Calvin Harris and pop music’s search for connection

thefader.com:

Back in February 2017, Frank Ocean stopped thinking ahead. There was no point. Donald Trump had been inaugurated a month prior, any sense of normalcy had crumbled away, and no one knew what to expect next.

What came to matter most was the here and now. “I might empty my bank account / And buy that Boy With a Pipe,” he sang, pitched up, on “Slide” — the lead single to Calvin Harris’s nu-disco-funk-fusion album Funk Wav Bounces, Vol.

1 — as he considered buying a Pablo Picasso painting that sold for ​​$104.2 million in 2004. “It’s like we can die here all young,” Ocean considered. “Like we could dye hair all blonde.” As the future started to blur, he sounded liberated by the notion that he could do anything he liked.

This idea was at the root of Funk Wav Bounces, Vol. 1, a collection of breezy hits that felt like the familiar arrival of summer but thrived on the novelty of Harris’s unexpected artist groupings: Khalid with Future (“Rollin”), Ariana Grande with Young Thug and Pharrell (“Heatstroke”), John Legend with Snoop Dogg and Takeoff (“Holiday”).