Chart Championship Week 4 RESULTS

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

And now the votes from the poptasticuk jury.

"Everyone has chosen so well, I feel bad having to pick winners and losers. Well done Poptimists! The songs seem to me more varied than some of the past selections, which I was pleased about. Now I have a whole load of ace new music to listen to - thanks guys!

1. Bonnie And The Treasures - "Home Of The Brave". Nice Motown-y sound (certainly of that era), female vocals. I'm a big Motown fan but haven't mentioned that before so a good taste-prediction. 10th Place - LOSE - unflattering scoreline for martinskidmore.

2. Data Panik - "Cubis (I Love You)". Fun 80s/90s style, a bit shouty but only as necessary. Obviously British vocals (I'm guessing Scottish cos the girl reminds me of Manda Rin from Bis... is it her?), both male and female. Lots of different ace bits. This is great! 1st Place - WIN - lisa_go_blind goes top after busy performance.

3. Jorge Ben - "Taj Mahal". Weird but very jolly. Liking the nonsense lyrics, plenty of 'dedede's and 'lalala's. Not sure where it's from - could be Spanish or Eastern European, which is a pretty wide guess! Goes on a bit, though, and doesn't really go anywhere. 8th Place - LOSE - epicharmus lacks penetration in the final third.

4. Ooberman - "Blossoms Falling". Ooh, 90s post-PSB British boypop - ace! Sounds like a gay Blur. More great 'lalala's but other lyrics too so beats the last song by far. 2nd Place - WIN - journeyman squad play their socks off for skillextric.

5. Bananarama - "Doctor Love". Super-80s sounding electro-pop, quite sharp but nice girly 'woo' bits. Is it Bananarama? Either them or someone very similar. 11th Place - LOSE - jeff_worrell won't believe this scoreline.

6. Miranda! - "Una Lagrima Sobre el Telefono" Euro dance-pop! In foreign, most likely Eastern European. I like it - although it's not the absolute best of its genre it's better than the majority, which can get a bit mindlessly boshy at times. Would be good for a bit of 'big fish little fish'. 7th Place - LOSE - World Cup stars fail to produce for lockedintheatti.

7. Ben Watt ft Est'elle - "Pop A Cap In Your Ass". I was immediately put off by the length (3 mins over the optimum pop song duration!) but it's actually a cool, interesting song which I enjoyed listening to. A mix of slightly 90s-ish dance sounds and a girl with a London accent describing her shoplifting exploits. 4th Place - WIN - gamble pays off and inf0vore climbs out of relegation places.

8. Manu Chao - "Bongo Bong". The backing music is familiar but I don't recognise the singing. Oh, I just realised - Robbie Williams and Lily Allen covered it. I don't know this version, though, so you're safe. It's good, but could do with more singing and a little less speaky bit. 5th Place - WIN - koganbot scrapes a win.

9. Ingenting - "Slapp In Solen". Yay, someone found something Swedish! Lovely. Typical Swedish indie-pop, a bit like Håkan Hellström. 3rd Place - WIN - tried and true tactics kickstart blue_russian's season.

10. Of Montreal - "A Sentence Of Sorts In Kongsvinger". Very jolly, cute indie pop, funny lyrics about living in Norway! Some great 'papapa's and squelchy background noises. 6th Place - DRAW - piratemoggy's first point of the season - could easily have been all three.

11. Mott The Hoople - "Saturday Gigs". A ballad in a very British accent (a bit Bowie-ish), sounds quite 70s. Not what I'd normally listen to but it's enjoyable nonetheless. 9th Place - LOSE - ageing striker fails to perform and leaves byebyepride under pressure.

I can't believe I'm putting the one I presume to be Bananarama at the end, since they are pop legends, but it just shows how much I liked all of the songs.

Comments

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

The thinking on Track 11 - and I totally see this myself - is that it's the ancestor of what The Ark do. It was one of two I knew (also knew track 8).

[infov0re.livejournal.com]

Cripes, I was dreading this one - I nearly gave you some of the Outrun2 soundtrack - but managed to get in with a nifty WIN. Alright!

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

OH NOES (mine was the Bananarama one*)

Ah well, #2 is a worthy winner. That track stood out for me too on first play of the mix.

*bragging points to anyone who can guess who wrote this song btw. It is someone very famous. No cheating!

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

I assume you're implying that the singer wasn't the writer. The only very famous person I can think of writing songs for lady singers in the 80s is Prince. I bet I look stupid when you reveal the answer!

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

I have googled! yes, I look stupid. But also -- what was s/he thinking!!

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

Oh noez, my clear run is ruined! :D

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

I thought your song might be Of Montreal. Is this from the new album? I quite liked another song I heard from that record recently (possibly again something you shared).

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

It is off the new album, yeah. That whole CD is rather ace, although the first (Suffer For Fashion) and last (We Were Born Again The Mutants With The Leafling) tracks frame the rest in standards. The track I sent is actually one that gets on my tits, bit about Norway aside but for some reason I concluded it was the best pick. Would've been '...Mutants' but I had shared that one in my journal so I figured it might be recognisable.

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Hahaha number 2 is indeed Manda Rin & co, I recognised this as soon as I downloaded it as it's on the Rough Trade Counter Culture 2006 CD. I was humming it all of yesterday!

[martinskidmore.livejournal.com]

Oh dear, I am guessing mine is track 1, in that although I don't think it's at all Motowny, that sounds a closer description than any of the others. Unless mine is 8, though I'd be surprised if those two covered it and I don't know about it.

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

I recognise track 1 as something you have shared on poptimists before. It's the only one I knew, apart from mine.

[martinskidmore.livejournal.com]

That'll be it, then. Spector-produced girl-group rather than Motown, in fact, but same era.

[martinskidmore.livejournal.com]

I note my great choice finished only one place behind the also-magnificent Saturday Gigs. I blame freak weather conditions or possibly astroturf.

When midnight comes around

[koganbot]

I hear a family resemblance in the melodies of "Home of the Brave" where Bonnie sings "Instead of all the trouble they hand him/Why don't they try and understand him?" and in "All Tomorrow's Parties" where Nico sings "And where will she go, what shall she do/When midnight comes around?" Further proof that people who prefer Cale to Reed hate rock 'n' roll.

[lisa-go-blind.livejournal.com]

Oh my! I made first!

I'm really surprised, to be honest, as I thought this was the best mix yet. I really liked # 1, 5 and 8 but I don't think there was a bad track on here.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

My reactions:

- This seems to be a minority view but I didn't find much to like in this selection, save the stuff I already knew (or should have known in the case of Bonnie or knew the band but not the track in the case of the 'Rama - even so it wasn't a classic Rama run-out)
- "Too indie" might be one way of putting it. "Too twee" is closer to the mark tho: there's a lot of tiggerish bounciness about. Maybe I was just in unbouncy mood tho.
- Astonished and impressed that "Pop A Cap" (neither tiggerish or bouncy) got a win even though I probably like it least of anything! (Except maybe the Manda Rin one)
- Poor old Mott. :(

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

(see also my comments in email to leagueofpop!)

I didn't find much to love here -- Martin's choice; the Manu Chao. Disappointed to see Mott dismissed so lightly, but I guess not having to worry about history is the prerogative of youth. Since I really didn't like the no. 1 I can only assume that poptasticuk is my taste nemesis!

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

I also refer my learned friends to my earlier remarks on the follies of mistaking indie for pop! Actually one thing I am learning from the Championship is that my implicit assumption that everyone else has the same taste as, or even thinks about music in the same way as me and freakytigger, is way off-beam!

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I think if I was playing I'd be lucky to get mid-table!

Indie vs. Pop

[blue-russian.livejournal.com]

I suspect that I have been just to stressed from work this week to think sensibility, but perhaps we could tease this out tomorrow, hm?

Re: Indie vs. Pop

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's a "folly" at all - note that Ooberman and a Bis side-project cleaned up and that byebyepride tanked!

Re: Indie vs. Pop

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

Perhaps I'll post something to try and explain tomorrow, and we could discuss it some more. Basically I don't mean that indie ISN'T also pop (in the broad sense) but that there is a particular indie ideology which a) applies indie attitudes to pop music (e.g. 'I'm into more obscure Scando-pop B-sides than you are') and / or b) actually claims to BE pop music (there is quite a specific genealogy of this which I think we have discussed somewhere, e.g. the moment when Creation records is inventing an alternative pop universe -- this is what pop would be like if the 70s had never happened).

re (b)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

paging nick lowe* surely**

*"pure pop for now people" as alt.title for "the jesus of cool"
**or possibly even greg shaw

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

If I was going to be provocative - and hell, I think I will be - I'd argue that maybe the problem is yours: not being able to get past the twee in order to hear the pop.

I'd also argue, in provocation, that Data Panik and Of Montreal undoubtedly work both as indie and as pop - at least, these particular songs of theirs do - and there is no reason to pigeonhole them as one or t'other.

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

there is a particular indie ideology which ... b) actually claims to BE pop music

Provoking further: but it is YOU in this case who is imposing this intention onto a song which you've never heard before. You are using other information to distort your reaction to the music. Contrast with the home player's reaction.

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

Yes I am probably being unfair to poptasticuk who does describe things quite carefully as indie-pop, Euro-dance pop etc. But I probably have a different definition of pop from you, since I can't hear the 'pop' in Data Panik at all, and although I can hear all sorts of pop music being referred to in Of Montreal (and I actually quite enjoyed this one), I can't imagine this being anything like a hit. In fact there are elements -- the tinny drum machines, the puny voice, the kitschy references to pop musics past -- which militate against it being a hit in the current climate, and which it's hard not to read as an indie negation of the 'popular'.

sub (specie aeternitatis) pop

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

if a chart falls outside time is it ordered?

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

see, I was with you up to "...current climate", then you had to throw in an assumed intention again. This is completely irrelevant! It is in my pop world anyway. :)

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

I don't think I'm talking about intention!

If we assume for the moment that we can separate the artwork from the social experience surrounding it, I think I can explain what I mean. I see an artwork as an assemblage of components. Each of these components is both formal and social. Each component on its own exerts a kind of social force, and the artwork as an assemblage of the various components exerts a kind of social force. This social force is not historically invariant, i.e. it is not independent of context and in different situations it might work in different ways (hence having to specify that an analysis is relative to a 'current climate'). These forces are ambiguous and hard to control -- they may appear to travel towards a closed rather than an open experience, but may always turn out to go the other way instead, as contexts keep getting scrambled. There's no a priori reason for assuming that indie is 'bad' or that pop is 'good'; but I think it's useful to distinguish the two, at least up to a point, and by indie I mean that I judge the lines of force to be travelling more towards closure than towards openness.

No intention here!

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

(a less po-faced response)

I wish I was in your pop world, not mine. I don't like it in here much today :-(

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

I'm happy to accept this is my problem not anyone else's!

I'm not using the pop / indie distinction to sort people into pigeonholes, I don't think (which would imply you could be one or the other, but not both, except in rare cases). Think of it more like: you have a piece of music. When we're talking about the open aspects of it (the things that mean it could be in the charts and played in the launderette when I go to pick up the washing later) we're thinking about its pop aspects. When we're talking about its closed aspects, i.e. the bits that can be fetishised, hoarded, turned into a competitive game about obscurity, we'd be talking about its indie aspects. Obviously a song can go back and forth

Look an actual example: e.g. White Town's Your Woman is obviously indie, but its pop potential was fully actualised, won't ever be totally diminished, but the more it gets forgotten from the public discourse of pop and becomes the sort of thing that fills out a 'top 50 one-hit wonders that were actually good' feature on Stylus, the more it returns to indie-dom.

So back to my problem: I guess I'm miffed because I think Saturday Gigs, which was/is HUGELY pop ought to STILL be pop, but clearly that side of it isn't discernible to people. Also I worry that there are people who hear the pop in twee / indie but won't hear it in the Lighthouse Family or Simply Red.

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

I guess I'm miffed because I think Saturday Gigs, which was/is HUGELY pop ought to STILL be pop, but clearly that side of it isn't discernible to people.

THIS is certainly worthy of further discussion. (Although Mott is a bad example for me cos I've never really liked them.) But yes, a serious discussion of why certain 'older' forms of pop music do not cut ice with ver kids today is an interesting topic. Far more so than the other matters you raise.

I have just realised we do not share a common understanding of the term "indie". And I think I reject yours. Use other words please to refer to the closed aspects of music appreciation.

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

what else does indie mean?

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

Also: I am not claiming to not be indie.

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

I do not presume to judge that anybody is indie (or not).

To the extent I use the word nowadays, it is nearly always as a convenient shorthand for the sound (production, instrumentation). Or to tease The Lex with.

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

In that case we differ -- I'm still using it as a (possibly poor) word for something which can link the formal aspects of pop to their social context. Except about teasing the Lex ;-0

[koganbot]

I too am having trouble with your use of the words "pop" and "indie." Indie contexts can be open and pop contexts can be closed, depending on the time and place. Also, it's crucial that you say more about what you mean by "open." I thought the 1978 New York punk-postpunk-power-pop-avant-garde-fake-jazz-no-wave-etc. scene in New York, small and haughty and bitchy as it was, was wide open not just in what people were listening to (everything) but also in its ability to be surprised and moved and changed and distressed and excited and hurt by music, and in its sense of having no idea where it was going or what it was leading to. I thought in 1986 - now living in San Francisco, though that was beside the point because the scene had been internationalized - that the much much much much MUCH bigger indie-alternative-fanzine-&-music network, more "open-minded" than ever, taking in everything from hardcore punk to noise skronk to whatever pygmy music Op magazine was into at the moment, had lost a good deal of its ability to move or change or surprise or distress or hurt anything. My potent phrase was "all rendered lame in the context of our appreciation," and it seemed to me that we could easily incorporate hip-hop and bubblegum into our vortex of nothingness and be equally enthusiastic towards and unchanged by them as well. Anyway, I don't think I necessarily came up with a great explanation for what was causing the shutdown, and I still need help developing my ideas, but I don't think that "indie" should be the name for the shutdown, if for no other reasons than that I've experienced indie scenes that weren't shut down and that poptimists itself is an indie scene: discussions and shenanigans like ours aren't exactly taking place in Time magazine and Us Weekly, and they're not frequent on television (or at least weren't in 1998, when I last had one).

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

Well this is the point in the argument where I usually fold and say I was just being sarcastic and negative BUT:

i) I agree with the idea that 'indie' and 'pop' don't necessarily align with 'open' and 'closed'. But the way I see the terms, 'pop' is a kind of ideal degree zero of openness, so everything ends up being some shade of indie. So my real point is maybe more about rhetoric, i.e. acknowledging owning up to being indie rather than pretending to be pop.

ii) I realise this is a rather negative strategy! I think it comes from the fact that when I say 'indie' I'm really talking about ME, from how I was like when I was a teenager and student -- so this would be a long story if I went into that. Because I don't see an 'alternative' to being indie, I understand it to mean both the turn against the world in which something like my identity is established, and the temptation to freeze the movement at that point. i.e. 'indie' is a necessary struggle against conformism, but also the name for a failure to see that that struggle has to dissolve itself: that there is really no such thing as conformism, which is the illusion that there is a world to struggle against.

iii) And yes I agree that there might be a problem with using that term without contextualising it in relation to personal history; and yes I agree that in (external) history, different scenes, different alternatives, have represented different kinds of vector of travel. And the other personal side of this would be having been part of the 'indie' scene in Edinburgh for a few years, and not being so now, owing to changes in my life, and what I feel are probably failures on my part. Having changed a real scene for a virtual one, I'm doing what I always do IRL, which is vacillate between self-imposed detachment / lack of engagement and open expressions of frustration which are at least as much meant for myself as for anyone else -- hence being constantly disappointed by the fact that poptimists doesn't feel open enough to me. (for which read: I'm not open enough to poptimists?)

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I don't think I said anywhere that any of these *aren't* pop.

(Which I would say of some of hauntedballroom's CD! Not that being pop is a criteria for performing well in the League Of Pop, any more than football players always score with their feet!)

I could, I guess, spell out each time that I mean "too twee to be effective for me" rather than "too twee to be pop".

Home of the brave, land of the free, oh why don't they let him be what he wants to be?

[koganbot]

Ah, I've arrived too late to show off my guess work; I knew Bonnie and the Treasures for the same reason Jeff did, but in my notes I said "I bet you this was written by Mann and Weill" for its class issues and its sounding like "Uptown," and I was right. Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill were the Brill Building people most likely to insert class conflict into their lyrics; also wrote the Animals' "We Gotta Get Out of This Place" (of course Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry also put class conflict in a couple of their teen tragedies). Anyway, I knew this track but if I hadn't I'd have given it a solid win. (Tom Paxton denounced "Home Of The Brave" in a c. 1965 attack on "folk rock" in Sing Out!, preferring acoustic folk. Entitled the piece "Folk Rot." Don't really know how he managed to associate the Spector sound and folk rock, though maybe it was the incipient protest in the lyrics where he made the connection. Haven't read his piece in something like 36 years, though, so I'm probably not doing it justice, and maybe the "Home Of The Brave" was in someone else's piece.) Christina Aguilera should sing this at a gay pride rally.

Anyhow, I scribbled that track eleven was "someone imitating Ian Hunter," and called track six "a Bananarama type group." I liked this mixtape from start to finish, though I agree with Tom in thinking it too indie, the indie problem for me being not tweeness but that the music is too muffled. My track, "Bongo Bong," which I like fine, is mondo twee but also very visceral, as Manu's got the rhythm down. Anyway, this is how I'd order everything but Bonnie and "Bongo":

win:
--Ben Watt f. Estelle (tremendous, not at all twee, more like half brutal and half mournful; its emotions remind me of the stylistically very different "Hustler," by Simian Mobile Disco, which also has the brutal-mournful thing going, and a shoplifter)
--Mott (I'm regretting forever that I sold the album with "Death May Be Your Santa Claus")
--Ooberman (big lumbering version of what ought to be a Hawaiian beach melody, the clumsiness giving life to the lilt, somehow)
--Jorge Ben (d'n'b type beats in what's otherwise coming across as calm resort music; nice feel but needs a better melody)

draw:
--Miranda (Argentine indie hi-NRG goofballs, but the beats are mixed too high, so conflict with the melody)

lose:
--Data Panik (near miss: lots of funniness in the playing; the guy vocals are frantic and pushy like Go4's Jon King, which adds good tension but is also cloddy and sexless)
--Bananarama (party-disco whoos and good funked-up rhythms, but the so-so melody brings this down)
--Of Montreal (this is witty and creative and quite enjoyable, prog lounge or something, but I'm not feeling my way into the melody)
--Ingenting (breezy but teeming with musical elements, the crowdedness slowing down the breeze; pretty damn interesting for last place)

[fugitivemotel.livejournal.com]

Dudes! I am confused! Why is there no track from me? I sent it before I went to Moscow!?

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

This is the Chart Championship -- you're playing in the Pop Premiership!

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

You're in the other league. Scroll down yr friends page a bit for your result.

[blue-russian.livejournal.com]

I felt pretty certain I'd score with my selection, unless poptasticuk happened to know them already. Two pretty strong albums by them out there (and reasonably wide-ranging within the "boys with guitars" backet), if you can find them.

I have to say I'm little disappointed there's not more enthusiasm -- as koganbot pointed out, I think there are a lot of ways into the song -- but, oh well.

[poptasticuk.livejournal.com]

It was probably the language which endeared the song to me more than others, as I'm learning it at the moment and my head is full of Swedish words and sounds, so they sound very pleasing to me in a song, but maybe not so to others less familiar with the language.

[poptasticuk.livejournal.com]

How strange that my mix of all people's gets called 'too indie'! Perhaps people found it harder to think of big-sounding pop songs that I wouldn't know, with the slightly indier ones being a bit more secure in that respect.

I thought that might be Estelle on the Ben Watt track! And I correctly spotted Manda Rin as well - I must have good voice recognition, even if my nationality guessing is rubbish (Miranda not being from anywhere near Eastern Europe).

[lockedintheatti.livejournal.com]

This was the hardest week of all so far for me - our tastes overlap quite a bit, and every track I thought of for you I was worried you'd already know, so I had to dig deep to find something I knew there was very little chance of you having heard (it was only released in Argentina and I haven't seen the EP it came from or the track itsself discussed anywhere else). I suppose I could have played for a safe draw, but what's the fun in that?

[poptasticuk.livejournal.com]

You were lucky - I have heard of Miranda but not that song.

[blue-russian.livejournal.com]

Choosing for you was actually one of the most interesting rounds, mainly because I have a much clearer (if not necessarily correct) sense of you/your tastes. I had some other more poppy stuff that I considered using, but given that I actuallly had Swedish-language music that I liked, I figured it was fate.