This year, I’ve challenged myself to write a review of every song that manages to get to No. 1 in the UK charts. Yes, I do realise that I’m running very behind schedule. Here’s the latest one:
In my review to OMI’s Cheerleader, I asked what the miserable-sounding singer would’ve sounded like before he found his boo. Well, now I have my answer: he’d have sounded like Lost Frequencies’ Are You With Me. The two songs are almost identical: one is a minimalist melancholy club beat about a man who really wants a girlfriend, the other is a minimalist melancholy club beat about a man who really wanted a girlfriend and now has one* – they’re the same story, just set at different points in the timeline. This made it really difficult for me to like Are You With Me for a while. I couldn’t come up with any reasons why this song needed to exist when we have so many songs like it around. I couldn’t tell why people were listening to it.
It’s grown on me though. The muffled quality to the music, alongside the club-esque beats played on acoustic instruments, gives it the feel of a party which is happening really far away, placing you in two places at the same time: inside the party and outside of it, like you’re in a place which is there and also not, neither real nor fake. It creates a barrier between the listener and the party: combine this with the song’s wishful lyrics – “I wanna dance by the water ‘neath the Mexican sky” – and you really get the feeling of this song desperately grasping for something it’ll never reach. Certainly this makes it a better song than Cheerleader – it knows what atmosphere it’s going for and manages to actually achieve it, rather than OMI’s effort which I still can’t tell if it’s meant to be happy or not.
It also follows a trend that I’ve been talking about for a long time: the Post-Club Age of Music. By taking club-esque beats and treating them as an unreachable ideal, the song reveals the utopian ideals which underlie club music for what they are: ideals and iconographies which are ultimately detached from real human experience. Who wants sex, booze and drugs and money when money is scarce, sex is unsatisfying and drugs will kill you? The narrator of Are You With Me thus represents the modern tragic hero who most people are nowadays – one whose social structures tell them that they can do anything and be whatever they want, yet whose social structures simultaneously lock them away from that ideal (and note how popular music, being made by the cultural elites for the mass populace, directly profits from there being an ideal to sell) – and his representation in this song is thus a bringing back of club music to the material reality of everyday life (and away from the invented reality).
This of course contributes to a running theme of pop songs doing this in recent years: Am I Wrong? and Nobody to Love were doing pretty the same thing this time last year. The bizarre thing is that this is a trend in the first place. These songs are deconstructions in the full Derridean sense. Indeed, the deconstructionist Post Club songs seems so distinct its own genre that I’m tempted to actually split my original definition of Post Club songs into separate camps: Deconstructionist Post Club Music and Reconstructionist Post Club Music.
Deconstructionist Post Club Music is the music I’ve talked about here: club songs which take the club form and modify them into deconstructions of themselves. Reconstructionist Post Club Music meanwhile is the music which is deliberately trying to break away from club music not by critiquing it but by supplanting it with something different: these would be songs like Sing by Ed Sheeran, Uptown Funk by Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars, Bills by Lunchmoney Lewis, etc. The difference between the two is that Deconstructionist Post Club Music is dark and sad – it works by revealing the music it’s based on to be inherently unfulfilling and crap – while Reconstructionist Post Club Music still wants to be happy and danceable, it just also wants to weed out the problematic elements which have plagued former songs. Deconstructivist Post Club Music is about club music’s flaws while Reconstructionist Post Club Music wants to throw away the flaws and pretend like they don’t exist.
And then, of course, there’s the traditional club that just wants everything to say as it is: this is the works of Jess Glynne, Jason Derulo, Meghan Trainor, etc. These are the cultural elite everyone else is railing against.
Assuming the above to be true, then my initial reaction to Are You With Me might’ve been due to me misreading what it’s trying to do. I couldn’t see why people would want to dance to this, but that assumed that the song was designed to be danced to. Post Club Music is instead designed to feel like it should be danced to when in reality it isn’t; the underwhelming lack of satisfaction to be gained from these songs is indeed the entire point of them.
And taken as a song that I’m not supposed to truly like that much, Are You With Me might be one of the best Post Club songs I’ve heard all year. At least, it is the one with the strongest command on it’s tone and purpose. Previous Post-Club songs have tried to be either danceable with sad lyrics or sound sad with happy lyrics; Are You With Me is as a sad song which is supposed to be sad and, as such, is the one that works best as a singular piece. It is the song which best fulfils the criteria of what a Deconstructionist Post-Club song should be.
Now with the current state of war between the Deconstructionists/Reconstructionists/Cultural Elite set into words, let us sit back and see how it develops in the future.
* And heaven knows he’s miserable now.
TheWrittenTevs 