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music: essential tracks

Dirty Projectors

POP

Dance For You, Dirty Projectors, from Swing Lo Magellan (forthcoming from Domino Records, streaming at youtube.com)

You can dance to this alright, but the Projectors want much more than a good party. The first track from their much-anticipated summer album is a swinging declaration of interest in answers to big existential questions, with a wide-arching melody, an easy backing of guitar and hand claps, and a smeary instrumental break.

HIPHOP

Bitch Bad, Lupe Fiasco, from Food & Liquor II (forthcoming from Atlantic Records, streaming at youtube.com)

Lupe's brooding five-minute analysis of a much-abused word looks at what the mainstreaming of "bitch" may mean to young girls and even younger boys. The smoothness of his delivery, over a butter-soft bass, contrasts sharply with the clash of meanings he describes.

POP

Sunshine, Little Dragon (streaming at youtube.com)

The Swedish electro-pop quintet greets summer with a nimble rising beat and singer Yukimi Nagano's best impersonation of a vintage soul singer who knows how to chill in the desert. Surprisingly good for a song commissioned to flog a vodka cocktail.

DANCE

Rocksteady, The Bloody Beetroots (Ultra Records, streaming at youtube.com).

This pounding dance floor banger from Italian producer Sir Bob Cornelius Rifo grinds a modal, quasi-medieval tune through a dozen seething variations, saturated with grainy keyboard sounds. Wyatt Neumann's wild-thing video is like Easy Rider with a happy ending.

VIDEO

National Anthem, Lana Del Rey, from Born To Die (Interscope, streaming at youtube.com)

Del Rey takes the Mad Men hypothesis – that every woman is either Marilyn or Jackie – to extremes, by impersonating both. She romances a black president (rapper A$AP Rocky), poses placidly for family photos, and rides through motorcade footage that eerily resembles a fateful amateur video from Nov. 1963. Love it or hate it (or both), this Anthony Mandler cinematic fantasy gives some hard twists to turbulent American mythologies.

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