chartpop obscurities & unpopular populism

i

there might be a thread about this already -- glossily produced chartpop that failed commercially, had little or no critical attention/rehabilitation and whose commercial failure attracted no attention

ii

that would exclude british style low-budget realness like vanilla, or (eg) victoria beckham's failed post spice girls forays with name producers and expensive videos

iii

there must exist some amount of music in this category that has been released in recent years and been poorly marketed while having no content-value to attract popists, so it will just be remaindered in youtube videos with 600 views and press releases littered around unloved blogs

2 True Steppers & Dane Bowers featuring Victoria Beckham Out Of Your Mind Single Aug 2000
6 Victoria Beckham Not Such An Innocent Girl Single Sep 2001 Notes
10 Victoria Beckham Victoria Beckham Album Oct 2001 Notes
6 Victoria Beckham A Mind Of It's Own Single Feb 2002
3 Victoria Beckham This Groove / Let Your Head Go Single Jan 2004

Failed?

Actually, I got the impression that she got to the point that she didn't actually want it.

So, basically, you want to talk about cheezy attempts at the big 'pop', that failed and nobody (but nobody) remembers?

However, the album has only sold 52,016 copies overall in the United Kingdom, much lower than any other Spice solo album, while costing 3 million pounds to record. After "Being Victoria Beckham," an official documentary that aired in early March 2002, the album re-entered the UK charts at number sixty-seven.

that is a sort of typical case of a supposedly failed chartpop album

there must be examples from recent years which due to industry panic and perhaps the diminished cost of ~glossiness~ have attracted far less attention than that

So, the single gets to number three, which isn't too shabby.

They have two albums of 'differing' style, seemingly stuck between releasing 'that one' or 'this one'.

Of course, particularly then, the natural option would be to release both in a double-pack in a "Speakerboxx/Love Below" style.

Or, someone turns around and goes, "You know what? Arsed, actually."

And so she packs the singing career, and concentrates on fashion, etc.

right

OK, now we can talk about "The Roaring Boys"

Except I have forgotten all I ever knew about them.

Apart from hearing Gary Davis playing one of their songs with the signoff "hope that does well for them"..

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Awes!

this a thread for the doyens of the ilm pop crew to show their knowledge

there is approx 1 metric tonne of this stuff released every week! at least if i'm reading the question right.

Yep, this probably made up about 80% of the pop released in the last decade.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35J-3kWoDTI&feature=related

Lucy Walsh, daughter of Joe, signed to Island by LA Reid, under 3000 Youtube views for an official video.

yes! this is just the sort of thing i am looking for

you know how when you are 15 and you discover ar kane or spacemen 3, and for a brief time whilst you fail or refuse to recognise that quite a lot of other people love ar kane there is a sense of sublime and private enamorment, for nobody else could possibly care as much about playing with fire as you do

so, i am looking for some utterly unloved and uncontemplated glossy pop with at least borderline professional 720p youtube videos that i can watch on repeat and possibly acquire some gnostic insight from these unknown songs of assonance and expedience

the lucy walsh track is a good start, it is poignantly gloopy and the video has some moments that could possibly seem spectral or even unsettling if you watched it repeteadly

rachel stevens and annie own this thread.

little or no critical attention/rehabilitation

ok ..

i concede they are not worthy of conclusion due to ilm/gruniad love ..

/fuckingthreadrules

conclusion = inclusion

it's not an arbitrary rule, i think nakh's looking for stuff that's unknown and at least in this corner of the world that doesn't apply to either of those 2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBNW7L24TUQ

is a group like this considered enough of a failure? i mean it didn't do *that* badly but it kinda looks like it was meant to do better

I seem to remember a Scottish girl group a few years back called Lemonscent. They failed miserably. Have no idea if they were any good or not.
Marcello do you remember them?

also the dancemania series of albums featured, in addition to some non-failure acts, plenty of clearly chart-chasing music by acts that probably would have been heard by almost no one had they not been featured on this series or in the video games that fed off the series (see album "in my dreams" by rebecca, etc.)

Poor Lucy Walsh, I bet she thought that would be a hit.

In the pre-internet days there would be heavily marketed boy bands that even yr standard teen or pop mags would rage a viciously unfair war against. My mind might have just made up the rollerblading boy band E-Male but I'm sure they actually existed.

"we are E-Male, we can't fail" iirc?

http://forums.digitalspy.co.uk/showthread.php?t=350606 <<<decent infodump for this sort of thing altho lots of legit albeit one-off hit bands get discussed also

does the kind of creepy boy band dream street (which had a young jesse mccartney) count? they had basically no presence outside the tv commercial promoting their cd (unless, idk, radio disney played them)... but their video has a few million views so i guess they can't have done that badly

you're going to love this: http://theisleoffailedpopstars.blogspot.ca/
and this (for singles): http://lostpoptreasures.blogspot.ca/

i also have fond memories of this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KEmgUq-KPs

and this singer used to be advertised in subway ads here in toronto but i've never heard her stuff:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dITNePiQoRg

I remember Lemonscent! They were gash, though.

They had a single get disqualified from the charts due to 'suspicious sales patterns'.

Not quite in the Lucy Walsh class but with under 200,000 views in the last three years for a song written and produced by Ryan Tedder from a band that apparently had their debut album (never released) produced by RedOne, Varsity Fanclub would count in my book.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLBHTP1h_nA

There's something particularly tragic about failed boybands with little freeze-frame captions that come up in their videos to tell you each individual member's name. 3/5 were odd-looking, so it was never going to work out

They had a single get disqualified from the charts due to 'suspicious sales patterns'.

aye that was because they sold shitloads in Scotland but nowhere else so they thought it was suspicious hahaha

The band Wonderland may be what you're after, a recent example of manufactured and failed pop. Put together by Louis Walsh in 2008, it took them a long time to reach the public, their debut "Not a love song" was all over commercial radio in the late winter of 2011 (it was always playing on our local station at the time, introduced as "The next big thing from Louis Walsh" like that was a badge of greatness) but didn't hit the charts in a big way, their follow ups barely got played on the radio, their label dropped them as their album was released and they split up a month later.

i probably have many contributions i can make here (#cassiefanclub to thread?) but i'm not really thinking about music much while wimbledon is on. but you can have this, which i'm happy arguing was AHEAD OF ITS TIME - nowadays this happily trashy vomity clubgirl pop is pretty much the default

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulO9B_4lAk0

BY THE END OF THE NIGHT IMMA HAVE YOU DRUNK AND THROWIN UP
BY THE END OF THE NIGHT IMMA HAVE YOU SO! FUCKED! UP!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfG7REZcD70

Paradiso Girls' Who's My Bitch was pretty great.

One of them (Lauren Holloway, iirc) appears on Party Rock Anthem.

(#cassiefanclub to thread?)

Too credible.

I know this was big in Canada but it's too amazing not to post (again) here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97CtEReZEaQ&feature=player_embedded

Does anyone remember Kinnda? The only version of "Don't Bring To The Beach" on youtube is this live version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsPduhcj8n8

Back on Paradiso Girls, Aria Crescendo's solo single Borrow You has 6,000 view in two months on Youtube and 37 on her official Myspace page.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lij-2GgF2vg&feature=plcp

She was definitely tipped as the breakout star of the group - it was effectively built to do for her what PCD did for Nicole Scherzinger (by the same producers, management, etc).

e-male definitely existed

haha i still listen to "patron tequila" often enough that i forget that the act never really went anywhere :(

i believe the girl who was on party rock anthem was lauren bennett -- who now leads pcd (???)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKm8L5F-Va0

w/nicole scherzinger

fatty koo should have struck it rich.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brzOkVL6SRc&feature=related

Paradiso Girls were astounding - Patron Tequila was a summer anthem for a bunch of my friends a few summers back.

And yeah, I mentally disqualified b4-4 because they had multiple hits in Canada, but Get Down really is the absolute best. If we're counting non-American/global smashes as 'chartpop obscurities' I'm basically doing this as a project all summer with Canadian chartpop over here: http://49thparallelpop.tumblr.com/

At the rate I'm going it's going to take *forever* because there is so much strange/wonderful/horrible chartpop that never left Canada.

I haven't written this one up yet, so it's a present for the thread - Busted, by the band I.D. which stood for Identically Different. I'm not sure if this was supposed to be a tongue in cheek name poking fun at other boybands, but well, this speaks for itself:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6XnbzyxW5Q

the Click Five's first single was prob too successful for this thread but i liked their follow-up "Catch Your Wave" that didn't do nearly as well on the charts

Motherlode:

http://popdirt.com/artist-search-0-f/

Unless they have taken down a previous video or reset the stats, Juicee Kouture's Might Be The Police appears to have 1646 views since it was first put up in April.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNi0zDTPgOc

For a song that has been stuck in my head for the bulk of the last six months, that's quite impressive.

http://tattletailzz.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/color-blind-450x300.jpg

u sprung

THAT CRACKER MIGHT BE THE POLICE is a dope song tho

It really is.

can I adopt this child?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWk4JBNFeSI

halfarsed irish pop band fifth avenue

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6FvkLxRmcM

similarly Dove whose crowded house cover seems like this weird time capsule of the modest aspirations of the kind of stuff they showed on irish pop music shows when i was a kid.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kD8Hr7saGlM

there are maybe twelve people that remember either of these bands

That Fifth Avenue came after Miss-Teeq I assume?

Hmm, auto correct there.

Actually, it's more No Scrubs isn’t it. I thnk I need to go to sleep.

Back on Paradiso Girls, Aria Crescendo's solo single Borrow You has 6,000 view in two months on Youtube

Now 10,000 in two years. She's still trying to make a go of it - her recent videos have a couple of hundred plays each. I wish her well.

Juicee K appears to have had another two songs but nothing in about a year.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BblbY1NERI0

I would probably listen to an album.

<3 Amanda Mair and boxedjoy and i both voted for her in the singles poll but Wednesday, which was released in April last year, currently has 4354 views.

https://youtu.be/QS37YUYofo8

Juicee K's classic Might Be The Police still waiting to break 10k two years on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MP1I3_Vi2ds

Juicee K brings me so much joy every time i'm reminded of it.

Probably fits into the 'british style low-budget realness' but nonetheless

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-euidrCj_c

I think the first Nadia Oh album was a legitimate attempt to make a pop star but the second album felt like someone's weekend hobby that couldn't distract them from a Mon-Fri office job. I mean that in terms of execution - it was actually brilliant, leagues ahead of the debut.

Amanda Mair doesn't really seem to me like an attempt to launch a proper pop star? Her indie credibility - ties to Radio Dept, Mary Onettes etc - seems too pronounced to see her cross over.

I still love this massive xenomania pop hit from 2003 which is actually a complete flop from 2011, though she still seems to get on magazine covers for some reason.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pj8122XxqDA

I'm a big fan of the consistently underachieving UK girl group M.O. whose tropical Sugababes routine appears destined to be ignored forever despite five or six terrific singles in a row now.

really love "shot you down" by florrie

xp Yeah, office job hobby is definitely the vibe, probs deserves some of that pc music money though.

there is a person uploading videos to Youtube under the name ohnoitisnathan, with about 100 different channels of twenty or so videos (eg ohnoitisnathan10, ohnoitisnathan11 etc) so that if his channel does get pulled for copyright infringement the library of uploads isn't entirely lost. It's a mix of late 80s and early 90s pop and rock that doesn't seem to exist anywhere else on Youtube and it all seems ripped from VHS from Australia's version of The Box. I find it fascinating and curious how there can be these songs and accompanying videos, that people have spent time and effort and money on, and they exist as forgotten ephemeral minutiae with a few hundred views. Basically if you type "ohnoitisnathan" into the search bar you'll stumble upon stuff perfect to this thread's remit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMD1ITCZfNY

Keren & Chelle "Sugar Daddy" - this is some good fake SAW pop from the girls who became Alisha's Attic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1IUiFirMkg

Ultracynic "Nothing Is Forever" - this is like if Saint Etienne had followed the rave hints of Foxbase Alpha into full piano-house breakbeat

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLqJfXBde3c

Deuce "On The Bible" - precursor to the Steps/S Club 7 mode of UK pop but with the kitsch factor considerably heightened

always had a soft spot for N-Tyce "Telefunkin'" - UK r&b pop about phone sex that feels older than it actually is

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoLXBufQuz0

The First Steps remix of that is an early UK Garage classic:

https://youtu.be/U_i4j1rx_lw

Not quite in the Lucy Walsh class but with under 200,000 views in the last three years for a song written and produced by Ryan Tedder from a band that apparently had their debut album (never released) produced by RedOne, Varsity Fanclub would count in my book.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLBHTP1h_nA

There's something particularly tragic about failed boybands with little freeze-frame captions that come up in their videos to tell you each individual member's name. 3/5 were odd-looking, so it was never going to work out

― Temporarily Famous In The Czech Republic (ShariVari), Wednesday, June 27, 2012 6:44 PM (four years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this song is so good!

it's really hard to find any info about this band or this song

seriously obsessed with this song

it's pretty tedder-by-the-numbers but the hook is undeniable and the bridge is pretty inspired