A kung fu fighter in a disco

It was pretty close, and I'm glad "Fist City" got through - even if it was at my expense - as it was easily my favourite and I honestly expected it to walk the group. Expected the Motor track to do well though surprised it won: solid electro, good but not very memorable (I preferred Kat's first entry, by Neuropa). I never managed to get more than 30 seconds into the Pizzicato Five track! Poor old Monkey vs Robot, I really liked it and it would have been my second place: I had heard of James Kochalka but expected his music to be a lot twee-er.

As for my own pick, I love its brazen-ness - here's what I wrote about it back in 1999, when I put it in my "Top 100 Singles of the 90s": http://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/1999/11/33-speedy-j-patterns-remix/

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jeff-worrell.livejournal.com

haha when exactly did The Bodysnatchers replace 1999

freakytigger? Don't fall asleep, people!

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katstevens.livejournal.com

Hooray! I will post up the Neuropa track at some point if you like.

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I'm going to round up the various "changed my mind" tracks into a post in between rounds, so don't worry!

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chezghost.livejournal.com

mid-September? is this thing going to run all the way to Christmas/into 2008? oof

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"It'll all be over by Christmas"

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Are you unhappy with 'this thing' steve?

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The reason for the break - track-getting aside - is that by then people will be back from holiday ~~and the novelty will have gone out of Facebook~~.

If I had my time again I would not do pop orgafun in the summer though.

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chezghost.livejournal.com

i'm just a bit frustrated by the slow pace, sorry to be annoying. maybe it is because i have no/am undecided on holiday plans still!

think you're probably right that this would be better had it started in september, the fa cup to the league of pop's premiership (and championship) - in my head i was expecting it to finish when Summer does (but Summer finished in May etc.) for some reason.

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Well I have my next round track already sorted out, but I guess not everyone will have had as long to think about it. Actually I didn't think about it, I just heard it and thought 'yes'.

I'm not actually surprised by the P5 placing, since it combines good and bad sides of poptimists' taste, but I'm disappointed that Patterns didn't do better. Of course if I'd not heard it and been able to vote for it, it would have come at least third I suspect :-(

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chezghost.livejournal.com

bait taken! what's the bad side of poptimists taste?

i liked the P5 cos it's BIG BEAT but i didn't think it would get votes because of this.

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indie, obv.!!

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or rather, poptimists = 'being indie about pop' which is most often manifest as liking pop which is just plain old indie.

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I'm not sure if I parse P5 as 'pop' or 'indie' or anything: my allergy to it is pretty much the same as my seeming allergy to most J-stuff, and to bouncy videogame music (I play Katamari with the sound down!).

I dunno WHY this stuff doesn't do it for me really.

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I play Katamari with the sound down!

WHAT.

I parse P5 as completely indie - they're indie in that 'not well-known to the mainstream kids in their home country' way, they're indie in that 'played on the evening session in 1997' way, they're indie in that 'making recursive pop which is sonically alien to the pop of today'* way. (this applies for the whole of shibuya-kei: none of this is j-pop, it hasn't been j-pop since the nineties!)

The stuff that Japan is actually great at, that no-one tells you about because they're all hung up on the mental stuff, is likeable journeyman MOR pop-rock, not very distinguished or distinguishable: the kind of thing you'd want to hear floating down from an outside radio on a summer's day. But I always feel like that's such a personal pleasure, the kind of thing where you pick your favourites by some odd algorithm of chance and the angle of sunlight the first time you heard it, and everything else sounds like so much amiable mud.

* i think this is a distinction that

thebopkids made in the pub the other day: that one of the ways indie isn't pop is that it's aping the sound of an older and out-of-fashion type of pop? probably badly explaining it here but it was a fantastic point.

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blue-russian.livejournal.com

ooh that is an interesting point for a larger discussion, n'est-ce pas?

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Sound down not sound off!

OK, they make more sense as the Japanese equivalent of "perfect pop" I guess. I agree that this whole distinction is really interesting - it's a point Tim's made a lot. The idea of "perfect pop" or "indie-in-pop's-clothing" or however you want to phrase it is the idea that at certain times and places mainstream pop Got It Right and it's all about looking for things that have that sound or 'spirit' - indie as pop in exile. The idea that pop can be caught at a point in time and then lifted clear of its blind idiot market context.

It is very hard to feel emotionally unsympathetic to this as an ideal, but equally if you were to say to me - "even the best examples of it sound somehow lifeless" I would have to agree. Though obviously thousands don't.

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Oh THIS kind of "perfect pop": I'd assumed this discussion was about the type of indie-pop (prob a lot more common now) which takes he electro/sexxx bits of mainstream commercial pop but makes them off-kilter, less catchy, more awkward, ie crap. I really hate all of that: so much potential for greatness, undone by the performers' fixations on Not Fitting In, or Being 'Subversive'. I heard some Simon Bookish tracks for the first time today, that's exactly the kind of thing I mean. The other kind of "perfect pop"...does it even exist v much any more? I can think of a few indie-friendly songs which might fit into it, but no one really talks about Scritti Politti/Jenny Wilson/Junior Boys in those terms. St Etienne might be the good end of perfect-pop? I have no idea what I'm even talking about any more.

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The Pipettes get mentioned in this context a lot.

I think there's a distinction though between people who genuinely believe that pop Went Wrong at some point and people who have simply hit on a sound and are running with it - I don't think the Pipettes have a firm ideological belief in the superiority of girl group pop in the way that I have the impression the 70s power-poppers had about the 60s stuff they were working from.

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so is the defining thing of 00s pop...this feeling of playing dress-up just because one can? you're right, the Pipettes aren't about ideology, but their approach to their aesthetic fits right alongside everyone from Lily Allen to Justice to Arctic Monkeys, this motivation of "just having fun" rather than an overriding ideology? prob healthy in some ways but infuriating in others. it's all a bit like a fancy dress party.

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I don't think that's the Arctic Monkeys' motivation! Mind you I've never read a single AMs interview.

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this motivation of "just having fun" rather than an overriding ideology

Maybe 'it's all just fun' is the new ideology! Not taking things seriously, appealing to the middle range, limiting your aspirations, self-censoring yourself into mediocrity (who needs the conspiracy of a ruling class to do it for us when we can do it to ourselves!). One might even call it... mundanism.

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koganbot

that one of the ways indie isn't pop is that it's aping the sound of an older and out-of-fashion type of pop

I'm not averse to this point at all - it seems crucial, in fact - except that "aping" isn't really fair to the Pizzicato Five, who hardly come off as purists; "draws on" would be more accurate (though you probably know far more about the P5 than I do). And also, the generalization ("aping/drawing on an older and out-of-fashion type of pop") doesn't always hold for (1) the music produced thereby not being pop, and (2) the music thereby not being good. Examples:

--Boyz II Men and Bell Biv Devoe in early '90s aping/drawing on the styles of r&b vocal groups of previous eras
--Backstreet Boys and *NSync in the mid to late '90s aping/drawing on Boyz II Men and Bell Biv Devoe
--Muddy Waters in the late '40s-early '50s abandoning the new-fangled single-string style of blues for the older Delta version he'd grown up playing (though rearranging it for small combo performance)(and don't say that blues wasn't pop; it sure was for black people, though Delta style was only regionally successful pop)
--Rolling Stones 1963-1965 aping/drawing on the rock 'n' roll and r&b of the mid '50s
--New York Dolls in the early '70s aping/drawing on old Chuck Berry, old girl group, and Stones

List could go on and on (first Dylan album, first Holy Modal Rounders album, lots of Zeppelin, etc.). Of course, everyone I mentioned drastically transformed the music in the process of aping/drawing on it, but so do the indie groups. The problem with the indie groups is that I usually don't like the transformation. So if you think indie tends to be especially problematic (or bad) [and I realize that no one here is saying that all indie is bad all the time], the explanations need to be specific to indie in its time and place, and the specific content of the transformation an indie group wreaks on its source material. (And of course there are multiple ways that indie can find to be bad, rather than a single template of badness.)

A good group of songs, but all seemed to lack the extra something (immediacy or pizzazz or killer instinct) that, say, the best of recent Aly & A.J. and Lil Wayne and Natasha have; you could attribute this lack to "indieness," but (I think) it applies to the nonindie Loretta Lynn track as well, which is good but doesn't hold a candle to, e.g., "My Boyfriend's Back."

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mcarratala.livejournal.com

Yes, but... what's common in retro-inspired music is an appeal to authenticity: Muddy Waters taking his cues from Son House down by the levee rather than slick urban T-Bone Walker; Led Zep revisiting the same places plus arcadian Albion; Dylan: Woody & Blind Lemon Jefferson... At its most grotesque: Rattle & Hum – liberalism as minstrel show.

Moz's idols the New York Dolls are much closer to what I would see as the indie-pop (as opposed, of course, to indie-rock) argument, by which will take us to the P5: we're in search of a past that is no more or less rooted than the present, but one that was groovier, more fun and just more pop!

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koganbot

Not following your reasoning, actually. I'm not analyzing (i.e., guessing) at the Stones et al.'s motives for aping/drawing on an older and out-of-fashion type of pop, just that they did it, and in doing so they created modern music that was good, and some of it was popular. So if they can do it, there's no reason in principle that the P5 and the Long Blondes and the Pipettes can't. So if we're saying that P5, Long Blondes, Pipettes, etc. are weaker and more lifeless than the groups I mentioned (are we? I think that's fair, even though I gave the P5 second place last week and in 1999 voted P5's friends Arling & Cameron's album my number two of the year), we have to give some other reason than that they're aping old pop.

Fwiw I doubt that David Johansen found Greenwich-Barry to be any less or more authentic or less or more rooted than Muddy found Son House, esp. given that in their respective times both Greenwich-Barry and Son House were making a new style of music that was superseding the music that had preceded it; and Waters only went back to the style after his attempts to hit with the single-string style failed; but as I said, motive isn't the issue: whether or not you're trying to resurrect a moment from the past, your use of the past doesn't prevent you from making good and/or popular music in the present out of it. And don't say "Ah, but the groups you mentioned were drawing on rock 'n' roll, or drawing on folk, or drawing on blues, or drawing on doo-wop." They were all drawing on previous styles of popular music, and most of them ended up making popular music themselves (though neither the Rounders nor the Dolls made much money on the styles they helped pioneer). And to say "But pop is different" is just to mystify the word "pop." The ontological popness of the Shangri-Las and the ontological nonpopness of Chuck Berry is something that escapes me.

groovier, more fun and just more pop!

This may well be the ideal of P5, whom I don't know much about, though it seems really unsophisticated. It doesn't work for the Dolls unless included in the idea of "more fun" are "more agonizing and more terrifying and more intense and more analytic."

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mcarratala.livejournal.com

It's six o'clock in the morning and I can't sleep, so I'm not going to dive too much deeper into this, so:

1. Goodness or badness of indie was not the question as far I am concerned.

2. Chuck Berry is clearly POP! (Nik Cohn says so!)

3. Notions of authenticity hugely important in the scene that the Stones sprang from – their disregard for such somewhat important – surely?

4. Happy with the (anti-song collectors' idea) that the blues guys were playing pop. But: what you've got Muddy doing is making a practical choice: "I can't play that fancy bendy note shit – I'm going to take that downhome sound and make it loud." That's clearly different from having the notion that pop has lost its way and has to be escorted back to what makes it good, which is what TIm was talking about – and certainly was a prevalent idea in British indie back in the day – and also now with folks like the Pipettes.

5. You probably get a little more from the New York Dolls than I do...

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[i haven't thought this completely through but want to make sure i've replied to some extent. will flesh out in a bit]

oh oh certainly not! I tried to cover this with 'sonically alien to the pop of today': one can make pop music that is recursive to earlier forms of pop music and also conforms enough to the sound of today's pop, people do all the time! Modern pop, when it draws on older pop, adapts it to current sonic rules; 'pure pop', drawing on older pop, is for whatever reason (lack of resources, desire to sound authentic, sheer innate indieness) incapable of transplanting it into the new sound.

P5 are an interesting case-in-point becayse they aren't drawing on, or aping, one specific time - in fact their music is quite intentionally out-of-time, it's a highly mannered invention of... perhaps sixties soft pop, I don't know? But it's not trying to recreate exactly a previous form of pop: it's nodding to various previous forms, producing something which sounds like them but is not them, and isn't modern pop either. It could perhaps be classed a loving recreation of a fiction (okay all loving recreations are of fictions: this one however is brazen, an honest fake of an honest fake).

I don't understand where I'm supposed to have said that indie is ever bad, or recursive music bad either! It's not even particularly problematic. Maybe I shouldn't have used 'aping', it has a kind of chimpanzee glee to it in my head that might not exist anywhere else.

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koganbot

OK, I shouldn't have projected my own negative connotations of "indie" onto what you were saying. But I don't see how P5 are not part of the sound of today (well, the sound of the 1990s, which is when I'm guessing this track was recorded). "Alien to the sound of today" may well be the sound of a particular day, if a lot of people are playing styles that signify "alien to the sound of today." But I don't feel that that captures P5 either: the whole copy, refer to, sample-the-sound-of-the-past thing was a part of international club music during the time of the band's existence. Plus (I just checked this to make sure) P5 were best sellers in Japan in the '90s, which makes them the sound of today [their day] whether they want to be or not. And actually I still believe that my examples are more apropos than one might think. That is, only by hitting big did Backstreet Boys, Rolling Stones, Muddy Waters get to be the sound of their day. Your phrase "loving recreation of a fiction" might pinpoint the different sensibility. But then, with the Stones and Dylan and several others, there wasn't a sound of the day that they were integrating into; it was a sound that was created by their success.

By the way, I'm not trying to knock down your idea. I feel that it's heading in the right direction. "Indie" might be the wrong word for P5, and P5 may be not so relevant to "indie pop" or "indie dance," not because of P5's commercial success but because its natural home would seem to be in the dance clubs. (Whereas indie dance's home would be in the indie clubs. This is assuming I know what I mean by indie dance, which I probably don't.) Am I wrong about that? That's where I imagined Arling & Cameron, whose music was sometimes called "club pop." There is something bohemian-sounding about P5, so maybe "indie" is appropriate, but I don't think I'd want to label the bohemian wing of dance "indie."

I think what I'm balking at is the idea that what P5 were doing necessarily makes them not pop. It might make them cold or overstudied or irritating (all of which are adjectives I've applied to them in the past, but I might be willing to rethink P5), but why can't there be pop that's cold and overstudied and irritating? And I don't see why a band like that couldn't have a Rolling Stones-like impact on popular music. (More likely to be a Rolling Stones-like impact than a Backstreet Boys-like impact, because it's more likely to appeal to hipsters.)

[It's also hard to argue that indie isn't to some extent the sound of today, and isn't to some extent pop. But I can understand why someone here might want to resist calling The Automatic "pop." So I seem to be talking myself in circles.]

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Right. I think I've scooshed about three different things together: I'm trying to make some kind of general unified point when the situation's not that simple (or at least it needs to get complex before it can become simple). So: it's not all indie I'm describing, here, it is mostly the "perfect pop" strain of indie.

I think there are three basic recreations-of-past-sounds at work here:
Type 1, which attempts to capture a previous sound and style, in aspic if at all possible. This is "perfect pop": which I consider to be representative of an indie sensibility, and which I think describes the P5 project very well, regardless of how well their records sell. (and I doubt their sales were a patch on, say, Namie Amuro's when she was queen of avex! everyone was a best seller in nineties japan!)
Type 2, which draws on older styles to produce an amalgam, either of various older sounds or of older sounds with the current sound. all your examples belong, I think, here.
Type 3, which adopts signifiers of a previous sound, but within the context of its own established sound, so that-- that Spoon song is recognisably Motown if you understand the language of indie rock enough to be able to filter it out and just hear the Motown flourishes (which someone who regularly listens to Spoon and similar bands, a 'native speaker' if you like, will do without thinking). A lot of sampling falls into this category, I think.

Your 'backstreet boys' example is completely apropos for me, because the BSB sound wasn't a loving recreation of a specific sound, it was an amalgam: it mixed the previous Boyz II Men r'n'b with a certain Europop sound. In fact, the thing is that I believe quite strongly in the presence of some kind of "sound of now", a noise common to records from a certain period that we don't notice at the time, being immersed. It might just be a change in technologies: the compression on records, the way a guitar is amplified, the noise of a synthesised note (stuff made nowadays that's aiming to sound 'eighties' doesn't, you know? I imagine synthesised notes from the eighties were made out of moulded plastic, they're solid, analogue: the synthesised note of now sounds both more digital and more organic, grown in petri dishes from fractals. nb this may be fanciful talk that bears no relation to real sound).

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koganbot

This is a different point, but I can imagine someone (though not me) arguing that a latter-day Pizzicato Five* would be much more contemporary and modern in their sensibility than Kelly Clarkson or Ashlee Simpson or Aly & A.J. are, even if Kelly et al. are more popular (and they don't seem to be holding onto their popularity anyway). The argument would be that the latter three are basically throwbacks, mixing old line singer-songwriter moves into basic '80s rock forms, whereas the P5 types are still the wave of the future, even if there hasn't been a "Pump Up The Volume" hitting recently.

*I'm not paying close enough attention to know who a latter-day P5 would be. I was real disappointed by last year's Arling & Cameron album.

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koganbot

Sorry for the multiple posts, but remember that this subthread starts with Alex saying that the votes for P5 represent both the good and the bad side of poptimists taste, and he goes on to identify the bad side as "indie" or "being indie about pop." So this is why I raised the idea of indie being problematic (even if you don't find it so). Of course you and Tom are the only ones likely to see my posts at this point. But what you say along these lines might end up crystallizing for other people what they find problematic about indie, even if that's not your goal.

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Perhaps... something that characterises many members of

poptimists is loving pop while having an indie sensibility, which is the kind of attitude that so often leads to curatorial "perfect pop". But I know I use 'poptimism' (whatever it is) as a way of getting past the ideology that comes as a corollary to the indie sensibility: if not removing it utterly, at least working out where it is and isn't needed. So it's not the indie itself that's problematic, it's "thinking indie" and what that leads to.

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which is what alex said upthread more succinctly WELL DONE ME

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I don't hear P5's 'aping' in the same way as I would a British band doing the same thing: I think their J-ness is a bit more impt than their approach to whatever they think Pop is? I remember you once telling me about this Japanese girl whose fashion style was total punk, or something, band T-shirts and everything, but she'd never heard of it or any of the bands? I think I misremember slightly. But there's that J thing of magpieing rather than aping, the disregard for what their loving recreation means, ie it's not trying to signify 'authenticity' or 'realness' whatever, just...the surface.

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How true is that actually, though - my problem is that my impression of 'fashion and pop culture in Japan' is very unfortunately influenced by the twitchings of Momus' ballsack and the theories he spins to legitimise them.

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I basically pretend that Momus doesn't exist outside of the ILM archives. I don't believe he's a popstar or a 'celebrity', I don't believe he's made music, he's just some appalling internet character. I have a similar reaction to a lot of J-pop to you - though I actually expect it to suddenly click one day! - so everything I know is from Cis. Which is nicer than having it from Momus.

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Well, that's a nice mental image, isn't it.

I've known quite a few people who have a similar line about Japan as does Momus, you know, and tempting as the yellow-fever argument is I think it is more... aesthetic? It's a delightful image to have of Japan, of this amazing pick'n'mix culture that just doesn't care for your authenticity, that practices syncretism in everything it does, that has retreated from the horrors of the modern world into a careful cocoon of caring very deeply about very unimportant things and nothing else, where things are more exquisitely done. And I'm sure some of it's true, too: but mostly it is just very, very appealing, and once you've started reading it into Japan - no matter whether your 'in' to the country was women or shib-k or manga or whatever - it's tempting never to stop. Especially when the Japanese are spinning it just as hard back at you!

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