The Pop Open Group E: RESULTS

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Here are the results for the violence group - I'm putting them all up at once because I may be summoned away from my PC (or I may equally faff about on it all day long).

First Place: Motor - "Black Powder" (Track 1, 8 1st place votes, 30% of total points) - katstevens wins.

Second Place: Pizzicato Five - "One Two Three etc Barbie Dolls" (Track 5, 4 1st place votes, 23% of total points) - skillextric qualifies.

Third Place: Loretta Lynn - "Fist City" (Track 2, 5 1st place votes, 21% of total points) - lisa_go_blind qualifies.

Fourth Place: Speedy J - "Patterns (Remix)" (Track 4, 4 1st place votes, 19% of total points) - freakytigger is OUT.

Fifth Place: James Kochalka Superstar - "Monkey Vs Robot" (Track 3, 2 1st place votes, 9% of total points) - jel_bugle is OUT.

Congratulations to Kat, who gets to pick which group she is in for round 2 - there are still - IIRC - places in 50s and Before, 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s. She also gets to pick which lisa_go_blind lands in, and then skillextric's fate is determined by the Randomiser.

Thanks to all voters, especially those discerning individuals who voted for track four.

This week's group is RELIGION, and is up tomorrow with results next week. Then the Pop Open goes on vacation until mid-September, giving the 24 players in Round Two a month to get their tracks in (and me a chance to go on holiday myself!). We'll fill the orgafun gap in some yet-to-be-determined way. I'll also put up a special post of POPOCRYPHA - the tracks people sent in for Round One but then changed their minds on.

Comments

[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."

[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...