Other Voices, Other Rooms: "Billions"
On newness, muchness, and Caroline Polachek's crystalline pop masterwork
Our penultimate guest writer was a last-minute addition to the roster, but you wouldn’t know it from the care and attention in the prose. It’s a tremendous honor to have one of my favorite Filipino artists (and my favorite writing workshop classmate, full stop) Niki Colet, a London-based music artist and multi-hyphenate, and longtime friend, on the newsletter to write about the closer to my personal pick for the decade’s best album so far.
(Yes, I know this is our second guest piece about a Caroline Polachek song. Yes, I do think she deserves this and even more, as you’ll find out soon enough.)
Here’s the full playlist of the 100 Best Songs of the 2020s (So Far).
In case you missed any of our prior newsletters for this series so far:
Top 10 (all by me): “TLC Cagematch” / “Casual” | “American Teenager” / “People, I’ve been sad” | “Silk Chiffon” / “anything” | “Hard Drive” / “Somewhere Near Marseilles” | “It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody” / “Welcome to My Island”
Guests: “Starburned and Unkissed” by Gian Balangue | 3 K-Pop Songs by Justin Nava | “Huwag Muna Tayong Umuwi” / “The Loneliest Time” by Emil Hofileña | “My Love Mine All Mine” by Ashley Ranich | “Billions” by Niki Colet | “party 4 u” / “Will Anybody Ever Love Me?” by Currie McKinley
The day “Billions” was released, I was packing up to move to London. In two days, I would be on a flight with my entire life in one suitcase: Psycho, priceless, good in a crisis. How else to sum up the way I felt, launching into space?
It was kind of an accidental move—I had applied on the fly to a masters degree in culture, criticism, and curation there, not thinking I would get in, and received my offer letter a month and a bit before my university’s mandatory in-person attendance date (I attended the first month remotely from Manila, at night, hunched over Zoom under lamplight).
I had just spent the last two years stuck in my bedroom, living with my parents. In the thick of the pandemic and its rigid restrictions, I literally watched the world outside through the window of my phone screen. My 25th year fell away, and then my 26th. Just as I was starting to grow bitter about having spent my entire mid-twenties inside, this came. I moved a week before my 27th birthday, heart yawning open out of my stagnant bedroom and into the chaos of this hectic, unfamiliar city. Everything was about to change, really, and I was completely unprepared for it. As Polachek later sings on another track on the Desire album, potential is the drug.
And what a high—like no other! “Billions” was a theme song for me then, a talisman of sorts as I tended to the fragile, infant seedling of my new life. I spoke about the song at length during a class discussion where my professor brought up the notion of excess in imagery within contemporary culture and media. Polachek’s work is always so rich with symbolism: I think about her opening scene in the music video, holding a cornucopia filled with grapes, and a split-second shot where she turns to the side so that the cornucopia’s thin, tapered back end juts out behind her rear like a tail. She looks like an otherworldly creature, a demon or an angel or both. Mythicalogical.
I watched that music video the day it came out, in between packing away my record collection and Facetiming a friend to ask which jeans I should take with me and which jeans I should leave behind. Polachek sings of a headless angel, dead on arrival, while emerging cherub-like from a well of cloudy bathwater. There’s a scene at the end where she reads an apocalyptic storybook to a group of small children. “The only newness is the youness,” she mouths, as a shuffling percussion flits like helicopter wings in the background. That line still moves me, three years on, sitting at my dining table in my East London flat, learning the same lesson over and over again (“the only newness is the youness”)—though it was truly something to have first heard fresh out of the pandemic, coming into myself as I moved halfway across the world and began to feel, for the first time, like my life was my life.
For a long time, I thought the line “Say, say, say, say something to me” was “Se-se-se-se-sex with me”—a funny mix-up, but it might as well have been. In Polachek’s own words, “Billions” is “really about pure sensuality, about all agenda falling away and just the gorgeous sensuality of existing in this world that’s so full of abundance, and so full of contradictions, humour and eroticism. You know that feeling of when you’re driving a car to the beach, that first moment when you turn the corner and see the ocean spreading out in front of you? That’s what I wanted the ending of this album to feel like.”
“Billions” captures the deliciousness of savoring all your sensations in a moment, the euphoric overstimulation of taking everything in. This world is wretched and magnificent and to enjoy it you must look over the edge—but not too far. In many ways, the song celebrates being too much—relishes it, even. And as someone who has had a chip on my shoulder all my life that my muchness was a liability, I can’t tell you what a joy it is to realize too much is a beautiful thing. To turn the corner and see the ocean spreading out in front of you: Here’s your life, babe, right here in your hands. You are all yours for the taking. It’s priceless.
Niki Colet is a music artist and writer with a multidisciplinary background in writing, curation, poetry, and art. After graduating from Central Saint Martins with an MA in Culture, Criticism and Curation, she has written for AnOther Magazine, had a poetry residency at Reference Point (180 Studios), and curated and organised art exhibitions and events around London. As a music artist, she has performed at renowned venues and events—both independently and for her London promoter Parallel Lines— including Next Door Records, The Waiting Room, Reference Point, and Peckham Levels.
Her 2024 EP, We Only Ever Meet In Strange Dreams, is a tender, vibrant pop record about loss and longing, released to critical acclaim with press from Dazed, The Line of Best Fit, Nylon, Luna Collective, Bandwagon Asia, and The Philippine Star. Written in the wake of a breakup that coincided with tumultuous shifts in the songwriter’s life, the record occupies a gritty, ethereal soundscape you can both cry and dance to.
You can listen to her music on all platforms, and follow her on Instagram, Soundcloud, and Bandcamp @nikicolet.
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