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Kimbra Wants You To Love Or Hate Her Music

08/14/2014
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(Radio.com) Love it or hate it, just don't tell Kimbra you're on the fence about her music. "There's nothing worse to me than people having a mediocre reaction to something," she told Radio.com over the phone from Los Angeles. "Like, 'I guess, I don't know, it's okay.' No. Love it or hate it, nothing in-between."

Kimbra (full name Kimbra Lee Johnson) must be quite happy then with the very mixed, but very extreme reaction her latest single, "90's Music" has received over the past four months.

Look through the over 1,700 comments for that song's video and you'll find that while some people are very sure Kimbra is a member of the Illuminati, most others are struggling to decide whether the track is a "Lady Gaga rip-off" or a "manic feast of frenzy for the senses" or "an overproduced POS." But the most common opinion from those who choose to publicly voice theirs is that they like the track, it just took some time to come to that conclusion. "It's definitely a polarizing song for a lot of people," Kimbra said laughing. "But I think it finds its way under the skin."

With shout-outs to Michael Jackson, Mariah Carey, R. Kelly, Nirvana, TLC and Aaliyah, the track's lyrics focus on that not-so-bygone era we all seem to have a particular fondness for, but the sound is something from the future with Kimbra's staccato delivery sounding almost alien as she questions nostalgia and its place in our memory.

"That's the deeper side of that song," she explained. "We change and we grow and we remember time, but we remember it completely differently, you know? We look back and it comes back slightly skewed and therefore we are changed by it and feel differently about things in our past."

Kimbra says she chose the track as the first single off her upcoming album, The Golden Echo, because it sets up this record as one that's not necessarily going to follow all the rules. "I wanted to introduce the idea of playfulness," she explained. "I think of it as a statement song."

A lot of the playfulness on her sophomore album - out August 19 on Warner Bros - stems from collaboration. Not much of a surprise being that Kimbra's most successful work to date is Gotye's "Somebody That I Used To Know," a collaboration that earned her two GRAMMYs in 2013 including Record of the Year.

Kimbra now lives on a farm in Silverlake, CA where sheep graze outside her window, but her gramophone statue still sits in Australia, packed away in storage like a lot of her previous apartment. "I don't know where to put it, I don't want to have shrine or anything," she said. "It's a bit of an awkward thing to work out. I'll have to think about it and find a nice place when I get it back." more.

Radio.com is an official news provider for antiMusic.com.
Copyright Radio.com/CBS Local - Excerpted here with permission.

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