The Friday Canon: NO DOUBT & GWEN

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

The runaway winner of the last week's Canon Selecta was Gwen & No Doubt, whose first eponymous album has been priced at £3 in HMV for the last ten years! 18 hits overall, SIX ticks to dish out for our yodelling princess & her ska-punk chums.

[Poll #1097759]
Stevie Wonder: (link)

1. Superstition
2. Living For The City
3. Uptight (Everything's Alright)
4. Signed Sealed Delivered I'm Yours
=5. For Once In My Life
=5. Higher Ground
=5. Sir Duke
8. He's Misstra Know It All
9. I Was Made To Love Her
10. You Are The Sunshine Of My Life

Comments

[cis.livejournal.com]

same for me -- and I'd heard 'just a girl' first (was orig the first single off trag king), so 'don't speak' was this absolute LETDOWN because it was so GIRLY and totally went against everything 'just a girl' was saying, omg. also all ballads suxxored. I like it now, a would-sing-at-karaoke amount.

[mostlyconnect.livejournal.com]

I think listening to Don't Speak on repeat aged 13, playing Premier Manager 3 with a friend all a long saturday afternoon, is the moment of pop music I'll take to heaven.

Nothing else they've ever done came close to touching it, for me? The new stuff leaves me utterly cold.

[cis.livejournal.com]

For me, I think the key with the first Stefani album was imagining it as the radio in mythical America in the late eighties/early nineties -- or rather, imagining that this was the thing Stefani had in mind, the thing she was working really hard to conjure up. That she'd sat down and thought "this album will be a love letter to the pop that I loved before I joined ND even", and that was the album she'd made. It works better with some songs than others. 'Cool' is the track that gave me the idea because it's such brilliant drivetime pop, it makes me feel as if I've been swept into someone else's life, the summer sun on an open-topped car, afternoon drive home, radio up, this is the song playing. And then the salt'n'pepa'isms of 'crash' and a few other tracks beside; 'the real thing' is a good example of the way tracks are so so strongly reminiscent even of specific songs of that period. Definitely the late eighties, the early nineties, an Alicia-Silverstone-Aerosmith-videos kind of time.
(I like to believe that that sort of theming/planning goes into my pop: I don't know if you do, if it's important to you at all.)