The Top 40 Songs of 2014
Ariel Pink – “Not Enough Violence”
St. Vincent – “Regret”
Among high-concept artists, the remove needed to create a compelling art-pop character and the transparency required to promote one has been causing palpable discomfort. Like a lot of Ariel Pink’s killer collages, “Not Enough Violence” is a pile of near-nonsense picked to aid the mood of the music. For a tone perfect goth-schlock jam he picks “doomsday clock,” “body farm,” and “carnage, violence, carnage, violence.” For kiddie cartoon psychedelia it’s “plastic raincoats in the pig parade.” When asked about himself in an interview he finds the words to fit that mold too. It’s a stream of faux provocations, weird headline fodder, the return of the short white duke. No one is content to let him just be the weirdo on the back of a record sleeve.
St. Vincent’s Annie Clark would also much prefer you dealt only with the image she presents to every photo shoot and video—the Cyborg Queen of Cloud City. The push and pull of retaining her privacy during a new album press cycle has been so well-established that she’s had to turn that into art-pop too. She’s seemed a touch priggish in the process, at the risk of becoming an anti-Internet scold. It’s a song like “Regret”, virtuosic, poetic, refusing to give up the keys to its own meaning, that keeps her ideal self pristine.
Lana Del Rey – “Brooklyn Baby”
More than both of them, Lana Del Rey has the most to lose or gain by letting her mask slip a bit. She’s also the most committed, so will probably remain an enigma indefinitely. Her doomed but glamorous image is so cleanly drawn that you instinctively know what she’s about, yet you still have no clue at all what she’s really like. “Brooklyn Baby”, the one Ultraviolence song that’s completely removed from her Hollywood starlet/Route 66 refugee/uber-L.A. persona suggests that behind the artifice she might actually be funny as shit.
When fictional Japanese anime character Hatsune Miku appeared fronting a live band on the David Letterman show earlier this year, it was like a benign Black Mirror plot, a perfect projection that will never lose its fan base for fucking up in an interview or Tweeting something insensitive. It seemed silly, still a little too futuristic. But really, if that cartoon had better songs, it might already rule the world.