Icon: enlarge
Singer Parks:
Modern disarming
Photo:
Jack Bridgelan / dpa
Anyone who counts Michelle Obama and Billie Eilish among their fans has actually already won.
The former first lady put Arlo Parks' song "Eugene" on the carefully curated accompanying playlist of her podcast last summer.
19-year-old Eilish, one of the most important pop voices of the moment, named Parks as one of her favorite artists in an interview at the end of November.
Afterwards, the British pop singer with African and French roots was declared by many critics as the new musical class representative of Generation Z.
Perhaps also because the 20-year-old's debut EP had the telling title "Super Sad Generation" and contained dismaying lines of songs about the mental crisis in her age cohort: "I hate that we are all sick," she sang on it.
In 2018 she uploaded a few demos to a BBC youth platform and was discovered by one of the radio DJs.
She quickly found her current management team and an indie record company that released her songs.
Parks is only now releasing her first album "Collapsed in Sunbeams".
It withstands the high pressure of expectations.
You can hear gentle jazz and soul ballads that are reminiscent of the sixties bard Nick Drake, the trip-hop of Portishead or, more recently, the British band Sault with their Black Lives Matter grooves.
The music, composed by Parks on the guitar or the keyboard, swings to leisurely beats, there is something old-fashioned and handmade inside, a spontaneous warmth and familiarity.
But also a modern, disarmingly melancholy attitude.
The overall package of this style and Parks' artistic personality match the zeitgeist almost perfectly.
Born Anaïs Oluwatoyin Estelle Marinho, the musician fulfills almost all the demands that many feature articles place on a modern pop star today: She is black, looks good, believes in her bisexuality and surrounds herself on Facebook with an aura of education and intellectuality;
feels inspired by Sylvia Plath, James Baldwin and Ezra Pound.
Parks names white rock bands such as Radiohead as musical influences as well as the Souldiva Erykah Badu, who is considered an icon of black female self-empowerment.
display
Title: Collapsed In Sunbeams (Deluxe) [Explicit]
approx € 7.98
Price query time
01/28/2021 10:26 am
No guarantee
Icon: Info
Order at AmazonIcon: amazon
Order from ThaliaIcon: thalia
Product reviews are purely editorial and independent.
Via the so-called affiliate links above, we usually receive a commission from the dealer when making a purchase.
More information here
At the same time, politics hardly plays a role in Parks' own music.
Parks grew up in Hammersmith, west of the City of London, a colorful district full of creative energy.
Fortunately, she has had little contact with racism or discrimination.
This allows her, like many other musicians of her age, to practice the navel gazing that her generation, especially older people, like to accuse of being exaggerated narcissism.
Nevertheless, there are also issues that are decisive for some of the topics of youth these days: drug addiction, psychological instability and depression, exploring sexual identities, of which there are many more to choose from today than there were 20 years ago.
In an interview on the phone, Parks says that it wasn't her intention to set a higher goal, let alone speak for a whole generation: “I started making music to work my way through a few things that I am currently doing experienced that it was something very private, very individual and specific: It concerned my little world, with my friends and family in Hammersmith. «She does not know what her songs say about her youth and the time in which she lived. but realizes that there are currently »more and more female artists of my age who discuss questions of identity in their music with a similar degree of openness and the same degree of vulnerability."
"I want to show the possibility of healing"
Arlo parks
The fact that Parks' album doesn't sound like a hip mindfulness seminar is also due to the fact that she not only has a feel for melodies, but also proves to be an accomplished storyteller with her song lyrics.
Parks does not always deal with her own experiences with a bright, but always slightly hungover voice; she herself appears more like other people's emotional writers: "Hurt", one of the strongest songs on the album, is, for example, a drama about pain of inferiority complexes: "Wouldn't it be nice to feel like something valuable," she sings about a friend named Charlie who is addicted to alcohol.
In »Black Dog«, Parks describes how she tries to help a depressed friend from the abyss to guitar chords and ghostly synth sounds.
In »Eugene«, the song from Michelle Obama's playlist, Parks is completely with herself: in it she remembers her school days with bittersweet.
She was in love with her best friend and jealous of the boy who, in turn, interested the friend - a miniature high school musical.
From: DER SPIEGEL 4/2021
The triumph of the dragon
The pandemic broke out in Wuhan a good year ago and China plunged into a deep crisis.
The People's Republic is now doing better than most countries in the world, and the West is facing a strengthened, often arrogant nation.
Can Beijing's march through still be stopped?
Read our cover story, further background information and analyzes in digital SPIEGEL.
Right arrow to output
Parks said in another interview that she discovered her imagination when she was seven or eight years old and started writing short stories.
However, she quickly realized that she wasn't so interested in the plot, but in conveying the atmosphere.
In their music, this talent does not create a spectacle that provokes, nor any avant-garde new sound.
On the other hand, you get the impression that an artist is looking very closely, observing other people's pain with great empathy - and following the thoroughly altruistic claim that her songs cannot heal injuries, but at least alleviate them a little.
"It's about finding a balance: Things sometimes seem very hard, everything isn't always funny or great, but I still want to show the possibility of healing, at some point there is always a ray of sunshine that breaks through the cloud cover," says she.
Icon: enlarge
Musician Parks: Casual pop culture references
Photo: Alexandra Waespi / dpa
This hopeful attitude makes "Collapsed in Sunbeams" a pop event that comes very close to the listener.
In order for the record not to appear too gloomy and worn, Parks occasionally drops pop culture and everyday references in her texts, mentions The Cure singer Robert Smith, TV series such as "Twin Peaks" or fast food by Taco Bell.
The breaks that arise make it clear that, despite her traditional songwriting approach, she is right in the middle of the action.
She is a bit like the quiet party guest who, in her early single "Cola", sits in a corner, nibbles sweet and sour grapes and tries to keep calm and hope in the midst of the loud roar.
From now on she will have to deal with being the center of attention.
"At the moment it doesn't feel like everything is going to explode around me," she says of the hype surrounding her person.
“I'm currently back home with my family and do the dishes every night.
Everything is very quiet - apart from the fact that great people like Billie Eilish talk about me, of course. "
Icon: The mirror