Now... am I going to do that Crystal of Atlan post that got bumped from the schedule yesterday or should it be the music post I was saving for Saturday? Hmm...
I could flip for it...
Nah, let's stick with the program and do the music one. I like a bit of a racket on a Saturday. Don't we all?
So, anyway, it turns out that I haven't been doing the homework, thanks to all the goofing off with my AI pals, which means pickings are thin. But only in volume. In quality they're thick as heck. I nearly said thick as milk but that's kind of a queasy simile. Then again "thick as heck" is just plain assonance with no semantic value at all, so...
Geez, just try to stay on topic for five minutes, can't you? No-one wants a repeat of yesterday's fiasco...
One thing I have noticed, which I'm leaning towards being an artefact of not spending so much (Read: any.) time crusing the back alleys of YouTube, is that everything I'm hearing right now is Big Pop. And I am not complaining about it.
It bears some repeating, I think, how what goes by "pop" these days would easily have passed for something else back in my younger days. Half of it would have been fricking avant-garde and about as likely to get airplay on an AM station as Bartok. (Not that I could pick a Bartok tune out of a line-up but you get the drift.)
I've been idly watching a few fragments from Barcelona's Primavera festival these last couple of days, just because it's being livestreamed on Amazon Prime and it's right there in front of me. That's ostensibly a rock festival, if the term still has meaning, and who are the headliners across the three days? Chappell Roan, Charli XCX and Sabrina Carpenter. Not sure I see the point of genre boundaries much anymore. It either bangs or it doesn't.
I'm not one hundred per cent sure whether Sabrina Carpenter's current single bangs or not because it's hard to concentrate on the music when I'm watching what has to be the best video I've seen this year. It's a complete road movie in a shade under four minutes. I'd love to see the full two hour version.
Manchild - Sabrina Carpenter
Do yourself a favor. Even if you can't stand Sabrina or the kind of music she makes, watch the video. Put some of the sort of music you like on instead or sing the national anthem or whatever. You'll be missing a treat if you don't.
It also made me wonder... do people hitch-hike any more? They certainly don't over here and haven't done since the 'nineties. You might see the odd driver with plates under their arm, waiting for another professional to stop and do them a courtesy but that doesn't count. Other than that, if I see one person with their thumb out every six months, I'd be surprised.
I used to do a very great deal of hitching. I hitched from University to home and back, a couple of hundred miles each way, almost every week for a year, before my then-girlfriend, now ex-wife, moved up to join me. I hitched for my summer holidays several years in a row, starting out at the end of the closest motorway and finishing in Spain. I didn't stop until I was in my mid-20s, when it started to get embarrassing, having to tell drivers I was in full-time employment and not a penniless student.
I loved hitching. One of my favorite things I've ever done. I really missed it for many years after I stopped, although I'm about over it now. I wonder why no-one does it any more?
Leave Me Alone - Reneé Rapp
Is Reneé Rapp pop? Apparently, although it really shows how definitions have changed. This sounds like the Beastie Boys to me and no-one ever called them pop. Well, no-one who knew what they were talking about.
I think this is Reneé's first time here on the blog, which seems odd. I had seen her name around but I can't recall ever hearing any of her work before. Apparently she has "a reputation", which was news to me but which supposedly just means she lacks "media training". I thought all pop stars got that by law.
Fame Is A Gun - Addison Rae
Reneé Rapp cut her teeth on YouTube before going into theater, movies and TV. Addison Rae bypassed all of that traditional grind and just went straight to TikTok. Once again, everything says she's a pop singer but if this was on Soundcloud with a DIY video on YouTube that some friend of hers shot on an iPhone, would anyone be asking questions? Sounds like indie pop electronica to me. Maybe it's just me that's obsessed with these definitions...
Also, what's with all the tortoises? Are tortoises pop now?
Sue Me - Audrey Hobert
Audrey Hobert is pop too. I guess she sounds it. Maybe? She's pals with Gracie Abrams and Gracie's definitely pop so that tracks. Audrey is also a singer-songwriter, though, and so, I think, are most of the pop stars these days. And they're good at it, too.
This really sounds like singer-songwriter territory to me. It's almost like Courtney Barnett or something. I mean, if you close your eyes and squint.
The big strike against Audrey being truly pop, though, is obviously that she keeps all her clothes on for the video. I mean, what pop star does that nowadays?
And Audrey, you may or may not be pleased to hear, is the last of the pop princesses for this week. But not the last we're going to hear about pop music itself.
Maslow - Pop Music Fever Dream
I think the day a song denying the validity of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs tops the singles charts is the day we have to declare pop music over forever. Fortunately, I don't believe there's much chance of that happening and certainly not with this chirpy little number. They're going to need another three orders of magnitude of views for the video on YouTube for a start. And I bet they don't have their TikTok strategy figured out, either.
Is he done with the "pop" schtick yet? Nope. One more...
Girl Band Starter Pack - Panic Shack
Okay, there is literally not one pop thing about this one except that girl bands were a huge pop deal a few years ago. This really needs to be played very loud so it's a shame the upload on YouTube seems to have been set to half volume. I heard it over headphones first time and that was much better.
Young - Little Simz
I guess it's video week. Until the Sabrina Carpenter arrived, this was my favorite video of the year. Also one of the best lyrics. Don't be looking at my face weird.
1800-Call-Me-Back - M(h)aol
Ain't no-one calling M(h)aol pop, that's for sure. Kinda weirdly reminds me of that Missy Elliot song I really liked but can never remember the name of (And now want to hear again.) I am sucker for an insistent, nagging, repeated sample.
And that's where I'm going to stop. I have a few more but that would just be "Here's the latest thing by that person I like" rather than anything I have actually been paying attention to this past couple of weeks.
Oh, okay then. One more. Don't think we've had any covers so far and I have quite a few of those backed up, waiting for a post of their own. How about this one?
Norman Fucking Rockwell - Evie Irie
If I need to tell you who the original's by, you must be new here. If so, grats for staying right to the end!
At the start, I wasn't convinced Evie was going to make a go of it but by the end I was glorying. Her voice could hardly be more different from Lana's. It gives the whole thing a totally different texture and scruffs it up the way a good cover should. Plus the little bit of Radio at the end. Genius!
And that really is it. More pop songs next time!
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I have to agree that Renee Rap is closer to the Beastie Boys rather than pop. The song also feels like it's half done, to be honest. I kept expecting a bridge or a concluding verse, but it feels like the song was cut off halfway through.
ReplyDeleteAudrey and Addison are definitely pop, although Audrey's use of synths makes me feel more New Wave about her song than anything else.
Pop Music Fever Dream made me smile. I haven't heard a good punk piece in quite a while. I was meaning to go visit my barber soon, and given that he used to be the drummer for Gang Green, it'll be something to talk about with him.
The girl band thing is cyclical. I'd imagine the latest batch of girl bands were inspired when The Go-Go's made the Rock Hall of Fame several years back, although Girl Band Starter Pack sounds less like an 80s or newer band and more of a mash-up between a 70s punk band and Spice Girls.
M(Haol) sounds truly avant-garde. I've (unfortunately) gone down a bit of a rabbit hole with avant-garde lately because of a book I've been reading, and there's a bit of similarity with some of the 60s avant-garde movement, the only difference is it's modern in scope and sound versus some of the Free Jazz that Ornette Coleman played.
You know, I wasn't sure that Norman Fucking Rockwell was a Lana song until you wrote "you must be new here". THEN I knew. ;-)
Oh yeah, the Sabrina Carpenter song. I really liked it too, but I honestly wasn't watching the video at all. I was playing WoW at the time, so I was focusing on the game. (Oops.)
The whole "half done" thing is interesting. Until at least the noughties, songs - pop, rock, folk, new wave, whatever - pretty much followed a format that had verses, choruses and bridges/middle-eights. They also tended to be no shorter than two and a half minutes, usually three to three and a half. There were, obviously, millions of exceptions, but the exceptions themselves tended to frame their exceptionalism around that formal expectation.
DeleteNow, though, little of that seems to matter any more. Songs can be any length or format or structure and it doesn't seem to matter. They're also getting shorter, too, with loads of the things I hear coming in closer to two minutes than three and some not even that. I'm pretty sure it's a result of the sea-change in the way people listen to and consume music now. With everything coming as loose songs or playlists via streaming platforms, the need for the kind of shape that fills one side of a 45 or puts six tracks on each side of an album or fits neatly between commercial, jingles and DJ banter on AM radio is largely gone. And songwriters just love it. It means they can make the songs the size and shape they ought to be, not force them into some pre-determined formula.
Or maybe that's just how I see it because of how I'm spending mytime these days...
I don't doubt that songwriters love it, but it just feels that even without the bridge, and I've heard plenty of songs like that, it just felt like the lyrics were only half done, as if there was another verse or two on the cutting room floor. Maybe that's the point, in that the song is purposefully left the way it is for some larger purpose, but it felt like after seeing her two exes I thought there was going to be something else after that than
DeletePut the three of us together
That's a real tongue twister
But like I said, maybe her wanting to have fun is the point of it, so why not end the song there without any conclusion to it?
I don't think many people hitchhike over here any more. Like you I hitched a lot when I was young and had some cool experiences, like one day some rich dude that lived up in a mansion on the ocean picked me up in a mint 1957 Mercedes that he had owned since it was new. He kept it in his 'summer cottage' and barely drove it. We had a great conversation about that car. Another time a young woman picked me up in the middle of a blizzard. Her car kept getting stuck and I'd get out and push to get her free again, so I guess that was a symbiotic ride.
ReplyDeleteNow everyone is afraid of everyone, I guess. People over here don't even know the folks living in the apt or house right next to them.