A kung fu fighter in a disco

What very odd choices for the dancing category! No real big pop OR dance hits in there - the only one I remotely enjoyed dancing to this year is actually quite awkward on the dancefloor ('Silent Shout' much better for dancing).

The songs I enjoyed dancing to in the 06:

Girls Aloud - Something Kinda Ooooh
Booka Shade - In White Rooms
Kelis ft Too $hort - Bossy (Switch rmx)
Simian Mobile Disco - Hustler
Rex The Dog - Maximise
Ellen Allien & Apparat - Way Out
Ciara ft Chamillionaire - Get Up
Amy Winehouse - Rehab
Hot Chip - Over And Over
Justin Timberlake - SexyBack
Delia Gonzalez & Gavin Russom - Relevée (Carl Craig rmx)
Cansei De Ser Sexy - Let's Make Love And Listen Death From Above
Christina Aguilera - Ain't No Other Man
Madonna - Jump
Nelly Furtado - No Hay Igual

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disappointed that you didn't subtitle the PH Wars LET THEM SNORT COKE or something similar.

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Some of those were nominated! I agree it's an odd category, but I also agree there wasn't an absolute cast-iron banger of the year. I would have included "Sexyback" but I now mistrust JT after it flopped at my werks party.

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I was expecting slightly more obscure things in the 'dancing' section for whatever reason (am very pleased 'Monster' made it in there, is extremely good to stomp around drunkenly to and you can remember the chorus no matter how much cider you've just thrown down your neck) and am very surprised 'Something Kinda Oooh' didn't make it in there.

Was 'Walk Away' by Kelly Clarkson out this year? I seem to remember it being but since I remember seeing it on my parents' telly that could easily mean it was far longer ago- if it was, that's very good to dance to in the kitchen, less so in your chosen dancing establishment. Same goes for Xtina's 'Aint No Other Man,' although this might just be my chronic case of white girl booty prohibiting me dancing to anything that requires a lot of shaking in public.

Generally my danceability criteria is nothing to do with the song and entirely to do with how drunk I am. I have been very drunk when I have heard the following:
'Yeah Yeah' by Bodyrox and Luciana
'Chelsea Dagger' by The Fratelli's
'Hey Kid' by Matt Willis
'Dance Dance' by Fall Out Boy (either the original or the excellent stompy electronic remix by whoever it is that did it)
'Lying Is The Most Fun A Girl Can Have Without Taking Her Clothes Off' by Panic! At The Disco
'Sounds Of Life' by Pendulum
'U and Ur Hand' by Pink
'Checkin It Out' by Lil Chris
'I Don't Need A Man' by the Pussycat Dolls

Justice vs Simian is strangely undanceable.

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'Hustler' is properly great to dance to and 'Rehab' caused some kind of dancefloor stormage at my university's Indie night. I find 'Let's Make Love And Listen Death From Above' kind of hard to dance to, though.

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koganbot

Yes "Walk Away" is this year, though the album it came from is late '04. Strange story, which I don't really know much about; Wikipedia says "Initially, 'Addicted' had been planned for release as a fifth single, but was cancelled when RCA deemed its dark tone and message too similar to that of her previous two singles, 'Behind These Hazel Eyes' and 'Because of You.' 'Gone' was then picked as the replacement, only to be dropped due to similarities to 'Since U Been Gone.'" Assuming that Wikipedia is correct here, RCA's reasons seem fake (we don't want the tone to be too much like the two previous massive successes). "Behind These Hazel Eyes" and "Because Of You" don't sound much alike - one's Dr. Luke pop-rock, the other's a ballad, and the respective styles could have supported much less unhappy lyrics. It's the words that have the dark tone. On "Addicted" the sound gives you darkness as well, Evanescence-style goth metal that's way more rock than "Since U Been Gone." My guess is that RCA reasoned that the sound was too dark for the Top 40 and Adult Contemporary market and that the rock market would never accept Kelly. It's too bad they didn't test this; there's a whole lot going on with Kelly that you don't know about if you haven't heard the album ("Hear Me" is even more metal-rock than "Addicted" is). Of the five songs that Kelly co-wrote on the album ("Behind These Hazel Eyes," "Because Of You," "Addicted," "Walk Away," and "Hear Me"), "Walk Away" is the only one whose lyrics aren't desperate despair.

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koganbot

When I nominated the Paris wars I said that the discussion was crippled by one side being total shitheads. By the way, the argument isn't between people who like Paris and people who don't like her, it's between people who dismiss her and people who are willing to take her seriously. The Shitheads were interesting, though, because they don't actually know why they dislike Paris, and instead of trying to deal with what the music does, they run to a Hero-Vs.-Villain Story about how the music is made, the Great Story Of Opposition And Capitulation To Authority, with a subplot involving the Work Ethic. And there are some complicated - and ugly - class politics as well. And put aside the fact that Paris is rich: the opposition to her is another variation on "Disco Sucks!" Which isn't so uncomplicated either.

By the way, I think that people like me and Dave (a.k.a.

skyecaptain and Lex feed off of the same Hero Story as everyone else, so I think it's important that we ourselves not dismiss the Shitheads, but rather try and understand them.

I wish someone would pay me to write about this.

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That actually really surprises me, cus whilst 'Breakaway' is still on my list of albums I want but have never remembered to acquire, 'Walk Away' screamed 'MASSIVE SINGLE' to me, so I'd assumed it was always slated for release. I dunno, her last few singles hadn't been very suitable for Britain and, indeed, quite a few of them didn't make it over here at all but 'Walk Away' seemed like the sort of thing she ought to be doing more than 'Breakaway' (the song itself) which sure did sound like Avril Lavigne's hand in it. Different markets etc. I suppose.

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I enjoyed reading the Indie/Emo comments more than I enjoyed reading any of the Paris commentary, but I enjoyed reading *all* the FT comments boxes a lot more this year ("Popular" especially though it's yet to spawn an argument as entertaining).

I think the stuff underlying the Paris Riots (Who gets to make pop? Who gets to like pop?) is more important than indie vs emo (though emo itself could be important), so I ticked it.

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koganbot

By the way, Dave examines the Paris Wars much more thoroughly in his post on Cure For Bedbugs going back to mid August, and he and I and Ross and a few others (I think Abby and Jessica show up at some point, but I might be misremembering; Greg comes along later) carry the convo on in the Haloscan comments. And his recent post (December 19) on a low-key but totally foul Voice piece really rams his point home (and here he's doing it on behalf of the Cheetah Girls, whom he doesn't like):

"Vacantly inspirational!" --Village Voice...I really hate this condescending tone, and it peeks out just enough all through this piece to really rub me the wrong way. It's also apparent in some recent pieces in the Times about Jingle Ball (which apparently had record low sales, a fact that wasn't mentioned in either the preview or follow-up). If you're gonna make an argument for vacancy, make it, but don't act like it's understood is all I'm saying.

Bingo!

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justfanoe.livejournal.com

I was about to post this same thing. Indie v. Emo was extremely entertaining. But the PH debate, if you follow closely, has very important things to say about the nature of music and music criticism. So it gets my vote.

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Acting like it's understood sort of *is* the argument, or the replacement-for-an-argument, the tone of "at least there's something we can all agree on" that seems to be so pervasive.

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justfanoe.livejournal.com

Because there was such a long delay in releasing the next single after "Because Of You", a lot of radio stations (including one of the ones here in Atlanta) started giving a lot of unsanctioned plays to "Gone". I think it even got enough of those to enter the top 100 at some point, though I may be misremembering. I would think it should have been released, but the "problem" is that there are too many massive singles on Breakaway.

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koganbot

No, all of Kelly's singles from "Breakaway" made it to Britain, and actually the two that didn't go Top 20 were "Breakaway" (the first from the album) and "Walk Away" (the last). "Since U Been Gone," "Behind These Hazel Eyes," and "Because Of You" were all top ten, and I'm guessing that they got massive airplay as well. [The U.S. singles charts are based mainly on airplay, the British on sales, which makes the Brit charts a less reliable index of popularity, actually, since most of the audience for most music doesn't buy singles; digital downloading is starting to reverse this, however.]

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koganbot

I think the stations had been told that "Gone" was going to be a single, and then the decision was reversed. And it's not like you're not allowed to play album tracks on the radio. For a Shanks song, "Gone" is just average, but that's a relative comment - as a pop songwriter of the '00s I think Shanks beats even Max 'n' Luke, and "Gone" has a wonderful line (from DioGuardi, I assume): "There's no light at the end of the tunnel tonight/Just a bridge that I gotta burn."

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A weighted sales plus requests chart would be the best indicator, perhaps. Airplay I've never trusted because it's based on what radio stations think their listeners like (which might be what they actually like, depending on how good the stations' research is, but this is an entirely hidden variable).

In UK airplay terms, "Since U Been Gone" and "Because Of You" got big big airplay, "Hazel Eyes" less so. (Subjective data based on listening to Radio 1 in the office).

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koganbot

Yeah, Tom, and if more of you guys had shown up on the teenpop thread (where we actually talked about Paris's music) and Bedbug, then those convos would have been even better.

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koganbot

I don't remember what I nominated for the dance category. Was it Blog 27's "Hey Boy," which I nominated because of this (my mission is to link this on every thread I participate in)?

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Yes, that sounds familiar.

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To me it revealed that despite lots of big grandiose ROCKISM-IS-DEAD statements coming out this year, most anti-rockism is still pretty superficial. It extends to Justin Timberlake (male, auteur, composer) and hip-hop (how could it not, in the US?) - big fucking deal!

The most disappointing aspect of it was seeing people who five years ago were totally popist (I have read the ilx archives and I have seen their excitement about Britney, Xtina et al) dismissing Paris in such a kneejerk way.

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koganbot

Well, airplay is based on what their target audience wants to hear, which is another reason for its unreliability, since not all audiences are weighted equally. But singles sales are even more inaccurate, since some audiences don't buy singles at all (at least from the late '60s 'til downloads came along). My impression is that Billboard does its best to weigh all factors it can. But unless you have a massive govt. grant you can't do everything: e.g., for some airplay categories Billboard simply relies on number of spins, whereas for others it takes into account when and where the spin took place, which can make a huge difference in the size of the listening audience; I assume they'd do this for all categories if they had the staff and the resources; I think they try to rely on their own monitoring rather than trusting the stations to report accurately. Billboard has a formula that gets periodically adjusted. I don't know what the formula is: Perhaps the Billboard scientists keep it as secret as Coke keeps the Coke formula.

One thing that bugs me on the Billboard 200 (the album chart, which is all sales) is that they don't list the week's sales next to the ranking. This feels really dishonest. Maybe Billboard would have to pay Soundscan to publish them, but each week Billboard runs an article on the Top Ten that lists sales figures.

(Jeezy opened at number one, if you're interested.)

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lockedintheatti.livejournal.com

I don't understand why The Knife song is leading at the moment here; it's actually my favourite song of the year but it certainly never struck me as a dancefloor stomper (and didn't seem so either whenever I've heard it out). Glad Monster has done so well though, it's a genuinely joyous record, which is quite unusual for indie.

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Ah, that's true- I somehow have it drilled into my head that 'Because Of You' wasn't a single here and thought there was another one in the US but now I think about it, that was 'Breakaway,' which obviously did come over here.

There's something very pubescent about 'Because Of You' that quite possibly turned off a lot of the album-buying agegroup, who may be who would have bought 'Walk Away' if they hadn't gone for the album, which had pretty good sales here to my knowledge. That song was on heavy rotation in the freeview music channels but I can't remember ever hearing it on radio. I have skewed feelings about 'Behind These Hazel Eyes' because it's got my name in the title and thus creeps me out.

I probably shouldn't attempt to say things about the charts, since the presense of JK and Joel on the Radio 1 chartshow renders it totally unlistenable and me totally unknowledgeable about the charts as a consequence.

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