Cooper B. Handy—better known as Lucy—is one of pop’s best and weirdest outsiders. He spent his formative years working as a dishwasher in Amherst College (“real lunch lady hours,” he once said) and then used his off time to record music in an almost compulsive way. This has led to an incredible amount of recorded music over the past 15 years: 9 albums, hundreds of songs. Along the way, he’s honed an unforgettable sound, the kind that makes you think, the first time you hear it, Is this all a big joke? Does he think this is funny? Handy is kind of a white rapper, but he’s also kind of like Daniel Johnston. He’s not afraid to interpolate the Beauty and the Beast theme. Or the Titanic theme. Or loosely reference “Maps” by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, exactly like Beyoncé. Somewhere along the way, this pop outsider and Amherst dishwasher, has become—in his own way—more than just a pop obsessive. He’s become a little bit of a pop star.
Or at the least, he’s become—as the cliché goes—your favorite artist’s artist. In the past few years, he has opened for King Krule on a leg of a recent US tour. He recorded an actually perfect song with Boy Harsher and then joined the S&M electronic duo onstage at Los Angeles Primavera. RXK Nephew had Handy open for him at a show in Brooklyn. GQ published a flashy, slightly hagiographic profile of Handy, talking about his rise like he was an actually famous person, instead of someone who is known mostly to people who hang out at Baby’s All Right. This kind of rise in status often leads musicians to go all out, to try something new—maybe try something expensive. But on his ninth album, Cooper B. Handy’s Album, Vol. 9, Handy opts to do exactly the same thing he has always done: write really short bizarro pop songs with surreal lyrics that sound like they were recorded inside of an Applebee’s bathroom.
Handy has often operated under a “first thought, best thought” mindset. It gives his work a really special and imaginative quality, like he’s coloring on paper restaurant tablecloth. (How do you listen to a song like 2018’s “Houdini Blvd” and not want to pop a wheelie on a Razor scooter?) And while digging in his heels on this method could have led him to further sharpen his sound, Cooper B. Handy’s Album, Vol. 9 proves the limits of always approaching music in this way. If you write hundreds of songs and never self-edit, if you only prioritize pleasure and having fun, you are inevitably going to write some songs that kind of suck. Unfortunately, many of the songs on Cooper B. Handy’s Album, Vol. 9 could have been reconsidered or labored over, or otherwise left on the cutting room floor. At 17 songs and just under 30 minutes, it’s his longest album yet. And it feels like it.
He’s turning on similar motifs: being an adult man but also being six years old, hanging out, keeping it real. “New Beach Song” has him singing lines like “I don’t know Tarzan! I don’t know Jane!” over some sort of vintage surf music sample. “Touch Actually” is dramatic strings paired with dumpster drum machines. “Trust” has Handy screaming over an epic canned guitar riff, his voice breaking as if a boy in a boy choir. “Bandage Off,” has us thinking about “Mary Poppins and the purses.” All of this is fun to listen to on its own, but it’s not much more than that.
There’s a homogeneity that plagues these 17 songs: Listen to them over and over again and they all blend together, like they could have come from any record Handy has ever made over the past ten years. The tracks constantly repeat Handy’s producer tag (“Lucy sweetie! Time to get up!”), and some, like “Strange As Can Be” and “I Do,” involve only the slightest variation on sample, drum machine, vocals. It strikes me less as cohesive and more as unambitious, so much so that his sound— which I’ve otherwise always found to be special and pure and weird—comes across as generic, a facsimile of itself. Of course he would do something like interpolate Céline Dion while shrieking about “being bad for no reason.” We’ve seen that before. So much of his earlier music sounds free-associative and boundlessly creative, how “first thought, best thought” sounds when it’s really working. Instead, Cooper B. Handy’s Album, Vol. 9 is, at its very best, “random.”
There is something to be said for consistency. But isn’t there something radical, exciting, invigorating about taking what you love about music and expanding it, bringing it to different, bigger, scarier lands? While I was listening to Handy’s latest, I couldn’t help but think about Meg Remy’s U.S. Girls project. Remy, too, started out as a real outsider in pop music. Instead of sampling Disney movies, she made heavily distorted music informed by midcentury girl groups and ’90s R&B. Over time, Remy went from making music about pop to making music that was pop: pushing herself in a direction that was sleekier and shiner but lost none of her music’s creativity, its weirdness, its complexity, its politics. Perhaps her work could be a blueprint for Handy. Likewise, listening to Handy’s song with Boy Harsher convinces me that Handy can be more than just consistent—that, if he wants, he can make music that is not only challenging for us, but is challenging for himself, too.
