While I am mainly a fan of heavy bands like Dimmu and Amon Amarth, there is nothing like a finely crafted pop song. So what do you get when one of pop's most transgressive enigmas crafts a pop album with the same edginess and raw ferociousness that crafted the works of Dimmu, Gorgoroth, and Cradle? You get 2022's pop masterpiece, Demi Lovato's
Holy Fvck.
While many of us know them as some Disney person, Demi dives deeper. While pop mainstays like Swift and Bieber have been seemingly frozen in adolescence for aeons, Demi has grown like a sexy weed, constantly sprouting in many ways, sprouting the listener and their artistic vision with the ferocious nature of a wild dinosaur escaped from a zoo. Doesn't matter if you locked the gate, for Demi knows no gate which cannot be penetrated by their artistic nature.
Holy Fvck is chalk full of edginess and singable songwriting, a finely crafted mixture not seen since Green Day's
Nimrod several aeons ago. The corner store selling rose bowls for meth pipes can blast this music and nary an eyebrow be raised, yet the same listeners who appreciate the dark and twisted vision of bands like Dimmu and Vader can also sink their teeth deep into the abyss. A transportative journey that gets the people moving, and such craft is rare in these times of dissonance and chaos. Songwriting often takes a backseat to aesthetic in 2022, but when an album enters the pop charts with the force and intelligence of an enraged dolphin, one has to wonder what is the reason others cannot craft their songs with such skill and fervor.
While it's no secret Demi was influenced by a fellow queen of pop, Avril Lavigne, there is also Madonna within these sounds. We all remember Hannah Montana's failed experimental stage. It did not pass the mustard for fans of Dimmu and Vader and A7X because we could smell the expiration date quite closely, it was rank as a fart but Demi's farts are like roses. There is disgust but there is also enticement, yin and yang crafted together like a quiche with extra tomato. You taste every flavor clearly, much like the songwriting here is crafted. Demi has been studying the masters of edgy pop, taking note of the mistakes of Hannah Montana and Taylor Swift and learning from them, looking to the masters like Green Day, The Offspring, Avril, mixing it with the masterful swordsman's edge found in bands such as Dimmu.
Even the song titles recall the days of Avril Lavigne's classic era and Green Day's anti-Bush anthems. Using numbers in place of English words is one such tactic used to convey the juxtaposition of maturity put side by side with innocence, reminding the listener that we never
really grow up. The message here is even if one feels like the teenager we once were, we have to keep ***ing trying, and that's about all we can do in this world of chaos and disorder.
Do not write off
Holy Fvck because you think a pop starlet cannot reproduce the finely crafted edginess of the heavy masters. This is transgressive art that manages to be fun and, dare I say, at times quite beautiful. Demi makes music for the times yet ahead of the time, and while the crass title might be offputting to Demi's early fans who are by now housewives, the daughters of the witches you couldn't burn will find soothing reassurance and empowerment in the finely crafted songs within.
