Semipop Life

"In “Guys Do It All the Time,” her only song ever to top the country chart, she turned..."

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 15:37:30 -0800

“

In “Guys Do It All the Time,” her only song ever to top the country chart, she turned tables on the dudes by staying out till 4 a.m. having beers with the girls: a rocking boot-scooter, surrounded on the album with other line-dance-ready two-steps about young ladies out on the town, ‘cause it ain’t a party till they get here. Even that hit about demonic temptation sounded totally optimistic, affirming Nashville’s fallback stance that, sure, things might go wrong now and then, but ultimately stuff will work out, because at least if you stick to home and hearth and God and the comfort of your small town, all is right with the world.

McCready probably already knew by then what a crock that is. But she was ambitious — she’d graduated high school early to get her career going — and in the wake of Shania Twain, Nashville had its eyes on photogenic young women. Ten Thousand Angels, which went on to sell 2 million copies, came out just a couple of months before 14-year-old LeAnn Rimes’ Blue, which went on to sell 6 million in the U.S. alone. The idea, it seems, was maybe to build a demographic coalition between suburban tween-girl pop fans and their country-fan moms; Lila McCann (1997), Jessica Andrews (1999), Rebecca Lynn Howard (2000), Alecia Elliott (2000), Cyndi Thompson (2001), and others had all come and gone before Taylor Swift finally hit the jackpot starting in 2006.

Which is to say: the industry is hell.

”

- Chuck Eddy, “Mindy McCready: When the angels stopped watching”

"Kevin Shields’ guitar sounds sexual – in a way, his guitar is like the late Luther..."

Sun, 17 Feb 2013 08:20:33 -0800

“Kevin Shields’ guitar sounds sexual – in a way, his guitar is like the late Luther Vandross’ voice. Both artists have an erotic signature sound that’s so massive, it’s a pure abstraction. Shields’ guitar and Vandross’ voice radiate the helplessness of love, as if they’re letting themselves get totally swallowed up, as if surrendering to the hugeness of the sound is the same thing as surrendering to love. I’ve always liked the title of my favorite Luther record: The Best of Luther Vandross … The Best of Love. Obviously there’s an arrogance in trying to sing in the voice of love itself, but both guys sound ego-free because their identity gets dissolved in the romance of this sound, a romance they share with their audience. (That’s why not even hardcore fans seem to care about these guys’ individual personalities, or their private lives.)”

- Rob Sheffield, “My hundredth listen to the new My Bloody Valentine album: Even better than the first”

Links

Sun, 10 Feb 2013 14:56:43 -0800

Kate Beaton: “Nasty”

Jessica Hopper: Fleetwood Mac: Rumours

Maura Johnston, “Post-menopausal antiquing, or: Please, Rick Moody, just quit it”

Allen Lowe, “Keeping the American in African American”

Rachael Maddux, “Do we need a Postal Service reunion?”

Michaelangelo Matos, “Why Grammys put other awards to shame”

Zel McCarthy, “Insomniac’s raves aren’t as bad as the LA Times is saying — they’re worse”

Wesley Morris, “Bow down to the queen: Notes on Beyonce’s halftime show”

Nick Murray, “With “Merry ‘Go Round,” Kacey Musgraves starts writing the future of country”

Ned Raggett, My Bloody Valentine: mbv

The Singles Jukebox, Margaret Berger: “I Feed You My Love”

Katherine St Asaph, “The Grammys’ R&B and rap problem”

Oliver Wang, “Bullet points: How hip-hop handles the gun”

Seth Colter Walls, “The ‘one drop rule’ of jazz”

"Concepts depend on the course of a particular, and Womack & Womack’s Love Wars reveled in..."

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 09:18:09 -0800

“Concepts depend on the course of a particular, and Womack & Womack’s Love Wars reveled in particulars. The 1983 album, a minor hit on the R&B and British charts, is most famous for the title track and the Larry Levanized mix of “Baby I’m Scared of You,” less for its quiet, rippling grooves and needle-sharp lyrics chronicling a relationship whose experience with discord deepens its intimacy, although they’d trade the discord for the intimacy without blinking. They even transform the most ridiculous Stones ballad into a cry of desolation. Love Wars should be as immense as Shoot Out The Lights, Blood on the Tracks, and Wild Gift as a breakup-to-makeup classic. If renewed interest in “think pieces” on indie attraction to R&B have a point, it’s to stir interest in albums this solid.”

- Alfred Soto, “Cecil Womack – R.I.P.”

"Watching a performer in her prime, especially in the day of the hundred-forty-character one-liner,..."

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 09:46:51 -0800

“Watching a performer in her prime, especially in the day of the hundred-forty-character one-liner, is as frustrating as it is thrilling. Beyoncé does nothing wrong live. She sings and dances as if both acts are simply getting easier as she ages, that synchronizing her body and voice to the visual mayhem around her isn’t even something she needs to rehearse. (She rehearsed.)…
Her smiles feel unforced, her high notes unstrained. She’s Beyoncé, the model of a pop star, who retains the right to be our alpha-female performer by never taking it for granted, by visibly loving all of the work the job involves. There’s a difference between being the object of everyone’s gaze and constantly recreating the reason the gaze is there. Who could look at anyone else when Beyoncé is on stage? The game apparently got pretty interesting after the blackout, but that involved some unknown force. (A power outage delayed play for thirty-four minutes right after Beyoncé’s thirteen-minute performance.) Beyoncé is exactly what we know, and it is more remarkable every time she just goes and does it, as if to always obscure the fact that she had to come up with herself first, before we knew her.”

- Sasha Frere-Jones, “America’s alpha-female pop star”

Links

Sun, 03 Feb 2013 11:54:22 -0800

David Bevan, “K-pop’s new style: G-Dragon blazes a cray path”

Amy Blaszyk, “Patty Andrews, leader of the Andrews Sisters, dies”

Jonathan Bogart, Dawn Richard: Goldenheart

Randy Fox, “Love at 33 1/3: Reflections on a year of writing about record stores”

Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, “When the lights shut off: Kendrick Lamar and the decline of the black blues narrative”

Corinna Jentzsch, Death Metal Angola

Alex Macpherson, “Rapper Angel Haze on religion, rape and survival”

Ryan Maffei, “25 45s from the ’50s (as per Christgau)”

Sally O’Rourke, The Supremes: “You Can’t Hurry Love”

Ann Powers, “All the singular ladies: 6 women at the cutting edge of R&B”

Jody Rosen, Les Miserables: Highlights from the Motion Picture Soundtrack

Hank Shteamer, Miles Davis: The Bootleg Series, Volume 2: Live in Europe 1969

Dan Weiss, “Sorry, haters: Kitty Pryde is staying a while”

Scott Woods, “Conversation with Joe Bonomo, editor of Conversations with Greil Marcus”

Jon Young, Tegan and Sara: Heartthrob

Lindsay Zoladz, Marianne Faithfull: Broken English: Deluxe Edition

"Once upon a time, country music influences were inherited at childhood, not selected in adulthood...."

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 12:27:09 -0800

“

Once upon a time, country music influences were inherited at childhood, not selected in adulthood. You grew up on Willie, Waylon, Merle, Dolly, George, Johnny and Hank, and even after you put your own little twist on that legacy, your influence was still obvious. The new generation of country artists pays lip service to that past, but it’s obvious those legends aren’t real influences anymore. What artist with commercial ambitions could afford to choose them? Just look at what happened to the artists who did.

Jamey Johnson released Living for a Song — a terrific, very personal tribute to Hank Cochran — and the critics voted it the No. 1 album of 2012. Dwight Yoakam did his Buck Owens-meets-Paul McCartney thing again, and the critics voted 3 Pears the year’s No. 2 album. Kellie Pickler abandoned her previous country-pop compromises and made 100 proof, the updated Loretta Lynn record she’s always wanted to make, and it was voted the No. 4 album. Alan Jackson sang as beautifully as George Jones on Thirty Miles West, voted the No. 8 album.

But here’s the kicker: For all their critic-pleasing artistic achievement, not one of those four albums — all of them released by major labels — yielded a Top 20 country single. Radio shunned these albums as instinctively as the critics embraced them. In other words, if an ambitious young country artist wants to get played on country radio, his or her role model has to be an ’80s rock star rather than a ’70s country star. The choice of which rock star to emulate can reveal the artist’s essential instincts.

”

- Geoffrey Himes, on the Nashville Scene Country Music Critics’ Poll

Cerebral Decanting: Listening Notes, Ultra-Brief (Pt. 74)

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 12:24:47 -0800

Cerebral Decanting: Listening Notes, Ultra-Brief (Pt. 74):

decanting-cerebral:

This Is….NRA Country, Vol. 1

For the moment, ignore the dreary anthems to self-sufficiency and race war making up this year-old compilation whose proceeds go directly to funding our most reactionary and violent lobbying powerhouse. Focus instead on the mission statement embedded within the advertisements, which serves as a reminder of how the language of division and use of false dichotomies helps split the electorate. “The heart” of NRA Country? “Support of our U.S. military,” despite the fact that most active duty military prefer hip-hop and metal to Craig Morgan and Justin Moore, even while all the guest appearances and product placements in the world won’t help slow the suicide epidemic depleting the ranks. “Appreciation for the great outdoors,” as if the vast majority of country music fans and gun enthusiasts don’t dwell within a suburban / exurban environment that has ravaged mother nature as surely as Le Corbusier or Robert Moses. Plus, “love of family,” as insidious an example of codespeak as Paul Ryan’s dire warning that the “urban vote” shortchanged the past election. Then consider the implications of a Trace Adkins line like “there’s more of us than there are of them” on a song about “the people who hate my God,” Josh Thompson sneering at welfare recipients while pledging to greet with a loaded weapon anybody “not welcome” in his zip code, and Rodney Adkins good-naturedly detailing the ways his daughter’s potential suitors get introduced to his well-stocked arsenal. “Now it’s all for show/Ain’t nobody gonna get hurt,” he smiles, and one doesn’t need to question the Constitution’s guarantee to keep and bear arms to know that’s a deadly line of cornpone bullshit right there.

"The situation described in the opening blurb of Complex’s list (she knows Lil Wayne songs. Cool! She..."

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 18:50:22 -0800

“The situation described in the opening blurb of Complex’s list (she knows Lil Wayne songs. Cool! She knows too much. I’m scared!) is a classic set-up for “negging,” the totally despicable “Pickup Artist” strategy of undermining a woman’s ego in order to make her more vulnerable to your advances. Restricting women’s role in rap consumption to “girl who tacitly obliges your personal tastes but doesn’t assert her own too much” is pretty much Rap Game Negging—you’re cool, but wait, sit down, you’re not that cool. And equally toxic is going so far as to call women “groupies” for paying attention to (and, yes, favoriting the tweets of) the same rap internet thought leaders as you do is so un-selfaware it’s laughable (and may I inject a hearty #HAUHAUHAU at the very suggestion that you nerds have “groupies”). And it serves only to perpetuate a flattening of a potentially very robust discussion—the critical equivalent of the pallid death that is a RapGenius lyrics page, every stone one could possibly unturn and examine beneath affixed solidly to the ground. Exclude women from meaningful participation in the discourse, and you’re left in a virtual Chief Keef video—a barren room full of shirtless bros shaking their dreads back and forth, forever.”

- Today is Katherine Calls Out And Links To Call-Outs Of Dudes Duding It Up Day, apparently, and I haven’t even finished writing. (via katherinestasaph)

"So it is only natural that young female artists engage us and communicate with their image(s) as..."

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 16:41:53 -0800

“So it is only natural that young female artists engage us and communicate with their image(s) as much as they do with their music. Image is perhaps an even more effective vehicle for their expression than songs. No girl escapes teenhood without a keen awareness of exactly how the world sees her, what it expects of her; she knows the weight of the world’s desire down to the ounce. Young women’s arduous fandom of an act is often seen as the very proof of their music’s artlessness, so rapt are girls with image that it supersedes any sort of real relationship with the music. And even though Swift and Boucher placed high in this Pazz & Jop—Lana less so (Born to Die, #54 album)—the critique with all three has frequently fallen to the seeming purposefulness of their artifice: their awareness of it; their dutiful maintenance of it.”

- Jessica Hopper, “Pazz & Jop: Taylor Swift, Grimes, and Lana Del Rey: The year in blond ambition”

"Maybe I’ve become so goop-averse in my battle against creeping cornballism that I’m..."

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 13:14:27 -0800

“Maybe I’ve become so goop-averse in my battle against creeping cornballism that I’m turning cynic-not-skeptic like too many bad critics do. But that’s not how it feels to me. I have a lot of fun for someone actuaries believe should no longer be working, and working in the fun business is one reason why. Instead I’d say the fissures subsisting below the year’s provisional consensus get me down. If twentysomethings want to like Kendrick Lamar’s album more than Loudon Wainwright’s, I say more power to them. The Cloud Nothings’, even — there’s an imagined future there that neither Loudon Wainwright or I will ever know firsthand again, and why shouldn’t someone whose life stretches ahead cherish that? But it bums me that it doesn’t go the other way — that the residual formal mastery of someone like Wainwright seems incapable of touching musical aesthetes of a certain age, who as children of 9/11 know better than they’d prefer that death is in the cards for everyone. Which does in turn cut into how much possibility I can feel in that mastery.”

- Robert Christgau, “May the consensus have consequences”. Context: The Dean’s List 2012.

"If you listen for it, Iyer’s approach to leading a trio echoes Ahmad Jamal’s. Though the..."

Sun, 13 Jan 2013 19:34:12 -0800

“If you listen for it, Iyer’s approach to leading a trio echoes Ahmad Jamal’s. Though the former’s climaxes are crowded with notes where the latter’s are spare, both styles pivot not just on thinking of the piano as an orchestra in miniature, but also on assigning orchestral roles to bass and drums as well. The breathtaker here is another spin on M.J.’s “Human Nature,” toughened and greatly expanded from the version on Iyer’s 2010 album, Solo, and building to a tremolo hailstorm.”

- Francis Davis, “Rhapsody Jazz Poll 2012: Vijay Iyer prevails”. See also Tom Hull, “The big sort”.

"It’s built to be played loud on headphones, late at night, all alone, staring at the wall and..."

Fri, 04 Jan 2013 15:28:18 -0800

“

It’s built to be played loud on headphones, late at night, all alone, staring at the wall and wondering when your life is going to stop feeling like imprisonment in the towers of Megadon. What are Rush but a three-headed “It Gets Better” statement for generations of messed-up adolescents, dreaming of a better world but unwilling to give up on this one?

So what will people argue about now that Rush have been voted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? Don’t worry – Rush fans can just move on to debating why their heroes are deprived of knighthoods or the Nobel Prize in economics. Rush fans love to argue. And Rush obviously like it that way.

”

- Rob Sheffield, Rush: 2112: Deluxe Edition

"Her first major hit was “With My Eyes Wide Open I’m Dreaming,” but she got noticed..."

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 18:27:24 -0800

“Her first major hit was “With My Eyes Wide Open I’m Dreaming,” but she got noticed a few years earlier in 1947 with “Confess.”
The arrangement of “Confess” required an echo effect from backup singers, but since Rael and Page were footing the bill, they decided Page would do all the voices by overdubbing.
“We would have to pay for all those expenses because Mercury felt that I had not as yet received any national recognition that would merit Mercury paying for it,” Page once said.
“Confess” was enough of a hit that Rael convinced Mercury to let Page try full four-part harmony by overdubbing. The result was “With My Eyes Wide Open I’m Dreaming.” The label read, “Vocals by Patti Page, Patti Page, Patti Page and Patti Page.””

- The Telegraph, “Tennessee Waltz singer Patti Page dies”

"The original “Mother” was a stoned singalong favorite during the dropout afternoons of..."

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 14:59:59 -0800

“

The original “Mother” was a stoned singalong favorite during the dropout afternoons of my own youth. Released in 1979, it was a centerpiece of The Wall, a concept album about one man’s slow death at the hands of a conformist culture that any kid who felt oppressed by school or their families or, really, anything, could embrace. Turned into a 1982 film starring the doe-eyed semi-punk Bob Geldof, The Wall gave kids like me, ready to rebel not quite certain about which specific protest movement to embrace but sure we needed to rebel, a kind of primer in what was wrong with society. “Mother” laid out the first big problem: domineering mothers.

Natalie Maines is a mother, however, and her interpretation of Roger Waters’s lyrics helps the original becomes something new — something bigger, I think. In Pink Floyd’s version, Roger Waters sings the part of the boy revealing his night terrors; David Gilmour, singing as the mother, is prissy and cruel, restricting his reach. Maines leaves the song’s vaguely misogynist lyrics intact, but her plaintive, tender reading, intertwining with Harper’s equally gentle guitar lines, reveals the terror and helpless yearning that feeds the effort to control. Freed of the male voice that made “Mother” into a diatribe against femininity, Maines’s interpretation becomes a tender acknowledgment of how fear can entrap all of us, even when we want to do nothing but love.

”

- Ann Powers, “Hearing a mother’s song after tragedy”

microphoneheartbeats: thesinglesjukebox: TAYLOR SWIFT - I KNEW...

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 13:34:26 -0800

microphoneheartbeats:

thesinglesjukebox:

TAYLOR SWIFT - I KNEW YOU WERE TROUBLE.
[6.17]

“The dialogue is too fricking long like really the song is nice but the video bugged the crap out a me still love her though”
… I did a quick re-edit and Ed posted it on the main site, but the TSJ Tumblr snagged the original edit, so for the time being in case the correction doesn’t get mirrored, here’s the final version of the blurb:

Alex Ostroff: This is weird. My love for Taylor has always stemmed from appreciation for her craft and her writing; I most often praise her tracks that play with perspective and time and place and song structure. “I Knew You Were Trouble.” is none of these things; it’s lyrically awkward and imprecise, and often a bit too obvious, and the track privileges electronic ornamentation and the melody over Taylor’s words. But it’s also visceral, and not just in the wub-wub-wub way. RED was officially released three days before my first boyfriend broke up with me, but I spent the weeks before October 25th listening to her heartbreak waltzes and “Stay Stay Stay” and pondering whether I actually had major relationship issues or whether I was just listening to too much Taylor Swift. (Answer: Chicken/egg.) Then I listened to “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” a bunch and remembered that the one honest moment in that song is the word “exhausting”. At any rate, after the break-up, I played “Trouble.” into the ground. Despite its shortcomings, it’s among my favourite of Taylor’s break-up tracks. She’s moved past uncomplicated laying of blame (most of these type of songs pre-Speak Now) or admissions of fault (“Back to December”). Instead, Taylor captures the messy mix of frustration and disappointment and self-recrimination and anger at your ex and at yourself (“shame on me”) for not seeing the signs sooner, for not listening to friends, for recognizing the shape and size of the problems from the beginning but getting distracted from pragmatic reality by the emotional heights to which you were flown. The second verse captures the next few ambivalent months, layering the genuine desire to move on and be fine, and — perhaps more importantly — the desire to seem to be fine (“he’ll never see you cry”) and the stiff upper lipness that accompanies it all. Most of all, there’s the utterly gross (and uncomfortably real) bridge, exposing that saddest fear that creeps under the surface of it all – that there was never any there there and that your two years were just one big notch no different from him or her or anyone or anything. But even though all of this is real, none of this is the truth. “I knew you were trouble when you walked in (shame on me)” is, in its own way, just as simple as “One of us is innocent and the other is bad.” If the end was preordained, you had no agency, and all that’s left to do is make like Natalie Imbruglia wallowing in brostep on the cold hard ground. If you emotionally Eternal Sunshine their side of relationship, they had nothing at stake and the joke was on you. It’s a copout as emotionally honest as every single Los Campesinos! song and just as ugly. Which is naturally why I love it.

"When we’re open to pop being a potential space of freedom, rebellion, and idiosyncrasy, its..."

Wed, 26 Dec 2012 01:08:08 -0800

“When we’re open to pop being a potential space of freedom, rebellion, and idiosyncrasy, its possibilities start to feel limitless. “A society constructed in the image of punk rock might…essentially become nothing more than a new source of authority,” says Trevor Link, who writes a thoughtful Tumblr about the revolutionary potential of pop music. “Whereas a society constructed in the image of pop… might very well be liberating in ways unimaginable within the former paradigm.” Or, as Caroline Hjelt from Icona Pop says, summing up the spectacular chaos, “You can do anything you want and call it pop!”
And yet, what does all of this mean for the average brooding high school kid? I’m not so sure. For me, one of the hardest parts of being a music critic is making sure you are not preaching to the converted. So for every time I think, “Yes! We are now free to like whatever we want and express ourselves fully without any obstacles because we have all read this very well-reasoned critical argument about why Carly Rae Jepsen is good and THIS IS UTOPIA,” I meet someone who is actually a freshman in high school, and remember that everything still sucks, and that the reason I hated 98 Degrees was that they made shitty songs with titles like “Give Me Just One Night (Una Noche)”.”

- Lindsay Zoladz, “This must be pop”

(We were going to resume reblogging after the semester was over, but it’s list/thinkpiece...

Fri, 21 Dec 2012 12:14:09 -0800

(We were going to resume reblogging after the semester was over, but it’s list/thinkpiece season so we’ll keep our head down a bit longer. See you next year!)

"It’s not that the promo around the album is slapdash—that’d be impossible for someone as famous and..."

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 23:25:56 -0800

“It’s not that the promo around the album is slapdash—that’d be impossible for someone as famous and meticulously branded as Rihanna—but it suggests another album entirely. The title, Unapologetic, suggests a brash confidence that on record comes off entirely feigned; meanwhile, on its cover, Rihanna’s scrawled over her body words like “happy,” “fearless,” and “fun,” none of which apply to the music inside. She’s chosen the only possible lead single that could be plausibly called “happy and hippy,” and her video and performances have been similarly innocuous; unless you’re one of seven angry seapunks, it’s hard to find anything controversial about them. Her plane trick’s getting her endless positive press, most of it party-oriented. It all points to a very different album than Unapologetic, where Rihanna sounds like she checked out of the party long ago.”

- Katherine St Asaph, Rihanna: Unapologetic. Counterpoint: Jon Caramanica.

"For now, you can watch the band’s beginnings, in footage of a show played in D.C. in April of 1992,..."

Mon, 19 Nov 2012 22:46:20 -0800

“For now, you can watch the band’s beginnings, in footage of a show played in D.C. in April of 1992, months before the first record came out. (The footage is available on Bikini Kill’s YouTube channel.) A song performed at that April show called “Thurston Hearts The Who” ended up on the first EP, but the more interesting performance is of “Lil Red,” which didn’t officially come out until October of 1993, on the band’s first full-length album, “Pussy Whipped.” In the clip, Hanna strips off a white T-shirt, Sharpied with the words “RioT GrrrL,” to reveal a yellow-blue-and-white minidress over knee-high white boots. You might momentarily think, Austin Powers, but not for long. “These are my tits!” Hanna yells, and then, “This is my ass!,” as she turns to flip up her dress and quickly moon the crowd. She starts stomping in place as she yells, “And these are my legs!” She is double-daring you now to figure out what to do. She sexualizes herself before you can, dragging in one of childhood’s most sexualized characters, Little Red Riding Hood, and rewriting the wolf’s deceptive patter for this new Red: “These are my ruby red lips, the better to suck you dry. These are my long red nails, the better to scratch out your eyes.” The song, before its ninety seconds are up, mentions the “pretty girls” and their “side of things.” Like Hanna’s dress under the T-shirt, the song works as a distillation of the competition between women and the war against the familiar term “the male gaze,” which was then still gaining traction.”

- Sasha Frere-Jones, “Hanna and her sisters”. Also: Aaron Franco’s Kathleen Hanna interview; Jessica Hopper’s oral history of the Bikini Kill EP.