Monthly Report: September 2021 Singles
1. T-Pain & Kehlani - "I Like Dat"
T-Pain is easy to root for, because he made such a huge impact on music, the style of AutoTune he popularized is still everywhere, people that doubted his talent have maybe had their mind changed by his Tiny Desk Concert or the passage of time, and he never really lost his touch after he faded from the charts (plus, he often tells sob stories about being spoken to rudely by bigger stars like Kanye West and Usher). So it's kind of frustrating that he mostly gets back on the radio by playing on nostalgia with samples of his early hits -- last year he remixed "I'm Sprung" with T*ry L*nes, this year, and "I Like Dat" samples "Buy U A Drank" while adding some new melodic twists and a flip on the premise so that it's now about a woman who can buy her own dranks, and Kehlani sounds elated to fulfill that role. Now I hope that T-Pain can keep scoring hits that don't sample his old hits while he has this momentum. Here's my favorite 2021 singles Spotify playlist that I update every month.
2. Megan Thee Stallion - "Thot Shit"
When "Thot Shit" came out I thought it was probably just a pretty good buzz single that would disappear pretty quickly when she released something else. But now that "Thot Shit" is on the radio all the time it feels pretty undeniable, she's really talking her shit and the third verse is some of the best rapping of her career, there's not a lot of MCs doing three verses on a single these days to begin with.
3. The Pretty Reckless f/ Matt Cameron and Kim Thayil - "Only Love Can Save Me Now"
When a big Chris Cornell tribute concert was held a couple years ago, someone had the excellent idea to get several women to sing with Soundgarden and Temple of the Dog (Brandi Carlile, Fiona Apple, Miley Cyrus, Nikka Costa). Taylor Momsen sang "Rusty Cage" and a few other songs that night, and now her band The Pretty Reckless has an awesome single featuring half of Soundgarden and one of those heavy 7/8 riffs that could've been on Badmotorfinger. Momsen launched The Pretty Reckless while she was a cast member on "Gossip Girl," and the band is still making hits now that the show has been off the air long enough to have a reboot, which is kind of cool to see.
4. Meek Mill f/ Lil Baby and Lil Durk - "Sharing Locations"
It's funny to think that between this song and DJ Khaled's "Every Chance I Get," neither of the 2 biggest Baby/Durk songs of 2021 are on Voice Of The Heroes. It feels like Meek Mill has squandered a lot of the goodwill he had 3 years ago when Championships came out but songs like this at least augur well for Expensive Pain, despite its terrible title and cover art. The way Durk talks about paying for lawyers for his friends in the same breath that he calls his friends murderers is weird, though, like, the way rappers' lyrics are getting used in court these days that just seems incredibly unwise.
5. Young Thug - "Tick Tock"
Young Thug announced the release date of the forthcoming Punk with a Tiny Desk Concert backed by a rock band, debuting "Tick Tock" and other new songs with guitar-heavy arrangements. But the studio version of "Tick Tock" is more of a standard Thug banger, and I underestimated it at first, but it sounds better every time it comes on the radio, this song and making my deep cuts playlist have really gotten me excited about this album.
6. Kali Uchis - "Telapatia"
Colombian-American R&B singer Kali Uchis's 2018 debut album was a modest success, and when she released a Spanish language album last year, it seemed more like a passion project that an attempt to cross over to a different audience -- it didn't even chart on the Billboard 200 when it came out. But "Telapatia" blew up on TikTok and became the biggest song of her career and a pop radio fixture, even though only a little of the lyrics are in English. It has a great groove, I hope she does more stuff with this sound.
7. PinkPantheress - "Passion"
PinkPantheress is a British teenager whose self-recorded songs blew up on TikTok and is starting to become a regular presence on the UK charts. The song that caught my ear, "Passion," is the only one of her 6 released solo tracks that runs even a little past the 2-minute mark, and it has a great '90s jungle breakbeat that adds some nice flavor to her otherwise pretty typical sad zoomer bedroom pop sound. Her other songs don't grab me as much but I'm interested to see where she goes from here.
8. Billie Eilish - "Happier Than Ever"
Happier Than Ever's title track is a standout on the album partly because it's cool to hear Billie Eilish over a roaring guitar-driven rock song for pretty much the first time. But I don't know if her label expected a 5-minute song with two distinct sections to be the most popular song on the album, and it feels like they kind of scrambled to release a single edit that features just the louder second half of the song. I think it works better in its entirety, though.
9. 42 Dugg f/ Future - "Maybach"
I initially kind of dismissed this song, partly because there's already a great Future deep cut called "Maybach," and partly because the track has mostly gotten attention for Future's corny lyric about his ex Lori Harvey. But the beat is great, the song has really grown on me.
10. Green Day - "Polyanna"
When the big Green Day/Fall Out Boy/Weezer tour was pushed back a year by the pandemic, Weezer pushed back the album they were about to release, and then wound up releasing two albums in 2021. Green Day, however, already released Father Of All Motherfuckers right before COVID hit, and it already felt like a distant memory by the time the tour finally started this year. So they released a couple singles this year to I guess have something more current to play, and this one in particular is one of my favorite latter day Green Day songs, almost has a Warning vibe.
The Worst Single of the Month: Twenty One Pilots - "Saturday"
"Saturday" partly annoys me because it unintentionally sounds like a weaker version of a favorite They Might Be Giants song and partly because Twenty One Pilots released a crossover single with no rapping that I don't enjoy at all. Their VMAs performance of this song had a very Fitz And The Tantrums vibe.
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