Dig if you will this picture: Weeks-rancid margarine that’s been stuck in the microwave for 30 seconds, then left to reconstitute itself on whatever plate it’s been placed on, creating a shapeless, smelly mess that would need to be soaked in Dawn for at least three hours in order to be ridden from your kitchen. What would a song based on that image sound like, do you think? Lucky for us, two pop forces of now have decided to figure it out! More »
Lost in the hullabaloo over the Black Eyed Peas’ stranglehold on the Billboard Hot 100’s top spot was the news that Jason Mraz’s strummy “I’m Yours” set its own record on the singles chart this week as well; the sweet ditty has now been on the Hot 100 for 70 weeks, breaking the record set by the 69-week chart run of LeAnn Rimes’ “How Do I Live.” More »
Apoplectic British music magazine NME has just issued its latest Future 50 list—“the 50 acts pushing things forward in 2009,” in the rag’s sorta-esteemed opinion—and one thing that’s sort of surprising to me is how pop-centric the overall list is. Sure, the top two slots are taken by Pitchfork darlings (a one-two punch of Animal Collective and The Knife), but the list also includes Lady GaGa, frequent Girls Aloud collaborators Xenomania, and the Idolator-beloved site Popjustice? Also the kids’ program Yo Gabba Gabba!, and… The Take That stage show?? Also, perhaps to goose newsstand sales by putting a little bit of the fear of God into anyone browsing the list online, the hyper-annoying, hypersexist, Hypercolored outfit 3OH!3 is at No. 41. The full list after the jump. More »
Saturday’s “surprise guest” at the two-day parking-lot festival known as the Bamboozle was introduced with the three words “Don’t,” “Stop,” and “Believin’,” and from my vantage point in the crowd–which rendered the men muscling through four of Journey’s hits onstage into something resembling very animated Berzerk robots–I thought that I was actually watching the San Francisco band collect a big, yet sorta-strange, paycheck. As it turned out, the band that I was singing along with was actually a really, really convincing tribute band. (Of course, some smart-asses out there will assert that having Arnel Pineda on vocals makes the currently touring incarnation of Journey a cover band of sorts, but we’ll leave that alone for now.) But the surprise and its “gotcha!” aftershock were both appropriate for a festival that, despite being clad in “FUCK SWINE FLU” t-shirts as far as the eye could see, spent a fair chunk of time looking back. More »
It’s possible I’m just bitter because the members of the electro-pop act Hyper Crush encouraged their fans to tag the exterior wall of my favorite music venue Club Congress on Sunday night, but between those clowns, the incredibly depressing 3OH!3, and (to a lesser extent) LMFAO, the recent wave of nu-electro–which marries misogyny and generally fratty behavior with semi-danceable beats–just feels like a jackass invasion scored by synths. More »
