An Over-40 Listens to the Top 40

Therein the problem.

Culture's splintering has made the Top 40 less influential. Hundreds of radio stations cater to individual tastes. If that's not good enough, you can program your iPod. If you want to ignore the Top 40, it's quite easy.

ihttp://i.a.cnn.net/cnn/2006/SHOWBIZ/Music/08/10/music.top40revisited.ap/vert.top.40.ap.jpg

Beautiful. At least he clearly knew how it would end up looking.

The Tom Cochrane version came out in 1992. [/pedant]

by far the least noteworthy factual ERROR in that statement

"Hire a few musicians and a new world will open up! We're talking to you, Field Mob. And you, Lil Jon. And Chamillionaire, E-40, Young Dro, Chris Brown, Cherish ..."

He mentions it in the sidebar, Tim. Calls it a guilty pleasure.

"But it helps."

if you delete "rap" from that sentence i guarantee you can find it in some similar aging-rocker-dude column from 1982. how can anyone still be hung up on "drum machines" in 2006?

i give him points for liking "unfaithful" and the xtina song. and at least he resisted talking about the "real musicianship" of john mayer (resisted talking about john mayer at all, good for him).

Bahahaha ok, I like this guy.

that's sort of OTM actually, it's essentially suburban music now, there aren't enough people left in small town USA to make it that popular. even the themes are much more suburban less rural now, altho there is a certain amount of rural fantasy going on, sort of idealizing rural small towns for people that never lived there.

the influence of Frank Kogan seeps into the mainstream

cable country

(If you say 'The Automatic - Monster' I might puke)

It's a long way from Aretha Franklin's "Respect." Today's women expect and demand it. You'll be thinking of another b-word when Kelis sings "Bossy." Romance means more than moonlit walks on the beach to Cassie and Kandy Girl, and they don't hesitate to say so.

MOST LIKELY TO BE ON THE RADIO IN 20 YEARS: Daniel Powter's "Bad Day," and not just because it was adopted by "American Idol." He takes a universal topic and skillfully puts it into words. It will live forever, and make songwriter Powter very, very rich.

I'm going to introduce him to Diane Warren.

"Bossy" is a piece of moronic shitscum.

"Bossy" is the woarstest song ever, "Hips Don't Like is also horrible. The Letoya song is boring and "Buttons" is highly meh. The Rihanna songs, Xtina, teh Gnarls & "Deja Vu" are the winners from that list.

Ha, good typo on my part.

"bossy" is excellent, i don't understand people not liking that song. i resisted "crazy" too, a little, because it seems way more like a prefab classic than any of the ostensibly prefab things on the chart. but still, a classic's a classic. (it's too fast, is the problem. dangermouse doesn't dance, i guess. which, i mean, no surprise. he's an auteur, after all.) i can take or leave "s.o.s.", but "unfaithful" is great -- so gothy, "i don'wanna be...........a murderer". bonus revelation being that rihanna can sing. and i kinda love how georgia-centric the chart still is, years after everyone supposedly stopped caring. it strikes me really with "snap yo fingers" how what lil jon did/does is just plain old rock n roll -- a beat, a hook, some shouty chorus or other, repeat as often as possible. i love that guy.

xpost

yes it totally is - she sounds so wilfully self-deluding, but also so in love, on the chorus.

"Bossy" is the woarstest song ever, "Hips Don't Like is also horrible. The Letoya song is boring and "Buttons" is highly meh.

which is the letoya single, 'torn'? there's LOTS better on the album. 'buttonz' is really addictive, kind of a pinnacle of generic scott storch synth hip hop, it's so fascinatingly robotic. people are confusing 'underwhelming' with 'terrible re 'bossy' (and again there's better on the album, it's just a v bizarre choice of lead single).

i like articles like this, outside perspective is always interesting. like when the telegraph sent their opera correspondent to review a bjork gig.

September 25, 2001, Tuesday

Bjork proves a very fine swan indeed

BYLINE: By Rupert Christiansen

SECTION: Pg. 21

LENGTH: 433 words

Music
Bjork
LONDON COLISEUM

I HOPE that readers will forgive an opera critic's temporary trespass into pop territory, but the prospect of the Icelandic chanteuse Bjork positioning herself behind the thoroughly operatic proscenium of the London Coliseum, as part of a global tour of classical music venues, was irresistibly intriguing. And I do think that the coteries of "serious" contemporary music could learn a lot from her.

Eclecticism is the most striking feature of Bjork's musicality. An early academic training, as well as elements of punk, jazz, electronics and her native traditions, all feed into her songs, most of which she writes herself. This concert, for instance, opens with her spotlit in a chair, cranking an old music box before a symphony orchestra launches into a prelude of positively Wagnerian nobility.

Her backing group is a choir of 15 Innuit women, and, instead of the usual crass guitar and drums thumping, the rhythms are subtly synthesized by Matmos, a pair of San Franciscan hi-tech radicals. She also duets with an astounding North Canadian called Tagaq who hisses, wheezes, grunts and squeals.

Her own singing style is a combination of punk belting with a falsetto soprano extension. Its strangely childlike quality is complemented by her mesmerising dancing, which is more a hop and a skip around the primary school playground than maenadic disco gyration. Swathed in a black-feathered costume that looks half Swan Lake, half Moulin Rouge, she is lost in a world of her own and shows no sign of a return to Planet Earth.

It's an act that could be an awful mish-mash of phoney pretensions and failed ambitions - rock music for art-school pseuds. But Bjork clearly believes in it all passionately, and that sincerity gave the show integrity and focus, whether in relatively conventional hits from her early albums such as Human Behaviour and Possibly Maybe, or the haunting Pagan Poetry, with its clanging gamelan accompaniment, from her new release, Vespertine.

Other highlights of a relatively short but padding-free concert were a solo version of I Have Seen it All (originally sung as a duet with Radiohead's Thom Yorke in the movie Dancer in the Dark) and the modal I am Strong in his Hands, which, with the help of Zeena Parkins's superb harp-playing, ended up sounding like a Highland folk song.

At such moments, Bjork makes Madonna look like a slick package of nothing, and also uncomfortably reminds one that so many of the singers who normally grace this stage simply don't have a personality.

YouTube the slower performance from Top of the Pops--much better (bcz less Dangermouse.)

That wacky Drew!

Slower take on "Crazy" would be good, I'd think. And this has all reminded me that the Rihanna album probably is no bad thing. (Then again, are the singles the only good things on it?)

Lex has a great idea; can we get Gang Gang Dance in on it, too?

it started on the brandy album from a couple of years back i think! when tim kept going on and on about his love for coldplay - he sampled 'clocks' on 'should i go' and brandy sang the line "think i wanna hear some coldplay" on 'i tried'. and on the ballads, they're this kind of weird digital attempt at coldplayesque epic melancholy - you know, stadium wistfulness, that weird mix of rock bombast and mewling bedroom self-pity that they do. but it WORKED, which was weird (and made me realise that there might just be something in that aesthetic which coldplay totally fail to get right due to hamfistedness, lack of melody, chris martin's voice, being total tossers &c &c).

and, yeah - 'say it right' and 'all good things (come to an end)' on the furtado album are more in that vein. in fact i think c martin co-wrote the latter, and it was slated to be a duet, until THANKFULLY rekkid company shenanigans forced them to remove his voice from it. i've heard the original duet and it's ghastly; the version on the album is really rather lovely.

Yeah, pretty much. (It's not a vein you're much interested in ;-) but I can see all the roots of what Coldplay do and the thing is they're roots I mostly love [fuck a Jeff Buckley though], and so to hear those feebs turn it all into mulch makes me contemplate sweet, sweet revenge.)

(Oh wait...)

The Fray does not belong on this list. The single about cable cars although it really isn't, is wonderfully catchy. No wonder it's been on the chart for half a year now. Powter can have its place on the list.

Shakira IS exciting and creative, but not "Hips Don't Lie" - Wyclef dug out one of his old songs and just had Shakira contort to it. It's great that she's conquering the world, but I just wish it wasn't that song.

"Should we support the melodicrock.com base?"

"They're fine supporting themselves."

"Very good."

yeah M. Matos that's part of what I was trying to say (and I didn't think yr post was really directed at me). The big point that I keep harping on is that country had a unique& defining relationship w/its past for a long time, much more tradition-oriented than R&B and that's what changed. Maybe now it's tied to a different tradition.