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Madonna has a reputation for being a trendsetter, but her true talent lies in bending those trends to her will, twisting them around until they’re barely recognizable. “That’s Just the Way that I Feel” is the musical equivalent of finding a faded Polaroid of yourself with a friend gone too soon.
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The song showcases Berman’s unmatchable wordplay: “I’ve been forced to watch my foes enjoy ceaseless feasts of schadenfreude” is a head-spinner, and the line about a Des Moines anthill is the kind of earth-shatteringly funny nugget that only Berman could concoct. If that sounds weighty, the song is bouncy enough to avoid being maudlin. With Woods as his rollicking backing band, Berman gleefully lays out the myriad disasters of the last decade and highlights the philosophical themes he’s getting ready to tackle: dying love, loneliness, and the crushing impermanence of life. “That’s Just the Way that I Feel” is part barstool rant about failure and rotten luck, and part mission statement for the album. Purple Mountains is as funny, incisive, and vital as anything in David Berman’s catalog, suggesting a phone call out of the blue from a friend you haven’t heard from in years. Purple Mountains, “That’s Just the Way that I Feel” The masses, or at least fiendish cult audiences, are listening. These self-possessed artists have decided to push against old formulas in search of something more transparently reflective of who they are and what’s happening inside their brains during a remarkably chaotic time. If there’s one unifying theme in this set of tracks, it’s a genre-less sense of exploration. FKA twigs’s electronic-pop ballads and Lana Del Rey’s revisionist take on ‘70s singer-songwriter material, complete with nods to Sublime and Kanye West, are practically programming categories of their own. So, Lil Nas X and Billie Eilish (the other commercial breakout no one could shut up about) sit comfortably alongside a quieter Taylor Swift, Bat for Lashes’s mind-melting atmospherics, the drifting grief of Nick Cave’s latest work, and the weirdest shit Madonna has ever put out. For the first time ever, Slant has ranked the best songs of the year, from radio darlings and streaming juggernauts to gorgeous deep cuts. And, in its own absurd way, liberating.ĭefining what we used to call singles, much less ranking them, doesn’t make much sense now. 1 by a young gay black man in Atlanta boasting about the “Wrangler on my booty” seems somehow natural. Or was it so surprising after all? As the world careens in wilder and wilder directions and the music industry’s rules have long since been abandoned, a hip-hop/Nashville crossover No. In 2019, Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road,” a country-trap novelty built out of a Nine Inch Nails sample by an erstwhile Nicki Minaj stan, became a TikTok meme and then the biggest and most surprising smash of the year. Where a song comes from, and how it becomes a hit, is more muddled than ever.