Another week of stagnation: except for minor shifting, the top ten remains the same, while places 11 to 15 fill up with contenders cooling their heels and waiting for something to break (or for radio to decide that it's tired of playing "Apologize" already). For those who are sick of seeing Flo Rida at number one, don't turn around, because the Timbaland-produced follow-up, "Elevator", jumped from 100 to 28 this week, and should be in the top ten sometime by the middle of March.
Once again the best debut comes from Missy Elliott: "Shake Your Pom Pom" from the Step Up 2 the Streets soundtrack. More straightforward rhythmically than "Ching-A-Ling", and less interesting, but decent enough (though it doesn't sound as if Missy put much effort into it). As for the rest, if you really want a Paula Abdul comeback record, or to wallow in various forms of country sentiment (youth, love and family, God, etc.), or hear T-Pain and Chris Brown lend some help to Lil Mama, who really doesn't need any, you're welcome to it.
This is the sort of week in the top ten that tends to send me spiraling into depression. It's bad enough that after nearly two full months only seven new songs have made the top ten. What's even worse is that the top five has barely moved at all in that time, and over half of the new songs have been truly awful. This week, if it hadn't been for the sudden collapse of Yael Naim's "New Soul"--after debuting in the top ten two weeks ago and moving up another step last week, it's now dropped completely out of the top forty--there would have been nothing new at all. Not that that would have been a bad thing, since it would have saved me the pain of writing a review of "Independent".
Best new debut: Taylor Swift's "Picture To Burn", a teenage version of "Before He Cheats", except instead of trashing her ex's car, she threatens to go out with all his best friends and tell everybody he's gay. Chuck Eddy says that Swift's album is better than Miranda Lambert's, and judging from the singles I've heard, I'm beginning to believe it.
Most unbelievably awful record you're likely to hear all year: Celine Dion and Josh Groban's "The Prayer" (recorded live, so you can vicariously wallow in the audience's adulation). Compared to Dion, Groban's voice sounds impossibly weak, and she kicks his ass all over the stage. At the end, they introduce each other, and Groban calls her the "brilliant, brilliant Celine Dion". Compared to him, she is.
Update: How depressed was I about the top ten this week? So depressed that I put it all together, wrote and posted an update, and then forgot to put the new list up. Now it's there. It's been that kind of week.
I don't want this blog to become all anti-T-bone all the time, but this piece by Terry Teachout in the Wall Street Journal (HT Michaelangelo), provides the perfect word to describe the infection that Burnett has been spreading for the last 20 years: importantitus. It's not just that Burnett suffers from the disease himself, but that he's passed it on to so many others. Elvis Costello, bathed in self-consciousness already, hardly needed the help, but T-Bone provided it anyway; Los Lobos, though I'm willing to make an exception for the first Latin Playboys album, were pretty much ruined by it; Marshall Crenshaw, who needed something bright and direct to boost his career after the commercial (though not artistic--it's my favorite Crenshaw album) misstep of Field Day, instead wallowed in the lugubrious atmospherics of Downtown and watched his fan base, and his label support, slide right down the drain. And so it goes, one career after another rendered impotent through the curse of self-importance and the belief that one achieves greatness not only by reaching for the brass ring every time out, but that slowing the carousel to a crawl and cranking up the fog machines somehow makes it easier.
Latest case in point is this clip of Robert Plant and Allison Krause (backed by Burnett and Marc Ribot) applying the Burnett philosophy to Led Zeppelin's "Black Dog". Don't get me wrong; unlike some, I hold nothing that Zep produced as sacred (if someone whipped out a 25 minute kazoo version of "Kashmir", I'd be all for it), and as much as I dislike Burnett's production I admit there are some pretty good things on Raising Sand (largely because Plant, thank god, is too much of a rocker, and probably too much of a shallow asshole, to go for Burnett's guff for long). But this is a horrible mistake. Forget, for a moment, the alt-country pretentiousness of playing the riff on a banjo, and just consider how out of place the song's lyrics, which are nothing more than a bunch of old blues tropes about sex and lust strung together, sound in this context. Zep's original is a masterpiece because they brilliantly and flagrantly raunched it up past the breaking point; it's outrageous, but as an example of a young man's unrestrained lust it makes perfect sense. This Burnett influenced version makes no sense at all. It isn't even dirty, or, if it is, it's school-yard dirty: look at all the rude things we can get away with saying if we're nice and sweet about it. There's something grotesque, in fact, about the way Plant and Krause smile at each other while sweetly crooning lines like "A big-legged woman ain't got no soul". Plant isn't a young man any more, and he should be more careful: Burnett has made him sound like some old pervert who whispers rude suggestions to young women whenever he gets close to them. Somehow I don't think that's the image he's wants to convey.
The increasing power of TV commercials (at least for computer related products) to make hit records reinforces itself with the debut of "Your Soul", which drifts straight into the top ten this week on the MacBook Air-freshened breeze. Thanks to Apple, "Your Soul", which no one in the U.S. would ever have heard of otherwise, is now the number one seed in the 2008 Top Ten Worst Ten rankings. Otherwise, aside from some shuffling in the first five positions, the top ten remains much the same. All the real action takes place in spots 11 to 20, where records like Buckcherry's "Sorry", and Miley Cyrus's "See You Again" jump ten places or more and look like true contenders. Cyrus, however, finds herself at unlucky number 17, the same place where fellow Disney-identified acts Aly & AJ and the Jonas Brothers found their top ten dreams dashed. Without a breakthough in radio play, or massive digital sales, it looks like these kids will be stuck at 17 forever, as fitting a metaphor for their soon-to-be-declining careers as anyone could imagine.
Best Hot 100 debuts: Missy Elliott's "Ching-A-Ling", and, I kid you not, Hannah Montana's "Rock Star" (better than Nickleback, that's for sure). Weirdest, though not quite Dragonforce award material: Soulja Boy's "YAHHH!" Three singles into his career and he's already complaining about pushy fans; who does think he is, Woody Allen?
Snoop Dogg finally seduces his way into the top ten, while the top five begins to show some signs of life, though not in the top two positions, which have been unchanged for over a month now. Oddest debut: the Akon-augmented re-issue of "Wanna Be Starting Something", the same Michael Jackson track sampled in Rihanna's top five "Don't Stop the Music". Doubly odd because Jackson's vocal is buried so far in the mix you'd swear that Akon was just sampling it for his latest single as well. If this is how they're celebrating the 25th anniversary of Thriller, then it's going to be almost as depressing as most of MJ's career over the last ten years.
