Rob Alexander’s “Get Over Yourself”

Some singles are all about making us move to the rhythm of their rhymes, and while I’m as big a fan as any of those songs, there are others, like Rob Alexander’s “Get Over Yourself” that have a much greater purpose than soundtracking your local bar scene. This purpose is arguably as divine as prayer; in Alexander’s new single, he uses wise words and a simple melody to unite those who have been affected by social tyranny in one form or another. He doesn’t relent in his quest, and in just under four minutes of play, he gets anyone listening on his side and feeling ready to take up the fight for themselves. “Get Over Yourself” is simple on a surface level, but its narrative is anything but basic.

There’s an undeniably 80s-style framework in play here, but it’s flanked with so many postmodern themes in the production quality that it’s hard for me to call the instrumentation a throwback. The bass elements are streamlined and spicy, but the synthy parts spend a lot of time gnawing away at the percussion, making the backdrop feel much gloomier than the lead vocal at the forefront of the track does. Alexander isn’t coming across as scattered at all here; I think that he sounds a lot more confident in himself than I would have anticipated him to be, considering the gravity of the song that he’s chosen to be his very first single. He picked a good beat piece for sure, but it’s a lofty choice at any rate.

No matter what you think about present-day pop/rock, it’s hard to avoid the spellbinding serenade’s incredible grasp in this single. “Get Over Yourself” is free of the conceited artificiality of mainstream rock n’ roll, but it isn’t self-absorbed in its verses in the way that most hipster indie pop has been lately. He’s taking broad strokes with his words, but giving us just as experimental a sound on the instrumental side of the song, too. I want to hear what he sounds like in collaboration with artists outside of his own scene; if he finds a worthwhile counterpart, I think that he could tap into some of the understated elements of his music a little more than he does here. He’s got all the time in the world, but with his urgency, I don’t think it’s going to take him that long to find his footing in this game.

With a little more pick-up in his attack, I think that Rob Alexander is going to be one of the best and brightest singer/songwriters to come out of Florida in this era of pop. He might not be coming out of the biggest scene in the United States, but with his talents and this new now under his belt, he’s going to have the requisite street cred to make a name for himself on either coast in the years ahead. “Get Over Yourself” is a wonderfully emotional club track, and it’s exactly what the season, and what could potentially become a very lucrative career for Alexander, needed to get started the right way.

Samuel Pratt