98. Dirty Projectors - Stillness is the Move
I could probably make a top 100 list of songs from the mid 2000s from Brooklyn art rock bands or just the top artists on Sub Pop/Merge/Domino/4AD/Jagjaguwar, following my worst instincts to just canonize my favorites from my college years. Some combination of the songs my college roommate downloaded from what.cd or oink.fm plus whatever Cokemachineglow or Brooklyn Vegan or Gorilla vs Bear told me was cool made up nearly the sum total of my musical taste after my high school obsessions with jam bands and classic rock. I haven’t done that with this list, but I could have. Maybe it would have been more honest than pretending my tastes are more diverse than they are, but anyway, let’s get specific.
This song is deeply etched into my psyche because a girl I was crushing on put it on a mixtape for me circa 2009 when I was newly single and deeply emotionally vulnerable, and she was older and a grad student and really smart and hot and I thought every song she chose was sending me deep messages about our relationship, which at the time consisted of one shared class and also smoking lots of weed together. I assumed she was telling me that maybe we could be together someday but not yet, we should just keep being friends, let’s not wreck this. In retrospect, it didn’t mean anything more than the Hood Internet mashups that made up a lot of the rest of the playlist, and she definitely wasn’t into me at all.
I like this song anyway because it’s ridiculously catchy and poppy but not straightforward as a composition whatsoever. That describes Dirty Projectors fairly well across the many different iterations of their band, and while Bitte Orca and Swing Lo Magellan are their two best known and reviewed, there are tons of gems across their full catalog. I like the percussion here especially. Dirty Projectors borrow from afrobeat and electronic music a lot, and I like how they shake off categories but make very listenable music at the same time.