I admit it: I have a bias against literary novelists who write about music. It has to do with my appetite for immediacy. That’s what I like about pop, and pop writing, and it’s not a tendency always shared by literary fiction writers. So I see detailed explanations of milieu that I take for granted and I grow impatient. Obviously, this is my fault, but sometimes it’s the writers’ too. Once I showed a friend a piece a long music essay, by a well-known author, that seemed to spend its first page clearing its own throat. My friend summed up my response with hers: “Trying. Too. Hard.”

So it’s nice to have this bias knocked over, as happened with Hang the DJ: An Alternative Book of Music Lists (Faber & Faber), edited by Angus Cargill. I hadn’t known about the book before Simon Reynolds, who contributed two lists (“Deserving But Denied: Thirty-three No. 2s That Should Have Been No.1” and “The Dirty Dozen: Twelve Great Artists Who Are Terrible Influences”), mentioned the book’s blog on his own. I hadn’t looked beyond a couple of names before my copy arrived; I wanted to be surprised.

I was and wasn’t. Cargill’s jacket bio says that he “lives in London and works in publishing,” and between that and the relatively subdued cover art, with a design and color scheme that give the book the look of the cousin of Paste magazine’s front-of-book, I figured I was in for a very literary time even before I began perusing the bios. By “literary,” I mean lots of indie rock, singer-songwriters, and folk, the styles litfic-folk seem to gravitate toward. Especially since Cargill’s crew is mostly English: judging from an average issue of Uncut, Brits are more in love with Americana than actual Americans, except maybe the ones who handed over their hard-earned to help establish No Depression as a bookazine. A quick thumb-through confirmed that I would be reading quite a bit about the creepy, gruesome, lonesome majesty of Mr. Tom Waits. Whether I’d actually learn anything was iffier. Because that’s how these books are, no matter who writes them: often, lists are where people go to stop thinking so damn hard.

What’s gratifying about Hang the DJ is how seriously its participants took the assignment. Not everything’s a gem–there probably isn’t a newly compiled anthology where that’s the case–but I enjoyed about two-thirds of the book with few reservations, and that counts for a lot. And of course, my reverse-snobbery is rendered pretty much moot. Not all of it, as when Rick Moody tells us that “Martin Rev’s synthesisers were creepier and more industrial in the analogue prehistory of electronic music than what came later when there were racks and racks of keyboards all wired together–in Skinny Puppy or Ministry or Nine Inch Nails or Daft Punk.”

Despite that, I enjoyed Moody’s list, on a great topic: “Get Rhythm: Ten Great Bands without Full-time Drummers.” A lot of the topics were similarly just-left-field-enough to throw new light on things–not (har har) Miriam Toews’ “How Not to Get Laid: The Ten Saddest Tom Waits Songs,” so much as Jack Murphy’s “Jane’s Affliction: Ten Ailments/Accidents That Changed Pop Music History” (Gene Vincent’s bad leg forcing him to adopt a confrontational stage stance, Tony Iommi’s work accident prompting him to tune way down), or Hari Kunzru’s “Yodo-Go a Go-Go! Ten Musical Moments in Revolution,” which sounds boilerplate until you read it: Paul McCartney’s “Give Ireland Back to the Irish” and Cornelius Cardew’s “show-stopping chorus [of], ‘There is the lie of imperialism and reaction/And there is the truth of Marxist-Leninism . . . ’” are both dispatched with a handful of swift, precise strokes.

Both Murphy’s and Kunzru’s lists are numbered 10 to one and are clearly written as countdowns. But most of the lists are counted down as well, even when it isn’t appropriate: Simon Reynolds’ bad-influence list goes 12 to 1 even though they write-ups are arranged chronologically. (He doesn’t seem to think the Byrds’ impact has been any less pernicious than Radiohead’s–the opposite, if anything, since their records have been around longer.) Other things are confusing too. I’ll allow that it’s my Yank provincialism that rendered these my complete notes on the Irish writer Patrick McCabe’s “Not in My Radio Booth: Ten Tunes for Captain Butty”: “?????” As for Snow Patrol frontman Gary Lightbody–great, he wants to write prose like Bono, too. Other singer-songwriters fare better, in particular Tom McCabe, who, writing about female singer-songwriters, is the funniest, most deadpan writer of the bunch. On Feist’s “Mushaboom”: “Feist’s voice and the production of her records are great, but really it’s the dancing in the videos that makes it all irresistible. I’ve never had dancers in my videos. Just rain.”

A few of these lists will probably prompt me to assemble playlists: Jonathan Lethem on the dirty Dylan (on “Cry a While,” from “Love and Theft”: “Included just for ‘late-night booty-call.’ Who does he think he is, Snoop Dogg?”); Andrew Benbow’s Flying Nun roll call; Peter Patnaik’s gruesome rundown of “Female Murder Ballads in the Pre-war Era,” which makes the music sound like the soundtrack to a complete run of Shock SuspenStories. But two stand out, for intrigue in both writing and selection. One is John Williams’ “Sheepshearing: Ten Classics from the British and Irish Folk Revival.” Williams writes so evocatively and with such abundant affection for this stuff that I was disarmed, particularly when he prefaces it by noting, “If you know this stuff, you’ll see it’s pretty much a Sgt. Pepper, Pet Sounds kind of list”—I don’t know it, and I’m curious to now. (Top 3: Anne Briggs, Dick Gaughan’s Handful of Earth, the Watersons’ For Pence and Spicy Ale.)

But there’s nowhere else I could conscionably end this than with John Kelly’s “The Pecking Order: Ten Songs About Chickens.” Anyone who “collect[s] songs about chickens,” as Kelly professes in his intro, is gunning for hero status on my particular island; anyone who adds, “Sad, dark or nihilistic chicken songs simply do not exist,” has my vote sealed and locked in permanent storage. Below is the list itself. The ones I know (1, 2, 4, 6, 8), I adore; the rest, I fully expect to.

1. Rufus Thomas, “The Funky Chicken”
2. Slim Gaillard, “Chicken Rhythm”
3. Samamidon, “Falsehearted Chicken”
4. Dr. Alimantado, “Best Dressed Chicken in Town”
5. Andre Williams, “The Greasy Chicken”
6. The Meters, “Chicken Strut”
7. Dan Penn, “Memphis, Women and Chicken”
8. Cab Calloway, “A Chicken Ain’t Nothing But a Bird”
9. Billy Ward and the Dominoes, “Chicken Blues”
10. Mississippi John Hurt, “C-H-I-C-K-E-N”

Hang The DJ [Official blog]

As part of Idolator’s continuing effort to geekily analyze every music chart known to man, we present a new edition of Project X, in which Michaelangelo Matos breaks down top-ten lists from every genre imaginable. In this special Oct. 10 edition of his column–it is 10/10, after all–he breaks down some of the worst lyrics to reach the airwaves of British radio.

In May 2007 the British radio station BBC6 conducted a survey of the worst lyrics in pop.

BBC6’s Top 10 Worst Lyrics (listener poll):
1. Des’ree, “Life” (Sony, 1998): “I don’t want to see a ghost/It’s the sight that I fear most/I’d rather have a piece of toast/Watch the evening news.”
2. Snap, “Rhythm Is a Dancer” (Logic/Arista, 1992): “I’m as serious as cancer/When I say rhythm is a dancer.”
3. Razorlight, “Somewhere Else” (Vertigo, 2005): “And I met a girl/She asked me my name/I told her what it was.”
4. ABC, “That Was Then But This Is Now” (Mercury, 1983): “More Sacrifices than an Aztec priest/Standing here straining at that leash/All fall down/Can’t complain, mustn’t grumble/Help yourself to another piece of apple crumble.”
5. U2, “Elevation” (Interscope, 2001): “I’ve got no self control/Been living like a mole now/Going down, excavation/High and high in the sky/You make me feel like I can fly/So high/Elevation.”
6. Toto, “Africa” (CBS, 1982): “The wild dogs cry out in the night/As they grow restless longing for some solitary company/I know that I must do what’s right/Sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti.”
7. Oasis, “Champagne Supernova” (Creation, 1995): “Slowly walking down the hall/Faster than a cannonball/Where were you when we were getting high?”
8. Duran Duran, “Is There Something I Should Know?” (EMI, 1983): “And fiery demons all dance when you walk through that door/Don’t say you’re easy on me/You’re about as easy as a nuclear war.”
9. Human League, “The Lebanon” (Virgin, 1984): “Before he leaves the camp he stops/He scans the world outside/And where there used to be some shops/Is where the snipers sometimes hide.”
10. Black Sabbath, “War Pigs” (Warner Bros., 1971): “Generals gathered in their masses/Just like witches at black masses.”

Let’s get the ugly part out of the way first: I am in full agreement with No. 10, and no, I do not love Sabbath enough to let them get away with it. I’m not a huge fan, though I certainly like a handful of songs, “War Pigs” being one of them. But I thought the line was stupid when I first heard it, and I’m glad there are still people who haven’t immunized themselves against it over the years thanks to the riff bypassing that particular area of the brain.

“War Pigs” is one of only three songs chosen here that I would have picked out any of those lines from in particular. The others are No. 7 (whose negative properties, inextricable in my mind from a lousy period of my life generally, I discussed in an earlier column about the Modern Rock Top 10 of 1996) and No. 8, which struck me as gauche even when I was in third grade. (Everyone knew nuclear war was easy–it was a matter of two men pushing buttons–that’s what was wrong with it.)

Three others, though, I knew but hadn’t really thought of in terms of lyrics, much less god-awful ones. What I mostly remember about “Rhythm Is a Dancer” is the title phrase, plus the odd “feel the passion” to give the singer more than two notes to sing. It’s not that I’m necessarily surprised the song contains the line, “I’m as serious as cancer/When I say rhythm is a dancer.” It just never jumped out at me. Likewise, the U2 line strikes me as bald description of banal euphoria: more wallpaper than painting, and not much to get worked up over. “Africa,” of course, is total dogshit, so much so I never parsed the verses (being seven when the song came out surely has something to do with this), but on paper, that is some serious D&D-playing loserdom coming out, all right. Good to know that in addition to being the top session cats of the era as well as winning the Grammy Award for Album of the Year for the album containing “Africa,” Toto’s members all aced world geography.

The rest I’d never even heard until I saw this list. I watched the videos for each, and the results were enlightening. Des’ree: she rides a car through the desert. I’d seen this list without the lyric attributions before watching the clip, but it didn’t take long to guess which one this had been nominated for: “ghost/most/toast” is pushing it even if you’re in the breeziest mood of your life. Razorlight: I didn’t know Richard Ashcroft had an understudy. Did England really miss the Verve that much? For god’s sakes, why? On paper, I must admit that, “And I met a girl/She asked me my name/I told her what it was,” is my kind of deadpan mannerist comedy, but hearing this schmoe declaim anything above all those forcefully strummed acoustic guitars buried the offending line for me.

Speaking of confessions, I’ve never heard all of The Lexicon of Love, so the follow-ups I’m even sketchier on. This lives up to Martin Fry’s explanation to Simon Reynolds in Rip It Up and Start Again that he was trying to make the ugliest music he could in response to that album, because this is one sour little pastry. And the “apple crumble” line really is the song’s core, if you will. (I apologize.) Finally, “The Lebanon” not only gets points for those awesome lines fitting perfectly within an equally awesome, er, meditation on terrorism, Phil Oakey gets double points for blueprinting the look Dave Gahan would take to the bank once he stopped cutting his hair a while. They even have the same facial expressions!

Before I open it to the wolves by asking which lyric(s) BBC6’s listeners forgot to include in this Top 10, allow me to indulge yet again my personal all-time favorite bad lyric. It’s from a tune everybody knows: “Your Song,” by Elton John. Take a bow, Bernie Taupin, for this all-time clinker: “If I was a sculptor/But then again, no.” That’s what Taupin should have said! Haw! Anyway, I’ve had my fun: now you have yours. 100 posts by Monday! Let’s do it!

As part of Idolator’s continuing effort to geekily analyze every music chart known to man, we present a new edition of Project X, in which Michaelangelo Matos breaks down top-ten lists from every genre imaginable. After the jump, he sits through VH1′s latest TV-based listicle, 100 Greatest Hip-Hop Songs, and finds a few poignant moments among the MC Hammer jokes:

Last week, when I wrote about listicles, I forgot a non-print, but still big and obvious, agent of the format’s spread: cable television. The televised countdown goes back to the ’50s, when longstanding radio favorite Your Hit Parade counted down the Top 7 or Top 10 (depending on the season) songs of the week, as performed by an in-house band and singers. Then rock and roll happened, and bye-bye house bands. This begat the record hop (e.g. American Bandstand and Soul Train and, in the U.K., Top of the Pops), followed by video, which just before MTV led to the syndicated America’s Top 10 and Solid Gold, each using different chart data and methodology to deliver the week’s Top 10. MTV did some of that, too. It also spawned VH1, which started out MOR but soon found its footing when it adopted a campier, retro approach, becoming Nick at Nite to MTV’s Nickelodeon. Which mean, wouldn’t you know, tons and tons of countdowns of the all-time Top 100 thisses or thats.

The one the channel ran last week actually had me a little bit excited, in part because I had no real idea how it would shake out: 100 Greatest Hip-Hop Songs, which ran in five installments. Maybe I would have figured the outcome had I allowed myself to guess, but between having absolutely no time to myself lately and wanting to keep my responses fresh, I watched all of it cold.

VH1’s 10 Greatest Hip-Hop Songs (as aired Friday, October 3)
1. Public Enemy, “Fight the Power” (Def Jam, 1989)
2. Sugarhill Gang, “Rapper’s Delight” (Sugarhill, 1979)
3. Dr. Dre ft. Snoop Doggy Dogg, “Nuthin’ But a ‘G’ Thang” (Death Row, 1993)
4. Run-D.M.C., “Walk This Way” (Profile, 1986)
5. Grandmaster Flash & the Furious 5, “The Message” (Sugarhill, 1982)
6. N.W.A., “Straight Outta Compton” (Ruthless, 1988)
7. The Notorious B.I.G., “Juicy” (Bad Boy, 1994)
8. Snoop Doggy Dogg, “Gin and Juice” (Death Row, 1993)
9. Salt-n-Pepa, “Push It” (Next Plateau, 1986)
10. Kurtis Blow, “The Breaks” (Mercury, 1980)

(You can find the entire list at Stereogum.)

That’s a Top 10 I would never have guessed–“The Breaks” at No. 10? “Push It” at No. 9?—and yet, reading it, I’m not surprised at all. Of course Public Enemy is No. 1: watching in order, I kept expecting “911 Is Joke” to pop up somewhere on the chart’s bottom half. That was the big one on MTV, right? That seemed to determine a few selections: No. 6, with its Symbolic Video; No. 38, Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise,” which makes every part of my body cringe; and No. 25, MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This,” whose talking-head segments seemed the most genuinely strained, as opposed to I-can’t-think-of-anything-to-say-help times 20 strained.

My guesses for the Top 10 mostly took place as the show reached the 30s. That’s one pleasure of this sort of thing: you get to play along. The game was tipped at the top of the final episode when its first selection, Kanye West ft. Jamie Foxx’s “Gold Digger,” prompted the arrival of Chuck D, almost nowhere to be seen in four prior episodes despite his obvious place as one of the most historically attuned rap pros. Surely he could be quotable about Hammer–whom Chuck D has always paid respect to in interviews–and his old tour-mates the Beastie Boys. Their entry–No. 27, “Hold It Now, Hit It”–was not a big hit at the time but has remained an enduring cult favorite, something the producers clearly did a lot of to balance out all that MTV.

Me, I’d wondered if the Beasties might not appear on the second episode, when 3rd Bass and House of Pain placed 70th (“Pop Goes the Weasel”) and 66th (“Jump Around”), respectively. If that sounds overly cynical, I’ll just say I figured they might make the list twice, along with others of their golden-era Def Jam ilk and maybe Jay-Z. (“Hard Knock Life” at No. 11?! Not “Big Pimpin’” or “99 Problems” or even “Izzo”? Come on!) The first episode made me especially suspicious of the way the numbers were running. The list was advertised as having been voted for by viewers, who must have been voting in very controlled patterns to place together three consecutive house/disco-inflected jams: Jungle Brothers’ “What ‘U’ Waitin’ ‘4’,” Wyclef Jean ft. Refugee All Stars’, “We Tryin’ to Stay Alive,” and Heavy D. & the Boyz’ “Now That We’ve Found Love,” Nos. 88 to 86. Come on, guys.

Aside from the usual wan jokes and “hey, I know the words of this very popular chorus too!” talking-head stuff, the clips and artist bios were rather more endearing here than on most of VH1’s 100-best-whatever fare. And more poignant: if you’re looking for a drinking game, wait till VH1 runs this as a marathon and swallow one shot for each time announcer Fab 5 Freddy mentions “the hip-hop nostalgia circuit.” You don’t even have to know the list to figure out who’s on it: Sir Mix-a-Lot (No. 17, “Baby Got Back”); Young MC (No. 47, “Bust a Move”); Tone-Loc (No. 39, “Wild Thing”); Arrested Development (No. 78, “Tennessee”); P.M. Dawn (No. 81, “Set Adrift on Memory Bliss”); Digital Underground (No. 29, “The Humpty Dance”); and 2 Live Crew (No. 83, “Me So Horny”), for starters.

It’s the old school, though, that got to me. (“Old school” has acquired too many meanings for its own good, so let me state clearly that I’m talking about artists who preceded Run-D.M.C.) Spoonie Gee (No. 65, “Love Rap”) walking around New York, head shaved, with a splendid orange-and-brown button-down, or J.J. Fad (No. 72, “Supersonic”) reminiscing about their younger selves, were somehow more poignant than their constantly touring descendants. And of course the Funky 4 + 1, creators of No. 41 (see what they did there?), “That’s the Joint,” still my favorite single of all time. Knowing that Sha Rock, the group’s female MC, does hip-hop bus tours–as does Grandmaster Caz of the Cold Crush Brothers (No. 77, “Cold Crush Brothers at the Dixie”)–makes me want to do something touristy for once in my life. And hearing the group discuss their disappointment at never having made an album gave a little gravity to a show that needed it.

As part of Idolator’s continuing effort to geekily analyze every music chart known to man, we present a new edition of Project X, in which Michaelangelo Matos breaks down top-ten lists from every genre imaginable. After the jump, he sifts through two rundowns of jungle singles that hint at where the genre’s been and where it’s going:

When does a genre reach its breaking point? At which step does it fold into history, no one wanting to touch it, until a re-introduction makes it eligible for lost-classic status? I wonder this about jungle a lot lately. I think I already did back when people thought it was a fad, or when the coffee-table thing came around, or whenever trudgestep exerted its all-powerful hand. Trip-hop will never die because you can dress it in all sorts of nicknames: it’s a masterstroke in that way. Jungle you can’t, not even when you call it “drum and bass.” But surely, I figured, people would remember jungle for its mid-’90s tumult, a breathtaking explosion of sonic creativity, and leave alone the past decade’s overarching sense of “whatever.”

Needless to say, I’ve mostly been wrong so far. I actually like the more recent stuff when I encounter it, which has been more often lately than it has in a decade, thanks to the BBC Radio 1 Top 30 Independent Singles, about which I’ve written here before. But this isn’t about those songs, but some older ones, and about the very different perspectives they offer on the style–different from each other, and different from mine, meaning not stuck in the past as I am.

Well, that’s not strictly true. The first can’t be, by design, since everything on it is more than a decade old, and the magazine I found it in nearly as old. Near the end of 1999, the Los Angeles dance-culture magazine Urb put together a series of lists of its top recordings of the decade: the Top 100 albums (DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing… on top) and eight separate lists for singles, with hip-hop, house, and techno each getting a Top 25 and jungle, trance, abstract, breakbeat, and experimental each got a Top 10; all were listed alphabetically by artist. Here’s Urb‘s Top 10 Jungle Singles of the ’90s:

1. 4 Hero, “Universal Love” (Talkin’ Loud, 1994)
2. LTJ Bukem, “Music” (Good Looking, 1993)
3. Jonny L, “Piper” (XL, 1997)
4. Krust, “Warhead” (XL, 1997)
5. Nasty Habits, “Shadowboxing” (31, 1996)
6. Omni Trio, “Living for the Future” (Moving Shadow, 1994)
7. PFM, “One and Only” (Good Looking, 1995)
8. Shy FX & UK Apachi, “Original Nuttah” (S.O.U.R., 1994)
9. Roni Size, “It’s a Jazz Thing” (Full Cycle, 1994)
10. Trace, “Mutant Revisited” (No U-Turn, 1996)

I’d seen this list when it was first published–I’m an obvious mark for this sort of thing, and in 1999 I was still doing a lot of clubbing–but had forgotten about it until the end of May, when I made Portland, Ore., the last stop of a month-long road trip via Amtrak and found a copy at a used bookshop heavy on magazine back issues downtown.

Reading that jungle list again, I had a peculiar response: it seemed too American. By which I mean that while all those songs were as often well known as tracks from crossover albums–the kind American listeners discovered the music through–as they were as singles-unto-themselves. Having listened to them again a few times, I was clearly overreacting. Call it identification panic–just because I can ID the albums and comps many of them first reached me doesn’t mean they weren’t chosen as singles-qua-singles. And call it clinging to a golden age, because the Urb editors got a few of the songs’ release dates wrong, skewing the list to 1996-97 on sight, which is the period where things started moving slower. Looking at it with the dates fixed (thanks, Discogs), it’s heaviest on 1994, a glorious year for the stuff, with the pre-’93 stuff left for the breakbeat Top 10.

Nevertheless, I have my after-the-fact cavils. I like all the tracks at least some, but the harder, darker stuff here leaves me coldest, particularly “Mutant Revisited” and “Warhead.” These are clearly classics, but both records, especially “Warhead,” with its wowing low end and hard one-TWO beat, points the way to the shape of boredom to come, and it’s hard not to hear them that way. “Living for the Future” is a very good record that I’ll never love nearly as much as “Renegade Snares (Foul Play V.I.P. Remix)” or (especially) “Mystic Stepper (Feel Better).”

Cavils are cavils, though, and what I’m most surprised (and gratified) by is how charming much of the more futurist aspects are, even if they’ve acquired a layer of kitsch now that we’re living in the actual future and not the one where ambient drum & bass would take us away like Calgon. I remember vividly the first time I heard LTJ Bukem’s “Music,” because I hated it. It was precisely the kind of softheaded pap I hated about the dreamier end of the post-rave spectrum; I wanted to be wowed loudly then. Today I think it’s remarkable, and for most of the same reasons. You ever see smoke going through laser ring, that weird glassy wisp of green light? The implacable loop at the center of “Music” is the audio version. Back then, this sounded like a bad idea. Today its soupy-eyed idea of the endless tomorrow seems touching, somehow, the way only old science fiction that shows its age can be.

A more recent list is a little wider in its outreach. KMag used to be called Knowledge; it’s a monthly devoted entirely to drum and bass, almost always packaged with a cover-mount mix CD. The July issue was its 100th, and in addition to a career spanning mix by Blame (quite nice, this), KMag asked its readers to send in their Top 5 D&B tracks ever for an overall Top 100. Tallied up, this is what the Top 10 looks like:

1. Fresh & Maldini )E|B( [a.k.a. Bad Company], “The Nine” (BC, 1998)
2. Goldie, “Inner City Life” (FFRR, 1994)
3. Konflict, “Messiah” (Renegade Hardware, 2005)
4. Roni Size/Reprazent, “Brown Paper Bag” (Talkin Loud, 1997)
5. DJ Marky & XRS ft. Stamina, “LK” (V, 2002)
6. D-Bridge & Vegas, “True Romance” (Metalheadz, 2004)
7. Omni Trio, “Renegade Snares” (Moving Shadow, 1994)
8. Ed Rush & Optical, “Gas Mask/Bacteria” (Virus, 1999)
9. LTJ Bukem, “Horizons” (Good Looking, 1995)
10. Shy FX & UK Apachi, “Original Nuttah” (S.O.U.R., 1994)

Given my biases, I should like this list less than I do the Urb one. But I might actually prefer it as a list, if not music. KMag‘s records aren’t better overall, but they present a more interesting dynamic range. Not just because they cover a longer span, either: the Urb list seemed to circle around its era without quite tying it together, while KMag‘s features items that defined their particular mini-epochs, whether or not I care about them as epochs. (Hello, Bad Company.) I definitely prefer Kmag‘s Roni Size and Omni Trio selections to those of Urb, which nabbed the far better Bukem track. (Though you could argue that “Horizons,” with its Maya Angelou sample–from the Clinton inaugural, how ’90s-nostalgic can you get?–and new-age-for-real ambience is more representative of jungle’s oceanic tendencies than “Music.”) But maybe it’s just that this one provides me more of an education. I’ll never care for this stuff the way I once did, but it’s nice to know it’s still around and still moving, whatever its direction.

As part of Idolator’s continuing effort to geekily analyze every music chart known to man, we present a new edition of Project X, in which Michaelangelo Matos breaks down top-ten lists from every genre imaginable. After the jump, he sifts through two lists of dance tracks picked by two different segments of the British populace:

Twenty years ago was Britain’s “Second Summer of Love,” in which acid house and ecstasy began to hit London club life and charge the charts with homemade variations on American house and techno records. Naturally, the British media has been celebrating. In particular, both Mixmag and BBC Radio 2 have caught the anniversary spirit by issuing a pair of Top 10s decided by their audiences.

To be fair, Mixmag‘s list isn’t tied to Second Summer of Love nostalgia, per se. (The magazine took care of that a few months ago with a cover package on acid.) Mixmag celebrated its 25th birthday with its May issue, which offered a Top 5 Tracks list for each of the magazine’s years in operation. The magazine then opened the floor for discussion, asking readers to submit nominations for the best tracks of its lifetime. The results were printed up front in the June issue:

Mixmag‘s Top 25 Dance Tunes of the Last 25 Years (reader poll, June 2008):
1. Underworld, “Born Slippy” (Junior Boys Own, 1994; reissued 1996)
2. Massive Attack, “Unfinished Sympathy” (Wild Bunch/Virgin, 1991)
3. Stardust, “Music Sounds Better with You” (Roulé, 1998)
4. Energy 52, “Café Del Mar” (Eye Q, 1993)
5. Prodigy, “Smack My Bitch Up” (XL, 1997)
6. Wink, “Higher State of Consciousness” (Strictly Rhythm, 1995)
7. Laurent Garnier, “The Man with the Red Face” (F Communications, 2000)
8. Liquid, “Sweet Harmony” (XL, 1991)
9. Faithless, “Insomnia” (Cheeky, 1996)
10. Tori Amos, “Professional Widow (Armand’s Star Trunkin’ Funk Mix)” (Atlantic, 1996)

There are few surprises here if you’ve followed dance magazines over the past few years, particularly in England. The dance canon, in many ways, is even more set in stone and immobile than the rock canon, with the second half of the ’90s generally seen as the music’s “mature” period, the way late-’60s/early-’70s rock culture is seen as that style’s peak before punk cleared a different path. Hence, Underworld in peak position–and showing up again on the list at No. 21, with “Rez,” the only artist to place twice besides Thomas Bangalter of Stardust and Daft Punk (“Around the World” finished 11th).

This may be the signature way in which dance culture differs from rock culture, in particular the modern rock Al Shipley writes about: they’re nostalgic for opposite halves of the ’90s. Modern-rock radio is a living monument to the lost promise of corporate grunge and alt; lists like this one genuflect at the moment when dance music seemed to have as much promise as rock once had–and when the music itself seemed bolstered by the idea. Two records in the Top 10 from the decade’s first half defined moments in the second half: “Café Del Mar” standing in for trance’s late-’90s global sweep, “Born Slippy” the biggest film soundtrack luck-out ever. (Ditto 19th-place “For an Angel,” by Paul Van Dyk, which like “Café Del Mar” came back even stronger five years after its release.) Broader-appealing four-four-driven genres–trance, techno, house–were approaching pop accessibility while digging deeper into their own stylistic grooves. Surely that largin’-it anthemic sheen pushed the likes of “The Man with the Red Face” and “Insomnia” and (yep) “Born Slippy,” because all these years later they all still sound dull to me. (Bring it.)

For all the Second Summer of Love’s place in U.K. pop lore, not many of its anthems made it into the Mixmag 25. “Unfinished Sympathy” came too late and isn’t really a rave record anyway (too slow), and beyond that only four records on the list could be said to fit into that period: “Sweet Harmony,” Jamie Principle’s 1986 house anthem “Your Love” (No. 14) and a pair of 1990 records, Orbital’s “Chime” (No. 23) and the Age of Love’s “The Age of Love” (No. 25)–and the latter rode in on Jam & Spoon’s classic remix from 1992 anyway. The only record prior to the Second Summer is exactly the record you’d expect, New Order’s “Blue Monday” (1983), which finished 15th and provided one of the few surprises of the list by not finishing Top 10.

“Blue Monday” also finished, surprisingly, out of the other dance-music Top 10 decided by the people–in this case, the listeners of BBC Radio 2, which has recently devoted a number of programs to its history. But as you might expect, the Top 10s couldn’t be more different: one was decided by the folks who purchase a monthly dance magazine devoted to the minutiae of club life and the other by a people who listen to the radio.

BBC Radio 2 Listener Poll: The Top 10 Dance Records of All Time
1. Michael Jackson, “Billie Jean” (Epic, 1983)
2. Donna Summer, “I Feel Love” (Casablanca, 1977)
3. James Brown, “Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine” (King, 1970)
4. Rhythim Is Rhythim, “Strings of Life” (Transmat, 1987)
5. Alison Limerick, “Where Love Lives” (Arista, 1990)
6. Soul II Soul, “Keep on Movin’” (10/Virgin, 1989)
7. Fingers Inc., “Can You Feel It” (Jack Trax, 1988)
8. Inner City, “Big Fun” (Virgin, 1988)
9. S’Express, “Theme From S’Express” (Rhythm King, 1988)
10. The Charades, “The Key to My Happiness” (MGM, 1966)

(HT to SoulBounce)

This list is obviously more historically inclusive. Broader definition of “dance music,” too–one I agree with even if my basic impulses draw me to usually mean “post-rave” when I talk about the concept. But the interesting thing to me is that this list doesn’t begin with the Second Summer of Love, but ends with it–and that half the selections are fully of it. (“Keep on Movin’,” again, belongs more to the R&B side of things than the house side.) There’s also a marked difference in tone between the late-’80s stuff here, which is full of possibility, and the late-’90s stuff on the Mixmag list, which is fuller of power. One is embarking on something new, the other consolidating its gains. It seems that the BBC voters look back at the Second Summer of Love as a culmination, while the Mixmag readership sees it as the first step toward a culmination to come. I’m sympathetic to both sides, but I have to say I prefer the BBC list simply because the pre-rave records are completely unimpeachable.

Well, most of them. The real surprise of the list, of course, is the No. 10, a 1966 New York R&B obscurity that’s a favorite of Northern Soul fanatics. I’d never heard of the song or the group before seeing this list, largely because I shy away of diving into Northern Soul compilations, of which there are many–I figure I own enough Motown box sets I don’t listen to enough. (Northern Soul is essentially mid-to-late-’60s U.S. R&B tracks that heavily reflect the Motown blueprint and have been forgotten by all but the U.K. faithful.) But sometimes the collectors have a point. Hunting to find an MP3, I discovered one only via a dodgy Russian site–no thanks. I also found it’s on a compilation called Northern Soul Connoisseurs, and I heard it via the YouTube clip embedded here:

Is this really the tenth-best dance record of all time? It probably isn’t the tenth-best Northern Soul track of 1966, in all honesty. The real question is, who organized the get-the-vote-out effort it certainly took to place the song tenth? How many mailing lists were consulted? Was bribery involved? There’s simply no way a song this obscure somehow wound up on a list like this unless some serious ballot stuffing went on. (Has Obama hired them yet? Could he still?)

Still, the point was made–and made well. I like this song tremendously. As the YouTube uploader notes on the clip’s page, the thing keeps unfurling, big and broad and strong, for its entire just-over-two-minutes length. And the visuals definitely enhance the music, from slow-mo images of Northern all-night dancers going for it to the quasi-animated stills of producer Tom Wilson, also behind such other perennial Greatest of All Time records list honorees as “Like a Rolling Stone” and The Velvet Underground and Nico. Those are records I found and learned to treasure after seeing them on lists like this one. It’s good to still find some surprises left in the form.

As part of Idolator’s continuing effort to geekily analyze every music chart known to man, we present a new edition of Project X, in which Michaelangelo Matos breaks down rankings from every genre imaginable. In this installment, he talks about the way experimental-music quarterly Signal To Noise broke free from the typical listicle template:

You’d have knocked over the teenager I used to be by saying so, but goddamn have I gotten sick of listicles. I buy the better-looking ones and spy in on those more obvious, the ones in the big music magazines. I’ve written and/or contributed to a number of them myself, not counting this column; my life was more or less changed by them. So feeling like I’m over them does not come lightly. But it seems more and more as if they’ve hit critical mass. Even Blender isn’t doing them much anymore (as our outed Anonodude has mentioned), which is sort of like Madonna not releasing singles. Maybe the listicle is finally finished.

Or maybe the formula just needs to be put to rest. At this point, listicles–most of them, anyway–have become numbingly predictable. Take Blender‘s 100 Greatest Indie Rock Albums Ever list from a while back. The only surprising thing about that was that people were actually surprised by it. Of course No. 1 was Pavement’s Slanted & Enchanted–let’s see, it placed 16th in the Spin Alternative Record Guide‘s Top 100 back in 1995, after it had only been out three years. Then it was fifth in Spin‘s Top 90 Albums of the ’90s, and fourth in its Top 100 Albums 1985-2005. (I contributed to the latter, though not the Pavement entry.) What were the chances that it wasn’t going to place highly on the Blender list? The listicle has become much the same as the pop charts themselves: mostly the same old shit, over and over again, without any real divergences, and lacking any real individual viewpoint.

That’s the major reason I like the cover package of Signal to Noise‘s 50th issue so much. I don’t always read this magazine closely: most of it is about improv and jazz, not styles I know much about, and its out-rock and electronica coverage tends to pass me by, though I’ll note the new issue has an interesting profile of East Orange, N.J., freeform radio station WFMU. (I’ll also note I’ve written one piece for STN, a jukebox feature with Jace Clayton, a.k.a. DJ /rupture, in 2002–the last time they ran one, as I recall. Too bad–I enjoy jukebox features wherever they run. I even like the Seattle Weekly‘s recent twist on it, in which artists respond to chunks of reviews of their own albums.) But publisher/editor Pete Gershon is an exceptionally warm guy in my limited email experience with him, and his commitment and enthusiasm are obvious and inspiring. And the Summer 2008 issue has a great premise: “Our Favorite Things: Signal to Noise writers and extended family throw open their closet doors and share 50 of their most-cherished musical possessions.” The Things are not presented in any special order, as far as I can tell, but they’re numbered, so here are the first 10 items chosen (writers in parentheses):

1. Duke Ellington Orchestra autographed photo (John Chacona)
2. Two free jazz posters (Martin Davidson, Emanem Records)
3. Muscle Shoals Sound tee-shirt (Kandia Crazy Horse)
4. Jimmy Giuffre interview cassettes (Alain Drouot)
5. 78 RPM record by unknown artist (Adam Lore, 50 Miles of Elbow Room)
6. Lead pipe left behind at Faust concert (Andrew Choate)
7. Misha Mengelberg’s piano stool leg (Dan Warburton)
8. “Graydog” (Kurt Gottschalk)
9. The Azusa Plane’s “For Claudia Cardinale” 7-inch (Ian Nagosk)
10. Tibetan thighbone trumpet (David Cotner)

You can see where this is going. A lot of the writing rambles–and it should. That’s that this kind of thing is made for. It’s favorites, not “greatest of all time,” and it’s stuff that means to these writers what it could to no one else. So they try to explain why, and in the process, they explain themselves.

This resonates, because much of what and why we love what we do as listeners depends on serendipity–of being in the right place at the right time, ready to have our expectations met or to be blindsided, however it happened. How it happens is the real story much of the time, especially if you’re dealing with stuff that isn’t poised for crossover. And STN‘s contributors write as if that’s the starting point, even if they were heading in this stuff’s direction before they knew how the rules were supposed to work. Take No. 38, Erik Davis’ “vintage copy of John Fahey’s The Great San Bernardino Birthday Party LP.” It belonged to his father, a Berkeley folkie whose Kingston Trio titles the eight-year-old Erik never cared for. But he flipped for Dad’s Faheys: “They seemed magisterial and lovely and strange, and the lack of wards let my mind ‘a wander.” Davis’s choice, though, stands in for a missing object, and he puts it in words that are funny, cutting, and jump off the page: “[T]he heirloom I would much rather be writing about here [is] Pop’s old banjo, jettisoned somewhere along the way because my step-mom said it smelled like a goat.”

Such regret is rare here, though. Much of it is unabashedly nostalgic: The Big Takeover editor/publisher Jack Rabid’s salute to his cherished issue of the punk ‘zine Search & Destroy (No. 13) is precisely what you’d expect (“Search & Destroy taught readers how liberating and fun it is to take part in culture, rather than absorbing it passively through endless electronic devices. I hope my own mag does, today”), and nice to read for precisely that reason. Then there’s Susan Archie’s 12-inch by Patti Smith: “I came in contact with Lenny Kaye … I sent him the Goodbye, Babylon box i designed for Dust-to-Digital and he asked what I would like in return. I asked, ‘By any chance, do you have any copies of “Hey Joe”?’”

—

In the spirit of election season, I’m going to give equal time here. The new Blender isn’t unusual, though I enjoyed more of it than usual, particularly Rob Sheffield’s Erasure column. What caught my eye was something written (without byline, as is increasingly the case throughout the magazine’s front of book) about No. 10 in the mag’s monthly 33 Most Wanted Songs in America:

1. Lil Wayne, “Lollipop” (Cash Money)
2. Danity Kane, “Damaged” (Bad Boy)
3. Mariah Carey, “Bye Bye” (Island Def Jam)
4. Clay Aiken, “On My Way Here” (RCA)
5. Vanessa Hudgens, “Sneakernight” (Hollywood)
6. Madonna, “4 Minutes” (Warner Bros.)
7. Three 6 Mafia, “Lolli Lolli (Pop That Body)” (Columbia/Hypotize Minds)
8. Motley Crue, “Saints of Los Angeles” (Motley)
9. Chris Brown, “Take You Down” (Jive)
10. Taylor Swift, “Picture to Burn” (Big Machine)

Over a picture of Swift at a vintage mike clutching a rhinestone-studded acoustic, it says, “Dudes: Let Taylor Swift drive your truck, OK? If you don’t, she’ll write one of her signature breakup songs (like this one) about how she’s going to exact her revenge.”

Here’s what struck me: this is precisely the kind of thing you say about someone who’s been releasing singles from the same album for a year and a half. Which is to say, it’s an explication of how her persona has evolved, as much as on what we think of as its basic premise. You don’t get to write a “signature breakup song” unless you’re on your third one, at least; you don’t get a “signature” anything, usually, until your second album. That’s the difference between paying attention to singles versus paying attention to albums. With albums, you’re absorbing the work as a whole, thus precluding the need to see how its components play out in the public sphere.

This sort of happened to me last year. I bought Rihanna’s Good Girl Gone Bad, played it a number of times, and picked “Don’t Stop the Music” as my favorite long before it had any traction outside of Billboard‘s Dance Club Play chart in terms of public recognition. By the time the song hit on the radio, etc., I was unmoved: What took everyone else so long?, I wondered. That wouldn’t be the case with Taylor Swift, were I of the same apparent mind and interests as the Blender blurb.

I’m not sure I am: I haven’t cared much for the little Taylor Swift I’ve heard. But the ongoing drama of pop as public discussion is a lot of its appeal. And I’d argue that a lot of people have gone back to being interested in it because, in part, of the way the diffused listening we’ve been hearing (and arguing) so much about lately. Certainly American Idol‘s popularity has helped as well. And it’s obviously in Blender‘s interest, as the magazine that most aggressively sells itself to the average pop fan, to discuss it in those terms. Which is fine with me, especially now that they’ve finally gotten rid of that stupid “Your music buddy” tag.

As part of Idolator’s continuing effort to geekily analyze every music chart known to man, we present a new edition of Project X, in which Michaelangelo Matos breaks down rankings from every genre imaginable. After the click-through, he sits down with his family for the fourth time to analyze last week’s Billboard Top 10:

I’ve been traveling all May, starting with a week in New York, with stops in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Detroit, and Chicago before spending a week in the Twin Cities. (Portland, Ore., is next, before heading home to Seattle.) I’ve been seeing a lot of my family while I’m here–and of course I had to play them the Billboard Hot 100 Top 10 of May 24.

The session, as always, took place at my sister Brittany’s apartment in the south Minneapolis suburb of Bloomington, near the scenic Mall of America, following an early-evening, belated Mother’s Day dinner at Red Lobster, fortified by extra to-go bags of cheese biscuits provided by my sisters’ waitress friend. No significant others tolerating us this time–just the loosest session yet, to which Mom attributes thus: “It probably went well because you fed us first.” As usual, I typed everyone’s responses on the fly, occasionally pausing the songs to fill in gaps, and clarifying and/or adding additional commentary after reading through what I had to the group.

Dramatis personae (and their Red Lobster meals):
Lorie, mother, 48: seafood-stuffed mushrooms
Michael, author, 33: garlic shrimp, coconut shrimp, and snow crab legs dinner
Alex, sister, 22: seafood pasta
Brittany, sister, 21: salmon, broccoli, and a baked potato
Veronica, niece, 3: popcorn shrimp

Preface
Michael: Brittany, do you still have that CD I made you of the last Top 10 we listened to?
Brittany: Miguel jacked it from me–straight up. He was bumping it in his car. I asked him, “Where did you get this?” He said, “It’s the Top 10 that your brother did.” I said, “Gee whiz, thanks, Miguel.”
Michael: Does he play it a lot?
Brittany: Yeah! He listens to it all the fucking time. Every time he listens to English [language] music I ask him, “What is this?” It’s kind of ironic that the one that enjoyed that CD the most was the one who’s not from this country.

1. Rihanna, “Take a Bow” (SRP/Def Jam)
Brittany: It’s Rihanna–but it’s not as good as “Umbrella.” Oh, this is the song jacked from Madonna’s “Take a Bow.”
Lorie: I like the music.
Brittany: The piano is nice. I’m just not big into this. She’s done a lot better. What’s the name of the song she did with that guy?
Michael: “Livin’ a Lie,” which is on The-Dream’s album.
Brittany: That’s what they should put out.
Michael: I don’t know why they haven’t. Maybe they’re just trying not to get in her album’s way, even though it’s obvious that “Livin’ a Lie” is the best song on his album.
Lorie: This song is kind of depressing.
Brittany: Depressing because it’s Rihanna and it’s not very good.
Lorie: Why grace the asshole with a song? It’s like that song that goes, “I bet you think this song is about you.”
Brittany: How old are you, mom? “You’re So Vain”? How old is that song?
Lorie: Why shouldn’t I be the age I am?
Brittany: You mean as old as humanity?
Michael: This has been on the charts for about a month, and it jumped from No. 53 to No. 1 in a single week.
Lorie: That’s probably because everyone has spring fever and is going out, hanging around the beach. Everyone dogged their girlfriends, and the [girlfriends] are pissed.
Michael: It’s also not on Good Girl Gone Bad–they’re tacking it onto the “special edition” reissue to try to bilk teenagers into buying the same album twice.
Brittany: That’s fucked up.
Lorie: How can they afford it?
Brittany: [muttering] Welfare.
Michael: You can buy the song individually on iTunes if you have the album already. A lot of artists are doing that now.
Lorie: And politicians.
Brittany: Politicians are adding songs to their [albums]?
Lorie: No–tacking on interests and fees and late charges.
Brittany: Damn you, Hillary. Damn you, Barack. No one gives a shit about the Republicans, so I won’t even dignify them with a comment.
Lorie: McCain needs anger management classes.
Brittany: He needs the fountain of youth. He’s old and bitter. Did you see those commercials with his mother? How the fuck is his mother still alive? He’s like 90!
Alex: Maybe it’s an actress.
Brittany: Maybe it’s a marionette.
Lorie: He’s like 72 now, right? Isn’t there an age where people have to die now?
Brittany: It’s called Botox.
Lorie: It’s called formaldehyde.

2. Leona Lewis, “Bleeding Love” (SYCO/J)
Brittany: I’m going to shoot myself if I have to hear this song again.
Lorie: I’ll do it for you.
Brittany: Someone get me a knife so I can cut my ears off, please.
Lorie: This should be [McCain's] election song: “Keep breathing.”
Alex, Brittany, Michael: Bleeding.
Lorie: Oh. Is this Mariah?
Michael: It’s Leona Lewis.
Brittany: Every female R&B singer is compared to Mariah or Whitney.
Alex: Because she has that high range.
Brittany: She sounds like she’s yodeling. I thought this was Jordin Sparks–I bet she’ll be on the chart, too.
Alex: I thought so too.
Lorie: I don’t like this song at all.
Michael: It sounds a LOT like an early Mariah Carey song.
Lorie: One that I don’t like.
Brittany: So that means it’ll be on the Adult Contemporary chart in nine years or so?
Michael: Leona Lewis is English.
Brittany: She’s Simon Cowell’s protégé. That in itself is bad enough: he created Il Divo.
Alex: Oh god! Don’t even get me started on them. [My boyfriend] Brandon’s mom is obsessed with them.
Lorie: What’s Il Divo?
Brittany: They’re this bad popera group.
Alex: They’re four older guys. They sing older opera type stuff.
Brittany: That isn’t opera. I like opera.
Michael: Apparently the American record company that signed her did so for something like a zillion dollars, at a time when the music industry is in free fall.
Brittany: They thought she was gonna redeem it? Yeah, right.
Lorie: Maybe they just thought she’d make it easier to let go.

3. Lil Wayne ft. Static Major, “Lollipop” (Cash Money)
Alex: Oh god.
Lorie: [The Supremes'] “Reflections”–that’s what [the beginning] reminds me of.
Alex: “Apple bottom jeans, boots with the fur”: I know this song. I don’t like this, though. Oh! It’s the wrong song. I’m thinking of “Low” [by Flo Rida ft. T-Pain].
Brittany: Is this Lil Wayne?! “Cash Money Records reppin’ for the nine-nine and the 2000!” I like Mannie Fresh better. He was a lot funnier to listen to. What’s that song, “Get Your Roll On”? Lil Wayne was like 12 years old when Cash Money Records came out–that’s what I always think about when I hear him. He was like 12 years old with a kid, and his lonely teardrop.
Lorie: A kid? Wow! I’ve been outdone!
Brittany: Yeah–nobody thought it was biologically possible, but it’s been done, Mom.
Lorie: You know what this reminds me of? Rap.
Alex, Brittany, Michael: It is rap.
Brittany: It’s more like a distant relative of rap. What kind of rap did you listen to, Mom, the Sugarhill Gang?
Lorie: No, I listened to that Superman song.
Michael: You mean “Rapper’s Delight”?
Lorie: Yes!
Brittany: That’s the Sugarhill Gang.
Lorie: Oh.
Michael: Wait–do you mean the song about Superman and Lois Lane, or the one about Supermanning that ho?
Lorie: [confused look]
Michael: OK, never mind.
Brittany: I thought about Eminem’s “Superman,” which is worse than anything we could have come up with. I just can’t believe Lil Wayne is still around. Look at all the other little kids who came out around that time. Sammy is apparently doing something. Lil Bow Wow is still around, I guess.
Lorie: Is that a person? A dog?
Brittany: I don’t know if it’s true or just hearsay, but the way Bow Wow got his name was that he was pulled onstage at a Snoop Dogg concert.
Lorie: Who cares if it’s true? Print it anyway.
Brittany: Yeah, it’s the Internet.
Michael: Speaking of the Internet: Lil Wayne’s reputation is a lot different than when he started out. Last year he put out over 300 songs on the web; a lot of people think he’s the best rapper alive. He put out a mixtape called Da Drought 3 that was him rhyming over other people’s tracks; it’s a great album.
Brittany: But he sucked when he came out! He wasn’t good. It could have been who he was with. That’s weird, because nobody else on Cash Money did well. I guess I thought the non-talent ran with the label.
Lorie: What’s the point of making your heart boom-boom?
Michael: What?
Brittany: The fact that it keeps you alive?
Lorie: [indicating stereo] It actually vibrates your chest.
Brittany: It’s called bass, mom.
Lorie: I hate it.
Brittany: You going to listen to “When Doves Cry” for the rest of your life, Mom? Tell me he’s not a sex symbol now, Michael?
Michael: I’m not altogether sure how that works.
Brittany: I know people used to think he was attractive. I didn’t understand it then, and I don’t now. I’m tired of these songs with references to candy. There was “Candy Shop,” and then there was “Laffy Taffy.” [listening] The Vocoder–the first time I heard it, aside from the Funkadelic stuff, was [T-Pain & Mike Jones's] “I’m in Luv (Wit a Stripper).” Everything has it now.
Michael: It’s usually just T-Pain.
Brittany: He’s like Nate Dogg. He was on everything for a few years. Only he wasn’t singing into a machine. And he wasn’t that good, either.
Lorie: How do you know all this stuff? How do you know all these dogs?

4. Jordin Sparks Duet with Chris Brown, “No Air” (19/Jive)
Brittany: Oh, here the fuck it is.
Michael: I want to point out that the song is billed as “Jordin Sparks Duet with Chris Brown,” as if we wouldn’t know it was a duet otherwise.
Brittany: They’re being politically correct.
Lorie: This isn’t that necklace one, is it?
Brittany: What are you talking about? “You’re So Vain”?
Lorie: No, the girl with no neck.
Michael: Oh, neck-less.
Alex: That’s Melinda Doolittle–she was on American Idol at the same time [as Jordin Sparks].
Brittany: Melinda Necklittle.
Lorie: I don’t think this is a bad song, actually. I can’t make the words out.
Brittany: They can’t breathe because they’re in the water without each other, or some shit. It’s like Titanic. Here’s how they could put a twist on this: if they were an arguing couple one of them could be drowning the other one. That would be a lot more entertaining.
Lorie: I don’t get it. Why can’t they breathe?
Brittany: Their love is each other’s air or some shit. It’s really stupid. Did Maya Angelou write this song?

5. Usher ft. Young Jeezy, “Love In This Club” (LaFace)
Alex: Oh my god. These songs are all so ghetto.
Brittany: This one’s actually featuring Brad Paisley. Brad Paisley’s hood. Who is this?
Michael: It’s Usher with Young Jeezy.
Brittany: Usher used to be good. But then after that one club song he made–”Yeah.” That was a good song, but then he kept trying to make club songs and they weren’t as good.
Michael: This is a slow jam, though.
Brittany: Well, it’s called “Love in This Club.”
Michael: I want you to hear Jeezy, because on this song he makes Usher sound like Prince.
Brittany: [Listens to Jeezy's verse] Is he autistic? Since when does it take this long to rap? He’s trying to be all seductive–it’s disgusting. I would never sleep with anybody that illiterate.

6. Ray J & Yung Berg, “Sexy Can I” (Knockout/DEJA)
Lorie: Stop! Rap and pointy-toed shoes have got to go.
Michael: What do those two things have to do with each other?
Lorie: They’re both terrible! Pointy-toed shoes have been in style for seven years. Enough!
Brittany: What are you talking about? You’re wearing Crocs!
Lorie: I just bought them to protest pointy-toed shoes.
Michael: I like Ray J’s voice–kind of early R. Kelly, kind of like Justin.
Brittany: He sounds like Frankie J, who was part of the Cumbia Kings and hten broke off from them and did English [language] songs. There’s a song called “Obsesion No Es Amor” that he turned into an American hit called “Obsession.” It was pretty good. [indicating "Sexy Can I"] I could tolerate this song.

7. Madonna Featuring Justin Timberlake, “4 Minutes” (Warner Bros.)
Brittany: Timbaland?
Michael: With Justin Timberlake and Madonna.
Brittany: Oh, this song sucks.
Lorie: So Madonna’s gonna rap, is that what you’re telling me?
Brittany: She’s gonna rap English-style. She’s gonna rap and then eat crumpets. It’s kind of eerie how similarly Madonna and Justin sound. I don’t know if Madonna’s just so manly or Justin’s just so feminine.
Michael: This sounds either like it’s a reject from Justin’s album that Madonna sang a couple lines on, or like he’s trying really hard to impress her, for some reason. He’s actually putting some back into it, and she’s just lazy.
Brittany: Maybe she should make a record with T-Pain, then.
Lorie: Who allows this stuff on the radio?
Michael: It’s three of the biggest artists out right now.
Lorie: Those guys? This is terrible. If you went to the club, you’d listen to this shit, wouldn’t you?
Alex: That’s kind of the point.
Lorie: I didn’t know any of these people rapped.
Brittany: Nobody’s rapping, Mom!
Lorie: [mocking background vocals] They’re “tick-tocking.”
Brittany: This song didn’t save anything.

8. Mariah Carey, “Touch My Body” (Island)
Brittany: I was waiting for this song so I could talk a lot of shit about it, but after hearing “I’m That Chick,” I don’t have the heart for it. [Mariah sings a line about YouTube] You can catch anything on YouTube. Like if you slept with Mariah Carey you wouldn’t put that shit on YouTube! God.
Lorie: Why?
Brittany: When Mariah Carey takes a shit it’s on YouTube.
Lorie: Oh. I haven’t seen U2.
Brittany: YouTube. She’s so narcissistic. The last 5 videos were her writhing around on a bed. Actually, all her videos were like that.
Michael: Not really. The early videos were narcissistic but also nonsexual.
Alex: Yeah, before she was rolling on a bed fully clothed. Now she doesn’t wear any clothes, or virtually any.
Brittany: Because she’s having a mid-life crisis.
Michael: This reminds me of the Madonna track in the sense that neither of them really sound like they’re doing the stuff that made them famous in the first place.
Brittany: She’s not bellowing, you mean?
Michael: Exactly. Mom, you keep asking about why rapping and singing sound so similar. You remember “Say My Name” by Destiny’s Child? That’s kind of where it began: the singing got really syncopated and rhythmic, so it’s half-and-half. R. Kelly does it too. The thing about Mariah Carey is that she stopped imitating Whitney Houston and, on her last album, started imitating Beyoncé.
Lorie: When will she be herself?
Michael: She doesn’t have a self! She’s a robot.

9. Natasha Bedingfield, “Pocketful of Sunshine” (Phonogenic/Epic)
Brittany: What is this?
Michael: Natasha Bedingfield.
Brittany: No wonder! She’s terrible.
Lorie: I don’t mind this.
Michael: It’s interesting to me that there are two Englishwomen in the Top 10–ever since Amy Winehouse there’s been kind a bunch of British female singers getting over in America–three if you count Madonna’s phony accent.
Brittany: Well, they’re not Amy Winehouse and they need to knock it off. [points to her daughter] Look–Veronica’s screaming at the TV: “Be quiet!” [Bedingfield's] not singing, she’s shouting. [listens to track] There’s a dial tone. I’d hang up on her, too.

10. Danity Kane, “Damaged” (Bad Boy/Atlantic)
Brittany: Is this Danity Kane?
Lorie: Fuck, is this for real?
Alex: She sounds like a wannabe Jennifer Lopez.
Brittany: And that’s bad. First of all, Puff Daddy should not have been successful; second of all, no protégé of Puff Daddy’s should have been successful.
Alex: Puff Daddy was “successful” with Jennifer Lopez.
Brittany: He was “successful” at shooting up clubs with Jennifer Lopez. [the song's chorus comes in] Their brains are damaged.

As part of Idolator’s continuing effort to geekily analyze every music chart known to man, we present a new edition of Project X, in which Idolator Critics’ Poll editor Michaelangelo Matos breaks down rankings from every genre imaginable. In this installment, he flips the dial to the nation’s Adult Contemporary stations and finds a lot of familiar faces.

Here’s a trick question–look at the following Top 10 chart and guess how long ago it was compiled:

1. Colbie Caillat, “Bubbly” (Universal Republic)
2. Sara Bareilles, “Love Song” (Epic)
3. Michael Bublé, “Lost” (143/Reprise)
4. Fergie, “Big Girls Don’t Cry” (will.i.am/A&M)
5. Timbaland ft. OneRepublic, “Apologize” (Mosley/Blackground)
6. Daughtry, “Home” (RCA)
7. Taylor Swift, “Teardrops on My Guitar” (Big Machine)
8. Pink, “Who Knew” (LaFace)
9. Michael McDonald, “(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher And Higher” (Universal Motown)
10. Alicia Keys, “No One” (MBK/J)

You’ve probably figured it out already: that list was compiled this past week and is therefore absolutely current. Well, sort of. To be strict, it’s Billboard‘s Adult Contemporary Tracks Top 10 for May 3, 2008, and the way some of these songs’ other numbers shake out is worth looking at closely. The average A.C. Top 10 entry for this week has spent over half a year on the chart–27.2 weeks. Half of them are also in the current Top 40–and those five have been in the Hot 100 for significantly longer than they’ve been in the A.C. Top 30. Here’s that list again, with the number of weeks each song has spent in the A.C. Top 30 in parentheses and, where applicable, the current position and number of weeks in the Hot 100 in brackets:

1. “Bubbly” (38 weeks) [No. 36; 43 weeks]
2. “Love Song” (15 weeks) [No. 8; 25 weeks]
3. “Lost” (15 weeks)
4. “Big Girls Don’t Cry” (43 weeks)
5. “Apologize” (25 weeks) [No. 18; 38 weeks]
6. “Home” (50 weeks)
7. “Teardrops on My Guitar” (17 weeks) [No. 38; 46 weeks]
8. “Who Knew” (37 weeks)
9. “(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher And Higher” (15 weeks)
10. “No One” (17 weeks) [No. 33; 33 weeks]

None of this is news, of course. The entire idea of the adult contemporary format is to act as a kind of strainer, filtering out the harsher, weirder elements of pop until what’s left is smooth and can go down easy. Chart-watchers, commentators, and other folks whose job it is to be up to the minute can laugh at this list, and at the A.C. charts generally, as being old and out of it. But being anti-cutting edge is precisely its point. (That’s why it’s a Top 30 and not a Top 100, for starters.) “Bubbly” only took five weeks to make it to A.C., as opposed to 16 weeks for “No One” and 29 for “Teardrops on My Guitar”–maybe beats take longer to settle for A.C. listeners than they do for pop fans. (Ditto twang.)

This fascinates me in part because it’s probably the closest of any of Billboard‘s charts to reflect the way a lot of people listen to music, and by “a lot” I mean “nearly everybody.” One of Chris Molanphy’s frequent points of discussion in “100 and Single” is how chart data is gathered and measured, and as interesting and frequently relevant that is to discussing the pop charts in general, it disintegrates in the face of the A.C. charts. However it’s compiled (I’m guessing iTunes sales mean absolute zero; this is almost certainly 100 percent airplay), the Adult Contemporary list is probably the most accurate chart around, in that everything on it is over a year behind the other Billboard charts, and that it contains only songs your mom knows.

I mean no insult by that. Still, I’ll understand if you think I did: music people tend toward the finicky like few other arts or entertainment followers. Partly that’s due to the isolation most of us, superfans or not, enjoy most recorded music in. (The radio may mystically connect us all, but I’d wager that most of us listen to it unaccompanied.) Obviously that one-on-one aspect is an important part of its appeal; even on a packed dance floor or a crowded stadium, the idea that a particular song is speaking directly to us individually is what galvanizes an audience. (The more people who feel they’re being directly spoken to, the bigger the galvanization, not to mention the bigger the audience.) But if people’s relationship with music has grown more peculiar, that’s largely because music has grown peculiar too–not because it’s weird, but because there’s simply too much of it to process easily.

Let me try it this way: For most people, music is akin to sports. Everyone knows the games, the rules, and the big teams; knowing anything beyond that is nitpicking. You can, week to week, pay zero attention to the minor leagues, but no one’s going to blink if you claim to love baseball. It’s perfectly OK to refer to a player who’s spent four years in AA and AAA ball before climbing into the majors as “new.” In this realm, the idea is to get to the majors and shine; it isn’t to make a life’s goal out of pitching middle relief for 12 seasons in Pawtucket.

This reckoning, of course, has nothing to do with how music actually works. In sports, a tiered system like baseball’s major and minor leagues presents an accurate reflection of talent and ability, for the most part. In music, those distinctions are arbitrary: the band you can see at a local dive can be as good as the one headlining an arena, and if you care at all you probably want to keep tabs on both camps and many points between. (Especially if you’re a genre specialist.) In music, all the leagues–major, minor, even foreign when we tune those in–exist on a level field, and there’s a lot more of them, too. In this scenario, the Pawtucket middle reliever’s life goal is both nobler and more commonplace–and given the vagaries of the marketplace, just as elusive as jumping to the bigs and snagging Rookie of the Year.

So right–my analogy went too far. Forgive me. Anything was better than actually listening to “Bubbly” and Bublé.

As part of Idolator’s continuing effort to geekily analyze every music chart known to man, we present a new edition of Project X, in which Idolator Critics’ Poll editor Michaelangelo Matos breaks down rankings from every genre imaginable. In this installment, he tries to sort the factual errors from the intentional comedy from the plan ol’ batshit as he subjects himself to the Fuse show 10 Great Reasons, where a zoologist, a cheereader, a TV chef, and Carnie Wilson all have plenty to say about girl/boy bands. Even if little of it is coherent.

Even if you’ve written concert or movie reviews, taking notes on TV watching can be exhausting, even if you’ve got DV-R and can pause to your heart’s content. It’s got to do with set and setting. Jotting things down on the fly while in a dark, crowded bar, or while seated in a darkened movie theater, somehow feels less unnatural than doing the same thing in a brightly lit living room, looking at something manufactured for the most passive audience conceivable.

Still, you can learn something from it. The obvious reason I started watching cable network Fuse’s program 10 Great Reasons was that I write a column about Top 10 lists. I kept watching because the show was so irresistibly ridiculous–as ad hoc and seat-of-pants as anything I’ve come across lately, willing to try anything as much out of obvious necessity as carefree spirit. “The show that takes scientific fact, classic literature, and human psychology to let you know it’s OK to learn those crazy dance routines,” went a line from the episode detailed here, which about sums it up. Watching, you start wondering which producers knew which author, astrologist, publicist, and/or ex-minor celebrity tapped to appear as a talking head; which ones they were college roommates with, or which ones dated their siblings or cousins, or what the precise nature of the favors one owed the other might be. (Gambling was involved, I’m almost certain.) Slow things down a bit during a randomly chosen episode and you might start wondering some other things, too.

“10 Great Reasons You Love Girl/Boy Bands”

1. You love a breakout star
2. Everybody wants to rule the world
3. Hotties always come first
4. They dance better than you walk
5. They’re your high school crush
6. You want mass volume arm candy
7. Cheese never tasted so good
8. Harmony isn’t just a great stripper name
9. You love those annoyingly catchy names
10. You like a nice package

By itself, this is a fairly opaque list; it’s there to be fleshed out by a multitude of video clips, talking heads, and stock footage. This episode begins with this voiceover: “Centuries of suffrage came to an end with the Equal Rights Amendment–but that doesn’t stop us from separating the sexes when it comes to boy and girl bands.” That’s certainly news to anyone aware that the Nineteenth Amendment, which in 1920 gave women the vote in the U.S., is distinct from the Equal Rights Amendment, which was never ratified and stopped being eligible in 1979. This sets the tone, as it were.

Soon enough, we get some of those talking heads discussing No. 10, which refers to the attractiveness of group dynamics: an Us Weekly photo editor; a publicist; a former member of 98 Degrees; a neuroscientist; a psychotherapist; and, somehow inevitably, Carnie Wilson. “In Wilson Phillips, I think that Chynna was the hot, pretty one, the lead singer,” she says. “Wendy was the mysterious, sexy one. I was more of the rock.” She frowns, then smiles: “The meat.” Before we have a chance for any embarrassment to sink in, we cut immediately to Daisy Martinez, who hosts PBS’s Daisy Cooks! and says, “When you prepare a menu, you have to have balance. You have to juggle texture, color, smell–you have to be able to juggle all of those elements to come up with a finished symphony.” Visuals: faded stills of diner food that lead, at “a finished symphony,” to a bright promo shot of . . . the Village People, who are precisely what I think of whenever I consider menu planning. Specifically, I think of the “Sex Over the Phone” video, but then I think of that video every minute of my life, whether or not I’m planning a menu.

And today’s special is whoppers. No. 9 is accompanied by Peter Grossman, the aforementioned Us staffer, saying, “People can take credit and pride in the fact that they know that, actually, it’s the N, then the apostrophe, then the S-Y-N-C.” Actually, it’s spelled ‘NSync, or *NSync, give or take entire-word capitalization. This must be why he’s the photo editor. Less factually disputable but equally dubious is financial columnist Laura Rowley’s statement that Wall Street condensations of corporation names are, apparently like boy-band names, “fun to say”–which, if you’re not being fucked over by those corporations on a daily basis, they probably are.

By the time we reach No. 8–which brings in commentary from a vocal coach, an ornithologist, and a political writer who argues sweetly but unconvincingly that “if you’ve ever been to a political rally and everyone’s singing the same song, it can be really powerful”–I had stopped attempting to keep track of the stock footage. It’s used entertainingly, for the most part, giving the show a kind of Behind the Music-meets-Night Flight feel.

But No. 6 was where things got interesting again. Not just because “mass volume arm candy” denotes the musical group as stand-in for group sex fantasies–complete with words from the attractive sexologist and “Personal Pleasure Coach” Dr. Sadie Allison–but because this is where we are introduced to Michelle Moran, who is identified onscreen as a “historian.” Funny, because Moran’s own website introduces her as a historical fiction author, which the last time I checked wasn’t remotely the same thing. Later, discussing the self-explanatory No. 4 alongside the Knicks City Dancers, zoologist/TV host Jarod Miller, author/actor Malachy McCourt, and Fordham cheerleader Casey McCurdy, Moran quickly traces the history of social dancing from circle dancing to square dancing to lap dancing. Yeah, that about covers it.

Down to No. 2, about chart domination, Fuse host Steven Smith notes, “The goal is to be the herpes of the music world.” That’s certainly one way of putting it. But no one is more eloquent on the matter of boy/girl bands’ importance than the aforementioned publicist, Jenn Nuccio of Susan Blond Inc. “The Pussycat Dolls are really hot,” she says about No. 1. “There’s going to be a point where one of them is going to get offered a movie role . . . She should totally go for it.” Please note that Nuccio doesn’t specify which kind of movie one of the Pussycat Dolls is going to be offered a role in.

As part of Idolator’s continuing effort to geekily analyze every music chart known to man, we present a new edition of Project X, in which Idolator Critics’ Poll editor Michaelangelo Matos breaks down rankings from every genre imaginable. In this installment, he looks at an issue of Spin from 1990 that attempted to tell rock history through Top 35 lists:

If you saw my bulging shelves full of CDs, books, magazines, photocopies, and printouts, you might call me a collector. But I’ve never been entirely comfortable with the designation: even when I was 13 and deep into comic books, I wanted to read them more than I wanted to preserve them. Keeping them around was a fringe benefit. The same has been true with music magazines, but it wasn’t always, which is what has lately driven me to eBay to find old copies of Spin. One of my favorite issues was cover-dated August 1990: Jim Morrison against a bubblegum-pink background on the cover. The headline: “35 Years of Rock’n'Roll.” A subhead: “Top 35 Lists of Everything From Guitar Gods to Dead Rock Star Charts.”

I’ve actually had copies of the lists for a few years before getting the whole thing back into my hands: researching an earlier project, I’d photocopied articles from a large number of back issues at the magazine’s offices. Still, it’s far more instructive to see them as part of the entire cover package–especially since I wasn’t able to reproduce one of them thanks to its placement against a dark-grey background. Mark Blackwell and Jim Greer’s “Death as a Career Move” lists the artists who, to that point, had benefited the most from dying: “Rankings are based on amount of sales increase after death of the artist.” Here’s the Top 10, with dates of death in parentheses.

1. Elvis Presley (Aug. 16, 1977)
2. John Lennon (Dec. 8, 1980)
3. Jim Morrison (July 3, 1971)
4. Jimi Hendrix (Sept. 18, 1970)
5. Janis Joplin (Oct. 3, 1970)
6. Roy Orbison (Dec. 6, 1988)
7. Buddy Holly (Feb. 3, 1959)
8. Keith Moon (Sept. 25, 1980)
9. Marc Bolan (Sept. 16, 1977)
10. John Bonham (Sept. 7, 1978)

The full list is 30 long, by the way, not 35–just one way the issue’s package shows its seams. But that raggedness is also what’s most fascinating about it, then and now.

“Then,” I should say, clouds “now” to a great degree. I’d only begun buying Spin a year before, with the issue featuring Flea on the cover, so I’d missed the magazine’s earlier list extravaganza, featuring the infamous list of 100 greatest singles headed up by Rob Base & DJ E-Z Rock’s “It Takes Two,” which had come out a year before. And growing up, I spent weekends in the city with Loretta and Arlene, my great-grandaunts–I lived in the suburbs–and from 13 on I’d begun exploring the city on my own. I purchased the 8/90 Spin after looking for it at about six drugstores up and down Lake Street in south Minneapolis on a great, hot summer day perfect for the long walk. The whole thing made a lasting impression, and it’s almost impossible not to look at the issue now without recalling details of my grandaunts’ house: the enormous oak dining room table, the tan nylon curtains, the screened-off porch where Loretta and Arlene smoked, Kemps vanilla ice cream in the meat locker next to the back door, the wondrous walk-in pantry, painted yellow to offset the white of the kitchen proper.

In 2008, though, the overriding impression is how obvious the issue’s cover concept was the work of Legs McNeil, then a Spin senior editor who oversaw the package. The features–Jim Morrison of course, Esquerita, Les Paul, the Cramps, David Bowie, and Iggy Pop–comprise a pantheon that should click with anyone familiar with McNeil’s and Gillian McCain’s oral history of New York punk, Please Kill Me. So should much of the roughly chronological “35 Meetings of Rock’n'Roll Minds,” which McNeil co-compiled with Holly Holiday and Jennifer Bernstein. (19 of the entries are book excerpts, nine come from old Spin articles, six are described without credits, and at No. 21 is “David Bowie Meets God [unconfirmed].”) Similarly, the Scott Cohen-compiled “35 Seconds That Say It All” is an unnumbered grab bag of interview quotes that make their own singular context. (James Brown, 1987: “Q: Where did the words for your song ‘For Goodness Sake, Look at Those Cakes’ come from? A: From God. Q: What kind of deodorant does the ‘Hardest Working Man in Show Business’ use? A: Right Guard.”)

But “pantheon” is probably the wrong word to use here. What made the 8/90 Spin so engrossing was how untethered to a neat pantheon all this stuff was. This wasn’t mere historicization; there was no bow tying the narrative together. For all of McNeil’s obvious touch, many of these items seemed to come from different direction than the last; that still seems to me like the lifeblood of a dynamic magazine. You might not have a toehold in everything, but the fact that it was all being claimed for the same sensibility was exciting in itself. It helped fill in the background of my increasing obsession with music, and helped teach me how deep and unlimited that background could be.

Reading Rolling Stone talk about old bluesmen was fascinating, but also like homework. Spin‘s “35 Blues Guitarists Who Definitely Started It All,” written by Jim Marshall, took the stuff out of the museum and made it seem real, tactile, alluring. (“20. Jody Williams. The unsung hero of many Howlin’ Wolf, Bo Diddley, Otis Rush and Jimmy Rogers records. His solo on Diddley’s ‘Who Do You Love?’ is a lesson in evil.”) Even more jolting was the chronological “35 Greatest Moments in Rock’n'Roll Television,” by Michael Corcoran, whose prize moments of irreverence and outlandishness were brought home by the writing: “32. January 29, 1983: Prince appeared on Solid Gold. Prince brought his entire stage set-up, complete with lights, ramps and backdrop, not to mention eight backing musicians, and then lip-synced ’1999.’”

Finally, two things. One: while looking for back issues recently I came across this blog post from last year by Marlon James, a writer I hadn’t encountered before. (A Twin Citian, too, though I should note I haven’t lived in Minnesota for nine years.) It’s a little clunky–blogs are like that, mine included–but it sums up well the mag’s appeal before it hardened into an alt-rock bible, as well as its more recent wobbliness, and I like how heartfelt it is.

The other thing is another Top 10–four of them, actually, my favorites of the issue even though it had nothing to do with 35 years of anything. It’s from “Word Up,” a quarter-page front-of-book piece by Gavin Edwards, who would later compile many small books of misheard lyrics. This list is about hearing lyrics right, and tallying them up. Edwards takes the words from all the songs by Madonna, Paula Abdul, Tracy Chapman, and Guns N’ Roses, “count[s] their nouns, exclude[s] the pronouns, and tote[s] up their rock’n'roll vocabularies.” The Top 10 most-used words for each, to that point, are as follows. It may not be all that clever today, but I’ve always loved these lists purely as found poetry.

MADONNA
1. love
2. baby
3. time
4. heart
5. eyes
6. world
7. girl
8. party
9. boy
10. day

PAULA ABDUL
1. baby
2. way
3. love
4. girl
5. thing
6. heart
7. boy
8. fool
9. eyes
10. world

TRACY CHAPMAN
1. time
2. heart
3. love
4. life
5. baby
6. soul
7. man
8. car
9. mountain
10. people

GUNS N’ ROSES
1. love
2. train
3. jungle
4. city
5. honey
6. patience
7. life
8. pain
9. mommy
10. knees

As part of Idolator’s continuing effort to geekily analyze every music chart known to man, we present a new edition of Project X, in which Idolator Critics’ Poll editor Michaelangelo Matos breaks down rankings from every genre imaginable. After the click-through, he looks at the Britain’s ever-shifting definition of “indie,” with a BBC chart that includes everything from soul to Radiohead effluvia to synth-pop that first hit three decades ago to, yes, even some indie rock:

Am I turning into an anglophile? Apparently so, because this is the third column in a row that concentrates on an English Top 10. You can blame this on any number of factors: the dullness of the American charts, an attraction to novelty not entirely unlike that of the U.K. charts. But I’ll blame it on Andy Kellman. Kellman, an All Music Guide editor and one of the overseers of AMG’s recently instituted blog, began keeping track of the new R&B singles as they appear weekly on the Billboard Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs Top 100. Since I write regularly about singles elsewhere, not to mention keeping an eye on Top 10s here, I’ve begun keeping track of new additions to several U.S. and U.K. charts as well. And if the American Top 10 is stagnation incarnate, the British charts are ever changing, especially the indie charts, which turn over like nobody’s business. Here’s the BBC Radio 1 Top 10 Independent Label Singles of March 2, 2008.

1. BWO, “Sunshine in the Rain” (Shell)
2. Adele, “Chasing Pavements” (XL)
3. Gary Numan/Tubeway Army, “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?”/”Down in the Park” (Beggars Banquet)
4. Benga & Coki, “Night” (Tempa)
5. Katie Melua, “If the Lights Go Out” (Dramatico)
6. Stone Gods, “Burn the Witch” (Stone Gods)
7. Thom Yorke, The Eraser Remixes (XL)
8. Band of Horses, “No One’s Going to Love You” (Sub Pop)
9. Radiohead, “Jigsaw Falling Into Place” (XL)
10. Lines, “Domino Effect” (Weekender)

You’ll notice the three positions in boldface. Those are the songs that were on the list the previous week. Not in the Top 10–in the Top 30. The entire rest of the Top 10–seven records–debuted on March 2, in those positions. (Six of the Top 10 for March 9, the list released on Monday, are also debuts.) Yet most of you have probably noticed that No. 3 is a reissue of a two-sided hit from 29 years back and No. 7 conglomerates remixes from a year-and-a-half-old album buy a guy with other priorities now, such as one of the week’s hangers-on, at No. 9. Also, you’ll probably notice that this list is about as “indie” in the collegiate-guitar-rock sense as the current Billboard Top 10: everything from sap to noise makes it onto this list. You could call it the straighter version of the national Top 10 if it weren’t for the fact that it’s just as batshit as the main list.

Typically when I cover a Top 10 here I don’t bother beyond the A-side unless it’s noted on the list itself. But beyond Numan and Yorke, it seemed only fair to do that with this one, because B-sides are sometimes part of what drives a sale. I’m glad, too: the Lines B-side, “Tie Me Up in Knots,” beats the A; it’s U2-style grand-sweep that sounds to me done the right way, getting over its own lyrical gaucheness with a good riff (and good guitarist) and palpable conviction. (The actual “hit,” “Domino Effect,” is more mid-tempo and blandly anthemic, though it gains some momentum toward the end.) For another, the Stone Gods’ song heralds a four-track EP, my favorite song being the riff-simple “You Brought a Knife to a Gunfight.” No wonder: days after noting them as “a metal band, in the ’70s sense–brawny riffs, masculine rhythms, leather-and-studs attitude, barking voice–I finally had the bright idea of looking them up. Duh, the best description possible, “the Darkness with a different singer,” turned out to be the correct one. What else should I have figured when “Heartburn” sounds basically like Foreigner? My thinking during all this: “Chuck Eddy would like these guys.”

Brits, some of them, really go for Americana, don’t they? Maybe Nick Hornby bought 50 copies of Band of Horses’ “No One’s Gonna Love You” for his friends and single-handedly drove it to No. 8. And maybe not. Either way, the single is sweet, and tedious, like a Mother’s Day card that goes on and on. Still, not unpleasant, which is gratifying given how irritated I became with repeated exposure to Band of Horses’ 2006 semi-hit, “The Funeral.” For annoyance, both Adele (who was also on the BBC Radio 1 Top 10 that I wrote about a couple columns back) and BWO (smooth, Euro, bombastic) come a lot closer than “No One’s Gonna Love You.”

I’ll go out on a limb and guess that the Thom Yorke remixes occupying the No. 7 position combines the sales totals for each of the three 12-inch remix EPs The Eraser has belatedly spun off in the retail realm. (The tracks were initially digital-only.) That makes nine remixes total, plus one Radiohead song, giving Yorke ten items in the Top 10. Nice. The actual music is, as you’d guess, a mixed bag. The two Christian Vogel remixes of “Black Swan” do their work cleanly and well, if not brilliantly; Surgeon’s “The Clock” and Modeselektor’s “Skip Divided” achieve nada. Each EP has one very appealing track: Four Tet’s remix of “Atoms for Peace,” which combines the best elements of Four Tet’s own work (cannily reprogrammed live playing) with the album’s loveliest vocal; the Bug’s** craggy reworking of “Harrowdown Hill”; and Various Productions’ laptop-skank version of “Analyse.”

I’m also partial to the Field’s*** eight-minute treatment of “Cymbal Rush” and, lesserly, Burial’s remix of “And It Rained All Night.” I definitely prefer Yorke’s singing to whoever did the honors on Burial’s own “Archangel.” Still, if you want something even better, go to the chart’s No. 4, a late-’07 club hit whose hoot-owl synth line is the most deliciously menacing sound effect I’ve encountered on any record in a while. That’s what we’re supposed to like about dubstep, right?

*Other Indie Top 30 debuts from March 2, in order: Raveonettes, “You Want the Candy” (Fierce Panda), No. 15; Capone, “Going In”/”Your Mind” (Test), No. 19; Blackout, “It’s High Tide Baby” (Fierce Panda), No. 21; Arno Cost & Arnold Doray, “Apocalypse” (CR2), No. 28; and Mighty Dub Katz, “Just Another Groove” (Southern Fried), a reissue of a decade-old dance track by Norman Cook, a.k.a. Fatboy Slim, No. 29.

**The Bug, Kevin Martin’s dub alias, has been on a tear recently: see also the “Skeng” 12-inch and the recent Poison Dart EP.

***This is possibly the only place I can put this, especially since it concerns a debate I’m not all that ready to join. Two of my favorite writers, Philip Sherburne and Andy Kellman, have expressed real, well-put reservations about the Field (though I’ll note that Kellman is the one who turned me onto his first single three years ago), as have others; often, the complaints center on Axel Willner’s production techniques, which in techno is all. I read these arguments and they make sense in my mind’s ear, but when I turn to the Field’s records themselves, I never hear the seams others complain about. I’m guessing Sherburne and Kellman have better stereo equipment than I do–it wouldn’t take much–and I’m not sure I could argue for the music’s merits better than my peers argue against it. But I wanted to mention it somewhere.

As part of Idolator’s continuing effort to geekily analyze every music chart known to man, we present a new edition of Project X, in which Idolator Critics’ Poll editor Michaelangelo Matos breaks down rankings from every genre imaginable. After the click-through, he looks at the legacy of British broadcaster John Peel’s annual Festive 50 countdown, and how Peel’s fans are continuing the tradition, for better or worse:

Last May, I wrote a column about the Top 10 of John Peel’s 1990 Festive 50. Last week, Tom Ewing’s Pitchfork column offered a broader, smarter, and better-written piece focusing on the Festive 50, the British radio icon’s annual year-end countdown, as a whole. My remit was narrower for good reason: I don’t have anywhere near Ewing’s deep background in listening to Peel. I’ve noted elsewhere (scroll down here) that I came to Peel the broadcaster late, long after falling for Peel the icon. Ewing’s column is valuable for the way it specifies the differences between the two, and for noting that they don’t cancel each another out–they make him more three-dimensional. And I’m especially intrigued by Ewing’s conclusion, because its implications go far beyond broadcasting:

If John Peel were starting a career now, as a DJ or perhaps an mp3 blogger, it wouldn’t just be marketers that would stop him finding an audience. The digital culture of personalization–your own last.fm station, your own tailored recommendations, your own Festive Fifties every day of every year–makes the idea of “education” by tastemakers like Peel seem even more antiquated. The sudden left turns and infuriating inconsistencies his shows offered would as likely be resented as embraced. It’s probably easier to admire John Peel than it sometimes was to listen to him. But if he was sometimes disappointed in his audience–and if he often baffled them in turn–it was because he respected their intelligence rather than pampering their tastes. The renegotiation of that contract is what stands in the way of his successors.

It’s the “left turns and inconsistencies” that were Peel’s real hallmark–his inimitable thumbprint on the works he played. He sounded for all his fluffs and miscues like a man who knew exactly who he was and why he played what he did. His integrity had little to do with specific musical tastes and everything to do with being open to possibility. A good critic, as much as a good broadcaster, aspires to communicating the pleasures to be had beyond that which she encounters regularly, be it singer-songwriters or teen-pop or horrible noise, and that pleasure leads to knowledge, or at least more pleasure.

And sometimes pleasure can be a box. Ewing’s column reminded me that Dandelion Radio, an online station devoted to Peel’s memory, puts together its own Festive 50 each year from listener votes. Here’s the Top 10 of Dandelion Radio’s 2007 Festive 50:

1. Battles, “Atlas” (Warp)
2. Dan Le Sac Vs. Scroobius Pip, “Thou Shalt Always Kill” (Speech Development)
3. Bearsuit, “Foxy Boxer” (Fantastic Plastic)
4. Beatnik Filmstars, “Curious Role Model” (The International Lo-Fi Underground)
5. Paul Rooney, “Lucy Over Lancashire” (SueMi)
6. Beatnik Filmstars, “Life in the Country AKA This Civil War” (The International Lo-Fi Underground)
7. The Fall, “Reformation” (Narnack)
8. Beatnik Filmstars, “Inside the Mind of Sam (Breakfast Serial Killer)” (The International Lo-Fi Underground)
9. Von Südenfed, “The Rhinohead” (Domino)
10. Von Südenfed, “Fledermaus (Can’t Get It)” (Domino)

Is this list reassuring or just kind of creepy? For me, it’s a little of both. Peel fans remain Peel fans, meaning they’re still voting the exact same kinds of records into the Festive 50′s upper deck: an annoying piss-take on current pop (No. 2), three by all-time Peel favorite Mark E. Smith, three from another longtime favorite (Beatnik Filmstars recorded five Peel sessions) that remain suitably obscure for F50 voters to get behind, C86-style indie-pop at No. 3… change the names and titles and this could have been the same Top 10 of nearly any preceding Festive 50. For sheer stick-to-itiveness, this list might as well be rockabilly revivalism, a.k.a. the all-time gold standard of dead-end nostalgia.

But I can’t dismiss the list entirely. I recently attended (and thoroughly enjoyed) “Noir City,” a weeklong film noir festival in Seattle, whose curator, the San Francisco movie historian Eddie Muller, bills himself as “the czar of noir,” a nickname at least as silly as Slim Jim Phantom’s. Obviously, analogies are always inexact, and the formal scales of movies and music are too disparate for any parallel to work entirely. But how different, really, was “Noir City” from Dandelion Radio’s Festive 50–or any of Peel’s, once his audience’s tastes had more or less hardened into place, even if Peel’s tastes hadn’t? There’s a thin line between a lost cause and emergent classicism. Would I have the same problem if Eddie Muller programmed “Noir City” with all present-day films? I’d hope not, because to become too stubbornly attached to the digital culture of personalization to want to find out is to become a lot poorer for it.

As part of Idolator’s continuing effort to geekily analyze every music chart known to man, we present a new edition of Project X, in which Idolator Critics’ Poll editor Michaelangelo Matos breaks down rankings from every genre imaginable. After the click-through, he looks at the Top 10 UK Singles for the second week of February, explores cultural differences related to Europop synths, and comes to grips with the Nickelback song he didn’t entirely hate (at first):

According to BBC Radio 1, here are the Top 10 UK Singles for Feb. 10, 2008:

1. Basshunter, “Now You’re Gone” (Hard2Beat)
2. Nickelback, “Rockstar” (Roadrunner)
3. Adele, “Chasing Pavements” (XL)
4. Rihanna, “Don’t Stop the Music” (Def Jam)
5. David Jordan, “Sun Goes Down” (Mercury)
6. Kelly Rowland, “Work” (Columbia)
7. Hot Chip, “Ready For the Floor” (EMI)
8. Britney Spears, “Piece of Me” (Jive)
9. Lupe Fiasco ft. Matthew Santos, “Superstar” (Atlantic)
10. Wet Wet Wet, “Weightless” (Dry)

For an American pop fan, the British charts can sometimes seem like they might as well have come from Mars—or at least like looking at a familiar room and trying to figure out which pieces of furniture have been replaced or moved around. I say this affectionately–plenty of my favorite music is English, and so are several of my favorite thinkers about it. Plus, compared to the clock-punching exercise the Billboard tally can feel like, the U.K. charts seem more like a force of nature, or a sport. (How else can you explain a national Top 10 that features both Lupe Fiasco and Hot Chip?) For the English, predicting the charts is like playing the horses; for American chart-watchers, it’s like deciding between nuking a Stouffer’s Macaroni & Cheese or a Swanson’s Hungry Man, for months.

Maybe that’s why I surprised myself by not actually hating the Nickelback song at No. 2. This caused me some alarm, usually in the form of rightfully ignored IMs to a few colleagues along the lines of, “Am I nuts?” Which I probably was, temporarily: I think the fact that “Rock Star” actually exhibits something close to a sense of humor so disarmed me that the song almost sucked me in. Fortunately, I escaped–hearing a song deteriorate over a handful of plays really is its own kind of experience. In an ever-changing world it’s good to know there are some constants–like the No. 1 song, Basshunter’s “Now You’re Gone,” whose Autotuned vocals and just-this-side-of-oompah house beat both bounce so aggressively they automatically code the thing “unfit for American ears.” We will always have Europop that flirts with toytown techno, as is made obvious by the filtered synths that take over a minute in. (On the 2:39 edit at the iTunes Store, anyway–apologies, completists.)

So, is Adele’s “Chasing Pavements” going to break America? Can it please not? The song has a Huge Chorus that’s mostly a giant slobber, with a vocal that makes it worse: Adele invests everything with even more straight-backed drama than the overbearing string arrangement that accompanies it. All of which makes it perfect for dumb Yanks who (forget her personal life) wish Amy Winehouse were a lot more maudlin. Maybe they’d like David Jordan, too. Trevor Horn produced his album; he’s Indian-English, still in his teens, seems ambitious, yet the first thing I thought of listening to “Sun Goes Down” was Lenny Kravitz. That’s almost certainly wrong, but after too many re-plays to try to nail down something else, my first impression will have to stand, however flawed.

Hot Chip have been a long-standing problem for me–I find them pretty blank, a puzzle too minor to solve, or maybe they’re just that old standby, “too English.” But prolonged exposure to Made in the Dark gave me some respect for them simply as songwriters: “Ready for the Floor” is one of a handful of songs I liked far more than I expected to; it burbles in an appealingly cheap way. They also have a skewed relationship with their inspirations, but who doesn’t?

The story that fascinates me here, though, is Kelly Rowland’s. She departed Destiny’s Child, she sang on Nelly’s “Dilemma,” but personality-wise she’s pretty much a blank. “Work,” from her second album, Ms. Kelly, doesn’t offer much help there. The track’s obvious inspiration is–big surprise–Amerie’s “1 Thing,” much of the music being a drum loop with occasional string stabs and, on the bridge, a guitar line that echoes the vocal. It’s bright, professional, anonymous.

It’s also not the version of “Work” that’s in the Top 10. That honor belongs to the remix by the Freemasons, which jettisons the original track altogether and substitutes a harder digital beat, the theme from Knight Rider (coded on the pop psyche thanks to Panjabi MC’s “Mundian To Bach Ke/Beware of the Boys”), and on the chorus, high-street house piano chords. I hear those keyboards, as well as the easy string stabs and the song’s shuffling rhythmic undercarriage, as an update of late-’80s Soul II Soul. In that way, the Freemasons’ remix of “Work” is probably the most British-sounding record in the Top 10–not counting, of course, Wet Wet Wet’s comeback power ballad. And if you don’t know who Wet Wet Wet is… well, just take my word for it.

As part of Idolator’s continuing effort to geekily analyze every music chart known to man, we present a new edition of Project X, in which Idolator Critics’ Poll editor Michaelangelo Matos breaks down rankings from every genre imaginable. After the click-through, he looks at two books aimed at list fanatics, one intermittently entertaining but flawed and one recommended unreservedly to all music geeks:

My life of list-geekdom began, more or less, with two books. Growing up, our house copy of The Book of Lists, first published in 1977, belonged to the library; a friend of my mom’s had left it at the house and it was never returned, certainly not by me. I wouldn’t call myself obsessed with The Book of Lists, because I think of obsession as requiring some awareness of its own state. It was just the book I looked at over and over and over, just like I did with Fred Bronson’s Billboard Book of Number One Hits, which my grandmother gave me for Christmas when I was 10 and which remains one of the most entertaining music reference works I know.

That isn’t quite true of either book’s recent offshoots. The Official Punk Rock Book of Lists, issued by Backbeat Books in November, is “official,” apparently, because it was co-written by Amy Wallace, one of the co-authors of the original Book of Lists (along with her father, Irving Wallace, and her brother David Wallechinsky). Or maybe it’s because of the bona fides of Wallace’s co-conspirator, Handsome Dick Manitoba, leader of the Dictators and owner of NYC bar Manitoba’s, where I’ve gotten happily drunk on a couple of occasions. After all, no species is quicker to claim “official”-dom like pre-Sex Pistols punk rock musicians from New York. “Accept NO imitations!” the back cover demands, and all I can think is, “What imitations? What are you guys talking about?”

That feeling comes up a fair amount throughout the book. Sometimes it’s just dumbly glib, as when the intro to “7 Punk Rock Bands That Pay Homage to–or Trash–Lester Bangs” IDs the late rock critic as “a wacky, fucked-up brilliant music writer and musician.” Sometimes it’s hopelessly corny, as with “14 Punk Bands That Snuck Onto The Sopranos Soundtrack.” No. 1 is Link Wray: “We say Link is a punk, and we should know. After all, this is The Official Punk Rock Book of Lists.” (Aaaaand . . . clunk.) Sometimes its facts are skewed. Not just in the slapdash historical acumen in “hilarious” personality-driven lists like Crypt Records founder Tim Warren’s “Top 10 Things That Doomed Punk Rock”–David Bowie is responsible for “All those bad Iggy recs”…Raw Power is a bad Iggy record?–but in some of the straighter stuff as well. Take No. 8 in the “11 Great Punk TV Performances and Degrading Sitcom Portrayals,” Patti Smith singing “Because the Night” on Wonderama. Surely they mean Smith’s notorious, absolutely straight version of “You Light Up My Life”–on which she was accompanied by the song’s composer, Joe Brooks, on piano–on the Wonderama-related show Kids Are People Too:

Beyond occasional instances of tired cred-grabbing, though, the book has some charm. The book’s funniest entry is dentist and Scared Stiffs guitarist Dr. James Brown’s rundown of the “8 Worst Sets of Punk Rock Teeth (and Recommended Treatment)”–Shane MacGowan is advised to pull ‘em all out and start over. There’s smart, playlist-ready record lists by ex-GNR guitarist Gilby Clarke (“10 Best Punk Rock Guitar Solos”) and Lenny Kaye (his 25 favorite reggae singles) that buzz with true believers’ fervor, and to get you started in other media, “Jim Jarmusch’s 25 Pre-Punk Films with ‘Punk Attitude’” and “Richard Meltzer’s Beatnik Roots of Punk: A Reading List.” And the book’s definition of “punk” is pretty wide, as with this Top 10 from Reagan Youth’s guitarist (his examples, when offered, in parenthesis):

Paul Cripple’s 10 Heavy Metal Bands Suitable for Punk Rock Consumption:
1. Motörhead (“Iron Fist,” “Ace of Spades,” etc.)
2. Led Zeppelin (“Communication Breakdown”
3. Jimi Hendrix (“Astro Man”)
4. Black Sabbath (first four albums)
5. David Bowie (The Man Who Sold the World–album, not song)
6. Van Halen (“Atomic Punk”)
7. Alice in Chains
8. Jethro Tull (the live version of “Dharma for One”)
9. Metallica (Ride the Lightning)
10. Megadeth (first album)

If a list like that–an aesthete’s list–is the kind I’d write as an adult, the juggernaut that caps the fourth edition of Fred Bronson’s Billboard’s Hottest Hot 100 Hits, published by Billboard Books in October, is closer to what I’d have wanted to do as a kid. Hottest Hot 100 is the ultimate chart-maniac’s book, 325 lists of the biggest hits of the last five decades by year (random example: the No. 1 of 1972 was Gilbert O’Sullivan’s “Alone Again [Naturally]“), decade (No. 1 of the Eighties: Olivia Newton-John, “Physical”), artist (No. 1 song by Barry White: Love Unlimited Orchestra’s “Love’s Theme”), producer (No. 1 song produced by Jermaine Dupri: Mariah Carey’s “We Belong Together”), songwriter (No. 1 song written by Bob Dylan: the Byrds’ “Mr. Tambourine Man”), record label (No. 1 song on United Artists: Don McLean’s “American Pie”), subject (“The Top 100 Songs About the Body”: No. 1, Toni Braxton’s “Un-Break My Heart”), all of it capped by a ranked list of “The Top 5000 Songs of the Rock Era.” The book is recommended unreservedly to anyone who dorks out about this kind of stuff, whatever their other, subcultural musical affiliations. And if you’re reading this, that likely includes you.

As students of pop history–or those who pay close attention to the comments and columns of Chris “dennisobell” Molanphy–are aware, the charts underwent a massive change thanks to the introduction of SoundScan into the data-gathering system in 1992. This has precipitously skewed the upper reaches of the Top 5000: only 22 of the first 100 entries predate 1992. Even if you take into account the payola of the ’50s and ’60s–and the ’70s, and the ’80s–the shift is manifest. Where once the positions of hoary old chart behemoths like Elvis Presley’s “Don’t Be Cruel”/”Hound Dog,” Chubby Checker’s “The Twist,” and Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life” were thought to be untouchable, they’re now 18th, 24th, and 39th on the all-time list.

Jay Smooth recently drew an analogy between the recent rappers-on-steroids scandal and Major League Baseball following the 1994 players’ strike: both were/are on shaky ground as far as fan appreciation goes, and the players/artists feel obligated to turn themselves into superheroes and/or caricatures to keep people’s attention. I wonder if there isn’t a similarity with the charts as well, songs staying on top for-freakin’-ever as a way of proving that, really, pop music really is too as popular as it used to be. Hell, maybe we can start using a Roger Maris-esque asterisk to mark things pre- and post-Soundscan. On that note, I’ll end this with two versions of Hottest Hot 100 Hits‘s biggest chart, with the records’ actual positions in the book’s Top 5000 in brackets:

The Top 10 Singles of the Rock Era, Pre-Soundscan
1. Elvis Presley, “Don’t Be Cruel”/”Hound Dog” (RCA, 1956) [18]
2. Chubby Checker, “The Twist” (Parkway, 1960) [24]
3. Debby Boone, “You Light Up My Life” (Warner Bros./Curb, 1977) [39
4. Bill Haley & the Comets, "(We're Gonna) Rock Around the Clock" (Decca, 1955) [44]
5. Pat Boone, “Love Letters in the Sand” (Dot, 1957) [47]
6. Bobby Darin, “Mack the Knife” (Atco, 1959) [48]
7. Olivia Newton-John, “Physical” (MCA, 1981) [51]
8. Diana Ross & Lionel Richie, “Endless Love” (Motown, 1981) [53]
9. Guy Mitchell, “Singing the Blues” (Columbia, 1956) [54]
10. The Beatles, “Hey Jude” (Apple, 1968) [55]

The Top 10 Singles of the Rock Era, Post-Soundscan
1. Santana ft. Rob Thomas, “Smooth” (Arista, 1999) [1]
2. Mariah Carey, “We Belong Together” (Island, 2005) [2]
3. Toni Braxton, “Un-Break My Heart” (LaFace, 1996) [3]
4. Los Del Rio, “Macarena (Bayside Boys Mix)” (RCA, 1996) [4]
5. Usher ft. Lil Jon & Ludacris, “Yeah!” (LaFace, 2004) [5]
6. Mariah Carey & Boyz II Men, “One Sweet Day” (Columbia, 1995) [6]
7. Boyz II Men, “I’ll Make Love to You” (Motown, 1994) [7]
8. Whitney Houston, “I Will Always Love You” (Arista, 1992) [8]
9. Elton John, “Candle in the Wind 1997″/”Something About the Way You Look Tonight” (Rocket, 1997) [9]
10. LeAnn Rimes, “How Do I Live” (Curb, 1997) [10]

As part of Idolator’s continuing effort to geekily analyze every music chart known to man, we present a new edition of Project X, in which Jackin’ Pop editor Michaelangelo Matos breaks down rankings from every genre imaginable. After the click-through, he [hilariously] examines the results of the Idolator Pop Critics Poll Tracks Top 10 with some special help:

By now you’ve seen the critics’ lists of the year’s best music. But what about the folks who really count–the people? In interest of fairness and balance, I’ve decided to take the critics’ choices to some regular folks. That’s right: it’s time once again for this column to exploit my family.

This time around, I played the 2007 Idolator Pop Critics Poll’s Top 10 Tracks for my mom, my sisters, and my sister’s friend who always comes over on major holidays. The listening session took place at my sister Brittany’s apartment in Bloomington, Minnesota, on Christmas Eve, shortly after dinner and gifts (opening everything the night before is a longstanding family tradition). Also around were my sisters’ very tolerant significant others, Brittany’s daughter Veronica, and plenty of delicious leftovers. As usual, I typed everyone’s responses on the fly and occasionally paused the songs to fill in gaps.

Dramatis Personae:
Lorie, mother, age 47; listens to Christmas music
Michael, author, age 32; listens to the Marc Anthony best-of Brittany got him for Christmas
Alex, sister, age 22; kicks everyone’s ass at Guitar Hero III
Brittany, sister, age 21; listens to the M.I.A. and Billie Holiday CDs Michael got her for Christmas
Cherrelle, Brittany’s best friend, age 21; listens to her Kanye West ringtone

1. Rihanna ft. Jay-Z, “Umbrella” (Def Jam) [117 votes]
Alex: You know this song, Veronica?
Brittany: She sings it all the time. Is it this version that’s No. 1?
Michael: This is the main version.
Lorie: Is there any versions without rap?
Michael: No.
Lorie: [frowns]
Brittany: Would you dance to it, Mom?
Lorie: I can’t dance to anything.
Alex: She can probably dance better than she can sing.
Brittany: She could probably play rugby better than she sings.
Alex: She used to put on–what was it, Mom?
Lorie: A show?
Brittany: Wilson Phillips!
Alex: And she used to sing into her bedpost: “Hold on for one more day . . . “
Lorie: Are you sure I was singing and not screaming? I was pole dancing.
Brittany: I’ll scream if you say anything like that again.
[The stereo we are listening on is connected to the TV, on which a commercial for itt-tech.edu is airing]
Lorie: Is this the video? People performing surgery? I thought maybe instead of the little drapes they put over you they were using umbrellas now.
Brittany: Are you retarded, Mom?

2. LCD Soundsystem, “All My Friends” (Capitol) [89 votes]
Brittany: This reminds me of Schroeder–it kind of sounds like the Snoopy theme.
Michael: This is a song by LCD Soundsystem called “All My Friends.”
Brittany: I wish I had a song about all my friends.
Alex: It’d be over by now.
Brittany: Michael, can you pass me that wine so I can drink my pain away?
Lorie: Good music. You couldn’t hardly dance to it, though, could you? I could tell you what you could do to it, but not too many people could.
Alex: Not with you.
Lorie: No, by yourself!
Brittany: I think she’s talking about cross-stitching. At least I hope so.
Michael: I’m surprised you guys like this so much; I thought the piano might turn you off. The song is basically about getting too old to party.
Alex: [immediately] No such thing!
Brittany: This is Alex’s theme song in 10 years.
Lorie: It was my theme song 10 years ago.
Brittany: Fifty.
Alex: I want people to get drunk and karaoke at my funeral.
Brittany: [after talking to her boyfriend, who is from Mexico] Miguel thinks it’s nice, too, and he doesn’t speak English. [Author's note: He does too.] You know the twins on Peanuts who just jump? They could dance to this.
Lorie: I hope they play this at midnight mass tonight.
Michael: Why?
Lorie: So I can stay awake.

3. M.I.A., “Paper Planes” (Interscope) [66 votes]
Brittany: I’ve heard this. It’s familiar. [The vocal comes in. Brittany holds up her just-unwrapped copy of Kala] It’s her.
Lorie: I’ve heard this before.
Brittany: Where have you heard this?
Lorie: I’ve been listening to the radio. [chorus comes in] I wanna go to a bar!
Brittany: Is that what this reminds you of? The gunfire reminds you of the bars you go to? [turns attention back to music] I really like this. But it’s so much different than, like, “Bucky Done Gun.” You say you like this album more? But the last album was really different. She’s more singing than shouting. Is she trying to be more mainstream? I think I could listen to this for longer periods of time if it’s all like this. Miguel, how do you like this? The gunshot [in the chorus] reminds you of the border, doesn’t it?

4. Amy Winehouse, “Rehab” (Republic) [60 votes]
Lorie: All right, hey! This is the suicidal one [Veronica] sings!
Brittany: No, that’s Sean Kingston.
Lorie: Oh, I remember this song now. What happened to her?
Brittany: She’s fucked up beyond words. This is kind of Christmassy. All the dysfunctional families can relate to this one at Christmas. [after the line, "I don't ever want to drink again"] You know, if drinking makes her sing like this, she should go ahead. I feel sorry for her, though. She has a lot of underlying issues, and it’s so evident.

5. Justice, ” D.A.N.C.E.” (Vice) [54 votes]
Lorie: This sounds like the beginning of Romper Stomper Romper Room. You ever heard of that?
Michael: Sort of. Romper Room was the kids’ show, and Romper Stomper is a movie about racist skinheads in Australia.
Brittany: I thought it sounded like schoolchildren but you brought that into a whole other light, didn’t you, Mom? It’s like “Rock with You,” in the beat. They should put this on Dance Dance Revolution. That would be fun times.
Cherrelle: Romper Room sounds like a porno. This reminds me of the Jackson 5. I could listen to this, definitely.
Brittany: This would be fun to dance to . . .
Cherrelle: . . . If I was drunk.
Brittany: And you’re drunk all the time!
Cherrelle: I should just start dancing.

6. Peter Bjorn & John, “Young Folks” (Almost Gold) [50 votes]
Lorie: Oh, I love this! [whistles along]
Brittany: How do you know this and I don’t?
Michael: Where have you heard this?
Lorie: I heard it at work. I love that whistle part. It just grabs you right away.
Michael: This came out last year internationally, and did well on last year’s poll, but it was released in America this year, which is why it placed again. It was a big crossover hit–Kanye West rhymed over it on a mixtape.
Cherrelle: Now, why do you wanna ruin a perfectly fine piece of music like this? He’s been stepping out of his realm with that Daft Punk stuff.
Brittany: He’s been taking a flying leap out of his realm with that.
Alex: I’ve heard this song before.
Brittany: Where did you hear it?
Alex: I don’t remember.
Michael: It’s a group called Peter Bjorn & John. They’re Swedish.
Cherrelle: [to Alex] Well then, maybe you heard it at Ikea.

6. Battles, “Atlas” (Warp) [50 votes]
Brittany and Alex: [immediately] “The beautiful people, the beautiful people.”
Brittany: It is! It totally is.
Michael: It’s not.
Brittany: I hate to disagree with you, Michael. I didn’t know Marilyn Manson was still making records. [vocals come in] They’re singing it backwards; they’re putting in subliminal satanic messages. We could do a ouija board to this.
Cherrelle: I couldn’t listen to this alone. I’d need to turn all the lights in the house on. Let’s have a séance. This is what Marilyn Manson makes love to.
Brittany: These are probably his kids. Hey, Alex, come over here and let me carve a pentagram into your arm.
[Lorie, in kitchen, drops a cake on her foot]
Brittany: See? This music fucked her up so bad she dropped a cake on the floor.
Alex: [growling] “Red rum. Red rum.”
Brittany: Did you just say you were going to spin your head in a circle?
Michael: So, do you guys like this?
Brittany: I like it on Halloween.
Lorie: [calling in from kitchen] I’m scared to fucking death of this song!

8. UGK ft. OutKast, “Int’l Players Anthem (I Choose You)” (Jive) [49 votes]
[Michael restarts the song a couple times so the group can hear the first verse]
Cherrelle: He sounds like he’s trying to be a pimp.
Michael: Sort of—it’s called “Int’l Players Anthem.” But Andre 3000′s verse is about getting married.
Brittany: Is he going to marry me? That’s all I care about.
Cherrelle: I don’t love that old crap in the background. It’s like ’60s gospel that my mother would listen to.
Brittany: I think that’s your mother singing in the background.
[Second verse begins]
Cherrelle: I like how he’s talking about marrying someone and saying “bitch” and “pussy.”
Brittany: They’re gonna get “bitch” and “pussy” engraved on their wedding rings.
Cherrelle: I like this guy’s voice.
Michael: This is Pimp C, who recently died.
Cherrelle: Well, how you gonna hate on a dead man?
Michael: OK, this is Big Boi now.
Cherrelle: They’re both tiny men.
Michael: Big Boi is much smaller than Andre.
Cherrelle: [to Brittany] Andre could wear your clothes.
Brittany: I’d let him. He can wear my clothes anytime.
Cherrelle: This is all starting to sound alike to me.
Brittany: [to Cherrelle, who's black] Racist.

9. Feist, “1234″ (Cherrytree) [48 votes]
Brittany: [immediately, to opening strums] “The beautiful people . . . “
Alex: This is the video with all the kids all skipping rope. [imitates choreography]
Brittany: [after the line, "Teenage hopes arrive at your door"] “Teenage hoes”?
Cherrelle: She keeps saying “ho.”
Brittany: Very Christmassy.
Cherrelle: [sings] “1-2-3-4, you a ho.”
Brittany: [sings] “5-6-7-8, your momma’s a ho too/9-10-11-12, your grandma’s a ho, too.”
Cherrelle: If we weren’t so mean, this would probably be a nice song.
Brittany: If we weren’t so fucking cynical, we could enjoy this. If we hadn’t just listened to Marilyn Manson . . .

10. Kanye West, “Stronger” (Roc-a-Fella/Def Jam) [35 votes]
Brittany and Cherrelle: [immediately] “Intergalactic, planetary, planetary, intergalactic . . . “
Cherrelle: I love this song.
Michael: Based on what you said earlier, I thought you didn’t like it.
Brittany: No, I said I thought he took a flying leap out of his realm.
Michael: I misunderstood, then.
Cherrelle: Yeah, this is my ringtone.
Brittany: [deadpan] And that says a lot. You’ve really got to be a hardcore fan to have someone’s song for a ringtone. And everybody turns around and says, “Hey, ‘Stronger’! Let me holla at you!” [to Cherrelle] Does this ringtone make you stronger?
Cherrelle: [sardonically] I feel empowered. [song continues for awhile] I felt bad when his mom died.
Lorie: You know recently I just took a day off when my father’s wife died.
Brittany: You know what’s a big factor of why I don’t like this song? Those awful fucking sunglasses with the blinds. They look retarded.
Cherrelle: You look like you have Down’s Syndrome when you have them.
Brittany: Camp Courage sunglasses. [to Michael] Don’t put that in there.
Michael: Can I please?
Brittany: If I get shanked for this, Michael, it’s your fault.
Lorie: If you get shanked for this, I get a day off!

As part of Idolator’s continuing effort to geekily analyze every music chart known to man, we present a new edition of Project X, in which Jackin’ Pop editor Michaelangelo Matos breaks down rankings from every genre imaginable. After the click-through, he examines the health of the bootleg mash-up thanks to a list compiling the year’s best in bastard pop:

Five years ago, when I submitted my lists to the Village Voice‘s Pazz & Jop survey, the albums I selected were:

1. Boom Selection_Issue 01 (Boom Selection import) 30
2. The Streets, Original Pirate Material (Locked On/Vice) 30
3. Sleater-Kinney, One Beat (Kill Rock Stars) 5
4. 2 Many DJ’s, As Heard on Radio Soulwax Pt. 1 (Waxed Soul import) 5
5. The Best of Boom Selector Vol. 2 (bootleg) 5
6. Clipse, Lord Willin’ (Star Trak) 5
7. Playgroup, Party-Mix Vol. 1 (Playgroup promo import) 5
8. 2 Many DJ’s, As Heard on Radio Soulwax Pt. 3 (Waxed Soul import) 5
9. 2 Many DJ’s, As Heard on Radio Soulwax Pt. 2 (PIAS import) 5
10. The Best Bootlegs in the World Ever (No Label import) 5

It was, of course, a stunt ballot; in year-end critics-poll terms, that’s second only to the protest ballot in terms of annoying petulance. Yet any regret I’ve had over it was short lived. The reason, I think, is that voting for seven conglomerations of bootleg mash-ups–No. 1 was three CD-Rs of MP3s–was a way of voting for Pop 2002 itself. That’s the way it seemed to me at the time, anyway. 2002 seemed like the cap of a stunning amount of pop activity, an impression that’s only deepened since. These stitch-togethers suggest why: hip-hop, R&B, indie rock, dance music, and mainstream pop seemed to not only be moving in interesting directions, they seemed to be part of the same conversation, nowhere more so than the bastard pop made from them. I’m also glad I risked foolishness by bowing to a pop moment rather than attempting to look good for posterity.

But a moment it was, at least for me. Within a year I had pretty much stopped paying mash-ups much attention, and though I enjoy them occasionally I rarely go back to even my favorites. So my curiosity was piqued last year when I saw that Chris De Line, on the blog Culture Bully, had put together a list of the best mash-ups of the year, just as the site had had the year before. He put up a 2007 list as well. Here’s the Top 10:

Culture Bully’s Top 10 Mash-Ups of 2007
1. Copycat, “Knowing the Rhythm Is Right” (Nelly Furtado vs. ABBA vs. Sagi Rei)
2. A Plus D, “Close to Konichiwa Bitches” (Robyn vs. the Cure)
3. Arty Fufkin, “Liar in a Brianstorm” (Arctic Monkeys vs. Beyoncé feat. Shakira)
4. DJ Morgoth, “Starz on the Boogie” (Just Jack vs. Jay-Kid)
5. DJ STV SLV, “Lose My Waters of Naza(b)reath” (Justice vs. Destinys Child)
6. Lenlow, “Bjorn Slippy” (Peter, Bjorn & John vs. Underworld)
7. ABX, “Tambourine Reckoning” (Eve vs. Radiohead)
8. Dunproofin’, “Fiddy Fiddy Fiddy Fiddy” (50 Cent vs. Kaiser Chiefs)
9. DJ Erb, “Ecstasy of Gold” (Ennio Morricone vs. Nas)
10. ABX, “Wouldn’t Grip Far” (The Game vs. the Go! Team)

Listening to these the first time was faintly embarrassing, like seeing a picture of myself during my ill conceived eighth-grade rat-tail-and-Zubaz phase. At first all I could hear were the joins. Take Copycat’s No. 1 entry: Nelly Furtado’s vocals have been clipped slightly, throwing off the easy cadence of the original “Say It Right.” On subsequent plays it sounds a lot smoother over its new bed–per Mashuptown, ABBA’s “Knowing Me, Knowing You” and “Gimme, Gimme, Gimme,” as well as Sagi Rei’s cover of Snap’s “Rhythm Is a Dancer” and some added instrumentation. (I now remember another thing I liked about mash-ups: listing their sources ate up my word counts, making them relatively easy to write about.)

That isn’t to say Copycat’s track isn’t pure stunt work. Most of these tracks are; that’s sort of the idea of mash-ups in the first place. And plenty of them are egregious: Arty Fufkin’s “Liar in a Brianstorm” might make Beyoncé and Shakira sound relatively right over the Arctic Monkeys’ hectic pounding, but it doesn’t make any of them sound especially interesting. On the other hand, “Lose My Waters of Naza(b)reath” (horrible title, like most of them) makes hay with Miss B’Day by looping and manipulating Justice’s track till the two things build momentum together, a reminder that arranging ability and not mere Vocal A + Music B was what separated the good from the bad.

Or, a lot more often, from the mediocre: take Lenlow “Bjorn Slippy,” which, actually decent title aside, merely pastes that ubiquitous whistling song over the beatless intro from Underworld’s greatest hit. It works, I guess, but it’s pretty one-joke, and when Karl Hyde comes in it just seems cheap. DJ Morgoth’s “Starz on the Boogie,” on the other hand, alternates Jay-Kid’s Jackson 5 cover with a Just Jack track to pretty good effect–though it might just seem that way since I didn’t know the Just Jack track beforehand and don’t find it distracting.

Of course, such juxtapositions can be their own ends: ABX’s No. 7 entry pairs Eve’s exuberant hit with my favorite track off the new Radiohead album, and DJ Erb makes Nas’s rising-momentum “One Mic” over with the help of an Ennio Morricone spaghetti western theme. Both prove their points nicely enough, neither will take the place of either the originals or anything else like them, and all of it convinces me that one year of wallowing in this stuff was quite enough.

Culture Bully’s 15 Favorite Mashups Of 2007 [Culture Bully]

As part of Idolator’s continuing effort to geekily analyze every music chart known to man, we present a new edition of Project X, in which Jackin’ Pop editor Michaelangelo Matos breaks down rankings from every genre imaginable. After the click-through, he tries on a pair of very different sensibilities thanks to 2007 Top 10 lists from Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon and the U.K.’s Fact magazine:

One of the reasons I wanted to write about lists instead of simply making them–though of course I did loads of that too–was to try and wrestle with other sensibilities. Lists by rugged individualists don’t necessarily have something over the will of the mass public (or press) in terms of intrigue, as I hope is demonstrated by some of the prior Project X columns. But usually a sensibility is particular, and its particularity is the pleasure of it. You may not want to wake up insisting on the truth and rightness of Alanis Morissette, but you’re glad someone smart enough to be able to make a case exists, just so you can think like someone else for a while.

My own early rock critical tendencies came from this place, and a lot of my work shows it only too clearly. But now when a particular writer strikes me, I try to hear what they hear the way I imagine they hear it. This produces a kind of pleasant (and usually short-lived) double-consciousness, because I have to figure out how I’m hearing it, too. Obviously if I find another sensibility persuasive enough to bask in it for a spell, there’s going to be some overlap in our perceptions: I can see where they’ve got a real thing for bells and sub-bass; mine isn’t quite so pronounced.

Recently two Top 10s got me thinking about sensibility. I know zilch about fine art, but I look forward to no magazine’s end-of-year issue more than Artforum‘s. The new Best of 2007 issue, as with each of their year-ends since the decade’s turn, is scrumptiously designed, particularly the art critics’ Top 10s in the back of the book. The layout–writing page left, lively arrangements of images from the lists page right–is clean and thoughtful, investing the lists with authority but also with air. The front of book operates similarly, though on a different plane. As it has for most of the decade, Artforum offers appetizers in the way of film and music Top 10s (five each), as well as 13 contributors’ favorite-book squibs and, under the title “The Artists’ Artists,” a smorgasbord of creators’ quoted raves.

My initial response to this year’s Music Top 10s was typical of a working rock critic all too aware of the dwindling opportunities the profession affords: I was disappointed and a little insulted. After all, I’d started reading Artforum in high school, for Greil Marcus’s “Real Life Rock Top Ten” column; the magazine kept the format but has a guest writer in the Top 10 slot every month. I wasn’t surprised, though, that each of the five contributors to the 2007 year-end Music 10s are best known as musicians, though Damon Krukowski (Damon & Naomi), Kim Gordon (Sonic Youth), and avant-garde composer Alex Waterman have written notable journalism, and David Byrne keeps an entertaining Web journal. (The fifth Music list comes from singer-songwriter and fine artist Marissa Nadler.)

Kim Gordon’s Top 10 of 2007:
1. Mouthus, Saw a Halo (Load Records)
2. Charalambides, Likenes (Kranky)
3. & 4. MV & EE with the Bummer Road, Green Blues; MV & EE with the Golden Road, Getting’ Gone (Ecstatic Peace!)
5. Islaja, Ulual yyy (Fonal)
6. Britney Spears at the MTV Video Music Awards, Las Vegas
7. “Monster Eyes” in Jonathan Lethem’s You Don’t Love Me Yet (Doubleday)
8. The Bastard Wing, To Contain Love (Ultra Hard Gel)
9. Negative Approach, Center Stage 1, All Tomorrow’s Parties, Minehead, UK
10. Karen Dalton, Cotton Eyed Joe (Delmore)

The first thing I noticed was how many of the items concern people Gordon knows well. The MV & EE albums came out on the label run by Gordon’s husband and bandmate Thurston Moore, who also curated the December 2006 All Tomorrow’s Parties festival at which Negative Approach appeared, and whose solo album Trees Outside the Academy features Christina Carter of Charalambides, who also appeared at ATP.

Big deal, you might say. I do, too; of course we want an artist’s Top 10 to mention the artist’s colleagues. If they didn’t, what kind of colleagues would they be? I’m unfamiliar with basically everything Gordon lists, but I’ll hazard a guess that it falls under the general lines of sensibility she’s established as a public figure and band member. Anyway, it’s not her sensibility I wonder about here. Am I wrong to worry what it means for music writing generally when a magazine like Artforum, a long-standing champion of informed critical writing, uses no full-time critics to summarize Music In 2007? Right, I’m overreacting; freelancing will do that to you.

Another Top 10–really a Top 100–has been worrying me in a much happier manner. I know little of Fact magazine, apparently a U.K. bimonthly. When it came up on the I Love Music message board recently, a couple of English posters mentioned they’d never seen it before. When the list was posted here a few days ago, DJ and critic Philip Sherburne chimed in: “fact’s electronic-music coverage is always solid, in no small part because they’ve got the awesome kiran sande, of the awesome tape blog, writing for them. they manage to broaden their dance-music coverage beyond blog-house because unlike most dance bloggers, he actually goes out and, like, buys records, and has opinions of his own, rather than just sitting around and waiting for someone to send him a link to the latest crystal castles remix or whatever. ok, so i’m being snide, but it’s kinda true.” That’s precisely what drew me to the list; it’s got a street-level feel, not least because I’d barely heard of any of it. Here’s the Top 10:

1. LCD Soundsystem, “Get Innocuous” (DFA/EMI)
2. Roisin Murphy, “Overpowered” (EMI)
3. Vampire Weekend, “Mansard Roof” (Abeano)
4. Holy Fuck, “Lovely Allen” (Young Turks)
5. Patrick Wolf, “The Magic Position” (Loog)
6. M.I.A., “Paper Planes” (XL)
7. Battles, “Atlas” (Warp)
8. Panda Bear, “Bro’s” (Paw Tracks)
9. Burial, “Archangel” (Hyperdub)
10. Foals, “Hummer” (Transgressive)

As it goes, the list mixes better-known stuff (No. 19 is “Umbrella”) with the ever more obscure. I can understand being put off by this list’s insider aura, but I’m drawn to it. The continuum it presents is a very persuasive one, and the main thing I get is a love for faded glamour, not as kitsch but as everyday stuff, and a very English sensibility (of course) that’s offhanded about its own Englishness.

Listening to the Top 10 is a little peculiar. It isn’t simply that Fact‘s writers don’t conceive of “pop” the way an American music magazine might, strewing their list with a 12-minute monster like the Panda Bear track or Holy Fuck’s instrumental, and aptly titled, “Lovely Allen.” It’s that it communicates not consensus but an argumentative aura; you get the idea that someone in London had probably fallen really hard for these songs and argued them hard into the upper echelon. Whether voices were raised in the making of this list is less important than the fact that voices were honored, not subsumed.

And that helped open me up to these songs, even ones (Vampire Weekend, Burial, Battles) that I’d heard but which hadn’t really clicked yet. This may be the main context in which I’ll enjoy them, but enjoy them I now do. Not to mention that, having stopped playing Sound of Silver and started hearing it everywhere instead, the song I most actively craved was “Get Innocuous,” the album’s first song. (That build.) Yet I’ve mostly avoided saying so, or even acknowledging it to myself, until Fact pointed out the obvious. My ears thank them again.

As part of Idolator’s continuing effort to geekily analyze every music chart known to man, we present a new edition of Project X, in which Jackin’ Pop editor Michaelangelo Matos breaks down rankings from every genre imaginable. After the click-through, he takes a break from Thanksgiving to sit down with his family and listen to the Billboard Hot Country Songs Top 10, capturing their cantankerous opinions about George Strait, Baz Luhrmann, and Cookie Crisp for posterity:

Back in July, I played the then-current Top 10 of Billboard’s Hot 100 for my family in Bloomington, a suburb of Minneapolis. Last week, visiting for Thanksgiving, I decided to do it again–only this time, I played the Billboard Hot Country Songs Top 10 for November 24, 2007–partly because my mother knows country music better than pop or (god knows) hip-hop and R&B. The listening session took place after Thanksgiving dinner at my mom’s house, where we were joined by all three siblings’ very tolerant significant others, as well as Brittany’s friend Cherrelle. Once again, I typed everyone’s responses on the fly, occasionally pausing the music to fill in gaps.

Dramatis personae:

Lorie, mother, age 47; listens primarily to country and soft rock

Michael, author, age 32; listens to lots of things

Alex, sister, age 22; primarily a country and R&B fan

Brittany, sister, age 20; listens to much music, but no one more than Marc Anthony

Cherrelle, Brittany’s best friend, age 21; listens primarily to rock and hip-hop

1. Dierks Bentley, “Free and Easy (Down the Road I Go)

Brittany: Josh Turner?

Michael: No, it’s Dierks Bentley.

Lorie: I know this. When I first heard it I hated it, but now I like it. I thought it was about a homeless person, but then I realized he has a car.

Brittany: Lots of homeless people have cars.

Michael: Anyone have any impressions about this song?

Cherrelle: [makes barf noise]

Brittany: The guitar was nice. I probably wouldn’t recognize it unless I heard it a second time.

[Veronica wanders out of room]

Lorie: Veronica?

Brittany: Well, that’s what she thinks of that song.

2. Kenny Chesney, “Don’t Blink”

Alex: Tim McGraw? Oh, Kenny Chesney.

Brittany: [a few seconds later] Is this Kenny Chesney?

Alex: I just said that!

Brittany: Oh. [deadpan] I ignore you a lot.

Alex: This song reminds me of that song that . . . you know that Rascal Flatts song that goes, “If you play a country song backwards, you get your house and your dog back”?

Brittany: “Backwards.”

Alex: Yeah, this sounds like that.

Lorie: It sounds like if you played a rap song backwards.

Brittany: Well, they’re the same thing!

Lorie: No! [Country singers] live hard, real lives!

Brittany: So do gangsta rappers!

Lorie: They say the same things–about booty and welfare lines. Country singers care about people.

Brittany: Rappers care. Haven’t you read Tupac’s poetry?

Lorie: What does it say?

Brittany: [mockingly] He said he was a rose that grew from the concrete. [listens for a while] This song is incredibly cheesy.

Lorie: I think it’s true, from my 50-year-old perspective in life.

Michael: That you lose track of time and are suddenly old? That’s new.

Brittany: Is that what happened to Jesus? All those lost years, he blinked? That’s got to be it. Can I blink this song over?

Alex: I don’t really like Kenny Chseney.

Lorie: You used to love Kenny Chesney!

Brittany: This song is terrible! That’s why she doesn’t like it. Just because you like him doesn’t mean you have to like every song he sings.

Michael: We have to listen to the coda. This is where he sings really “soulfully.”

Cherrelle: [looking agonized] Do we get a cut of the money [from this column]?

3. Carrie Underwood, “So Small”

Lorie: Shania Twain?

Cherrelle: Is it Carrie Underwood?

Michael: Yes.

Cherrelle: I could tolerate this. This sounds like “Don’t Blink.” They’re just saying the same thing.

Michael: “Everything seems so small” . . . except the production on this record.

Brittany: And the notes she’s hitting. She has a good voice but she has the tendency to oversing.

Lorie: You know what happens after that, don’t you? You marry Bobby Brown and start doing cocaine.

4. Garth Brooks, “More Than a Memory”

Lorie: Oh my god. There are songs that the first time I hear them, halfway through I just love them. Turn it up: it just gets prettier as it goes along.

Brittany: He has a great fucking voice.

Michael: Mom, were you ever a Garth Brooks fan before this?

Lorie: No, it just started. There’s two people that, all of a sudden, in the last year I’ve started liking: him and Bob–who’s that guy from here? Bob Dylan.

Brittany: [stunned] When did you get good taste in music?

Lorie: It’s just in the last few years. [Brooks sings, "Waking a friend in the dead of the night/Just to hear him say it'll be all right"] I didn’t know that guys called each other in the middle of the night and talked! I thought that was just a chick thing.

Brittany: Haven’t you ever seen MySpace’s Missed Connections? It’s full of guys doing that.

5. Josh Turner, “Firecracker”

Brittany: This is Josh Turner, isn’t it? You can tell with that voice.

Alex: This is a pretty good song.

Lorie: [yells from kitchen] All right, “Firecracker”!

Brittany: I don’t care about the song. I just like his voice.

Cherrelle: [Turner sings, "My little darling is a firecracker"] “My little daughter”?

Brittany: No, that’s Billy Ray Cyrus.

Cherrelle: He’s hot.

Brittany: Have you seen Josh Turner? He’s hot.

Cherrelle: Yeah, but Billy Ray Cyrus has age on his side. Like, some guys are sexy because they’re older . . .

Brittany: . . . And you’re a slut. [Cherrelle and Brittany crack up]

6. George Strait, “How ‘Bout Them Cowgirls”

Lorie: Oh! This is embarrassing. It’s “Cowgirls.” It reminds me of something from Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, like from the ’40s or something.

Cherrelle: Eww. This sounds like something circa 1983.

Michael: That’s pretty accurate, actually: George Strait started out around 1983, and he hasn’t really changed what he does since.

[Strait sings, "I've criss-crossed down to Key Biscayne/And Chi-Town via Bangor, Maine"]

Cherrelle: Did he say “Chi-Town”?

Brittany & Cherrelle: [hands in air] Woo! Woo!

Brittany: Did he just say “brown girls”? Chi-town? Cowgirls? He’s mumbling. Is he even saying words?

Lorie: You half expect him to be driving off into the sunset on a horse.

Brittany: Driving on a horse, eh? [addressing song] So, are city girls the same way?

Michael: All women are the same way in this song: under the thumb of the patriarchy.

Brittany: Cowboys don’t want strong women; they want women who will make babies and food.

Lorie: This is embarrassing.

Cherrelle: The music is nice, but the words suck. Someone should shake this man.

7. Clay Walker, “Fall”

Michael: Another ballad.

Brittany: Go figure. Who is this? They all sound the same.

Cherrelle: Can someone throw in a “yee-haw” just to perk things up?

Brittany: [Country singers are] more fun when they drink. Is it body function day? “Blink,” “Fall.” Now “trip”–that would be funny. Or “Shove,” “bitch-slap” . . .

Michael: You’re quiet back there, Alex.

Alex: I’m tired. This song isn’t helping.

Cherrelle: I thought he was telling her to hold on, but now he’s telling her he’s not going to catch her.

Brittany: “Every time you fall it’s because I’ll push you.” He sounds like the guy from the Cookie Crisp commercial: Cooooooooookie Crisp!

8. Jason Michael Carroll, “Livin’ Our Love Song”

Brittany: Why do all women in country songs have baby blue eyes?

Cherrelle: Racist!

Lorie: The one that had the abortion in the back of the car in the Tim McGraw song, who was pregnant when he first met her ["Red Ragtop"]–she had green eyes.

Brittany: What was the Tim McGraw song where she was always on the verge of death? They were at the movies and she was about to get shot.

Lorie: “Don’t Take the Girl.” I love that song.

Brittany: She must have lived in Compton.

Cherrelle: Or East Bloomington.

Cherrelle: It sounded like he said “prison” instead of “princess.”

Brittany: “A backyard fairytale prison”? He could find a lot of people there. He could sell himself for cigarettes.

[Carroll sings, "Say I love you without a sound"]

Cherrelle: He wants to bump that. So who wrote the love song they’re living?

Brittany: What if the love song is “Whiskey Lullaby”? Then they’ll kill themselves over it.

Cherrelle: Are we really arguing about a country song?

Lorie: Oh, country music’s the shit.

Brittany: What do you mean? You just trashed every song on this list!

9. Taylor Swift, “Our Song”

Brittany: This is Taylor Swift.

Cherrelle: She sounds like she’s 13.

Brittany: She is. Well, 17, 12, whatever.

Lorie: She thinks this is like a sermon, man.

Brittany: Whenever I hear “God” I think, ugh, next song. If I want to hear that I’ll go to church. This is like bad Shania Twain.

10. Montgomery Gentry, “What Do Ya Think About That”

[First line: "I heard it through the grapevine"]

Brittany: Wait, wait–Marvin Gaye!

Lorie: Is this the song, “Mind Your Own Business”?

Michael: No, but it’s the same sentiment.

Brittany: Did he say “jackin’ their jaws”? I like this.

Alex: I could line dance to this.

Brittany: Do it!

Alex: No, because I know you’ll just laugh.

Lorie: I like this a lot.

Brittany: The guitar was nice. [The lyric] sounded like an inspirational speaker at a high school.

Lorie: That song was good, too.

Brittany: Which one?

Lorie: The one with the inspirational speaker at a high school. It was probably 10 years ago.

Brittany: [Baz Luhrmann's] “Everybody’s Free to Wear Sunscreen”?

Lorie: Yeah.

Brittany: Are you kidding? That’s the song Chris Rock modeled “No Sex” after. [deadpan] That song was inspirational. It made me who I am today.

As part of Idolator’s continuing effort to geekily analyze every music chart known to man, we present a new edition of Project X, in which Jackin’ Pop editor Michaelangelo Matos breaks down rankings from every genre imaginable. After the click-through, a list from the 1995 Spin Alternative Record Guide provides a proverbial springboard to explain how a new history of the Replacements will leave you unsatisfied:

In 1995′s Spin Alternative Record Guide, Rob Sheffield began his overview of the Replacements’ catalogue by listing his Top 10 Paul Westerberg proverbs:

1. “Meet me any place or anywhere at any time now I don’t care/ Meet me tonight/ If you will dare, I will dare.” (“I Will Dare,” 1984)
2. “Lonely/ I guess that’s where I’m from.” (“I’ll Be You,” 1989)
3. “Bring your own lampshade/ Somewhere there’s a party” (“Swingin’ Party,” 1985)
4. “I hate music/ It’s got too many notes.” (“I Hate Music,” 1981)
5. “I’ll give you my jacket if you give me your glamour/ Gimme that racket, gimme that clamor.” (“Gimme Noise,” 1982)
6. “It beats picking cotton and waiting to be forgotten.” (“Bastards of Young,” 1985)
7. “You wish upon a star that turns into a plane.” (“Valentine,” 1987)
8. “I ain’t too good but I get practice by myself/ Forgot my one line so I just said what I felt.” (“If Only You Were Lonely,” 1981)
9. “Used to live at home/ Now I stay at the house.” (“Here Comes a Regular,” 1985)
10. “Yesterday’s trash/ Too bored to thrash.” (“Treatment Bound,” 1983)

The Replacements were the first band that made me realize that you could be popular, even famous to some degree, and still break up because you couldn’t stand it anymore. That’s not because I was a fan or, despite being from Minneapolis, because I was part of the band’s milieu–I was too young to have gotten into them while they were active. Instead I’d caught mentions of them in the local daily, seen a segment about them on a PBS special called The Minneapolis Sound (here’s the Hüsker Dü clip from that show), read Steve Pond’s feature in the June 1, 1989 Rolling Stone and, a year later, a sidebar in City Pages that the group was finished after a terrible show in Chicago. Boom. Done. Just like that.

Like a few people from Minneapolis I know, I sometimes resent the Replacements’ grip on the hearts of many Twin Cities residents. This doesn’t necessarily stem from any particular dislike of the band; it has more to do with the sentimentality that ‘Mats lore invariably comes doused in. Sure, all lore is doused in sentimentality. Still, the kind of self-defeating ironic triumphalism that in many ways the Replacements exemplified is one of those traits I find tiresome–about the Midwest generally, about the Twin Cities in particular, about punk rock as an ideal frequently enough. I understand it, and I’ve never entirely held it against the Replacements. Scratch that–I’ve never held it against their music. But I do have to remind myself occasionally how much I actually like their records. Let It Be is on the short list of greatest rock records ever made, never mind made in the city where I was born. But the legend can even get in the way of a masterpiece.

This sort of sentimentality saturates Jim Walsh’s new oral history of the band, The Replacements: All Over But the Shouting (Voyageur, $21.95), and it’s one of the book’s main problems. The other is its choppy flow. Oral histories read more effortlessly than just about any kind of biography; even when disorganized, they can be devoured quickly. Walsh’s book goes down speedily enough, but reading the first half, I kept thinking that the main reason I was able to follow it was that I’d already read the Replacements chapter in Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life. (All Over But the Shouting uses quotes from many outside sources, particularly the band itself, whose surviving original members didn’t talk to Walsh for the project, forcing him to rely on old interviews from a variety of places. Notably, Azerrad’s book isn’t one of them.) Why, I wondered, didn’t Walsh provide some kind of stand-alone timeline or intersperse some omniscient, italicized narrative, a la Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller’s Live From New York: The Oral History of Saturday Night Live?

I discovered why midway through the book. There, Walsh reprints an entire Replacements live-show history he’d written for his college newspaper on the eve of the five-night stand the band undertook in the tiny 7th Street Entry in October 1985 to promote their Warner Bros. debut, Tim. The piece wasn’t used–Walsh turned it in too late, and it was too long–but while the author disclaims its “warts and misspellings and green writing,” it actually helps put the half of the book that came before it into perspective. Too bad it follows 144 pages that could have used the coherence these concert synopses supply.

What’s most distracting, though, is Walsh’s over-reliance on fan testimonials. Around 15 percent of the book is given over to this stuff, and a lot of it reads essentially alike. Walsh isn’t wrong that one of the things that made the Replacements special was how their fans heard themselves in Westerberg’s lyrics, how deeply they identified with his reflexive-smartass outsider-looking-in stance. But every time another album comes around we get not a specific, well-placed tale or two about how Paul really understood, but a litany of them. In aggregate they’re a slog–like stumbling into the wrong group therapy session. (Can you imagine how tedious Legs McNeil, Jennifer Osbourne, and Peter Pavia’s porn history The Other Hollywood would have been if they’d interrupted the stories of Sharon Mitchell’s coke binges for a few quotes from dudes going on about how her girl-girl scenes totally changed their lives?)

There are, of course, some excellent stories collected here; as an oral history of the Replacements, it could hardly be otherwise. Substances are abused, the underage Tommy Stinson learns about life, the band blow hot and cold onstage–the usual stuff, sure, but at times vividly rendered. It’s also a kick to hear how giddy Westerberg became whenever he’d topped himself as a songwriter, from boasting about having come up with the hook line of “Within Your Reach” to insisting then-manager Peter Jesperson come over to hear a new tune Paul was certain to be a hit. (Jesperson didn’t go; when he heard “I Will Dare” a week later at a concert, he knew instantly that this was the song Westerberg had been talking about.)

But too often, All Over But the Shouting flaunts its own insularity. I don’t mean the exorbitant amount of local Twin Cities color (one of the book’s charms, actually); I mean the sense in reading it that something is missing–and that if you don’t already know what it is, too bad. That’s tedious enough to encounter in person, in a local music scene. In a biography, it just stinks.

As part of Idolator’s continuing effort to geekily analyze every music chart known to man, we present a new edition of Project X, in which Jackin’ Pop editor Michaelangelo Matos breaks down rankings from every genre imaginable. After the click-through, he watches 10 films from the cusp of the 1970s that offer a variety of takes on the era’s nostalgia for the rock and roll of the ’50s and ’60s:

A couple months ago in this space, I watched ten movies made between 1959 and 1964 that got perfect scores in 1994′s Marshall Crenshaw-edited book Hollywood Rock, which awarded up to five stars each for “Music,” “Attitude,” and “Fun.” This time around, I skipped ahead–and back–a few years:

Hollywood Rock‘s 15-Star Movies, 1970-73 (in alphabetical order):
1. American Graffiti (dir. George Lucas, 1973)
2. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (dir. Russ Meyer, 1970)
3. Eat the Document (dir. Bob Dylan & Howard Alk, 1972)
4. Elvis: That’s the Way It Is (dir. Denis Sanders, 1970)
5. Festival (dir. Murry Lerner, 1970)
6. The Harder They Come (dir. Perry Henzel, 1972)
7. Let It Be (dir. Michael Lindsay-Hogg, 1970)
8. Let the Good Times Roll (dir. Sid Levin & Robert Abel, 1973)
9. Stamping Ground (a.k.a. Love and Music) (dir. Jason Pohland, 1971)
10. That’ll Be the Day (dir. Claude Whatham, 1973)

Ask most rock fans under 40 about the early ’70s and we’ll tell you it was a golden age, a continuation of the hallowed late ’60s, the period of heavy metal and funk defining themselves, the mature peak of much of the British invasion, and the flowering of sophisticated soul. Then you read much of what was being written about rock at the time and you’ll find a lot of hand-wringing about rock’s peak being long past. Well, sure–hindsight’s 20/20. But it’s worth remembering that the early ’70s were also the time of one of rock’s major nostalgia cycles–its second, after the doo-wop revival of the early ’60s, and this one was on a much larger scale. This was the heyday of (groan) Sha Na Na, an era where post-Woodstock festivals competed for business dollars with rock and roll revival shows. Naturally, this list contains one of each.

Stamping Ground is a documentary of a 1970 rock festival in Rotterdam. It features a handful of the period’s obvious big names (Santana, Jefferson Airplane, Pink Floyd), up-and-coming duo T. Rex ‘twixt folk and glam, the boring late Byrds, and period-pieces-only like the Flock, It’s a Beautiful Day (whose sole redeeming factor is that their set was interrupted by a lightning storm that provides some nice, if accidental, visual effects), and Family, whose singer’s strangulated “a-a-a-a-ah”s are some of the most unpleasant things I’ve ever heard come out of a human throat. We see lots of topless women and open dope smoking on the grounds, skinny-dippers of both sexes, and a cool-looking plastic pyramid contraptions in which people stand and crawl around on the water. Too bad the latter is accompanied by Jefferson Airplane doing a crappy “Saturday Afternoon.”

The Airplane’s Paul Kantner and Grace Slick are also interviewed by a local journalist, and their rich-hippie bullshit has aged at least as badly as any of Stamping Ground‘s music–which is to say, very badly indeed. When asked if the music from the U.S. has “more guts” than that from other places, Kantner, with no hint of irony, answers, “That’s almost true of any art. If a country is persecuted and bummed out, you should get really electric artistic endeavors…How much great art comes from Switzerland? All the stuff comes from where there’s turmoil.” Congratulations on seeing The Third Man, Paul.

You can see that interview here, at the beginning of this longer clip. Some kind soul has put the entirety of Stamping Ground up on YouTube, broken into 11 parts, though they’ve disabled embedding. It’s convenient, though, for anyone wanting highlights only. Here are a few: a raucous Dr. John; Santana blowing out “Jingo”; and Pink Floyd at their most head-tripping. I’ve always liked Pink Floyd more than a lot of other critics, though not as much as lava-lamp-owning Middle Americans. Their second number reminds me of…”Hotel California.” Classic rock: it all sounds alike.

On the other side of the big-show coin is Let the Good Times Roll, which in an admittedly meager amount of searching I could find nowhere on YouTube. Hardly surprising: the movie seems to be nowhere in sight. (My DVD-R, purchased from The Video Beat, was taped off A&E.) Filmed at a New York rock and roll revival show, and intercutting ’50s footage in a way that somehow sidesteps cutesiness in order to deliver the impact these artists had when they emerged, it’s almost unremittingly joyful; nearly everyone–Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, the Five Satins, Fats Domino–puts out like their careers depend on it. (Performance for performance, I prefer it to The T.A.M.I. Show.) And the behind-the-scenes footage is equally good, from Little Richard demanding that his piano be moved closer to the edge of the stage to Berry guiding a cameraman through a dead tour bus to Bo Diddley shopping for chicken to cook on his traveling barbecue backstage–a practice from the old days, when a black man usually couldn’t eat at a decent restaurant on tour.

Ah, the fabulous ’50s–or, in this list’s cultural terms, the period between Elvis and the Beatles. Elvis: That’s the Way It Is, a documentary of his Vegas show, may have taken place in the cultural present of 1972, but it’s as rooted in the ’50s as Let the Good Times Roll, whatever current string of hits Elvis was enjoying. During rehearsals, he’s a little self-parodic–the freedom of the 1968 comeback special is hardening into routine. But he’s also putting in work, and even in haphazard rehearsal, his band smokes. At one point during “I Just Can’t Help Believing,” he relaxes into the groove, calling out for a piano solo and visibly basking in the sound his group is making. At the end of the show itself he decides to mingle with the crowd:

Key line of patter: “You didn’t think I’d make it, did you? I didn’t either.”

American Graffiti and That’ll Be the Day are reverse-image versions of the same basic rock and roll coming-of-age film: American vs. British; upbeat vs. downcast; clear-skied vs. rainswept. Chances are you’ve seen the former a zillion times; if not, the trailer does kind of say it all:

That’ll Be the Day isn’t a better film, but it is lesser-known, angst-filled, and its main character, played by David Essex (yes, the “Rock On” guy), becomes so obsessed with rock and roll that he becomes even more of a selfish jerk than he starts out as. In other words, it’s the most realistic movie ever made. This 10-minute clip, featuring Ringo Starr as Essex’s even-bigger-prick best friend (and a bit of Keith Moon’s role as the drummer in a resort band), gives the film’s basic flavor:

That’ll Be the Day is in many ways a model ’70s movie in that its basic subject is the loss of innocence. Festival, Murry Lerner’s documentary of the 1963-66 Newport Folk Festivals, deals with much the same loss, only by accident. It’s a very well made film, with dozens of performances and interviews; the most affecting of the latter are the intercut clips of Michael Bloomfield and Son House discussing their very different relationships with the blues. Still, given how stiff much of the music sounds to my ears, it’s hardly surprising that the second Dylan goes electric he throws everything in the air:

I actually saw Dylan’s Eat the Document in a theater, a rarity. It was made for ABC-TV during Dylan’s 1966 European tour; by the time it began circulating (at least according to Hollywood Rock) in 1972, it must have fed as much into nascent ’60s nostalgia as anything, at least in sodden “what have we lost?” terms. If you value coherence and flow, never mind narrative, the segments Martin Scorsese recycled for No Direction Home will be all you need. If you crave more–such as Dylan, obviously amphetamined up, bantering blitheringly in the back of a limo with a deadpan John Lennon–that’s what YouTube is for:

Let It Be: more just-past-the-’60s nostalgia. Yadda-yadda Beatles breaking up, yadda-yadda passive-aggressive McCartney vs. deadpan-pissed off Harrison, yadda-yadda rooftop concert. Of course, when Rolling Stone named the latter event one of its “20 greatest concerts of the last 20 years” in 1987, they were genuflecting hard to the canon–I’m sure there were dozens of better gigs that didn’t fit Jann Wenner’s vision of generational solidarity. But damned if the Beatles’ offhanded mastery isn’t a sight to behold. Here’s a hefty 10-minute clip of them performing “Don’t Let Me Down,” “I’ve Got a Feeling,” and “One After 909″:

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Beyond the Valley of the Dolls can be seen as a ’60s flashback too: no way was the Chocolate Watchband any kind of “relevant” in 1970, unless you were Lenny Kaye with a gleam in his ear (correctly, as it turned out), and Russ Meyer’s exploitation conventions were embedded in the pre-Beatles era, whatever his taste for tits and gore. As a musical, this really doesn’t have much going for it; the Carrie Nations’ songs aren’t anything special, but they’re hardly the point, are they? Nevertheless, this movie deserves its cult, and the trailer encapsulates as much of it as it’s possible to without giving too much away:

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I’ve saved the best for last–not to mention the movie that, despite its obvious debts to Jailhouse Rock, feels like the most “modern” film on this list. The Harder They Come is probably my favorite-ever “rock movie,” for reasons my old manager at Norman’s Sound and Vision, Joe, put into words for another coworker: “[Jimmy Cliff] smokes a ton of weed, he shoots a cop, he fucks the preacher’s daughter–it’s great!” If it doesn’t have the best soundtrack of all time, it’s in the Top 5 at least. But let’s let Jimmy Cliff have the last word: