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

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

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

while i'm enormously fond of mr hibbert (and indeed of this song), i don't think i'd have voted for it in this kind of poll -- that said, i'm kind of glad it's here, because it actually hews to its own aesthetic very clearly and directly, and this aesthetic does somewhat challenge the assumed shared aesthetic of the great plurality of the winners i think, and i think this kind of dissonance (a sort of aesthetic non-commensurability?)* is a Good Thing**

*by which i mean that there's no way the Rules By Which X is Judged Good and the Rules By Which Y is Judged Good can be squared with one another
**It's not after all an accident that I ran the wire so that the various claims for value of the various schools of music were channeled so as to collide, to mix it up in the street-fight sense; my natural feeling when one school is largely making the running (even when this triumph is justified by the material) is that there's an airlessness to the overall conversation -- i think within R&Bworld there IS an airlessness; the palette of potential content, soundwise and topicwise and conceptwise, while far bigger than its dectractors think, and i believe bigger than any of its rivals, is not as big as it thinks it is....

less abstract way of putting this

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

"All Gaul is divided into three part. No! Not all..."

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

[chezghost.livejournal.com]

It reads like you're suggesting R&B (as we know it today) as the best vehicle for Pop in terms of scope and capacity for experimentation and comprehension (maybe including the best way, today, of manifesting personalities on record). And rivals = all other (pop) genres? Bit confused here (partly cos I would prefer to believe they're all on the same level when it comes to potential).

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

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i might start this as a separate thread because it feels a bit tucked away and off-topic here

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

[koganbot]

the Rules By Which X is Judged Good and the Rules By Which Y is Judged Good can be squared with one another

Well, assuming that this divides up by genre (does it? do I judge "A Milli" in the same way I judge "Wobble"?), there's no reason that someone who judges is required to conform to those rules of judgment. I'm thinking off the top of my head, but the fact that genre titles are Superwords (which is to say that people not only argue about what's good and what's not good in the genre and what belongs in the genre and what doesn't, but that also they tend to have ongoing ideals for the genre that are never quite attainable, and the ideals get jiggered so that once attained the ideal shifts so as to be something that's once again not attained), means that there's some "incommensurability" within a genre's "rules of judgment," not just between this discourse and that.

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

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

I sort of agree but R&B is an odd example to pick, b/c I don't think it's running things anywhere except its own R&B world right now SAD TO SAY. But this is how I feel about pfork-indie, which seems to be disproportionately running things in critic-world despite this being wholly unjustified by the material.

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

[koganbot]

Also, Thomas Kuhn, one of the two guys who popularized the term "incommensurability," didn't think that scientists followed rules but rather that they followed models. That's why he used the word "paradigm," which is a fancy word for "model." So a song can resemble another song in this aspect or that without there being a rule that says "all songs in this genre must do this." And similarly for criticism, a way of criticizing Song A can be a model for how one criticizes song B, but there isn't a set of rules that says "This is how we criticize songs of this type."

I have no idea why you wouldn't vote the Hibbert "in this kind of poll." I wouldn't because I don't think the song is good enough, but I don't see where its type has anything to do with whether one would vote it in this kind of poll.

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

[koganbot]

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.