The Songs of the Decade: "Hard Drive" / "Somewhere Near Marseilles"
On grief accrued, grief borrowed, and two of the decade's best paeans
Our penultimate entry in this series is shorter than the others, which feels fitting for this pairing: Two songs that are each about something unspeakable. I’ll leave it at that.
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
4. Cassandra Jenkins - “Hard Drive”
The last time I wrote about Cassandra Jenkins’s An Overview on Phenomenal Nature on this newsletter, the world was only just emerging from the crucible of COVID-19, and was only just discovering how much it had lost in its wake. While the record isn’t about the pandemic per se—Jenkins wrote the record in the wake of the death of Purple Mountains’ David Berman just before the pair were set to go on tour together—it grapples with the same volatile cocktail of anger, confusion, and despair that seemed to permeate the very air we breathed then. At the time, I called it the album that best captured how it felt to live through 2021; I had no way of knowing then that living through the next three years would be much the same.
It is now 2025, but it feels like the world is only even more unsure of how to carry the immense grief it has accrued over the past half-decade. It is human instinct to snuff out negative sensations, so perhaps it simply tracks that our societal response to cataclysmic loss—of life, of communities, and of time—has been to burrow deeper into distraction and denial. Perhaps it makes sense that we want to think of grief as something that passes and ends in its season: Not just treatable, but curable too.
The unflinching clarity of Jenkins’s record, then, only becomes more remarkable with time. No matter where I go, she sings on “Ambiguous Norway”, you’re gone, you’re everywhere. Grief—the real, bone-deep grief that comes with real loss—never leaves. An Overview on Phenomenal Nature is precisely what it says on the tin: A scientific survey on grief as an observable phenomenon, somatic and tactile and rigorous in its depiction of a feeling that can burn your heart out if you stare at it for too long.
“Hard Drive” is its centerpiece: A musical Rorschach test, impressionistic and painterly in its use of disparate presences to suggest a gaping hole in its center. With saxophones and soft drums swirling in the background, Jenkins recites a suite of spoken-word anecdotes, seemingly unrelated but willed into conversation with each other in the same way that stars are imagined into constellations, or islands into archipelagos: Everything is mostly composed of absence, even human bodies. Characters float in and out, each imparting some sort of knowledge or attempt at healing before floating back out into the ether of the music, whose sparseness and oblique haze lend themselves to kaleidoscopic projections of our own unspeakable griefs.
The last time I wrote about this album, I had only just moved halfway across the world, and everything still seemed coated in the glossy sheen of possibility. I hadn’t yet lost the people I would lose, nor had I yet made the mistakes I would make. My heart wasn’t yet so battered by unfulfilled promise, nor had I yet reached for so many things beyond my grasp. When I wrote about grief then, there were gaps in my knowledge I had to fill with ethnography and borrowed experience. I know a little more about it now.
A lot of things hadn’t happened yet; a lot of things aren’t here anymore. The business of living is putting your heart back together despite, again and again, however long it takes and however often you must.
Close your eyes, and count to three.
Take a deep breath, and count with me.
One, two, three.
3. Hikaru Utada - “Somewhere Near Marseilles”
The greatest pop song of all time is Carole King’s “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?”. This is an unassailable fact, and the logic behind it is simple: It is a song about being hopelessly, desperately, down-fucking-bad in love. Certainly, pop music has tried its hand at myriad topics to varying success in the 60+ years since King’s song was first put to wax by the Shirelles, but at its very core, pop music is at its best when it is an act of self-abnegation: Sentimental, aspirational, and vulnerable to the point of embarrassment. What can be more vulnerable and embarrassing than asking, simple and plain: Will you still love me tomorrow? I rest my case.
What does this have to do with Hikaru Utada’s “Somewhere Near Marseilles”?, you might ask? It’s a fair question. Musically, the two songs have very little in common; one is a punchy, three-minute, melody-forward Brill Building song written for the Top 40 radio, the other a gargantuan, 12-minute rhythmic house-adjacent track intended for the crying-in-the-club crowd. And yet they both come from the same basic human desire to not just love and be loved, but to know for sure that they are loved by their beloved, even if love, by nature of being freely given, cannot ever truly be promised too far ahead.
Give me something strong enough, Hikaru Utada sings to open the track, as vulnerable an admission as King’s own titular question; then, she follows it up with an even more naked couplet: Maybe I’m afraid of love / Say I’m not the only one. From the jump, the song is a plea for reassurance that if this affair is a negotiation—what else could it be, with one in London and the other in Paris?—then the person on the other side of the telephone line is bargaining in good faith.
And how they bargain. The ambiguities and uncertainties of a push-and-pull permeate the song (Let’s go fast, then go slow / Not too far, not too close), as Utada puts forth promises and attempts to extract the same ones in return, the song’s insistent beats rising and falling alongside her anxious insistence. She is ultimately bidding against herself; this is not a duet, after all. Around halfway through, the opening entreaty fades away, leaving the song to spiral into repetitions of Utada’s surrender (I’m gonna give it to you / I’ll get a room with a view): The sort of absolute concession that comes when one is hopelessly, desperately, down-fucking-bad in love. We’ve all been there, from Carole King to Chappell Roan.
After all: What is more romantic that meeting in a city neither of you call home, where you can be strangers to everyone but each other, or perhaps even to each other, for at least a night? And what is more human than ruining all of that because, rightfully or not, tonight is not nearly as precious as forever in our eyes?
Tonight, you’re mine completely. You give your love so sweetly.
I’m gonna give it to you. I’ll get a room with a view.
Hoping to get the top two out sometime during the weekend, but in the meantime, do drop a line if you dug this.