While big-name celebs post treacly hymns of healing, upstart artists have created freaked-out, gallows-humored hip-hop and pop songs that better reflect our moment.
’,” by the 18-year-old South London rapper Psychs, is taut piece of U.K. drill, with lyrics that mix machismo and paranoia, while pondering the new protocols of everyday life: “Please don’t touch me, we are not G’s … We can make a handshake using our feet / We can make a handshake using elbows, knees / I ain’t tryna catch a disease.
Gmac Cash’s song meets the test of great pop: its hook — “Move, bitch, you got coronavirus!” — is silly and irresistible, a mantra for the era of social distancing that insinuates itself into your consciousness, you might say, like a bug your immune system can’t repel. Whether the song will make the leap from minor internet sensation to wider renown remains to be seen.
In the meantime, there is “Coronavirus Remix,” a bona fide hit, the first stirring of what a future historian may call pandemic pop. It cracked the iTunes Top 10 in the U.S. and shot to the top of that chart in Brazil and Egypt, among other places. The song’s great big refrain — those nattering five syllables, “Co-ro-na-vi-rus!,” looped and repeated dozens of times in two and a half minutes — may speak volumes about terror and chaos of life in March 2020.
But it is also a reminder of a cultural verity that pertains even now. Pop music is shameless. Anything and everything, even a plague, is fair game — fodder for a catchphrase, food for a hook, fuel for a dance party. This doesn’t seem likely to change, whatever the coming weeks and months bring.
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