Another Year In Pop: 24

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

A very static top 20 this week - although last week's highest new entrant Morrissey has totally disappeared out of the top 100 already! Mint Royale are still at number one, milking it for all it's worth.

[Poll #1205575]

Comments

[koganbot]

Jordin Sparks f. Chris Brown "No Air": Starts relatively blank - "Tell me, how am I supposed to breathe with no air?" - then Jordin and Chris exchange compliments, the arrangement inhales and exhales, lungs fill and let go. BIG AERATED TICK.

(OK, question here - and I haven't read your comments yet - is how does "No Air" work so well? Rissi Palmer's country cover of the song is merely OK, proving that the song is pretty good but hardly sure-fire great. So what's going on in the Jordin-Chris arrangement that's so compelling? Something about the contrast between emptiness and crowding, inhaling and exhaling. (Except it's standard in pop music for verses to be spare in relation to choruses, so how especially does the alternating spareness and cluttering work in this track?)

Feeder "We Are The People": Guitars lay down a big fog of fuzz, with a melody embedded deeply within it. Then a boy in tight crotch-crushing pants sings a pretty song in a semi-emo whine. Must be hard for him to breathe. NO TICK.

Madonna "Give It 2 Me": Unpretentious little half-reggae rhythm that Pharrell jerry rigs w/ rubber bands and chewing gum. Madonna's singing is a bit snoozy, just sort of nicely there, which is fine for the song. TICK IT 2 RIDE.

We Are Scientists "Chick Lit": As a couple of different rhythms do battle, a melody flees from the beat. The sound is too disparate for me to connect to emotionally. TICK NOT.

The Music "Strength In Numbers": Basic pounding beat enlivened by violent jitters. Vocalist spits cough drops. There'd be a nice song here if the instruments weren't trying to trample our feet and dynamite the city. Not awful, but NO TICK.

Flo Rida "Elevator": Timbo's going for a dark Southern sound. Melody and sensuality fight their way up through a swamp, don't quite make it. Interesting but NOT A TICK.

I know you're only sorry you got caught

[koganbot]

Speaking of country covers of r&b, I don't think I've mentioned in poptimists the Taylor Swift version of "Take A Bow," caught here in a fan phone vid. I completely love this. Painfully out of tune in spots, but I'm feeling this version a lot more than Rihanna's. The thinness of Taylor's voice adds an extra hurt to the sarcasm and sorrow.

Hear the girls in the audience shrieking.

(Don't know what went wrong for me with the Rihanna version. It's not as if Rihanna's an inexpressive singer, but the fullness of the arrangement neutralizes her expressivity. I had to hear Taylor's version to find out what the song was about.)

Re: I know you're only sorry you got caught

[koganbot]

What I wrote about "Take A Bow" on rolling country:

What interests me about Taylor's "Take A Bow" is that I was riveted by the lyrics of a song I'd up to then totally ignored. I tend to pay only cursory attention to r&b lyrics, though Rihanna is usually an exception. (The lyrics to "Disturbia" are quite disturbia, though enjoyably rather than disturbingly so.) Anyway, in Rihanna's "Take A Bow" the whole arrangement neutralized its effect, too full or something, so the song passed me by. But with Taylor singing it, it's suddenly in the world of adolescent infidelity and sarcasm and pain. So it's "You Can't Do That" and "Should've Said No," etc. And now I may find a way to go back and appreciate the original, now that the song's got my attention.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure it's so much the arrangement as the vocal performances - 'No Air' is the kind of song which can only really be sung in a certain way if it's going to maximise its effect. Understatement and maturity and distance really don't work - it's too fundamentally silly for that, but Jordin and Chris's youth means they can get away with the nihilistic life-or-death melodrama, because they sing it as though it's the very first time they've actually felt these emotions.

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

I've not heard the Palmer version, but does it preserve the very strange rhythm in the vocal line (in the verse)? I can imagine other singers attempting it and coming a right cropper, but CB pulls it off effortlessly.

[koganbot]

Yes, Rissi preserves the vocal rhythm, which is basically to emphasize the offbeats, "if I should DIE beFORE i WAKE it's 'CAUSE you TOOK my BREATH aWAY." But the accompanying strums are mostly undifferentiated sixteen notes against backbeats from the drums, as opposed to the counterbeats that are thrown underneath Jordin and Chris. So Rissi's version has vastly less tension. Is definitely worth hearing, however. Rissi is a good singer, and she's the first black female to have had an impact on the country charts in twenty years - not that it's much of an impact yet, but she's not just someone who sings country and happens to be black, she's emphasizing the r&b and going for a country dance market. "Country girl," her best song, is a country-blues groove with gospel touches. The lyrics claim that the country beat speaks to the world, the vid cannily mixing country and city, and white, Asian, and black. The guitarist who's laying down the wicked blues slides at the start is portrayed by a bearded old white guy.