Emily Warren

The Top 10 Chainsmokers Songs Of 2018

10. Somebody (feat. Drew Love)

“Beach House” was singled out (by critics and by the group themselves) as the most obvious Memories… Do Not Open-style throwback of the Sick Boy era, but “Somebody” is the only Chainsmokers song of 2018 that truly captures the dreary sameness that plagued the worst parts of the group’s debut. Actually, it’s even a bit worse; at least something like “Bloodstream” was fully committed to depicting its narrator’s drunken self-loathing in a vividly specific (if self-obsessed) way. “Somebody”, on the other hand, is overloaded with meaningless “being a rock star is hard” platitudes that have been clichéd since 1973. Yes, yes, you wanted to be famous because you thought it would be awesome and now you are famous and it is awesome, but the problem is that it’s a little too awesome and now you feel kind of guilty about how insanely awesome your life — it’s such a common story! Who among us can’t relate to a down-to-earth emotion like the exhaustion triggered by overexposure to expensive alcohol and fancy cars? The only nugget of a decent lyrical idea here (“I don’t really like anybody/So don’t tell me I’m like anybody”) clearly comes straight from the pen of co-writer Emily Warren, and everyone involved seems to know it’s the best part of the song because Taggart repeats it during every verse and then, when it comes time to sing a bridge, gives up and repeats it two more times. Well done, everybody. Really stellar work, just… just amazing.

9. Siren (feat. Aazar)

When I previously wrote about this song, I was gripped by a mania that caused me to refer to as “the best short story I’ve read all year” — a statement which, like basically all criticism, says more about the writer than it does about the work itself — and while I can’t excuse that flagrant abuse of the english language, I can theorize that maybe my intense and/or delirious fixation on the song’s lyrics was inspired by a need to avoid thinking about this actual music. The most glaring problem here is that the sound of the drop — the thing that the entire lyric conceit of the song is based around, that Taggart dramatically builds up to during the chorus — in no way resembles a siren. What it does sound like is a chicken. An aggressively clucking chicken, sure, but not one you could, like, dance to, or anything. And even if you weren’t interested in dancing, is there any reason you’d want to subject yourself to this harsh, repetitive sound? This is nothing against trap music or dubstep or any other variant of EDM that involves aggressive, unpleasant noise that is impossible to dance to — catch me down at the number 4 spot for more on this — but even within this particular subgenre, there has to be a limit on what sort of nonsense we’re expected to endure.

8. You Owe Me

An enjoyably dark song that finds the Chainsmokers fully embracing their aspirations to be an alternative rock band with bitchin’ EDM drops, this is the sort of song that “Sick Boy” (the first single of 2018) seemed to promise for this album cycle. The problem is in the particulars. One problem: the limp and empty-headed “fuck the haters” verses don’t quite live up to the bitter condemnations of the chorus; the sarcastic use of the word “awesome” reeks of mid-2000’s internet humor, and references to “the papers” are weirdly anachronistic in a band that’s always embraced modern technology in their songwriting. Another problem: for all the improvement he’s shown since “Closer”, Taggart still doesn’t quite have the voice to sell this sort of venom, and it’s not necessarily his range that’s teh problem. His diction is all over the place here, to the point where many amateur music critics were confused about whether or not the second iteration of the chorus changed the word “dead” to “there,” altering the meaning and, some would argue, improving the song drastically.

7. Beach House

Speaking of Taggart’s voice — and being as I am also a person with a serviceable-at-best voice that nevertheless loves to sing, this is a topic I have a lot of thoughts on — his biggest problem has always been that he’s working in the wrong genre. Taggart voice isn’t the best fit for the type of shiny and polished radio-friendly pop that his band produces — which is why he sounds so much more at home among the jagged, unpolished chaos of “Save Yourself” — but if you heard someone like him singing in a confessional, literary indie-rock band, something like Okkervil River or even Neutral Milk Hotel, it wouldn’t be out of place at all. It would scan as authentic; it might actually make you like him more. I don’t expect Andrew Taggart to usurp John Darnielle’s place in the indie rock canon any time soon, but “Beach House” seems like a good example of what we can expect when Taggart inevitably grows tired with being “one of the #SELFIE guys” and releases a solo record: lots of electronic flourishes, but with a hook built around lightly strummed guitars and nakedly romantic lyrics. He’s still got room to grow as a writer — he’ll need to drop any references to red pills, for one — but “Beach House,” even though its a sonic rehash of “Youth” from Memories…Do Not Open, suggests what path that growth might follow. Also, you can tell from the way he sings on this and a bunch of other Sick Boy songs that he just learned how to belt and it’s really endearing.

6. Hope (feat. Winona Oak)

For a while, the Chainsmokers were the sort of producer act whose songs were defined entirely by their guest vocalist. Most of the time, this was a good thing: “Let You Go,” “Roses”, and even “Waterbed” are competently-made tracks undeniably elevated by the person singing over them. Yes, sometimes this strategy resulted in with the heavily-processed cheese of “Good Intentions” or the utter blandness of “New York City,” a song I have unsuccessfully tried to force myself to like on multiple occasions, but for the most part, you can see why folks like Diplo or David Guetta or Benny Blanco leave the singing the professionals. But there is another path, a path walked by a man who was born under the name Adam Richard Wiles but who deemed himself ‘Calvin Harris’ because he deemed it “a bit more racially ambiguous” (yikes) — the path of the producer who (sometimes) sings on their own songs. The Chainsmokers chose to walk this path and, for the most part, they’ve never looked back. While I personally have no problem with Taggart’s voice – the unpolished quality of his vocals is the thing that fueled my initial obsession with Memories…Do Not Open – and while only the least generous among us would deny that he has improved in the past two years, it’s hard to ignore that “Hope” would be a lot better without him.

The music itself, based around what is either a xylophone or possibly a marimba, is a unusually evocative (for the Chainsmokers themselves and for EDM-pop as a genre) and the vocals from Swedish singer-songwriter Winona Oak (who possesses a deep, smoky voice and an extremely powerful jaw) threaten to push this song over the line into the rarified realm of the genuinely good Chainsmokers songs, the type of song that I can play at a party without being made fun of. And the lyrics aren’t bad, either! Building a song around the idea of hope as a counterpoint to love, positioning hope as a negative, harmful thing – all that is very interesting. But Taggart just feels out of place. His vocals aren’t mixed with the same inventiveness as Oak’s, and the narrative of the song doesn’t really support a second perspective the way “Closer” does. I understand the impulse to have Drew’s voice on every song, from a branding perspective and an artistic perspective – and I support both! – but this shouldn’t have been a duet. Still sounds cool, though.

5. This Feeling (feat. Kelsea Ballerini)

Sure, this is basically “Closer” with the rough edges sanded away — no offhanded mentions of budding alcoholism or references to beloved pop-punk songs, just a lot of posturing about being true to yourself in the face of judgement from your friends (judgement which is probably either imagined or completely justified). And yes, it’s a little suspicious that the Chainsmokers built a dance-pop song around a country artist just months after their esteemed colleague Zedd scored a major hit by doing the same thing with “The Middle.” And yeah, the song is troublingly emblematic of the cynical strategy that the band embraced in the second half of 2018, after their new darker material failed to chart and they seemed to be embracing every style they thought might net them another “Paris”-level success. But if you put all that aside, it’s a solid little pop song, it’s another entry in the all-too-short list of decent karaoke duets, and most importantly, it passes the Weezer Test; named in honor of the famously inconsistent band’s post-2000’s singles, the Weezer Test requires you to ask yourself one question: “If this song were performed by a band that I had never heard of before, would I like it?” Songs that pass this test include: “This Is Such A Pity”, “Feels Like Summer”, and, of course, “This Feeling.”

4. Save Yourself (feat. NGHTMRE)

Forget about the fact that featured guest producer NGHTMRE is probably responsible for at least 80% of this song, and forget about the fact that, despite the subtle distinction between trap and bass music, this sounds like the kind of thing that even hack comedy writers stopped making fun of three years ago – well, not all of them – and please consider the fact that this song absolutely fucking goes. The three distinct drops in between the ominous-yet-vaguely-inspirational verses all match each other for intensity but are distinct enough that they don’t all blend together. This is powerful, aggressive music, the kind of thing that makes you want to do a high-intensity workout or tear a sink out of the wall or reorganize your entire apartment. You know: wild shit. I don’t know how you would dance to this, but I would love to find out and immediately start doing it at every concert I go to, unless the appropriate form of movement is moshing, in which case I will stand anxiously at the edge of the pit, nodding with admiration but slowly edging towards the wall of the venue.

3. Sick Boy

Folks, let us not mince words here: this is song is a bit silly. It’s hard to ignore the goofiness of the verses, with all that borderline-nonsensical talk about the east and west side of America. The central rhyme (“They say that I am the sick boy/easy to say when you don’t take the risk, boy”) is kind of hilarious both for its sloppy construction and for the implication that being one of the Chainsmokers is in any way a “risk”. Really, the whole idea of the guys who made “#SELFIE” doing a big, dramatic and dark song about depression and narcissism in the Internet age is inherently silly – and yet, the first time I heard this song, it blew me away. It had such an impact on me that I ended up devoting a year to writing about this band and trying to figure out exactly what it was about this song that had such a massive impact on me. And I have come to realize that the very silliness that turned so many people off is exactly why the song works for me.

It’s ridiculous to think that a band so widely regarded as shallow, superficial and obnoxious could say anything insightful about the human condition, but I remain steadfast in my belief that the bridge of this song (“feed yourself on my life’s work/how many likes is my life worth”) is a genuinely clever lyric that gets at something very real about the way that an algorithmically-defined need for content sucks the life out of those who attempt to feed it. Maybe it’s just me; maybe, in order to get anything out of “Sick Boy”, you have to be so terminally online that you will search the lyrics of any slightly unusual pop song for hidden meanings. Even if that’s true, it doesn’t matter. Even if I were the only person in the world who liked this song, it wouldn’t matter, for the three minutes I’m listening to this song, as far as my experience is concerned, I am the only person in the world. Maybe that sounds silly or even a little solipsistic, but hey, three minutes isn’t a long time; it’s definitely not enough time to worry about shit like that.

2. Side Effects (feat. Emily Warren)

Emily Warren’s noble-yet-quixotic quest to legitimize the Chainsmokers remains a source of much fascination to me, so much so that this November I travelled all the way to the other end of the G train (local humor! we love it!) to see her perform. It’s hard to tell what she’s getting out if, aside from a steady paycheck – Warren once said that she and the Chainsmokers have never written a song together that didn’t get released, a statement that either demonstrates the efficiency of their collaborative process or reveals just how hard up Taggart and Pall are for decent songs. And while it is also hard to ignore the feeling that Warren will someday give a devastating tell-all interview about her time with the band so disturbing that it will force me to douse this entire blog with gasoline, for the time being, their partnership seems marked by creativity and respect.

In a just world, “Side Effects” would have been the group’s most successful song since “Paris” – in the awful hell-scented fleshworld we inhabit, it petered out just below “Sick Boy”, which is odd, and not just because of the shamelessly click-baiting video featuring one of the stars of the inexplicably popular Riverdale. When considering how some songs would be received critically if they weren’t associated with the endlessly toxic Chainsmokers brand, “Side Effects” surpasses even “This Feeling” and “Hope” to enters the realm of the Truly Good Pop Song With No Qualifiers Necessary, a song so undeniably decent that even though it was produced by the Chainsmokers, I would be completely unashamed to play this song for friends and family alike. Not to be a downer, but if this song can’t break the Chainsmokers out of the commercial tailspin they’ve been in since 2017, I’m not sure what could.

1. Everybody Hates Me

Pop music, maybe more so than any other art form, is meant to be universal. This is by and large a good thing, and accounts for much of my fascination with the genre; what could be more interesting than a near-universal musical language? But sometimes, the overwhelming need to appeal and relate to as many people as possible can stifle creativity, or, even worse, make the whole medium feel totally artificial. I know that Drake, Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift all experience the same heartbreaks and joys as the rest of humanity because they are all (allegedly) human as well, but really, we don’t have that much in common. The average day of a normal, non-famous person might have some superficial similarities to the average day of a pop star, but their existence is in many ways incomprehensible to someone like me.

All this is to say that, while I may roll my eyes at something like Bob Seger’s “Turn The Page” or audibly groan every time I remember that Post Malone has a song literally called “Rich And Sad”, I actually really like it when rich and famous musicians make songs about how rich and famous they are. One of my favorite examples in the past few years is Future’s verse from Maroon 5’s “Cold,” which cuts through the aggressively bland and unspecific lyrics of the rest of the song with the revelation that Future’s arguments with his beau got so heated that he actually had to stop hiring drivers for his expensive cars because he was so embarrassed by the things she was saying. That’s a perfect, almost novelistic detail about a lifestyle I will never experience, and I’ll remember it long after the sound of Adam Levine’s nasal droning has finally left my mind. This is why “Everybody Hates Me” is the best Chainsmokers song of 2018, and possibly the best song they have ever released: because it’s a song about becoming famous off a novelty song based around a dumb internet joke only to find yourself turning into a dumb internet joke. It’s a song about the perils of smart-phone addiction and internet brain poisoning written by someone who is painfully aware that their livelihood couldn’t exist without both of those things. It is, simply put, a song that only the Chainsmokers could have made. And that is beautiful.

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Emily Warren: Live at Rough Trade

Emily Warren occupies a unique space within the music industry. She’s spent the last four years as an extremely prolific songwriter, collaborating on high-profile songs with some of the biggest names in pop music and even appearing as a featured performer on several occasions. Her writing is sharp and emotionally insightful, but her strong pop sensibilities always shine through with big, radio-friendly hooks.

At the same time, her debut album Quiet Your Mind, released last month, would be more at home on the alternative charts than almost anything else she’s done. The songs all have the high level of polish you would expect based on her previous work, but the actual content mostly hews closer to indie rock than to anything like “New Rules” or “High Five.” Another unorthodox aspect of her career is her association with the Chainsmokers, a close working relationship that far exceeds her investment in any of the other artist she’s worked with. Warren at times seems to be single-handedly driving the duo’s evolution from faceless EDM producers into a legitimate musical group, one well-written song at a time.

With all this in mind, I had one question going into her concert at Rough Trade in Williamsburg: what was the crowd going to be like? This is something I think before arriving at most concerts, and often the answer turns out almost comically predictable (two highly personal examples: Mountain Goats shows are packed wall to wall with sad young queers, many of whom are likely practicing Wiccans, while Magnetic Fields performances are so completely stacked with bespectacled English majors that I almost felt I was being made fun of), but this one was particularly mysterious, given that Warren’s big-name collaborations combined with her still-nascent solo career make her exact level of fame difficult to discern.

Rough Trade is an intimate venue — the performance space is actually in the rear of an independent record store, but the whole building has those wonderful high ceilings that you can only get on the far outskirts of Brooklyn — but the show sold out so quickly that two further blocks of tickets were opened up in the week leading up to the show. Even as the crowd filled in and I found myself crammed shoulder-to-shoulder with a mass of fans in front of the stage, understanding continued to elude me. Who were all these people? There were easily hundreds of them; surely they couldn’t all be running an obnoxiously self-referential Chainsmokers fan blog.

The short answer, which hit me as soon as Warren began her first number (“Something To Hold On To”) to wild cheers and everyone around me began to sing along, is simple: the audience was filled with people who have, one way or another, come to discover Emily Warren’s music and found something meaningful in it. People who had already fallen in love with the music of Quiet Your Mind and were here to see those songs performed live. In other words: fans.

The longer answer is a bit more complicated, but not in a bad way.

Before we get to that, let me back up: the opening act for the evening was Annika Zee, a Canadian-born multimedia-artist/musician who produces the exact kind of dreamy and atmospheric music that you could imagine being set against a projection of an experimental short film, or serving as the soundtrack for a confusing modern dance performance. Not in a bad way, to be clear: Zee’s music is endlessly intriguing, alternating between soothing soundscapes and controlled chaos. A song built around a simple drum loop and a spacey synth will be suddenly pierced by a confrontational vocal that sets your hair on edge. Again, not in a bad way. Zee also has the sort of casually commanding stage presence that you might expect from an artist who maintains full control of her work, from writing and production all the way down to visuals and cover art.

Warren was similarly at ease on stage, though she brought a more openly giddy energy to her performance. Warren was exceedingly grateful to the audience from almost the first moment, enthusiastically commenting on the size of the crowd and reacting with infectious joy when she realized how many people had already memorized the lyrics to her songs. Backed by a four-person bad, Warren sang every song on Quiet Your Mind, and while there were no notable deviations from the album arrangements, her vocals were given considerably more room to shine than they do on the album.

Warren has a unique voice, powerfully emotive with a sharp edge and crisp annunciation, closer to a jazz crooner than the sort of pop star she usually writes for. It isn’t that her vocals are buried or obscured on record, but even while her lovely falsetto is on full display throughout the album’s eleven tracks, some of her voice’s more interesting qualities remain obscured. My favorite of Warren’s vocal performances is actually “Until You Were Gone,” her first outing with the Chainsmokers, where she burns through the vocal line with an abandon that she’s rarely matched since, letting the edges of her voice fray in a manner that matches the driving force of the music. The quieter tones of Quiet Your Mind suggest that she’s not currently interested in that style of singing, which is fine, but it was still exciting to hear her sing live and be reminded of how bracingly powerful her voice really is.

In what was a real treat for those of us depraved enough to consider ourselves “Top 40 nerds”, Warren performed an acoustic medley of some of the songs she had written for other artists, including “New Rules,” “High Five”, “Capsize,” and, of course, “Don’t Let Me Down.” This was followed shortly thereafter by a full-band performance of her Chainsmokers-assisted summer single, “Side Effects,” which featured a surprise appearance by Andrew Taggart, who danced onto the stage holding two full tequila shots before performing the background vocals during the song’s breakdown. Taggart followed this cameo with a heartfelt speech commemorating Emily’s accomplishments (during which he referred to her as “the third Chainsmoker,” which suggests that I was at least on the right track when I wrote this piece back in April).

It was a show filled with good vibes and affable stage banter, suggesting that Warren was incredibly comfortable with the crowd, for reasons that became clear as the night went on. New York City is Waren’s hometown, so this performance (which she humorously referred to as the second stop in a two-show tour) was a sort of homecoming, and that was reflected in the audience. Aside from the family and VIPs cordoned off in the balcony around the performance space, there were quite a few of Warren’s friends packed into the front of the crowd, a fact to which I was ignorant until several of them joined her onstage for a recreation of the choreography in the “Poking Holes” video.

Undoubtedly, the proximity of so many loved ones contributed to Warren’s comfort on the stage, which transformed even minor errors — choking on the first line of a song, spilling her drink over her setlist, her microphone somehow coming unplugged — into utterly charming moments. It’s a rare pleasure to see an artist perform in their home town; Hanif Abdurraqib once theorized that the anticipation of leaving the concert and getting to fall into their own beds inspires performers to leave it all on the stage. Emily Warren may have been playing with a home field advantage, but the musical skill and engaging stage presence she demonstrated last night were certainly no fluke. Watching a performance like this, one can hardly disagree with Taggart’s prediction that she has plenty of similarly successful shows in her future.

Side Effects

“Side Effects” is such a radical departure from everything the Chainsmokers have been doing this year that it suggests a major shift in their current strategy. It originally seemed that Taggart and Pall planned to release one song a month for the entire year, but it’s been three full months since their previous single “Somebody”, which made only a minor impact on the charts. Of the four songs they released between January and April, “Sick Boy” has been the most successful, and even that hasn’t come anywhere near the group’s past hits.

The underwhelming performance of the group’s recent singles might be the reasoning behind the stylistic pivot of “Side Effects.” “Side Effects” is the first of their 2018 singles where Andrew Taggart does not perform lead vocals and the first not to address the subjects that have become the band’s primary thematic concerns: the negative effects of social media, the dangers of fame, and the way those things intersect in modern times. Instead, “Side Effects” is a self-consciously fun and breezy “summer bop” with highly relatable lyrics and none of the darkness that has accompanied their previous four songs.

While it lacks the bracing honesty and weirdness of something like “Everybody Hates Me,” “Side Effects” does make for a fine piece of mid-summer pop-funk with a sprinkling of classic house style. The strutting, bass-heavy instrumental bears more than a passing resemblance to the recent output of one Charles Otto Puth Jr., but (hopefully) not enough to draw the ire of his most ravenous fans — “Sick Boy” lifted some stylistic elements from a few songs by Twenty One Pilots and that band’s cultish followers still haven’t shut up about it.

Lyrically, frequent co-writer Emily Warren revisits the subject matter of previous songs like “Don’t Say” and “My Type,” tirelessly reporting on the intoxicating ups and downs of being attracted to someone who you know you shouldn’t be with. If the lyrics are lacking in the deliciously anti-social and specifically modern barbs of this era’s previous singles (“how many likes is my life worth,” “I don’t really like anybody,” etc.), it’s only because the subject matter is so much more conventional.

“Conventional” in this case is not necessarily a negative — everyone involved in the production and writing of this song knows exactly how to deliver a solid dance track, and Warren gives her best vocal performance on a Chainsmokers song since “Until You Were Gone”. If “Side Effects” had been released between “All We Know” and “Setting Fires” it would rank as one of the most straight-up enjoyable songs the band has ever released. The only problem with this song is the potential future it suggests for the Chainsmokers, one that is considerably less interesting than the direction they seemed to be heading in.

If their recently singles failed to perform as well as expected, it only makes sense that the Chainsmokers — or, more likely, someone at Columbia records — would want to alter their approach. It would be a shame if “Side Effects” marks the end of the era that began with “Sick Boy,” forcing the Chainsmokers to retreat into a style that has paid such high dividends in the past, churning out pop-EDM with generic lyrics sung by a roster of faceless indie performers (and, occasionally, Chris Martin), but it wouldn’t be surprising. The folks at Columbia don’t have any reason to care that the Chainsmokers were just coming into their own as musicians and developing a unique identity within a space that few other acts could occupy; all that matters to them is that the boys can keep churning out hits, and once you put up numbers like they did with “Closer,” it’s awfully hard to go back.

There is, however, a more charitable interpretation of this song’s existence: namely, that Taggart and Pall wanted to give their long-term collaborator and friend Emily Warren a proper spotlight on one of their singles, now that they’ve established their own identity and no longer feel pressured to consign her to ‘uncredited guest vocals’ as they did om “Paris.” It would take a bit of naivete to believe this version of events, but that doesn’t place it entirely outside the realm of possibility.

Really, we won’t be able to fully understand the philosophy of “Side Effects” until we hear what the Chainsmokers release next — which, in all likelihood, is dependent on what the general reaction is to “Side Effects.” Meaning that, even if you enjoy this song (as I do), you can’t help but feel a little gross about what it represents. It’s a complicated situation — exactly the sort of thing that the Chainsmokers used to write songs about.

The Fifth Chainsmoker

One of the most fascinating things about the Chainsmokers is the way they meaningfully integrate contemporary technology like cell phones and social media into their work. Their interest in this subject stretches all the way back to “#SELFIE”, but that song is, to be generous, a little shallow. It does capture some of the everyday absurdity that comes with maintaining a public image online, but to no real end — aside from mocking its female protagonist for her supposed vanity.

But in the group’s recent work, beginning with Memories… Do Not Open and continuing into their current run of singles, the Chainsmokers have learned to fold these references into their subject matter organically. Their songs casually reference cell phones as modern life’s most ubiquitous device while also addressing the sense of profound alienation that technology can create, and this stylistic evolution would simply not be possible without the work of singer-songwriter Emily Warren.

Warren first collaborated with the Chainsmokers on 2015’s “Until You Were Gone,” but she didn’t actually meet the group in person until they co-wrote “Don’t Let Me Down” (along with Warren’s frequent collaborator Scott Harris¹), the group’s massively successful follow-up to “Roses” that solidified their position as reliable hit-makers. Right away, we can see Warren’s impact on the group in terms of sheer survival. If not for the success of “Don’t Let Me Down,” the second act of the Chainsmokers’ career might have ended prematurely, and the world would have been denied their two most significant contributions to American culture: the song “Closer” and that one Instagram post where Drew is helping Alex with his resistance training.

Even before her collaboration with the Taggart and Pall really started to heat up, Warren was already a proven talent in the music industry, writing songs for Fifth Harmony, Shawn Mendes, James Blunt and many others. Much of this work is very good and most of it is deserving of discussion regarding the creative development of a singular talent, but two songs in particular point the way towards the subject matter she would later explore in-depth: “No Filter” by Britt Nicole and “Phone Down” by DJ duo Lost Kings, featuring vocals from Warren herself.

“No Filter” is a song about two people in a dying relationship who still feel the need to pretend everything is fine. It’s tried and true subject matter for a sad pop song, but Warren gives it a modern touch by framing the couple’s superficial happiness around the pictures they post online. The verses reveal details of the couple’s life (“I think we got the perfect shot/You’d never know at dinner, we didn’t even talk”), while the chorus draws a direct parallel between their personal unhappiness (“And what we let the whole world see/Isn’t really you and me”) and the more broadly relatable issue of the pressure people feel to present a certain type of image online (“We always put a filter on/To try to cover up the flaws”).

It’s an interesting idea, but it ends up being too vague to really connect. The details of the couple’s life, while realistic, lack the specificity needed to be truly compelling, and the song itself, with all due respect to Britt Nicole, ends up being a bit of a drag. But if “No Filter” ends up falling short of its lofty goals, it’s still hard to get too down on it; Warren was addressing a massive, unwieldy topic here, so it’s not surprising that the end result is a bit awkward.

More fun (and far more successful) is “Phone Down,” a song that should resonate with anyone who’s ever had to compete with a cell phone for someone’s attention. Unlike “No Filter,” “Phone Down” doesn’t use cell phones or social media as a metaphor for anything; this is quite literally a song about the frustration of having a quiet, romantic moment ruined by the appearance of a glowing blue screen in your partner’s hand.

Warren is no luddite. This isn’t a song about how we should all toss our phones into the sea and live free from society’s influence; it’s just an acknowledgment that some aspects of modern technology have intruded on our personal lives in unique ways. That it believably builds this story around a dance track with a cathartic hook is a testament to Warren’s talents as both songwriter and performer, two skillets that would prove equally valuable when she collaborated with the Chainsmokers on their debut album.

Emily Warren is the first voice you hear on Memories… Do Not Open, providing background vocals for “The One,” one of four songs on the album that she co-wrote. In addition to providing vocal support on this and three other songs (including “Paris”), Warren uses her writerly instincts to helps Taggart sharpen the self-loathing artistic persona that he’s been developing since “Closer” and contributes lines such as “Let’s go, let’s end this/I delete before I send it/And we can play pretend like we haven’t reached the end yet,” which seamlessly and relatable incorporate cell phone imagery into the narrative of an impending break-up.

Aside from helping set the tone of the entire record and expanding its sonic palette with her own unique voice, Warren’s presence provides a much-needed sense of balance. Since much of the album’s lyrics concern self-destructive men and the women in their lives, it’s incredibly helpful to have Warren singing a song like “My Type” from the point of view of a woman who finds herself inevitably attracted to this very same subset of unreliable partners.

A song like “Honest,” with its morally shady late-night confessions hedged by claims of internal conflict, could not exist without a song like “Don’t Say,” which is explicitly about not accepting these sort of of excuses and features the cutting refrain “Don’t say you’re human/Don’t say it’s not your fault”. If someone finds the pop-emo stylings of Memories distasteful, no one song is going to win them over, but Warren’s presence stretches over more than a third of the album’s run-time and prevents it from being fully consumed by a black hole of self-obsession.

Warren is credited as co-writer on all three singles that the Chainsmoker’s have released in 2018. Her razor-sharp writing instincts are now fully integrated with the group’s surprising musical evolution, producing some of the most unexpected and fascinating songs of the year. Removed from the novelty of its initial release, “Sick Boy” still contains the indelible couplet “Feed yourself on my life’s work/How many likes is my life worth”, an absolutely classic Warren line that scans as mildly clever on its own but is somehow attains great power when sung by an artist who many people would dismiss as disposable. “You Owe Me” is a darkly modern twist on the classic middle-finger-to-critics style of song, and “Everybody Hates Me” is such a perfect encapsulation of the group’s entire aesthetic that it’s hard to imagine where they can even go from here.

The influence of Warren’s artistry extends far beyond her work with Taggart and Pall. She co-wrote the massively popular Dua Lipa song “New Rules” and Charli XCX’s critically-acclaimed single “Boys”, and the work she’s released as a solo performer demonstrates that she’s certainly a performer to watch in her own right. But her ongoing collaboration with the Chainsmokers is a perfect pairing of creators, each of them elevating and expanding the scope of the other’s work. As the group continues their transition from DJ duo to pop stars, Warren is their most consistent and vital collaborator and an irreplaceable talent. If George Martin was the fifth Beatle, then Emily Warren is the fifth Chainsmoker.²

1. Harris, by the way, wrote Stephen Jerzak’s “Party Like You’re Single,” the best bad song that you’ve never heard of.

2. Before you write in: I am aware that this analogy has a major, glaring flaw — namely, that while the Beatles were really a four-person band, the Chainsmokers is “officially” composed of only two people. Your objections are noted and, while a bit pedantic, very much appreciated.

Everybody Hates Me

(or: The Chainsmokers Problem, Fourth Variant)

To truly understand the Chainsmokers, you can’t think about music — you have to think about Twitter.

If you spend any time at all on Twitter, you’ve no doubt encountered a certain type of popular tweet: tweets made not by people who are otherwise famous, or by people who are known for making successful tweets. These are tweets by everyday, regular folk that are well-written, clever, or relatable enough to rack up re-tweets into the tens of thousands and likes into the half-millions. A witty, well-timed comment that momentarily launches an unknown account into the spotlight.

If you recognize this type of tweet, you are no doubt familiar with the type of tweet that usually follows it: the pivot. The moment when the originator of the popular tweet discovers that the countless eyes of the internet have fallen upon them. The way Twitter is designed, clicking on a tweet automatically displays the replies to that tweet, with replies by the writer of the original tweet sorted to the top. Because of this system, the author is left with an opportunity to amplify their voice, an opportunity that many find too tempting to resist.

Sometimes the pivot is as an innocent as a request for the reader to follow the author’s twitter account, maybe with the added benefit of a “follow-for-follow” arrangement. A slightly more cynical and/or financially-conscious tweeter might offer to retweet products or personal advertisements on their page in exchange for monetary compensation. The most popular response, so blatant and so uniquely contemporary that it spawned a minor meme, is the posting of the author’s SoundCloud page as a means to further promote his or her music — said music usually consisting of ambient chill-wave synthesizer loops or hip-hop beats crassly named after more popular artists (“Future type-beat,” “Drake-type beat,” “Fetty Wap type-beat”).

No matter how it’s used, the pivot has become a common element of the online experience, and a particularly immediate example of how social media has altered our construction of “fame.” Because of the way that content spreads, something that would have been totally ignored in previous eras — say, a cheap novelty dance song about a minor pop-culture phenomenon — can be passed around by like-minded people to the point that it becomes legitimately successful, regardless of whether or not it was any good to begin with. More often than not, that’s exactly the point: someone who posts a popular tweet doesn’t really care about the artistic merits of what they’re doing — they just want attention, and a chance to heave themselves into the spotlight.

It seems crass, and it usually is, but really: can you blame them? Do you really know what you would do if you got famous overnight (even if it was “only” internet famous)? What if the reason that you’re famous isn’t so great? What if it’s actually shameful?

Of the three songs that the Chainsmokers have released in 2018, “Everybody Hates Me” does the best job of articulating band’s current modus operandi: examining the perils of social media culture and modern-day celebrity, told by two people who are especially qualified to do it. Whereas “Sick Boy” was a bit gloomy and self-centered and “You Owe Me” was too glib to sell its darker subject matter, “Everybody Hates Me” splits it right down the middle. The verses offer a shockingly reflective and measured list of complaints about the life of someone who has become suddenly famous in the age of quote-unquote viral content, while the chorus repurposes an old meme based on the opening lines of Macklemore’s “Thrift Shop”, a novelty crossover hit that, in its own way, is just as obnoxious as “#SELFIE”. That the Chainsmokers (and co-writer Emily Warren) would utilize a played-out Vine joke in order to express their own inner turmoil is such an obviously pandering gesture to surface-level internet culture that it speeds right past ‘cliché’ and loops back around to ‘brilliant.’

While some of the lyrics are directly tied to the struggles of the wildly famous and super-successful (“poor me, I made it”), many of the sentiments expressed by the singer could belong to anyone who is even a little uncomfortable with the prominence of social media — which would be, at a low estimation, only almost everyone. “I’m a product of the internet” is true for all of us, but is doubly true for Andrew Taggart, the person singing it: his existence as a musician, as a product, is only possible due to the internet. But while most of us didn’t get famous off of a meme disguised as a song, nearly all of us have left a less-than-respectable paper-trail. Whether it’s an old LiveJournal, an offensive joke told at a press junket, a screen-cap of a misbegotten tweet, or a particularly unfortunate interview with Billboard Magazine, everyone’s got something floating around out there that they’re not ready to account for. Anyone who’s taken a public stance on anything knows the feeling behind the lyric “Why do I still have to mean everything I ever said?” It doesn’t matter if you change your mind, walk it back or  delete every trace of what you said from existence; the Wayback Machine is always gonna be there, and your greatest mistakes will always be single click away.

“I post a picture of myself ‘cause I’m lonely/Everyone knows what I look like/not even one of them knows me” — sung by anyone else, this line would seem so obvious, so preachy, that it would land with all the impact of an after-school special. But it’s fascinating when it’s sung by the man who wrote “#SELFIE”, who apparently needed a full four years and the help of a co-writer to condense the sentiment “it’s not healthy to be obsessed your own profile picture” from a three-minute sad-trombone-noise of a joke into a punchy three lines. Also: even though that line might scan as cheesy, it is no doubt a sentiment that many people will find relatable, particularly young people, people who entered middle school with an Instagram account and were already bored with SnapChat before you even knew it existed.

By drawing this line from the uber-relatable everyday pitfalls of a casually publicized existence to the crushing pressures of a life spent stumbling through scandals and dodging paparazzi, Taggart and Warren force us to consider how similar those two modes of existence have become. The Chainsmokers are two rich white men who spend their lives flying around the world with their gang of young and attractive friends. But if you imagine their entire career happening in the string of replies below a popular tweet, it doesn’t seem all that far off. It seems almost relatable.

“Everybody Hates Me” is a song that couldn’t be made by someone without a moderate streak of self-loathing. The Chainsmokers are living the dream, but they’re still at least a little ashamed of themselves. But should they be? They caught a lucky break and decided to ride it out for as long as they could. They’ve gotten further off of their moment in the spotlight than most people do: even if someone catches a few new followers off a funny tweet, the rest of the world moves on in the amount of time it takes to press ‘like,’ leaving the author with one minor achievement and string of embarrassing follow-ups.

But if the same thing happened to you, if you had a chance to make your voice heard, can you really say you wouldn’t use it? Maybe you’d try to further your own career and achieve your dreams of artistic legitimacy, or maybe you’d just try to make some money by selling retweets. You might think you wouldn’t act so shamelessly, but that’s only because you’ve never been in that situation. If you woke up internet famous, can you really say what your next move would be?

The problem with the Chainsmokers is that you can’t ever really know yourself.

The Complete Videos, 2014 – 2015: Part 2

Roses

Released a full eighteen months after “#SELFIE”, “Roses” elicited a reaction of equal parts admiration and bewilderment. Society simply was not prepared for a song by the Chainsmokers that was not just listenable, but downright enjoyable. To this day, it remains one of the few Chainsmokers songs that can be enjoyed completely guilt-free. It stands apart, not just as a song in the Chainsmokers discography, but as a singularly fascinating objet d’art, a radio-friendly crossover jam that holds within it a nearly endless list of contradictions. It’s a second hit song by a band that immediately destined to languish as one-hit wonders. It’s completely divorced from most people’s image of the Chainsmokers, but it’s the first song where either of them contributes vocals, the first step towards establishing themselves as pop stars. It was, in a way, the most important moment of the group’s career, but it stands totally removed from the controversy and criticism that have dogged them their entire careers.

As if in acknowledgement of the song’s paradoxical nature, the Chainsmokers produced two separate videos for “Roses.” The first video, shot by future “You Owe Me” director Rory Kramer, is a video travelogue of the duo on tour in Europe. Sharply edited to fit the song’s chill-yet-upbeat vibe and shot with an eye for the quieter moments of a long overseas trip, it accomplishes its modest goal with a skill that calls to mind Joe Zohar’s work on the video for “Let You Go”: it makes the Chainsmokers seem fun to hang out with.

This is not to say that Taggart and Pall are, in reality, unpleasant to be around; nor is meant to excuse the less-than-admirable things they’ve said and done. But when you see the two of them jumping between the twin beds in their tiny hotel room, or having a glue-fight with their friends, or just quietly sticking their heads out the window of a car while they ride through a foreign city, it’s hard to work up any serious ire. And while their off-stage antics have never reached loathsome heights (depths?) as did those of Justin Bieber, it’s not surprising that Bieber hired Rory Kramer to be his full-time videographer shortly after “Roses” was filmed: if he can make the Chainsmokers look good, he can make anyone look good.

The second video is unique in its own way: it is the first, and thus far the only Chainsmokers video in which neither member of the group appears on-screen (though the lead actor, Scott Lyon, looks like what might happen if you merged Taggart and Pall together with some sort of facial compositing software). It’s almost as if they made the first video, focused solely on them and their trans-continental exploits, in order to purge their essence from this video, which, like the song itself, succeeds because of how it subverts our expectations of what the Chainsmokers can do as a group.

Directed by Andrew Roberts and James Zwadlo (working under the moniker “Impossible Brief”), the “Roses” video features a woman (Callie Roberts) caught in an ambiguous but clearly loving on-again/off-again relationship with a visiting man. We see them spend time together, relaxing on a couch and smoking weed before having sex. It’s more or less a straightforward adaptation of the song’s lyrics, with one unique touch: interspersed between the narrative scenes is footage of Roberts dancing in a nondescript space, illuminated by a ghostly spotlight.

The second video, much like the first, is a simple concept greatly enhanced by the quality of the song. But the visuals here do a better job of matching the audio. The video, like the song, has a straightforward, almost swaggering quality that is anchored by a sense of vulnerability and longing. The shots of Roberts dancing communicate the emotion that would otherwise be missing from the more muted narrative sections — and there’s one truly sublime shot of Roberts floating through the air that almost reaches the heights of magical realism. 

There is, technically, a third video for “Roses,” in which the Chainsmokers enlist an Uber driver to play the song for his passengers, all of them singing along in what is, if not a legal infringement on the work of James Corden, then at least highly derivative. And while there’s not much to say about this video, it’s worth noting because, taken with the other two videos, one really gets a sense that someone — the Chainsmokers themselves, or maybe their label — was hedging their bets. “Roses” was a turning point for the band, and by producing three distinct videos with totally different styles and purposes, they were doing their best to make sure that people heard it. And, I mean, hey. It worked.

Waterbed

Believe it or not, “Waterbed” is the first truly awful Chainsmokers video. “#SELFIE” was lazy and obnoxious, but it lacked the ambition necessary to be a true failure. Joe Zohar returns as director, seemingly determined to completely undo the creative goodwill he built up in his previous two videos.

Things start off promisingly, with Taggart laid up with a broken leg while a party rages on outside, while he has only an iPad and an adorable puppy to keep him company. Pall stops by to check on him, but his sympathy only extends so far, and he abandons his friend to pursue hedonistic excess. At this point, the video is set to follow the same track as the Simpsons episode “Bart Of Darkness,” itself a parody of the film Rear Window. Taggart decides to attach a GoPro to his canine friend, and for a moment it seems like we might get an entertaining twist on the perils of voyeurism in the modern age — like Disturbia, with a cute dog — but then Taggart, in order to explain the dog’s mission, displays several crude drawings of women with exaggerated sexual characteristics. After this point, things quickly go downhill.

The fact that the main character of this video attaches a camera to his dog for the purpose of ogling women does not necessarily make it irredeemably awful, but the whole situation plays out in the worst possible way. Basically, Zohar uses this premise as an excuse to film as many butts as possible, then justifies it by awkwardly inserting the image of a dog onto the footage, without the slightest attempt at verisimilitude. Again, the cheapness of the visual effect is not the problem here, but the gross objectification of women — and, to be honest, the wasting of a perfectly cute dog.

The video ends as it must, with the poor dog, overcome by the same animal lust that motivates its owner, launching itself through the air to hump an unsuspecting woman’s leg. In the process, the dog causes Pall to take a nasty tumble, resulting in him breaking his leg as well. In the end, Taggart and Pall are consigned to the same bed, bickering as the dog watches on from across the room, and humanity suffers the minor but deeply-felt pain of another blow to our collective dignity.

Until You Were Gone

Zohar’s final collaboration with the Chainsmokers is less actively distasteful than his work on “Waterbed,” but it comes from the same school of misogynistic hackery. The premise is clearly executed but very basic and more than a little creepy: Taggart and Pall, along with guest stars Chad Cisneros and David Reed of the electronic music duo Tritonal, all develop a crush on the same SoulCycle instructor, portrayed by actual SoulCycle instructor Karyn Nesbit. After lusting over her during a class, the four men obsess over her in ways that range from “awkward dork creepy” to “serial-killer creepy”.

Taggart and Pall both engage in some light stalking, following the instructor after the class in order to bump into her and continue their ogling, while Cisneros and Reed hold up in their rooms and stare worshipfully at photos of her. The humor is meant to come from how foolish the four of them look, and, blessedly, the video doesn’t reward any of their upsetting behavior, as their instructor ends the video in the arms of her boyfriend while the four DJs walk away defected. If you could ignore the toxic implications of unwanted male attention being portrayed as laughable or even charming, the whole thing might play as innocent fun, if not for the way Zohar’s camera lingers over the instructor’s body, engaging in the sort of music video objectification that’s so widespread it’s become almost subliminal.

Despite the plot of the video centering around the hilarious misadventures of four American DJs, nearly half of the runtime is given over to another, less clearly defined joke, the entirety of which seems to be: “SoulCycle is hard.” This is likely the result of the video’s genesis as an extended piece of product placement for the almost cultish spin-class service. The Chainsmokers are not the only pop musicians to partner with SoulCycle in recent years — many artists have guest-hosted classes that double as listening parties for their new music — but they are, as of now, the only ones that have extended that partnership into a full-length music video.

For more on this subject, check out this interview that SoulCycle did with the Chainsmokers to promote the video’s release. There are a lot of bizarre touches to this interview; for one, it wasn’t posted online until the video was almost nine months old. Instead of indicating which one of the Chainsmokers was answering the questions, the editors have credited them as a single entity, one that ends every single sentence with an exclamation point. It’s entirely possible that the Chainsmokers do, in fact, answer all interview questions in complete synchronicity and with unnecessary enthusiasm. But it seems just as likely that this entire project, from conception all the way to this promotional interview buried on the ‘Community’ section of the SoulCycle website, was produced by a machine that can only approximate the actions of real-life humans.

Could this be the soundtrack to an experience you’ve had in real life?
Hahaha, it definitely could be. We don’t know a single person who hasn’t had some real life experience that could help them relate to this, whether a relationship or even an experience with summer camp!

…

Did anything surprise you about the shoot?
Haha not us, but the extras 100 percent! We don’t think they knew when they came on as extras that they were going to be required to actually cycle for seven hours! By the end of the day, everyone was dead!

What was your favorite part of the shoot?
Well, besides essentially getting a free indoor cycling class for 8 hours, it was just great to hang around there! Everyone is so cool! The amazing SoulCycle team is a large part of why this all worked out so well!

Well, like they say: it’s all up there on the screen.