Song Of The Day 10/10/2016: …And the Native Hipsters – Mr. Magic

This number has been going through my head for pretty much the whole past week. It's getting crowded in there. Last week I started working on a new mixtape -- I might have mentioned it here, or maybe it was somewhere else -- which collected a bunch of new wave pop from the '80s by dapper young men. It's called Mixtape #32: She Saw You Pout, and the aesthetics were a survey of decidedly non-punkish music by vulnerable young men. It's a good mix, but not a second after I finished it I thought, well, it didn't feel fair for me to do a survey of '80s music with just men. I'm terribly concerned with the whole balance thing. So I started another mixtape featuring all women. It's called Mixtape #33: He Saw You Point. I listened to about 300 songs I'd gathered up. Some of them fit in the pop tradition of Mixtape #32 (and what a tradition it was), but almost half of them were a bit too aggressive and harsh for the concept I was going after. However those were the songs I reacted to most instantaneously. So I decided I'd split all those 300 songs, make the more melodic ones part of Mixtape #33, and then put the rest in a pool for a mixtape of female-fronted punk and experimental music from the '80s. This one's very tentatively titled Mixtape #34: You're Not Gonna Need It. I emphasize that this title is tentative because I don't know what it means. By the end of the weekend I had drafts for three mixtapes, and I can relax because I met my quota.

Today's song is kind of the crossover point between 33 and 34. It's from the London duo ...And the Native Hipsters. They had a British indie hit in 1979 called "There Goes Concorde Again." But I found "Mr. Magic" to be much more subversive: a super-innocuous piano pop hook sandwiching psychologically jarring proclamations from narrator Natalie Greenblatt. And like I said, all week it's been trampling through my head, like native hipsters.