Oh RedOne, you and your endless hissy frying pan synths. You and your autotune. You and your tales of hot singing men watching hot dancing women in a nightclub situation. If it wasn't for the fact that you're clearly good at what you do, together with the fact that the world will never tire of dancing to strutting, pumping songs about watching sexy girls dance to strutting, pumping songs, I'd be tempted to suggest you're in a bit of a rut.
However, even the presence of Pitbull - the unthinking person's shouty rap twerp of choice - can't dent this, ah, club banger. Even Pitbull's rap section - which begins with him shouting "Go DJ!", and then "that's my DJ!" as if he has turned to some disinterested girl nearby, nudged her in the ribs and proudly pointed up at the unimpressed fella behind the decks - even THAT can't make this fail.
This is a measure of how good at the pop lark Mr RedOne is.
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On the new Miley Cyrus album there's a song called 'Two More Lonely People', which is a bouncy, but mournful acoustipop sort of a thing. It has the distinct meaty thrust of a Kelly Clarkson super-normo-ballad, but reduced to a dull roar, as if trying to be friendly.
As is often the way with these things, there's a breakdown section where she sings the chorus - which owes more than a little to 'Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now' by Starship - quietly over some gently strummed guitars. This is so that she can really bring home the emotional clout of the song, before the rest of the band come steaming back in. And as is also often the case, the drummer does a little fill around the kit to re-introduce the ruckus.
Trouble is, he's playing syn-drums, and the fill he's gone with will be recognisable to almost all UK residents as the EastEnders "doof-doofs". Miley's US fans may feel very differently, because they don't have the same cultural reference points.
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Some parts of the brain are more important than others. The auditory cortexes, for example, get a LOT of love from various different sensory organs and must feel like the most popular kid in school. Whereas the front plaintive membrane - devoted to opportunities which you have missed, and which could've turned out to be something really special now you come to look back on them - occasionally swells and glows like an inflatable lightbulb and then goes back to being feeble, dark and neglected.
But the one that we're all devoted to is memory. Memory makes us who we are, because without it we'd forget every knock and hug, every boo and hurrah that taught us valuable lessons about how to live. We'd forget how to do things we now take for granted, and we'd forget who we love and who we do not love. Memory is where everything that comes into the brain gets stored, the way an old man stores washers and bolts in carefully labelled drawers, ready to be brought back out again, should the experience prove to have been a useful one.
Songwriters rely on memory. They want to sink bits of music so deeply into your consciousness, they can't be yanked back out without risking severe damage. To do this most effectively, they need to create a musical event which you can process straight away, and which can be recalled forever more. It doesn't matter if you are pleased to recall it, it just matters that you do.
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Ha! Brilliant! For reasons too complicated to explain, my first experience of this song was a dodgy YouTube link which I was trying (and mostly failing) to watch on a crowded train on a really hot day. I knew this was the latest club banger from Skepta, an MC with a lot of love riding on his back. Unfortunately, I could only watch the first 21 seconds (which might sound like the feed line for a So Solid Crew joke, but it's not), and could not work out what on Earth was going on.
I mean, acoustic guitar? Earnestly-sung lyrics about self-development and things going wrong? Isn't that the preserve of your rock-type people? Surely someone has mis-labelled the YouTube clip? Surely there's been some kind of MISTAKE?
And then, in a miraculous parting of the binary clouds, letting pure information shine through, the rest of the video suddenly arrived. And that's when things started to become very clear.
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Man, I'm a sucker for songs like this. There's something about a bone-stripped beat, cavernous bass and the vocal monotone which - if delivered right - makes for a happy ear. And if you're not bringing much to the table in the way of music, you'd best be able to swagger a bit in order to sell the thing, or how is your drone-hop club banger going to be remembered over all the other ones.
And let's be clear, there are a LOT of other ones around at the moment. Everyone is chasing the most minimal beat/bass/voice combo they can muster, so's to hammer their point home as hard and as unrelentingly as is robotically possible.
The irony being, while musical ideas are getting ever simpler, the amount of people it takes to execute them is on the rise.
Look at this lot: there's Diddy, the glue in this particular model aeroplane, and his two band cohorts, who form Diddy Dirty Money. You'd think, for a song which is largely rapping and singing, having a rapper (ish) and two singers (NOT ish) would be more than ample. Apparently not.
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Confusingly, this isn't supposed to be offically released until August 9th, even though it has been biffing around the lower reaches of the Top 40 for a while now. This is clearly a crackers state of affairs, so let's just plant a stick in the ground that says "it's available to buy, ergo, it's officially released" and get down to firing up the ChartBlog Reviewmerizer. It takes about a month to warm up in any case.
Now, this is not the most original of subject matter for a rap song. A pondering on how far BOB has come since his first scrabbly steps as a wannabe MC. It's fair to say almost every rapper has a bash at this song eventually, with varying degrees of success. Hell, Drake's DEBUT single was about this very thing, presumably because the memories are still very fresh for him.
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Not for the first time, I find myself lost. Having settled down to give this highly-rated new song from a notorious, opinion-dividing, confrontational electro duo a quick once-over, I find I'm unable to take the whole thing in, because it's almost overwhelmingly mournful.
To distract from the chilly dark haze, I retreat, curling into a ball around one line, and attempting to decipher it, as if this is somehow the key to the entire endeavour. As if this cold, hissy wail of repressed pain is like a crossword puzzle AND a frosty beat encounter rolled into one, hand-made by people who look like they could use a good square meal and some vitamin D.
So while Alice Glass, uh, glassily calls out from some ghost dimension, I'm sitting here, making myself work out how to hear the line "do you pray with your eyes closed, naturally?"
Is it one whole question? Does Alice want to know if the act of prayer is so deeply ingrained in someone's consciousness that they become unable to talk to their creator without automatically retreating to an internal world?
Or is it a question and answer: "do you pray with your eyes closed?", and then the reply, "naturally."
I don't know the answer, I might add, but thinking about it is keeping me safe from getting washed away in all the sadness.
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There's a fine and noble tradition, for people who create music - songwriters, producers, whatever you want to call them - to elevate their own job, within their own job.
It might be a song about a tambourine man, or thanking some unknown entity for The Music, or one of those eternally awkward songs bands do about life on the road, and how grateful they are to you, the fans, but the message is the same. It's a song about how brilliant it is to be able to write songs, which is not unlike a baker creating a loaf with the words "this one goes out to all the ladies, signed Bakey" written on the crust.
Of course, with the advent of the DJ/producer who writes songs with professional songwriters for famous people to sing for him, things get a little stranger.
What we've basically got here is a song written by Rico Love, for David, a DJ, to be sung by Kelly, a very famous singer, about how brilliant DJs like David are, and how she is like the boss of you, JUST LIKE DAVID IS THE BOSS OF KELLY, EVEN THOUGH SHE IS FAMOUSER THAN HE IS.
Srsly, I have NEVER felt that cocky.
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I dunno about you, but unless something is going to be incredibly, immaculately perfect - and that's perfect by own particular standards, and probably no-one else's, not pristine in general - then I'd rather have quirks and oddities than blandness and smoothery. Music is a personal relationship after all. Far better to have that with a real functioning human, just like you.
This goes double if a song is being sold as a very personal message from one person to another, and the person doing the singing is hanging her hat on the fact that the person she is singing to is a close personal friend of hers, someone who knows her better than anyone, flaws and all.
It's the personal touch that sells the reality of the song, you see. Unless Daisy doesn't actually know anyone called Rosie at all and this is all an ELABORATE CON...
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There are hallmarks of quality all over this song like chicken pox on a toddler - signs that this is exactly the kind of thing our nation's pop youth should be enjoying on a regular basis, if they want to grow up to be the kind of fine, upstanding citizens who can do a sudden backflip in a nightclub without kicking someone's drink over/glass eye out.
Take the Sound Of Music reference. I'm amazed no-one has thought of throwing that in before. It's perfect! The little minor-key warbly melody gives that great big Austrian hilltop moment a bit of metropolitan urgency, and they do it twice. Once without the banging beat and once with, after a shouty count-in. Amazing.
And this is all over a bed of stormy synth strings and spiralling bleeps. It's startlingly moody for what is supposed to be 'just' silly old pop music.
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The human voice is a wonderfully adaptable - and surprisingly powerful - tool, isn't it? Down here in Cornwall, you've got your Fisherman's Friends, an amount of men (you count them, I'm on a roll here) who do nothing but arrange themselves into a semi-circle and sing sea shanties, and yet they are capable of bringing otherwise sensible adults to the brink of tears. I know some of them. Hell, I AM some of them.
Then there are opera singers, who could no more whack out a sea shanty than I could throw a javelin and pop the moon, but they have the same gift. They open their mouth, and everyone listening quivers and inflates and then exhales and collapses, emotionally speaking.
Somewhere in the middle is yer pop music, which likes to take great liberties with the stuff that comes out of the human mouth, and yet it too can leave devastation in its wake.
This song is almost entirely made up of human voices. It might not make you cry though.
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The internet has been a fascinating breeding ground for all sorts of new etiquette problems; from flame wars to trolling; and from Facebook flirting to people pretending to be their own friends on messenger, as a prank. It's an emotional minefield out there.
One of the most bizarre, in terms of how people choose to get together and get along, is the strange relationships that tend to grow out of web communities. These can be found in any website where people regularly post their thoughts, and they can coalesce around any topic. Over time, with regular interaction, these communities can grow to be become mutually supportive, friendly, welcoming places where people treat each other with a kind of easy, mocking respect. The hardcore regulars become web-peers, and start to value each other more than they do the fly-by night one-post wonders, or the newbies ("n00b! n00b!" etc...)
Eventually, if allowed to flourish unchecked, the community can start to erect walls around itself. Each new person who puts up a message will need to be vetted by the group, some will speak for, some against, and they'll be expected to fight their corner if they want to stick around.
I mention all of this because sometimes I find myself acting like a forum-snob over chart-bound songs which only exist to promote some event which exists outside of the music itself.
I'm not proud of this, but there we are.
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I always loved the expression "fight fire with fire", because it really takes some thinking about. "An eye for an eye" has a certainly grisly logic to it, and implies that revenge is about swapping places with the person who has wronged you, leaving you both disfigured. But to fight a fire - metaphorical or real - with with another fire, just makes for a big fire. It doesn't make the fire go away, just ask anyone who ever got into a flame war with an idiot on YouTube.
A full list of the things that fire IS good at fighting would include the following: wood, the cold, raw food, over-inquisitive grizzly bears, paper, the deceased (in a respectful way, naturally), an unfriendly ambiance in a living room, marshmellows, the Guy, potatoes in foil, the lack of a sing-song in a campsite situation.
But I guess most of those wouldn't scan.
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Is someone trying to get in on Alicia Keys's action here? Are we about to be besieged by songs about places? And if so, can we hurry up and get to Norwich or Zurich, for variety's sake if nothing else.
Alicia's song was all about how inspiring and enervating New York is, and it's great, but you couldn't really call it a party jam. Luckily Katy Perry has come along to rectify that, by pointing out that in California the girls don't wear a right lot, and that is because it is sunny and they are sexy. A point which Snoop Dogg is more than happy to reiterate.
The funny thing is, the difference between the two songs, in tone, delivery and lyric, speaks volumes about how the two places view themselves. Simply put, New York is for romantic realists, for people who draw inspiration as much from the toughness of their surroundings as the spirit of the people who live nearby. People who can see past bad stuff to the good stuff within.
On the evidence presented here, California is for people who like the sun and the beach and being hot (in both senses of the word). That is all.
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It'd be really easy to get carried along on the wave of goodwill that surrounds and carries Kylie in everything she does, and to conclude that any song which features her soft, deep, velvety tones is an instant classic. Especially her first song for a while. She is, after all, KYLIE MINOGUE (in starry letters with a twinkle on top).
But that would be bad manners. If she deserves anything it's the knowledge that even though putting out rubbish records would not dent the public's affection in any way, we can still tell the difference between "OMG it's KYLIE! She's BACK!" and "aww, look, it's Kylie. She came back."
Luckily for everyone concerned, the correct response to this BELTER is the one with all the exclamation marks in.
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See these men with their cartoon friends? That's right, it's like someone took that band the Hoosiers, and put their wigs in a hot wash (and Alfonso's moustache got lost, like a spare sock). But don't hold that against them, for it IS the Hoosiers and they are back with a new song called 'Choices'. It's a bit of a brave departure for the band, but good with it.
Here, have a preview...
Now, having been a hit band, and then gone away for a bit, they must surely have interesting things to say about this fame business: what it is like on the way up, what it is like when you arrive, and what it is like when you're not in the public eye every day, after you have been used to that kind of attention. I made it my business to find out more.
As it turns out, the Hoosiers have interesting things to say about pretty much any topic you care to lob their way. Read on and see!
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The brutal and sad news first: this probably won't trouble the chart compilers unduly.
This would be true at almost any time, but is especially relevant when the Top 40 is in a state of siege from football songs and Glee songs. And I'm fairly sure the band aren't really expecting it to go Top 10 in any case. It's a shame, but there we are.
So why mention the song in the first place? Well, there's the small matter of it being brilliant. And unusual. And brilliant. I mean sure, if you WANT to put up with cash-ins and rehashes for the next month or so, with no extra mental sustenance beyond your prized old songs of the past, by all means ignore me. But if you've an ear for something ELSE, this is worth a go.
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I had an interesting moment while digging about on YouTube for the video for this. You know how you always get a list of other videos which are in some way related to the one you want to watch? Well while I was watching the dancers and the neon and Kele's statuesque physique, and quietly pondering where I'd heard the principle musical motif before (srsly, that's how I think), my eye ran down the list, and the first clip which doesn't feature Kele himself is Wiley's 'Wearing My Rolex'.
I'm not sure how those lists are generated, but someone - or something - has made the connection between Kele's slurping portamento synths and Wiley's slurping portamento synths, and whacked it on YouTube for all to see. And that's because there IS a connection. They're pretty much the same.
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Whoah! What happened to the fragile waif who was hurt by every heartbeat? Has she been doing emotional pushups? Has she bought some feelings kevlar? Are those clickysticks (technically known as claves, fact fans) actually the sound of two skulls being smashed together? The skulls of her enemies, stripped clean of their flesh by her malevolent stare?
Well no, that would be ghoulish, but there's something punishingly tough about this song. And not just the hammerdrill throbbing synth, although that does set the tone admirably, being the sonic equivalent of sticking your face in a rotary fan*, and feeling nowt.
No, the toughness lies in her ability to express total agony, and total assurance at the same time, via the medium of a plaintive chorus.
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Apparently, even though we all use words to talk to each other, all of the time; even though texting and MSN and Facebook and Twitter and social media all rely on words; even though reading and writing are still as central to our everyday lives as they have ever been, we're all doing it wrong.
There's a new organisation, called The Queen's English Society, which is devoted to working out if we're allowed to continue saying OMG or, like, LIKE, in our sentences. And if we are not, well they're going to...actually I'm not sure what they are going to do, but whatever it is, it will definitely contain more grammars than a day centre for the elderly.
McLean's latest, while it is a fine thing, runs the risk of appearing in the minutes of a future QES meeting, and may even provoke a wrathful response. It might be a pretty song with a marshmellow-soft chorus and some of those chunter-synths that everyone seems to like using nowadays, and it might express the triumph of love over cynicism in quite a charming and witty way, but does that make it RIGHT? Does it make it CORRECT? It does not.
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It's amazing what a sporting tournament can do. Why, with just a whiff of World Cup fever, the nation's recording studios have become a hive of activity. People who normally wouldn't be allowed near a microphone are warming up their throatal membranes, while people whose whole lives are caught up in music are taking the opportunity to have the musical equivalent of dress-down Friday.
New songs are being commissioned, old songs are dusted off. Then they're all whittled down, knocked into shape, puffed up, shouted over and kicked repeatedly in the face over and over again until they lose all sense of meaning or form, and then sung by celebrities in front of a baying crowd of men in shorts.
It's an astonishing time to be alive, I tell ya.
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Bit of a minefield, this one. The principal reason for putting fingertip to keypad today is that GaGa has released the full version of the video to this song. It's an event in a music world which does not really see the unveiling of a new promo clip to be big news. Hell, it's not even as if the SONG is new, that's how astonishing the times we now live in have become.
Unfortunately, I can't send you to look at the video, even though it is freely available on the internet, because there are scenes in it which are, as you would probably expect, a bit ripe.
I'm probably not going to linger overlong on the song either. Because after the astonishing brilliance of 'Telephone' and (particularly) 'Bad Romance', this is the first GaGa single since her debut that simply doesn't do it for me. Other people may hear frosted romance with a Spanish accent, I'm just getting a gene-splice between Ace of Base and 'La Isla Bonita', with an ABBA song title thrown in for good measure.
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FINALLY! We've been waiting for this for YEARS. Y'know how people of a certain age have a problem with hip hop unless it is by either Run DMC/Aerosmith or the Beastie Boys? And y'know how a good deal of that problem is to do with not being able to understand what rappers are on about because they often gabble and shout instead of enunciating their words in a slow and clear manner? Well here comes Giggs, the answer to their prayers.
Listen to him speak! Each line coming out slow and clear and carefully pronounced, so as to maximise impact and understanding. Each syllable balanced and finely-honed for aural pleasure.
He could be delivering a lecture to members of the WI, they'd understand every word.
Incidentally, if the Women's Institute were advertising an evening of games on a certain Nintendo games console, do you spose their posters would read: "Come In And Have A WI-Wii"?
No. Clearly not.
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What we've got here is a synthpopdance sort of song about a failing relationship, the kind where you sometomes can't bear to be together but you can't bear the thought of being apart. It's not that the feelings aren't still there, it's just that old, old story: familiarity breeds contempt. You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone. You can't live with her, but you can't live without her. Her fingertips are holding on to the cracks in your foundations, and she knows that she should let go but she can't.
Yep, that's right, I'm calling this the lairy male response to Kate Nash's prim 'Foundations'. It even, if you listen carefully, shares very faint trace echoes of Kate's descending piano in the chorus, although that might just be wishful thinking on my part.
I don't think so though.
Then again I wouldn't, would I?
*gazes down at shoes*
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There's a curious rite of passage that all youthful female pop stars seem to have to undergo these days, a change they have to endure in order to make sure they get to keep being pop stars for a bit longer, and maybe even gain cultural icon status, if they do it right.
No, I'm not talking about working with Timbaland, this is The Ensexification Moment.
The basic rules of The Ensexification Moment are this: you take a singer with a strong teen fanbase, who has always made very wholesome entertainment until that point, and you apply an ensexificating filter. This loosens a certain amount of clothing, encourages heavy breathing, and changes the basic, ah, thrust of the songs from being about love and trust to being about bedrooms and heat.
Or if the star in question has come from a very chaste branch of entertainment, about freedom and self-expression (with a strong undercurrent of bedrooms and heat).
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Before we get started, just WHAT is "I don't even wanna kiss her" supposed to mean? It he a bit OCD about oral hygiene? Is it just a way of saying you're so full of animal lust you're all BANGBANGBANG and then off to the shower, bad boy style? And if so, is that hot, girls?
Are you bragging to your mates, claiming such intense sexual magnetism that you don't even have to bother with such girly fripperies as the snog, because those crazy girls are so besotted they'll do whatever you demand, and thank you afterwards?
Cos doesn't that make Tinie the hip hop equivalent of Jay from The Inbetweeners? Y'know, massively cocksure about his prowess, obsessed with his loverman status, until faced with an actual real girl, and then something of a wet nelly in the end.
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Today's lecture is on the topic of mystique: the pop fan's catnip.
Some pop stars are gifted with the ability to transform the act of saying very little - while still desperately pointing to their own faces and generally pleading with the general public to love them unreservedly - into utter fascination.
This is called creating an aura, because you're deliberately conjuring up a cloudy, ghosty sort of a haze around yourself, and allowing tantalising glimpses of what seems to be the real you underneath. The best way to do it is to keep schtum, and strike some seriously arresting poses. To reveal too much, even in your music, is FATAL.
Or to put it another way, one of the principal differences between Ke$ha and Lady GaGa is that Kesh is no lady.
She is gaga tho...*
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I sense a schism in popular culture. People - and by people I mean pop stars - are refusing to live in the present any more. They're either rushing towards a romanticised future, where every throat is made from synthetic materials and you can swap musical ideas and performance personae as quickly as you can swap games in a console, or pretending to live in the past.
The benefits are immediate, especially if you want to avoid appearing to be, like, SO LAST WEEK. If you're pretending you're in the future, you can't go out of date, and if you're pretending you're part of something which has proved to have lasting appeal over the years, something which predates electric guitars and You've Been Framed, you're so far out of date, you're *cough* 'timeless'.
Or to put it another way, you're never old hat in an old hat.
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Can I ask an awkward question? I was just having a look at Pixie's chart record, principally to double check exactly how many singles off her debut album 'Turn It Up' have charted. Assuming this does well, it'll be the fifth, but what's striking is the pattern of peaks for Pixie's previous hits.
'Mama Do' and 'Boys And Girls' got to No.1, which is great, really gets an artist off to a cracking start, a one-two like that. Then 'Cry Me Out', the mature '50s ballad, got to No.12. That's fine though, it definitely found her a new audience, and probably not among the most tradionally single-friendly of people (hi Mum!).
Then, a definite mis-step: 'Gravity' - aka The Song That Tried To Re-Write 'No Air' - came out either as an attempt to cash-in on Gleemania (they did 'No Air' too, y'see), or an attempt to further convert new audiences. This time, the target must have been fans of overwrought power ballads that sound like other, recent overwrought power ballads. It peaked at No.20.
So, is it all over for Pixie Lott?
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