Today's Top 40 Spectrum: Pop Radio Staples and The Status Quo

This month's Top 40 is full of the same old same old, plus Jay Sean. It's frustrating and familiar, boring and comfortable, and all mapped out, ranked from best to worst, in this handy grouping of paragraphs below...



"Run This Town" by Jay Z & Rihanna feat. Kanye West: It's about time, Z. It's taken me far too long to learn to appreciate Mr. Beyonce's awkward slacker baritone rhyming. Yes, it's thrown practically into the background with Rihanna's almost grating refrain dominating the balance, but its mere presence (alongside Kanye's similarly classic awkward delivery) is enough to put some humanity into the rap game. Sure, it's full of the requisite machismo and ego, but at least it sounds like it's emanating from two men of average stature, even though we all know there's little to nothing average about either of these superstars. But they've climbed the ranks because their styles are so uniquely pedestrian and somehow it's still not old. West forgoes the AutoTune (possibly thanks to Jay Z's understanding of hip hop purity) and Jay-Z keeps his beat tense but minimal (on some listens, it admittedly comes across as lifeless), churning out an effortless (yes, possibly in a bad way) quick hit that sounds a little realer than it probably should. And that's fine with me.


"Down" by Jay Sean & Lil' Wayne: But sometimes that which feels the most "real" or the less "tricked out" just ends up sounding inert and like airwaves filler material. I mean, his album is called Blueprint 3 for crying out loud, as if he's outlining the same thing for the third time. At least people like Jay Sean are riding on the coattails of a bombastic trend and are one-upping those before them with an instrumental track that's even more dramatic than most of Ne-Yo's or Chris Brown's attempts at saccharine space-hop. At least he's incorporating the voice of another rapper that has been lost on the charts for some time while he's blogging for ESPN, having just enough time pass by so that people are clamoring for some raspy AutoTune, but not quite too long so as to have the majority of the prospective audience not remember him or stop caring about him. Yes, it's sickly sweet and arguably just as mind-numbingly blank-slated as the track slotted above this one, but at least its laminated heart is lovingly paved over with gloss so immaculately constructed that it goes down the 'ol "ear-throat" like a medicine that makes your stomach hurt a little bit and doesn't actually make you feel better, but at least it tasted kinda like grape soda.



"Party in the U.S.A." by Miley Cyrus: I first saw this song performed on The Today Show during their "Summer Concert Series" that I somehow caught far too often as my summer days dwindled down and the beginning of the school year loomed nearer and nearer. As I sat catatonic in my boxers with a tiny plastic cup of orange juice in my hand, I watched a group of JC Penney models act as Cyrus's backing band while she plastered a smile on her face and phoned in a song about partying with hand claps and a pristine swishing guitar lick. After the performance, I could see through Matt Lauer's receding hairline into his skull and the machinations of his mind became crystal clear to me, telepathically communicating to my own inner thoughts, through my bedhead and thin film of drool that had traversed across my cheeks overnight and onto my forehead. If the dusty cogs and gears could have been be translated into English, they would have groaned with defeated earnestness into Cyrus's ear in the midst of the August rain: "My heart is ripe with sorrow and my soul is but a faint memory from a cloudy past." The studio version of the song is kinda catchy, though.



"Already Gone" by Kelly Clarkson: If Clarkson ever attempted a ballad in the past, I don't remember it. But I'm sure she did at some point; maybe it just didn't become a single? I'm not sure and this new found confusion is affecting me to a deeply disturbing degree. Her voice is still aces. The strings are synthetically golden. The simple kick-snare beat is dampened, reverbed, and split into stereo echo, rendering it sweetly hypnotic. But holy stinkin' crap is this song boring. Even when the hi-hat and tambourine glimmers into the track's second half and the guitar pulses slightly into the mix while Clarkson's voice gets a little wobblier with every falsetto ululation, it still manages to fall limp into my eardrums. Yes, if I very carefully and with the utmost attention caress the plastic on my headphones as I pick out every detail from the production, these parts add up to an impressive sum, but when played while my back slouches and I quick check something on iMDB about some actor I've been wondering about lately, it all fades so easily into the background. It's too gorgeous to be muzak and too specifically sculpted to be even mediocre; it's just disappointingly perfect.



"Sweet Dreams" by Beyonce: Are we still worrying about Sasha Fierce? In fact, all of the names above with the exception of Jay Sean (and still, the only reason his song is near the top is because of Weezy) are old news to the max. Do we really need to comb through the wreckage of the throwaway halves of albums from almost a year ago to find hit tracks, especially as the winter seasons approaches and I would think record execs would want to excite the public with some new artists and/or albums to keep their minds occupied while their bodies freeze? Or is it that in order for us to thaw out in the car in between short bursts from door to door, we need to hear the familiar, reminisce about the summer jams through fourth and fifth singles off records that we almost forgot about, but then were force-fed to relive the magic of in order to subtly tingle us into submission with the same homogenized airwaves we've already accepted and "enjoyed" for years and years? Here's to hoping next month's Top 40 Spectrum is a bit less of the same and a little more of the WTF.

This entry was posted by chris, on Tuesday, October 13, 2009. You can leave your response.