Poptimists Tracks Of 2008 PART FIVE

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

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!

Comments

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

I think 7 of these are great, one is pretty good, one is boring (but actually quite good by the low, low standards of indie) and one is bafflingly terrible.

[braisedbywolves.livejournal.com]

Okay, I can see a lot of criticisms of Time to Pretend (admittedly most of them falling under "hating fun"), but boring is hardly one of them! Particularly compared with, say, the tall glass of warm milk that Solange provided yesterday. How do you listen to it and describe it as boring? I'm not trying to be confrontational, I just have NO IDEA what your ears are doing.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

It's mid-paced and keeps repeating the same falling melody in its verse and chorus?

(I don't think it's boring, I like the keyboard sounds, but I don't think it's especially thrill-powered!)

[braisedbywolves.livejournal.com]

It has some great drum fills that break up the main beat, though! I hadn't noticed the melody.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

The music is completely generic indie-dance, the singer affects ennui but just sounds bored (and boring), the lyrics are incredibly bad and it repeats the same (not very good) melody on pretty much every line. And it goes on for bloody ages.

Whereas Solange has actually bothered to write verses AND a bridge AND a chorus AND a middle eight, she sings the (great) lyrics with tremendous character (seriously her vocal inflections and her lightness of touch are just irresistible here) and the chorus has all sorts of excellent "ooh-ooh-ooh" and "ba-ba-ba" melodic counterpoints going on.

[chezghost.livejournal.com]

weirdly i kinda of agree with your criticisms but i still think the track is OK. it must be the synthetic warmth of the music itself that renders it any good at all. the other two MGMT singles are better tho.

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

i still prefer time to pretend out of all their stuff - it's just outstanding. the blend of ennui (as lex picks out) and arrested-development warmth is overwhelmingly bittersweet. it still catches me unawares in the details when i listen to it now.

it does to me what i imagine Snow Patrol's Chasing Cars/Run seems to do for the rest of the UK.

[chezghost.livejournal.com]

it's definitely got a 'good times' kinda vibe but somewhat in spite of the singer!

so yeah, indie then...

[braisedbywolves.livejournal.com]

It's generic in that it's in a genre I like, but not as in forgettable - I've walked around with the melody stuck in my head for days.

I think we have totally different ears on the voices - Solanges sounds much more bored and characterless, like oh this is a pastiche, apply this effect here and this effect here and continue. I know I sound like fodder for your forthcoming "Why do all you indie bastards hate musicianship?" thread, but I really do like this stuff when someone's doing something with it EG Ain't No Other Man. Whereas because MGMT's vocals are so appropriately flat, when they soar, it really hits me. Also I really love flat vocals.

It's is probably safe to say that I disagree with you about the great lyrics - I would find it hard to reprint them without making fun, so let's leave it at that.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Oddly I used to agree with you about the Solange - when I first heard it I thought, god, another pastiche, why are people getting excited about this? And it just grew and grew on me, thanks to the chorus being stuck on me so much: I still wouldn't have voted for it because it never quite outgrew its pasticheyness, but I'm hugely fond of it.

I think my basic problem with MGMT is that I don't trust their ennui: maybe I wish they'd either be sincere or mocking about their milieu or generation rather than this kind of cagey half-and-half I get from them. On the one hand I know that the diffidence is something their audience can glom onto and really feel and sympathise with (he sez patronisingly, but it's the same kind of "I RLY MEAN THIS until i don't" I get from a lot of Young People's Blogging.) On the other hand I find it kind of exhausting, like reading Hipster Runoff is exhausting (except that's also very funny).

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

"I wish they'd either be sincere or mocking"

don't you think there's wiggle room for this ambivalence though. morrisey always gets away with something similar. (oh hai indie)

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Yes you're right! This is exactly the defense I always apply to Moz. I am OLD MAN. I think it rubs me a bit because it's "we" here rather than "I" - Morrissey tracks are generally about Morrissey (or pretend to be), this seems more overt in its spokesmannishness.

(of course it could just be because there's two of them)

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

oo, i definitely hear more mocking in it. the protests that they are FATED to pretend and so on - are all 'yeah, of course you are dear'

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

NO HE DOESN'T

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Haha Xtina is the most pastichey of all (no diss!). idk I think Solange hits a really good balance of poutiness (which is totally apt! because she's daddy's little princess who's used to getting her way, and you get the feeling that the situation in the song is the first time she hasn't, and of course she falls back on pouting as a first resort), vulnerability (the entire sandcastle metaphor; also, I liked Hazel's interpretation of "please don't blow me away": both an appeal not to make her fall head over heels and a plea not to hurt her) and flippancy (like, how pat does "I'm a cool low Jane with a skip on my feet, I play tough as nails with my heart on my sleeve" sound - but it's obv a defence; that's probably my favourite line in the song). And of course joy, in the music, in the way the chorus storms in and the drums kick up a notch and the sheer dreamy crush of the second bridge, "You're an old-skool dude with a kick on your shoes..."

[koganbot]

"Pastiche" seems to be too strong a word for what you guys are getting at. I tend to reserve it for stuff like Transglobal Underground or M/A/R/R/S or Lennon when he did "Happiness Is A Warm Gun" where it's stitched together consecutively and they quite deliberately want you to feel the disjunctions. Whereas Solange and Xtina (at least in what I've heard of Xtina) are melding styles together, and whether the melding works or not, the songs are trying to come across as a unity. So they're giving rhythms to material that had never had those rhythms before, but where this doesn't work (if it doesn't work), the problem is more like "This spice doesn't belong in this soup" rather than "This part doesn't go with what just preceded it." My problem with Solange's voice is that it just doesn't feel flexible or expressive enough, even though she certainly puts as much into her singing as she can. I still like the album overall, but it kept falling lower and lower on my list.

[anatol-merklich.livejournal.com]

I guess they mean pastiche[1], not pastiche[2] (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pastiche)?