On the same day that I watched a video delivered by the revered philosopher Alain Badiou on the subject of love it was fascinating to listen to this lo-fi treatise on much the same subject by Norway’s Boy Made Flower, aka Henrik Lund (“a flower?” cries Peter Gabriel in the background).
A ringer for a young Jarvis Cocker and undoubtedly one of the common people, Lund plays the unrequited lover in this song. He’s so laid back that I swear he’ll fall off that chair if he isn’t careful.
The problem with lo-fi hip hop like this is that it sounds so lazy that it is difficult to take too seriously. So when he uses the adjective ‘f***ing’ as he does frequently (“just f***ing text me” and various other examples) it’s like he just discovered a new expletive and can’t resist repeating it to all and sundry.
Vocally, lo-fi also often entails the slurring of words and sentences. Does he really say “I could sing about your t*** or your a***” or is it my imagination? It certainly spices up the song just wondering if that’s what you heard. The f***ing bits apart, the lyrics could be the work of Shakespeare for all I know but are largely unintelligible.
Working out of his bedroom, as do the majority of songwriters these days it seems, the song arose out of him having a crush on a close friend. “At that point I had already decided not to pursue my feelings. I remember sobbing all the way home after having passed out on the street, without even opening my third beer for the night. I was completely out of it, and I wrote the verse the morning after, based on the things I could remember from the incident.” And it sounds like it.
Musically, it isn’t bad, with a dominant snare drum and accompanying trap beat anchoring a quite complex and unusual arrangement.
I suppose I’m not the best person to judge this sort of track and I’m fairly sure that amongst those it is targeted at – recent shavers who drive around at speed in souped up and pimped older cars with oversized tyres and black windows - it will go down a treat.
'Text Me' is available to stream now.
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