"A genre’s name means absolutely nothing if we don’t unpack it."

June 6, 2024 3:02 PM

Sabrina Carpenter's "Espresso" is the Song of the Summer. It sounds like a genre that, in its time, was rejected by MTV and radio as 'not pop enough': '80s electro/synth funk/roller disco (Dan Charnas, author of The Big Payback and Dilla Time, writing for Slate).
posted by box (32 comments total)

My best friend texted me last week and asked if this should be our summer song. I listened, enjoyed frothy little pop confection, and texted back, "Why the heck not?"
posted by Kitteh at 3:14 PM on June 6 [1 favorite]

but what about Million Dollar Baby???
posted by scose at 3:45 PM on June 6 [4 favorites]

I don't know if this is my summer jam, but I'm all for a revival of 80s electrofunk or synth funk or whatever you wanna call it. I didn't even learn Robert Palmer's version of "I Didn't Mean To Turn You On" was a pale shadow of the synth funk original until a year or two ago.
posted by jonp72 at 3:56 PM on June 6 [3 favorites]

Huh. It sounds like slightly funky pop, but no way is it synth funk or electro. Those genres put the electronic elements much more forward in the mix.

This is the sound of electro circa 1982.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 4:08 PM on June 6 [1 favorite]

Wow. I mean...there is overthinking a plate of musical beans, and then there's the linked article.

But really - it's just dance-y pop music - never heard of the song until this post, but gave it a listen - enjoyable, poppy, danceable.

Also note - many of the artists listed in the article are mainstays on the Studio 54 channel on SiriusXM - which is so strongly linked with disco that they are inseparable, I think.

So we can call Espresso disco-ish? Disco-adjacent?
posted by davidmsc at 4:14 PM on June 6

Charnas' article is great, IMHO. There was a lot more to the issue of disco being killed and this genre being mischaracterized than a bunch of racist homophobes at Disco Demolition Night (though that was a very ugly moment). The cynics responsible for Ethel Merman disco, Disco Duck, all that crap need to start getting some heat too.
posted by queensissy at 4:16 PM on June 6 [6 favorites]

Thanks for the linked Slate article, I wasn’t familiar with this “genre with no name” and learned a lot. The discussion of the segregation of the music charts in the 80s reminded of this 1983 MTV interview with David Bowie where he calls out MTV for not playing Black artists. The interviewer makes the exact excuses the linked article notes.

Though I agree with others above that “Espresso” doesn’t really sound anything like that early 80s music except maybe in the very vaguest terms. I guess I’m an Old because it sounds like a fun, perfectly fine but generic bit of modern pop that’s not so different than anything I’ve heard in the last 5 years or so.
posted by star gentle uterus at 4:21 PM on June 6 [13 favorites]

I'm loving "Espresso", and I also loved a playlist called The Roller Rink that Spotify first served to me a few months ago, but I hadn't put those thoughts together until I read the main article of this post. I also don't know if the genre assignment is an exact fit for "Espresso" but I did find the article a really interesting musical history and culture discussion!
posted by sigmagalator at 4:23 PM on June 6 [3 favorites]

Ugh it's such a good song; even Adele said it's stuck in her head.
posted by catcafe at 5:10 PM on June 6 [1 favorite]

Loved the song and the article. The reghettoization of black American pop in the late seventies, with the mentioned "permitted" exceptions (e.g. Michael Jackson), especially by MTV, remains one of American culture's unprosecuted crimes.
posted by Halloween Jack at 5:29 PM on June 6 [3 favorites]

Maybe it's a bit of parochialism owing to growing up Minneapolis–adjacent, but for me (and i suspect a lot of folks like me) this genre's name is "Flyte Tyme". Jam + Lewis's seismic cultural impact is really criminally underappreciated.

(abusing the edit window a bit to add: and that's probably why the only version of "Didn't Mean To Turn You On" i was even aware of was the, yes, Jam+Lewis-associated Cherrelle one.)
posted by multics at 5:51 PM on June 6 [7 favorites]

but what about Million Dollar Baby ???

The VHS mix sounds so dirty and crunchy, I love it.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 6:01 PM on June 6 [1 favorite]

The article was really well-written!

star gentle uterus: I guess I’m an Old because it sounds like a fun, perfectly fine but generic bit of modern pop that’s not so different than anything I’ve heard in the last 5 years or so.

I have been saying the same thing for decades now. To my ears, radio-friendly dance-y pop has been sounding like this for a long, long time, at least 30-35 years. Today's pop sounds a little different due to new technology, there are some subtle differences in style and the lyrical content is definitely more explicit and direct but I don't think that this type of pop has changed all that much for quite a while.

The author is totally on the mark, as well. I'm an old and I never, ever heard any "soul" or "black" music on the radio in my large Canadian city other than the established artists of the time. And when I finally got a chance to listen to 80's funk, I really didn't like a lot of it because it wasn't 70's funk - it was too sterile for me. My loss.

It's a good song and it's catchy and earwormy and fun and....it brought us that great article. Thanks for the post!
posted by ashbury at 8:57 PM on June 6 [1 favorite]

Sabrina Carpenter's "Espresso" yt is the Song of the Summer. It sounds like a genre that, in its time, was rejected by MTV and radio as 'not pop enough'

Hmmmm. Well, I guess this is the sound of me bouncing off this tune and this piece in Slate.

I feel like I'm missing something when I read a quite good and informative article about the marginalization of Black artists in the early 80s, and then listen to Sabrina Carpenter's vocals overlaid on Evelyn King's backing track. I think the argument is "this pop song sounds like all these overlooked songs that should have been successful pop songs too, except for racism". One part that's not really clicking for me is the premise that this song sounds any more like post-disco Black dance music than other random pop tunes. It also doesn't sound particularly like "the 80s" to me: too flat, too polished, too cold, too modern in the vocal production. Then talking about "what music looks like" and tying a very white sounding song and white looking video to overlooked Black musicians is frankly puzzling as hell- especially overlaying Carpenter's vocals over IMO more interesting and danceable tunes like Walking Into Sunshine or I'm In Love while comparing her to Madonna is... just sort of odd in the context of the article. And it doesn't sell it so much as make it awkward: look this vocal fits over these other beats!... which are actually way more compelling. It might have been better to put Evelyn King's vocal over Sabrina Carpenter's backing track, just saying.

Anyway, having lived through the era while listening to lots of music, I'm just not buying it. I'm not saying it's not fun and catchy, just that I don't find the argument(s) in the article compelling. I even looked up Dan Charnas' age because it seemed like it was written by someone who wasn't around then- but he's older than me. And for what it's worth, I heard a ton of the music he brings up in the article- probably because white students were not the most populous group at my high school, and the little community TV stations playing videos actually did play artists like the Gap Band, Rick James, Newcleus, The Pointer Sisters, and Frankie Smith. This isn't to dismiss the fact that these artists were shut out of bigger mainstream success by a hostile, racist music industry, but to clarify why a significant part of the article didn't resonate for me, personally. I had to read it four times in order to stop feeling confused by it. I might still be confused by it.
posted by oneirodynia at 10:19 PM on June 6 [5 favorites]

Although there is a (sadly quite slow) /r/boogiemusic, I think of this genre as "Fever 105". Anyway, the taxonomy and history is important, but honestly I'm just here trying to collect good songs to listen to. Am I not hearing much as hot as "Sticky Situation" because that's further funkward than the article's thesis or what?
posted by dick dale the vampire at 10:54 PM on June 6

I have a highly personalized "coughing baby vs. nuclear bomb" meme bouncing around in my head for the perfectly natural category of "songs released in the winter of 1983-84 where a female singer expresses her appreciation for her man".
posted by dick dale the vampire at 11:30 PM on June 6

I prefer last year's Padam Padam.
posted by Toddles at 11:33 PM on June 6 [2 favorites]

Way back in the mid-00s, through a brief Scritti Politti fandom, I fell down a rabbit hole of listening to pop music from the early 80s that had been segregated off pop radio, and back then nothing on the charts sounded like that. I think I first started hearing those sounds back on the radio in the mid-teens, but yes, now it’s ubiquitous.

I really liked Dan Charnas’ article, which laid out the context and evolution of that particular sound really clearly. I wish it had been around back when I fell down that rabbit hole.

Incidentally, for the latter half of the 00s, a lot of my coworkers were middle-aged black women, and knowing these songs helped me many times in understanding what they were chatting about, and they told me about lots of good music I had missed out on.
posted by Kattullus at 12:05 AM on June 7

Yeah, I think the music segregation that happened was more or less visible depending on where you were at the time. Growing up in Ohio, in a very segregated city, there was a lot of cultural pressure to listen to what was programmed for you. If you wanted to rebel, punk was right there. Listening to Black music as a white kid was a ridiculous prospect, socially. At the time it was impossible to see how the whole system was designed to divide and scare everyone back into a time before I'd been born.
posted by rikschell at 4:52 AM on June 7

Did a Group of Irish Tweens Write the Song of Summer?
slNYT leprechaun tween gawking - youtube link
posted by lalochezia at 5:11 AM on June 7

If roller disco is the sound of the summer, Ghostface Killah's (of the Wu-Tang Clan) new album from a couple weeks ago leans into it with a song called Skate Odyssey.

(He also has another song on the album with a guest spot from Kanye in the year-of-our-lord-2024 and that's certainly a choice.)
posted by GamblingBlues at 5:23 AM on June 7 [2 favorites]

I think the argument is "this pop song sounds like all these overlooked songs that should have been successful pop songs too, except for racism".

I don't think Charnas' point is that this song *sounds like* all these overlooked songs. I think his point is that they share musical *bones*. What's the difference? Well, the Ramones don't sound like 50s teeny bop music - dramatically different instrumentation, delivery, mix, sonic characteristics, etc - but they share rhythms, melodic approaches, and song structures.

"Espresso" has what I consider to be very contemporary pop vocal delivery, but if you strip it out and look at is happening in the beat (not the mix or production), then you start to identify shared musical DNA, and it starts to sound like a lot of the music that Charnas identifies, which I think of as stuff that got heavily sampled by hip hop in the late 80s. What are those bones? Charnas says:

"And though it retained disco’s precision and slick production, and often its “four on the floor” kick drum pattern, ’80s funk slowed down the tempos, ramped up the syncopation, leaned into the backbeat with hearty handclaps, and put melody and suspense back into disco’s monotonous, repetitive bass lines."

So while the production may scream "standard pop music" to some folks on here, these bones are not found in all contemporary pop music, by any means, and I really appreciate the musicology and historical context that Charnas brings with this piece.
posted by entropone at 5:47 AM on June 7 [9 favorites]

I agree that for most of us, pop music tends to sound the same-ish (I guess that's what makes it pop). But it's nice to have someone pick apart the threads a bit. And I agree that Espresso has as early 80s feel to it.
posted by rikschell at 8:05 AM on June 7

Love, love, love the music from the era that (I think) Charnas is referencing. Shalamar, Cherelle, the Gap Band, Zapp & Roger, so much amazing music.

Particularly Shalamar. I've always said they don't get enough credit for making truly ground-breaking, interesting music.
posted by ishmael at 8:52 AM on June 7 [2 favorites]

Listened to it; it's just not my jam. I'm glad others are enjoying it, though!
posted by grubi at 8:56 AM on June 7 [1 favorite]

Not a diss, but maybe an interesting insight into how [modern pop music can come together in a very prepackaged fashion]
posted by mon_petit_ordinateur at 4:23 PM on June 7

I'm not sure what's going on musically, but Sabrina Carpenter's song Nonsense vibes very similar to songs I remember from Top 40 radio in the 90s. I didn't like Espresso much until I heard it a dozen times, but "Nonsense" took over my brain the same way Olivia Rodrigo's "brutal" did, blazing through my addled thirtysomething brain with nuclear-powered nostalgia. I'm enjoying a lot of this stuff, but it does feel like I can't be proud of myself for listening to new music when a lot of it sounds like music I remember fondly from my childhood!
posted by grandiloquiet at 5:55 PM on June 7

I'm enjoying a lot of this stuff, but it does feel like I can't be proud of myself for listening to new music when a lot of it sounds like music I remember fondly from my childhood!

I hear you, but music goes in cycles, so I'd say don't beat yourself up about it. What's the quote, "good artists borrow, great artists steal"?
I still remember being surprised that Doctor and the Medics - Spirit in the Sky was a remake, and was essentially a part of a psychedelia revival at the time. Still a great song and I still enjoy it.
posted by mon_petit_ordinateur at 6:34 PM on June 7

Just came across Chapell Roan's "Hot To Go", which I guess came out last August. This is more interesting to me as a summer jam.

It's still not early '80s electro, but it's a lot closer to it, in my book. It's way more raw -- and way less smug -- than that Sabrina Carpenter song, IMO.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 10:42 PM on June 14

Chappell Roan makes songs-of-the-summer for people who were still in the closet during their high-school theater days, and it's glorious.
posted by mittens at 8:07 AM on June 15 [1 favorite]

She has a lot of cheerfully horny songs, which is basically my favorite genre.
posted by grandiloquiet at 9:45 AM on June 15 [1 favorite]

Chappell Roan makes songs-of-the-summer for people who were still in the closet during their high-school theater days, and it's glorious.

That's a great precis -- thanks. I knew zilch about her before happening on that track, and I gathered from the YouTube comments that she's broadly viewed as a queer artist. But that song seems quite catholic in the small-C sense -- even as a straight I find it relatable.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 1:48 PM on June 15