Can I Get An Amen?

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

Can I Get An Amen? by Nate Harrison. There is a video (popular on YouTube too).

Not strictly poptimist fodder, but thought it worth pointing out all the same. It's a little audio pop-music essay on a very recognisable "break" concluding with some thoughts on how the ENFORCEMENT of copyright law has changed - arguably for the worse - from the perspective of sample-based cultures that have arisen since the break was first recorded in the late 60s.

ps, odds that someone here knows this fella: evens.

To The Extreme

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Extreme Pop discussion on koganbot's LJ - relevant to here.

Actually when I nominated Bruce Springsteen's "Jungleland" in the what is Poptimism??? poll I had something like "EXTREME POP" in mind - though I don't know if "POP" is quite the word I want there, but "EXTREME ROCK" means something else, and "EXTREME ROCK N ROLL" surely means something else too, so maybe what I'm talking about is "EXTREME ROCKISM" (ha ha only joking) - that moment in the second (?) verse where Bruce is describing his imagined street scene, the neon signs, the hustling, the kids, and he's willing it to be real so much that it becomes overloaded, absurd, reaching the line -

"kids flash guitars just like switchblades"

- and it's something like cosplay or fan fiction, or Peter Pan urging the audience to believe in fairies, a beautiful desperate wish to bring the dream to life, like the supersaturated Guy Peelaert pics in Rock Dreams. It's the longing that makes me like this and hate, say, PRML SCRM, whose rock litanies are more like catechisms and always tinged with a grubby self-satisfaction that they're Livin' It.

The rest of the song is all post-coital disappointment of course.

SUKRAT'S GUIDE TO (LACK OF) ETIQUETTE

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

never link an recent old post abt simon reynolds just bcz yr minions pals seem to be overlookin it in the stream of time

(no subject)

[anthonyeaston.livejournal.com]

I think that Courtney Love's Moono wouldnt have been the most extreme song on american life, if it wasnt for the amazing, strange video, that video for me is so important, because it bridges the witchy woman stevie nix/punk rock queen past with something "new".

i think that what is extreme about some of the examples below, is an awareness of their own artifice and their own realness, and how those depth bombs of concepts can be used in concordance... (so life despite god, while a masterpeice, is too earnest and not artifical enough, to be extreme)

(so using yr inital examples:
Mariah Carey--her hyper femminity, of course, but also using the edges of her instrument, and the sheer, crystaline, theatricality of that instrument, i want wayne kaustenbaum to write about carey, because in the 1991 period, she made herself an icon of craft, but she knew that an icon was being made, her diva like tendencies were considered to be part of not only an r and b tradition but something else entirely. their voices sound different, but in this peroid carey reminded me of nothing more then callas, and callas knew what she was doing (she was too crafty in fact, compare callas losing aristotle to jackie, with carey losing motalla to thalia)

Napoleon XIV's i have not heard this.


The Veronicas' "4ever" The veronicas realise that its perfectly okay to want to be a pop star and a punk star at the same time, to be coy and to fuck. there are threads of this in britney, but she was never punk enough and in avril but you never wanted to fuck her, and in ashlee but their is an autonomy missing. you know where joe simpson is in lala for example, you dont know where max martin is (does out svengaling the svengali have something to do with this?)

Boney M is not extreme for being eccletic, boney m is extreme for being so fucking weird. personal anecdote, when i was a teenager, i went to offically sanctioned lds dances, for all three years of high school, and there were large group dances, and slow dances, but also a strange attempt to control the eroticism of the situtation, it was the first place where i realised that eroticism of popular culture couldnt be contained, that it was forever leaking over the edges. we would dance to songs that seemed so out of it, so strange, and it shocked me that they were allowed, they included time warp, rasputin, ymca. i still dont know how a song about cruising in the bathrooms of a working class mens club got so huge, and i have no idea why time warp was allowed, but it was incredibly fun to dance to, but rasputin...rasputin allowed all of these tight, hard, cold, scared boys and girls (scared of sex, of pleasure, of the end of the world, of all sorts of things, the culture of the church was always a kind of paranoid fear) to dance in this theatrical, overly dramatic way, we acted int his kind of music hall pantomine, and at the end the bodies were stacked like cordwood into the next song--like rasputin was a kind of heretical mystical reworking of jesus, we were playing the same game, dying and rising again, like we would at the end of the world. i dont know if boney m meant any of that, but the self concicous theatricality of it gave us something before missions and marriages. (maybe thats what im talking about here, self concious theatricality)

Richard Harris' Wrong Song (Donna Summers version is the correct version of this song) the song you are thinking of wrt Harris is the Hive

Lindsay Lohan's video for "Confessions of a Broken Heart (Daughter to Father)" (this is the first video for a pop song that i ever turned off because it was too close to tabloid violence, it isnt reflective at all, and the theraticality is stage managed, the slippages are too raw to be extreme, the blood doesnt come from cornstarch and food colouring; i think what you might be looking for is the britney video for lucky, which does everything about fame that lohan's video does, but more knowingly, or britneys everytime, which talks about internal violence more theatrically) (or maybe im just obessed with how much the wounds in the video look like stigmata)

Johnny Ray (havent heard him enough)

The Shangri-Las were the place i started to love pop more then anything else, it was the place that let me into super pop...the sheer overwrought emotion, the real violence, the silence at the edges (is walking in the sand really about rape?), all makes it extreme, what might make it not is a dependence on authority figures (esp mothers, in the text and phil spector outside the text)

Little Richard for sure (what happens with the exteremity of little richard with the evil hoodoo of pat boone?)

The History Of Pop Part 50 aka Last night, I had a dream about you

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

OMG in Now 49 we had...a DRAW! And a draw of two songs with great big ticky ratings at that! And poor old "Survivor" one point behind, with a score that would have walked 9 out of the last 10 polls. I feel as overexcited as Davina pretending a phone vote is close! Make yr choice between S Club and Outkast after you've voted in THIS Now poll, which kicks off with perhaps the iconic modern pop song and has a host of other 'talking points' - I expect plenty of Lexular squealing and much HEATED debate. Debut tracks from Sophie E-B, Five (late in the game!), Alihen Ant Farm, So Solid and a couple of French robots you may be familiar with...

EDIT: And how could I forget THE MOST ROMANTIC SONG EVER MADE?

( Na na na, na na na na na )

LET'S GO!!

(no subject)

[chezghost.livejournal.com]

In anticipation of tomorrow's Top 40 Singles poll for May (bringing us up to date) here are links to the videos for most of the songs that will feature so that you may familiarise yourself with any you may not have heard.

( Read more... )