Country Single of the Year?

[anthonyeaston.livejournal.com]

note the erotic cross cut sawing

(does it mean that this year there have been four or five country singles disparaging hip hop, with explicit references to the back woods, but that use hip hop musical vernacular?)

Britters!

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Britney announces two London tour dates!

SO. TEMPTED. I imagine that getting tickets will be near impossible though...

nobody's talking, cuz talking just turns into screaming

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

OK, the twist at the end of this video just made me totally choke up.

It's probably really predictable but I didn't have my mind fully engaged when I started watching. Anyway, Matos at Idolator is OTM about how the quality of this video corresponds exactly to what makes Ne-Yo's music special: scenes we've seen before, but done with so much more acuity that they cut that much deeper.

Also of note is Ne-Yo's 'Single' - a rejigged version with New Kids On The Block is the actual single, and it's fine but definitely not as good. But the song itself is just exquisite: on first half-listen, I assumed the scenario was just Ne-Yo macking on a girl on a club, which meant that it stood out more for the 'Time After Time' sample and gorgeous melody than the lyrics. But then I realised that it's actually some kind of apotheosis of meta-pop. Ne-Yo is singing as Ne-Yo, the pop star, present not in the action of the narrative but in the music the subject hears; the song doesn't refer to itself for the sake of it, with an arch wink that leads nowhere in particular, but as a perfectly expressed comment on how pop music functions as fantasy, escape and comfort. And it's a never-ending thing: just as the fictional girl in the song, hurt and rejected by her boyfriend, finds solace in Ne-Yo's song for three minutes, so there are probably thousands of real life girls in the same situation doing the same thing.