Yell At The Clouds - "Closer" by The Chainsmokers

“Closer” by the Chainsmokers is one heck of a memorable song. I hate it like Duterte hates respectability, but I’ll be damned if I call it forgettable and dull. In fact, despite its stupid f***ing lyrics, or that soulless bleepity-bloop drop that seems to come out straight from an EDM version of Puff Daddy, or the fact that the male singer sounds like he just came home from an all-night rave and was forced to sing the song because their label was trying to rush out the single before the end of the summer, it’s still quite an unique song, one that will probably live in the annals of 2010s nostalgia far off in the future.

POSITIVE THINGS ABOUT THE SONG:

The song is basically about an alcoholic asshole and a shallow lady meeting after four years and then having a one-night-stand in the back in his/her Land Rover. Before I get negative, let me just say that I really like the fact that they give us enough details about these two people that we can extrapolate their character based on what they sing, and hate them accordingly for it. He’s a jack-off who gets drunk a lot, she’s super shallow in her perception of romance, and they’re both horny and beautiful enough to sleep together.

It’s just nice for them to characterize them realistically, and to have it be a duet because it would not be half as memorable as it is than if it was a single point-of-view brag/lament about banging his ex (like half of Drake’s songs).

And the fact that there’s a story being told, and not just another song about sex with as few details as possible, is absolutely refreshing, especially considering how most of the songs that topped the Billboard chart after this (“Bad and Boujee,” “Black Beatles,” “Starboy”) are empty brag raps about how awesome it is to be them. It’s nice to hear a little effort being exerted to the lyrics of a song, especially when lyrics seem to be confined to meaningless catch-phrases that rival sitcoms in shameless lack of value.

(“Raindrop, Drop top” is basically the “Did I do that?” of Migos, except more embarrassing to say)

NEGATIVE THINGS ABOUT THE SONG:

1. The chorus is messy and under-baked

Now, I really do hate this song. First, let me just start with the chorus, which is a mess, to say the least. The chorus goes:

“So, baby, pull me closer/In the backseat of your Rover/that I know you can’t afford/Bite the tattoo on your shoulder/Pull the sheets right off the corner/of that mattress that you stole/From your roommate back in Boulder/We ain’t ever getting older.”

I hate this f***ing chorus. Every time I hear it in my head, my blood boils so much I could probably use it to make instant ramen. There are so many unnecessary details in this chorus that I wonder if this was deliberate to create a feel of rushed foreplay from the both of them. I mean, it sounds improvised, it’s very self-centered and self-adulating, and it’s being sung while they’re trying to have sex. It’s either a deliberate attempt to replicate the awkwardness of foreplay, or the first draft that they didn’t bother polishing because it kinda rhymed already.

I mean, why do we need details like “that I know you can’t afford”? Does that really turn people on, thinking about car debt and being penniless? Or how about the stolen mattress? Why do we need to know about the stolen mattress? You’re in a damn car, not a mattress. Get used to it. Heck, what about the roommate from Boulder? Why do we need to know about where the mattress was stolen from? WHY DO WE NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE ROOMMATE?!? I thought he hated her friends? Stop talking about them, then.

To be perfectly honest, my hatred of this song comes from those lines about the stolen mattress from her/his roommate back in Boulder. I mean, it shifts the details so unnecessarily—I don’t get what for. We were already in the car, and then suddenly you transport us to Boulder where we think about a person there forced to live without a mattress? Holy sh**, why do we need that? This is supposed to be about a one-night-stand between you two and you shift perspective to someone far away from you, with no relevance to the story you’re telling, sitting there in their bedroom mattressless?

WHY DO WE NEED TO KNOW THAT?!?!? You cretins took us out of a halfway decent chorus just to talk about something irrelevant, and what for? To add more lines to your chorus? WHY?!?! WHY THE F*** DO I NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE ROOMMATE IN BOULDER?!?!

2. The inability of the male singer to sing

…Secondly, the male singer’s voice sucks. I’m not sure who got the idea to let one of the Chainsmokers try to sing a song when he obviously doesn’t have the mettle to do it, but they were probably high. This man cannot sing, and even with the help of Auto-Tune, he is barely better than Wiz Khalifa’s voice in “We Dem Boys,” which isn’t even faint praise: if you barely sound better than Wiz Khalifa and his bored droning about cars and girls, you have a damn problem with your singing voice.

I mean, we have so many viable male singers out there, some with voices that could lend this song actual depth, and they decide to sing the song themselves? I do not know what kind of cocaine or ecstasy they use where they recorded this, but it must’ve been super-f***ing-strong if they thought that he would be a good substitute to someone like EDM-regular Justin Bieber.

Yet, despite the male singer’s lack of any acceptable voice, I do see the kind of drugged-out reasoning they must’ve used to justify it. See, the male persona in the song is an alcoholic asshole whose drunkenness and horniness compels him to sleep with his ex-girlfriend that he hasn’t seen in four years. And you know what? It sounds like it. The dude is so apathetic, so passive-aggressively emotionless in tone that it’s very believable that this dude still hates the girl he’s currently sleeping with. The resentment is there, and it shows in how he barely tries to keep her interested.
That apathetic, barely-trying sound that comes out of the singer’s mouth is literally the only justification in my head on why they didn’t get an actual singer to do this part.

(And if you’re wondering, Halsey did fine. She embodied the shallow, rose-colored nostalgia presented to her when she sees her drunk ex in a bar. She at least sounds like she cares about it, which is how her persona is presented to us, so she’s no problem at all.)

3. The drop is soulless.

Finally, that drop. Ugh.

Do you want to know how you can sour a song for me in my first listen? Follow up a terrible line (“of that mattress that you stole/From your roommate back in Boulder”) with a drop that sounds like it came from a terrible ‘80s New Wave band, or a ‘90s alternative rock band learning how to use a synthesizer, or Rockwell.

That bleeping sound annoys me, mostly because of how utterly nonsensical it feels. For me, it evokes feelings of the ‘90s, specifically Puff Daddy’s music, because it sounds soulless, and it feels like a corporate business decision rather than an artistic attempt at music.

The idea of an EDM drop, at least from what I gathered, is that this is supposed to be a big emotional moment, one where we go beyond the words of the song and into the searing, dancing soul of the music. That’s what I got from something like “I Took A Pill in Ibiza” or “Lean On” or “This Girl”. It’s supposed to transfer an emotion to you that cannot be described by words, a visceral feeling that trumps all logical reason and linguistics.

And in a song about trying to reclaim your youth by f***ing your ex in the broken car they can’t afford, a song that tries to evoke a feeling of freedom and nostalgia with lyrics that talk about “never getting older,” a song about living in the now, HOW DO YOU EVOKE THOSE EMOTIONS MUSICALLY?

WHY, WITH A FARTING XYLOPHONE STRAIGHT OUT OF SESAME STREET!

And you know what? They were on the right track. They were using pianos, hand claps, and soft drums, all instruments that could theoretically do something nice about nostalgia. But nope, farting xylophone it is!

I do understand, dimly, why the xylophone was used. I mean, the first time I heard it, I immediately thought of Puff Daddy’s output as a producer, and while that is strangely specific, I think the song is supposed to harken back to a nostalgic time of innocence, something Puffy used to do lazily by sampling classic soul, funk, and early hip-hop songs wholesale and with business-minded precision.

Here, the Chainsmokers aren’t as shameless as Puffy there, because I don’t believe they sampled anything in this song, but it invokes the same desperate grab for easy nostalgia that Puffy perfected in the ‘90s. There’s no feeling of artistic reason as to why it would sound like this. It just does, and that business-like decision to have it sound like that annoys me to no end, especially considering how much it sounds like no effort was put into it, and it was mass-produced from some popular sound people like to listen to.

Heck, I’m surprised Puff Daddy isn’t credited in the song. It would make so much sense.

To summarize: the chorus is clunky, the male singer is terrible, and the drop is awful and soulless. Surely I should just forget this song ever happened, just like I did with other terrible songs of the past few years that I don’t listen to (which includes two other songs from the Chainsmokers; you can probably tell by now that I don’t like this duo).

ITS BID FOR LONG-TERM RELEVANCE:

Yet, even then, the song is still stuck in my head literally 8 months after I first heard it. This is not just because of overplay: I’ve started using it as a comparison point to other things.

In class, for example, we were analyzing a poem (“Salamin” by Jema Pamintuan), and there was a weird detail there about a woman playing violin in the middle of a snowing street in Iowa. My mind immediately went to that stupid line about the roommate from Boulder, and I realized that from now on, that stupid, unnecessary detail about that roommate from Boulder will forever be the first thing I go to when I come across any seemingly-unnecessary detail. So it’s stuck to me, unfortunately.

And with further analysis, it feels like the chorus with the unnecessary details, the singer with the voice of a sick, smoking frog, and the blippity-bloopity notes of the drop actually contributes to its uniqueness as a song. There’s a sense of accidental genius in it, one where a lot of disparate parts that should’ve ruined the song actually add to the personality of it and make it memorable and interesting. The Chainsmokers have not shown one iota of knowing what they’re doing, but their approach of “throw everything to the wall and use whatever sticks” appears to be effective in creating something akin to good pop music.

The Chainsmokers are the Sugar Ray of their genre (EDM, they say, but I refuse to believe that their clusterf***, throw everything at the sink, shotgun approach to music is anything resembling EDM), which isn’t a bad thing essentially. Sure, Sugar Ray wasn’t really respected or well-liked by anyone except their huge demographic of sunshine-happy, lotus-eating suburbanites who likes Limp Bizkit but wish it was watered-down with sunny optimism; but Sugar Ray fulfilled the role they were given: inoffensive, memorable pop music.

That’s the role the Chainsmokers find themselves in, and because they seem to have a more lasting popularity with the public than I expected (then again, this is a public that voted for Donald Trump, so it’s not surprising), it’s a role I hope they fulfill at least half as well as Sugar Ray did in the ‘90s.

So, in conclusion, “Closer” by Nine-Inch Nails is still the better song, the movie “Closer” is probably better written than this, and my brain must hate me so much to keep this in my head for such a long time, to the point where I’m forced to write about it, even after so many incidents where I literally screamed at people at the mere mention of this song and subjected them to long rants about how much I hate this song and what it represents.

(ah, my friends must think I’m a delight to talk to)