Video & Audio: Such great heights

Subterranean South Africa and Skypeian F-sharps

Sho Madjozi: “Chalé”

Even longtime gqom queen Madjozi is making concessions to amapiano, with the underlying synth bed spooky, though there’s still some shift-the-ground-from-under-you rumbling in the breaks. She gleefully disses some dude who “wasn’t there when we were shooting in the gym”, as if the best times of her life were before John Cena knew who she was. The best song of her life may be now.

Caroline Polachek: “Welcome to My Island”

Ah, the old “non-melodic verse that makes the chorus sound like Holland-Dozier-Holland” trick. The second syllable in “ocean” is a mere F♯5 (the coloratura in the intro goes almost an octave higher), but it feels like it’s floating up in Skypeia.

Asake: “2:30”

The success of Afropiano was inevitable as soon as Nigeria and South Africa got around to sharing sample packs. What’s surprising is that Nigerian artists have appropriated some of the most avant-garde South African sounds in the name of populism: producers Magicsticks and BlaiseBeats do tame some of the rougher edges of Harvard-donks for general consumption, but they should still get invited to commencement in Cambridge.

Robert Forster: “It’s Only Poison”

Should I ever require chemo, I now have one song for the playlist. (Googling brings up playlists including the likes of “Fight Song” and “Girl on Fire”, which I mean, whatever gets you through, I’ll refrain from slipping Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Cancerland” essay under your door.)

Usher: “Glu”

He’s now one of the rare singers to maintain a falsetto at the highest level into middle age, making his entendre-and-a-half stick a semitone above Polachek’s high note. (There are no unintended puns.)

Grupo Frontera & Bad Bunny: “un x100to”

Bad Bunny’s greatest recent miracle (even more than getting a good singles match out of Damian Priest) has been his Jay Z-on-“Umbrella” level assist here to make norteño America’s breakout pop genre of 2023. It’s Payo Solis and his Grupo, however, who make a song about low cell phone battery uncannily moving, especially in the New Mexico-filmed video, where they and Bunny look like they’re from a Breaking Bad spinoff that’s better than Breaking Bad because it’s not about drug dealing or law.

James Brandon Lewis: “Eye of I”

On the title track of a new trio album, Chris Hoffman’s heavily doctored cello gives JBL a platform from which to open his chakras and translate the secrets of the universe into tenor lines, which doesn’t necessarily make them easier to interpret.

Kes, Michael Brum, Busy Signal: “HoneyComb”

A pan-Caribbean team-up of a Trinidadian group, a Haitian producer, and a Jamaican rapper. Soca and dancehall fit together well, though that’s the least surprising successful genre combo in this column.

Aymos & Ami Faku: “Fatela”

The amapiano vibe remains rarely duplicated outside of South Africa. This song’s about lovers seeking forgiveness but it’s also hard not to interpret as not being partially about COVID among other recent tragedies (“many did not see this year”) but it’s also also just very chill.

Fall Out Boy: “Love from the Other Side”

Despite how fjucking weird and unnatural their genre is, by this point they make everything seem so unforced. When they say “We were a hammer to the statue of David”, they might mean in the sense of that Spongebob cartoon where all he has to do is tap a block of marble to create a fully formed work, much to Squidward! at the Disco’s chagrin. (“Artist Unknown”, season 2, episode 38b, you knew that.)