Lykke Li: "Little Bit"

What does it even mean to be a good pop song anymore? The layers of irony, pretension and referentiality run so thick on everything from Billboard’s current #1 (“I Kissed A Girl” by Katy Perry) to whatever the latest is by Vampire Weekend that they manage to obscure the black hole that lies where a song should be. Irony and hip references can work perfectly in the right situation, but as media oversaturates itself the right situation becomes harder and harder to find, even as those trying to find it multiply. Thus to have a guileless singer without agenda or stake in the ongoing indie-cool competition is a thing to be remarked upon, especially one who is able to transmit earnesty without even suggesting cliché.

Enter Sweden’s Lykke Li, bouncing off Continental hype and some killer production from Bjorn (the one whose two best friends are named Peter and John), with a lilting vocal whose weezy quirks should prove catnip for undersexed, coke bottle glass’d hipster teens. But it’s her self-assured lyrics, riding atop the spare, inventive arrangements—flutes, banging drums, guitars, synthesizers, and other junkbin items artfully sampled into pop bliss—that combine for the charismatic bombast left just ripe enough that shafts of vulnerability poke through. “For you I keep my legs apart / Forget about my tainted heart,” she sings, eyebrow-raisingly, on first single “Little Bit.” Still, the chorus (cloying, perhaps, on the page: “I think I’m a little bit, a little bit, a little bit in love with you / But only if you’re a little bit, a little bit, a little bit in la-la-la-la love with me”) seals the deal, its tentativeness and universality undercutting (and, strangely, enhancing) the assuredness. We see where she’s coming from, what she’s covering up now, and believe that we can front like her too now, safe in the knowledge that our outward confidence requires no sacrificing of ambiguity.

What’s staggering is that all this beauty is built on no more than a clicking drum machine and some classical guitar, which in context are elevated towards minimalist pop virtuosity. Accessible enough for an adventurous Top 40, quirky enough for the cool kids, poised to blow up big. And thankfully, while all of this could be twisted to refer to some unavoidable precedent or forced eclecticism, she plays it straight, going right for the heart, right where it counts.