poptimists | Poptimists Tracks Of 2008 PART FIVE

Here it is! The ten best tracks of 2008 according to YOUR votes.

10. MJ HIBBETT AND THE VALIDATORS - "It Only Works Because You're Here" (28 points)

I'll let the voters go into more detail on this one, I think.

9. ADDICTIVE ft T2 - "Gonna Be Mine" (29 points)

Mariachi bassline explosion! 2008's most unjust non-hit gets its due.

8. LIL WAYNE - "A Milli" (30 points)

Hip-hop's biggest crossover ripples through to Poptimists.

7. CASSIE ft LIL WAYNE - "Official Girl" (33 points)

That rarest of things, an actual Cassie release!

6. MGMT - "Time To Pretend" (40 points)

MGMT are too hip for embeds. Their other hits picked up a vote each too.

5. SANTOGOLD - "L.E.S. Artistes" (45 points)

A handful of these points were for the XXXChange remix (which is also very good). Santogold. A horse. Rum goings-on.

4. GOLDFRAPP - "A&E" (47 points)

Alison G. cavorts with some leafy otherkin. Benefitted from a late flurry of votes.

3. WILEY - "Wearing My Rolex" (78 points)

featuring N London dance troupe the River Fleet Foxes.

2. JORDIN SPARKS AND CHRIS BROWN - "No Air" (94 points)

The runaway early leader, then flagged a bit in late voting.

1. ESTELLE ft KANYE WEST - "American Boy" (113 points)

"Who killin them in the UK? Everybody gonna say you, K" - it is impossible to find an actual video for this song on YouTube!

Thanks to all who voted - tomorrow I'll put up the full list and appendix (every song mentioned). Now let the debate begin!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I like that this conversation is buried, since I've never pulled my thoughts together on this topic (applying Kuhn to the nonsciences). It's hard to come up with a good musical analogy to Kuhn's notion of incommensurability. Aristotle's and Newton's dynamics are incommensurable because Aristotle and Newton are using radically different concepts of motion, so some of what one calls "motion" wouldn't be recognizable by the other as motion, so if you're looking at Aristotle's dynamics through modern eyes they seem incoherent. You have to in effect learn his language, learn that for practical purposes "motion" and related concepts are different words from the ones you know. Once you learn his language, his ideas are strong and coherent. And it's wrong to read Kepler as trying to come up with Newton's ideas and failing - rather, he's trying to pull together his own ideas (and not altogether succeeding, but doing a lot better than he'd seem to if you are viewing him through the lens of Newton).

Now, a musical equivalent might be the Europeans who heard African rhythm as "wild" and "free" and the singing "out of tune," whereas actually the singing is in tune but in a different scale, and the rhythm, far from being wild and free, is well-ordered, but with counterrhythms that the European listeners weren't able to pick out. Now a less strong but more pertinent example would be a person who doesn't listen to much "avant garde" music who simply thinks that the music is a mess. In some instances it is a mess, but this listener doesn't get where the mess is deliberate, where a performer put some work in making sure that the music coalesced as little as possible so that what ever order appeared in the work was one that the listener had to choose and impose. (Assuming that there are performances that succeed at this.) In this instance, the listener isn't getting how this is a created mess. And the avant gardist can turn around and talk about how pop is so boring in its incessant order. But here, if the listener does "get" that the avant garde mess is created, she might still dislike the music for being a mess. What's happening here is that the listener and the avant gardist value different things (or at least value different things in particular circumstances). One dislikes musical incoherence and the other values musical incoherence. But I wouldn't call this difference in values "incommensurable," since the two people aren't using incommensurable concepts of incoherence. They're merely valuing different things. And to say "Ah, but their values are incommensurable" I think misses a crucial point: in evaluating music you're always making value judgments, within genres and discourses as well as across them. So yes, hip-hop and classical audiences may value different things, but fans of hip-hop can also differ from each other in what they value. And I think people carry these differences across genres. E.g., I don't think I listen to Pop in a Pop Way and Rock in a Rock Way.

Poptimists Tracks Of 2008 PART FIVE

Re: "it only works because you're here": metatextual justification