Real Life Rock Top 10: November 27, 2023

1. & 2. Sleater-Kinney, “Say It Like You Mean It,” video directed by Carrie Brownstein (Loma Vista / YouTube) & Olivia Rodrigo, “Can’t Catch Me Now” from The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (Universal).  “It unfolds the same way the book does, with the same rhythms,” said a Rodrigo fan about her new movie song. It does open up, first slowly, then bigger, but with no sense of affect. If it matches the book it even more completely fits right over the music in the Sleater-Kinney video for a number from their January release Little Rope: the songs seem to be playing with the same melody. The video steps into the world, in this case a fairly tony bar where J. Smith-Cameron, late of Succession, overdresssed, drunk, and looking every one of her 66 years, lip-syncs Carrie Brownstein’s singing while coming on to the middle-aged people in the place. She drapes herself over one man, shoves another and the woman next to him, trying to make some kind of connection, to get someone to recognize her, to acknowledge that she exists on the face of the earth, and no one even turns a head or tries to squirm away, either because she’s a specter in her own bad dream or because they know what she wants and they’re not going to acknowledge that she exists, not for anything. It’s unsettling. It can stay with you. But were the song to come on the radio next to “Can’t Catch Me Now” I think that’s what you’d want to hear again first.