A Year In Pop: 42

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

As the radio edit says, "It's Britney, dear."

[Poll #1075401]

Comments

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Britney! "It's Britney, dear" - seriously? Oh dear.

Rihanna seems to not want to release any of the reallty good songs on her album as singles, apart from 'Umbrella'. 'Hate That I Love You' is at least better than 'Shut Up And Drive' but the best ballads on GGGB are clearly 'Cry' and the title track.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Haha no I made it up. I expect the radio edit just leaves the intro off.

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Hits!TV plays a dialling tone instead.

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Britney - it's still a good song even though the video makes me wince. Poor, poor Britney. Sympathy tick.

Killers - hmm, appears to be no official video for this yet, probably why I haven't seen it on Hits yet this morning. Radio static intro leads to Death In Vegas style John Carpenter dirge, then veers off into Sparks chanting territory. OMG it all goes proper prog halfway through! Scary children! This is really good. Enthusiastic Tick.

Elvis - whatevs.

Orson - this has a good chorus, but I'm finding it increasingly annoying. Would have got a tick three weeks ago.

Kenny - this has charted because of the rugby or something, hasn't it? I've got nothing against Kenny and this is a reasonable bit of trucker country. Tick.

Rihanna - very sweet duet, definitely one of the better tracks on the album. Tick.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

The Killers is ridiculous - also the last 30 seconds is SO BLATANTLY ripped from "black parade"! It's getting a tick though.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I'm not ticking Rihanna, it's a bit lame rly - also this is the kind of record which would NO WAY be getting this level of votes if it wasn't by her.

[pot80.livejournal.com]

Okay, I've been meaning to ask for a while, but are they really just releasing a lot of random Elvis songs as singles in the UK now? I don't understand.

[pot80.livejournal.com]

I find that a LOT of pop records do that, the totally awesome songs very seldom end up as the first single. Kylie and Girls Aloud are super guilty of this in particular.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Oh God. The theory - as I understand it - is that the Elvis reissue campaign a couple of years ago was a big success in terms of getting some of his old singles to #1, generating publicity etc.

So the people who market Elvis came up with another campaign - marking the anniversary of his death - in which favourite songs that DIDNT get to #1 would be reissued. This has been less successful - everything has showed up in the mid-10s and dropped out after one week - but I guess they're seeing it through.

[damnspynovels.livejournal.com]

I thought it was just a last gasp at milking his back catalogue dry before it all falls out of copyright and into the public domain? or is that an urban legend?

[blue-russian.livejournal.com]

Madonna also often seems to have the second single be the huge one. (Didn't we talk about this sometime?)

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

Whut? Which one is 'Cry?' My pirate copy either has it mislabelled or flat-out doesn't have it.

[jel-bugle.livejournal.com]

Britney's video is so "The HITS top ten worst comeback videos ever" it's untrue.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

It's a bonus track on the UK edition - here you go (http://www.zshare.net/audio/4401936a060391/). Might be labelled wrongly, the file seems to be called umbrella.mp3 (but comes up in itunes as 'Cry' so er um I dunno!) but it's GREAT - brilliant lyrics, the first verse rings v true.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Is the Kenny really in the charts because of the burly men with strange balls? Because I love the song (courtesy of a friend who runs a country night), but was truly mystified by its presence here.

[koganbot]

Agree, but it is above my tick threshold, so maybe I'm a case in point. (I don't get the hostility to "Shut Up And Drive," which I quite like.)

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I came round to "SUAD" pretty quickly - and actually it's scored very highly on the overall charts so I think that was just Lex being vocally hostile.

I'm not really suggesting that most of the tickers are only ticking it because it's Rihanna, either - more likely it's that a lot of people got the Rihanna album and so the slower tracks (that they'd tune out or not bother to hear or YouTube if it was someone else) have had time to sink in for the normally balladphobic.

[koganbot]

Er, not saying that it's your hostility to "Shut Up And Drive" (is Lex's, but he's not the only one, I think); but anyway, I like the Rihanna about as much as I like the Orson, which I also ticked, not enthusiastically, so either Rihanna should have only got three ticks or Orson should have gotten twenty.

[koganbot]

xpost

[koganbot]

I love the way the Killers track runs through the crud, and I love the guest vocalist (assume he's on the single) even if he is thirty-nine years past prime); about half-way through they insert a song or something which is something of a letdown, but they never forgo the crud. Enthusiastic tick.

[koganbot]

Burly Men With Strange Balls should be the title of a movie.