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

[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.)