Dr. Luke protege and upcoming Lilith Fair performer Ke$ha has been steadily continuing her wave of raunchy pop terror, and even amped it up a bit at a House Of Blues gig in Houston on Monday, where the 22-year-old singer shared a bill with Adam Young (aka Owl City).
As Young was in the middle of performing his ever present mega-hit “Fireflies,” Ke$ha and two of her band mates hopped on stage—decked out as, uh, fireflies—and proceeded to jiggle around behind him. That’s certainly one way to jazz up a song that even Owl City fans have probably had their fill of.
Was Adam in on the joke? It doesn’t look like it. He seemed amused, nonetheless. Catch Ke$ha pranking Owl City below. More »
Reluctant pop star Adam Young—aka one-man band Owl City—is back at #1 for a second non-consecutive week on the Billboard Hot 100 chart with “Fireflies.” We’re using “reluctant” here because it’s somewhat hard to track down a press shot of this guy where he’s not shoe-gazing or doesn’t have beams of sunlight obscuring his face.
Not that we’re happy to see “Whatcha Say” booted from the top down to #3, because someday the world will come to appreciate the whaaaaa…? that was a minimal Imogen Heap tune filtered through a Jason Derulo pop song. More »
Back in 1997, when I was a critic for CMJ, I led off my review of a new album by vintage Britpoppers the Sundays with the following sideswipe at another band:
“In the five years since their last album, [the Sundays] watched the Cranberries swipe their sound and turn it into three obscenely popular and dreck-filled albums.”
I can’t front: I had a soft spot for the Cranberries’ light-as-air Top 10 smash “Linger.” But I could never get past the fact that the Sundays, a better band with one major alternative hit to their name (the downy, warm-blanket 1990 Modern Rock chart-topper “Here’s Where the Story Ends”), had failed to cross over to the U.S. Top 40 while Dolores O’Riordan rampaged across my radio dial. The ’Berries weren’t awful, just… a little undeserving, and massively benefiting from someone else’s sound.
This week—unless he’s too busy counting his Twilight soundtrack money or canoodling with the missus—Ben Gibbard is probably feeling something similar. It’s got to be a bit galling that Owl City’s “Fireflies,” the new No. 1 song on Billboard‘s Hot 100, is a candied replica of a sound he and Jimmy Tamborello codified six years ago.
Again, I can’t front: on a Top 40 radio dial awash in Black Eyed Peas’ faux-hop and Miley Cyrus’s shrill Autotunage, “Fireflies” is a nice contrast. But it’s basically The Postal Service for Dummies, and it’s mystifying how easily it shot to No. 1 during the same decade when “Such Great Heights,” which some of us consider one of the best-written pop songs of the ’00s, didn’t even grace the Hot 100.
But you don’t have to be a Gibbard fan to still find Owl City’s feat bizarre. Because even if you’ve never heard of the Postal Service, “Fireflies” represents a head-scratching rarity: a No. 1 hit by a solo white guy with no other radio format to call home. More »
Owl City’s “Fireflies” moved into the Hot 100 penthouse this week after shifting 196,000 paid downloads last week—it’s currently at No. 5 on the iTunes chart, behind a couple of bonus tracks from Taylor Swift’s re-released Fearless and Lady GaGa’s “Bad Romance.” More on this slightly unexpected triumph of post-Postal Service bedroom pop from Chris Molanphy on Friday, but for now, let’s all wonder if this means that the next Twilight soundtrack will move on from Pitchfork darlings to Jimmy Tamborellos in training. [Billboard / Dailymotion] More »