West End Girls - Goes Petshopping

WEG should lez up live, but that may be hoping for too much.

Artist Is Bigger Than The Song

This argument would make Nina Simone's cover of Randy Newman's I Think It's Going To Rain Today an improvement on the original. But it isn't.

west end girls, along with bodies without organs, are exhibit a for the racism of racistjustice. dom says "all pop is better if sung by nubile Europeans" ===> surely you have seen the underlying rationale which underpins entire racistjustice edifice, viz. "all pop is better if sung by Aryans".

because whether you enjoy listening to them or not, they're basically just a tribute band, and i don't see anyone running to defend what the spicey girls were doing in '96. why waste energy and words on a tribute band when there is lots of amazing pop out there to talk about?! oh wait because the amazing pop is being made by ne*yo and christina milian and 50 cent, and they're black.

(the tATu cover of 'how soon is now?' is fabulous and completely not in the same vein as what west end girls do, because tATu actually, y'know, change the song a bit and stuff.)

ed, it's the west end girls who are indie: their entire schtick is "pet shop boys are POP CANON and therefore we don't need to do anything but cover them and be completely lame"

And how can you be more melodramatic than Morrissey! Other than Mexican soap operas, I mean.

my entire point about west end girls is "who cares? so what? why spend any energy at all talking about them?" tell me why i should!

Well yeah, OTM. Lex is little more than a troll these days, right? His "PJ don't cover much RnB, boo hoo" quickly morphed into "PJ are racist" (ignoring the PJ love for rihanna/sugababes/maria lawson/whoever) because ALL RnB IS MADE BY BLACK PEOPLE, right Lex? So yeah, if you don't write about it then YOU ARE A SUPPORTER OF THE ARYAN IDEAL. And the latest step, which seems to be "If you're white and make pop then you're RACIST" (see his reported comments on Lily Allen, for example) just emphasises the "I want to say something controversial and antagonistic so I'll warp the facts to fit them into a stupid theory" nature of the rest of his argument. Yawn.

my racistjustice thing is only part schtick actually - surely i am not the only one who sees something pretty dubious about the whole sweden-fetishising thing? and there were some VERY dodgy comments on the forum (about ciara or fiddy, i forget) last year which weren't called out, they were what sparked my suspicions. (i haven't actually visited the site since then for much the same reasons that i don't visit the kkk website)

i can't see the point of West End Girls really, having heard only 'West End Girls' by them.

Did Addis Black Widow have more than one single? Dr Alban obviously had lots.

Popjustice is a perfect example of pitfalls w/r/t defining "pop" as a sonic signifer instead of, y'know, it being the music that's popular at any given time. the thing with Popjustice is that they're openly obsessed with a particular (Abba-derived, perhaps?) strain of pop that's falen out of favour with mainstream in recent years. i don't mind their obsession (i too think BWO are dull and bloodless, yes, but on the other hand A-Teens' "Close to Perfection" is my fave non-single album track of this millenium so i can't knock the Swedes), but the problem is that they present that strain of pop as the "real", PROPER pop as opposed to "that R&B rubbish clogging up the charts". is that a racist stance? i don't think so. rockist (or, if you wish, popist )? pretty much yes.

P.S.i'm interested in West End Girls because, while i like a lot of PSB tunes, i find Neil Tennant's voice a bit grating so i'm all up for PSB classics sung by teenage girls with new up-to-date production. i haven't heard much yet, but their cover od "Domino Dancing" is lovely, fresh and invigorating.

P.P.S. Lex, check out The Attic's "Just Can't Help It" if you can - glorious Swedish take on anthemic tearjerker French house!

1) abba are one big pop band i like but don't love - this may explain my being left cold by much of what racistjustice recommends
2) i will try and check out the attic! i don't have anything against swedes (some of my best friends &c, the knife album one of my favourites of year so far) really
3) however i do genuinely think that, even if racistjustice may not be outright racist, i do think that - especially on the forum - residual 'issues' with black people are quite common

But this is the point, why should 50 Cent get more of a pass as a "pop" artist than Arctic Monkeys? Or Beyonce more than Kaiser Chiefs? Or Ne-Yo more than The Kooks? It's a horrid hangover from indie thought that black people are automatically more populist than whites (look at the fucking P&J ballots of the majority of name writers. A bunch of white indie bands that sold 7 copies of their album between them, and then just shove Kanye or Outkast on top. Balance), and really "Pop" (with a capital P, for methed-up lisping gayers and six-year-old sleepovers) has no more to do with LL than it does with RHCP.

"Pop" (with a capital P, for methed-up lisping gayers and six-year-old sleepovers) has no more to do with LL than it does with RHCP.

that's a rubbish way of defining 'pop' though. as you may have inferred by now, i see pop as more of a teenage thing (kidz on the bus &c &c), what the broadsheets like to term 'youth culture' and so on, and i think you'll find that hip hop and r&b have ruled the school for a while now (and QUITE RIGHT TOO).

you have to wonder WHY someone only likes metal or classical, is the real point. it's just suspect generally.

but Arctic Monkeys are teenagers and a lot of their fans must be too. in certain playgrounds they probably do rule.

It seems to me these are well defined genres in the sense that they are identifiable in purely musical terms. So I think that it is certainly possible that people may only like certain type of music because of what they find appealing in it, regardless of other factors like the race of the people involved.

Most of the guys I knew growing who exclusively liked metal were a half-step removed from being frothing racists. I didn't know anyone who exclusively liked classical until I came to college and those people were more pretentious than anything else.

Strawman video time:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?search=pantera+white+pride&v=5iQZEBBg7hE

IN LONDON AND NOWHERE ELSE IN THE COUNTRY. If you really think that 15 year olds in Bletchley and Droylsden are listening to Chris Brown more than they are the Kaiser Chiefs, then you're functionally retarded.

I attended a school talent show at a home counties comprehensive school earlier this year. Emo it seemed had made quite the impact, it's just the laest permutation of mosher core innit. No girls lip synching to pop hits as I remember in 1996 - 2000 ish. There was a girl free-styling over beats though, balanced out by one singing a Dashboard Confessional song. Also a performance of Sonic Youth's Diamond Sea this may be an anomaly.

b) i have lived in provincial middle-of-nowheres for most of my life and the kidz were certainly listening to the hip hop and the r&b. which resulted in retarded children of the indie dismissing great stuff like sean paul and mary j blige as 'chav music', an attitude which racistjustice has taken on board entirely.

memo to gordon brown.

THAT'S ALMOST EVERYWHERE SOUTH OF BIRMINGHAM AND WEST OF LONDON.

to unpack: "the kidz" = which kids? at which schools? and the "children of the indie", who are they? and were they saying 'chav' and listening to seaneh when you were at school with them?

in the provincial towns i've lived in hip-hop was barely on the map.

Thats Arctic Monkeyland.

Where Polar Bears eat the monkeys?

xpost

WTF? Cardiff is frequently sold as the most exciting and up-and-coming place in Britain, and has been for as long as I've been in Bristol (10 years).

Other famous people who grew up in the town include pop star Peter Noone of Herman's Hermits and cult author Jeff Noon.

you can't go claiming that if the kidz like sean paul it's racist not to, and then go repping electroclash!

xp

but it's barely bigger than Southampton isn't it?!

This is better than anything the Pet Shop Boys have done in, like, 15 years (with the possible exception of "Fugitive")...and I'd be very surprised if anything on "Yes" tops it:

The lyrics are pretty banal but it CRUNCHES like something fierce doesn't it? Excellent stuff, particularly after the let-down that was their cover of "What Have I Done...".

They got everything right this time; even Isabelle's vocals (which I usually found too high-pitch for my taste) work. And yes, the vocals are banal, but that's Neil's fault...

...I mean, the lyrics.

Neil's lyrics haven't actually been _good_ since about half of "Nightlife", and lots of "Bilingual" is dubious too.

But this sounds amazing, who produced it?

I don't know, I'm curious too. But I bet it's a new producer.