Pick Up
Track eight of Knock Knock: a disco loop under a Gladys Knight vocal, the album's second single and Pitchfork's number five song of 2018.
DJ Koze, from Knock Knock (2018)
"Pick Up" was premiered by Stereogum on April 12, 2018, where Tom Breihan called it a gorgeously heady song that still works as dance music, and FACT posted the video the next day. Wikipedia's credits list Jim Weatherly, Gene McFadden, John Whitehead and Ronald Rose, and say it samples Gladys Knight & the Pips' "Neither One of Us (Wants to Be the First to Say Goodbye)" and Melba Moore's "Pick Me Up, I'll Dance". The Knight song was released in December 1972 on Motown's Soul label, produced by Joe Porter and written by Jim Weatherly, and reached number two on the Hot 100 and number one on the soul chart.
Spin's Arielle Gordon heard the 1970s ballad turned into pensive disco, with the drums built up and stripped away across nearly seven minutes to show off Knight's words; Resident Advisor wrote that her half-sung lyrics flood an otherwise ecstatic track with despair. FACT describes a tight disco loop under a melancholy vocal sample. The official video, animated by Terlina Lie according to Wikipedia, is mostly a black screen with notes such as "Vocal sample #1" and "Disco sample loops 6x", and Koze said it leaves space for the viewer's imagination.
It was number five on Pitchfork's 100 best songs of 2018 and number one on Mixmag's top 50 tracks. Rolling Stone reports that it reached number one on Beatport in May 2018. Koze played it with Roisin Murphy at the Sydney Opera House in December 2019. No account from Koze of the song itself, and no recording date for this track, was found; the upload is presumably the album version.
On stage
- 2019-12, Sydney Opera House With Roisin Murphy.
Sources
- Knock Knock (DJ Koze album), Wikipedia
- DJ Koze Pick Up, Stereogum (2018-04-12)
- DJ Koze Pick Up video, FACT (2018-04-13)
- Neither One of Us (Wants to Be the First to Say Goodbye), Wikipedia