Boys and Girls Living Together :: An 8tracks Mix

Boys and Girls Living Together from 32feet on 8tracks.

Last summer 8tracks asked us to curate a summer mix for them, which we did and got us involved in their personalized take on Internet radio. After a long layoff, we returned to 8tracks this afternoon with a mix exclusively concerned with boy-girl pop music. Not surprisingly, most of this music is about break ups. Called "Boys and Girls Living Together" it comprises some of the best pop conversations between male and female vocalists (a trend that we traced to Human League's sex-power treatise, "Don't You Want Me"). The requirements were that each vocalist had to sing at least a verse or a bridge, not just the hook in the chorus. If you enjoyed the Postal Service's brutal "Nothing Better" or the masochism of Stars' "Elevator Love Letter," you already know this aesthetic well. Stream the mix above and take a spin around 8tracks and let us know what we missed.

The History of Panic :: "The Chase"

Modern love songs are often and best written with dual perspective, a sort of twin cinema, the bias and narrative of a protagonist offset with the opinion of another. The Postal Service described this methodology with crushing clarity on 2003 release, "Nothing Better" where Ben Gibbard's romantic solipsisms were redirected by Jen Wood's corrections, a style immortalized for all time with, "I feel I must interject here." The rest was history. If love and loss are done by two people, perhaps they are best sung this way. Sounding an awful lot like Stars - also pioneers of this boy-girl synth pop, The History of Panic craft a big, buzzing, boy-girl single, "The Chase" of this same archetype. Of course, "Nothing Better" was a cautionary tale where "The Chase" is more of a conversation, the male narrator, here History of Panic's mastermind Gerald Roesser, still playing the role of the bleeding heart against the distant laissez-faire of their counterpart. The key difference being, "The Chase" ends with the open-ended conditional, "If we want to ..." as the vocals merge briefly into a duet before the individual recidivism again creeps at the corners.

Listen :: The History of Panic - "The Chase" [Vimeo]