Big Wild

One Liner: Electronic chill music for your next terrible mixtape

Wikipedia Genre: Electronic
Home: Portland, OR

Poster Position: 5
Both Weekends.  Sunday.

Thoughts: Dadgummit.  Two artists with the name "Big" something on the fifth line of the poster, and neither of them are the massively epic rock band that I want them to be.  The top song is kind of pop R&B-ish stuff, and may be about getting freaky with your partner person.  "6's to 9's" - either I'm very childish (which, uh, yeah) or this is the great bedroom ying-yang.  When I first started dating my now-wife, she had a sticker on the front windshield of her car that, if I recall it correctly, was a very small circle with a 69 in it and YAGA written behind it.  YAGA was a brand that originated in Galveston many moons ago, and was very cool back in the 90's.  I don't recall ever being cool enough to own any YAGA gear, but this sticker was stinking hilarious to me, because the wife had no clue what "69" meant, and just thought the sticker looked cool.  I joked her to death about it until one day it disappeared from the old Mercury Topaz.

Let's check it out, just in case.  62.7 million streams.

Nothing explicit in the lyrics about making the action, but you certainly can read between the lines of all the things they want to do together because they are so in love.  Including this little bit: "Save your conversation for the basement (Yeah), I want you speaking in tongues, You know what they say about those."  So yeah, I'm just going to say this is the 69 song.

Anyway, this is electronic music with a chill vibe, lots of lush layers of synth sounds and frequently unintelligible vocal sounds that just set the mood.  Like "Awaken," his third most streamed tune, is just someone making pretty vocalizations over the waves of synth patterns.  Very relaxing.  Should be playing next to a pool in Palm Springs right now.  Others have actual lyrics, but generally their relatively vapid - "you are my home!"  "we're in love you and I!"

Real name is Jackson Stell, a 31 year old from Massachusetts.  When he was 14, he started his career as a hip-hop beat producer known as J-Beatz.  Good job on changing the name.  He graduated from Northeastern University and worked in advertising before moving to L.A. to begin his Big Wild journey.  Also, slightly terrifying, is that he went through treatment for thyroid cancer in 2013, but appears to be healthy now.

Only one album - 2019's Superdream - and then other singles and EPs going back to 2014.  The 69 song is on that album, as are several of his other top tracks.  I'll go with the newest single for his other track on here so that you can experience that as well.  Well, actually, his newest single is someone else's song (Cory Wong) that he is just featured on.  Weird, so is his one before that - "Firepit" with Phantoms.  And the one before that was "Awaken" with Surfaces (ACL alum from last year).  The last one with just him as the artists was in 2020 with "Who Do You Believe."  1.5 million streams.

So, it's never a good sign when I'm listening to one of these bands and just slam the brakes on whatever I'm doing at work because I can't handle continuing to listen to them while working.  These songs are annoying the crud out of me right now.  There are obviously people who love it and have listened to it millions of times, but I just mumbled "shut the hell up!" and paused Spotify so that I could just come and finish this one up and move on.  I really wish something else was occupying the fifth line of this poster.