Jark's 2020 in Music (soon-to-be-completed EOY countdown)
- Thread starter Jark
- Start date
Tisch
DO IT FOR HER
@Jark I have been listening to your EOY Remix Playlist and am blown away. Perfect for a shitty Monday morning. On My Mind by Diplo is one of my songs of the year.
I feel like you've introduced a new world/genre to me. I always found the dancey world of remixes a bit unreachable as it was all just infinite and daunting and there was no way for someone not in the know (like me) to know where to search for the "good" ones. But your little packages
have hugely helped with that. So THANKS HUN!
I feel like you've introduced a new world/genre to me. I always found the dancey world of remixes a bit unreachable as it was all just infinite and daunting and there was no way for someone not in the know (like me) to know where to search for the "good" ones. But your little packages
have hugely helped with that. So THANKS HUN!
A
AGinAg (37)
Guest
You literally have two songs left before you get distracted.
If you complete it we need a banner @Indie
Jark
PLUMP and RIPE
- Joined
- Oct 27, 2007
- Messages
- 59,232
02. Miley Cyrus - Midnight Sky
everything great that's been happening with Miley Cyrus in the past six months can be directly traced back to the winter of 2018, when she and Mark Ronson released Nothing Breaks Like a Heart. that song, in all of its twangy, country-disco glory, felt like the beginning of something for her, a goodbye to all the apologies and "Bangerz wasn't the real me!" bullshit and a first introduction to a Miley who might be sticking around. it's pretty incredible to think her run of four singles in 18 months went: Nothing Breaks Like a Heart, Mother's Daughter, Slide Away and, circling back to 2020, Midnight Sky—that is a run of 10s and 11s very few artists can lay claim to, and successively? like, shit.
but where Mother's Daughter and Slide Away were horribly slept-on, neither climbing any higher than UK #29, Midnight Sky immediately burst into the collective consciousness, sequins shimmering and Miley's power vocal purring and growling with total command. Midnight Sky has the sound of a dark disco-rock/power pop anthem uncovered from some long forgotten 80s mixtape—I remember hearing it and thinking, christ! this is one of those soft reinventions executed with such confidence, from an artist clearly so in control of her own narrative, and so dedicated to upping her artistry, that it takes precisely one listen to know it will become the axis on which her career turns. but the joy of Midnight Sky is that doesn't feel calculated—it just feels right. it topped UK radio for six weeks straight, peaked at #5 with countless weeks top 10, is on its way to platinum and was named by several critics including Pitchfork (37) and The Guardian (3) one of the defining songs of 2020. it finishes in second place in this Jarkette countdown having been played to death without losing a single sequin of its charm.
check out any performance from the promo campaign, but particularly the visually dazzling Graham Norton perf, for a lesson in how it's done from (for my money) the most promising popstar on the planet right now.
Jark
PLUMP and RIPE
- Joined
- Oct 27, 2007
- Messages
- 59,232
Dua Lipa - Physical
common love isn't for us. we created something phenomenal... don't you agree?
it takes approximately ten seconds for Physical by Dua Lipa to announce itself as that bitch. this is pop music of the very highest order, the kind of once-in-a-career song that seems to be too good to be true. from the moment the verse kicks in, with an ethereal flute riff that immediately drops into a dark, sparse, propulsive bassline, it's clear that Physical is on a mission to take the listener to a higher plane. because Dua is a generous musical overlord, we're offered a brief moment of respite in the form of a cheeky, slightly offbeat spoken-word bridge—who needs to go to sleep, when I got u next to me?—before the chorus comes slapping in. and what a chorus. jesus christ, it's massive. it's so easy and so blissful to imagine this song as the finale of the Future Nostalgia tour, twenty thousand cigarettes screaming every word back at their newly-crowned empress of pop.
there's so much I could say about the joys of this song, but instead I'll just highlight a few of the details that really elevate it: the way her voice goes up on every line of the chorus except one (baby keep on dancing like you don't have a choice...) where it drops DOWN into her divinely silky deep register, tipping the balance of the vibe from euphoric and triumphant to melancholy for just a split-second; the way the second verse deviates in structure from the first for the I don't wanna live another life couplet, making that feel like a snatched sample from some other galactically game-changing banger; the post-chorus which comes in half way through and somehow sends a whole new seismic shockwave of ecstasy through the song; the fact that, despite being so massive and so emotional, it goes big and then retreats and spends its energy in all the right places, earning every climax.
all of that before we even get to the video, which also happens to be the greatest of the year, a kinetic explosion of colour that feels like the song's DNA visualised.
of all the songs that defined 2020 for Miss Jark, none that did it better than Physical by Dua Lipa, also the current and reigning song of the decade.
thanks for sticking with the countdown and don't miss the #1 album of 2020 tomorrow (probably!)
