The History Of Jop Part 19 aka You have so many relationships in this life

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I decided to do a Jop poll after all, so here's 1997. With "Lovefool" left off for appearing twice, you have nine picks on twenty-five songs - a generous allowance!


[Poll #861316]


Joptimism 1996: Predictable, Us?

1. Common People (38 votes)
2=. California Love (33 votes)
2=. Born Slippy (33 votes)
4. Lovefool (31)
5. No Diggity (30)
6. Woo Hah! Got You All In Check! (28)
7. Setting Sun (23)
8. 1979 (20)
9=. Ready Or Not (19)
9=. Macarena (19)

Thank heaven the Macarena scraped in there ahead of Beck!]

TYPO ERROR: That should be "Cornershop" doing Brimful of Asha, not Chumbawamba - apologies for Cornershop and all their fans. Also it's "Da Funk" not "The Funk". Mondays, eh.

Comments

The Year of No Next Big Thing

[koganbot]

Xgau's essay was entitled "The Year of No Next Big Thing," and I was glancing at the title last week and thinking, "Man, he missed it (though not as much as I would have)." But his point turned out to be not that we were locked in the doldrums - alt.indie was in doldrums that were producing some high quality but little outreach to the world, he thought - but rather that lots of other things were moving in many directions at once, including into a past that seemed full of mystery and surprise (The Anthology of American Folk Music, an anthology compiled in 1952 of music from the mid '20s to the mid '30s, won the reissues category with more votes than either the top new album or the top single). So there were lots of things, if no next big thing.

But he was wrong, the chart really did contain a Next Big Thing, in fact contained at least two. If Timbaland didn't end up totally defining the sound of hip-hop and r&b for the next decade, he certainly was a source and creator for a big part of it - and a lot of the other sources weren't that far from his sonic neighborhood: Miami bass, New Orleans bounce, crunk (already underway), whatever-you-call She'kspere's snake-and-harpsichord magic, and so on. As for the other big big thing, "Wannabe" was Simon Fuller's first big impact on America, but more important than that to future teenpop is that teenybopper girls were now buying girl performers in massive amounts, meaning they were wanting stars to identify with. So the way is being paved for Avril and Ashlee, even if the latter sound more like Alanis and Courtney than like the Spice Girls. (Maybe some of you can speak about the other Big Things, e.g., O.K. Computer (second place on the P&J albums chart), which I've never heard in full so my vague impression that it's old wine in new bottles can do with challenging).

(Best Xgau moment: he describes the Spice Girls flick thus: "their movie defines girl power as bearing a baby - a female baby, with her dad on the lam"; later in the essay, he says of "MyBabyDaddy": "I loved its nutty deep-South hook before I had any idea what the song was about, which is - as in Spice World, of all things - raising a baby (female, but that's muffled and incidental) with its dad on the lam.")