Fans had 24 hours to digest the announcement of Folklore’s imminent landing. A collective gasp rippled across the internet because, like us, she’d been quarantining. The day that production began rolling she threw everyone off the scent with an Instagram selfie captioned ‘not a lot going on at the moment’. Could this signpost a new beginning of how albums are made and released?
The traditional agenda of making an album might include long-haul studio sessions with cryptic posts of nozzles for nosy fans, intimate collaborations and vanilla-scented candles. This has been scrapped for WeTransfers and Zoom calls, yet Folklore’s rustic magic feels cosy - and almost live.
Charli XCX also released a ‘quarantine album’. She announced and dropped how i’m feeling now in a month and, recording it from her living room, created a real-time documentary through various Instagram Lives with fans being a core component of the creative process. Sonically high in the clouds compared to Folklore, it was quite the opposite of Taylor Swift’s hush hush approach.
Both projects have unique narratives that offer something to actually smile about in 2020, so should it matter how they were made? Spotify’s impact, and the digitisation of music consumption in general, might have old-schoolers reeling at an apparent lack of authenticity – but what happens when there are no other options? Folklore and how i’m feeling now have exceeded the bars set in non-global pandemic standards and we should embrace those who are traipsing new paths in new territories of making and releasing music.
If artists can dish quality content in such a dire time for the music industry, it might just be a catalyst for changing attitudes in how we enjoy the result.
Dua Lipa is riding the wave of Future Nostalgia (released in the early stages of lockdown) by releasing a remixed edition, Club Future Nostalgia. A now dwindling project often handed to producers for the sake of extra shelf-life, Dua’s firmly sunk her foot into this one. She’s enlisted the help of Madonna and Missy Elliott (no biggie) for a remix of Levitating with a Back to the Future on acid style video. Club is a choppier, fast-paced version of its original but doesn’t veer away from the disco roots. It’s logical when Dua Lipa’s tour has been postponed by a year.
It’s easy to waggle tongues over artists squeezing the juice out of a lemon. And I’m sure there are many on the Twittersphere who are resentful of the fact that the Levitating collaboration didn’t have the grandiosity of WAP. But when we’ve been so starved of content, it’s okay to just… enjoy it. Dua’s dancehall project is just as exciting; it doesn’t require a heartfelt friendship with a big budget video to make it valid.
Almost 10 years to the day, Katy Perry was superglued to the top of the Billboard Hot 100; Teenage Dream was a force. But she was also pelted with stones for ‘cheating’ her way by including big name features to songs that were fine on their own. This even led to a Billboard rule change. Yet, Lil Nas X scroll list of Old Town Road features remains unscathed. In fact, it’s arguably the musical soundtrack of 2019. The rodeo quirkiness of releasing it with Billy Rae Cyrus, alongside his sharp social media self-deprecation, certainly helped. It’s clear that attitudes from fans depend on how transparent those currency signs are.
Folklore, how i’m feeling now and Club Future Nostalgia are solid bodies of work that, we can assume, were made and released through pure digitisation. Music isn’t less important because we’re streaming it rather than buying an obnoxiously expensive vinyl - it’s been a lifeline for music lovers. A collaboration can also be just as sexy when made remotely through email exchanges. We’ll assume Dua and Madonna wished each other well in these strange and surreal times.
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