Yet Another Year In Pop: 36

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Jigga deals with his North London problems well enough to beat Heidi & Co to the top spot.

[Poll #1454305]

Do feel free to go back and change your ticks on any of this year's chart polls - voting will remain open on all of them until the end of the year. Here's how they're shaping up so far...

1 Lily Allen - The Fear
2 Britney Spears - Circus
3 Veronicas - Untouched
4 Girls Aloud - Untouchable
5 Britney Spears - If U Seek Amy
6 Ciara ft Justin Timberlake - Love Sex Magic
7 Miley Cyrus - Fly On The Wall
8 Dizzee Rascal - Holiday
9 Florence & The Machine - Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up)
10 Kelly Clarkson - I Do Not Hook Up
11 Pet Shop Boys - Love etc
12 VV Brown - Shark In The Water
13 Gossip - Heavy Cross
14 Lady Gaga - Just Dance
15 Lily Allen - Not Fair
16 Kelly Clarkson - My Life Would Suck Without You
17 Black Eyed Peas - Boom Boom Pow
18 Cascada - Evacuate The Dancefloor
19 Little Boots - Remedy
20 Dizzee Rascal & Armand Van Helden - Bonkers
21 Beyonce - Halo
22 TI ft Justin Timberlake - Dead And Gone
23 Lily Allen - 22
24 Keri Hilson ft Timbaland - Return The Favour
25 Little Boots - New In Town
26 Bat For Lashes - Daniel
27 Pink - Funhouse
28 Keri Hilson ft Kanye & Ne-Yo - Knock You Down
29 Freemasons ft Sophie Ellis-Bextor - Heartbreak Make Me A Dancer
30 Taylor Swift - Love Story

Rankings calculated via the extremely complicated method of multiplying raw votes by percentage (hence the relevance of the 'Don't Like Any' boxes) - Lily and Britney have a clear lead ahead of the rest of the field.

Favourite single missing from the list? Taylor cruelly languishing while Miley rides high? It's up to you to go back and tick (or un-tick) anything you might have missed!


Reminder: You have until Friday to nominate tracks for the 2002 heats - please comment on the nomination post over here so they don't go missing. I'll post up a list of noms so far on Tuesday.

Comments

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Also I should point out that the list up there doesn't include any Michael Jackson tracks or ancient re-entries.

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

Worst Sugababes single ever? (OK second worst if you count the GA duet.)

[koganbot]

Jay-Z f. Rihanna & Kanye West "Run This Town": This is Rihanna's first time back from the beating, which outshouts any other consideration, and any voice that isn't Rihanna's is an interruption. Jay-Z accommodates by rolling off the beats rather than dominating them. And Kanye just sounds tacked-on at the end, plying his metaphors for boobs and other sexual parts, and who cares? So it's just Rihanna in the spotlight, her voice the same instantly recognizable burnt wood as always, burnt sorrow, same not-exactly charisma and not-exactly personality, simply an unmistakable sound that's been the voice of American music for two years. The track's not all that, but she is. Yet now there's this unavoidable wonderment: who is she? TICK.

Sugababes "Get Sexy": The 'Babes sound like they can't be bothered even to simulate joy. What went wrong? NO TICK.

Wale f. Lady GaGa "Chillin": You're all gonna dismiss this, but you're wrong. GaGa, going subdued and functional, makes this her sweetest and best vocal, a nice hypnotic little sing-song. The Steam "goodbye" hook is tasteful, for once, and lightweight Wale is charming, teaches us to pronounce his name, makes a basketball pun, "Got a buzz like a nigga Chris Mullin." TICK.



Jamie T. "Chaka Demus": Strange mixture of a happy Caribbean backing and a slightly morose who-gives-a-fuck vocal. The juxtaposition is interesting but I don't like the way it sounds. NO TICK.

Friendly Fires "Kiss Of Life": Unemphatic too-normal-to-open-my-mouth vocals, accompanied by incongruous third-world percussion that attempts interplay, but it's with a guy who won't play. NO TICK.

The Prodigy "Take Me To The Hospital": Jitters meet electroshock. BORDERLINE NONTICK.

[koganbot]

Oh, I forgot Booty Luv.

Booty Luv, "Say It": Serviceable thud-thud from the dance salt mines. BORDERLINE NONTICK.

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

S'babes - still not been motivated to listen to this all the way through. Oh Heidi what great heights you have fallen from...

I was pretty disappointed with the Friendly Fires song. The chorus really gets on my nerves :(

Booty Luv on the other hand = HURRAH

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

Third worst if you count the Boots advert one.

[graciousviv.livejournal.com]

Everytime I hear some music in passing I always seems to catch a line with the word hospital or something about hospitals in it. Starting to freak me out.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Better than "Shape", "Girls", "Easy", "Denial", "Change" and "No Can Do". It's not a horrible track! Apart from the Right Said Fred bits. Take those out and it's an adequate Pussycat Dolls banger, which...if not great, exactly, is fucking better than, say, anything Girls Aloud have done in recent memory, or the shitty cheapo electro chancers clogging up the charts.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

LOL, a Britney single that I don't believe anyone really cares about at No 2. This year is quite possibly the worst year for the charts in my ENTIRE LIFETIME.

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

I really like "Shape" and will be nomming it for the Best of 2003 polls, but it's the exception that proves the rule when it comes to Sugababes interpolating others' songs into one of theirs (or doing cover versions for that matter). With that one exception they come a cropper EVERY TIME. I'd say "just stop it, ladies", but it seesm to work for them commercially. No.2 with a bullet, I see.

Also, despite their many qualities, one thing they aren't and never have been is 'sexy'. Sexy and Sugababes just doesn't mix IMHO.

[chezghost.livejournal.com]

i don't like the charts contents much this year but i'm not sure they've ever been more "balanced" racially - pretty much a 50/50 split between white and non-white acts. it's really noticeable and interesting even if the music isn't (imo).

ten years ago the ratio was more 4 or 5:1. tho 20 years ago the ratio seems to be more 2:1. this is just based on looking at the top 40 from the same time of year in each case so it's not the most reliable extrapolation but probably holds.

i suppose what this could mean is that in a very crude sense, when it comes to ADD or ringtone pop (which most of this stuff can be defined as frankly) at least, the industry and consumer may be less concerned than ever about who performs it. i don't know, i'm sure it means SOMETHING ;]

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

How dare you say that about my lovely WIFE Heidi actually yeah they always look kinda awkward when they're doing the sexy-sexy - except for 'Push The Button' which they pull off pretty well.

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

Akonomics, innit.

[meserach.livejournal.com]

Sorry, Kat, are you multiplying the raw votes by the percentage as in you're taking the percentage of the total participants as listed at the top of the poll? Because if so that's a little odd? (It counts the people who've "not heard any" for one thing).

Or are you doing something else?

[meserach.livejournal.com]

Wait, so the only good thing about the Jay-Z/Kanye/Rihanna track is that Rihanna appears on it and we like Rihanna? I mean, that's precisely correct, but I don;t see how it's enough to save the song from being pretty dang dull all told.

I mean it may just be that Kanye has really been getting up my nose this year, almost through sheer ubiquity alone.

[jel-bugle.livejournal.com]

I like that Sugababes song! It's the only one I've heard. The others don't seem to get played on 4 Music or TMF.

[mcarratala.livejournal.com]

Eh, they've shown Run This Town loads in the last two/three days.

[mcarratala.livejournal.com]

It's a horrible, horrible song – half the lines sound like they've been left in from a very early draft and never replaced as planned. And really the Sugababes are capable of many more interesting stances than aping the deeply unsexy zombie narcissism of the PCDs.

[mcarratala.livejournal.com]

Not just Rihanna, it's Rihanna dressed as a Black Panther…

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

We had this problem last year with Britney as well - song that rly didn't represent the year at all doing super-well. SORT IT OUT BRITTERS

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

No, I'm far too lazy and am using the percentage given on the poll option - the 'not heard any' box is as good as 'don't like any' really, you'd think by the end of the year that there wouldn't be that many of those if it's a heat that's going to bother the top end of the chart anyway. I mean, there was one week a while back that had just two crappy songs in, and 'not heard any' got a v high percentage there. But as there's no 'Not Heard Any' song listed on my spreadsheet (too depressing!) that small heat would only start being a problem if loads of dudes went back and ticked just one of the crappy songs.

Basically, it's not statistically perfect but it is quite practical for me and my copy of Excel :)

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Indeed I saw the delectable Booty Luv on 4Music on Friday night.

[koganbot]

Hmmm. Not sure that Kat's explanation explains everything. We want to include the people who voted "not heard any" because if there were no "not heard any" option then there'd be fewer total voters on weeks when there were only two or three new tracks - the "not heard any" people not having anything to tick. Hence on those weeks the songs that did get ticks would pull in higher percentages - because the percentage is of a smaller total - and would appear more popular than they actually were in comparison to equivalent songs that showed up during weeks when there were a lot of new songs and therefore a larger number of voters.

[meserach.livejournal.com]

See, for me, what you want is a number that expresses "of all the people who heard this song, what proportion liked it?". Anything else would seem to penalise songs that people didn't get around to hearing.

(although technically the people who are ticking songs have not necessarily heard ALL the songs in order to do so - they're just claiming to at least have heard the ones they ticked).

Anyhow I'm'a have a bash at running the numbers my way instead and see if it makes much difference. Probs not.

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

By all means have a bash if you have the time! I'm stupidly busy at werk at the moment so cutting corners is the name of my game.

[koganbot]

Don't see how you can possibly determine "all the people who heard the song," since you don't know how many of the people who didn't tick a song nonetheless heard it. Right now we've got 22 voters; subtracting the one who ticked "haven't heard any," we've got 21 left, but I guarantee you that not all of those 21 people heard the Jamie T track. Well, we know for certain that Jel didn't since he said the only track he'd heard was the Sugababes. And if Lex heard the thing this would entirely have been an accident, someone nearby playing an iPod too loud, perhaps. Lots of voters don't bother to listen to what they haven't already heard.

[koganbot]

(Of course we know that if Lex had heard he wouldn't have liked it, but this won't necessarily be true of, say, an American voter who pops in to tick Wale or Jay-Z/Rihanna but doesn't have a chance to YouTube the rest.

[meserach.livejournal.com]

Right, as I said in my above paranthetical. But we have to make the best of what we have, and those who definitively stated they "haven't heard any" can definitely be removed from the dataset, right?

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

One other thing to bear in mind is that if we want to compare percentages with last year's polls, I did it in the same way then (obv this may be of little interest to everyone).

[koganbot]

No, because then the top flyers on a slow week have an unfair advantage over top flyers on a busy week, which is why we included a "haven't heard any" choice in the first place.

[meserach.livejournal.com]

Hmm.

Essentially I guess there is no correct way to go about this, as we have a self-selected sample and they aren't all hearing the same things (as we've said even those voting for a song haven't heard ALL the songs).

It probably doesn't really matter anyhow :) carry on!

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Almost makes me wish I'd paid attention in A-level Statistics instead of flicking bits of paper at the boys in the row behind me/bunking off with 'a mysterious rash on my thumb' (I thought I had meningitis so I spent half of the previous lesson writing my will).

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

I really really really want to tick "Chillin" for at least one reason koganbot gives -- Lady GaGa's best vocal ever (though I'm somewhat partial to "Paparazzi" tbh) -- but Wale's rap is just so mediocre, and the rest of the song seems too functional (not amazing in and of itself) to be much more than a spotlight for said rap. It's not a BAD rap, really, it just feels like a weirdly throwaway thing to stick a big spotlight on. GaGa has the right idea hanging around in the background.

[chezghost.livejournal.com]

not sexy? you clearly never saw their Pretty Polly advert that was on display in the dry cleaners/locksmiths/other bobbins place by Old St. station

hm some things to download this weekend

[blue-russian.livejournal.com]

I actively like two songs on the list (The Fear, Just Dance) and know only a half dozen more.

No La Roux at all, I am surprised...

[jel-bugle.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes, just saw it. Kinda meh.

[chezghost.livejournal.com]

"It's the Akonomy, stupid"

(sorry but i only just thought of that!)

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

That's what I typed originally! (But it read a bit rudely.)