Guitars in a Booty Beats World

Every once in a while, I like to check in on the charts at Minnesota's home for Top 40 music - KDWB. It's always interesting to see what few chosen "rock" songs have made it into the Top 40 chart amongst a sea of hip-hop, R&B, and various T-Pain collaborations (that's right, yet another Blogulator music post referencing the vocoder superstar). These past few weeks, the guitar songs have been staying even more toward the bottom half of the charts than usual, with only two using said instrument in the top ten, and these two tracks are of the variety that I generally wouldn't even consider actual songs, much less "rock" songs: "Bubbly" by Colby Caillat at #2 and "Over You" by Chris Daughtry at #9.

Wait for it...wait for it...yes, lite grunge to soundtrack two broken souls.

First of all, I thought for sure the world's flirtation with VH1/MTV cross-pollination was over (or the music-related 90s versions of these two networks anyway). Let the watered-down calm-day-on-a-beach video lovers have theirs and let the ADHD flashy flash loud bangs have theirs. KDWB, or K-Dweeb as I'm sure they wish they were called, is all about the aneurysmic MTV music until one of those songs comes on and then suddenly around the world, you can hear either a million 12-year-olds turning off their radios or a million soccer moms who begrudgingly let their kids choose the radio station in the car say, "hey, this ain't half bad" and turn up the volume just a teency bit.

No, Blogulator readers, not until #16 on the charts do we finally get to an actual rocking tune that does not use the guitar as the musical equivalent of Sunny Delight or Surge soda. Please click on that link. (Peanut Gallery: "Excuse me, sir, but I believe you've bypassed "Wake Up Call" by Maroon 5 at a respectable #12!") Sorry, Peanut Gallery, but I must ignore you for obvious reasons. #16 presents us with my latest guilty pleasure bordering on actual pleasure - "Misery Business" by Paramore. While their formula is basically Kelly Clarkson meets Fall Out Boy, at least there's energy and passion here, unlike our other two examples. It also signifies opening the male-dominated emo-pop field to more female vocalists, a subgenre that has until now been all about "losing the girl." Until now, angsty rocking female-fronted Top 40 tunes have pretty much just been Avril and Kelly, while Boys Like Girls and Plain White T's stood off on their own, unmentioned in the same breath. Paramore is proving that the split doesn't have to exist. That is, if pop culture was gendered I mean.

In this current landscape of booty shaking and bland ballads, it's always good to have at least one rock song rocking the proverbial boat. Funnily enough, only one spot below Paramore, there's also a supposed "rock" band that is trying in all the wrong ways to bridge that gap between the dance song and the guitar song. Indie music has already been doing this successfully since 2003 with LCD Soundsystem and The Rapture, and until the mainstream comes around and bastardizes that subgenre (Dance-pop-rock?), people like Good Charlotte shouldn't even be trying. The ridiculously titled "I Don't Wanna be in Love (Dance Floor Anthem)" apparently thinks that 80s retro isn't totally out of style yet. I mean c'mon, when you've got The Killers sounding more like The Boss than New Order, I think it's time for everyone to move on. Once again, indie's taking care of it GC. Go back to dating barely legal super skinny actors that write better songs (or rather probably hire people who can) than you could ever imagine.

Trying to make it all the way through this song gives the same kind of feeling I get at the end of watching this commercial. At first, you're bored, then your eyebrow raises, then you are scarred forever (pun intended).

This entry was posted by chris, on Thursday, November 29, 2007. You can leave your response.