Let’s All Take a Moment to Luxuriate in the Immaculate Sting-ness of Mk.gee’s “Rockman”
The unlikely breakout star returns with a minimalist track that lives up to his burgeoning legend.
You can’t wear a Mk.gee song out. Along with the uncanny ways he mines the sounds of 1980s pop, this replayability is his greatest superpower. And it’s been on full display throughout his recent tour, where Mk.gee and his two bandmates have taken to playing “DNM,” a robo-funk banger from his album-of-the-year contender Two Star & The Dream Police, not once, not twice, but up to 12 times in a row. (When I saw the show last month in Brooklyn, he ran it back only [!] four times, with the crowd screaming louder with every rewind.) It’s become a very fun bit—a cult-incubating inside joke—as well as a way to fill out a set from an artist with relatively little material. Like all of the tracks from Dream Police, “DNM” takes on a more muscular character live, with the beat and guitar and vocals blown up to fill the cavernous theaters Mk.gee is now regularly selling out. His new single follows that trend.
OK, sure: “Rockman” reads like the title of an Audioslave song. And its cover art, showing a gun pointed at a tangled modular synth rig, looks like something Death Grips would do. And its chunky bassline sounds like a fifth grader trying to play along with Michael Jackson’s rock opus “Beat It.” But for all of its macho signifiers, the song is spare, spontaneous, and vulnerable, pushed forward by a deconstructed Police riff alongside a beat made up of a shaker and a snare and that’s it.
Once again, figuring out the ’80s references is its own satisfying little game: I hear some of the somber verse from “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic,” a line snatched from INXS’ “Need You Tonight,” and even some “chk-chk” mouth sounds à la MJ. But the real star here is the vocal: Mk.gee’s singing has never sounded better, fuller, more upfront. The Sting-ness of it all comes through clearest on the hook, where Mk.gee smooths out a biting lyric—“You can laugh it off/But you started a war”—by layering his voice to tingling effect and tagging on a featherweight falsetto denouement; it sounds like both an accusation and an apology. The song will be on repeat until further notice.
