Today's Top 40 Spectrum: Youth Trumps Wisdom
Only a couple of new faces on this month's Spectrum, both of which aren't new by any means other than the fact that they have finally found themselves a top ten hit (in America). However, two names have found themselves at the top of the rankings again, one who we haven't heard from since 2007 and another that I am embracing more and more each day that it is officially bordering on creepy. And then finally, and deservedly, at the bottom we have Lady GaGa once again. This time with two capital Gs and the song that is responsible for the overly ubiquitous phrase "disco stick." But she's the only young performer on this month's Spectrum that finds herself getting slambasted with criticism. It's kind of sad, but the two at the top are both babies who were founded by fame at a young age and have a kind of vibrant youthfulness that coats and elevates their sound above the more "credible" acts that follow them in the list. Peep it (and listen to the Lala widgets to hear what I'm yakkin' about)..."You Belong With Me" by Taylor Swift: Knocked it outta the park twice now. Hoo-wee. And while her follow-up 2009 single doesn't achieve the kind of mind-melting moment of celestial enlightenment experienced in her first smash hit "Love Story", this new one has equally affecting hooks, subtle twinges of twang that offend "true country" fans and tickle me pink, and a trite music video that tells a trite story that makes me want to cry at its trite gimmicky ending. But this is all for naught now because I read that The New York Times called her, "one of pop's finest songwriters, country's foremost pragmatist, and more in touch with her life than most adults." The totally normal girl pretending to be a nerd in love with a popular guy who's with a bitchy girlfriend but thinks he's really a nerd at heart and then he finally breaks up with the bitch to be with the nerd even though neither of them are nerds is by no means a fascinating narrative, but when sung and plucked by Swift, the NYT quote rings so true it doesn't even make any sense. She sounds like she knows what she's talking about as a fake nerd more than I know what I'm talking about as a real nerd. And thus my existence means nothing.
"Fire Burning" by Sean Kingston: Okay, Sean, we get it. You're adorable. Even when you try to make a rip-roaring dance track with a video filmed in a dingy abandoned warehouse, you still look and sound like a combination between Kenan, a cartoon panda, and the happy-go-lucky demeanors of an entire Jamaican bobsled team. It's especially odd considering you actually do have a police record and grew up listening to Buju Banton and Ice Cube, according to your Billboard biography. Then again, former angryman extraordinaire Mr. Cube now makes family films in which the only thing he gets angry over is dirty diapers, not racial/societal injustice, so I suppose your transformation into an indefatigable kind of gentle and sweet is just as random (and much more welcome). Too bad this one doesn't have the 1-2-punch of 2007's "Beautiful Girls," though; there's always room for a little random lyric about suicide and pitch-shifting amongst your blissed-out beats and innocent celebratory rhymes, my friend.
"That's Not My Name" by The Ting Tings: It finally made it. It took months and months of hipster MP3 blogging, NPR-assisted indie radio play, and general obnoxiousness, but they finally did it. The Tings, who are our age almost exactly by the way, have drilled their way into the public consciousness much like M.I.A. finally did with "Paper Planes" last year, except without the aid of a kick-ass David Gordon Green trailer or a sick Diplo-produced beat. That's both more impressive and less noteworthy at once. Yes, it's a fun hook for approximately 1.5 choruses, but soon this song and its 1.5 riffs become akin to a commercial jingle that you love to hate and hate to hum on your way to work when the car radio's broken, or a sound that you know you'll always hate but wonder if the world would be more boring without its existence (kinda like that "meee-rowww" my cat makes in the middle of the night when it forgets where it is).
"Say Hey" by Michael Franti & Spearhead: Here's our other "months later" success story. Except this one's more like a "years later" success story. Franti has always been a mainstay in the American International music scene, which is a very frustrating subgenre of "International music" (which is already a frustrating genre for obvious reasons - how can one identify something aurally as being American vs. International? What about hip hop from Argentina or --shudder-- Soweto from Brooklyn?). These are the artists championed by "International" divisions at the major labels not because they are from other countries, but rather because their music sounds like it originated from another country, and while they may indeed be of foreign heritage (like Franti), they are superbly and without question, American as eff. So here's the Spearhead project, looking and sounding like a delightfully eclectic music machine from Jamaica or South Africa, but with the intensely glossy production values of something distinctly American. It sounds wrong, feels wrong, but what the eff, at least it's a drop in the bucket for something somewhere other than LA and NYC, even though it 9/10 comes from one of our culture co-opting synthetic-centric coasts. Jebus, Sean Kingston is more reggae than this cat.
"Love Game" by Lady GaGa: Oh man I want so bad to just make this a one-line zinger; too bad that's gotten old by now, especially with this feature in which the lowest ranking track is almost always deserving of it. But Lady GaGa does not deserve that. It would be too easy, simple, and appropriate to just type "Disco stick?! Are you srrrrssss??" for someone that isn't even shockingly bad anymore. In fact, I don't know if she ever was. Looking back, I even typed that her first big jam, "Just Dance," was a serviceable pop song worthy neither of clamor nor disdain. And thus, since I don't want to just "leave it at that" like I usually would, I will take the high road and stretch this one-line zinger out into a mediocre paragraph of pedestrian dribble, somehow saying nothing at all but looking at a solid block 'o text that seems so...texty...but really it's just white space disguising as content, like Ms. GaGa herself.
Zing!
Labels: chris, music, Today's Top 40 Spectrum
This entry was posted by chris, on
Tuesday, July 21, 2009.
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I <3 you, Taylor Swift.
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