fast snarey beat that reminds me of a lot of pop-punk, like that harry styles tune luka made a thread about or that weekend tune that was massive last year. Claps as beats seem to be in vogue. People seem to be open to weirder rhythms than I’d expected.
It is genuinely a bit weird to hear how much of the production is the same across the whole top 100, there’s a certain thing people are doing to drums and vocal production that obviously I have no idea how to explain. Loads of reverb as well. Vocals sound very perfect to me, quite grainless, they sound like those minimalist coffee shops where everything is white and looks like an old iPod to me.
There’s a fair amount of tunes that relate to I guess the concerns and needs of teenage girls, a kind of expressive confessional thing, and also at least one George Ezra that must presumably be played at children’s birthday parties, it really is children’s music. Guitar tunes are totally absent, except in how some of the teenage girl tunes basically sound like an even more watered down version of pop-punk. The most compelling bit of the teenage girls tunes is a bit in an Olivia rodrigo tune where she starts talking instead of singing, which is something I hear all over the place now, the podcast-music crossover is coming I think. All this stuff is American, UK doesn’t seem to make this stuff domestically.
There’s a whole strain of upbeat music for cheesy clubs and I guess the evocation of the clubbing experience through the radio, celebratory party music, David Guetta and Tiesto which I had assumed must have been over by now. There are still a few sounds in that stuff evoke an Ibiza beach to me, or at least some kind of foreign beach, which is again a long-lived resonance by this point. Male falsetto, or at least men singing quite high, which is the single most offputting thing for me, is everywhere, and so is autotune. Was happy to hear a d&b tune with a cheesy sample (down under), it’s still the thing that makes me feel the most home in England, glad that the lineage lives on, and there were a couple of decent house tunes as well. Nice to hear that someone sampled In For The Kill as well coz in my mind that’s a Skream tune.
Euphoria is all over the top 100 actually, it’s generally happy and upbeat. A lot of the sad tunes are made by UK rappers surprisingly, it’s either that or it’s like tom odell and that kind of thing doing a kind of hangdog lovesick falsetto. There’s a Dave tune on there and he sounds totally despondent, it’s weird to hear the usually upbeat or at least rowdy grime/UK hiphop thing used to fill an emotional hole that used to be filled by acoustic guitar music. Jack Harlow isn’t UK I think but is more or less the same kind of thing, although he’s a lot more in the early Drake template, silky smooth R&B production, and that boasting vs dissatisfaction dynamic that Drake used to pull off. Apparently Future is still making tunes that people listen to en masse, I’ve never got the appeal even though mainstream us hiphop is right up my street, there just doesn’t seem to be anything of interest going on with him. Someone I’ve never heard of called ArrDee has a pop-drill tune in there, which is pretty interesting firstly coz it also has a garage thing going on and secondly coz it shows that even something as malevolent and mean as UK drill eventually gets chucked into the pop pot. AJ Tracey is in there, obviously he hasn’t made anything good for a long time but have a soft spot for him coz his first tunes sounded so much like wiley.
Absolutely none of the tunes in the top 100 were funny, I don’t think I caught one joke. I keep telling people that afrobeats are taking over the world – I heard a lad djing amapiano to sunbathers at a hotel pool in Morocco the other day – and they’re around in this, mostly on tunes involving ed sheeran – there were literally three of them - and doja cat.
Unsurprisingly the best thing on there was Running Up That Hill. I got a lot out of the re-emergence of that tune over the summer, it felt like something weird was happening with time, the sense of the past and the future being so connected. I’ve never been into her but I think I have some deep memory somewhere of hearing her on the radio when I was very little.
