Posts Tagged ‘Martina McBride’

New this week—4/4/10

Thursday, April 8th, 2010

Sean Kingston & Justin Bieber—”Eenie Meenie”
#30
This is more Kingston than it is Bieber, and just enough of both to render it meaningless. Peeling back the garishness that has decorated Kingston’s more recent singles only reveals how lacking they are in anything resembling a hook, and mixing in Bieber’s usual pablum provides the final push toward total mediocrity. Any charm Kingston may have possessed is gone; now he’s just another dancehall-pop hack. As for Bieber, he’s never been charming. Being charming requires a personality.

T-Pain—”Reverse Cowgirl”
#75
I can understand why people write T-Pain off, but more and more I’m beginning to think he’s some kind of genius. This isn’t his most insane record (that’s still “Chopped ‘n’ Skrewed”) but it may be his funniest, and it’s at a level of musical sophistication that jokesters like 3Oh!3 and LMFAO can only dream of. All its best jokes are musical rather than lyrical (he was beaten to most of his rodeo metaphors a long time ago, anyway), and without a single swear word it’s dirty as hell. Based on the title alone, I can’t imagine it will get much radio play, but it’s bound to be a ringtone favorite. Yee-hah!

Young Money—”Roger That”
#86
The best Young Money track so far, and the second best hip-hop comedy record of the week, and that’s not a put down. Nicki Minaj does a killer Lil Wayne impersonation, while Wayne himself spends a good deal of his time giggling. The guy in the middle (do I really need to waste my time looking up his name?) is at least tolerable. The beat is insane, the raps as dirty as they want to be, and if the whole isn’t a as great as its parts, at least it doesn’t waste them.

Jaron And The Long Road To Love—”Pray For You”
#87
From the first organ note you can see the joke coming, and though keeping the music country-lovesong straight is probably intended to be satirical, in reality it drags the humor down. It doesn’t help that Jaron didn’t bother to write a third verse, either. Jokes are supposed to build, not just repeat themselves.

Luke Bryan–”Rain Is A Good Thing”
#91
Because it leads to sex, of course. Doesn’t everything in uptempo good ol’ boy country? This is better than most, though; catchy as hell, and doesn’t throw in too many cliches. I could, however, do without the self-satisfied chortle; sounds way too calculated.

Justin Bieber—That Should Be Me”
#92
This awful record makes me wonder if Bieber isn’t, in reality, Usher’s revenge on all the fickle teenage fans who have turned to younger pastures over the last couple of years. But then, those are the fans who have put this record on the chart—it isn’t being promoted as a single, it’s just an album track that the Bieberfreaks (or maybe their mothers) have decided to give extra attention. Maybe I’m just being cynical—but not half as cynical as Usher.

Martina McBride—”Wrong Baby Wrong”
#95
This isn’t bad: nice Stones inspired riff at the beginning, and I like the idea of a mother’s advice song from the mother’s point of view. It gets too tame about halfway through, though, and it goes on too long. McBride should pay more attention to Eric Church or Luke Bryan: for a song like this, three minutes is all you need. The rest is just showing off.

Miranda Lambert—”The House That Built Me”
#98
I’m always wary of this sort of country sentimentality—when country singers talk about “finding” themselves, it almost always means a return to their smalltown, family roots, a confession of their sinful, straying ways, and a nostalgia that’s sure to turn into bathos, usually accompanied by a healthy dollop of strings and some whining steel guitar. But even taking those reservations into account, this is a perfect record. There are no strings or steel guitar to be found, and Lambert’s understated vocal drives home more real emotion than any amount of Nashville oversinging. It helps that the song is the best example of its kind you’ll ever hear: the two-part chorus is stunning in its impact, and if the verse about mama and papa building their house doesn’t bring you close to tears, nothing ever will. Lambert didn’t write this, but it proves that even when she’s not falling back on alt-country standbys (Patti Griffin, John Prine, etc.), she has an unerring ear for good material. Which means she’s going to be a star for a long, long time. Boy, do we need her.

Colbie Caillat—”I Never Told You”
#99
I’ve badmouthed Caillat a lot in the past, and this isn’t a great record, but it’s made me realize who and what she really is: the twenty-something, SoCal version of Taylor Swift. She’s not as lyrically inventive as Swift, too often she falls back on cliches, and despite the title of her first hit, she’s nowhere near as bubbly—but her point of view, her romantic sensibilities, and her sense of taste and (if I can use this term) musical decorum, are almost exactly the same (there’s a reason Swift performed with Stevie Nicks, after all). The main differences are of age and geography. While Swift optimistically negotiates the fresh hell of a Nashville high school with fairy tale visions of romance, Caillat faces the ages-old Southern California disconnect of the messiness of emotional and sexual reality while living in a physical paradise. Both seem almost untouched by the real world, when the truth is that both know it all too well, and are shaping their own version of the perfect escape. Swift is the greater artist of the two, but Caillat may very well surprise us somewhere down the line.

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“…it’s got too many notes…”

Friday, February 5th, 2010

Despite the sheer level of bombast and confused—and confusing—showmanship displayed at this year’s Grammy awards, there was nothing about the show that could be considered controversial. In fact, with its largest audience since 2004, the program can be considered, in business terms at least, a stunning success. But where there isn’t controversy, you can be sure that someone in the news business will create some, and sure enough, here comes MTV, that bastion of journalistic integrity, doing their best to maintain what is now a week long debate over Taylor Swift’s inability to hit certain notes in the chorus of “Rhiannon”, and whether that inability invalidates her entire career.

Just to keep the debate humming, and no doubt to keep his client’s name in the papers (as if she needed the publicity), the owner of Swift’s label, Scott Borchetta, gave an interview providing a defense that ran along the lines of the importance of emotion over technical proficiency, and in the process took a swipe at American Idol. This brought out Kelly Clarkson, who quite rightly felt insulted, though she made it clear that her beef was with Borchetta, and not Swift herself. Swift, meanwhile, with wisdom beyond her years, has kept her mouth shut about the whole thing.

What many of those currently following this apparently meaningless debate may not realize is that it isn’t new. For well over a year, country blogs have been full of comments about Swift’s occasionally erratic pitch in live performance, and the debate has moved pretty much along the same lines it has on MTV over the last week: she can’t sing and her music sucks vs. she can too sing vs. she can’t sing but it doesn’t matter because her records are still great.

My own opinion is that despite obvious technical limitations, Swift is still an excellent vocalist, and an even better songwriter. I’m also tempted to say “who cares as long as the records are good?” Except that a lot of people care, and they care for a very important reason: Swift represents the future of country music, and everyone, whether they like it or not, knows it. They also know that that future is going to be a lot different from the present, in ways that many people may not have even realized.

In terms of the current debate, one piece of the future Swift represents is the ultimate collapse, for a time at least, of the cult of the vocalist, which has ruled country for several years now. Listening to the country top ten over the last few years, it’s been impossible not to notice the almost fetishistic attention that is paid to vocals, especially among male singers. Whether it’s the tenor keening of Rascal Flatts, or the craggy baritone of someone like Trace Adkins, vocal perfection and detail is a central part of their records’ appeal. As such, the songs are no longer the point of most country records, but merely the vehicle for various vocal pyrotechnics.

Oddly, less attention seems to be lavished on women’s vocals (women are somewhat out of the picture in country right now, anyway—though they’re making a comeback, there are only nine in the current country top forty—another area where Swift could end up changing things). In the current market, women are required to be either belters or vamps, and little else (the whole redneck woman phase seems to have faded), and the prettier their voices are the better. Carrie Underwood is the obvious reflection of this, and no doubt Swift’s manager was thinking of her when he made his comment about American Idol. The only major exception beside Swift is Miranda Lambert, and even she had to soften her violent ways to finally get to number one; the others are mostly old-timers like Reba McEntire and Martina McBride.

Swift steps away from this completely. Not that her voice isn’t pretty enough, but because her primary focus is on her songs, not her voice. Not that her songs aren’t shaped to her vocal strengths —of course they are. But that’s because she wrote them, not because she chose them to fit her voice or show it off. And this is another area where Swift could have a major impact on current country. When she accepted her first award Sunday night and thanked her record company for letting her put out an album consisting entirely of her own songs, she wasn’t just rambling, she was helping to overturn a major country paradigm. Few country performers, and certainly not teenagers straight out of high school, record their own material, even if they’re capable of writing it. Only major stars who have proved themselves in the marketplace get to do that, and even then few do.

But if Swift does represent sweeping change in the country market, no one in the country establishment is resisting it. They’re well aware that the music has been in the doldrums the last few years, just like the rest of the music industry, only worse. Like every other genre, country album sales are down over 30% the last couple of years, and without the benefit, so far, of catching on digitally to compensate. They desperately need someone like Swift, who, besides selling a lot of records, promises a whole new paradigm for the industry and its audience, something that more traditional performers like Carrie Underwood or Lady Antebellum could never do, despite their sales.

So they’ve given Swift every award they could think of, and more so. Who can blame them? Name another performer who could generate a week of debate among a non-country audience over a couple of bum notes?

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New this week

Sunday, August 9th, 2009

T.I. featuring Mary J. Blige—”Remember Me”
#29
The verse about his woman cheating on him while he’s in the joint sounds real enough, but it doesn’t matter, because T.I. loses me on the very first line, where he compares himself to Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcom X. Is it even necessary to point out to anyone but right wing gun nuts the difference between being arrested fighting for your civil rights and a federal weapons violation (for that matter, did Malcolm X do jail time for anything but being a pimp?)? Of course, the line goes perfectly with the over-the-top production and Blige’s prayerful chorus. Did I really believe that T.I. had changed? I may have to take it all back.

Toby Keith—”American Ride”
#54
Despite it’s jingoistic tone, this is really about tolerance and loving this crazy country of ours, liberal or conservative, black or white, Democrat or Republican, rich or poor, right or left. Too bad all his examples seem to come off The O’Reilly Factor.

David Guetta featuring Akon—”Sexy Bitch”
#56
I like the conceit of the hook line, “I’m trying to find the words to describe this girl without being disrespectful”, but the music is like Kid Cudi’s “Day ‘n’ Night” badly welded onto Sean Kingston’s “Fire Burning”, and Akon’s vocals lack whatever distinctiveness they once had. He also sounds uncertain—that hook line may as well have his fingerprints on it, but it sounds like Guetta is singing it. After the relative failure of Akon’s loverman album, this half-hearted return to his player ways suggests confusion about how to recover from all that bad publicity a couple of years ago. It will be interesting to see how this pans out. It has all the marks of a hit, but I think Akon’s blown whatever goodwill he had going for him. And I don’t think anybody’s going to turn this into a wedding video.

Tim McGraw—”It’s A Business Doing Pleasure With You”
#73
No kidding. Except this is so plodding there isn’t even any pleasure involved. Co-written by Chad Kroeger of Nickelback, which figures.

Jay-Z, Rihanna, & Kanye West–”Run This Town”
#88
Jay-Z’s career is becoming confusing. On American Gangster he was on top of his game, cool and confident. Without Denzel Washington’s example, however, he seems a little more insecure. “D.O.A.” was just dumb, and this negates a not bad black pride rap by ending with West belittling a woman for having less fashion sense than he does. And why would anyone who hates autotune feature Rihanaa, who sounds like a machine even without the help of special effects? If these guys are the new Rat Pack, then this is the original Oceans 11: lazy, self-absorbed, and self-satisfied.

Michelle Branch—”Sooner Or Later”
#93
Second-rate Taylor Swift, just the thing to revive a rapidly dwindling career.

Uncle Kracker–”Smile”
#95
Kid Rock cohort turns into Daniel Powter knock-off. He’s still trailer trash, but now his trailer’s on the beach.

Martina McBride—”I Just Call You Mine”
#97
Before the country banality and the usual Nashville overarranging take over, McBride confirms what a sharp and intelligent singer she can be. By the end of the first chorus, though, she’s just another country diva singing what’s been handed to her. I don’t know if McBride deserves better or not (she co-produced this, so she takes a greater share of the blame than usual), but her voice sure does.

Parachute—”She Is Love”
#98
This sounds like the intro to what could be a really nice love song. Too bad nobody wrote the rest of it.

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