Posts Tagged ‘3OH!3’

New this week—2/28/10

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

Christopher Wilde
“Hero”, #57
“StarStruck” #77
“Something About the Sunshine” (with Anna Margaret), #81
Christopher Wilde, in case you’re not a connoiseur of the Disney Channel, is the name of the fictional teen heart-throb in Disney’s latest made-for-TV tweener extravaganza, StarStruck. The actor who does the singing here is Sterling Knight, who the folks at Disney are no doubt hoping will become a real heart-throb. As Disney soundtracks go, these three songs are above average, less cutesy than the Hannah Montana or High School Musical numbers, without all the cloying lyrical uplift. They’re also more mature. “StarStruck” includes a line about girls who want to take Christopher out on a date and make him holler, which in the Disney universe is as close as you can get to an NC-17 rating. Disney is obviously beginning to realize that the audience for its teen fantasies is older than it was when High School Musical debuted four years ago. Those tweeners are into their mid- to late-teens now, and they want a little romance, and even a suggestion of sex, with their song and dance. But even though these are more adult than the standard Disney fare, they’re also not up to the best of the non-soundtrack material that Disney artists like Miley Cyrus, Selena Gomez, and Aly & AJ have put out the last couple of years. “Starstruck” moves along nicely, but it has nothing new to say about fame (Lady GaGa would seem to have a lock on that theme at the moment), and though I like the bouncy/stretchy sound effects on “Something About the Sunshine”, it’s obvious they’re there to hide its other weaknesses. So I’ll give Disney an A for effort and for upping their game, but only a B for the results.

k.d. lang—”Hallelujah (Vancouver Winter 2010 Version)”
#61
A few weeks ago I was complaining about Justin Timberlake’s attempt to recontextualize this song after the earthquake in Haiti. But this, performed by Lang at the opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics (and what a celebratory piece of work it is!) is even worse. Verse by verse, Lang drains every ounce of meaning out of the song, and then bathes the final chorus in one of the most banal string arrangements I’ve ever heard. Even at the peak of her popularity I thought Lang was overrated, but I never thought she’d get as bad this.

DJ Khaled featuring T-Pain, Ludacris, Snoop Dogg & Rick Ross—”All I Do Is Win”
#64
The frustrating thing about DJ Khaled (aside from his fuzzy, overloaded, melodramatic beats) is that he’s a one-idea man. That doesn’t need to be a detriment—a lot of DJs have made great records with less than an idea—but Khaled’s depends entirely on the guests he finagles into rapping on his productions. The result is an often irritating variation in quality, not just from record to record, but within each record itself. In this case, he gets a mediocre but passable hook from T-Pain, a slightly above-average rap from Ludacris, and an unintelligible, below-average rap from Rick Ross. Then, just as you’re getting ready for the wind-down of another tepid Khaled production, Snoop Dogg steps up to the mike, and in four lines blows a hole in the middle of the record. I’m not familiar enough with Snoop’s stuff to know whether he’s used these lines before—all I know is they’re better than anything else I’ve heard Snoop come up with, and just about any other rapper I can think of, as well. It’s not just a matter of the shock of Snoop’s laid-back style compared to the others’, either, because every time I listen to this record that verse seems even more powerful, more portentous, more menacing. The only thing I can compare it to is Lil Wayne’s rap on Khaled’s “We’re Takin’ Over” a couple of years ago. Exactly why Khaled’s productions should be so inspirational to these guys I have no idea. Maybe there’s more to those beats than I’m picking up on.

Usher—”There Goes My Baby”
#71
The best thing Usher has done in years (he appears to have been listening to a lot of Ne-Yo and Maxwell), but still far short of whatever mark he’s aiming for. Whoever or whatever made him decide to cut short the middle-eight, which would have brought the song to a higher level, should be booted out of his entourage, or his head, as quickly as possible.

3Oh!3 featuring Neon Hitch—”Follow Me Down”
#89
You knew once they stopped being offensive they’d be boring, right?

Mariah Carey featuring Nicki Minaj—”Up Out My Face”
#100
Over the last few years Carey has been making the best music of her career (not a great leap, I know)—just in time for her audience to dry up and everyone under the age of 25 to start ignoring her. Judging by this record, which is only slightly above average but which she obviously had a great time making, and by reports of her recent concert appearances, she doesn’t really care. Good for her. That’s the sort of attitude that could make her even better.

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New this week—1/17/10

Saturday, January 16th, 2010

Ke$ha
“Blah Blah Blah” (featuring 3Oh!3), #7
“Your Love Is My Drug”, #27
“Take It Off”, #85
It’s hard not to think of Ke$ha as Reality-TV-Pop, with a musical persona not far removed from the ladies on Jersey Shore. That’s at least better, in some ways, than thinking of her as a female version of 3Oh!3, or a full time Fergie-in-party-mode. The music is suitably garish and blaring, the vocal phrasing party-girl flat, and the character that of a woman who thinks she’s a goddess because she can take five straight shots and still stand up. She explores this a little more deeply and humorously on some of the album cuts—especially “Party At a Rich Dude’s House” (she throws up in the closet) and “Dinosaur”, which is about creepy older men hitting her up—but these three cuts (plus “Tik Tok”) provide everything you really need to know. If you really want to know, that is.

Lady Antebellum—”Love This Pain”
#93
There’s nothing wrong with wearing your influences on your sleeve, especially in country music, but when those influences slip from Fleetwood Mac to Bon Jovi, it’s probably not a good idea to emphasize them by releasing the results as a single.

Timbaland featuring Drake—”Say Something”
#94
Listen to the background and you’ll notice that, as a producer, Timbaland is still capable of making interesting music. As a rapper, though, he has nothing to say, and Drake doesn’t have much more. And the music isn’t all that interesting.

Easton Corbin—”A Little More Country Than That”
#100
I love the conceit of this, where Corbin rattles off a few country and small town cliches, and then pronounces himself even more country in a tone both good humored and dismissive. He then digs behind the cliches and defines country as a form of honor and emotional honesty. It’s a neat trick, and Corbin wisely plays it as low key as possible. Though the song doesn’t build in the way it possibly should, it’s a neat llittle package.

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New this week

Saturday, August 29th, 2009

Kenny Chesney with Dave Matthews—”I’m Alive”
#92
It’s anyone’s guess as to who came up with the Beatlesish feel of this record—it sounds like a mash-up of “Dear Prudence” and “Mother Nature’s Son”—but whether it was Chesney or Matthews, it’s the only thing that’s interesting about it. Since it’s technically Chesney’s record, though, he gets to stick Matthews with the biggest cliche: “Today is the first day of the rest of my life”. Not that the song isn’t one long cliche already.

3OH!3—”Starstrukk”
#95
There’s a hint—just a hint mind you—that this is intended as satire, that these guys aren’t really the sexist assholes they present themselves as, but are actually making fun of such people. They’re often described as a comedy act, after all. But like Lady GaGa’s The Fame, it’s hard to make a distinction between the act and the actor, and even if you could it wouldn’t make the music, which in its blaring boorishness is even more insulting than the lyrics, any better. Whether this is a sign of something new or the final gasp of the old is hard to say. To me, though, it sounds like an exhausted culture slapping itself to stay awake.

Iyaz—”Replay”
#96
This isn’t bad, but from the emphasis on the singer’s Jamaican accent to the hints of romantic naivete in the lyrics it’s so obviously producer J.R. Rotem’s attempt to create another Sean Kingston that the whole record starts to sound forced. Not as forced as Kingston’s own attempts to keep his career alive, but close.

Owl City—”Fireflies”
#97
With it’s affected simplicity and dreamy lyric that buzzes in endless circles around itself and goes nowhere, this is like a musical version of a children’s book intended to lull the little tykes to sleep. Except it appears to be a love song, since there’s more than one person in the bed. Do bands that send confusing mixed signals like this think they’re being profound somehow? Or are they just too lazy, or too dumb, or too full of themselves, to make sense? I suspect it’s all of the above.

Sugarland—”Joey”
#98
I generally like Sugarland’s lower-key sound—they don’t blast you the way so many country bands do, even on their uptempo songs—but this is bland and lifeless. So much so that it’s impossible to figure out exactly what’s going on. Is Joey dead? Dying? Late back from a trip to the grocery store? The lyrics don’t fill in the details, and the music doesn’t provide a clue. The inspiration seems to have stopped after providing the missing Joey a not very musical name. Is this about a real person? That would make the blandness even less explicable. Am I overthinking this song? Probably. But that’s better than barely thinking about it at all but releasing it anyway, which seems to be what Sugarland has done.

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New This Week

Monday, May 25th, 2009

Eminem—“Beautiful”
#17
The recent interview with Eminem in the New York Times confirms two obvious points about Relapse: one, it came out of a period of intense confusion, depression and self-doubt; two, the Slim Shady stuff was done more from a sense of duty to fans than any real desire to resurrect the persona. Which explains why this record, where Eminem speaks pretty much as himself, is so much superior to the Shady-oriented material that preceded it. I have my doubts about the power ballad intro and outro, but this is a great record. Even clean and sober, though, Eminem finds himself in a difficult position. The Slim Shady stuff is old hat, but he can’t, and shouldn’t, build the next phase of his a career out of down-tempo raps about depression (leave that to the indie kids). He needs something new, something that will probably alienate large sections of his audience. As much as I respect his desire to please his old fans, he may find that they’re another dependency he’ll have to wean himself from. Are their twelve-step programs for adulation addiction?

Jordin Sparks—“Battlefield”
#32
I’ve liked some of Sparks’ earlier records, but the bombast here is too much, with whatever personality and charm she possesses overpowered by thundering drums. Note to songwriters and producers: “Umbrella”-inspired songs with choruses that consist of nothing but the title repeated over and over like an echo are old and overdone. Time for a new trick, please.

Jonas Brothers—“Paranoid”
#37
Critics, and the Brothers themselves, are attributing the darker tones of this record to “maturity” (why, they’re almost a year older than they were when they made their last album!), but it probably has more to do with spending the last few years on the entertainment industry hamster wheel. Since I assume these clean cut boys don’t ingest any substance stronger than caffeine, their paranoia is probably the result of sleep deprivation more than anything else, which would explain why the change of tone is lyrical rather than musical; their machine-tooled pop-punk is as bouncy as ever, and just as unoriginal. If I can be excused an untoward comparison, they’re in roughly the same place The Beatles were in late ‘64/early ‘65: exhausted, but still game. In the Brothers case, though, I don’t think there’s an equivalent to Rubber Soul waiting around the bend, and not just because they don’t smoke dope.

Cobra Starship featuring Leighton Meester—“Good Girls Go Bad”
#76
Coming on the heels of Lady GaGa and 3Oh!3, this single suggests a new trend: bombastic electro-influenced records about women losing (or intentionally throwing away) their inhibitions. This one includes an appearance by a member of the cast of Gossip Girl, which should cement the idea in the minds of culture watchers nicely. If this becomes a hit, there should be a piece in the New York Times Style section before the summer is out.

The Fray—“Heartless”
#79
I’d be more than willing to ignore The Fray if they saved their self-indulgent warbling for their own material, but this act of desecration forces my hand. Say goodbye to Hinder and Nickelback, because these guys are now officially the Worst Band in the World. Question: Does this mean “You Found Me” would sound good if Kanye sang it? Answer: No.

Jessie James—“Wanted”
#87
Many people, including me, complain that country is still lost in the late ’70s, or maybe the early ’80s, but this roaring piece of female raunch is as modern as it gets. That is, it’s main influences aren’t the Eagles or John Mellencamp, but Kelly Clarkson and, especially, Katy Perry. This may sound horrible to you, and it certainly isn’t what most people would call country, but Nashville professionalism and attention to lyrical and musical detail make it more interesting than most of Clarkson’s and Perry’s stuff. Sexier, too–and a lot dirtier.

Darius Rucker—“Alright”
#91
Rucker’s first two country singles possessed the lyrical specificity and detail that makes up for a lot of rote arrangements and fruity singing in Nashville. This one doesn’t. He sounds almost as vague as Hootie.

The Pussycat Dolls featuring Nicole Scherzinger—“Hush Hush”
#96
A terrible record, and when it shifts into “I Will Survive” you can feel the desperation take hold as the Dolls slide back into the oblivion from which they came. The only thing that keeps this from being the worst single of the year is the existence of The Fray.

Trey Songz—“I Need a Girl”
#100
Chris Brown having sabotaged his career, Trey Songz steps into the gap with the oldest trick in the pop book. He needs a girl, and ladies, you could be the one. All you need to do is hollaback, preferably in the form of buying this record, the album, concert tickets, and associated merchandise. Not a bad song, but the blatant pandering is a bit much.

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Top Ten Update

Sunday, May 10th, 2009

This year has been too slow to do any real trend spotting (four and a half months in, and only 17 new records have appeared in the top ten), but based on this week’s new entry I think it’s fair to say that it hasn’t been a very good year for women–women with any self-respect, that is. First came the All-American Rejects, urging their fans to sing along as they kissed off their ex; then Lady GaGa’s poker-faced heroine, targeting men for bouts of unemotional rough sex; then came Flo Rida with his paean to strippers and/or oral sex; then Beyonce, nominating her lover/husband for sainthood; and now, this week, 3OH!3, whose tastelessness far exceeds their musical grasp. Even in a slow year, when you’re talking about nearly a third of the records to make the top ten, I think that qualifies as a trend.

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