The Popjustice 20 Quid Prize 2009 shortlist POLL

Lily by miles! (though there are definitely other good songs repped here)

Yeah, for sentimental reasons, I wouldn't mind if St. Etienne won but "The Fear" should take it. This being Popjustice though, it'll probably be Girls Aloud (over there).

alesha dixon - the boy does nothing - CRAZY COUSINZ REMIX - AMAZING.

'the fear' is really good, even if it seems to be a bizarro one-off for allen. 'beat again' is hugely likable, even if it is a straight rip of ciara's '1 2 step'.

original 'boy does nothing': kinda fun track carried mostly by alesha's liveliness, but there's a touch of the "geri halliwell goes to samba class" about it, and it's aimed far too obviously at daytime radio when she should be ~going back to her roots~ and vocalling some uk funky tunes.

'new in town' is a well-written song but they should probably find an actual performer to sing it rather than release the songwriter's half-assed, charisma-free demo.

'take me back' is annoying trebly electrocheese with a dose of autotune bandwagonning for good measure; its role as harbinger of tinchy's terrible new direction makes it significantly worse. i'm glad tinchy's a bankable no 1 pop star now but the disparity between his best tracks and his most successful tracks makes me grimace.

'method of modern love' is ok, can't really remember it, strictly for sentimental ostriches.

'love etc' also for sentimental ostriches except it's kind of awful, especially with its trite lyrics :/

'the promise' is a clumsily-sung, poorly-written attempt to jump on a bandwagon of a pastiche. what a pointlessly turgid group girls aloud have become.

hey let's recreate rachel stevens' career with half the hooks, a quarter of the production and a tenth of her personality (lol she had none anyway) spread over 5 british chicks. how is it even possible to give a shit any way about the saturdays, especially given the emergence of electrik red.

i've dealt with that worthless hack frankmusik here already.

calvin harris is also a worthless hack in much the same vein, plus he gives every impression of being a cunt as well. why on earth is this pound-shop james murphy popular?

which leaves that shrieking harridan la roux. words literally cannot do justice to my hatred of her at this point. bitch is unreal and needs to sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up forever.

that shrieking harridan la roux. words literally cannot do justice to my hatred of her at this point. bitch is unreal and needs to sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up forever.

Lex and I AGREE on something! (this may have happened a couple times in the 2008 poll threads too, iirc)

Lex, OTM about almost all of them except "Up" which is actually pretty decent (though the Saturdays aren't)... and even though your La Roux hate is justified, "In For The Kill" isn't bad either; would've picked "Quicksand" myself.

I listened to "The Boy Does Nothing" 27 times in a row when I first heard it. Therefore, it gets my vote. (I agree about it being kind of "Geri Halliwell goes to samba class," but I love it in spite of that. Brian Higgins still has it sometimes.)

I'm surprised "In The Kill" was picked over "Bulletproof."

i'm voting for The Count remix of 'The Fear'

Yeah the original Alesha is kind of plodding but the Crazy Cousinz remix is fantastic, especially the middle eight which just takes off with that kind of funky backing.

Still, voted for New In Town. This is a poor list though.

(Surprised there's no Bonkers, incidentally)

In For The Kill, no contest. Still sounds so fresh, so new, and everyone loves La Roux.

lol

'beat again' is hugely likable, even if it is a straight rip of ciara's '1 2 step'.

I think it's one part 1 2 step and one part Kardinal Official (sp) - Dangerous.

I can't say I'm really in love with anything on the list to be perfectly honest. "The Fear" is great, and "The Promise" is so overrated to the point where I begin to doubt my own sanity...I think I'll end up voting for "Up". I don't harbor any illusions about the Saturdays being a force in pop for years to come but they did release a solid album and "Up" is terrific.

'Work' is better than 'Up'. it is the worst 'Work' tho (after Ciara and Juniper Boys).

also after k.rowland

yes i def hear a bit of 'dangerous' in 'beat again' too...

Although I like some of the songs on this list staring at it makes me think that Lex is right about pop in 2009.

That weird combination of stylistic consensus + diminishing returns + a certain "will this do" half-heartedness.

Most of the sounds being paraded in these songs all peaked somewhere between 2003 and 2006.

Like, I love "I'm Not Alone" when it comes on the radio (and it's Calvin at his least smackable) but there's something kinda wretched about a rip of Madonna ripping Booka Shade being one of the best things here.

I'm not sure why 2009 R&B escapes this logic - perhaps because the specific style that got the most crossover action during that period (Neptunes, "Crazy In Love" etc.) isn't getting much play now.

I wd vote for Lily Allen, despite Lily Allen, or La Roux, despite June Ackland's daughter, or Alesha Dixon, who I quite like as a persona.

This list is a bit rub, maybe as a tribute to the utter rub that is the Mercury?

Remember people, that this list is only Britishes... I don't think its fair to judge the state of pop based on a list subject to this constraint (especially when it excludes the US out Sweden).

Also, am I the only one here who thinks R&B IS pop.

sorry, meant "...the US AND Sweden".

personally i'm not sure i could come up with 12 great non-British big pop songs either (as in stuff which wasn't more readily labelled as something other than pop).

I think of R&B as pop, but only sometimes as "pop" in the Popjustice sense.

the existence of "pop" in the popjustice sense has been the death of pop tbh. bear in mind this is a site which has droned endlessly on about shitty british girl groups like the saturdays and girls can't catch, but which has yet to acknowledge the existence of electrik red.

i'd like to think of r&b as pop - at the height of my pop love, the late 90s and early 00s, this was undeniable - but it's clear by now that the people who've taken it upon themselves to hijack and redefine "pop" this decade have very little time for it, unless it somehow transcends its genre. wanting people to "transcend" r&b implies a fundamental lack of respect for r&b itself. which is bullshit.

i's also like to think of hip-hop as pop, too, but the merest hint of a hip-hop beat or american guest rapper is enough to give the uk pop community vapours.

and uk funky is something that "only 6 people in london care about" o_0

i really shouldn't get annoyed about this on the internet when half drunk really, but this shit is basically why i no longer call myself a pop fan.

the existence of "pop" in the popjustice sense has been the death of pop tbh. bear in mind this is a site which has droned endlessly on about shitty british girl groups like the saturdays and girls can't catch, but which has yet to acknowledge the existence of electrik red.

i'd like to think of r&b as pop - at the height of my pop love, the late 90s and early 00s, this was undeniable - but it's clear by now that the people who've taken it upon themselves to hijack and redefine "pop" this decade have very little time for it, unless it somehow transcends its genre. wanting people to "transcend" r&b implies a fundamental lack of respect for r&b itself. which is bullshit.

― lex pretend, Thursday, July 23, 2009 2:11 AM (22 minutes ago) Bookmark

OK but I think you're being a little drastic here. Aren't "the people have hijacked pop" basically only one person (Peter Robinson)? I don't even think this applies to Popjustice as a community (there is a fairly active thread on Electrik Red over there BTW). And I think there's still plenty of attention to R&B as a sub-genre of pop everywhere else.

most people seem to recognise that while hip-hop based pop and R&B obviously constitute pop music there's a need to distinguish this from the pop which doesn't fit with that (lots of people care about one much more than the other). there are other names for that stuff, unlike the kind of thing most of PJ's most championed acts do. Robinson's agenda has always seemed to be based more on supporting a tradition of UK pop acts in the spirit of Smash Hits inc. retaining a general preference for stuff that kids can/do like.

Lily, easy. Brilliantly produced, weirdly poignant. My 2-year-old calls it "my song" so I've heard it about 100 times this year and I still got tingles when she played it at Glastonbury.

Wish my daughter didn't keep singing "Don't care about clever, don't care about funny" though. Irony doesn't go across so well with 2-yr-olds.

hopefully not singing the "fucking fantastic" bit either

"fucking fantastic" is the best bit of the song (tho)

meh

Aren't "the people have hijacked pop" basically only one person (Peter Robinson)

as one person's taste it's fine but you can't really deny that this aesthetic has gone way beyond that now!

"fucking fantastic" is the only moment in lily allen's career where she genuinely sounds like the privileged posh girl that she is, no matter how ironic it's meant to be - it's ~authentic~

I think the empty, careless way she sings the chorus is more authentic in the context of that record, but the contrast of that numbness and the way she enunciates "fucking fantastic" does bring something that gets lost in the radio edit, true.

no matter how ironic it's meant to be - it's ~authentic~

Hate to break it to you, Lex, but that line of thinking is fucking retarded.

Had to download a clean edit for the first time in my life. Before that we only had the regular CD in the car so had to cough loudly over the "fucking" bits.

I love the "fucking fantastic" line because, as Lex says, the irony doesn't stretch all the way - there's part of her that believes it. Which is key to her appeal - a pop star who enjoys aspects of the bullshit even as she's attacking it, which is how I think a lot of people would feel in that position. She doesn't sound snotty or superior, which is surprising in a song with this kind of theme.

(While typing King Boy Pato's post appeared - don't see how noting the obvious ambivalence in this song is retarded tbh)

There's a lot of that lyric that sounds very superior to me, if not snotty. The narrator clearly isn't meant to be Lily Allen, it's her failure to distance herself properly from the people she thinks she's better than that makes it interesting.

I still maintain that the narrator is part-Lily and there's some self-mockery in there. At least that's how it sounds to me - whether she intended it that way I don't know. So much if it comes down to the voice - the carelessness and the melancholy too. Intentionally or not, it defuses any superiority contained in the lyric alone. I generally think that Lily is hugely overrated as a lyricist and hugely underrated as a singer.

That last bit sounds about right.

it's a bit bret easton ellis, ostensibly attacking and satirising a culture but really being totally seduced by it. i <3 bret e.e., obv.

as a former lily hata it really brought me around to the idea of her - or rather, what she wants to be, this midpoint between dorothy parker and black box recorder, posh girl about town dealing out caustic bons mots. then i listened to the album and was like, where are the bons mots? for someone who trades on a rep for wit and wordsmithery, something like 'not fair' is a travesty - it's composed entirely of playground-level put-downs with a touch of TMI.

xps

she's definitely a more tolerable singer now she's toned down the cockney street urchin shit a bit. or maybe the emergence of REALLY awful chicks like kate nash and la roux makes lily seem better by comparson.

I think it's partly that the arrangement of "The Fear" is so good tho, it's the first Allen song I'd heard were the music was this beautiful twinkling thing of its own that her voice could get lost in, rather than a backing track for some not very clever wordplay.

personally don't give a toss about whatever she's saying on 'The Fear', it's just quite a pretty Kursten production

something like 'not fair' is a travesty - it's composed entirely of playground-level put-downs with a touch of TMI

otm tho

Hmm, last post disappeared into ether.

Lily gets far too much credit for slagging off obvious targets in a lazy way - crap men, the BNP, religious fanatics. If you're going to be outspoken it helps to have fresh things to speak out against, or at least fresh ways of doing so. The Fear's in a completely different league although Chinese is wonderful - the way the flatly prosaic lyrics are harnessed to this meltingly luscious melody.

Lex, do you know Cristina's stuff? She really pulls off the art-disco Dorothy Parker persona. Her cover of Is That All There Is? is the quintessential jaded-party-girl-on-coke song.

Cristina is the greatest person who ever lived. big on 'Things Fall Apart' lately.

ok that's weird - was gonna say no, have had cristina recommended me many times but never heard her stuff. typed "cristina" into my itunes randomly and what do i see but that exact cover of 'is that all there is'! how the hell i acquired it i have no idea. it's a shitty 128kpbs rip anyway :(

anyway listening and you're right dorian, right down to the holding court in the middle of the room, talking slightly too loud over people feeling. it's pretty great.

lol and the over-emphasising of random words and syllables which you think makes you sound dramatic and theatrical but which actually just sounds a bit mental :/

Just finished reading Superstar DJs by Dom Phillips, which might as well be titled Greedy Cokeheads Fuck It All Up. Reading about some awful coked-out Manumission after-party where it suddenly occurs to some water-treading DJ that this alleged dream life might all be hollow bullshit, Is That All There Is could be the theme tune.

Must stop derailing thread.

Lex and Dorian are spot on re the ambivalence of "The Fear". I think it's definitely Lily having a go at herself as much as anything else.

I don't think it's even ambivalence, "I'm criticising this culture but I am totally 100% part of it because it's so seductive" is writ pretty large. "It's not my fault it's how I'm programmed to function" for god's sake.

NB I think The Fear is rub and Lily's voice is awful and the wordplay is awful. I can't get past "weapon of massive consumption".

Most of the sounds being paraded in these songs all peaked somewhere between 2003 and 2006.

Tim I think you're underestimating the amount of time it actually takes for trends to trickle down to UK High Street level. For example, with the exception of Girls Aloud (something of a special case) and Madonna (who can get away with 'risks' that lesser established acts can't) there were virtually no girls-doing-electropop hitting big in the UK charts from 2003 to 2005. I'm thinking specifically of records like Come And Get It here, which pretty much flopped despite being not-hugely-different to the 2009 model of UK pop.

Likewise it took about three or four years after the Strokes album for choppy haircut indie to become the dominant force in the charts. The UK music industry is hugely conservative and it takes at least two or three years of acclimatising to sounds before launching them as successful mainstream pop. This is why I'm not joining in the "why aren't more people buying funky records?" handwringing - I wouldn't be surprised at all to see the funky beat become a fixture in parts of mainstream pop circa 2011.

What's weird about the last couple of years of UK pop is how it corresponds to a less satisfying version of the vision of pop that significant parts of ILM were pimping around 2004 - girls doing 80s-influenced electropop, grime MCs going pop, people like MIA and Robyn having actual proper huge hits.

The big link record between 2004 and 2009 is of course Drop The Pressure/Dr Pressure, the ubiquity and success of which pretty much directly paved the way for Calvin Harris and the use of electro as the ultimate faux-unifying force in UK pop music. It probably helped kill electrohouse as an exciting club sound as well but that's an aside.

(I'm not sure if this four or five year lag is actually a new thing, or whether the internet has just made it more visible)

It's actually only just occurred to me that much of the Lex-style railing against the state of 2009 pop is less to do with race or ageism or radio playlists and everything to do with the fact that the UK just doesn't have auterish producers who are able to throw newer sounds straight into the pop marketplace and make them work. There doesn't seem to be any sensible midpoint between Terror Danjah and Calvin Harris.

What's weird about the last couple of years of UK pop is how it corresponds to a less satisfying version of the vision of pop that significant parts of ILM were pimping around 2004 - girls doing 80s-influenced electropop, grime MCs going pop, people like MIA and Robyn having actual proper huge hits

otm, it's real "be careful what you wish for" shit - which is partly why i react so badly to it, b/c it's not like the wave of landfill indie bands which just washed past me and never really impinged on me, this seems more...aimed at me, somehow.

it doesn't help that a lot of it is pitched either explicitly or indirectly at a gay audience, i think i actually take personal offence to that.

""Tim I think you're underestimating the amount of time it actually takes for trends to trickle down to UK High Street level. "

I dunno, Sugababes, Richard X, Goldfrapp... wasn't a good half of the UK pop that did well or semi-well 2003 - 2007 in this vein? Leaving aside UK Idol winners and Jamelia.

And before that, circa the beginning of the decade, there was a pop arms race to see who could embrace jittery beats faster and more ostentatiously.

And, y'know, garage had its first massive hit ("Sweet Like Chocolate") in early 1999, and it's second ("Rewind") by the end of the year. Adopting an equivalent chronology, we're already in early 2000 for funky (the release of a first MoS compilation helps with the carbon dating process).

The closest precedent electro-house/electro-pop etc. I can think of is the filter-disco sound. The finest filter-disco-pop-songs ever - "Digital Love" and "Love At First Sight" - were singles in 2001 and 2002 respectively, some 5/6 years before the sound first crossed over. And at the time the less interesting/good versions of that sound (e.g. Room 5's "Make Luv") seemed really past-their-use-by-date.

The difference was that by that point there was no critical consensus in favour of filter-disco, electroclash had already definitively arrived etc. What annoys with the current consensus is the way it's built on a marriage of convenience between the mainstream consumer's most conservative impulses and style guides. I don't expect the populace to thirst for new sounds, but it doesn't help when magazines portray La Roux et. al. as something substantively new.

That said, if the current sound throws up a "Digital Love" or "Love at First Sight" equivalent I'll be happy to praise it.

"The Fear" easssssssy

i adore that song's atmosphere, so beautiful and surreal

K-Punk's piece on "The Fear" was actually very good I thought.

I'd sort of forgotten that the Sugababes even existed, and that's a pretty big blind spot in this argument.

That said, if the current sound throws up a "Digital Love" or "Love at First Sight" equivalent I'll be happy to praise it.

too bad that Surkin mix of Juan Maclean's 'One Day' won't be a hit huh

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

I can't get past "weapon of massive consumption".

God, yeah. It's a great song, probably my favourite on this list, but that line is like something that Carter USM would have spiked for being too crap.

*All* of Lilly's songs are marred by her lyrical awfulness, though.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

i dont think the lex is going to be happy with 3 of the top 4.
I have never heard the Saturdays, i suppose i should youtube it to see why musically and the rest of ilm love it so much. La Roux sucks though. Really really horrible.

ok i played the vid. Not very good. Can see why ILM pop fans like it though I suppose.

Speaking of videos, the best of all these is "Better Off As Two," directed by Tim Pope.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=769atcL8rpc

I'm not upset cause I like "Up" but how could Lily not win?

I think the song sounds better without watching the video though. The Saturdays have zero charisma.

I'm guessing we just done got street-teamed. By a really tiny street-team.

Hi random mentalists from The Saturdays message board!

wtf

NB to Little Boots: This Is Where You Are Going Wrong.

perhaps she should do a single for Children In Need

'The Promise' by Girls Aloud 0

lolllll

that'll show THEM

Particularly when they wind up winning the actual thing for the howevermany-th year in a row.

How things have changed on ILM when Girls Aloud get 0 votes and Calvin Harris gets 11.

That's partly due to GA getting dramatically worse though.

and calvin harris got better?

did you vote?

i didnt know many of them.

i just like poll results, steve. Poll are great aren't they?

i only like the ones i vote in

you vote in them all?

Please stop now.

Sad to see the best track in the list sinking at the bottom of the chart. I'd voted it if I had known the poll was so close to close.

(BTW of course the best track in the list is "Beat Again", not "The Promise", for God's sake)

I'm guessing we just done got street-teamed. By a really tiny street-team.

LOL I just think it's an awesome video. I already cast my lot for Lily early on.

They had whittled it down to The Promise and I'm Not Alone, and Girls Aloud won. Disappointing.

And I have a lot of affection for the Girls. Loving Kind trumped most of the nominees.

sigh

The Promise is easily one of their worst singles, I don't know who votes but you might as well have asked the Girls Aloud fanclub to pick

You mean they aren't the Girls Aloud fanclub?

Nicola turned up apparently, which probably swayed them.

The Promise was the best of the bunch. Why that song somehow has a bad rep in certain corners of the net is beyond me. It's not a useless rehash of the 60s horn revival, it's a ridiculous cut'n'paste of punctuated horns.and.words.and.exlamation.marks and shouts, and is more like a funny house mirror image of the Ronson sound than a pastiche of it. The album is one of the weaker of the recent GA albums, not very coherent, but since Tangled Up is a masterpiece on its own it's a little rushed to say the group is on the decline.

Nicola turned up apparently, which probably swayed them

she turns up most years, and they win most years

the girls have turned up when the show was nominated and didn't win

that was the one some of us went along to but i can't remember what won (jamelia maybe)

lolololololololol FAIL

actually even more embarrassing, not to mention conservative, than the mercury going to a middling rap album

good job it's not a major industry thing then

ridiculous cut'n'paste of punctuated horns.and.words.and.exlamation.marks and shouts

that sounds pretty unappealing, and nothing about it is "house". the song just didn't go anywhere, xenomania can write a helluva middle 8 but if the song is left unresolved then it's all for naught.