In the nineteen-eighties, before YouTube and streaming services made nearly the entire history of popular music instantly available, intrepid artists knew that fishing deeper waters tended to yield a better catch. Why stick to what the present culture was offering? Early hip-hop crews ransacked used-record bins, taking samples from old LPs without regard to genre or origin. For them, everything was compatible—context didn’t matter, because context was too hard to come by.
In the Internet age, this is how almost everybody listens to music, minus the dust: songs arrive free of circumstance. For artists working today, records from any time and place are easily juiced for inspiration. Maggie Rogers, a twenty-two-year-old singer and songwriter from Easton, Maryland, feels like the apotheosis of this sensibility. Recently, Rogers released “Now That the Light Is Fading,” her début EP. She has already enjoyed an unlikely flash of celebrity. Shortly after she completed her undergraduate degree at New York University, in 2016, she returned to her childhood home to figure out a viable path toward adulthood, as recent graduates often do. Then a video went viral; it featured the producer and songwriter Pharrell Williams hosting a master class with Rogers and other students at N.Y.U. and listening to a recording of one of her songs.
The clip is beguiling. Rogers wears her long blond hair loose. She is dressed in worn jeans, woollen socks, and a plain black shirt; elk vertebrae hang on a string around her neck. There is something elemental about her presence that feels at odds with the metallic studio equipment gleaming in the background. When Rogers’s song starts to play, Williams is visibly affected. The beat is skeletal and twinkling. In the pulsing pre-chorus, Rogers’s voice leaps an octave and thins out, like a candle flame stretching for more oxygen. As the chorus begins, Williams scrunches his face, as if someone had told him something ridiculous. Because the class is being filmed, there’s an inevitable element of performance to their reactions, but his incredulousness and her nervousness—she appears deeply uncertain of where to direct her gaze—feel true. They sneak anxious looks at each other. Williams periodically shakes his head in disbelief. “I’ve never heard anyone like you before,” he says when it’s over. “That’s a drug for me.”
As half of the production duo the Neptunes, along with Chad Hugo, Williams has helped define the airy, jabbing aesthetic of contemporary pop. At the start of the new millennium, the Neptunes’ signature sound—a sly, spare, slightly cockeyed beat, discernible on high-profile singles like Britney Spears’s “I’m a Slave 4 U,” Nelly’s “Hot in Herre,” and Justin Timberlake’s “Rock Your Body”—was inescapable. The Neptunes’ work was a fanciful synthesis of old modes (Queen, the Gap Band, Stevie Wonder, the Jackson 5, Earth, Wind & Fire) and new technologies, though it is sometimes difficult to tell where one ends and the next begins.
In recent years, Williams has had remarkable success both as a performer and as a collaborator. Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines,” which Williams produced and sings on, is one of the best-selling digital singles of all time. In 2013, the family of Marvin Gaye sued Williams and Thicke, claiming that “Blurred Lines” copied Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up,” a loose and loping funk song from 1977. The d.j., drummer, and producer Questlove discussed the case with New York’s Vulture blog: “Because there’s a cowbell in it and a Fender Rhodes as the main instrumentation—that still doesn’t make it plagiarized. We all know it’s derivative. That’s how Pharrell works. Everything that Pharrell produces is derivative of another song—but it’s an homage.”
What Questlove is suggesting—that we should perhaps reconsider how we think about and use the word “derivative”—seems to be a necessary paradigm shift. When an immense library of songs can be tucked into your pants pocket, the spirit of the past is always close. It is how that influence manifests that is changing.
“Alaska,” the song that Rogers played for Williams, is difficult to reverse-engineer. Rogers deploys several original samples, drawn from recordings of a mourning dove, found conversations from a marketplace in Morocco, finger snaps, and the patting of her own thighs through her jeans. “Alaska” owes an obvious musical debt to the Neptunes—you can hear it in the space between the beats—but most of its borrowing is less explicit. Hip-hop, folk, dance, rhythm and blues, gospel: they’re all here. Some of these traditions have been crossbred before. In the early two-thousands, Four Tet, Beth Orton, Imogen Heap, and other artists helped pioneer ethereal folk-electronic hybrids. But “Now That the Light Is Fading” is being released into a culture that no longer thinks the organic and the synthesized are in opposition. All our musical planes are lateral; all our inspiration is ambient.
Lyrically, “Alaska” is concerned with navigating change. For many people, self-transformation is a terrifying exercise, so we look everywhere for capable guides. Rogers is a good one. “And I walked off you,” she sings. Her voice is high, scratchy, and plaintive. Something pings ominously, like radar detecting enemy aircraft. “And I walked off an old me,” she adds. This might seem a straightforward victory—the narrator has unburdened herself—but Rogers’s plainspoken acknowledgment of the self-destruction that accompanies true metamorphosis is eloquent. The process, she suggests, is twofold: first you relinquish the thing you loved, then you relinquish the part of yourself that loved it.
Last month, Rogers appeared on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.” (“Remember this name,” Fallon said as he introduced her.) Rogers is an unguarded and idiosyncratic performer, and watching her move—she seems to favor jarring, convulsive gestures, which are odd but unmistakably beautiful—it becomes harder still to situate her work on a continuum. Her voice contains bits of Joni Mitchell—a kind of gasping delicacy—though it can also recall the wounded falsetto of Smokey Robinson.
Rogers has four previous releases available online, mostly folk recordings in which, over banjo and light percussion, she sings quietly of heartbreak and of changes in the weather. Her vocal tone is deeper and rounder on these recordings; it is as if she had not yet had occasion to access the sharper parts of herself. “Now That the Light Is Fading” is a more sophisticated work. Instead of being about the tension between the past and the future, about what was done to her and what she might do in response, her new songs are focussed on reconciliation. “Two things made a third,” Williams told Rogers and her peers in the songwriting class. “That’s what happens when you allow different worlds to collide, and find the most beautiful angle in it.”
“Of all that is shifting and shaking my system, I know your rhythm, and I know, I know, I know, I know, I know that I’m the one that loves you,” Rogers sings on “Dog Years.” Her voice is easy and sanguine over a flurry of pastoral sounds. “There’s some spoons and some jars for a main rhythmic sample, there’s a lot of birds, there’s a woodpecker,” she explained in a recent interview. “I hide a lot of them in the production. A lot of times I’ll use more rattlesnakes when I need more high-end on a snare. I have a song where I have a tree falling to accent a bass line.” It’s this belief—in the simple interconnectedness of all things, from creatures to synthesizers and beyond—that most makes Rogers an artist of her time. ♦
