A kung fu fighter in a disco

Oh how annoying I had a reply and it vanished.

Anyway yes thanks - might post the pop mix on Tumblr, it is a mess!

The ending was as upbeat as I could make it: I think Gaga has sort of cracked everything about being a successful, media-relevant pop star EXCEPT the "making amazing music" part, and the fact that she's so successful without that is kind of miserable but perhaps not unexpected (there have been pop stars w/o amazing music before, and will be again). I mean, her latest thing of doing a special "monster edition" of her album so she can dress up as vampires etc - I really like that, the implicit acknowledgement that nobody's buying CDs so why not do silly limited editions for publicity. But the music is for the most part feeble (very difficult to pick a track for the spotify list).

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dubdobdee.livejournal.com

This is traditional! The Boy Looked at Johnny, Julie Burchill's legendary "where we at" radpoptimist treatise, ends with a rousing cheer for the Tom Robinson Band, who had basically already invented worst-case indie eight years too soon...

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alexmacpherson.livejournal.com

The funny thing about Lady Gaga is that when she pulls her various "wacky" stunts like wearing a gimp mask to a press conference (UGH), no one goes "oh isn't Lady Gaga crazy", they go "oh isn't Lady Gaga clever". Her real angle isn't "art" or Warhol, it's business - ie doing exactly what eg PCDs do, except their business model is outdated and flailing while Gaga's new models are cannier.

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dubdobdee.livejournal.com

and plus my 1992 wire essay on pranksters and troublemakers brings us to the present with Fabulous (http://www.geocities.com/retropalace/fabulous.html), d'oh!

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jeff-worrell.livejournal.com

pop (and R&B and hip-hop) judgment was reduced to "cool sounds: y/n?" for too many

Guilty as charged, but (i) I think we all were at some point, not just those going through this alleged 'gateway', and (ii) it's not a bad critical tool to employ though I agree a critic shouldn't stop there.

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braisedbywolves.livejournal.com

It seems great, but one thing that struck me is that there is (micro/)blogging breaking down barriers and there is backroom wizards making their way to the front but there is no Kanye?

The thing about Lily Allen is that even though people think they know the Real Lily Allen and that the one in 'The Fear' isn't her, the response to a room of people being played it is still a room of people dancing (amusingly, this is also the response to being played Lady Gaga, up to the point that they realise what they're listening to).

Re: Justin and the BEP: I think he's kept his options open - what people will have seen him on this year, apart from the SuperSerious Dead and Gone (and the Madonna single, which I think everyone on the planet is willing to forget) is his work with The Lonely Planet. I don't know that a spot with the Black Eyed Peas would be such a surprise (though I may be saying that just because I'd really love to hear it)

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re Kanye - I thought that there would be a decade in hip-hop essay, so I left him out (same with Eminem). He was in that very sentence about the backroom wizards moving to the front, in fact.

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A very fair criticism of the piece, in fact, would be to say that pop in the 00s basically WAS hip-hop and this other stuff is a lot of interesting niches. Certainly I'd really want to read a thinkpiece on hip-hop in the 00s which dealt with how it coped with being dominant.

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I don't see it as a bad thing. The alternatives are not taking an interest in at all or everybody reacting to and thinking about the music in the same way and I'm glad there's more than one way or a best way to appreciate this stuff.

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Really nice read and not as long as ppl made out (it doesn't seem as big as Eric H's mp3 social history thing which I also liked of course).

Annoying pedant moment: Lily Allen's famous Dad connection was surely as much a part of her success as the MySpacing, opinions4u etc.

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'EXCEPT the "making amazing music" part'

this is a key thing for me and particularly frustrating having done a 'Just Dance' mashup just before it was a (finally, sheesh) massive hit year that works so well for me but would be of little interest to most others. for many it's not just a case of 'she needs more "interesting" music for me to like her/the songs' but in my case that's pretty much enough esp. as i can decide what alternative context i am more willing to hear her reasonably-good-pop/dance-songs in and just do it (and i suppose i feel she is malleable in this way whereas someone like Taylor Swift really isn't).

in the case of 'Just Dance' it was just desire to make it all sound both harder and more epic and the song was strong (thanks to her voice) yet light enough to survive re-editing.

i'd like to think this aspect of listener (or even 'user') choice will thrive more in the 10s (aside from or in spite of the de-trendification of mash-up concept). there's a 'remix 'I Gotta Feeling' context on Beatport where you have to buy the track's parts to enter - i would probably have a go if i liked that track well enough!

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braisedbywolves.livejournal.com

Outpedanting the pedants: Robin Hood didn't start until she was already famous, most of her fans would have no real idea who he was.

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i don't think that's right. lots of ppl who liked her ska-sampling stuff and "mixtape" ft. old jungle and whatnot would be well aware of keith - not that the sense of cred he provided was a reason to like and buy her, more just as a media talking point and publicity generator.

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katstevens.livejournal.com

Apart from perhaps 'that dead dude in Shallow Grave'.

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sm-woods.livejournal.com

"But I think a really big element was that the early-00s attention paid to pop production meant even pop-friendly listeners cared more about how the music sounded than how it might feel."

You've caused much discomfort on the home front with this! A nagging concern of mine, most of the decade, is that I'm turning into a modern day equivalent of the seventies power pop critic -- albeit one who's never lost interest in the music of the present -- constantly on the lookout for the right sounds that thrill, failing (and at times not even necessarily feeling the desire) to make any better sense of it than that. I've more often than not felt strangely disassociated from the world most of the music I've loved this decade emerges from (incl. much of the attendant discussion around the music), and yet... I don't feel I love the music any less -- I've sure listened to some of it a lot -- though I do probably love it somewhat differently.

Anyway, excellent, sprawling piece... hard to absorb on a single spin.

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See, what's interesting to me is how much I recognize in this piece but how little of it I see in myself, if that makes sense. But then I'm one of the creepy Radio Disney critics!

I think your insights are right on, and it echoes something that, IIRC,

dickmalone said in re: the "two types of poptimist critics" or whatever, #1 being the "sounds and producers" type and the other being the "ideas and auteurs" type (auteur being the closest shorthand I can get to a less-distancing idea of "persona," or "artist-object" or something). But I've always been firmly in camp 2, because to me it's a lot harder to have an intellectual conversation about sounds. They interest me, but only as a gateway to conversation -- they so rarely are the focal point of the conversation, even if it's not impossible. I think there's plenty of, e.g., instrumental, dance, and other music that facilitates deeply intellectual conversations; but tracking production teams through their minimalism, e.g., just doesn't strike me as being all that much fun. Hence the focus on CASSIE, or the Cassie-idea, over Ryan Leslie's production, or on ASHLEE, or Ashlee-Kara-John, over the guitar sounds (or whatever); these (the guitar sounds) deserve more ink, and I've only tried to get at them somewhat vaguely, but it's not really where the STORY is. The beat in "Come Clean" remix (it sounds like pop-rock because the original was basically a guitar-rock tune!) sounds perfunctory and pre-programmed (it probably is); the interest is a combination of melody and performance, the realm of the auteurs -- the songwriters and singers, not producers. (The guitar line in it perhaps holds a middle ground; like John Shanks's guitar, it's part melody and part production.)

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Key distinction here, though, is that the pop-auteur critics, many of whom frequent here, don't want the context of the artist -- a kind of extended intentional fallacy. We're looking for it in the music. This is why Nelly Furtado, say, is such a problematic star for me -- I really think she seems plain dumb in her output, yet so much beauty has been produced with her at the center, it means I have to grapple with the dumbness and process the beauty simultaneously. Not so for more controversial stars -- Paris Hilton, Hilary Duff, Lindsay Lohan -- whose beauty seems, to me, self-evident regardless of how dumb-shit they may appear in whatever reality is reality.

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that should be "daily life context," as in Twitters, interviews, etc. These things are certainly interesting -- I'm so glad I had the chance to actually engage with Brie Larson as an intelligent person, not just as an idea -- but they don't necessarily play a role in the music's ultimate effectiveness.

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I think it was me who said it and Mike quoted it approvingly. The binary doesn't totally hold up, partly because the content of "Baby One More Time" and Destiny's Child (MAN HATERS!!!!111) was really central to the discussions of those at the time, partly because they're modes of appreciation and, as Steve M says, neither are useless ways of approaching stuff.

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'Course there's nothing mutually exclusive about great sounds and great ideas. The-Dream has great sounds AND great ideas, and they feed each other. But I guess the difference between a #1 and #2 type is that they're translating sounds into ideas, putting sonic revelations on the same footing as conceptually interesting facets of a song -- performance, lyrics, feeling. So they're part of what I'd call the "type-2" conversation, a full intellectualization of what may start as visceral enjoyment. Simply tracking evolutions and following the sonic trends doesn't necessarily pass the threshold into type-2 conversations, though often it can, and often it does; this is just something I've noticed in the nature of pop conversation, I guess.

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