Week one

Wow-- I wasn't lying about my ignorance. After one week, it's been thrown into sharp relief how non-pop my music collection is. I've probably listened to A Senile Animal a hundred times, and I consider it a great album full of accessible rock songs that most people would probably like... and all of my friends agree the Melvins are awesome, but they're a world away from the stuff that climbs the Billboard charts.

So far, so good, I'd say. I'm enjoying my little experiment, even if I haven't really dug the songs that got picked. I am thinking I'll add another song to the listing: #99. This week, the upper numbers 3 and 17 were fairly slow and kind of weepy, and it wasn't until #51 that a was less interested in crying into a beer and more keen to actually drink one. Well, maybe not a beer. Maybe an appletini.

Regardless, I'm hoping the jump in energy between 3 and 51 is similar to the difference between 51 and 99. Of course, this is all arbitrary... it's my first week, so I can't really see any trends in the chart positions yet, but I am looking forward to how different songs line up in the charts.

I also haven't given up hope that, as the weeks move on, I'll find a song that I won't immediately delete from my mp3 player. In the first week, I'm 0 for 3.

Last-- anyone have a good place to play these songs-- as of right now, my play link is invariably YouTube... but I'm listening to songs, not watching videos, and I think videos change things a little.  I'm only listening to these songs... I haven't watched the movies set to music where the singer cast themselves as the heroes.

Pink - Raise Your Glass

Fairly important: the formatting on this post goes to hell in most feeds, and it will be best read at ericonthecharts.blogspot.com

Pink
Raise Your Glass
Party Anthem
#51 (LoMid)
Oct 14, 2010
YouTube

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Hey-- that's different. The first two songs were both pretty maudlin, down-tempo affairs, so it's nice to hear something move a little quicker. The house beat that drives it might be about 20 years late to it's date with a rave, but the song's got some energy to it, and that's a step up from both the Nelly and Chris Brown songs this week.

I think the most effective thing about this song is "Wooooooo! Party!" I'm not so cynical as to ignore the fact that the Party Anthem is never going to go out of style-- off the top of my head, the oldest versions of these things I can think of are out of Tin Pan Alley, but I'll bet someone more knowledgeable than myself can find older party songs than that. Somewhere out there, Dr. Andrew W.K, Esq has published several papers on the origins and evolution of party anthems... but Doctor W.K. is published in the kinds of specialized journals a layman like myself can't readily access.

The least effective thing about the song is a "if you're wrong in all the right ways" message of craziness and non-conformity presented in the most bland way possible. It reminds me of a third hand dig at the radio I picked up somewhere (“of course I don't listen to the radio. I'm not a fifteen-year-old girl.”) I can imagine 15-year-olds finding this song as freaky as it claims to be... and maybe not even real 15-year-olds, maybe the twentysomethings playing kids in a PG-13 movie, this is song at the party they throw when their parents are out of town.

There are others who this song works on... it sort of reminds me of my (thankfully brief) time in an accounts receivable office-- it was an oppressive place, everyone was dead eyed, lethargic, and out of shape (I can't really evoke this place for you: the best analog I know is Bruce McCulloch's bank teller). This is the kind of thing that would have been a big hit at the office party that ended by 10:00PM, but for a song that proclaims “5AM, turn the radio up! Where's the rock & roll?” I can't imagine it being listened to by rock fans. I can imagine it being listened to by someone who would call the cops if you were to crank up some rock at 5:00AM.

Regardless, it is nice to hear something with a pulse after two pretty maudlin, down-tempo songs. It's slick sounding and well produced, but it's not something I need to listen to any more than I just have.

Walk

Stay with the song, walk away, or run like hell:

Chris Brown - Deuces

Fairly important: the formatting on this post goes to hell in most feeds, and it will be best read at ericonthecharts.blogspot.com

Chris Brown
Deuces
Trash Talk
#17 (HiMid)
Oct 14, 2010
YouTube
 

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Ah... now there's the Autotune. I do remember a time when Autotune was a tool used to nudge a slightly flat note into place in an otherwise great vocal take-- you didn't want the singer to go back and do it again if the performance was really, really good... but you just needed to tweak that one sour note. When Cher turned all Autotune's knobs to 11 on Believe, the robotic, atrifacty sound was added to the book as a record selling effect, and it was already a cliché about three days later. And there it remains.

Now that everyone's adapted to hearing obvious Autotune effects on the radio, it's opened the floodgates for... well... people who can't sing. Not at all. They can basically just talk into a mic and have Autotune make a melody out of it later. I'm still sort of torn between thinking it's sort of cool from a composer's standpoint and thinking it's the nastiest sort of false prophet fakery, making stars out of singers who can't sing (and often don't write their own songs, either).

Basically, I have no idea if Chris Brown can sing. This is my very first time hearing him, and the only think I know about Chris Brown is that he beats up girls.

Okay-- that might be too flip. The only thing I know about Chris Brown plead guilty to physically assaulting Rihanna... another star I don't know. I do know photos of her bruised and beaten face are online, and I know that Oprah themed a show around this abuse, and Chris Brown called it “a slap in the face.” Oprah had the gall to call the beating “a problem,” so I can see why Brown would be offended. Poor guy.

This is a long and roundabout way of saying: I have no way of knowing if Chris Brown is good at anything. His voice is autotuned into oblivion, so there's no way to know if he's singing, or if he phoned in a scant three lines and had a computer write a song around it. And since I know only one thing about Brown (he hits women), a song about how he needs to shake off a no-good bitch who always made him feel small doesn't really make me want to like him or his song.

The song itself is so paper thin it feels like it might blow away-- Brown has a few lines in the beginning (she “ain't nothin but a vulture, always hoping for the worst, waiting for me to fuck up”), but he sings maybe eight bars total in the song. The rest is just a couple samples and loops of his voice in between the song's guest stars-- it's like a movie where the star hardly ever left his trailer, so it's mostly footage of the back of a stunt double's head.

And I think the guest stars sound clunky. I may not have a PhD. in flow, but I know what works and what feels off-rhythm and forced; both rapped verses by Tyga and Kevin McCall have a stunning lack of groove. Past that, the one and only thing I know about Chris Brown (back to the domestic abuse thing again) makes the guest rappers' lines like “like Tina did Ike in the limo, it finally hit me” rankle... not only are we evoking Ike & Tina, we're making Ike the victim. Classy.

Like I said, this is my first time hearing Chris Brown, but it's such a lazy song, one where he does very little, my immediate reaction is to consider him a hack. But... maybe I'm missing something.

Add the lyrical content and the context of a woman's bloodied face, and he's a hack with terrible taste.

RUN!

Stay with the song, walk away, or run like hell:

Nelly - Just a Dream

Fairly important: the formatting on this post goes to hell in most feeds, and it will be best read at ericonthecharts.blogspot.com

Nelly
Just a Dream
Power Ballad
#3 (High)
Oct 14, 2010
YouTube

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I've had a theory for a while-- when grunge seemed to kill the vapid, narcissistic beast that was hair metal (see also: butt rock), the whole personality of that scene reemerged in R&B almost immediately. So when the rock stations turned dour and serious, the pop stations started to feature songs by guys who sang about how much money they have, how awesome their cars are, how wild and excessive their parties are, and how many sleazy women are in their bed nightly.

I think I've discovered another parallel between those two genres: eventually, any party rockin' hairspray consumer would pick up an acoustic guitar or plop down behind a piano and write a sad, sensitive song about the girl who is now peeling the spandex off another (probably inferior) rocker.

So my first entry is a type of song I haven't heard in many, many years: the power ballad. From the guitar opening, it easily could have been the intro to a lost love song by Warrant or Extreme circa 1989... and honestly, the programmed beats and electronic flourish that fill out the body of the song don't change all that much-- this song is totally a lost love power ballad.

Going back to my ignorance, this is the first Nelly song I've heard, and while it is sort of what I expected from a chart topper (in that it's incredibly bland-- I couldn't have asked for a more average song), I'm pleasantly surprised by a few things.

First, it's not noticeably autotuned, which is nice, and indicates that Nelly might be actually be able to sing... it's still a dodgy bet, because anything might have been done to his voice with the sparkly, platinum dusted production on this song.

Second, the bridge is awesomely ironic-- it mixes the club anthem “put your hands up” with the power ballad pull-back. So all of the beats go away and all you've got is a very quiet, plaintive guitar. Kinda makes you cry, eh? And then (remember, there are no beats here) the lyrics are “If you've ever been in love, put your hands up.” I don't know if someone's being clever and subverting a cliché, or if it's just the most misplaced “put your hands up” call-out since Jon LaJoie. Either way, I thought it was pretty entertaining.

Not a bad start, but I don't see myself becoming a fan...

Walk

Stay with the song, walk away, or run like hell: