Poptimists Top 40 Of 2007 Part 6

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

No embedding means no need for a cut on these three...

6. MILEY CYRUS - "See You Again" (44 pts)

There doesn't seem to be a video for this, or at least it's not on YouTube - here is the "full length album version".

5. BRITNEY SPEARS - "Gimme More" (46 pts)

I'd never actually seen the video before! (embedding disabled). The whole grainy handheld cam thing is creepily Lynchian i.e. I WUZ RIGHT.

4. AVRIL LAVIGNE - "Girlfriend" (54 pts)

The Manichaean video has been embed-disabled: find it here!. Was in 3rd place for ages until a late surge for...[FIND OUT IN A COUPLE OF HOURS!]

Comments

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

I'd never even heard OF the Miley Cyrus song! How on earth has it ended up so high?

Am unable to shake off creeping feeling that this chart is happening in reverse.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

How it ended up so high: 6 people liked it a lot! I'm also a little surprised by its placing (and "Gimme More" actually).

For the Top 3 entry I'll also list the entire Top 40 (and then there'll be a huge list entry with EVERYTHING in it).

[ms-bracken.livejournal.com]

It was on skyecaptain's teenpop compilation, and easily one of the best things on it - that was how I heard it, anyway. I'd probably have voted for it if I had voted.

[braisedbywolves.livejournal.com]

If it's any consolation, even I have given up any hopes of "All My Friends" turning up at this stage.

I have not been paying enough attention to Ms Cyrus at all (in a "I son't have the time to just sit down and listen to it all" way), but I assume that it's been discussed by koganbot, and it turned up in justfanoe's predictions last week.

Excitement!

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

"All My Friends" or "Piece of Me"? A left boot is riding on this!

Re: Excitement!

[braisedbywolves.livejournal.com]

I was hoping that you'd forgotten that. I think Piece of Me is a shoo-in, what with being the best AND mentalest track on a supremely great and mental album.

[justfanoe.livejournal.com]

The reason I predicted it was because I knew it was #1 on my ballot and #2 on koganbot's ballot, which I figured had to be enough to get it somewhere on here. I'm somewhat surprised by the high placement of both that and "Gimme More", though.

I did vote for both "Gimme More" and "See You Again", as well as "Potential Break Up Song" (which I assume is in the top 3) and "Call the Shots", which puts me at 1x poptimists consensus.

[koganbot]

piratemoggy put it number four on her list when she did her top twenty-five countdown, though I also remember her saying that she'd botched the deadline and wasn't sure if she was voting in the poptimists poll (or something).

[koganbot]

This is what comes from not reading the lists I post on koganbot - even when you post on the comment thread beneath the lists! - and also your not noticing when I mention everywhere I possibly can that Miley's co-writers on "See You Again," Antonina Armato and Tim James, were Aly & A.J.'s producers and co-writers on "Potential Breakup Song."

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

OMG 'See You Again' is FUCKING AMAZING!!!!!!!!!!

It's like...Bond theme surf guitar + sleeeeek beats + song Garbage would have come up with if they hadn't been so uptight (not that I didn't love them back in the day for the brief moment in time that they were good) + sophisticated hushed backing vox + really amazing lead vocal, menacing and bratty and elusive and sugary all at once + more than a hint of electroclash sneery attitude + "My best friend Lesley says, "Oh, she's just being Miley" which I heard as "my best friend Ashlee" the first three times + is that 'Sunglasses At Night' it nearly turns into at one point?

I can't stop listening to it!

No fucking wonder it's crossing over. It's AMAZING.

AMAZING.

[justfanoe.livejournal.com]

Absolutely. It's one of my 5 or 10 favorite songs of this decade.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

No wonder she's corrupting (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7165125.stm) the youth of America (http://www.kutv.com/content/news/watercooler/story.aspx?content_id=01686e60-5669-4ef1-b6cc-522198b59263).

[koganbot]

But the presents were wrapped, so the kids didn't know what they were stealing.

[koganbot]

I think the first line of the verse follows the melody to "Sunglasses At Night." But if you go for overall feel, with the ominous reverb and the deep singing, the song is a lot closer to Johnny Cash c. 1962 than to Corey Hart - but a discofied Cash, made sweet by the basic sweetness of Miley singing about being nervous.

[atommickbrane.livejournal.com]

OMG and just the other day I was thinking about getting a Hannah Montana icon!

I decided not to bother though.

[justfanoe.livejournal.com]

DO IT

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

Do we have any views on whether the rest of the Miley Cyrus album is good (I know I am stuck in the past viz the 'album' concept)? The Avril Lavigne one is I think pretty solid all the way through.

[justfanoe.livejournal.com]

The Miley/Hannah album is extremely inconsistent, with some very good songs and a lot of crap. I like "Start All Over" almost as much as "See You Again", but it's a pretty huge dropoff thereafter. See: skyecaptain's Mostly Wanted compilation.

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

"East Northumberland High" (included in one of the Poptimism podcasts in 2007) is also v. good. Otherwise, Meet Miley Cyrus is patchy, as Greg says. I've not heard the Hannah half of the second album.

[justfanoe.livejournal.com]

OK, "East Northumberland High" is v. good, and "GNO" is good as well. The Hannah half of the album is more just downright bad than patchy, though there are a couple of OK songs.

[koganbot]

Haven't heard the Hannah/Miley No. 2, but in general her singles have been comme ci comme ça enough that I assume Greg and Dave are right in being mixed about it overall. But this and "Start All Over" and "G.N.O. (Girls Night Out)" and "East Northumberland High" all rise to various levels of aceness, and might make an acquisition worthwhile.]

I thought the Avril album was consistently irritating (I way way way way way prefer her first, which wasn't altogether unirritating itself but was far more metal, among other things) and inconsistently good. I liked her more as a kid trying to grow up than as a grownup acting childish (though notice my own inconsistency here e.g. in regard to Brittsky).

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

Well I didn't hear much teenpop last year, and have only just got started on the Bedbugs compilations - See you Again beats all the Avril, and would have done really well in my list if I'd heard it in time. Will dig out the old Avril albums, since I like pretty much all the singles.

[edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com]

Yeah but Britney's not being childish, just bratty/insane. Can't think of a single song on that album that isn't particularly adult -- she's workin' and bein' a mama, she wants a real man to take care of her. Avril's doing cheerleader chants and crashing her car and not liking your girlfriend, and it's not really that those things are definitely childish (grown-ups can be poppy and petulant too, Ashlee managed to do those things and still seem grown up when she was just 19) but nothing in her nonspecific lyrics indicates that this is happening to an adult. Plus she still dresses like she's 14.

[koganbot]

Not only is there no video for the Miley Cyrus song, so far I don't think the record company even realizes that it's a single. I emailed a publicist at Disney about this and about Aly & A.J.'s "Blush" (no one can figure out whether "Blush" is on their album or not, though I've actually held a store copy in my hand that contains the song). Anyway, according to the nontrustworthy Wiki, it's Miley's favorite song on the album, so my fantasy goes that she insisted it be first up on her MySpace (though now it's dropped to second), people started to download it in droves from iTunes, as these downloads accumulated some music director at a Top 40 station noticed and began playing it, got strong audience response, other music directors noticed and did the same, same results, and all of a sudden by accident a song that Disney hadn't promoted as a single does what no other teenpop song on their label including "Potential Breakup Song" had done, which is to gain traction on mainstream Top 40 radio. This all happening while Disney REFUSES TO PLAY THE SONG ON THEIR OWN STATION. They'd settled on "G.N.O. (Girls Night Out)" and "Start All Over" and "Nobody's Perfect" and that boring duet "Ready, Set, Don't Go" with dad Billy Ray as singles, and they'll be damned if they'll switch gears just because they've got a shot at their first big breakout pop star ever. (I'm not counting Plain White T's, since though they're on Disney label Hollywood Records they're not a teenpop act.)

Of course, a different scenario is that somehow Disney decided (even though this has never happened before with one of their acts) that this was a song that would go over on pop radio and so they pushed it there with great success (despite not making a video) but also, for brilliant reasons that are entirely unknown to me, they decided that by keeping it off Radio Disney and thereby suppressing its popularity among its presumable core audience, and almost certainly suppressing its sales numbers thereby, they were accomplishing the great commercial and publicity feat of... - I just can't figure this out.

The publicist I'd emailed was someone unknown to me, and I never got a reply, so I really don't know the story, and I'm not that intrepid a reporter (in fact I suck at being a reporter) to find out.

[koganbot]

I do think the Miley songs Disney did pick for their own station are good ones. In fact, I'd say that "G.N.O. (Girls Night Out)" is at least as good a song as "See You Again" but got an uncharacteristically tepid performance from Miley. Otherwise it'd be my track of the year. (Still makes my top twenty.)