A New Decade In Pop: Week #7

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Charity gubbins knocks Owl City off the top; the Glee juggernaut continues to mow down anything in its path.

[Poll #1525702]

Comments

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

As someone who is still watching Glee, I can confirm that the songs are the best bits of the show by a mile. This week the girls and the boys each had to do a competitive mash-up while high on cough syrup. Although the storyline wussed out and neither side won, clearly the girls' Halo/Sunshine medley was better.

[rechabite.livejournal.com]

The Glee locust infestation continues.

All of it is shit.

Well, let's be fair - it's very well put together, produced and performed shit.

I'm sure the music consultants hugely enjoyed coming up with these pseudo-bootleg song combinations.

Perfectly assembled karaoke, without any air or individuality or real emotion or purpose beyond making the show's creators as much money as possible.

Meanwhile, real musicians who are trying to earn a living and maybe even push music forward get muscled out of the charts by the Glee and Cowell plagues.

Easy to go all Meldrew and Kids Today - so let's do it!

Kids Today just want slash fan fiction photocopies. They don't want originality, don't understand anything about feel or emotion or the danger without which music isn't worth making, can't grasp complexity or ambiguity or anything that doesn't go BANG BANG BANG.

So something like "Everybody Hurts" - whatever the hell that's supposed to do with Haiti - gets through to 453,000 people because of this willed absence, this inability or unwillingness to get to grips which anything that isn't baby simple.

Perhaps the saddest thing I've read recently was someone on Popular recently who said that they preferred listening to "soulless music."

Back in the mid-eighties, that wasn't what we meant.

When we rankled against Soul, Passion and Honesty in Capital Letters it was against the aesthetic tyranny which seemed to insist that that style was the only approach worth considering, that if it wasn't "authentic" - and few things are less authentic than, say, "Let It Be" by Ferry Aid - then it was worthless. This didn't mean we wanted "soulless music" - anyone who imagines something like "Acid Tracks" to be soulless isn't listening properly. But "Soul" as received wisdom (received from whom?), as a gesture of...what, exactly, other than what was fashionable in 1986/7?...that was a fulsome and deserving target.

Plenty of the real stuff around at the moment, though, so my advice is to hibernate from the chart for the next 6-9 months until the Glee typhoon has blown over. It's the only way to stay sane.

[koganbot]

As someone who's never watched Glee, I emphatically say the numbers don't work outside the context of the show, whatever energy they add within - though see first blip of enjoyment below.

Helping Haiti "Everybody Hurts": I've hated the original for years; this version makes me realize that the song really does have a nice melody. Not that the original swallows the melody, but it falls so fully into the song's ache that it becomes a parody of feeling. This strange showcase (voices in such small snippets) is less gloopy and chewy, at the expense of being wooden. BORDERLINE NONTICK.

Glee Cast "Halo"/"Walking On Sunshine": The girls sprint through "Sunshine" and give it zero feeling, at least that I can feel, but "Halo" comes through as its intro, not 'cause of anything special from the Glee-ers, but because of the backbone and melody that Tedder and Bogart gave it in the first place. A tick to Ryan and Evan but not this track. NO TICK.

Glee Cast "It's My Life"/"Confessions Pt II": When I subjected myself to all this Glee shit back on Another Year In America this was the first time I felt any actual pleasure. I credit songwriters Jon, Richie, and Max, but also the Glee arranger and the Glee character's sub-karaoke bellow, which is appropriate considering Jon's own sub-Brucean bellow. Then "Confessions" comes along and all is ruined. BORDERLINE NONTICK.

Cheryl Cole "Parachute": The melody's natural tendency is to flow but it's given barriers and hard turns instead. Cheryl's voice isn't programmed for "hard," but she's adequate, sticking out elbows and cutting short where required. BORDERLINE TICK.

DJ Zinc ft. Ms. Dynamite "Wile Out": Zinc and Dynamite take hard harmony and compress and compact it until it's like those old Super Balls, tight synthesized rubber, extra-violent bounce, released fiercely into a narrow space. TICK.