30-Day Song Challenge Day 8 – An Underrated Song

Author Ed Miller: “Music is the weirdest human thing. A few dozen songs out of the zillions recorded fire off like a massive dopamine flood every time I hear them.

And then like other people don’t even like those songs.”

A friend and long-time loyal blog follower sent me a 30-Day Song Challenge meme in the hope that I couldn’t resist taking the challenge and blogging about it. Here’s Day #8 – An Underrated Song: Turn the Music Louder (Rumble), KDA ft. Tinie Tempah, Katy B.

Arrrgggghhhhhh! This was SOOOOOOO hard! Much of my music life is devoted to great (in my mind) artists struggling to get plays on Spotify or Soundcloud. I think they’re all underrated!

But I decided to go with a song to represent an artist who inexplicably never made the big breakthrough like a number of her London peers – Katy B.

I discovered her in 2011 when the Washington Post wrote about the little London powerhouse “on a mission”[1] for U.S. pop stardom:

“She sounds like a pop star, without question. Her debut album [is] . . . exactly the kind of album that continues to elude so many American superstars . . . If Taylor Swift grew up in London’s underground club scene, she’d be lucky to have written songs that feel as true as these.”

Katy’s album Little Red was my favorite album of 2014. Her album Honey made my faves list for 2016. And she’s done nothing as a solo artist since then. Sigh. 😦

I adore her. Her whole career is underrated – Rolling Stone lamented that “in a just-world . . . [she would already be] a first-rank star in the States” in their review of Little Red – so it’s agonizing to pick just one song. But I’ll settle on Turn The Music Louder (Rumble) from her album Honey. The video is awesome, Rapper Tinie Tempah is my style hero and it uses the word feinin’ which is urban slang for “to want something badly that you don’t have”. Oh, and that note that Katy B. hits at 2:19? Seriously.

Honorable Mention (this song slays me): Crying For No Reason

Honorable Mention: So Far Away

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[1] A play on her debut album On a Mission. There’s also a longstanding in-house debate between My Daughter Diandra and I over how I discovered Katy B. She believes that she told me about her first. My version is that she coincidentally told me about her very shortly after I read the Post story.