“Lips”
from the album Jewellery
2009
iTunes
“Lips,“ by Micachu, might just be the most thrilling single of the year. This, in its entirety, is what it consists of: a scratchy 16-second intro of roughly strummed guitar with seemingly random treble notes scuffed over the top; the main melodic figure repeated four times in around 10 seconds; a verse (or a chorus), sung by Mica Levi (who is Micachu), in which the words seem to have been chosen for rhythmic impact rather than their poetry, which lasts a further 10 seconds; then the melodic figure repeated another four times with a more boisterous background than in its initial incarnation, followed by another verse, and another eight repetitions of that main figure. Then it stops. It lasts 80 seconds, and every one of those seconds is perfect.
Levi says she doesn’t have the attention span to listen to long songs. “I’m quite bad at concentrating for a long time, and I get bored.” She likes what she calls “the mini thing,” though she wants you to know that Lips isn’t some thrown-together stew of scraps. “It just seemed to be complete,” she says. “The traditional structure is there.”
Brevity is one of pop’s greatest virtues. The record that refuses to bore you is the one that you find yourself listening to for hours on end, trying to work out how something so slight can seem so weighty. Would “C’mon Everybody,” or “Keep a-Knockin’,” or “Rave On” still sound so thrilling today if they had been five minutes long? Would the Ramones’ first album have made such an impact had it been 45 minutes long instead of 28?
The thing about pop is that it doesn’t really have much to say, so why draw attention to that lack of substance? The real substance often lies in those moments of wonder, and that’s apparent in the way people talk about songs — the way they say they love the bit where the guitar drops out, or the chord change before the chorus. Everybody adored Beyoncé’s “Crazy in Love” simply because that Chi-Lites sample sounded so amazing in the intro, so why not make records comprising only the good bits, with the boring bits cut out?
People have told Levi she should write longer songs. She tells them she will, and then she doesn’t. And she finds herself drawn to shortness, regardless of what format she’s working in (she studied composition, so it’s not all pop). “I wrote a string quartet that’s 10 minutes long, with eight movements,” she says, “and one of those was 10 seconds long. But it would be good to develop things over a longer stretch of time.”
Her listening habits tend towards cherishing the great moment over the extended play, she says. “A lot of songs I really like, but before I get to the end I step to another one. There have got to be more people in the world like that.” (There are: some of them work in A&R, where a common piece of advice to young bands is to make the songs shorter and get to the good bits quicker. It’s advice more musicians should heed.)
Levi also says she listens to dancehall and hip-hop mixtapes, which dispense with boring longueurs all together. “It’s just bits of each song,” she says, “and lots of mucking about. “
Her debut album, Jewellery, won’t disappoint those for whom the multi-part epic is the enemy of enjoyment. Only two of its songs break the three-minute mark, and though one reaches 24 minutes, it’s the last one on the album, and more than 20 minutes of that is silence, before a burst of noise at the end. This is not a Yes album, for which we can all be thankful.