This is old news, but I felt a need to comment on the piece Billboard ran on The Wanted a couple of weeks back. I have no doubt that The Wanted are a real story; their single (which I’ll get around to reviewing soon), is moving quickly up the charts, and the reaction from the (carefully planted) crowd on the clip from Ellen below suggests that they could be as big as Billboard claims they’ll be.
But calling it the start of a new British Invasion can only be done if you ignore all the other British acts that have been washing up on the charts the last two or three years. At Billboard, apparently, a true invasion can only involve cute white boys. If you’re female, like Adele, whose teenage fans are far more dedicated than The Wanted’s will ever be, or if you’re black, like Taio Cruz, whose sound The Wanted blatantly draw from, you don’t count. Hell, even prog rockers like Coldplay and Muse don’t count. Those four, along with Amy Winehouse, Estelle, Jay Sean, Natasha Bedingfield, Florence + The Machine, even Jessie J (whose single, “Domino”, is inexplicably number 8 on the Hot 100 this week), were apparently nothing but scouting parties, drawing fire and preparing the beaches for the troops who really count. Go get ‘em, boys.
Is it great? Hard to say. The lyrics strike me as too bare, and the music is old-fashioned and nostalgic. But Springsteen hasn’t sounded this energized in years, and the message is both potent and ambiguous enough to make you think. So ambiguous that this could easily be embraced by both sides of the political debate, which might be exactly what Springsteen intended.
When I first listened to “Stay Away” a few months ago, I was impressed but not decidedly so, filed it away in my head as “interesting”, and pretty much ignored it, even as more and more people were raving about it. My mistake. This more austere live version is stunning: beautiful, emotional, perfectly controlled.
Everyone is raving about the new Scissor Sisters single, “Shady Love”, co-written and featuring vocals by Azealia Banks (under the name Krystal Pepsy). I like it, and the partnership is exciting, but I’ve always thought the Scissor Sisters were overrated, and on first hearing this seems more pretentious than danceable (maybe if I hadn’t watched the ridiculous video on first hearing I might have a nicer opinion).
What I am excited about, however, is another Banks collab, “Runnin’” (which I missed when it came out in September) with one of my favorite up and coming DJs, Lunice. It’s not as powerful as “212″, which came out just a week before, but then it points in an entirely different direction. Which is more than you can say about the Scissor Sisters’s record, which sounds like a discofied version of “212″. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s like an instant pop conversion.
Should have figured this was coming, especially from Pitbull. It doesn’t carries the historical import of the original, but it’s fun anyway. And Sensato is great. Just listen to those Rs rolling down the street.
It is the right, it may even be a requirement, of every generation to revise, or even reverse, the work of the generation before it, either through intention or misunderstanding. On those grounds I have no problem with Ke$ha’s version of Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright”. If she wants to turn a sarcastic kiss-off song into an ironic (in the Alanis Morisette definition of the word) “suicide note”, she’s free to do so with no complaint, no matter how mistaken it may seem to me and many others. I am free, however, to complain about the performance itself, which seems to me to wallow in just about every artistic fallacy that pop music is prone to, the least of which is accepting Alanis Morisette’s definition of irony and acting as if it made sense.
Anybody who writes seriously about pop music long ago resigned themselves to the fact that most performers define art as self-expression, and that, for them, self-expression generally means vomiting forth your emotions in a public arena and seeing what sticks. If something does, rinse and repeat. Most of the time this idea is underplayed and can be tolerated, especially if it comes with a good beat, but occasionally a performer will double down on this doubled fallacy and come up with something that is, if you sympathize with the performer’s situation, emotionally affecting; yet at the same time, whatever your feelings, it’s impossible to listen to.
According to Ke$ha, this recording came about because, while tracking the vocal for what she thought would be an entirely different version, she found herself connecting with the lyrics, as she interpreted them, far more strongly than she had anticipated, and she began to cry. Instead of cutting the take short, she soldiered on, and reworked the arrangement to fit the vocal track. It’s a sweet, touching story, if true, but it doesn’t excuse the result. It makes sense that Ke$ha’s version would be slower, but the irregular tempo here is so slow that the melody almost disappears, along with any sense of emotional dynamics, tension, or variation. Dylan’s version bounces back and forth between lyrical regret and deep sarcasm. Ke$ha’s starts at a single emotional pitch and stays there for the entire song. It could almost be described as emotional minimalism if it wasn’t for the constant, over the top sound of Ke$ha sobbing, snuffling, and sniffling, sounds as irritating to me as distorted electroclash synth bursts are to those who hate her pop records.
According to Popdust’s Katherine St. Asalph, many people, when they heard Ke$ha was recording this song, expected the worst: a bitchy, discoey version full of random electronic effects and Ke$ha’s sarcastic, braying vocals. If only. That would not only have been a closer fit to the song Dylan wrote, but would have been far better musically than what has appeared. I can already hear those who will say that Ke$ha is finally revealing her true self, that after bathing in artifice the last two years she has finally decided to be “authentic” (no doubt at least one of them will cite the influence of Adele). Let’s just hope that Ke$ha herself doesn’t buy into that idea. My belief is that she was overawed by the idea of recording a Dylan song (and on such a high profile project) and thought she had to do something serious and “different”, both from the original and from her own records. A temporary and understandable lapse. Fortunately, she has simultaneously released the latest remix (with Andre 3000, Lil Wayne, T.I., and Wiz Khalifa) of my favorite of her songs, “Sleazy”, which is joyfully inauthentic (whatever that may mean) and therefore closer to the truth. Long may she bray.
If you’re looking for a good summary of the musical landscape over the last year, at least from an indie-centric but pop-loving point of view, you could do a lot worse than Matthew Perpetua’s Fluxblog 2011 Survey mix: 183 songs, almost 13 hours, and it hits just about every high point you can think of. Some of the choices are questionable, of course, and like most indie-centric mixes it’s a little weak on rap and even weaker on country, picking the most obvious names from each, but for the most part it’s a solid, worthwhile overview. Just listening to the first CD I’ve discovered a gem that I’d somehow missed: Britney Spears’s “How I Roll”, a perfect piece of modernized girl group fluff.
