iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Dave Moore @otherdavemoore.com · 27/09/2026

Too early to know if mine is true I guess

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Dave Moore @otherdavemoore.com · 26/09/2026

Current 2026 20 (will likely change v soon):

Six Sex: Ultra
Myaap: Pixie Dust
MOLIY: BADDIES <3 MOLIY
Ravyn Lenae: Blue Island
Brennan Wedl: s/t
Shannon: Tropical Mood
Fallon: Winter Princess
Ditonellapiaga: Miss Italian
Cain Culto: Culto
Gilla Band: Pugnello
JayJayy: Detour
Robounoishi (路傍の石): Album 13
LinLin: Disco Inferno
Haku.: When the World Changes
DJ Love: Budots Republic
Willow: The Thread
Fif: The Lower Forty-Eight
Djy Biza: Art of War
DJ Erik JP: No Clima da Sul
Whodamanny: Onda Biloba

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Dave Moore @otherdavemoore.com · 25/09/2026

Another week, another couple of footnotes that probably should have been the essay

2 - I think you can get stuck going down dead-ends when you conflate individual taste and expressions of something like “mass taste” (that is, popularity) in the same way you might with individual financial choices and macroeconomics. The macro view is a separate and important analysis, but not one that maps easily onto individual choices, even if it represents an accumulation of those choices.

3 - I eventually ended up caring a lot about how young people engage with popular culture through my professional work, though it never really gave me much insight in the music that I liked that was ostensibly designed for younger people than myself. I could only trust myself there. The first thing I learned about using popular culture as a teacher was that it was never only a connecting or dividing presence in a classroom; it was always both simultaneously. One song lets a large group of kids in at the expense of a smaller group who feel shut out, or shut themselves out intentionally. There was never something for “everyone,” even though you can get everyone to join together toward a shared goal—especially if they’re creating music in some way themselves.

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Dave Moore @otherdavemoore.com · 20/09/2026

But the champion by some distance was... 🥇 Life Without Buildings, ANY OTHER CITY Congrats! Thanks to everyone who voted!

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Dave Moore @otherdavemoore.com · 20/09/2026

There is a TIE for silver with nine votes! 🥈 Gotan Project, LA REVANCHA DEL TANGO and 🥈 k., NEW PROBLEMS

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Dave Moore @otherdavemoore.com · 20/09/2026

that brings us to our MEDALISTS. There are four of these, with one tie. In BRONZE, with eight votes, we have... 🥉Drive-By Truckers, SOUTHERN ROCK OPERA

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Dave Moore @otherdavemoore.com · 17/09/2026

Thinking again about what I dislike about the post-prestige television environment and how it applies to the pop landscape: losing old conventions while also competing with new global conventions that it can't easily absorb. In TV those new conventions are "internet," in music it's rhythmic genre

For many years now what most people think of as “pop” and what I’ve been starting to call “A-pop” has been appealing to a more savvy and online audience that has certain expectations of content—confessional enough to suggest a writer in the center, but more knowing and less genteel, often with profanity as a kind of shortcut to “realness” in a way that was harder to get away with in a pre-streaming environment—a weird amalgam of confessional rock and raunch-pop. Pop-as-genre’s relationship to “least objectionable” popularity has become more like indie rock’s relationship to the mainstream rock that preceded it—defensive, cerebral, and highly sensitive to territorial breaches from general audiences and outsiders. It’s not designed to let everyone in, even if it doesn’t think of itself as actively keeping everyone out.

It also reminds me of the creatively exciting but structurally disastrous rise of prestige television, where an abandonment of conventions could seem thrilling during a transitional phase, after which everything takes on a leaden, overworked feeling without offering the simpler pleasures of the more conventional past—comedies without jokes, dramas without episodic cohesion, a sense that no one is really sure what they’re trying to do, but in a way that is pretentious and hesitant, like spinning an ART roulette wheel and hoping to reverse a losing streak.

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Dave Moore @otherdavemoore.com · 16/09/2026

Well I’ll be damned, was indeed calling it Afropiano in 2024 and promptly forgot about it

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Dave Moore @otherdavemoore.com · 05/09/2026

"Bedrock" sped up is hyperpop

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Dave Moore @otherdavemoore.com · 27/08/2026

how many footnotes did I *delete* this week? More than three, fewer than ten.

You could think of ferment literally to visualize a process that speeds up with heat and slows down with cold. So any field that has ever experienced ferment always “has it” to some level, but at some point it’s chucked itself into the freezer. In some cases, a fermentation process is “done” and you just have the final product—you don’t really want to change it too much anymore. But in music that usually signals the end of a style; the more generative form of fermentation is more like a live culture than perfecting a bottle of wine.

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Dave Moore @otherdavemoore.com · 24/08/2026

Don’t like this song but do like this story

They decided to try some writing exercises — opening a book, pointing to a random word, and then trying to write a song around that word, as Thomas told Genius years later. They ended up with the word "rusty," which led to the opening line: "She said, 'I don't know if I've ever been good enough, I'm a little bit rus-tyyyy." Somehow, that one line led them to come up with a sensitive growler about a toxic relationship.

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Dave Moore @otherdavemoore.com · 13/08/2026

I should stop reading and postomg while doing like five other things lol

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Dave Moore @otherdavemoore.com · 10/08/2026

Hm should go out and sift before it starts raining…

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Dave Moore @otherdavemoore.com · 31/07/2026

No it’s a dumb idea I made up as the inverse to hyperpop

By hypopop I mean the sublimation of the Songful Pop Impulse into waves of sound and feeling with the older structures visible just under the surface, in contrast to the sublimation in hyperpop of the Songful Pop Impulse into an overstimulating deluge of flickers and flashes around a song stuck in a glass box. The difference between the two—though maybe it’s more of a distinction in search of a difference as far as your ears are concerned—is immersive sensory deprivation (hypo) versus alienating sensory overload (hyper), two routes of tripping the same pop pleasure centers from unexpected, indirect angles—both following roundabout routes to endorphin release but usually getting there (when it works—which it does, sometimes).

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Dave Moore @otherdavemoore.com · 30/07/2026

crammed a lot into the footnotes this week

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My own tastes in confessional pop largely didn’t survive into the current pop era. I recently participated in a big 2000s pop retrospective where people chose their favorite singles, and my #1 single of the whole decade—“Don’t Save Me” by Marit Larsen—wasn’t picked by a single other participant, despite that song having a huge moment among friends and fellow travelers in 2006.

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I appreciated the economy of mid-aughts confessional teenpop artists trying to fit as much information as possible into fewer words conveyed in bigger melodies. (Ashlee Simpson was excellent at this.) Which detail gets chosen matters much more when you simply don’t have that many syllables to choose from.

Economy has basically no place in the post-Swift songwriting environment, where songs are constructed to allow truckloads of words in without worrying about mucking up the hooks, because the hooks themselves are softer—weakened intentionally to give more space. I tend not to like the way it sounds, but I’m not against it in principle, only in practice.

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Dave Moore @otherdavemoore.com · 30/07/2026

anyway I sort of wrote about that this week. Taylor Swift has a way of "talking to you" you through her music, even if you don't like what she's saying or how she says it, in a way that almost none of her peers manage. (But mostly a lot of post-Taylor pop is too many words and not enough tune.)

More generally, confessional-minded music in the wake of Taylor Swift’s success gives us a deluge of diaristic words pointing to the inner life of the artist, the deluge itself often coming at the expense of melody and economy. This autobiographical quality was not in and of itself something that really motivated me to like millennial confessional teenpop that preceded Taylor Swift (and which, I argue in my series, she took over completely)—it’s just that this approach happened to create lots of good, affecting music that I took to heart. The recessive 2020s version in the shadow of Taylor Swift is verbally denser and melodically weaker, and most of it simply doesn’t sound very good to me. But impact’s impact, the rest is taste.

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Dave Moore @otherdavemoore.com · 30/07/2026

not sure I've ever even seen something like this before

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Dave Moore @otherdavemoore.com · 18/07/2026

anyway, something like this for songs I've shared that linked to YouTubes would be cool, will keep working on it

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Dave Moore @otherdavemoore.com · 18/07/2026

Trying to see if there's a way I could tag every song I share to its country in an interactive map and wanted to see if anyone has created a glossary of regional genres. RYM has one, but you can see the issue in tackling a project like this -- orders of magnitude more genres than any other category

screenshot of RYM genre lists with reggae/ska/dancehall (30 subgenres), Regional Music (1,535 subgenres), and Rock (274 subgenres)

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Dave Moore @otherdavemoore.com · 14/07/2026

spent some time going through the simplest proxy I could find of US/UK chart convergence -- simultaneous #1 entries in both countries (there's a wiki entry for this thru '24, I did '25/26 best I could). Convergence of #1 explodes in the streaming era

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Dave Moore @otherdavemoore.com · 26/06/2026

New Debbii Dawson EP is a strong collection of songs -- she deserves a great album! THE HAPPY WORLD LP YouTube: www.youtube.com/playlist?lis... Tidal: tidal.com/playlist/ef6... Deezer: www.deezer.com/us/playlist/... Spotify: open.spotify.com/playlist/5p4...

SIDE 1
Happy World
I Want You
Kool Aid
Chemical Reaction
Money
The Great Magician

SIDE 2
Where Have All the Good Men Gone?
Gut Feelings
Don’t Want to Play Anymore
You Killed the Music
Turn the TV On
Mars

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Dave Moore @otherdavemoore.com · 25/06/2026

Never understood why Manny Farber singled out “Jules et Jim” in his White Elephant essay until I heard the new B0YG1RL album and realize I have a similar reaction (and think it sounds about as weird to say)

So this one poses a bit of a sticking point for me—I really disliked it on first listen and particularly disliked the arty framing it got in Pitchfork. I think that its avant hipster tendency to reduce global sounds to capital-N noise not only misses the spark in those sounds but often misses even the noise, like tuning your vacuum cleaner. The roughness—signifying as such—bothers me, because it’s too smooth, or smooth in the wrong way, like a rock tumbler’s artificial sea glass.

It has also helped me understand why Manny Farber included Jules et Jim in his White Elephant Art essay, a choice that made me lose the thread a bit when I first read it, because I found Jules et Jim scrappy and charming myself. There’s something about the totalizing control exhibited over this work that smothers the little embers—in performance, in rhythm, in noise—trying to fly out. In fact, the way Farber describes Jules et Jim is not far off from my thoughts about the album: “Jules et Jim, the one Truffaut film that seems held down to a gliding motion, is also cartoonlike but in a decorous, suspended way.”

But at the end of the day my body doesn’t reject this thing outright even though my brain is pretty convinced it’s right about this. Maybe it’s just a brain problem.

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Dave Moore @otherdavemoore.com · 23/06/2026

man I am NOT paying my therapist money to talk about this shit

wall to wall olivia rodrigo coverage in pitchfork, a publication that once intimated I was a sleazy degenerate for liking ashlee simpson and interviewing brie larson

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Dave Moore @otherdavemoore.com · 22/06/2026

Olivia Rodrigo's next move for cred with one very specific subset the rock critic demo (me)

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Dave Moore @otherdavemoore.com · 16/06/2026

Lia Lia is in the lead position and I can't let her down, especially when she apparently has an album coming out sometime this year??

A screenshot of Lia Lia's Instagram from a few months ago. A burning cigarette with the following text written on it: "music, money, sex, fame, love, love [illegible from cigarette ash]." With "2026" on the picture.

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Dave Moore @otherdavemoore.com · 14/06/2026

It can be done but you might lose your nose

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Dave Moore @otherdavemoore.com · 13/06/2026

These are the ones I kept for a mix, a bunch of others in my SA holdover list I think I

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Dave Moore @otherdavemoore.com · 11/06/2026

Cowards!! Good review though

Pitchfork review of ULTRA by Six Sex with a 7.7

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Dave Moore @otherdavemoore.com · 11/06/2026

GAPDY revisited: despite the framing, 2009 (and the late 00s more generally) was a low point of music critic consensus and the end of an era. I think we’re dealing with something similar now in pop-as-genre (“A-pop”)