NowPlaying — Some Music We Listened To April 2026

Some of the songs we considered important enough to post with a #nowPlaying tag on Bluesky.

Playlist for songs here, although also a few others we listened to that are talked about in this article.

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Solid jam, but weird presentation.

I have not talked about this much, but weird presentation from the beginning of the career is a double edged sword, you go too weird too early you may get enough money, but it is highly unlikely that you will ever get the money that normalcy represents.

Whereas if you go normal and represent yourself as normal, then when you go weird people will be like “look at that crossing boundaries trying new stuff having fun, I gotta respect that level of artistic risk-taking yo”

Go Weird early you might get attention and financial payback early, but you might limit your reach.

Go Normal early you might struggle too hard for too many years.

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The story of a girl who doesn’t want to have anything to do with this loser that is stalking her and can’t take a hint. It’s a laid back groove, it’s sort of funny because if it were a rock and roll song it would be screaming angry or fragile folk rock girl who is traumatized by the jerk who makes her worried about being killed.

But not here, Momo Boyd is doing what women of course have to do, be apologetic for their personal safety when some jerk is crossing boundaries type of thing, which has some down sides, I personally prefer people saying clearly no, because if I were to get “Oops, I swear I meant to call back” it might give me hope, because taking a hint is not necessarily my strong point. And then I would be the irritating stalker that needs to be let down easy. Which is not the fault of women, it’s the fault of all the weak jerks who can’t handle the clear cut no, never, it’s not happening. They messing it up for the rest of us who have to try to decipher what shit means with all their bullshit raping, assaulting, and killing women that don’t want to sleep with them.

But at the same time the song is a laid back groove. Not the angry one you’d most probably get with a white girl. Momo Boyd seems a bit satisfied she has a guy she doesn’t want whose heart she can break, it’s cool enough for her, she has to be nice and not scream and not call the police to get rid of him, but hmm, she sort of is liking it, and her girls, the friends she hangs out with, they think it’s sort of groovy too.

Also that guy is a 10. Momo Boyd is so high up she can let a 10 go like that, it’s no sweat.

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Sort of wistful laid back, not what I normally like, but it’s the kind of thing you can drink coffee and eat pancakes to, the music of a relaxing early morning hanging around not being stressed out by anything. It’s an important under-served demographic of our musical landscape.

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Has a bit Cruella by Florence and The Machine phrasing in it, which I am very much in line with.

There does seem a lot of fin de siecle, downfall of civilization undercurrents to a few of these songs, but sort of we’re going to fight but we’re going to die type of feeling. Doomed but angry.

I bet there are people who hear that and think YES, they feel doomed! Happy times!!

But you know, that’s because those people are really stupid, frankly, and they don’t understand about fighting and revolutions and all that stuff. They think the way to beat the revolution is to break it, and they’re right, when the revolution is being fought by people who are hopeful.

Hopeful people who think they just need to stand up to you and get you to listen and you will back down because of the strength in their numbers, those are the kinds of people who are easy to beat, because they have hope for the future, they are fighting you to make that future better, if you make them feel they won’t have a nice future if they continue fighting but you will let them have a slightly less nice future if they comply, well you can get them to make nice real quick.

It’s the people who think they are going to die, and be killed miserably and vanished somewhere and burned alive and their kids given diseases and starved to death and they want to fight you anyway because they just fucking hate your guts you gotta watch out for man, those folks ain’t gonna make nice if you offer them a 10 cent raise and say but all this can be taken away if you don’t behave!

There are people who are willing to burn, because they want to watch the world burn. To paraphrase a recent saying from fiction. If you spend a lot of time making people want to burn the world, you are not going to be able to negotiate your way out of the bonfire.

Anyway it sure has been getting hot lately.

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When you got fin de siecle energy everything seems bigger and more important and you put the back of your wrist to your forehead whenever discussing your day.

Classical feels and opera seems the right model for music in this mood to gravitate towards.

But for all the drama and melodrama this song is somewhat hilarious, lyrically speaking

If I’m gonna dance, then you’re gonna dance too What’s the matter, babe? Did you bring the wrong shoes? Fire in the risers, so your body better move To the tiny violins and the big ones too

You really feel like explaining the difference between the piccolo violin and the normal violin.

Anyway did you know they actually made special tiny violins to play for The Exterminating Angel — there’s decadence for you!

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You know, I really get the feeling that Richard Carter has never actually conducted an orchestra in his life!

I have also been noticing a bit more French language showing up in smart English pop lyrics lately, not sure why, unless it is the cultural memory that the French, when their rulers get out of hand, know how to deploy slicy boi and people are starting to envy that bit of decisiveness.

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Normally I would think for monetary purposes and economic foresight, you would want to bring in Spanish, but nope, it’s French.

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Sugar, one of the basic early addictive substances humanity discovered, has been put in metaphorically for pretty much every substance or thing that people like over the centuries, Sex a major one.

So this song, completely about eating sugar, is also metaphorically about drugs and sex addiction.

It makes a good addition to some Sugar playlist somewhere, as a solid base to give a break for the more major highs.

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The Anti Momo Boyd. I must admit I get tired of being sold the sexual desirability of women I don’t know in videos, I mean what if I meet Sophie Harris sometime? It’s not quite as embarrassing as meeting a porn star, since that meeting and recognition implies probably having masturbated to them at some point.

Here as we’ve gotten into a sensitive subject, I don’t masturbate to singers or musicians or movie stars or people I have just met in the street because it is rude, I feel it is an ethical violation.

I know some people do, but my feeling is that if you have known someone intimately, ok, if they are a porn star, ok, if you have almost had sex but it didn’t happen but there was a lot of sexual tension, ok. Otherwise not OK. This is just my personal code and I figure other people have different rules and I don’t care what they’re rules are, pretty much although there are often edge cases where I would think that’s too much, but anyway those are my rules.

And this is why I dislike the sexualization of women in a music video because it does make it seem that maybe you have masturbated to them when you meet them. Which I find not just gross, but meeting someone who you have been presented to as a sexual object before must also be sort of gross for them, unless they have a particular kink that makes it cool, which I am not able to say anything about.

So both Momo Boyd and the Anti Momo Boyd here, Sophie Harris, are presented sexually, but Sophie Harris affects me slightly more because damn it, doesn’t she remind me of a few ex-girlfriends.

Because then as the song goes on it starts to promise not just sexual closeness, but sensual, emotional and intellectual closeness. Momo Boyd keeps that shit away from you — even in her big hit

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Which is really a nice critique of the whole video sweetheart culture she is serving. A declaration that no matter what, she isn’t that.

Anyway back to Johnny’s Dreamworld. I like the musical intro, the drums and the clashing guitars, when it resolves however I didn’t like it that much until the lyrics.

Often this is the case of modern post-punk indie rock stuff for me, the rhythm is boring, it is an anti-groove, it seems, given the intro, almost studiously clumsy. Dancing should not be impossible to these songs, but it should perhaps be sort of awkward and full of mis-steps.

The Modern Woman in Johnny’s Dreamworld, Sophie, the singer of the song, is presented sexually, but with awkwardness, she is not an unproblematic alluring piece of delicious sexual confectionery that you can lust over but never have like Momo Boyd.

Momo Boyd is, in the Oops video, presented as a traditional pop star, a receptacle of male lust; The Modern Woman presents Sophie as a person who pushes her erotic desires out, her desires are an attack as it were, which is why much of the video must spend its time keeping her in a box.

As the music builds it becomes more enticing, louder, less awkward, as the lyrics become more emotional, and then the outro where she retreats into the box, as the music is more brutal and ending.

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Thank god for some straight ahead British rock and roll where I don’t have to feel conflicted about what the video wants me to feel in the quest to divide me from my entertainment dollars.

On the other hand it only has 18k views which seems weird, I guess good old fashioned sex and messed up neurotic sex sells, in that order.

Black and white moody British kids walking are not selling at the moment it seems.

Black and white moody British kids walking down the black and white streets singing about how women get tricked by arrogant player guys, ah these guys I know them, obviously all in love with Sophie Harris from Modern Woman, who ended up going out with some rapper and leaving them to walk down black and white streets of Bolton England, which I have looked at in Google Images and surprisingly these streets are also available in color. As these young kids, who should be playing Dungeons and Dragons in somebody’s basement and not being mopey about the girl who got away, will reveal at 2:19 mark of their video, but sufficiently dark that the color will not disturb the mood too much, and remember the mood is moody!

Until the loud guitars will get louder and let us know that there is life out there, even in Bolton!

I mean when I was that age my band sounded like shit and we sang about losing our girlfriends too, but in our songs they dumped us for a zombie who had rigor mortis so he was always “hard” if you get my drift.

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So I guess I should shut up and respect their abilities. Carry on, Florentenes.

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Cool, a Lesbian Love song, based on a female singer and “her” being the object of affection in the song, on the other hand not sure if that really means anything or should mean anything. Is the evident gender of the singer actually pertinent to the lyrics. I sort of feel as though it is natural to think so and I am strange for even considering the opposite so, again, a Lesbian Love song.

This is probably the most to my taste of all the songs here. I think it’s great. But it doesn’t really make me think about anything, because it’s so much to my taste that well, I just experience it, It’s aligned with me on a level I don’t need to think about it.

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