Aside from M.I.A. and the Jonases, the only other interesting debut this week is Jazmine Sullivan's "Need U Bad", produced by Missy Elliot. It's not a great record, but I don't think anyone's ever put old school dub on the Hot 100 before. Sounds as good as ever.
Glam emo kids, that's who. At least according to this poll on the All Songs Considered blog. Panic At the Disco number one? Really? By almost three times the vote of the number 2 band, Death Cab for Cutie? Of course, the post itself is all about how PATD's fans flooded the poll after a link was posted on the band's MySpace page. Still, you need to wonder who in PATD's camp spotted this. Maybe they were reading Carrie Brownstein's blog and clicked the banner for this one out of curiosity, like I did. Whatever the case, I actually approve of their ballot stuffing, since the rest of the poll does nothing for me other than reinforce my dislike of NPR in general. Give them another year or two and they'll make hipster culture as boring as the boomers', if it isn't already.
If you ignore the pretentious blather of the first few paragraphs, this summary of the disappointing James Brown auction at Christies will tell you all you need to know. DJ Shadow was there, as was Paul Shaffer. A lot of jumpsuits were sold, along with various awards and certificates and other pieces of ephemera, including a medical bracelet and a few scrawled letters. In one, Brown kisses off a girlfriend with a few kind words ("I hope our short Relationship got you on the Goodfoot"), and a present of $6,000, "so you won't have to go to work to guick [double sic]". In another (not sent, apparently), he complains about rappers ripping him off and record companies not paying him royalties, and ends with a threat to destroy the recipients' career. If Brown had seen the results of this auction, which was protested by some of his descendants and which brought in less than half of what was estimated, he'd have written another one.
backmasking is not good for tomatoes and other living things
Artist Tony Romano subjects tomato plants to Judas Priest forwards and backwards. The one that got it in reverse looks none too happy. But then, neither does the other one.
Now that you do all your listening with ear buds, right? All you need is cornstarch, water, and a cookie sheet. And maybe a little food coloring to heighten the effect.
Nothing new this week, and the only notable change is Miley Cyrus' return to the top ten after falling to 16 last week. Airplay dropped, but her digital sales increased, and all I can say is that I'm counting the days until Billboard announces its next formula change.
Not much happening on the rest of the chart, either. Only five debuts this week: John Mayer covers Tom Petty; DJ Khaled and the usual gang of idiots essentially cover themselves; Vanessa Hudgens hires J. Rotem to turn her into a nerdy Christina Aguilera ("Basically what we're gonna do is dance"--huh?); The Lost Trailers defensively celebrate country life after discovering there are such things as white hip-hop fans; and Kid Rock celebrates summer by mashing up Warren Zevon and Lynyrd Skynyrd. Seems the summer doldrums have started early this year.
I haven't said much about the singles that have been popping up in the lower reaches of the Hot 100 lately, mostly because there's been little that's either exceptional or odd enough to be worth mention. This week, however, there's a record that's both. Debuting at number 94 (for reasons that will soon be apparent don't count on it getting much higher than that), Rehab's "Bartender (aka Sittin' At a Bar)", is as fine a piece of twisted redneck songwriting as I've heard in a long time. Imagine, if you will, a mixed-race, redneck hard rock band (with a DJ) from Atlanta, trying to write like Todd Snider. They don't come close to Snider's delicacy and grace, but they sure have that "I could give a shit" feel down.
She broke my heart in the trailer park So I jacked the keys to her fucking car And crashed that piece of shit Then walked away
Uh-oh. It's been less than a year, but it looks like it might be time for Billboard to change its formula for tabulating the Hot 100 again. For the second week in a row, digital sales have propelled Disney-identified teen and tween pop into the top ten, and there's more to come. The Jonas Brothers plan to release a new song to iTunes every two weeks until their album comes out, and no doubt there'll be another Miley Cyrus single in the works soon, as well. At the same time, Rihanna's "Disturbia", a track off the special edition of Good Girl Gone Bad, debuted at 18 last week and, if it hadn't been for Disney, would be in the top ten right now, despite the lack of significant airplay (it's not even on the Hot 100 Airplay chart). Billboard, which always tries to keep radio happy, changed their formula last year, essentially halving the effect of sales on the chart (I do my best to explain it here). Since then, according to numbers released this week, digital track sales have increased by 30%, and the Hot 100 is starting to bounce around in much the same way as it did last year.
Me, I think this is great news. But radio programmers hate it because it makes the charts too volatile, and hence too difficult to adjust to effectively as far as programming is concerned. Which is another way of saying they would prefer to play the same records for months on end, and have greater control over what becomes a hit and what doesn't, because the more power they have, the more money they'll make. Ultimately, I think this is going to bite them, hard, because the audience they're resisting now is the one that will rule the ground in a few years, and will essentially have already abandoned terrestrial radio in favor of whatever medium plays what they actually want to hear. At the moment, radio is too powerful for Billboard to abandon, but the writing is on the wall, and it might be a good idea for the magazine to start standing up to the radio conglomerates now. The industry is rapidly moving past them, and it's time for Billboard to more actively acknowledge that.
As if to prove the point I was making last week, Coldplay does me the favor of debuting their new album at number one, while the title single, which was number one last week, drops to six. Katy Perry's taking number one in the same week her album debuted proves nothing either way--the single is still climbing on radio, and I suspect she would have hit number one anyway. As a debut artist (if you don't count her brief foray into contemporary Christian), people are probably more wary of putting money out for the album and are sticking to the known quantity until they get a chance to hear a few more tracks.
Meanwhile, there's another possible trend that suggests people are being more cautious in the way they're buying music, at least in terms of paying more than once for the same track. Last year, ten different artists had more than one single in the top ten. The year before, eleven. This year, so far, there have been three. More to the point, almost all of those previous multiple charting artists were pulling material from a single album--Fergie, Mariah Carey, Kelly Clarkson, Justin Timberlake. The labels squeezed those LPs until they bled.
This year, the three artists who have managed to make more than one appearance on the chart have done so either with material from different albums (Miley Cyrus), or with bonus cuts added to special editions of their previous LP (Chris Brown and Rihanna). In both Brown and Rihanna's case, those cuts were issued over a month before the special edition came out, making them essentially non-LP singles. Brown's "Forever" is especially illustrative. His next single was supposed to be another album track, "Take You Down", but a week after it debuted at a dismal 99, "Forever" was released on iTunes with little promotion and went straight into the top ten. "Take You Down" never cracked the top forty, and is now at 48 and dropping, while "Forever", though it fell out of the top ten for a while due to lack of airplay, is now at number seven and climbing while the album itself slowly moves down the chart.
This is all anecdotal, of course, and I'm not going to make any sweeping statements based on a handful of records (well, I'll try not to anyway), but it looks more and more as if the audience is adjusting to the digital era and turning it to their advantage far more quickly the than record labels are. I still won't vouch for their tastes, but they obviously know they've been getting the short end of the stick, and have become much more savvy in their buying habits--those who are still buying, that is, and not just downloading.
I haven't yet read your recent article in the Atlantic (it's so long!), but I understand you think that constant web surfing is turning people into attention deficient zombies who find it impossible to read anything longer than a paragraph.
I myself have been surfing the web, in it's various and everchanging guises, for well over fifteen years now, and, as you can see, maintain my own blog, the entries in which are rarely over a paragraph or two.
Over the last ten years, as my web browsing and blogging have continued to expand, I have also read, in addition to many other things, the complete fiction of Henry James, half the novels of Iris Murdoch, and, come the end of this month, the complete fiction of Fyodor Dostoesvsky in tandem with Joseph Franks' five-volume, 2300 page biography.
Up until a few months ago, there was along established phenomenom on the singles charts known as the "album bump". Singles by established artists, unsupported by a current album, would enter the charts, gain some radio airplay and some sales, settle into the mid-30s for a week or two, and then, when the album was released, suddenly leap into the top ten (Avril Lavigne's "Girlfriend" is a good example of this). It was as if a large part of the audience wasn't aware that the single could be purchased until the album came out. Singles that were already in, say, the top fifteen, would almost always jump to number one, and stay there as long as album sales and airplay were strong.
In the last few months, however, the album bump seems to have disappeared, at least for established artists. Mariah Carey, Usher, and Lil Wayne have all had number one singles this year, and all three had albums debut at number one, as well. But here's the odd thing: the week each album was released, the lead single either stayed stagnant, or actually dropped on the chart, and all these singles achieved their number one status before the album appeared. Lil Wayne sold over a million copies of Tha Carter III last week, the biggest week for any album since 2005, but this week, the lead single, "Lollipop", which has been number one for a month, inexplicably dropped to number three. Mariah Carey's "Touch My Body" also dropped the week of her album's release, while Usher's "Love in This Club" stood motionless the week his album came out, and slowly dropped in the weeks that followed.
As Antony Bruno points out in Billboard, it's been accepted wisdom at the major labels for a long time that pre-release singles hurt album sales (that was why Epic foolishly held back on releasing Sean Kingston's "Beautiful Girls"; it would have been number one for a full two months--instead of a paltry one week--if they'd released it before the album). Now it appears the exact opposite is the case. Once the album is out, the audience picks up the LP instead of the single, which, unless massive airplay holds it up, quickly drops down the chart. The artist, and the song, are no less popular, but the audience is going with the bargain bulk package instead of the higher priced individual unit.
This undercuts yet another piece of the record industry's accepted wisdom: that you could make the audience buy the same song dozens of times if you packaged it attractively enough. Now there is no package, and that trick is a lot harder, if not impossible to pull off. This, in turn, makes it difficult to peddle follow-up singles in any market other than radio. Mariah Carey's latest single, "Bye-Bye", which debuted the same week as the album, has barely made top 25 and shows no sign of going further, even though it's gotten plenty of airplay. In order to keep album sales up, artists are going to need to release more LPs, with fewer singles pulled from each one, a marketing scheme that takes us back to the mid-sixties, at least (this has been Def Jam's strategy for Rihanna, who's released three albums, and scored 9 top ten singles, in less than three years). The problem is that, ultimately, that isn't going to work either. Those 60s albums never sold very well, and besides, as long as iTunes refuses to sell albums as discrete, all-or-nothing units, no one would buy them (though they might pick up enough of the better cuts to get them onto the lower reaches of the charts). People might not even bother with that mightiest of all cash cows, the greatest hits set.
All of this, of course, is probably moot as long as filesharing exists (and predictions are that as time goes by, the filesharing situation is only going to get worse for the record companies). Although Lil Wayne has demonstrated that you can sell a million official releases by giving away a ton of unofficial ones first, that isn't an example that will work for everyone (just like the Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails and Coldplay models may only work with their particular audience). And when the audience essentially stops paying for music at all, it will hardly matter what sort of marketing scheme the labels come up with. The first person to invent a marketing plan that makes the record companies money and that works with more than one artist or genre will be hailed as a savior, but I'm willing to bet no such person exists. The record industry will eventually, I'm afraid, become the equivalent of online busking--"If you like our music, please buy a t-shirt or drop a few dimes in our Paypal account. Thank you."
Anthony Miccio and all the commenters at Idolator hate it, but fuck 'em, Feed the Animals is the most outrageously hilarious mash-up, break-in record I have ever heard. Haven't you always wanted to hear someone rap over "C'mon Eileen"?
I don't think much of the Ting Tings' first single, "Shut Up and Let Me Go", and the album is pretty ordinary, but "That's Not My Name", their current UK single, is the best dancey pop song I've heard all year. The video is great, but I recommend the LP version, which is a minute and half longer, adds yet another layer of vocals (and another layer of feelng), and just keeps building and building. A great record.
It's a stupid question, I know, considering how many bizarre names rock bands have adorned themselves with in the past, but I need to ask it anyway: what the hell kind of name for a band is Flyleaf? Flyleaf, in case you don't remember, is a publishers term for the blank sheets that appear at the beginning and end of books (I could tell you exactly why they're there, but I don't want to get too technical here). Does this mean that the band considers itself a blank page, a tabula rasa, or simply a leftover piece of a larger process (like a spandrel, to get even more esoteric)? Whatever the case, now that the example has been set, I'd like to suggest a few other names based on printing and publishing jargon, and the genre's they would best fit.
Saddle Stitch -- Country (duh) Dust Jacket -- Post-grunge (or whatever genre Nickelback and Daughtry fit into) Verso -- Minimalist Techno Hardback -- Metal Remaindered -- Emo Spiral Bound -- Shoegaze Perfect Bound -- Christian
This morning I had thought of ones for Disney pop-punk (i.e. The Jonas Bros) and goth, but somehow I've forgotten them already. Suggestions welcome, of course
In this week of stasis--nothing new in the top ten, with just the slightest shuffling amongst the top four--here are a few statistics to sum up the year so far. Among the songs that have made the top ten this year (that is, not counting "Low", which ruled for the first 10 weeks or so), there have been five number ones. All five of them are still on the chart, four of them in the top four spots. Each spent virtually no time in the lower reaches of the charts--once they were available for download, they went straight to the top. All, except "X Factor" winner Leona Lewis, were already established stars. Every one of them is mediocre at best. In fact, though this week's top ten doesn't come close to being the worst of the oughts, it might well be the most meh. The only song I can bring myself to hate is "Bleeding Love", with "Damaged" a distant second. The rest I struggle to pay attention to, but don't seem worthy of outright dislike. That goes for almost every song to make the top ten this year. In February I thought the chart was depressing, but now it's worse. Now it's just boring.
Denny's is now promoting bands with special menu items and free downoads on their website. And all the bands get free breakfast when they're touring. What a deal!
Luc Sante makes up for a dirth of blogging by posting a few illustrations from one of my favorite books, Nize Baby, by Milt Gross. Written in the twenties as a newspaper column, it purports to be the overheard conversations of the residents of a lower east side tenament, but all the talk jumbles together, and it quickly turns into one of the most bizarre and hilarious exercises in dialect humor you will ever read. Much of it retells classic fairy tales, and at times the dialect gets so thick it becomes a Yiddish Finnegans Wake, only funnier. Long out of print (that's a hint, Fantagraphics), but if you come by my place I'll let you look at the less valuable of my two copies.
<satire> As a critic--that is to say, as one whose expertise, knowledge, and taste have placed one in the position of setting standards for the seething masses of society to follow--I find it unsettling, not to say offensive, when artistes regarding whom I have already expressed my contempt dare, in defiance of all that is holy, to concoct musical endeavors which, it must be admitted, possess a certifiable, if infinitesimal, allowance of aesthetic value. Such base effrontery is barely to be born. And yet, this is precisely what not one, but two, such artistes have had the audacity to lay before your humble servant in this past week; against all odds they have conjured from thin air, as if in consort with the devil himself, not only music of undeniable quality, but have also contrived, and here I discern even more strongly Lucifer's guiding hand, to have these endeavors make their initial public appearance in the hallowed ranks of the top fifteen itself! Chris Brown's effort I can accept with partial equanimity--having enjoyed a goodly number of popular successes in the recent past, he can well afford the hire of skilled professionals in compensation of his woeful shortcomings--but Jesse McCartney? The man who must take partial responsibility for the soul scouring "Bleeding Love"? The man whose previous endeavors so overflowed with affectation and imposture of sincerity as to beggar adequate description? The man I hoped had vanished for all eternity in the capsizing of the WB Network? How can such audaciousness be tolerated? My only possible compensation for this woeful breach of decorum, though I may say without undue temerity that this happens only on rare occasions, if ever, is that my first impression might indeed be mistaken, and that both of these articles of musical expression may prove to be more dismal than presently appears. One must always hold out hope of some sort. </satire>
Having got all that out of my system (you never know when the mood for producing poorly parodied 19th century prose will strike), I need to admit that, like all satire, most of the above is true. Both McCartney's and (especially) Brown's records are of surprisingly high quality, and both debut this week in the top fifteen. And, yes, it does bug me, because I had written both of these guys off. Admittedly, they had a lot of help--from Polow Da Don in Brown's case, from Chris Stewart and The Dream and The Neptunes in McCartney's (did it really take all of them to make him sound good?)--but whatever the case, they make a pair of wonderful records. A good thing, too, because it looks like they'll both be around for awhile.
In anticipation of summer, perhaps, the Hot 100 is full of interesting debuts (though not a single country record--maybe Nashville is on spring break). Aside from Brown and McCartney, there's new Weezer and Weezy, both sub-par (Lil Wayne has apparently decided to release the oft-delayed Tha Carter III in dribs and drabs until further notice), the US debut of UK star Duffy (a slightly more electronic, brassier, and blonde Amy Winehouse), and V.I.C.'s (with help from Mr. Collipark and Soulja Boy) "Get Silly", a record that lives up to its name and then some. Plus remixed Usher, lame G-Unit, and power ballad Ashlee Simpson. Finally, there's The Dream, who for the third time releases the wrong single from his album. Can't some enterprising program manager step up and put "Livin' A Lie" on the air and show this guy how it's done?
It's far too late to add anything new to the endless analog vs. digital debate, but this snippet from The New Yorker's recent article on Dust To Digital Records and the difficulties involved in transferring analog sources to digital confirms something I've believed for a long time: it isn't vinyl's supposed sonic superiority that people love about it, but its imperfections.
A few years ago, audio engineers played two versions of the same song for a panel of listeners. The first was free of noise. The second was the same recording, only with some random noise dubbed onto it. In almost every case, the listeners preferred the noisy version.
Scratches, hiss, even the occasional skip, people love that stuff, most likely because it equates much more with a live listening experience, where there is always extraneous noise flitting about. As for that quality of "warmth" vinyl aficionados like to go on about, claiming that only analog can reproduce enough of the original sound to create that feeling, I always figured that was turntable rumble, though I doubt you'd ever get an audiophile to admit as much.
The only people who ever listen to music in a completely quiet environment are people who are making records. Music perfectly played and flawlessly recorded, no matter how beautiful it may be, and no matter how high the sampling rate, is always going to sound antiseptic, as if the listener were sitting in an operating room. And just like an operating room, sonic purity scares us a little, makes us uneasy. People like a bit of mess. It reminds us of our lives.
