Another Year In Pop: 31

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Some movement in the top ten at last! Kid Rock has turfed Dizzee off the top spot, the Script have whinged their way up to number 3 and Katy Perry's questionable ode to lesbianism is the highest new entry at 4 (its bosh remix is at no.50!), making this week's poll an aptly all-girl affair...

[Poll #1234871]

Comments

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Do you think it's just that you don't like electropop any more? Your comments every time there's an electropop song these days sound like the kind of things I used to say back in the Britpop era when I was an indie fan and eventuallly I just had to admit I didn't really like current indie.

No disagreement w.r.t Katy Perry though!

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Maybe - I still like the electropop stuff I liked then, though (R Stevens, Richard X et al - though I rarely listen to it), and there are still a number of electropop songs I love now (erm...do Junior Boys, Kelley Polar, The Knife, Jenny Wilson et al count?), but I do seem to be disappointed by it a lot. I think it's suffered from having fallen out of zeitgeisty favour so quickly, and as with all electronic genres it really does depend on not sounding dated - but all the electropop I hear now just seems to want to recreate its glory days. Still, I think the Saturdays' cheapness would be a lot more tolerable if the song was about anything at all.

[koganbot]

Seems to me that we could count Heidi Montag and "Disturbia" as electropop (Kat's Eiffel 65 comparison is on point, actually, though I don't see where that's a criticism) and count Cassie as electro in her own, more austere way, too, so we could say that electro is growing in various r&b directions while Kylie et al. are unable to grow with it. (Which doesn't explain why Kylie et al. were so blah this time out, however, since not growing doesn't make one's music bad, necessarily.)

Of course, all along we could have also been counting bounce and crunk as electropop, if we'd wanted to.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

'Disturbia', 'Don't Stop The Music' et al are virtually electrohouse, just with big pop choruses on top, so they have their cake and eat it while the Saturdays are left with breadcrumbs (ie neither going as hard at the dancefloor nor having any chorus to speak of at all).

[chezghost.livejournal.com]

what about electropop creeping into US R&B - 'Forever', 'Closer' etc. the bandwagon is still rolling strong (even if the sound is increasingly stale)

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

That's probably the area it's least stale - anyway as per my comment above the R&B strain of this is less R&B trying to do electropop, more R&B taking on straight-up house characteristics and ending up with a better kind of electropop.

[chezghost.livejournal.com]

i'm not sure about that - none of it sounds particularly 'housier' than 'If This Is Love' or no more/less electropop than 'Black & Gold' (I think there are other reasons why they might be better than those - nothing to do with house really). if anyone wants to co-opt house they'd be better off dropping the rave-synth preset and using piano+marimba.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Oh the reasons they're better = the vocals, easily.

There is piano house on the new Lloyd album, it is amazing.

[koganbot]

Well, hip-hop and r&b have had disco and electro impulses ever since there was disco and electro. I read an account by Kurtis Blow about how at the start in the mid '70s there was a split between the Bronx hip-hop of Bambaataa and Flash based on funk and the Manhattan club hip-hop of DJ Hollywood. But Bambaataa and Flash themselves were heavy into Kraftwerk, and the Bambaataa-Baker-Robie productions helped create electro in the early '80s. But in NY it was the club musics (freestyle, etc.) rather than hip-hop that embraced electro, whereas in Miami hip-hop didn't shun club music. So the commercial rise of the South in hip-hop and r&b basically has put these sounds into the mix even if there'd never been house or techno, though of course it also explains why hip-hop and r&b is now open to house and techno. (I recall someone in the Voice c. 1999 - Reynolds? - talking of Mannie Fresh's past as a house DJ.)