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

[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?)