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Back in 1997, when I was a critic for CMJ, I led off my review of a new album by vintage Britpoppers the Sundays with the following sideswipe at another band:
“In the five years since their last album, [the Sundays] watched the Cranberries swipe their sound and turn it into three obscenely popular and dreck-filled albums.”
I can’t front: I had a soft spot for the Cranberries’ light-as-air Top 10 smash “Linger.” But I could never get past the fact that the Sundays, a better band with one major alternative hit to their name (the downy, warm-blanket 1990 Modern Rock chart-topper “Here’s Where the Story Ends”), had failed to cross over to the U.S. Top 40 while Dolores O’Riordan rampaged across my radio dial. The ’Berries weren’t awful, just… a little undeserving, and massively benefiting from someone else’s sound.
This week—unless he’s too busy counting his Twilight soundtrack money or canoodling with the missus—Ben Gibbard is probably feeling something similar. It’s got to be a bit galling that Owl City’s “Fireflies,” the new No. 1 song on Billboard’s Hot 100, is a candied replica of a sound he and Jimmy Tamborello codified six years ago.
Again, I can’t front: on a Top 40 radio dial awash in Black Eyed Peas’ faux-hop and Miley Cyrus’s shrill Autotunage, “Fireflies” is a nice contrast. But it’s basically The Postal Service for Dummies, and it’s mystifying how easily it shot to No. 1 during the same decade when “Such Great Heights,” which some of us consider one of the best-written pop songs of the ’00s, didn’t even grace the Hot 100.
But you don’t have to be a Gibbard fan to still find Owl City’s feat bizarre. Because even if you’ve never heard of the Postal Service, “Fireflies” represents a head-scratching rarity: a No. 1 hit by a solo white guy with no other radio format to call home. More »
Archive for October, 2009
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Such Great Hoots? Owl City Is A Rare Boy-Pop Chart-Topper
Headlines
Even The Buskers Are Going Corporate These Days
Jerk-pandering cologne adopts a similar ethic when it comes to paying its ad campaign’s participants, film at 11: “To introduce a leather-scented deodorant called Axe Instinct, Axe sought out about 20 street musicians and college bands in several cities, using Craigslist, MySpace and other Web sites. In exchange for an estimated $1,000, Axe asked the musicians to put up ‘Axe Instinct’ signs, offer free deodorant samples when they play and, a few times a day, sing a ditty ‘Look Good in Leather’ that Axe is using in its commercials. The musicians’ stints started in September and run through the end of the year.” Wait… only a thousand dollars? Some of the targeted street musicians play Penn Station, and probably have at least as many people pass them by in a typical 15-minute rush hour spam! Is it selling out if you grossly undervalue your worth? (I hope that Cody ChestnuTT, whose song is being used in the ad, at least made more bank than that…) [NYT] More »
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No. 36: Lady Sovereign, “Food Play”
George Costanza gets the rap song he always wanted. More »
WTF
The Lady GaGa-Illuminati Connections: Still Going Strong
Part two of “Lady GaGa, the Illuminati Puppet” has been posted, with much more photographic evidence of her links to the Masons (all taken from a photo shoot that’s a Hello Kitty tie-in… uh oh, am I going to have to rethink my childhood?) and a pretty-well-backed-up assertion that her elaborate outfit changes during the Video Music Awards were actually an extended homage to Alice In Wonderland: “Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz are two of the biggest mind control themes in use, interestingly enough, due to all their ready-made symbolisms, use of ‘inverted reality,’ reality vs. dream and illusion, and word play,” the author helpfully reminds us. [Vigilant Citizen / Previously] More »
Headlines
Robbie Williams Will Not Let Himself Entertain You
Robbie Williams has canceled his appearance at next week’s MTV Europe Music Awards, citing “scheduling conflicts.” I wonder if he’s going to do a last-minute resequence of his new album, which leaked earlier this week and which suffers from the I Am… Sasha Fierce problem of front-loading the thing with too many ballads? I know, I know, a lot to ask for, but a girl can dream. [BBC] More »
On The Tube
Jay-Z Solidifies His Position As This Generation’s Billy Joel
After delaying his pre-World Series performance of “Empire State Of Mind” for reasons that were either weather-related or scheduling-conflict-borne, Jay-Z took the song to the field at Yankee Stadium before last night’s Game 2. (He continued his run as a good-luck charm for the home team; the Yankees topped the Phillies, 3-1.) Our F2K correspondent Christopher R. Weingarten was not all too pleased about this, saying on his Twitter, “If New York is so great, it really shouldn’t fall for something as cloying as ‘Empire State Of Mind’.” Which garnered a sorta-obvious, yet still noteworthy, parallel from diehard Phillies partisan JT Ramsay: “I hope Billy Joel gets a songwriting credit!” Sure, the titular similarities between the two Big Apple odes were obvious from the day that the track listing leaked, but this recent spate of Yankees-flogging does take things to another level. Why, just look at the below performance of the Piano Man performing his Big Apple shout-out at the old Yankee Stadium in 1990. More »
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Adam Lambert Stomps Around The Stage
ARTIST: Adam Lambert
TITLE: “For Your Entertainment”
WEB DEBUT: Oct. 30, 2009 More »
Headlines
Just What The World Needed: A Second Mickey Avalon Album
“It’s a little smoother, but the sound is just as raw. That’s where having a good producer can take it to where it works for the mainstream, but the subject matter is still raw and it sounds raw,” said the hustler-turned-really, really lousy rapper of his forthcoming second album, which will include contributions from the likes of Dr. Luke and Travis Barker. You know, between this and the continued flogging of the cringe-inducing Morningwood, I’m starting to wonder if the next 12-ish months won’t be the equivalent of a body-hollowing, shake-inducing, intestine-ravaging hangover, one that exists chiefly to serve as a reminder of all the bad decisions made during a particularly decadent binge. In this case, of course, said binge was really “the majors’ pathetic attempts to ride the Last Night’s Party wave”—and in this case, it’s all of us who have to suffer. (Also, I still think he’s saying “do the tampon” in the above clip.) [MTV Newsroom] More »
Video
Britney Spears Is Dancing At The Top Of The World
Today is the second anniversary of the release date of Britney Spears’ Blackout, the pop tartlet’s weird “dark period” album that was chock-full of good dance jams and cameos by the likes of Robyn. I doubt the release of her clip for “3″ is explicitly in honor of that milestone, but it does seem like some sort of circle of life has been completed, with the song topping the charts and her once again unafraid to show off her midriff in a (relatively) tasteful manner. The video isn’t all that much, when all’s said and done; it mostly consists of Britney dancing suggestively, if somewhat disinterestedly, with phalanxes of men and women, intercut with her giving the camera the old “over-the-shoulder sultry” look that we’ve all come to know and love. But, you know, given that the song’s already topped the charts, a) did it really need to be anything else, and b) isn’t it nice that she resisted the CGI menace that has befallen so many other pop stars as of late? Clip after the jump. More »
Music
Alicia Keys Fashions Herself As One Of The Beautiful Ones
Friend-of-Idolator Michaelangelo Matos has a pretty spot-on review of Alicia Keys’ snoozy first single from her forthcoming pushed-back album The Elements Of Freedom in The Stranger; in the writeup he writes about how his sister saw the deadly serious arteeeste Keys in concert in 2001, and how she was then flogging her over-the-top cover of Prince’s “How Come U Don’t Call Me Anymore.” Well, Keys’ Prince mimickry continues on her new single, “Sleeping With A Broken Heart,” which is an even less subtle attempt to channel the Purple One. This time out she’s channeling his breathier side, and the results are certainly better than before—but they still have that sort of oppressive Seriousness As An Artist that so many of Keys’ efforts, from her piano-etude-turned-pop-tune “Fallin’” on, seem to contain. Clip after the jump. More »
