Posts Tagged ‘P!nk’

Bubbling Under 4/30/11

Monday, May 9th, 2011

Rihanna—”California King Bed”
#113
Ever wondered what Colbie Caillat would sound like if she sang for Guns ‘n Roses? Me neither.

The Ready Set—”Young Forever”
#115
Better than “Love Like Woe”, but what wouldn’t be? This is much tougher, and some of it is almost clever. But I have an inborn distrust of any song with a title that contains the words “young” and “forever”, no matter what order they’re in or whatever other words come along with them. And I certainly don’t trust a fallacious message of hope from anyone who doesn’t know the difference between “woe” and “whoa”. Young is one thing, ignorant is something else altogether.

Aubrey O’Day—”Automatic”
#108
A record that lives up to its title in every way.

Jessie J—”You Are You”
#112
Ever wondered what someone would sound like if they tried to sing like Rihanna, Katy Perry, and P!nk all at the same time? Me neither.

The Beastie Boys—”Make Some Noise”
#115
The great lyrical turn around—from “fight for your right to party” to “party for your right to fight”—isn’t just a clever word game, it’s a demonstration that not only hasn’t age dulled their wits, it’s sharpened them. This may be a party record, but the sound is dense and filled with a wary sensibility, full of confidence but also a sense of mortality. It’s party music laced with age and understanding. It’s fascinating to think that the brattiest of all the ’80′s rap groups should be the one to age the most gracefully and energetically.

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Compare and contrast

Friday, January 28th, 2011

Although I welcomed the arrival of Popdust, I’ve been a little put off by the reality—a little too jokey and snarky, a little too concerned with trivialities. Any new endeavor needs time to find itself, though, and the site has taken a big step in that direction this week with a correspondence between popduster (and former Idolator) Maura Johnston and LA Times music critic Ann Powers comparing the new videos from Avril Lavigne and P!nk, and the message the two artists are sending to young women (Johnston’s opening post is here; Powers’s reply here). It’s somewhat unfair—Lavigne has always been a bit of a fraud, and P!nk has certainly never kept her feminism a secret—but it’s good to see nonetheless. More of the same sort, please.

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Hot 100 Roundup—12/26/10

Wednesday, December 29th, 2010

Lil Wayne Featuring Cory Gunz—”6 Foot 7 Foot”
#9
The background provided by Bangladesh is so stupid—and not in a good way—that it almost ruins the record for me. Wayne himself saves it. His gnomic notes to himself—you can almost see him obsessively scrawling them out in his cell—are so full of twists and turns and puns, words and phrases pulled inside out and examined to reveal newer if not always deeper meanings, that even if he isn’t saying much he seems to say it all. Writing down his raps has tightened and intensified his language, revealing more about his character than any of his free-form, off-the-cuff displays, brilliant as they were, ever did. Turns out he’s something of a grammarian, though that should have been obvious a long time ago.

Taio Cruz featuring Travie McCoy—”Higher”
#80
Reviewed in Bubbling Under, 12/19/10

Nicki Minaj featuring Drake—”Moment 4 Life”
#82
Reviewed in Bubbling Under, 12/5/10

P!nk—”Fuckin’ Perfect”
#86
“Fuck” being the word of the moment (word of the year, really), P!nk, with her usual commercial intuitiveness, tosses it into the title of a song in which the word itself doesn’t appear. I wish it did; it might liven up this otherwise bathetic self-empowerment ballad.

Jerrod Niemann—”What Do You Want”
#90
Reviewed in Bubbling Under, 12/12/10

Thompson Square—”Are You Gonna Kiss Me Or Not”
#92
Sugarland as Bon Jovi, just what we’ve been waiting for.

R. Kelly—”When A Woman Loves”
#93
I loved the video for this when it came out a few months ago, but I guess this is just another example of a mediocre record being lifted by it’s accompanying visuals (this is why I don’t watch Glee; I don’t want its horrible music tainted by theatrical quality). What looks loving and soulful in the video turns out to be stiff and lifeless when heard on its own. Kelly isn’t that great a singer, and his soul inflections sound calculated and more often verge toward homage, and even parody, rather than actual emotion. His “Thank you” at the end, which works in the video, sounds like a dumb, knowing wink on the record, as if the whole thing was nothing but a stylistic game.

Fabolous—”You Be Killin’ ‘Em”
#94
Though this eventually turns into one of the most sexist pop songs I’ve heard in some time (“She looks like the best money I ever spent” Fabolous says of his latest acquisition), what really sums it up for me comes in the first 30 seconds. After a brief intro establishes the electric piano riff that drives the song, Fabolous steps up to the mike, and by way of introduction, says “Niiiice”. The first thought that came into my head: “Isn’t it a little late in the day for a Vanilla Ice parody?” Second thought: “This isn’t a parody.”

The Script—”For the First Time”
#97
At first I was willing to give them points for writing about something truly meaningful: the stress economic hard times places on relationships. A lot of songs have been written about that, though (I’m sure there are a couple of hundred songwriters in Nashville working on it right now), and The Script’s tin ear for detail and sentimental musicality guarantees that this is nothing but a sop to those who feel they need a good sorrowful wallow every once in a while to get by. Every human emotion has its exploiter; self-pity, meet The Script.

Mariah Carey—”Oh Santa!”
#100
Reviewed in Bubbling Under, 12/19/10

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Hot 100 Roundup—10/17/10

Sunday, October 24th, 2010

Taylor Swift—”Speak Now”
#8
Another cute fairy tale, a song form at which Swift has become an absolute master. Sassy, funny, and sharply observed as always, only this one is streaked with some real bitterness, including details and descriptions that would be considered, um, mean coming from anyone else. As the title cut from the new album, it obviously serves as justification for the deeper anger that permeates some of the other songs. Like most fairy tales, however, this ends at the point of victory, and says nothing about the aftermath. Which makes me wonder if Swift, both as a character in her songs and as a real person, is ready for the tempest she’s stirring up.

Kanye West featuring Pusha T—”Runaway”
#12
Ever since 808s and Heartbreak, and even more so since his disastrous VMA fuck-up, the main focus of Kanye West’s audience, and certainly the press, has been not his music, but his state of mind. Is he falling apart? Does he regret what he’s done? Will he apologize? Will the new record present a more humble, subdued Yeezy? The answers so far (No. Yes. Sort of. Are you kidding me?) are fascinating in their way, but they distract from the main point, which is the music. In the last three months he’s released two excellent official singles, plus a boatload of good to great tracks as part of the G.O.O.D. Friday download series, and all I read on the blogs and in comment sections is analysis of his emotional ups and downs, as if every new piece of music were nothing more than the latest installment in a soap opera: Kanye West and the Price of Fame or As the Rapper Yearns. Part of this is West’s fault—his self-absorption is far beyond the call of duty of even the most egotistical rappers—but at the same time he’s one of the few whose work lives up to their own hype. And even if the latest records break little new ground—“Power” harks all the way back to The College Dropout, while “Runaway” sounds like an 808s track with some pop sweetening—the ideas he’s already dug up would be enough to fuel any number of lifelong careers. If, that is, he doesn’t drive his into the ground by making music about nothing but himself. It’s a narrowing of the palette that few artists survive, no matter how brilliant they are. I just hope this album gets it all out of his system and he can go on to something else.

Glee Cast
“I Want To Hold Your Hand”, #36
“One Of Us”, #37
“Only the Good Die Young”, #50
“Losing My Religion”, #60
“Papa Can You Hear Me?”, #65
“Bridge Over Troubled Water”, #73
“I Look To You”, #74

P!nk—”Raise Your Glass”
#51
For a Max Martin-produced party record this is surprisingly stiff, never more so than in the throwaway vocal interjections that are supposed to provide that loose, freaky atmosphere (and all the jokes). It’s all far too calculated and machine-tooled, without a single moment left to chance. I don’t know if this is Martin’s fault or P!nk’s, but it sure isn’t freaky.

Bruno Mars—”The Lazy Song”
#82
Dear Bruno Mars: You can be a pop guy with serious undertones, or you can be a serious guy with an instinctive pop sensibility, but you cannot be Jack Johnson with keyboards. Not if you want any respect, that is.

A Rocket To the Moon—”Like We Used To”
#91
One of those records that’s upended by the details guys like this learn to put into their songs in their Songwriting 101 class. Pleading with an ex-girlfriend you caught naked in a car with somebody else fourteen months ago does not make you sensitive or passionate—it makes you a wimp. As does the music and the vocals.

Edward Maya & Vika Jigulina—”Stereo Love”
#93
Reviewed in Bubbling Under, 10/10/10

David Guetta featuring Kid Cudi—”Memories”
#94
Reviewed in Bubbling Under, 10/3/10

Shakira featuring Dizzee Rascal—”Loca”
#98
Reviewed in Bubbling Under, 10/10/10

Bubbling Under

Justin Moore—”How I Got To Be This Way”
#101
By being kicked in the head by a horse, apparently. This explains a lot.

Ne-Yo—”One In a Million”
#102
This is the catchiest and most pop-oriented of the preview singles off Ne-Yo’s new album, which also means it’s the most familiar sounding and the most ordinary. Ne-Yo’s style and class set him apart from almost everybody else on the chart, but they also hold him back somehow. It feels as if he’s not telling us everything he could because he’s afraid of stepping outside of the image he’s concocted for himself. Maybe it’s time for him to be a little less of a gentleman, or at least find an outlet for the tension that stance implies.

Trace Adkins—”This Ain’t No Love Song”
#103
In fact, it’s barely a song at all.

Luke Bryan—”Someone Else Calling You Baby”
#104
Bryan is a decent, mid-level country singer, and this is interesting for being essentially 70s country pop with a more soulful, modern rock setting, The Bellamy Brothers turned up to 11. Past 11, actually, which is the problem.

Willow—”Whip My Hair”
#105
This is far better than anyone had a right to suspect, and surprising, as well. Willow’s voice is literally unbelievable—it’s not just the strength, but the mature phrasing—if I hadn’t already known I never would have suspected her real age; I would have gone for thirty. The track is rougher than you’d think, as well, a poppified mix of electro and crunk that never lets up. Tougher than anything her dad ever did, that’s for sure.

My Darkest Days featuring Ludacris—”Porn Star Dancing”
#106
With Nickleback’s Chad Kroeger as co-writer and co-producer doing his best 3Oh!3 impersonation, the presence of Ludacris helps this record achieve a perfect storm of demographic triangulation. The sheer commercial shamelessness of it almost makes its stripper pole sleaze appealing. Kind of catchy, too.

Lifehouse—”All In”
#108
If it were anybody else turning to poker metaphors to describe their passion, I’d assume they were shooting for a country crossover, but these guys sound like the same old boring rockers they’ve always been. Only without hooks. It doesn’t mean much to go all in if all you’ve got left is a couple of bucks.

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New this week—7/4/10

Wednesday, July 7th, 2010

Eminem
“Love the Way You Lie” (featuring Rihanna), #2
” No Love” (featuring Lil Wayne), #23
“Won’t Back Down” (featuring P!nk), #62
“Cold Wind Blows”, #71
“Talkin’ 2 Myself” (featuring Kobe), #88
“25 To Life”, #92
I have no doubt that Recovery is a better album than Relapse 2 would have been, and it probably is Eminem’s best since The Eminem Show, but that isn’t saying much. His skills remain amazing: his rap on “No Lie” is a marvel of technique, so much so that Lil Wayne is left with little more to do than stand back and cheer. But his sense of humor has all but disappeared, he repeats himself endlessly (the lyrics read like daily affirmations for victims of Tourettes), his vocals are overloud and overbearing, and he ends up both boring and a boor. I realize he has a lot of crap to work out, and there are occasional flashes of the old Eminem in these songs, but if he keeps up at this rate he’ll need to call his next album Redundant. And after that, dare I say it, Retirement?

Selena Gomez and the Scene—”Round & Round”
#24
While Miley Cyrus makes a big to-do and madly flaps her CGI wings to break out of the Disney mold, Gomez does it effortlessly. My hesitations about anything Kevin Rudolf is involved in disappeared after a couple of plays, and I now think this may be an even better record than “Naturally”. It’s modern dance pop without the controversial bits, more Cascada than Lady GaGa or Ke$ha. I still don’t know what The Scene do, other than appear in her videos, but Gomez, once she shakes off her teen vocal phrasing, looks to have a great career as a disco diva in store for her.

Maroon 5—”Misery”
#44
The groove is tight, I admit, so tight you can barely breathe. But that’s not the same as being too funky, and, based on their previous records, it may be the only groove they have. If it weren’t for Adam Levine, I might mistake them for INXS. Which isn’t a bad thing, but it isn’t a great thing, either.

Sara Barielles—”King of Anything”
#59
Catchy and sarcastic is a great pop combo, but catchy is all the music gets, the lyrics are a rehash of “Love Song”, and when Bareilles isn’t being sarcastic she sounds bored, a feeling she passes on to the listener.

Miley Cyrus—”Stay”
#75
Can’t be tamed, maybe. But domesticated? Sure, why not?

Adam Lambert—”If I Had You”
#94
Lambert makes interesting records, but I’m not sure a mix of modern dance music and hair metal is a good idea, even if the results were more appealing than this. Do we really need an updated version of Journey? Isn’t Glee bad enough?

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New this week–2/14/10

Tuesday, February 16th, 2010

P!nk—”Glitter In the Air”
#18
Even aside from the impressive aerial ballet on the Grammies, this song has a lot of things going for it, all of which P!nk somehow manages to subvert well before it’s over. It’s frustrating to see an artist of such obvious intelligence and craftsmanship constantly fall back on cliche in order to get through her songs, but that’s what she does, time and time again. Whenever she gets close to a real emotion she stops and whips out some tried and true piece of schtick. It’s almost as if she’s afraid. Either that or she’s not as smart as she seems.

Lil Wayne
“Knockout” (featuring Nicki Minaj), #44
“Fuck Today” (featuring Gudda), #76
“American Star” (featuring Shanell AKA SNL), #91
On first listen these seem a big step up from the Lil-Wayne-goes-metal tracks that have appeared off and on over the last year. The sound is brighter, the tempos have more snap to them, the songs even seem to be about something besides the usual rap bragging. But they wear thin fast, and though I’m fascinated by the sense of racial frustration that permeates them (especially “Fuck Today”, which is a far better version of the same idea than “Drop the World”), the simple fact is that these records don’t work. He may love it, but metal doesn’t do Wayne any favors: it slows him down and constrains his natural gifts, and leaves you wondering exactly what he’s trying to get at. I’m not even sure that Wayne knows. Does he think that metal will allow him to delve into a deeper and more profound form of rage than rap (since when?), or is he just bored? Someone should remind him that twenty years ago Ice-T pulled the same trick just as his own interest in rap was fading. After that his music career was pretty much over (and the Body Count album was a lot better than this). What a perfect time to go to jail.

Dave Matthews Band—”You and Me”
#57
For all his much vaunted skill and musical sophistication, it’s amazing how easily Matthews falls into cliche—hitting a high note on the word “fly” is about as old-fashioned and hackneyed as you can get—and all the rhythmic trickery in the world won’t cover up the fact that this song has virtually no melody; it’s just a collection of riffs strung together. I can understand why musos like him—I just don’t see why anyone else would care.

Kevin Rudolf featuring Birdman, Jay Sean, and Lil Wayne—”I Made It (Cash Money Heroes)”
#59
I find it hard to believe that anyone from New Orleans (I mean Lil Wayne, not Rudolf, who’s from New York), could ever find this sort of plodding, lugubrious mush appealing, but obviously that’s a regional stereotype I’ll need to reconsider. The chorus isn’t terrible, but it isn’t exactly fresh, either, and the raps are meaningless. Why would anyone, from anywhere, think it’s a good idea to play hair metal slowly?

Mary J. Blige and Andrea Bocelli—”Bridge Over Troubled Water”
#75
I missed Blige and Bocelli on the Grammy Awards, but I read somewhere that Blige appeared intimidated by Bocelli’s voice, to which I can only say “Huh?” Even forgetting for the moment that Bocelli can’t sing (not in English anyway, and I’m not sure about his Italian, either), Blige walks all over him. Not that that’s a good thing, since she walks all over the song, as well, but “Bridge Over Troubled Water” has a long and glorious history of being oversung, and I’d be the last to deny Blige her shot at it. I just wish she’d done it on her own—she might have taken it even more deeply into church.

Gucci Mane—”Lemonade”
#93
This is the most interesting Gucci Mane track I’ve heard, and easily the most eccentric. I haven’t been able to parse out enough of the lyrics to decide whether he’s saying anything worth hearing, but the music, especially the chorus (are those children singing or women’s voices electronically raised a couple of pitches?) holds my attention well enough even without being sure about what’s going on.

Shiny Toy Guns—”Major Tom”
#97
This record, which sounds like a bunch of semi-talented suburban middle-schoolers playing in a three car garage with two of the doors open to annoy the neighbors, provides further proof that with enough exposure in TV commercials—especially during the Grammy Awards—anybody can scrape into the bottom reaches of the Hot 100 for a week. That we already knew. What I want to know is how anybody could have dared to complain about Taylor Swift’s vocals with this blaring out of their TV every ten minutes?

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New this week—12/27/09

Saturday, December 26th, 2009

Eminem
“Hell Breaks Loose” (featuring Dr. Dre), #29
“Elevator”, #67
There’s no doubt that these are sharper and more to the point than the tracks on the original version of Relapse—less fussy and more energetic, as well (even Dre sounds fully focused for a change). So even though they’re nothing new in and of themselves, they are promising. Maybe Slim Shady has some life in him yet. Whether or not that’s a a good thing at this stage—or at Eminem’s age—is open to question.

Alicia Keys—”Empire State of Mind (Part II) Broken Down”
#55
The hook is still there, but the verses sound like Keys did a Google search for big city cliches—”concrete jungle”, “melting pot”, women working the streets, etc.—and didn’t bother to come up with a single idea of her own. As for her musical abilities, she’s become one the most irritating keyboard players I’ve ever heard—all meaningless fills and runs, quaranteed to trivialize the rare instances she actually has something to say.

Adam Lambert—”Whataya Want From Me”
#72
As much as I respect and appreciate the way Lambert has faced down his conservative critics, I still find myself stopping short when it comes to his music. The best song on his album is a Lady Gaga reject, and on this P!nk reject he achieves nothing except a decent, mediocre imitation of the original owner. If he’s going to keep fighting for the right to be himself, isn’t it time he actually put himself on record?

Robin Thicke—”Sex Therapy”
#79
Thicke tries hard, and his grooves are sexy and intelligent, an achievement both impressive and rare. But then he gets to the chorus, and I’m sorry, but nobody, nobody in the world, not even the resurrection of Marvin Gaye himself, could convince me that Lesley Gore, or anything that Lesley Gore has ever touched, is sexy. Once Thicke puts his warm and tender hands on “It’s My Party”, the sex therapy ends, the session is over, and all that remains is camp. Maybe for those younger than me, who are less familiar with the original, the effect isn’t as extreme, but as far as I’m concerned there’s no way to take this record seriously after the chorus, and no amount of horny falsetto will ever convice me otherwise.

Usher featuring Plies—”Hey Daddy (Daddy’s Home)”
#94
I had no idea Usher felt he had sunk so low that he had to resort to pairing up with The Worst Rapper In the World®, but here they are all the same. The image created by the chorus, of Usher’s lover with her butt in the air murmuring the title phrase, is bad enough, but then Plies steps in, and it turns out that his idea of eroticism is pouring Kool-Aid on a woman’s back and kissing it off before any of it spills. I just hope “Kool-Aid” isn’t code for something even more disgusting.

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Who says singles don’t build slowly anymore?

Thursday, July 9th, 2009

I first mentioned The Ting Tings’s “That’s Not My Name” over a year ago, when it was a hit in the UK. Finally released as a single in the US near the end of the year, it crawled, slowly, up into the mid-fifties on the Hot 100, stayed for the full 20 weeks Billboard allows records below the top 40 that have stopped growing, and then, in June, disappeared. It stayed on the Hot Singles Recurrents chart, though (where, until Michael Jackson’s death, it was Number 1), and never left the iTunes top 40. Now, thanks to a sudden rise in sales and airplay (including, of all places, Radio Disney), it’s back on the Hot 100.

I’ve never understood why this wasn’t a bigger hit–it’s a great record, and if something as un-pop as “Paper Planes” could go top five, there’s no reason why this, which bears some resemblance to the Black Eyed Peas, only with more of a post-punk as opposed to techno feel–also more simplicity, more artfulness, and greater depth–shouldn’t be a smash as well. Isn’t it time some post-punk inspired dance music made the top ten? What they need is some swift media exposure, like a guest spot on the Jonas Brothers show or something. In September they’re touring with P!nk. That should help.

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