poptimists | Best Song of 2001: Heat #4

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Missy Elliott gets the highest turnout of the decade so far, with a whopping 49 votes to win heat #3. Daft Punk, S Club 7 and Mary J Blige are safely through, but Alicia and DanBed tie for fifth - see below for the run-off.

Today's poll sees double J-Lo remix action, microgoth, mashups, possible incest and the Jackson Five (sort of). It's heat #4, everybody!

You get a maximum of TEN TICKS over the three bits of the poll. The top five will go through to the next stage.

If you want to change your vote (or tick too many by mistake), you can edit your votes by clicking on 'Poll #12345' then 'Fill Out Poll'.

UK chart placings given in brackets.

You have until Friday lunchtime to vote.

Rep for your favourites in the comments! Youtube embeds very welcome.

[Poll #1436184]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

infov0re.livejournal.com

Right. You can tell Osmyso clearly loves his source material, rather than just thinking he's being clever/cool. It's also highly musical; I still adore the INXS/Dexys call-and-response.

Girl Talk: more fun on record than in person. I saw him in person, and it was a bland show, not as live as I'd have liked, not feeding off the audience much, but full of every US college kid in London going mental. It looked like this (http://www.flickr.com/photos/felix_cohen/3367897832/). Even seeing that picture again gives me the fear.

From:

piratemoggy.livejournal.com

When I was at university I once had a gigantic argument with my friend Matt (with whom I also had gigantic arguments re: who the best violinist in pop was etc. and I think it has to be considered a mercy for THE WORLD that me and him didn't accidentally end up going out with each other BUT I DIGRESS) as to whether Girl Talk was the best mash up artist out there, to which I said 'bollocks' and 'but he barely mixes the songs together at all, just plays thirty seconds of each!' and 'look if you knew the source material at all you'd realise it's really not very clever' but he tried to insist he was right. The Indiesoc committee were really keen on Girl Talk, unsurprisingly, having never been exposed to this INSANE HIP HOP MUSIC before presumably.

Nothing like having been fvcked around with by some white dude with a laptop to make Lil Wayne acceptable to indie students. D:

(Obviously the best mashup people are Soulwax, for a genuine consensus 'no really this is not a matter of opinion' thing, altho everyone has their faves besides that)

From:

freakytigger.livejournal.com

I really like Girl Talk too! Not that yr making it particularly vehemently but the "oh he messes about with hip-hop to make it acceptable to whitey" argument comes over as really precious to me: so what? Besides I bet plenty of people have gone and listened to Lil Wayne after hearing Girl Talk who would never otherwise have bothered.

From:

alexmacpherson.livejournal.com

It's an argument I definitely make a lot, it comes from years of putting up with people saying "oh Lil' Wayne/Craig David/Destiny's Child are so shit BUT they're really good when bootlegged with [indie fave] or fucked around with by Kid 606/Girl Talk/whoever".

Plus the various bootleggers never actually made the source material BETTER. My favourite bootleg is probably the Xtina/Strokes one but no way would I choose to hear it over the original 'Genie'.

From:

freakytigger.livejournal.com

In my experience this attitude is a total straw man though. I mean, maybe it happened more at university so you and Moggy met it more (students think shite things about music shocker!!) but I've known a lot of indie people and the ones who don't like hip-hop also wouldn't like Girl Talk.

From:

alexmacpherson.livejournal.com

That's the thing though, there's a nagging suspicion that the target demographic for this = the students who think shite things about music at university - if not consciously then it's certainly perfect for them.

From:

chezghost.livejournal.com

think you would've liked my Ciara 'Get Up' / Sasse 'Loosing Touch' one - if both those tracks had come out a few years earlier and i'd done it then instead of only 18 months ago. sounds less like a mash-up and more like an Italo-revival remix which is a plus.

From:

alexmacpherson.livejournal.com

I don't think I have an issue with mixing difft tracks into or on top of each other, it's just what DJs have always and will always do, it's just the idea of creating some horrible trend/scene around mash-ups where the point just seems more to be as "wacky" as possible.

From:

chezghost.livejournal.com

a lot of it was definitely more about Do You See/meta jokiness for the sake of pun song titles (i got sick of this and tended to only mix rap/rnb acapellas with dance/electronica...rarely indie/rock because i wasn't interested in and kinda disliked that side of it, tying in with 'making rap appeal to indie kids' argument) altho often this was cut pretty evenly with the tracks actually working well musically - as long as the latter happened the rest was fine. that's drifting into a 'competent mash-ups = remixes' argument tho really (which i'm cool with - the best mash-ups DID sound just like remixes/re-imaginings - and if there was a joke on top of that that's a bonus or at least shouldn't affect the quality).

is also true that rarely would a song be actually improved by doing this, but that wasn't really the point just as many remixes don't improve on original tunes but do provide a complimentary alternative take.

From:

piratemoggy.livejournal.com

I don't think it's especially precious; it was definitely true in my uni friendsgroup. None of the people I knew (with the exception of Matt actually, to be fair) would've listened to any of the stuff on Girl Talk's albums unless he'd been at it, which is a big 'so what' because why is it only ok then? I mean, not in an aggressive way, just more '...wtf?'

To my knowledge no one in that group knows who Lil Wayne is, still. When I say these people would not have listened to hip hop I mean they would not have listened to anything not signed to Constellation, Saddle Creek or Wichita and yet there they all were loving Girl Talk; it's more surreal than anything else.

From:

freakytigger.livejournal.com

OK, should've clarified: I think the argument that it makes the music BAD is - or at least risks - seeming precious in re. hip-hop. The point is it's not damaging hip-hop - which, in the case of the stuff GT uses, is a music a lot more commercially successful and widely listened to than his is.