Maxim Ludwig – Baby I Wanna Be Your Lover Tonight
It’s been prophesied that in these days of personal branding and lust for something meaningful, nobody’s going to come out of this with their dignity intact. How could they? Unless you’re an accountant who has a desk that they can go back to, your way of attracting interest in anything is by dancing around the kitchen in your underwear, filming it and sticking it on the internet.
It hits everyone, from the poets to the ridiculously moustachioed would-be dictators. And it hits the ones who have a natural tendency towards honesty. Eventually, they’ll need to plead and crawl. What’s pop music left with but having to reflect back the way that the world works nowadays? The best modern songs are about wishing for something, anything, to happen.
Maxim Ludwig assures in “Baby I Wanna Be Your Lover Tonight” that he has given up on being a poet in favour of a quicker form of gratification. But that’s not entirely true. Ludwig begs and pleads like someone who’s just been kicked out of their apartment for not making rent. But the words are convincing, and so is Ludwig’s gasping Lou Reed delivery. This ain’t music written by someone pretending to want something else than what they truly want.
Cult Caves – No Pleasure
A pop song used to pull in one direction precisely. It was either designed to make the listener deliriously happy or send them on a wild shopping spree. Or, alternatively, it was designed to make their blue heart swell up with sadness and make them want to order another drink.
Audiences were trained in this kind of program. But, truthfully, many listeners, as well as the people making the music, were much more sophisticated than that. The history of pop music is filled with great albums that failed upon release, on which the artists explored just how much they could play with the sense of expectation of their fans.
One of the most effective strategies is to create a contrast between the music and the words being sung. Is “Heart of Gold” a sad or a happy song? It’s a damn depressing major chord number. Was Lennon trying to make the kids sing along with “Help”, or did he genuinely require some kind of professional assistance that he never received?
Cult Caves are similarly playing with our sense of expectation of “No Pleasure.” The instrumental is perfect festival-friendly indie-pop and seems to call for scientists to finally design an endless Summer all over the world. But the lyrics are interesting and bizarre. They seem to talk about draining ambition and overstimulation. The singer whispers about his friends who are jealously wasting their lives away. It’s a marvellous songwriting and negotiation trick. Cult Caves get you comfortable. And once you are, they lay the truth on you.