Encounterculture

Here's another cool thing about mashups, gleaned from the in-progress Frenchbloke & Son Superchunk set (thusfar not exactly the greatest thing ever committed to ones and ohs, but fuggit): mashups may be the first musical phenomenon that I've run across in real-life-time where the aesthetic being pushed calls the medium itself into question. The opening few minutes of this set, as has been the case with most mashup sets, is pretty much just a sonic collage of vocal snippets and tiny snatches of songs; unlike most mashup sets, this particular intro was engineered to sound as much like technology fucking up as songs skipped like the CD was scratched, bass kept cutting out in a most stressful fashion, and such. My timid panic on behalf of my consumer electronics is the kind of thing that leads me to declare this movement a runaway success, since asking if the worst possible thing that can happen in a medium can be art is essentially the precise question asked by the once-infamous "talentlessness" of the Sex Pistols. It also makes you want to slash the throats of the seven thousand people who inevitably come over and bother you with work while you're caught in the throes of figuring out if your CD player or your headphones are in the moment of death, which again only makes it a Win Win Win.

Okay, Were You Ready?

Right now, we’re in the throes of what seems to be, if all the indications are correct, a musical revolution, as dancepunk, Son Of Electroclash, seems poised to take over the critical discourse in much the same way that postpunk FOOOOOOOKED dragged us away from the experience-first modality of Lester Bangs. The Rapture’s Echoes was named the album of the year by Pitchfork, which for all its many, many, many, many, many, many, manymanymanymanymany flaws is probably as close to a journal of record as we’re likely to get right now; DFA mixes and LCD Soundsystem tracks have become increasingly hard to avoid/ignore; and it’s damn near impossible to read a review of a beat-propelled album without exhuming the tautological equine known as I Don’t Care It Makes Me Shake My Ass.

But let’s spin it back for a second.

* * *

Because there’s been such a singular deluge of writing done on the subject of pop culture since World War II – a phenomenon born from the combination of the lull of peacetime and the violent explosion of the standards of what constitutes leisure-time activities – we, the consumers, tend to internalize its content without really considering the conventions. Usually, that’s fine, since most albums and songs are by definition conventional; I love Guitar Romantic as much as anyone on this planet, but the only thing I really have to add to the discussion of it is a series of Buzzcocks comparisons and giddily profane superlatives. This, of course, is because music itself, and especially pop music, is damn near omnipresent, far moreso than it’s ever been before (although not as much as it’ll be tomorrow). Flying back to Durham, North Carolina on a red-eye flight last month, I had already started acclimating myself to the stench of the guy sitting next to me (who, as best I can guess, was returning from a month-long vacation inside of a humidor) before I realized that I recognized the artfully inoffensive song coming out of the overhead speakers. Better yet, the fact that now I can’t remember for the life of me what that song was only proves how disposable all this stuff is: in one ear, processed in the brain, out the other. And I could, of course, listen to KROQ or G105 for two hours and probably come back reporting the same thing: if you’re honest about how it sounds to you, eventually it all kinda runs together.

It should, of course, go without saying that even within this definition, there’s plenty of room for experimentation and notion-breaking; Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey probably had more of an impact on what we consider “good” female singing to be these days than Madonna, but given Madonna’s efforts to stretch the boundaries of what’s acceptable content (lyrically and musically) of a pop song, I doubt I’d even hesitate if asked which of the three was “the best”. And yet “Justify My Love” just sounds like “Slave 4 U” a lot earlier and quieter. “Hey Ya” is nothing if not El Hijo Del “Superstition” for a generation that needed it like oxygen. Matchbox 20’s “Bright Lights” just sounds like Journey’s “Lights” just sounds like Perry Como. Et cetera.

At the root of any definition of dancepunk is the simple concept of the meeting of music that makes you dance with music which challenges your aesthetic sensibilities, which in other words means it’s just another extended comparison. Dancepunk is not changing anything; socially awkward 20somethings managed to find a way to dance in every day of every year before this one, so it ain’t the music, it’s just you learning to chill the fuck out and fruitfully look like an idiot for a while. I love “Echoes” and “House of Jealous Lovers” and “Danger! High Voltage!” and “Synthesizer” and “Losing My Edge” and “Me & Giuliani Down by the Schoolyard” as much as most people, I guess, but at the same time I could hand you fistfuls of CDRs full of trance and house tunes which just SLAY them in terms of sophistication and composition and melody, all of which are perfectly acceptable reasons to get your ass on the dancefloor even if the scraggly mane protruding from underneath your trucker hat won’t let any of them actually penetrate your ears.

What neuters dancepunk as a viable force of progress for me is the fact that I can’t escape the preexisting contexts for it. It probably took me at least six months of listening to and thinking about the Rapture before I buckled under the weight of my own conclusions and decided that hell, they’re good enough for me to like a bunch. Simply put, I knew how to react to it: until you get used to the conventions and find a place secluded enough for you to start attempting to move to the music (in my case, an automobile with a steering wheel for me to slap the fuck out of in time with that magnificent cowbell), it really does sound like shitty atonal rock music. I’m sure that plenty of people would object, of course, but all I have to offer those people is a shrug and an apology, because that’s all I got out of it. I have heard some shitty, shitty bands in my life, and many of them had a singer like that over hooks as ineffective as those and strange synth sounds just like those too, and as I don’t really care much about shitty music, the Rapture got filed away in my I-respect-this-but-I-don’t-much-like-it cutout bin. As it turned out, I was just being bullheaded and stupid, but it wasn’t without basis. The Rapture, in spite of all the bounty that I eventually was able to reap from them, just didn’t stand out to me at first – at all.

* * *

I was born in 1981, so I missed the punk explosion and the hip-hop explosion simply as a result of forces beyond my control; by the time I became aware of pop music they were both tenable musical paradigms in the eyes of the Powers That Be, both critical and corporate (but I repeat myself OH ZING). When I first heard Guns ‘n Roses for the first time, I couldn’t have been more than eight, and when I heard Nirvana for the first time there’s no way I was older than eleven; when you compound this with the fact that I was one of those unlucky children with watchful and attentive parents who wouldn’t let me watch non-PBS television outside of Saturday mornings, I think you may get some semblance of a picture of how dramatically ill-suited I was to understand any of the importance inherent in either band. The memory of encountering Dr. Dre’s “Dre Day” and, later, Biggie’s “Big Poppa” stuck with me if only because of the endearing accompanying memories of the manifold new kids at my middle school – white kids redistricted from rich neighborhoods – suddenly seizing gangster poses and looking fucking ridiculous. I do remember hearing Beck’s “Loser”, the Spice Girls’ “Wannabe”, and Britney Spears’ “Hit Me Baby One More Time”; in each case, I got nothing more than a pleasant pop diversion and a faint impression that this wasn’t like what was on the radio.

I was, of course, wrong. The above is the barest-possible-bones version of the history of what comprises pop music; every single song on that list changed more than what we’re willing to accept as pop music – it changed the discourse about pop music itself. I remember hearing “Teen Spirit” for the first time and thinking it was the shittiest piece of shit that I’d ever heard, since that guy couldn’t even sing and the music was so simple and the words don’t make any sense and so on. In time, of course, I grew to like it an awful lot (although not as much as the rest of my middle-school coterie; my Nirvana song was always “In Bloom”), if only because it stood out so dramatically from everything else I had access to at the time.

Freeze. That’s the key right there.

* * *

For nearly three and a half years, the Belgian Dewaele brothers – aka Soulwax, aka 2 Many DJs – have been compiling the most important body of work since the Sex Pistols decided to commit their songs to wax, and you can quote me on that. Along with Richard X and Freelance Hellraiser, they have served as the key figures in the bootleg movement, releasing singles famously pitting the Clash against the Basement Jaxx or Salt & Pepa against the Stooges or the Breeders against Skee-Lo against Survivor, among others. I do have to confess that if we’re just talking about bootlegs, then I’d probably go with Freelance Hellraiser’s output; in addition to releasing the single most significant bootleg so far, his pop sensibilities just seem that much sharper (go listen to “A Stroke of Genius” and tell me that shouldn’t be on your local top 40 station). But there are times when one must force favoritism to yield to quality, and as someone whose ridiculous taste forces him to make that concession frequently, let me tell you this: I’ve never made that concession with nearly as much gusto as when I say Soulwax is better than everyone right now.

In 2002, Soulwax put out their now-legendary As Heard On Radio Soulwax Volume 2 mix, part of the still-ongoing 2 Many DJs line. All of a sudden nobody could shut up about it; if it wasn’t the super-filtered disco remix of Kylie Minogue’s “Can’t Get You Out Of My Head”, it was the mashup of 10cc and Destiny’s Child, or maybe it was that “Fire in the disco” song (for all intents and purposes, they broke the Electric Six) that’s kinda catchy, innit? As with all of their albums, AHORS 2 had been taken from one of their famous sets compiled for Belgian radio, yet most people couldn’t have cared less – it was that compelling of a document. And it really wasn’t just the standout tracks; the transitions were something near-spectacular in and of themselves, little independent collisions between ridiculous pop vectors. To this day, I still remember getting chills hearing the first few cheap synth sounds and then KAAAAABOOOOOOM, there’s ELO’s “Peter Gunn” as the Basement Jaxx holler “WHERE’S YOUR HEAD AT” and before you can even start howling along, the foot of quality has stricken your gut and you’re sitting there in awe of what you’re hearing. It ain’t like anything else, or at least it wasn’t back then.

Tom Moulton, famous producer of Philly International acts like the Trammps and First Choice, once said that he didn’t make dance records, he made records that you could dance to, and that’s probably the best way to approach the 2 Many DJs CDs. From the ground up, these discs are engineered to make you move, be it a simple embarrassed-hipster head-knock or a full-on freak-out in the club or the car or the whatever. Soulwax CDs are, to this day, defined by what appears to be a steadfast refusal to play by any rules, even the by-definition loose rules of mashups; just today I was listening to one of their sets and they introduced a track setting the beat of “Billie Jean” against the vocals of “Smooth Criminal” and I tell you, kind audience, that I motherfucking lost my shit when it got to the chorus. The Dewaeles have no shame; you will suddenly be listening to Chicago or some other equally lame band and you will be LOVING IT, or you just don’t get the point, which is simply that it doesn’t matter whether the text itself (here, the song) is any good whatsoever; it’s how you use it in the context of the whole. It always reminds me of one part from the excellent movie 24 Hour Party People, as the Happy Mondays’ Shaun Ryder, having just been pitched to a producer as “the greatest poet since Yeats”, volunteers as an example of his lyrical ability something to the effect of “Good good, good good good good” or something. It sounds stupid and awful, just like all of the Mondays tracks did up to that point; they’d show them recording their songs in the studios and it sounded like hell being put on wax. And then all of a sudden they’re playing “Tart Tart” live, and everything just starts exploding; Bez starts dancing, everyone starts dancing, that ruthless white-boy funk guitar starts tipping your head back and forth, and goddammit if Shaun Ryder’s lyrics don’t sound motherfucking amazing. That right there is Soulwax.

Typically, this is where I start drawing endless connections between the mashup and punk rock, pointing out the DIY ethos which made the scene so initially attractive and quickly passé, or underscoring the relative brevity of their peaks (who was it who said that no true musical revolution lasts longer than 18 months?), or by making a comparison between the second-wave of mashup kids like Dsico, Go Home Productions, Magic Cornflake, Dinbot, and such with the postpunks (in both cases, the sophistication of the music doesn’t touch the giddy let’s-see-if-this-works recklessness of the first wave, although you'll never catch me shortchanging anyone’s talent). The problem with this line of reasoning, of course, is that it goes no further than creating the genre of the mashup and preordaining a continuity and giving lazy critics a framework in which to churn out reams of the same exact essay (“You Ungrateful Pissants Weren’t There For ______”). Which sucks, because a case can be made that in many ways, the mashup is an even more subversive working mode than punk rock. Consider:

1. Aesthetic vs. Content. If you attended high school during any year after 1977, you know the type: the ass who thinks he’s a punk, dresses like a punk, listens to punk music, screams about how he’s punk as fuck at every given opportunity, but in reality, he’s just an ass. Punk rock as an ethos, unless everyone important from that era whom I’ve ever read or seen interviewed is lying to me and God and everyone, isn’t about the leather jackets or safety pins or even the speed of the music or the volume; it’s simply, in the words of Mr. J. Rotten, “Attack…attack…attack”. Yet today, the legacy of punk is pretty much that of the Izod shirt for the disaffected: act like this and you’re in the club. The same simply cannot be said of mashups. There is no mashup code of dress (many artists go to ridiculous extremes to hide their faces; notice how the cover of every 2 Many DJs CD is a man with a bag covering his face), nor is there a mashup chant or pose or anything like that. Hell, when you really get down to it, there’s not even a mashup sound, since the principles of the mashup are so amorphous and indefinite; the only rule is that it has to sound good. Recently, notorious steezjacker Superstar DJ Keoki attempted to jump on the mashup bandwagon by releasing a CD colliding a bunch of shit with a bunch of other shit (he actually couldn’t get the licenses for the songs he used – unlike Soulwax, still by far the leaders in the field - and as a result had to pen shitty cover versions to take their place) and as you might expect, got laughed out of the building. Granted, the mashup phenomenon is still relatively young and there are plenty of fakers, but at the moment, it ironically seems to be nearly steal-proof.
2. Stealing the medium. What made the Sex Pistols so great wasn’t simply that they were smart and funny and great rock stars; they also wrote very amazing pop songs which just happened to sound nothing like any other pop songs in the contemporary consciousness at the time. Likewise, one can make the argument that Soulwax are less important as DJs (since the consensus is that they have to mix the sets either on computers or with the extensive aid of computers) and more important as radio programmers putting both their encyclopedic knowledge of music and their ADHD to astonishing use. Melody and beat give their sixty-plus minute sets a propulsive effect frequently lacking from songs only encompassing a thirtieth of that. And while it’s important to keep in mind that, as with the Sex Pistols, the shockingly untraditional aesthetics guiding the music make it easy to read it as a polemic against the status quo, ultimately it’s the poppy accessibility which keeps it in your CD player. The shock of the furious new, after all, only lasts for so long.
3. The medium itself. I have a feeling that music historians of the future will be placing a lot of importance on the fact that the first Radio Soulwax broadcasts went out over the airwaves in 2000, as those of you with elephantine memories may remember this little program called Napster doing for file-sharing what the Pony Express did for mail back in the 1800s. Naturally the bootleg scene benefited greatly from all of this sudden access to music, but more to the point, so did Soulwax. Word of mouth flew around the globe; the time between when I heard about their mix CD (and generally, I presume that once I’m hip to something it’s no longer “in”) and when everyone else on non-music-related discussion boards suddenly got all up in bootlegs was dizzyingly brief. Everything, even/especially the mixes got shared, of course (the 2 Many DJs website makes reference to an early “Billie Jean” bootleg which was even released as a white-label without the permission of the Dewaeles), but more to the point the word got out, and things started happening. Of course, you can say the same thing about punk (and here’s where I’m sorely tempted to bang the DIY-made-the-scene drum), as it’s important to remember that a Bay City Rollers single looks exactly like a Sex Pistols single if you rip off the labels. What’s remarkable about bootlegs, however, is that they existed outside of the music industry wholly and completely; at no point did anyone involved in the commercialization interfere with the production of the mp3 file (which, incidentally, looks no different on your desktop from a Clay Aikin mp3 if you change their titles). Put another way, built into every punk single was the irrevocable proof that this had to be some kind of good since someone obviously thought enough of it to pay to record and press it up. My grandmother can make mp3s, but they don’t sound anything like 2 Many DJs.
4. The immediate familiarity. Nowadays, of course, punk has the edge, as the catastrophe which opens “Anarchy in the U.K.” and “London Calling” and “Neat Neat Neat” are pretty much canonized alongside “Layla” and “Stairway” at this point in the Great Big-Ass Book of Rock. This, of course, is the benefit of decades of praise and criticism being heaped on these licks, on their endless dissection at the hands of writers who experienced them and felt inspired to pen gigantic screeds like this one. What gets lost is the expressive character of the music; I have yet to encounter a piece of criticism of the punks who just plain missed the point (probably due in no small part to the fact that I don’t have to read EVERYTHING being written about the first-run punks, but still, it ain’t like I sit around on my ass all day). That’s not to say that there’s a party line as to what was being expressed through the music, but rather just that there didn’t seem to be any need for time to digest what was being presented (as compared to Led Zepplin and the Doors, whose bullshit is still being sifted through by the betunnelvisioned today). The same can be said of G’n’R, or Nirvana, or Biggie, or the Beatles, or the Stones, or any great pop act ever. When all of a sudden I’m listening to “Sweet Talking Woman” in the middle of Hang All DJs Vol. 4, it’s clear from the jump that I’m being presented with something silly and fun, not to be taken seriously. Am I supposed to dock it points simply because it’s uncheckedly offering up that instead of rage or something? I don’t rank my emotions or my reactions; all I know is that when they’re being triggered that brutally, I am in the presence of something that requires my attention.

And so on. The point is simply this: if there is a theoretical point to Soulwax, it lies in their seemingly unique ability to make you aware of the fact that you live in a world of music, something that dancepunk wishes to separate itself from (“No, this is the music that you can dance to!”) and electroclash wishes to magnify to the point of the grotesque seemingly just for visceral thrills. With a mashup, you react to what you hear, unless of course you are shamelessly determined to react to the creative middleman at all costs (and I have a certain fondness for the DFA but they are nothing if not different, albeit very talented, middlemen). With a mashup, there are no comparisons; the text itself is the comparison that you wish you could have made, just made for you, and made to sound good.

* * *

Mashups, by just about anyone’s watch, are pretty much dead. The scene died a while back; it’s now starting to get aggressively formalist (see Dsico’s impressive cutup remixes of pop songs) rather than aggressively expressive, and if you’re going to be honest, only dorks really care about form (and I say this as a flag-waving dork who will argue about the form of Exile on Main Street and “Heart of Glass” until the cows come home, so I’m not exempting myself here). Of course, plenty of people argue to this day that punk died the moment when Johnny Rotten posed the question of whether or not people had ever felt as if they’d been cheated (and I’m not exactly ready to say they’re wrong), but we’re still talking about it today. The point of pop culture criticism, if you want to make something noble of it, isn’t to find out where everyone will be going before everyone gets there (although that’s so much fun to speculate about that I can’t really disapprove and mean it), but rather to figure out what’ll be worth defending ten, twenty, fifty years from now, and while I don’t want this piece to come down to simple handicapping of the future, I’d say that right now Soulwax is a better bet than the Rapture or the !!! or the band that’s going to come out in a few weeks and kick the shit out of all of them. When you get down to it, what stands out about the Soulwax mixes isn’t the songs, but rather the music itself. I gave my sister one of the CDs for her last birthday – my sister, the one who has elected to retain some sanity rather than sacrifice it to understand pop music and cinema – and she lost her shit; more recently, I went to Amoeba to see which ones they had, and not only had they sold out of the most recent edition, a guy was morosely flipping through the few copies left on the racks. He kept going through them over and over again, as if this time maybe that copy of Hang All DJs 1 or As Heard On… Volume 7 was going to reveal itself to him. But I guess he came up short, because he kind of sighed, started shuffling away, and muttered (either to me or to nobody in particular, I’m still not sure), “Man, those never turn up used.”

You Can Find Me in the Club*

Two facts resolutely refuse to settle into the compost pile of my cognitive thought processes:
One, that I have hated clubs, bars, socials, etc – all that shit – basically for as long as I’ve known that someday my age would grant me a safe passage in, and
Two, that I’ve been really fucking stupid for a long time.
Unless tonight’s events were a complete aberration (and, to be fair, I’m not ruling that out), clubs and me may just end up getting along fine after all. I had always thought of them as these cliquey establishments where everyone knows each other and constantly find themselves enraptured in fascinating conversation, and to some degree that was probably true. I didn’t get lucky tonight or anything; I’m not balls-deep in some wannabe actress who thinks I’m a casting agent – hell, I basically didn’t talk to anyone I didn’t already know. But I had a good time, and please believe it when I say that I’d have expected that to happen about as much as I’d expect to jump straight up to the moon.
I have to talk about the music they played above and beyond anything, since priorities are priorities and this is a popcult blog. Basically, they played exactly what you’d expect; standing outside, I could hear the muffled thump of “Milkshake” and “Get Low”, and I wasn’t in there for more than four seconds before those magnificent horn stabs from “Crazy in Love” sent a foot at my chest cavity. For a while, they kept shifting back and forth between top-forty hip-hop and early/mid-90s stuff, which contrary to what you may expect from my Give-me-the-Strokes-and-the-Exploding-Hearts-and-be-damned aesthetic pretensions, will do quite nicely. Then for some reason the DJ decided to bump Ye Olde Classick Rockque, and everyone yowled along to “You Shook Me All Night Long” and other assorted frivolities and good times were had by all. By that time, my second seven-dollar “Jack” and Coke (quotation marks used to pointedly delineate watered-down ineffectiveness, as per the rules of popcrit blogs) was coming to an end, and I decided to quit while I was ahead.
What struck me was how the DJ made seemingly no effort to mix the songs together; he’d just play one to the end or parts nearby and then immediately cue up the next one. Hell, he might not have even been mixing from vinyl, which would be heresy in my mind-club; the musical omniscience of everyone in attendance was what kept the vibe afloat, not the sudden sensation of being overpowered by Something New. Nights like this teach you that what you know about stuff is frequently embarrassingly wrong; smooth mixing in between songs is one way to do a mix set, but it’s far from the only way. Really, the only right way is to play stuff that people want to hear.
But here’s the thing: Although I think that that’s a worthwhile thing to talk about, and at some point when I’m bored at work and need to eat up some on-the-clock I’ll probably return to in full-on pedant-lecturer mode, that ain’t got shit to do with the fun I had tonight. The fun I had tonight wasn’t really even mine, if you demand honesty; I’m a self-diagnosed anhedonic even outside of the setting of a club, so whatever. What I’ll remember is the fun everyone else was having. I’ll remember my friend Doug, drunker than whatever Fuck is, dancing like he’d rented some limbs for the evening and had decided to get his money’s worth. I’ll remember Betsy, an old friend who had invited me (and like eight hundred other people) to celebrate her birthday, kissing me repeatedly throughout the night and introducing me to everyone as her favorite (not for any prurient reasons, of course; Betsy had consumed enough alcohol to make any prospective date-rapist’s job pitiably simple. Besides, there are some girls who are simply your friends. Still, out-of-character is out-of-character and needs to be noted, even if it means violently embarrassing one of your friends after the fact:). I’ll remember Kim showing up from out of fuckin’ NOWHERE because, well, yeah. I’ll remember seeing Blaze and Nick and all these other people who I haven’t seen in monthsandmonthsandmonths just emerging from the scenery. In other words, I’ll remember being an inconsequential part of a mass of people having what looked to me to be a very good time.
I am someone who has spent a lot of time in search of rapturous beauty in culture, and the fact that a lot of that’s contained in things easily accessed from home like movies and music and books and such, coupled with my own pathological litany, means that more likely than not, I spend a lot of time in my apartment by myself. I’m not bitching or moaning; this is the life that I’ve chosen for myself, and I could rattle off a list of exceedingly satisfactory experiences that I’ve had in that context that couldn’t possibly translate to the club. I doubt, for instance, that any manifestation of a club could match me being high off my ass and really hearing “Are You Ready For Love” or watching Chungking Express or reading Songbook for the first time. But the conclusion that these things lead me towards is that (a) everyone has their own standards of quality since everyone connects to things differently by virtue of their different lives, and (b) that’s incredibly depressing. I mean, to think that someone could watch, I dunno, Amelie and find it as beautiful a movie as I did for completely different reasons – reasons which, if the vox populi of the internet has made irrevocably clear, preclude any meaningful discussion of the work itself – that just saps any perceived nobility right out of the quest, and the saving grace of my life as far as I’ve ever known is that at least I’m living it in noble service of a higher ideal, albeit a stupid one.
Tonight, though, nobody wanted to discuss anything (and the music was way too loud to enable any discussion of anything anyway). All anyone wanted to do was have a good time, an impulse which led them to, yes, the club. When I think back on tonight, I’m guessing that what’s going to stick with me is the notion of the club as some indefinite signifier, a bar which really could have been one of several hundred or thousand in the city but which served as a site of unrestrained fun. I mean hell, the kind of fun I had was in the spirit of simple observance; I discovered that all I needed to do to have a productively fun night was nod my head to a Neptunes beat and make shy, thrilling eye contact with hot-but-probably-the-second-or-third-hottest-out-of-a-group-of-five-or-six girls, sip Coke doctored with a fluid which purported to be alcohol but which really only changed the taste, and get a quintessentially Club setting to describe to you (two rooms, one playing hip-hop, one playing new wave and punk; line outside; trucker-hatted assfaces bitching about how “bourgie” – yes, someone behind me in the line actually said that). I suppose that’ll do; if that means my standards are low, then there you go.
To tell the truth, I’m not even sure why I’m writing about this; one would think that benign, nondescript fun wouldn’t be the kind of thing which one would rush home and record (which is exactly what I’m doing). I have no defense for it, but the fact that I don’t and that I keep writing this thing anyway imparts upon me the distinct impression that I learned something worth knowing, something which may be one of those things which only gets transmitted by the innate enthusiasm in my language. I suppose the worst consequence that could happen would be that I come off sounding like a squealing girl whose conclusion is “omg i had such a good time!!!!1!!”; then again, there’s an argument to be made that that’s the dominant mode of expression on blogs, and that this is simply me momentarily embracing my medium. I leave it to history.
But I want to go back to the music for just a second before I conclude. Right now I can’t think of more than six or seven songs – MAAAYBE eight if you count the tabla intro to “Get Ur Freak On” – whose names I could tell you. There was a lot of what I’d call shit-rap; really poppy stuff and really awful stuff, frequently at the same time. But I didn’t care; I bobbed my head, cradled my jacket, attempted to maintain my usual demeanor of endearingly sly shame towards Betsy, and such. Music in that setting was simply, well, music, like background music from a movie – granted, background music being played at eighty thousand decibels, but just there for mood all the same. I’d spent all day trying to come up with a way to describe the precise manner in which I’d failed to appreciate the Rapture for well over six months simply because I’d only listen to it while I’d always listened to it while at work, and that’s just flatly the least conducive circumstance to enjoy music in the world. I didn’t get the Rapture until I bought Echoes on a whim from Circuit City while home on vacation and promptly drove around Durham, North Carolina embarrassing myself behind the wheel of my mom’s Acura by pumping my fist and caterwauling along with “House of Jealous Lovers”, but from that moment since I haven’t really been able to shut up about them. The fact of the matter is that music can be fun, just like a DJ can mix stuff together; you’ve just got to find the right place to enjoy it. Right now I'm rattled by the question of what tonight would have been like if we'd been in the throes of a DJ who refused to spin anything not touched/influenced/in effulgent praise of DFA; it would have been different, that's for sure, and I'm not sure if my top-forty let's-all-sing-along-with-"The Humpty Dance"fun would have been worth making the trade, obvious coolness be damned. Life making your points for you rules.

* And you better believe that they played and I loved the everliving up-rocking down-getting left-leaning right-waying fuck out of this.

Fear and Loathing on the Top Forty

It is a gimmick called real time reviewing.
The aim of the gimmick is to preserve vectors of thought by recording them as they present themselves.
I stole it from either Phil Schneider or Phil Rippa (although he probably stole it from Dean Rasmussen), so credit where it’s due.
I had a really, really, really, really, REALLY shitty day at work today, but I’m still going to try to maintain some semblance of fairness.
The bold, bracketed song titles appear when the next song comes up on the playlist.
What follows is my tour through the top forty biggest selling singles in Great Britain from 2003 in descending order from 40 to 1 in the real time it takes to listen to them.
There are two songs by the Darkness.
I am absolutely motherfucking terrified of this idea.

8:51. [40. Mis Teeq, "Scandalous"]
8:51: Eh.
8:51: Yeah, eh. Living in Los Angeles, home of a certain medical practitioner named Dre, one kinda gets complacent when around violin-based hip-hop beats.
8:52: No, this ain’t bad. I mean I never thought it was BAD or anything, just not really impressive or anything. Jesus, listen to me talk like I’ve heard this song forty times already. So that you know, I did my damndest to not listen to any of these songs, although I know for a fact that there’s one exception.
8:54: It occurs to me that I might not be doing these songs justice since I’m really not paying much attention to the lyrics at ALLLLLLL, but the hell with that. In the context of pop music, especially in terms of hearing it for the first time, [39. Big Brovas, "Baby Boy"] lyrics < disco whistles
8:55: Not that the disco whistle in this song is anything special.
8:56: These two songs could not possibly be more identical in terms of the effect they’re having on me. It’s like listening to any random City High song right after any random Ashanti song, which is to say that it’s so bland that I can’t even be an effective smartass.
8:57: Oh, this was a bad idea. These songs aren’t even funny.
8:58: Good lord, Common moved to England and his songs got even wussier.
8:59: If [38. Busta Rhymes, "I Know What You Want" (feat. Mariah Carey)] England has a DeGrassi, this is the theme song to the sex episode.
8:59: Oh hell.
8:59: Busta Rhymes is significantly more fun when he’s trading verses with Mystikal than when he’s Expressing his Feelings to Us, his Caring and Rapt Audience. Mariah Carey is more fun when she’s gagging on my Johnson. I mean, I guess. NOT GUILTY~.
9:01: I deeply, deeply, deeply want to make a drawn-out comparison between this song and some useless hair-metal ballad, but I seriously can’t think of a boring enough ballad. That is motherfucking SAD. Busta didn’t used to be boring.
9:03: All of these songs so far kinda sound alike, and I’m talking in terms of the notes that they’re using. Yeah yeah yeah only nine notes (or whatever) but you know what I mean. OH THANK GOD IT’S OVER. Okay, now I’ll hopefully [37. Fast Food Rockers, "The Fast Food Song"] have something HOLY FUCK THIS IS UNBELIEVABLY FAGGY.
9:04: I wish I could say that I was surprised that a song called “the Fast Food Song” is about, well, fast food, but some things are just there. I was not, however, expecting fast food to serve as a very labored metaphor for the ding-dong.
9:05: Y’know, I like silly crap as much as the next man, but hell, this is just dumb. The idea strikes me that that might be the point and that I might be playing the role of Dour Aging Snide Hipster Who Rains Upon Parades, but...
9:07: I have heard the words “Pizza”, “hut”, “Kentucky”, [36. Bo Selecta, "Proper Crimbo"] Oh god. Well, this is something new.
9:07: It’s like a Christmas version of “Henry the Eighth”. I leave it to you to decide if that’s good or bad.
9:08. I am as yet unsure as to what “crimbo” is or isn’t.
9:08: Okay, now they’re rapping.
9:09: I get the distinct impression that I’m going to be running the phrase “This is fucking stupid” into the earth tonight.
9:09: I dunno. Maybe I am just an old grouch. I guess maybe this is kinda stirring; it’s at least fully orchestrated and doesn’t have that fanny-lancer Nu-NRG thumpthumpthumpthump beat, so there’s that. And no mentions of KFC yet to boot. BEST SONG EVER so far.
9:10: Far be it from [35. Daniel Beddingfield, "If You're Not the One"] me to drop a yule log, but what the hell is wrong with people in December?
9:11: For everyone who ever wanted to hear what Justin Timberlake would sound like if he covered a Belinda Carlisle song, here you go. Not that that’s a bad thing, mind you.
9:12: I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t liking this so far. It’s very middle-school slow-dancey, but hell, there’s a time and a place for everything. Everything can’t be Guitar Romantic.
9:12: I am positive that this song was on the Love Actually soundtrack. Go see Love Actually.
9:13: Man, it’s not even wussy when he hits the high notes.
9:13: No, no, I’ll say it: this is a decent little song.
9:14: The one thing that’s going to get shorted from this project is any kind of perspective. I mean, right now I’d say that this is one of the cream of this class of singles, but there’s like thirty-some to go, and that’s a lot of ground, even with two Darkness songs. [34. Busted, "Year 3000"]
9:15: Is there a pussier, parent-approved version of Blink 182? I mean besides these guys. Seriously, Smashmouth is laughing at these guys. They revel in the line “totally naked” and I die a little.
9:16: When I own a CD publishing company, this will be the first song on the first edition on our series of compilation CDs for well-off white teenagers.
9:17: Thank you, Busted, for introducing me to the digital banjo. I hate this project.
9:18: I like Lening’s idea for this song way more than the song itself. [33. The Darkness, "I Believe in a Thing Called Love"]
9:18: OH FUCK OH FUCK OH FUCK
9:18: No, no, I get it. The Cure meets Ratt. I don’t like any of that.
9:19: Oh LORD is this embarrassing, and not in the good “I know it’s not any gooooood, but fuck it, it sounds good to me” way (I mean, I like the Jet song and I have no shame). No, in five or six years this is going to make all the twelve-year-old proto-hipsters write a wads of miserable snotty album reviews where they go to great prosaic lengths to camouflage the fact that they ever liked anything this stupid. In other words, hiring crush at Putzfuck OH ZING.
9:22: [32. XTM & DJ Chucky, "Fly on the Wings of Love"] I can’t hate cheesy trance like this, although God knows I can point out how stupid it is. There’s just too much great disco to write everything like this off. Besides, there’s times when melody alone will do, and that’s what cheesy trance was made for. But it’s really stupid. When your friends make fun of ravers by doing that dumbass pantomimed ball motion thing (you know what I’m talking about), this is the kind of song that’s playing in their head.
9:24: The panflute is not making this any less excruciating.
9:24: That’s it, I need beer.
9:25: Allright, this is about to get a whole lot better or a whole lot worse, depending on how you look at it. [31. Westlife, "Mandy"]
9:25: Aw, it’s a pop ballad with a piano. And it’s MANDY. I may be on the verge of embarrassing myself in front of God and the blogosphere.
9:26: That stutter-step beat just sounds retarded here, but this is honest boy-band pop and I can deal with that. It’s when boy-bands decide to Break Musical Ground (the phrase “Dirty Pop” springs to mind) that I get antsy and start ridiculing. But this is just music intended to introduce twelve-year-old girls to womanhood and I…am going to stop that sentence right now.
9:27: I might actually keep this. There is plenty of room in my heart for worthless catchy pop. Hell, I might actually like this more than the Me First and the Gimme Gimmes version, although the big note at the end doesn’t even compare.
9:28: It occurs to me that this song was mentioned in Can’t Hardly Wait and my admiration grows again.
9:29: [30. Kelly Rowland, "Stole"] OHRIGHT THIS SONG. My friend David’s girlfriend was the star of this video, actually, so this is going to get bonus points from me here. Plus the chorus is actually kinda good-sounding.
9:29: I’m wondering if I should maybe be doing more analysis here, although I’m not really sure if that’s true to the spirit of real time. Certainly there’s some analysis to be done; ten songs in, the vast majority have been pop ballads, which jives with that thing I was reading on Stylus today about how file-sharing benefits the single. Which makes sense; these ballads are increasingly dynamic and it’d make sense that people would want direct access to ‘em (remember that the British charts are based on sales, so this is people buying this music, not requesting it or anything like that). But I digress from making jokes about the Darkness. The Darkness is ridiculous. [29. Jennifer Lopez, "All I Have" (feat. LL Cool J)]
9:33: Oh I just LOST.
9:33: Man, I went into this project in the spirit of gonzo journalism, but god, this is just the worst possible way to do this. Gonzo journalism is all about capturing the spirit of the moment, but the fact is that my spirit while listening to songs like this is essentially just an extended dull hum. Jennifer Lopez bores the hell out of me, but not fruitfully like the Darkness or Ja Rule; she’s the musical equivalent of remembering that you left the bathroom light on right when you’re walking out the door.
9:37: I think the thing that makes [28. Justin Timberlake, "Cry Me A River"] these songs so popular is that snatch of vocals in the beat. Outside of that, musically that song’s no different from the Big Brovas one.
9:38: I am realizing that I am about to become an idiot for this song.
9:38: Yep. I’m stupid. Like everyone else, I liked the part at the end with that waterfall of Justin tracked vocals, but yeah this part’s really great.
9:39: Thank you Stylus Magazine: this song makes a lot more sense if you try not to think of it as a generic U Left Me pop song (which is exactly what made me keep it at arm’s length when it was actually going around) and instead keep in mind that Justin just lost his girl to Fred Durst.
9:40: That beat in between “now it’s your turn” and “to cry” is the place that hits come from. FUCK I was dumb.
9:40: And lest we forget, Timbaland is still god. OH FUCK THIS REALLY IS GOOD.
9:41: Chris Lening is going to make so much fun of me.
9:42: And [27. Elton John, "Are You Ready For Love"] you gotta love how it ends with “Yakyakyakyakyakyakyak”.
9:43: OH OH OH OH. Right. This was the song that I cheated like hell on; I’d heard it before, and in the search to download this track I ran across what I thought was a mix on Southern Fried records (which usually means really good things). Instead, it’s the full-length song, and it took me exactly the length of time from the opening note to the first chorus to realize that it was the best song of the year, and as such I’ve been listening to it overandoverandoverandoverandover ever since.
Here’s the thing about this song: it’s like an acid test where you get to find out a lot about your tastes. I’ve read at least a few reviews of modern house music where they dismiss it as disco piffle that couldn’t hold a candle to the real Gamble and Huff stuff, just like I’ve read at least a few reviews of pop records where the critic yammers on about how They Made Pop Music Way Better Back [26. Jamelia, "Superstar"] In The Seventies when guys like Elton John were making music. And now all those people get to shut the fuck up, because out of nowhere we get a MFSB/Elton John collaboration and – here’s the key – we get to evaluate it as pop music first and foremost, not as some canonized piece of musical literature. (It also really doesn’t hurt that it’s MFS Freaking B and Elton Kerfungled John, making this some sort of ridiculous fanboy crossover like if the Green Lantern suddenly showed up in Watchmen or something.)We get to [25. Eminem, "Lose Yourself"] evaluate it on its own terms, not the terms of critical writings (except this one, I guess), so you get a real chance to see how you would have reacted to disco music.
9:52: I really want to keep writing about that song but god dammit this beat won’t let me focus. I still remember hearing this for the first time; it was immediately apparent that this was going to be the song that you’d drag out whenever you ran into one of those stuffy mannerists who likes all rap except Eminem because he’s a misogynist and homophobic and vulgar and besides he’s just a pop star. Well, here you go.
9:54: Fifty years from now I will still know every word in this song.
9:54: No, you know what makes this song? It’s the way he inflects the word “not” in the chorus. It’s the alchemic reaction that occurs when you mix determination with fury. God bless Eminem. [24. Ultrabeat, "Pretty Green Eyes"]
9:55: Urgh. Every time I hear this thudding beat I get reminded of when I was trying to leave the Paul Van Dyk show and got accosted by some condescending flyer-wielding street teamers who wouldn’t let it go that Cosmic Gate was “too hardcore” (my words) for me. God, what the fuck is up with that pan-flute. WHAT THE FUCK IS THE DEAL WITH THE BRITISH AND PAN-FLUTES?
9:57: Okay, this is really not Cosmic Gatey at all. Just so’s y’know. I have a habit of jumping guns. Cosmic Gate would basically have just been the thumping drum and then one synth stab and then a drop-out for a voice saying something like “Five fingers” or something equally nonsensical. “I lost my keys. Have you seen my keys?” You get the point. Cosmic Gate can rub my grundle.
9:58: THIS SONG IS SEVEN MINUTES LONG? Fuck, I knew I should have broken with the rules of the real-time review and gone with the full version of “Are You Ready For Love”. I really don’t know if I could put into words how much the Philly International sound is going to be the music in my ears right after I die if I’ve been good. Plus I missed out on the breakdown, and the breakdown’s just fucking retardedly great. PLUSSSSSSS the version I keep talking about has all the radio commentary all over it, and from the sounds of it the deejay is hearing the song for the first time too, and it sure sounds like he likes it as much as I do. He did talk all over the breakdown, but hell, if they’d played the full version back in the 70s I bet they would have talked over the breakdown too; at least this way they were going through the history with the rights issues and all that instead of just talking about stupid bullshit. AMBIANCE~.
10:02: Urf. Talking about that song makes me want to listen to it instead of this song. Hey! Great timing. [23. Christina Aguilera, "Beautiful"]
10:02: It’s not a bad song or anything, but Sarah McLaughlin’s “Angel” is *right*there*. God, I might as well just rip up my Heterosexual Card for typing that.
10:05: It seems oddly fitting that after releasing this song, Christina Aguilera decided to embark on a voyage to becoming the ugliest possible sex symbol. Whoever told her that the Wendy O. [22. Rachel Stevens, "Sweet Dreams (My LA Ex)"] Williams look was hot needs to jump in a goddamn lake and stay there ‘til the bubbles stop surfacing.
10:07: Gotta love how the answer song to “Cry Me A River” charts higher than the song itself (danke clapclap). God bless the British and their shamelessness.
10:07: Okay, this is pretty goddamn great radio pop music. Britney should be weeping into her seventy thousand dollar pillow for not recording this.
10:08: EVERYONE NEEDS TO HEAR THIS SONG. The best thing about it is that you get to see exactly how much credit her songwriters give her: there’s lines about how not playing that record (i.e. “Cry”) and such. Justin, on the other hand, gets to be at least somewhat veiled and act like he’s got a brain or something. It’s like they WAIT HOLD ON THAT’S ONE HELL OF A WAY TO INTRODUCE A SYNTH SOLO. God, this is a great radio song. [21. Girls Aloud, "Sound of the Underground"]
10:10: This is a very poor man’s Kylie Minogue. For some reason they added a synth that sounds like a bumblebee. Poor this song for following that last song.
10:10: No, the chorus is somewhat redeeming. If I have a beef with hip-hop, it’s that it’s done a lot of damage to the idea of using a lot more instruments in the chorus to grab your attention, and that ain’t the case here.
10:12: I am guessing that somewhere on this thing called the intar-nette there is a remix of Puretone’s “Addicted to Bass” with this vocal on top. I know that there’s one of the track from here with the vocals from “These Boots Were Made For Walkin’”.
10:13: The surf guitar sounds very much out of place until it’s surrounded by the rest of the instruments in the chorus. INSTRUMENTATION INSTRUMENTATION INSTRUMENTATION.
10:14: [20. Black Eyed Peas, "Shut Up"] See, I know I’ll never be able to fully hate this song since I wrote something about it for a local weekly (danke Rick). Doesn’t mean that it’s anything good or anything, and it’s DAMN sure no “Weekend” or anything, but hey. Memories are memories.
10:15: I hate hate hate that “on the phone” effect. It just sounds fucking stupid.
10:15: SEE?! Listen to the chorus – the only way you know it’s the chorus is that there’s like one synth violin. And verily you sit there relatively unimpressed. Phil Spector needs to produce everything ever, and Paul McCartney needs to go ahead and jump up his own ass and get it over with.
10:17: I got nothin’. I forgot that this song is like eight years long.
10:18: [19. Fatman Scoop, "Be Faithful"] Hey, it’s that song that jacks that DJ Kool song that. I think it was DJ Kool. DJ Kool is certainly a valid point of reference for this loving tribute to the act of yelling a lot.
10:20: Poor poor British people; this is probably a pretty badass floor-filler in British hip-hop clubs, like some sort of copyofacopyofacopy of Holidae In or something. Wait, hold on, here’s a Tribe Called Quest verse. I am confused and not enthused. Burma-shave.
10:21: And now we’re back to the part of the song that would have broken my mind wide open if I’d heard it in the sixth grade. I’d have been all DAAAAAAAAAMN. Good lord – “Go Brooklyn, it’s your birthday”. Did the Brits just give up on hiphop after “OPP”? (yesIknowaboutdizeerascalshoddop)
10:23 [18. David Sneddon, "Stop Living the Lie"] This is a tender ballad being sung by a Clay Aikinalike named David Sneddon. This blank space is for you to insert all the jokes that seem obvious to you.












Whatever you’re thinking, you’re right.
10:24: Okay, I deleted the Babyface and Amy Grant and Richard Marx jokes because the truth is that this guy’s last name is Sneddon and that really says it all. This is so breathtakingly mediocre that any deformity appears as big as the sun, but seriously, the idea that teenage girls while away their youthful primes pining away and every so often, letting loose a soft sigh of “Sneddon…” No sir, that dog won’t hunt.
10:26: Well, it was short, anyway. [17. Shane Ritchie, "I'm Your Man"]
10:27: What the fuck is up with the British and their bizarre fetish for music that sounds like it should be playing in the background of a local Chrysler retailer ad?
10:28: It sounds like the mutant offspring of Billy Joel and Beck. Make up your own mind, I guess. It doesn’t work for me.
10:30: [16. Junior Senior, "Move Your Feet"] OH WIN. God, those first four synth notes just work. God, this song rules.
10:31: It’s still impressive to me that this song broke here without a big club culture. God knows that this song just has to CRUSH dancefloors everywhere, since if you can hear it without moving in some way then you need to get off’n my planet, but I’d have never guessed that people would want to listen to it outside of that context. I guess that’s the video for you. It really was a great video.
10:32: What makes this song work is that cymbal crash behind those four notes. The song might as well have [15. Beyonce, "Crazy In Love"] overlaid vocals going PUMP.YOUR.FIST.HERE.
10:33: I can’t help it: I like this song too. Brendan’s going to kill me but I CANNOT HIDE MY SHAME. It’s a great beat, Jay’s verse sounds fine to my untrained credibility-challenged ears, and Beyonce doesn’t get in the way of it. I’ll gladly admit that it’s absolutely iPod-hop, but at some level either music sounds good to you or it doesn’t.
10:35: YOUNG HO Y’ALL KNOW WHEN THE FLOW IS LOCO YOUNG B IN THE R-O-C – UH-OH. Yeah, that fucking rules. If you like the art of the single, Jay-Z is categorically your favorite mainstream hip-hop artist since Biggie; a little bit of him goes a million miles. His albums always have a bunch of crap on them, but fuck, I’ll take a disc full of “Change Clothes” if it means one “December 4th”.
10:37: More songs need horn sections. This is the truth and you know it. Modern music is all [14. Kevin Lyttle, "Turn Me On"] about sex and contains zero horns and I cry BOOOOOOOLSHIAT. Someone is missing the point of symbolism.
10:38: There are songs where you know you just fucking HATE them within the first two seconds of hearing them. Exhibit A. URGh. I hate the voice, I hate how the beat is catchy and way too simple, I hate that watery synth shit going on the background, etc.
10:39: I half expect this song to segue into “Oh Sherry”.
10:40: I would prefer to hear “Oh Sherry”.
10:40: Ahhhh. Delete snide dancehall bitching [13. 50 Cent, "In Da Club"], continue to something good. You know a song’s really great when you can identify it just by the rhythm section within the first second, and God Knows you can do that here. Dre really doesn’t get the respect he deserves here – it’s a super-simple beat, laconic as fuck, but eminently familiar. I like Stunt 101 more, but even I can see why it’s not nearly as big a hit as this.
10:43: I shall now quote everyone else who’s written anything about 50: He’s not great, but he’s really good, and that’ll do.
10:44: Man, it grabs you by the nuts and doesn’t let you pay attention to other stuff. There was a lot more to write about in that song, but it’s just arresting. [12. Dido, "White Flag"] It’s also pleasing to my young heart that this is a Ja Rule-less list.
10:45: Hey, this is actually kinda good. I always wonder about how history’s going to preserve songs like this – I mean, back in the sixties, not every song that survives today was either a gigantic hit or Emblematic of the Times, Man; a lot of them survived just because they’re pretty, pleasant, moving songs, and I’d say that at least two of those could apply to this song (think trip-hop Fleetwood Mac).
10:48: I would, however, be lying to myself and the Lord if I didn’t point out that it’s Dawson’s Creeky as fuck.
10:49: [11. Evanescence, "Bring Me to Life"] ARGH. I guarangoddamntee you that in fifteen years, this’ll be just as embarrassing as Styx.
10:50: For the record: I thought this song was boring even before I knew it was about The Big J.C.
10:50: I actually saw Daredevil (for the class taught by Leonard Maltin! Honest!), so that may have contributed to my resistance to this song. Of course, no song that inspires/forces that kind of full disclosure can really be worth much, cannit?
10:51: Okay, well, maybe I’m just being an ass. I’ll admit that when I first heard it, it did sound kinda neat, but it did NOTTTTTT survive the test of time and repetition. Now it just sounds like Creed With A Chick to me – terrifyingly Serious and shit. Sigh; Junior Senior was just a few songs ago.
10:53: [10: The Darkness, "Christmas Time"] “Gentlemen! She’s gone from ‘suck’ to ‘blow’!”
10:53: Nonono – it’s like a mashup where someone puts Queen on top of Good Charlotte!
10:54: Okay, MAYBE this is good music if all you ask of your music is that it focus your attention solely upon it. I will say that between those Queer Guitars For A Straight Guy and erm, that voice which I can only really imitate by doing the “Oh my! I have accidentally bitten into a lemon!” face without actually doing an imitation of how it sound, it certainly does that.
10:56: Well, it was better than the first one I heard. And thus ends [9. Room 5, "Make Luv"] my experience with the Darkness.
10:56: Home stretch! This is actually OK so far, since it just sounds like recycled O’Jays OH FUCK THERE’S THE HOUSE BEAT. It ain’t Agent Sumo but it’ll do. Goofy house is way more fun than goofy rock since at least goofy house is about creating a good time. Goofy rock is about watching other people have a good time and manic-depressive recluses like me don’t cotton to that much.
10:58: Oh My, The Lyrics In This Song Certainly Wouldn’t Hold Any Water With Putzfuck!
10:59: Well, this really isn’t going anywhere. And I got my dander all up for nothin’!
10:59: Rather than bitch and be a sourpuss, here are some house songs from 2003 which are vastly superior to this: Lamb, “Wonder” (Dead Guys remix); David Guetta, “Just A Little More Love” (Wally Lopez remix) – well, okay, those are the two best. I obviously can’t be bothered to divert my attention from this (throwing dirt on tracks).
11:01: /got nothin’. The British really need to flock to stuff that I can make fun of more easily. Someone flood Kiss FM with copies of Jackpot.
11:02: [8. Blu Cantrell, "Breathe"] THIS IS A DR. DRE BEAT. WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ME AND YOU?
11:02: Oh hell, it’s Sean Paul. I like a few of his songs and it’s always because of a beat which sounds kinda cool when I’m driving around LA. Right now I’m listening to a beat that I’ve heard a squillion times before (complete with the car crash!) while sitting in my apartment.
11:03: I have become convinced that this song is less interesting at the moment than taking a piss.
11:05: That piss did not last nearly long enough. Boy that sounded bad when I reread it.
11:05: Yeah, you can pretty much go back and reread what I wrote about that J-Lo song as it applies %110 to this.
11:06: [7. Kelly Osbourne & Ozzy Osbourne, "Changes"] Oh no.
11:06: O NEAUX.
11:06: Is Kelly doing a Dobie Gray imitation? And Ozzy just sounds ridiculous after hearing that dong from the Darkness.
11:07: Life seemed a lot more interesting back before Ozzy Osbourne turned into a gigantic vagina.
11:08: One can only imagine how much studio magic had to go into this song. I heard Kelly Osbourne live on Conan or Leno or something or other and I swear before God and Sonny Jesus that she missed every single note with valor and candor. Here, she just sounds like a 13-year-old boy, thus making it a Great Leap Forward of theoretical Maoist proportions.
11:10: What always kills me about these songs are the session musicians in the background, since (A) they manage to sound exactly like singers on commercials, and (2) they HAVE to know how [6. T.a.T.u., "All the Things She Said"] much their talent’s being wasted.
11:11: It seems quite fitting that as this song goes on, the lesbian couple that lives in the apartment above mine undertakes their nightly gigantic loud-ass fight.
11:12: OH I GET IT – it’s just ABBA. The world makes the sense again. Seriously, I could cut back and forth between this and “S.O.S” and yeah. I have no fundamental problem with ABBA, ergo I have no fundamental problem with this.
11:13: It seems that the dulcet tones of TABBATU have stilled the combative lesbians. Who says music is just for the decadent?
11:14: [5. Will Young, "Leave Right Now"] This is becoming much longer than I’d anticipated.
11:14: Listening to this song engenders a conviction that the record industry really wants to get rid of all those unsold Chris Gaines albums. They practically just overdubbed a string section and fagged his voice up a little bit.
11:16: Also: ten’ll get you twenty that a decade ago, this song would have been coming out of Mariah Carey.
11:17: And so ends Blah Blah Blah, the song.
11:18: [4. Gary Jules, "Mad World"] Hey, it’s that song from Donnie Darko, Movie Which Did Doodly-Squat For Me (Outside Of The Soundtrack Which Had This And “The Killing Moon” And “Under The Milky Way Tonight” and “Love Will Tear Us Apart”).
11:19: I actually do like this song, all Five For Fightingisms aside. It reminds me of that Neil Young song from Philadelphia (called, to the best of my knowledge, “Philadelphia”). Being raised by a mother who recreationally used to play the piano for local plays makes one like some instruments.
11:21: [3. R. Kelly, "Ignition" (remix)] *shakes head* I am powerless to resist this song. It makes zero sense (“It’s like murder she wrote/Once I get you out them clothes” – zuh?), that backing track is just ridiculously perfect, like a modern-day “Sexual Healing”, and the hell if I can ignore how deliriously poor taste the whole thing’s in. I am only one man, and this song is a whole lot more; call me a decadent pervert if you must but hell. Pop music should sound good.
11:23: My first time hearing this song: sometime last fall I was driving to the Nuart to see some poncey movie and right up by the 405 at the light before Sawtelle, I pull up [2. Gareth Gates, "Spirit in the Sky"] next to an SUV. All of a sudden, this little dork leans fully out the window and starts SCREAMING the lyrics to the song at me, even throwing a bow or two if I remember. Then the light turned, and I drove away, thoroughly confused but with one more archetypal L.A. story to my name. Ask me about “The Nitro Of Love” sometime and I’ll tell you about the time I saw some guy start spontaneously juggle traffic cones.
11:26: You’ll notice that I’m writing over this song. There is a reason for this, and that reason is simply that this song is fucking stupid. It is almost of an acceptable caliber for the soundtrack to Coyote Ugly; the fact that it’s not should probably tell you something.
11:27: Songs with banter can suck it.
11:27: And so we come to…
11:27: [1. Black Eyed Peas, "Where Is the Love" (feat. Justin Timberlake)] Say it with me: FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK
11:27: Okay, I’m about to bitch a bunch, so let me get the obligatory positives out of the way first: Yes, that’s a damn catchy beat, and yes, Justin’s a pretty good choice to do the guest vocals. And – wait, yeah, that’s it.
11:28: You’ll notice that they propose zero solutions in this song.
11:29: I liked this song an AWFUL lot more before I heard “Game of Death”, which at least has some fucking BALLS to it.
11:30: I’d be quite curious to know the extent of the Peas’ support of human-rights organizations outside of this song. OH YOU CYNIC THEY’RE SINGING ABOUT LOVE GO BACK TO YOUR CYNIC HOLE WITH YOUR FOREIGN FILMS AND YOUR THE RAPTURE AND THE LCD SOUNDSYSTEMS

And that’s that.