January 2010
33 posts
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December 2009
38 posts
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My top 10 singles of the year list
I’m kind of exhausted with EOY and EOD decade lists and want to be done with them by January 1 so I can begin focusing on the year ahead, not looking back. Having said that, I’m adding one more list to the queue. It’s mostly as a placeholder to look back on in coming years. If this blog even exists then.
Without commentary, my favorite 10 singles of 2009:
10. “Boom Boom...
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What makes a song the best of the decade?
It probably makes for a huge gap in my musical knowledge knowing that I had never heard Robert Christgau’s favorite single of the closing decade until a few moments ago. It’s “We Can’t Make It Here Anymore” by James McMurtry.
Christgau’s, like anyone else’s, choice is his own prerogative and is under no obligation to list anything other than his personal...
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When pop stars rock
I had fallen a few days behind with PopJustice so I completely missed this post from last week about Cheryl Cole from Girls Aloud being on the cover of Q magazine. PopJustice wrote:
Magfact: it’s ACTUALLY ALRIGHT to put a popstar on the cover of a purported rock magazine but only if you say that they ‘rock’, because then you have made them legitimate and proper and then...
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Auto-Tune has become ubiquitous in pop music today. When people want to make an anti-pop or inauthentic argument, it’s often Exhibit A. Even Jay-Z tried to write its obituary on his latest album and the music editor at the LA Weekly said Auto-Tune is “like fake boobs: once you realize they’re fake, it kind of diminishes the joy of seeing them.” What is Auto-Tune? More importantly, is it a...
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No. 1, Revolution, Miranda Lambert
It must be quite the seduction for a red-state girl who keeps firearms in her purse alongside lipstick and credit cards to top the best albums list for a blue-state, pro-gun control, pro-Obama (mostly) liberal music writer, but after I listened to Miranda Lambert’s third album, Revolution, I knew it would make my top 10 list; where it ended up was an instinct that didn’t waver.
Right now,...
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“Though Greenwich wrote for nice urban girls (the Chiffons, the Crystals, the...”
– From Rob Hoerburger’s loving portrait, “Ellie Greenwich: Crackle and Pop”, in the New York Times Magazine, December 27, 2009.
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No. 2, It's Not Me, It's You, Lily Allen
As a lover of pop music, no other pop star is more of a pleasure for me to listen to than Lily Allen. She’s self-aware and moralizing but it comes from experience. Throughout It’s Not Me, It’s You, Allen looks at the mistakes she sees younger people making and says “oh dear” because she knows she did the same things when she was younger. Lily Allen defies the...
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No. 3, It's Blitz!, Yeah Yeah Yeahs
{As with nearly every website, I’ll also be counting my favorite albums of the year. I’m not sure if I would have done it again this year if I didn’t have a Pazz & Jop vote. I’m hoping to cover one album each day until I get to number one.}
Or how Karen O got her groove back.
I may be in the minority, but I loved the Yeah Yeah Yeahs second album, Show Your Bones. It wasn’t the beautifully...
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No. 4, Don't Stop, Annie
{As with nearly every website, I’ll also be counting my favorite albums of the year. I’m not sure if I would have done it again this year if I didn’t have a Pazz & Jop vote. I’m hoping to cover one album each day until I get to number one.}
It took about five years and after a false alarm last year, the Norwegian pop princess Annie finally released her sophomore album, Don’t Stop after a...
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No. 5, Fortess Round My Heart, Ida Maria
{As with nearly every website, I’ll also be counting my favorite albums of the year. I’m not sure if I would have done it again this year if I didn’t have a Pazz & Jop vote. I’m hoping to cover one album each day until I get to number one.}
Rare is the album that could come across as so confident while dealing with a person’s insecurities in song. Norwegian singer/songwriter Ida Maria dives...
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No. 6, 21st Century Breakdown, Green Day
{As with nearly every website, I’ll also be counting my favorite albums of the year. I’m not sure if I would have done it again this year if I didn’t have a Pazz & Jop vote. I’m hoping to cover one album each day until I get to number one.}
It was sometime around American Idiot that Green Day established themselves as the most politically relevant rock band in music. And they continued that...
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Never been in a riot
The votes, err, sales figures are in and Rage Against the Machine sold more records than Joe McElderry in the UK. This week.
McElderry was the winner of the “X-Factor” (“American Idol” for Brits, which even includes Simon Cowell) in the UK and it’s become something of a tradition that the “X-Factor” winner has had the number one single at Christmas...
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No. 7, New Worlds, Charlotte Hatherley
{As with nearly every website, I’ll also be counting my favorite albums of the year. I’m not sure if I would have done it again this year if I didn’t have a Pazz & Jop vote. I’m hoping to cover one album each day until I get to number one.}
Charlotte Hatherley may be the busiest working musician in England. She’s a touring musician for Client, Bat for Lashes and Brian Ferry, a former member...
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No. 8, Two Suns, Bat for Lashes
{As with nearly every website, I’ll also be counting my favorite albums of the year. I’m not sure if I would have done it again this year if I didn’t have a Pazz & Jop vote. I’m hoping to cover one album each day until I get to number one.}
For Two Suns, Natasha Khan created an alter ego named Pearl, supposed to be the antithesis of Bat for Lashes: materialistic, blonde and vapid. That...
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No. 9, Love vs. Money, The-Dream
{As with nearly every website, I’ll also be counting my favorite albums of the year. I’m not sure if I would have done it again this year if I didn’t have a Pazz & Jop vote. I’m hoping to cover one album each day until I get to number one.}
The-Dream (aka Terius Nash) was pissed when his album, Love vs. Money, wasn’t nominated for a Grammy. Really, what more does the guy need to do? He’s...
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No. 10, Ray Guns are Not Just the Future, The Bird...
{As with nearly every website, I’ll also be counting my favorite albums of the year. I’m not sure if I would have done it again this year if I didn’t have a Pazz & Jop vote. I’m hoping to cover one album each day until I get to number one.}
This album was the first pop record of 2009 that I really enjoyed. It’s full of quirky, catchy numbers and is solid from...
There was a loving profile of Three Imaginary... →
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“I’ve spent the last couple of days listening to an advance copy of...”
– Jody Rosen, from Slate’s Music Club, December 16, 2009.
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Can we get #buzznetfail to trend?
Jesus. Last night I’m bitching about the anonymous idiots on the internet who know nothing about pop - except that it sucks and now I’ve run across the flip side of that coin. From what was once my very favorite website in the world, a list of new features, including:
Pop or Poop Our weekly poll where you get to vote on a hot or recent topic. Is it pop, or is it poop? You decide.
I...
I always assumed Dr. Luke was an American (I couldn’t envision “Party in the USA”, with its red vs. blue state landscape coming from a Swedish songwriter/producer), but everything I read indicated otherwise. Jody Rosen’s last post on Slate’s music club this year clears up some confusion and a big misconception:
Friends, the songwriter and producer Lukasz “Dr....
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You can dress me up in diamonds, you can dress me...
I don’t normally pay attention to what rockist, anonymous assholes on the internet say but this one reached a fever pitch (on a day when I already felt somewhat volatile).
On the F2K countdown on the Village Voice’s Sound of the City blog, the entry this morning was for Ashlee Simpson’s song “La La” (which I really liked and listened to regularly but don’t...
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“One of the best-selling musical artists of this year and last, Swift had already...”
– Time magazine on Taylor Swift, getting it right on Swift’s pre-VMAs popularity, where a lot of rock critics writing their end of the year analysis incorrectly insist she was was unknown prior to West interrupting her acceptance speech.
"From Arcade Fire to Ashlee Simpson": I highly... →
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Did U2 really make the best album of 2009?
Is U2’s twelth album, No Line on the Horizon, the best album of 2009? Rolling Stone says yes. Lots of other places suggest a little better than mediocrity.
To be fair, the U2 album has gotten a handful of rave reviews, including a five-star review in Rolliing Stone, written by David Fricke and the previous U2 LP, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb did only get a four-star review from the...
“pop album for girls who used to listen to N’SYNC... →
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I can transform ya
Chris Brown is angry. Maybe even as angry as he was that one time.
The troubled R&B star is upset that he believes retailers are boycotting his comeback album, Graffiti. He says he went into a Walmart in Wallingford, CT and did not see his CDs on shelves, tweeting (since deleted; sic throughout):
im tired of this sh*t. major stores r blackballing my cd. not stockin the shelves and lying...
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The LA Times Pop Hiss blog explains how Silversun Pickups, a band who had their biggest hit album and single in 2007 (Carnavas, “Lazy Eye”) were just nominated for a Best New Artist Grammy. I didn’t think excluding Lady Gaga from consideration was that controversial - and would have been moreso had the rules been rewritten to include her (she was ineligible because she was...
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While the Grammy nominations are being revealed tonight, I started to think about the issue that has always puzzled me about the Grammy award rules: what is the difference between the Album, Song and Record of the Year awards?
Album of the Year, of course, goes to what the National Acadamy of Recording Arts and Sciences says is the best album. Song of the Year and Record of the Year, though,...
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“…[T]he truest thing [Britney Spears has] ever said was in a 2003 interview with Entertainment Weekly: “Anyone can sit down and write some boring artistic song. Pop music is the hardest s— to write.” If you think of pop music not as “three-to-five-minute-songs with vocal refrains” or even as “what happens when Scandinavians, synthesizers, and MMC veterans collide” but as the musical...
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I saw you twice at the pop show.
When compiling album sales charts, Billboard counts double albums as two units. For example, chart expert (and friend to this blog) Chris Molanphy pointed out that when Pink Floyd’s The Wall has sales of more than 23 million albums, there are actually only 11.5 million people who own a copy of it. It’s still a lot of people that own it but more people actually own Dark Side of the...
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What has made both Don’t Stop and Anniemal (and the singles in between) so irresistible is the manner in which Annie describes basic human instincts of love, longing, lust and desire and tells those stories in a way that is both simple and sophisticated at the same time while having so many hooks that the gratification is immediate. That isn’t new: it’s exactly what good pop should, and does, do....
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One time
I’m not one to normally reprint the press releases I get, but this one struck me as being interesting. The whole Justin Bieber phenomenon caught me by surprise (mostly because I try to limit the pop I cover to music made by adults). I read a handful of posts on nu-Idolator on him and all of a sudden he’s responsible for riots in shopping malls (see above).
JUSTIN BIEBER REIGNS...