koganbot

More people have told me their stories of the decade's music (for others, see here and here and here):

--"Rap, rap, and rap."
--"The Thong Song"
--"No more need for euphemisms"
--"International music is more accessible than ever before. One of my favorite songs is in Urdu, and I've listened to it so many times I can practically sing the Urdu."
--"Country becoming rock."

Very bad poem here.

This week's Top 40 newbies feature Taylor Swift twice, once on John Mayer's "Half Of My Heart" ("Haven't heard it," said Tom half-heartedly)(nor did Frank) and once on Boys Like Girls' "Two Is Better Than One" (I've heard it once and pronounced it whiny emo-pop, far inferior to Taylor's brilliant, whiny princess pop, but will require myself to give it a second chance). Only other newcomer is Leona Lewis's "Happy," which didn't make me happy a couple weeks ago over on poptimists but it too will get another shot, when the next Billboard comes out and I'm on a computer where I can hear music.

In other chart news, Glee Cast do several things that don't hit the Top 40, Chris Brown's "Crawl" doesn't crawl up the charts (and won't crawl anywhere near my eardrums in the near future if I can help it*), and Sounds Of The Season: A Taylor Swift Holiday Collection from 2008 re-enters the album chart at #20.

( *Asterisk aghast )

Taylor Swift in "Tim McGraw," which she released at age sixteen but that refers back to a conversation that occurred when she was thirteen:

You said the way my blue eyes shined
Put those Georgia stars to shame that night
I said, "That's a lie"

Taylor Swift in "Fifteen":

'Cause when you're fifteen
And somebody tells you they love you
You're gonna believe them

People keep adding interesting answers to my Decade's End question, if you want to go back and look. In the meantime I've gotten another response via email, which I'm putting into the comments. The question is:

What do you think the story of the decade in music is? Or what was the story of the decade in music for you? I said "Just list one" last time, but I've kind of added a second question here in adding that "for you" bit, haven't I? So if you answered one of them last time ("what the story is") and the other ("what the story is for me" ["me" being you]) is different, you're invited to answer the second one here in the comments. (And you can comment on the last comments in these comments if you want, lj's "use-by" date being so frustratingly quick.)

OK, here I am at the UConn library, raring to do some last-minute research

dubdobdee says here:

It travels because, however newly named, it's one of the golden oldies in aesthetics — the phenomenon of the Sublime, that combo frisson of awe, fright, satisfaction and pleasure, which stopped being avant garde about a quarter of a millennium ago, round about the time Edmund Burke said, "A clear idea is another name for a little idea", while all around edgy folks swooned before the immensity or violence or dreadfulness of chasms, volcanoes, stormclouds and shadows; and Hugh Walpole — on a forests-and-mountains walking tour in the Alps — got to see his beloved pet poodle being gobbled up by a wolf.

All right, clearly if I am to understand the decade in pop, I will need someone to tell me in what essay, book, or broadside I can find various people - Edmund Burke, Hugh Walpole, Kara Dioguardi,, not to mention whoever wrote the idea when it was still avant garde - putting forth the theory of the Romantic Sublime. The Encyclopedia of Philosophy is rather taciturn on the subject.

All right, if all goes well I'm writing a decade's end music essay for the LVW, though this endeavor will have a breath-taking finish given that, for some reason, Las Vegas ends its decade on December 4 rather than December 31, which means my drop-dead deadline is probably the 1st, if not earlier. And I'm going to be on planes for part of the time between now and then. And I have something else due on the 2nd.

One thing I want is for the essay to allude to the multitude of such essays that my essay could have been but isn't. So you can help me by posting in the comments what you think the story of the decade in music is. Just list one.

In situations like this I wish I did Twitter. If those Twitterers among you wish to ask the question and paste in the answers here, please do.

My first year-end ballot for 2009, though the only tracks that are eligible were the ones reviewed by the Singles Jukebox collective, and the 17 highest-rated by Jukeboxers aren't eligible,* since they've already qualified for the year-end tournament. This ballot is, in effect, my nominations list for the tournament. I've got three alternate nominees in case any of the not-yet-reviewed "amnesty" tracks on my list reach the top 17.

(I'd hoped to get a chance to listen to the tracks on Lex's list, not all of which I'd heard the first time, but other commitments intervened.)

Plenty more I liked that didn't make my list. Wished I'd had room for Morandi, to be in solidarity with Chuck on that one. (It was creamed by most Jukebox raters.)

1. Shystie f. DJ Deekline "New Style"
2. The Black Eyed Peas "Boom Boom Pow"
3. Love And Theft "Runaway"
4. The Lonely Island "I'm On A Boat"
5. Das Racist "Combination Pizza Hut And Taco Bell (Wallpaper Mix)"
6. Timberlee f. Tosh "Heels"
7. Girls Aloud "Untouchable"
8. Depeche Mode "Wrong"
9. Asher Roth "I Love College"
10. Tempa T "Next Hype"
( Tracks 11 through 23 )

*I'd have definitely listed Ne-Yo's "Part Of The List" and Taylor Swift's "You Belong With Me" if they hadn't made the top 17. Might also have gone for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' "Heads Will Roll" and Medina's "Kun For Mig."

girlboymusic contributes new Kara-John-Ashlee anecdote here.

I'm going away for a week on Monday, with partial computer access (but no sound), so I'll start the rah-rah now:

Here are some very good tracks from 2004 that I won't be able to nominate for the poptimists Best Of 2004 poll, since I've already got another ten picked out. (By the way, Ashlee's "La La" peaked in Britain in early 2005, so you can feel free to nominate other songs that you love that begin with L, though none of these do.)

No Lay - "Unorthodox Daughter"
Crime Mob - "Knuck If You Buck"
Method Man - "What's Happenin"
Jim Jones f. Juelz Santana and Cam'ron - "Crunk Muzik"
Big & Rich - "Real World"
Big & Rich - "Save A Horse (Ride A Cowboy)"
M.I.A. - "Galang"
Skye Sweetnam - "Hypocrite"
Skye Sweetnam - "Tangled Up In Me"
Ying Yang Twins f. Trick Daddy - "What's Happnin'"
Kelly Clarkson - "Hear Me"
Kelly Clarkson - "Addicted"
Miss B - "Bottle Action"
Toby Keith - "Whiskey Girl"
Ashlee Simpson - "Autobiography"
The Hold Steady - "Positive Jam"
Montgomery Gentry - "Gone"

EDIT: Lex, have you ever heard Miss B (or Ms. B, according to the video) "Bottle Action"? I embed it down in the comments.

Has anyone ever asked the livejournal people why they don't have a "new comments"/"updated thread" feature? Nested threads and the lack of an update/new comments feature are the two problems that make lj a worse format than ilX for ongoing discussion.

Of course, if people want a discussion they'll have one, and I'm here basically because discussion falters and founders on ilX. But it falters and founders everywhere, to some extent (and the average comment thread on ilX is vastly better than the average comment thread on the Web as a whole). Back to my original question, an answer might well be, "Because there isn't enough user demand for such feature."

Speaking of discussion, yesterday the convo about Rihanna lyrics migrated here ("Fire Bomb") and here ("Te Amo") (EDIT: and over to Dave's Tumblr, and somehow I missed Erika a few days ago here, with pre-revisionist Dave on the comment thread). And Chuck and I added lotsa new content to poptimists' artist shoutouts thread (with Chuck grumbling about how the convos there are already over before he gets a chance to contribute to them).

Meanwhile over on Tumblr, Maura writes (in regard to chillwave/beach-pop/wavegaze, a music genre, apparently, though if everything runs true to form I'll not hear any of it until no one's making it anymore, but anyway I'm linking Maura's post not for the music wave but for its relevance to dropped discussions):

Maybe this is another thing about the appeal of this particular music to people who write online — it's in some ways a reflection? People on all sides are trying to muddle through their creative impulses with tools that allow for instant publishing/dissemination, and by extension the impulse to get something out overtakes the impulse to make something "right" in whatever abstract sense.

( And Tom and I comment briefly on that )

EDIT: Kuhnian content on comment thread.

Lady Antebellum's excellently mushy "Need You Now" jumps to #5 (also is collectively rated the 21st best single reviewed on the Jukebox this year, and is currently #41 for the year on the koganbox, which draws from a larger sample than do the other two charts). Meanwhile, as predicted here last week, "Russian Roulette" takes a dip (to 16), though I've also pegged it to hang on for a while.

( Glee Cast )

( Kenny Chesney )

( Miranda Lambert )

( Reba McEntire )

OK, the latest Rihanna discussion that people frustratingly put under flock regards the second line in verse two of "Fire Bomb." Candidates are:

"Like the way that I'm at a tragedy"
"Microwave and a metal tragedy"*
"I echo within a metal tragedy"

My heart says "microwave" but my mind says "I echo," though the issue is hardly settled, and a third-party candidate may well carry the day.

*Leads to discussion of late-evening college entertainment consisting of different objects experimentally placed within microwave oven (some reliably characterized as "it's beautiful and it's blue").

EDIT: "Microwaving a metal tragedy" seems to be the - excellent - consensus, now. Or perhaps "Microwaving the metal tragedy." See here, especially weasel_seeker's suggestion that we add a dash:

Seems cold but baby no it doesn't have to be / Microwaving the metal - tragedy"

Something I stuck over on an flocked comment thread and that didn't make it into my Jukebox blurb for "Wait Your Turn":

POST ONE: Yeah, that's where I am with Rated R, haven't really broken it down to tracks; in my blurb I made a preliminary attempt to describe what's going on with the grain of her voice, how she uses it. (The football metaphors in "Wait" make me shrug in weariness, but the charred-ember hardness of her voice makes "the wait is ovah" chant overwhelming, as are the thick twists she gives words when she puts on her island accent.)

POST TWO: OK, listening some more, I'm struck with how gently lilting the second half of the verse ["sometimes it takes a thousand tries" etc.]* could have been if her voice hadn't been burning holes in it. I like the solid mass of "Russian Roulette," but I'm glad the album has these half-non-massive moments too.

*I don't want to call it the chorus, even though that's where it sits in the song structure, since the chant is what really acts as the refrain, even if the chant doesn't have a fixed spot in the song structure.

"Russian Roulette" entered the chart two weeks ago at 100, rose last week to an unpromising 75, then this week on the heels of a publicity blitz that included Rihanna's 20/20 interview it jumps to 9. We'll see if it sticks; it doesn't match anything else on the chart, in subject matter or severity. My guess is it holds on for a bit, maybe falling a little then hanging around as people get used to it.

( Rihanna )

( Justin Bieber )

( Jay Sean )

( Jesse McCartney )

( Taylor Swift )

( Luke Bryan )

( Birdman )

Good discussion of Rihanna over on Lex's lj; dull discussion of Rihanna over at ilX, though I like where some dude says, "the knowledge that Ester Dean wrote an Esmee Denters song is just extra insurance on the guarantee that I will never remember which is which."

Meme from catsgomiaow

( meme )

It's from Hegel: Texts and Commentary translated and edited by Walter Kaufmann. I am also wearing a T-shirt, given to me by my friend John Wójtowicz, that says, "It's a Hegelian thing. You wouldn't understand." (OK, that's a fib, but John did once state his intention of creating such a T-shirt.)

I haven't actually gotten to page 56.

But while we're on the subject (so to speak), you would do me a favor by explaining this passage to me:

( Passage in need of explication )

Supposing I were to write a Decade's End essay, what would you like it to be about?

The correct answer is "Taylor Swift," of course, but you should make other suggestions as well.

New Luc book, mostly pictures.

The text—a mere 25 pages; won't take you long even with today's reduced attention span—represents the boiling down of thirty years' thinking on the subject, and comprises a miniature theory of photography as a bonus. The pictures, 122 of 'em, display the United States (and Canada and Mexico to a smaller extent) of a century ago in all its messiness, sprawl, disaster, homely comfort, hard labor, pageantry, violence, optimism, piety, ignorance, hubris, imaginative flight, orderliness, grandeur, chaos, and pastoral quiet. If it were a movie it would be three weeks long and you'd still hate to leave your seat. The pictures are distant and immediate, beautiful and crude, and each one tells a story and leaves a mystery.

(I originally hypothesized that what Luc blogged about "Zion City" was fiction, since he often writes little imaginative bits there that ring true as fact. But I checked Wikipedia, and what he wrote did indeed occur.)

Another thought, maybe a strange comparison in that the connection is just that the two of them were interviewed on TV, but...

Consider, when she was faced with the most important interview of her life, how much more thought Rihanna gave to who she was and what she was about, and what her responsibilities as a public figure were, than Sarah Palin did when she was faced with the most important interview of her life thirteen-and-a-half months ago.