carolesdaughter Spearheads the Next Generation of Alt-Pop Music - V Magazine
carolesdaughter: So I grew up Mormon, the youngest of 10 kids. I wasn't really allowed to listen to punk music or rock, any of that stuff. I have a really good memory for random things but I remember I saw a tattoo of the Black Flag logo and I didn't know what it was. For some reason, that just stuck in my head — just those four squares. But then I went on Reddit when I got a school computer, which was like a big deal for me — finally getting a computer! And obviously, I didn't do any school on it. (laughs) I was homeschooled, so I just didn't do any school. All I did was go on Reddit and find music. So after figuring out it was Black Flag and seeing some of their music, I was really interested. At first, I didn't really understand it just because it's a little abrasive to your ears, you know? I didn't love it the first time I heard it to be honest. But after that, it unlocked the world of other punk bands. I really started to relate to a lot of it when I started going through like, just stuff — I've been to rehab nine times. Going through all of that and having that inner turmoil in my head made me realize I had something to say, I needed to get stuff out.
V: Do you feel that being the youngest of ten kids influenced your art and your creative endeavors in having to find your voice and make a name for yourself?
V: I want to touch on your aesthetic and your style because it's super punk rock-inspired and Gothic. Who would you say are your fashion influences?
CD: I would say the person that inspired me to make music was Lil Peep because I started on SoundCloud and I was really into that whole OG SoundCloud rap wave, like Bones and Lil Peep. That inspired me to make music just because I knew they were doing it. You could just find homies on the internet and they send you beats and you could just record something and make magic. It was really cool because my phone was this world in and of itself. I've met so many people just online who are so talented and I was just like, " I can do this!". I can literally just make music on my phone and put it out. Nobody's stopping me. Why not? I think that's probably how a lot of people start.
V: This past year shut down the music industry almost entirely. How do you feel that quarantine affected your creativity and your music?
CD: I have so many songs that are waiting to be released, so many songs that I've been sitting on for years . In my mind, they're timeless. They're just great songs. Since being signed, I've been focusing on getting those records out and trying to tell my full cohesive story because all of those songs I wrote in rehab are really indicative of the time that I spent there and the things I was going through.
V: You've mentioned before how you are aware how music can emotionally influence people and that there are songs by Lil Peep, for example, that you can't listen to anymore because of the subject material or a memory it triggers for you. Do you keep your influence in mind when you release music?
Makeup Holly Silius (R3 Mgmt), Hair Dennis Gots (The Wall Grup), Manicure Yoko Sakakura (A-Frame Agency), Set design Danielle Von Braun (Art Department), Producer Jordan Metz (Art Department), On-set producer Abby Gelsomino, Digital technician Evan Strang, Photo assistants Gregory Brouillette, Kenny Castro, Stylist assistant Sam Knoll, Madison Martin, Makeup assistant Bailee Wolfson, Hair assistant Jessica Miller, Production assistant Kelly Wundsam, Retouching Dtouch Creative Location Milk Studio L.A.
All The Best New Pop Music From This Week: Bad Bunny, J Balvin
This week in the best new pop music saw a number of upbeat releases. Bad Bunny returned with his first new single of the year, J Balvin delivered a pumped-up duet, and JoJo dropped a snappy and reflective tune.
After taking center stage and dropping three albums in 2020, Bad Bunny fires off some well-deserved flexes in his surprise-released track “100 Millones” with Puerto Rican rapper Luar La L. Over a hard-hitting beat, Bad Bunny trades verses about being in his prime. The song signals even more music on the way, as he revealed to Apple Music’s Zane Lowe .
J Balvin has been steadily releasing singles this year, and this week was no different. He tapped Argentinian singer María Becerra for a smooth reggaeton number featuring a driving beat and watery guitar chords. Dusting off his melodic flow, J Balvin and Becerra shoot off lyrics as they debate whether or not to stay in a relationship.
On the heels of her reveal as the black swan on The Masked Singer , JoJo shares her hypnotic new single “Creature Of Habit.” A departure from her folksy single released earlier this year, “Creature Of Habit” features a snappy beat. On the track, JoJo leans on her powerhouse vocals to deliver a captivating tune about recognizing her own toxic habits in a relationship.
Fresh off her 2021 Brit Award for Rising Star, songwriter Griff shares “One Foot In Front Of The Other,” a touching tune about the painful process of healing. The single showcases Griff’s optimism as well as her showcases as her captivating vocal range, and serves as the title track from her forthcoming project of the same name.
Following up on her standout EP Too Young To Be Sad , Tate McRae returns with a release off the soundtrack for the Amazon Original Series Panic .”Darkest Hour” is the perfect mix between a piano ballad and a soulful dark pop tune, opening with McRae’s sultry lyrical delivery and picking up speed to craft a sense of urgency.
18-year-old artist and producer Ericdoa leans further into their lovelorn hyperpop sound with the new track “Fantasize.” The feel-good tune features Ericdoa’s saccharine and metallic-twinged vocals as they imagine an improbable perfect future with their crush.
With her new single “Who Could Say No?” Canadian singer/songwriter Olivia Lunny pivots to disco-pop. Warm-toned guitars open to a funky bassline on the fun and carefree track, offering an exciting preview of her impeding self-titled debut album.
Neo-soul singer Gabrielle Current expands her down-to-earth style of music with her dazzling EP Virgo . Her track “Make It Right” offers a summary of the tender and comforting sounds heard on Current’s EP. "My main goal for music is to spread love and encourage community, it’s just how I was taught growing up,” she said about the project. “I'm proud of my Asian-American heritage and I've learned through my Filipino culture how important our values of family and togetherness is.”
Hayley Kiyoko is resurrecting pop music with her queerness
Hayley Kiyoko has been in the entertainment industry for well over a decade. From taking on a recurring role in Disney's "Wizard of Waverly Place" and starring in the 2011 Disney Channel Original Movie "Lemonade Mouth" to playing Aja Leith in the 2015 musical drama "Jem and the Holograms," Kiyoko was destined to be a performer.
The 30-year-old pop star hailing from Los Angeles was a member of the now-disbanded girl group The Stunners before eventually going solo and releasing her first EP, "A Belle to Remember" in 2013. It wasn't until two years later that one social media site would become a vehicle for a music video and song from her second EP, "This Side of Paradise," and would help propel it — and Kiyoko — into viral fame.
The music video for the song "Girls Like Girls," which was directed by Kiyoko and Austin S. Winchell, depicts a friendship between two girls, played by Stefanie Scott and Kelsey Chow, until one of the friends begins to develop feelings for the other, which is complicated by Chow's relationship with a boy. The video conveys a rollercoaster of emotions that comes along with young love and ends with both girls kissing as they finally express their own romantic feelings for one another.
Kiyoko recalled being "terrified" to release the video, revealing that she almost didn't, fearing that nobody would be able to relate to it. Her own hesitancy was met with the refusal of other outlets to premiere or support the song or video, which admittedly threw her. The "Found My Friends" singer eventually bit the bullet and released the video, which AOL premiered, after which she said the "Tumblr gods" were working in her favor and helped put the video in front of so many eyes, increasing viewership by the millions at a time.
"It just continued to go up week after week, so it was shocking," she told TODAY. "But it also was just such a great reminder that all of those years I felt isolated and alone, I hadn't been up alone. There have been other people that feel the way I feel, and I think that's what's so amazing about social media and the internet is because my fans were able to be this community that I never felt I had growing up."
Despite the support she felt from her fans, Kiyoko didn't have an easy road following the success of "Girls Like Girls." In fact, she said that for the first handful of videos that she'd done, she struggled with feedback that it was "too much" and "too risqué."
"(People) would say, it's 'risqué,' and I'm like, 'What's risqué? Two women are kissing and they love each other,'" she said. "I didn't understand why everything I did was uncomfortable for people. I had to learn how to accept that with my career and decided that everything I have to do is going to be uncomfortable for people because I'm trying to normalize and make space for stories that need to be told and need to be heard."
While trying to be a voice for the LGBTQ community, Kiyoko was met with numerous challenges. Along with those obstacles came some positives, including finding her fans, community and her purpose. On the opposite end of the spectrum, she explained, "There are also a lot of extreme challenges that you have to face while trying to break the stereotype and normalizing the stories and celebrating these stories."
Growing up, Kiyoko always thought that she would have to wait until she was in her 30s to come out, thinking that she just had to survive until she reached that age. When she first released "Girls Like Girls," she said that she didn't even want people to know that she was gay or show her vulnerable side, she just wanted people to listen to and love her music. But the lack of visibility of queer artists to look up to while Kiyoko was growing up became a driving force behind her goal as an artist today.
Stand by your man—or don't: Ragnar Kjartansson will dissect the patriarchy of pop music at the
Romantic Songs of the Patriarchy , a work by Ragnar Kjartansson , the Icelandic artist whose practice involves music, video, performance, installations, painting, drawing and more, is making its New York debut at the Guggenheim next month. Like much of Kjartansson's work, Romantic Songs of the Patriarchy , first show in San Francisco in 2018, has a durational element to it.
At the Guggenheim, roughly two dozen women and non-binary musicians will be positioned throughout the museum's towering rotunda, where they will repeatedly perform the same songs for hours. Each will be a famous love song from musicians as varying as Bruce Springsteen, Doris Day and Lil Wayne, and a closer look at the lyrics of each chosen song reveals how they are all a product of patriarchy, often written with a foundation of implicit and explicit objectification of women. The songs will be performed simultaneously, but carried out in similar keys and arrangements, so as to meld together. The performance will run from 2 July to 5 July.
Romantic Songs of the Patriarchy is the third of four installments of Re/Projections , a performance, film and video series that was conceived of during the pandemic with aims to reimagine how the institution uses its famed rotunda. This week, the museum's performing arts series Works & Process also announced the appointment of two new board members: fashion designer, television host, and producer Isaac Mizrahi—who narrates and directs a popular annual performance of the opera Peter & the Wolf at the museum over the winter holidays—as well as ballerina and founding member of Dance Theatre of Harlem, Virginia Johnson.
Adelaide's Festival of Orchestra draws from global phenomenon of pop music collaborations -
You would be hard pressed not to notice a proliferation of pop and orchestral performance collaborations this millennium — from the Hilltop Hoods backed by the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra (ASO), to Ben Folds' symphonic tour.
The ASO yesterday built on that trend by announcing a six-concert Festival of Orchestra (FOFO), which will include a set of dance classics via the Ministry of Sound franchise and a performance with The Angels for 20 of their greatest hits.
According to ASO managing director Vincent Ciccarello, pop music performance collaborations with orchestras have been occurring worldwide in a "concerted way" for nearly 20 years.
Mr Ciccarello said it originally came with high hopes that it would stoke new interest in symphonic and classical music.
"People will come to a discreet thing because they're interested in dance, rock, or the music of a particular band, but it doesn't necessarily follow that they then come across to straight classical music," Mr Ciccarello said.
What it has done, however, is translate to new ticket sales as people queue to see their favourite music boosted with the unparalleled power and depth of a symphonic orchestra.
"Our collection of data, which we do legally though our box office, tells us what the percentage of new audiences are, and it is actually quite a respectable number," Mr Ciccarello said.
The ASO's outdoor FOFO — scheduled to kick off with a classical spectacular at the Adelaide Showgrounds on November 24 — aims to capitalise on this in an "Australian first" event devoted to the cause.
The opening night will present popular mainstream classical music such as Ravel's Bolero, the adagio from Khachaturian's Spartacus, Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture — complete with fireworks and cannons at its climax — as well as Ghershwin's Rhapsody in Blue and music from Bernstein's West Side Story.
Bella Poarch, Addison Rae and the rise of TikTok pop - Los Angeles Times
Yet the gig was hardly his first time in front of an audience. Born Jaden Hossler, Jxdn is an established star on TikTok, where he developed a following of millions as a member of Sway House, the L.A.-based bad-boy creator collective known for its bite-size videos of good-looking (if hard-to-distinguish) Gen Z guys doing … well, whatever.
Now Jxdn is looking to use his newfangled celebrity to launch an old-fashioned music career — and he's not alone.
The result is an inversion of what happened on TikTok in 2020, when any musician who wanted to get near the Billboard Hot 100 took to the ultra-popular video-sharing platform in the wake of Lil Nas X's "Old Town Road," which broke chart records after countless kids posted clips of themselves dancing to the song in their bedrooms. COVID-19's shutdown of the concert business attracted even veteran musicians — think Mick Fleetwood glugging from a bottle of Ocean Spray — suddenly in need of a way to keep in front of content-hungry fans. But given that the Ocean Spray meme that put Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams" back on the chart was launched by a random dude on TikTok, it's no wonder that influencers would eventually try to make hits themselves.
Yet the shift from $13 CDs to $9.99-a-month Spotify has done nothing to diminish the perceived cool of rappers and pop stars, which helps explain why marketing-minded TikTokers — already reasonably close to music thanks to the app's foundation in lip-sync and dance-challenge videos — are so eager to make records that will bring in only a fraction of the money they can make hawking branded hoodies or cosmetics.
Only a churl would lament the existence of these testaments to the out-of-nowhere potential of a great pop hit. (Friendly reminder that Cardi B got her start on Instagram.) But believing in pop's glorious exploitability doesn't mean you can't separate the ridiculous from the sublime.
But assuming the style is right, sometimes the process can free a singer from the burden of taste, like a private-school kid rolling out of bed only to put on his uniform, in a way that gives the music real energy.
The Mozart of Pop Contemporary music, Andy Michaels, releases new single "She reminds me of
Andy Michaels is well known for his wonderful journey from surviving an incapacitating car accident to that of an internationally recognized contemporary/pop songwriter.
He belongs to Perth, Western Australia, and has released several mesmerizing music albums in the last few years. Each has a deep sense of melody with poignant lyrics that has helped him to be at the forefront of multiple genres in the music industry worldwide.
In 2021 and despite the Global upheaval which has thrown most countries in turmoil, Andy is still doing what he does best – writing inspirational, uplifting and memorable songs to appease the hearts, souls and minds of people in a tumultuous and constantly changing world. His new single "She reminds me of Beautiful" and his first release in 2021 has just been released globally.
"A bout as good as indie can get… his adherence to an efficient pop ethos is refreshing and a far cry from anything his mainstream counterparts are doing at the moment" http://www.indiemusicreview.com/album-reviews/andy-michaels-incendiary-heart
"Another poetic winner for Andy Michaels. It doesn't take more than a single look at its tracklist to fall in love with the man who gives it such luster." https://skopemag.com/2020/02/20/andy-michaels-releases-sophomore-lp-incendiary-heart
"A diverse look into the future of pop/rock… fabulous new album -one of the best indie LPs I've heard on either side of the pacific in 2020" https://mobangeles.com/andy-michaels-releases-second-album-incendiary-heart/
"He's at the forefront of a sonic hurricane not to be messed with. This really is an amazing time to be a fan of indie pop/rock …He is a premier singer/songwriter and hero to adult contemporary fans everywhere" https://www.theindiesource.com/cnt/3964/Andy-Michaels-releases-new-LP/
"This is one indie artist we need to follow into the spotlight. His confidence is infectious .. Andy Michaels undeniably shines like a diamond and the unstoppable buzz surrounding the new album Incendiary Heart is only spiking." https://entertainmenteyes.com/2020/02/19/andy-michaels-shines-like-a-diamond-via-new-release/
"Required listening….it is only fitting that one of pop/rocks most promising singer/songwriters would choose to end the decade on such a progressive note as this one" http://gashouseradio.com/2020/01/incendiary-hear-by-andy-michaels/
BTS' pop disco track Dynamite becomes fastest K Pop music video to hit 1.1 billion views |
Quiz: How much do you actually know about pop music in 2021?
Our quiz below will test your knowledge good and proper. You'll find an array of questions, including lyric-based ones, image-based ones and general pop knowledge.
"And I know we weren't perfect but I've never felt this way for no one
And I just can't imagine how you could be so okay now that I'm gone
Guess you didn't mean what you wrote in that song about me
'Cause you said forever, now I drive alone past your street"
This guy's album 'YHLQMDLG' was the most-streamed album on Spotify in 2020, with over 3.3 billion global streams. Who is he?
"Breathe me in, breathe me out
I don't know if I could ever go without
I'm just thinking out loud
I don't know if I could ever go without"
Dua Lipa's 'Future Nostalgia' was one of the biggest pop albums of last year. Which of these songs did NOT feature on the tracklist?
This guy is the brother (and producer, and co-writer) of one of the biggest pop stars right now – who is he?
'Wellerman' by Nathan Evans is one of the most-played songs of 2021 so far. What is unusual about it?
Oh dear. You really don't know much about pop, do you? Be honest: most of those were probably guesses, too. For your homework, go and listen to the latest 'Now That's What I Call Music' compilation on repeat before you embarrass yourself any further.
Decent effort! You know your stuff and you gave it a fair whack. Still need some brushing-up, though. You should probably find the nearest young person and ask them to explain Justin Bieber to you.
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