Another song where hearing the original changes your perspective on it: as a Bananarama album track, “Young At Heart” is fizzy but unusually thoughtful, a vignette of a kid growing to understand her parents’ choices and compromises. Even at three minutes it runs out of ideas, but it’s a lovely, wise little song and – like all early Bananarama material – it brims with can-do enthusiasm.

Bobby Bluebell co-wrote that song and then worked it up into a hit, making two major changes – one his own, one proven otherwise in court. The bit that’s not his is the violin hook, contributed by Bobby Valentino. It’s immediately recognisable and has the unfortunate effect of pitching the redone “Young At Heart” into an unwinnable comparison with “Come On Eileen” – another fiddle-driven song about coming to terms with your parents’ lives. Even so, Valentino’s wandering violin lines are the best thing about the reworked version – switching from punchy to wistful, corny but at least not leaden.

Which is more than you can say for The Bluebells’ other addition – that lumbering chorus. “YUNG! At heart! You’re so – YU-UNG AT HEART!”. Ken McLuskey is a non-singer in the grand indiepop tradition, but unlike his rough contemporary Edwyn Collins he doesn’t have the clarity, wit, or phrasing to make up for it – he smears his way through the verses, obscuring them in favour of that bellowed refrain.

Together, the fiddle and the chorus were hooky enough to catch Volkswagen’s attention and dredge the song up from 80s limbo to irritate a whole new audience. To be honest, “Young At Heart” sounded OK rubbing shoulders with Cabaret Voltaire and JoBoxers at the fag-end of a cheap compilation tape – it was only weeks in the spotlight that made me come to hate it. But my newfound dislike of the song never faded, and I sometimes wondered why – since some of the things it does (fiddles, fresh-facedness) might be winners in another context. Finally hearing the original doesn’t improve the song, but it at least puts its failures into a kind of focus.

Shaggy’s take on “Oh Carolina” acknowledges its debt to the past right away – sampling the intro from the Folkes Brothers’ 1960 original. Not just a nod of respect, it’s a canny move, as the crackling, wheezing shanty-town piano sounded like nothing else on 1993 radio, giving “Oh Carolina” instant cut-through.

But everything about Shaggy’s breakthrough hit is shrewd. His “Oh Carolina” is shooting for crossover smash and party smash at the same time, which means that every touch the production adds – bells, brass, “Peter Gunn” bass – is trying to bring new people into the tent. It’s shameless, but it works. The Folkes Brothers’ track is shockingly raw – Count Ossie’s drums mixed aggressively high, so the group’s lilting song gets buried under their clattering, peg-legged rhythm. And you could argue dancehall works best when it’s stripped down likewise – the novelty of the riddims and the swagger of the MC mixing confrontationally, without compromise. “Oh Carolina” is comparatively eager to please, but the theme park version of old Jamaica it conjures up is still a terrific place to spend a few minutes.

If anything lets the track down, it’s Shaggy – at the start of his career, pushing ragga MCing out to an international crowd, he sounds more hesitant than you remember, with growls scattered around the track but less of the gruff brio of later hits. Never the flashiest of MCs in any case, Shaggy here is having to spell out what ragga is and does for a big chunk of its new audience: at two decades distance, with that educational work done, his patience doesn’t seem so much of a virtue.

31. The Heart Of The Crowd: An example of the type of piece where you take a concept – in this case, things being “generic” – and fiddle with it until a hinge pops open and something interesting comes out. Hopefully. I was pleased with this one – a lot of times I’d tried to write pieces which unravelled a nuanced idea with something approximating logic, and I’d ended up getting bogged down or reducing stuff, but I think this managed it.

32. An Alphabet Of Arguments: This is my favourite Poptimist! Also probably the longest and hardest (though also most fun) to write – 26 miniature thinkpieces or pointlets, which could interlock in longer thematic ways. This was sort of written with hypertext in mind – a kind of pop criticism choose your own adventure – but I gave up on that idea and never suggested it to the editors. I was also thinking in terms of movie/pre-season TV trailers – the idea of chopping together the “good bits” of all the columns I was going to write coming up. I am really proud of this one.

33. The Wardrobe: Like any liberal smart alec I am a big fan of Adam Curtis, and this wore his influence very heavily (and openly) – an attempt to imagine Britpop as a Curtisian tragicomedy of unintended consequences, weaponised ironies and gothic unleashed forces. Re-reading this, it looks like it’s going somewhere really interesting for the first three sections and then I don’t think it gets there. Of all of them this would be the one I’d be most tempted to rewrite.

34. RIP Walkman: The only “commission” I ever did – Scott emailed to suggest it as a topic and I fell on it like an idea-eating wolf, since I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to cover. It ended up being a very enjoyable piece to write though I don’t think I concluded anything very much, but it still reads as though I did.

35. Everything’s Gone Green: By this point I think Poptimist was as regularly good as it ever got – this is another one I’m really pleased with, where a bunch of things I’d half-thought about dealing with (James Blake, Eno, Facebook) turned out all to cohere and connect. When it happens this is an amazingly good feeling. I also think by this point I’d worked out how to integrate the “social media” and “pop” sides of my writing so they fit together smoothly.

36. I’m So Fucking Special: Mazy piece talking about Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Fleet Foxes, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, and the Facebook v Google split. Again, a bunch of stuff I’m trying to knit together with a story about “self-actualisation” and its discontents. Again, a long piece which runs into a certain degree of fog towards the end, but I’m still pleased with it. (This was the piece where I was most conscious of being a well-off 30something white bloke who is quite self-actualised enough, thankyou very much.)

37. Joe Chip, What’s On Your iPod?: Worst title! This one explores what cultural death/decline feels like from the inside – not a gradual process or a sudden collapse, but a series of small, discrete step changes. (I suspect economic decline feels like this too to the middle class: we shall see!) By this point I’d decided it was time to finish the column so I was working through a handful of things I’d planned to write about and never got round to – the “death of the album” in this case.

38. The Milton Point: Like the last column this one is about subjective experiences of macro trends – in this case the “retromania” idea of a pop culture strip-mining its past. There’s a wider question behind these which I don’t fully know the answer to: how visible are network effects within a network? (I think “tangible” is a better way of putting it though)

39. Continuing Backwards: I have only just noticed that this isn’t called “Counting Backwards”, oh well! Anyway as I freely admitted on Tumblr this was a “write about a bunch of unconnected shit I’m listening to” post knitted together with a conceit about the specifics and contexts we lose touch with as we go backwards in time. Does it work? I dunno, I think the conceit overwhelms the possibility of saying interesting things about the records.

40. To Be Of Use: The “Very Special Episode” of Poptimist, about my experiences with depression. It was well received, and something I’d wanted to write about for a while: it was also a springboard for some people to talk about their own experiences which was interesting and moving. I’m so unused to writing “personal” stuff that I had no frame of reference to work out if this was good or not, so I was thankful that people responded to it.

41. We Hurt Ourselves In Our Confusion: Emo title! The last (well, almost) “music-lite” column, about POKEMON! I love Pokemon, best of all the child-exploiting collectables. I knew my Pokemon playing had gone too far when a particular questioning strategy in the Murdoch’s select committee session reminded me of the move Stealth Rock. The message of this column is about the unity of fandom – I should have been ballsy enough to use Mark S’ “critical theory pokemon” observation but he explains it better than I (ask him in the pub sometime).

42. Bands Won’t Play No More: Pop and the riots. Not the only piece to be written on this topic, certainly not the best, but not idiotic either. And it would have taken far more will than I had to have sat down and written about anything else at the time!

43. Imaginary Stories: Another take on pop’s conflicted relationship with its past – this time returning to the idea of pop as a kind of fictional continuity (a la Marvel or DC) and the possibilities for musical “retcons”: ‘influence’ as a role-playing game. Very unusually for one of my columns I wonder if this one wasn’t abstract ENOUGH – it felt while I was writing it like a list of examples in search of some glue, but perhaps it reads better than that.

44. Sonic Cathedrals: I’d wanted to write something for ages about ROCK MUSIC and the reluctant way I responded to a certain type of it. A trip to America seemed a good excuse, especially with the (tedious) Coldplay and Florence albums on the iPod. The best thing about this was getting approvingly cited and quoted by Christian blogs – as with music, if the specialists take what you’re doing seriously it’s usually a good sign.

45. Take Me To The River: Double-size finale imagining web culture as a kind of pop in itself, which I finished a couple of weeks ago and have no real perspective on. A worthy finish? You decide.

Thanks to everyone who edited these, commissioned them, read them and most of all inspired them or contributed ideas. It was incredibly enjoyable.

16. Within The Realm Of A Dying Sun: Another one all about comics, with what seemed like even more tangential connections to pop. This looked at the then-current Final Crisis and Secret Invasion series, and at how a ubiquitous mass artform had become a weird inward-looking sect. Perhaps not so tangential, then. Beneath the ephemera are some good ideas, I think – speculation and annotation as modes of distributed web-era criticism, for instance. Also features a rare cameo from Isabel, my wife, who a poster on a comics forum promptly accused me of inventing.

17. No Weak Men In The Books At Home: The column as pitch – a proposal for a history of pop music which would leave out the actual music. In a sense every Poptimist column is me trying not to write about actual music, as I got less and less convinced that what I (or anyone else) thought about it was remotely important. I would still love to read this book.

18. 45 Things I Love About Pop: First attempt at the column as a megamix of unwritten other columns, it failed to inspire any imitations. It also failed in its secret primary purpose, of being a really easy column to write in between gaps in an increasingly brutal work schedule: this one took AGES though was a lot of fun. Massive apologies to the Pitchfork subs, too, for making them track down so many obscure records. But my goodness there are some brilliant tracks here. And a Keane record.

19. Fated To Pretend: In the month between that column and this one I started a new job and had what probably amounts to a breakdown. This piece was ground out over train journeys and sleepless nights and my memories of writing it are basically ghastly. I don’t think the final result is exactly lucid either – it’s one of the driest, most abstract Poptimist pieces, about networks and how “influencers” are really triangulation points.

20. Even An Android Can Cry: A tour of performers pretending to be robots, from Kraftwerk to Kanye – probably the most straightforward Poptimist column ever! This felt like a knock-off when I was writing it, and now reads (I think) really well.

21. Don’t Think You Knew You Were In This Song: A game of two halves – a light, music-centric tour round some of my favourite answer records, and then a big slugging chunk of borrowed THEORY exploring the idea that all records are answer records, and using fanfic to explore the idea of musicians transforming each others work. The two bits mix rather uneasily, unfortunately. The more I started bringing my outside work into Poptimist, the more this became a risk.

22. Around The World In 84 Tweets: This stood in as 2009′s “column not actually about music”, an attempt to talk about and explain Twitter in – formalism alert! – a series of Tweets. I was going to do 140 tweets (140 x 140) but realised there was no way I had that much to say. The music bit is OUTRAGEOUSLY shoehorned in this time. Otherwise I think this is a good column, the first time I’d successfully managed to write about the web I reckon.

23. Chartopia: Quickly followed by the second time! This is the halfway mark of Poptimist – it offers one definition of “poptimism”, then goes on to explore another, talking about pop as a thing to have arguments in, and how to chase the energy of serendipity around the web. A lot of the columns from this point on are long, dense, multi-partite: I don’t think many of them work as well as this, which I’m still very proud of even if some of its closing examples are a little weak.

24. We’ll Take A Bit Of This And That: Written in an American hotel room on a business trip, this was about “baggy”, but really it was about taste imprinting – the idea that the music you encounter at an impressionable age becomes a favourite even if it ‘turns out’ later on to be crappy and unremarkable. Baggy was my “break glass in case of emergency” topic – the thing I knew I could write a column on in my sleep (which was, thanks to jetlag, almost literally the case) if I was in danger of completely botching a deadline. Like the Kanye one, I was suspicious of the ease of writing but I shouldn’t have been.

25. Pop As Art: This is the only one I didn’t title – it was given a functional title by the editors when a format change required one. “Pop Vs Art” would be closer to it I guess. Or “Column As Missed Opportunity”. This was one I’d kicked around in my head for ages – it stewed too long, unfortunately. The central idea was a kind of reactionary approach to pop, wanting to explore the notion that the acceptance of pop music as “art” was actually a disaster for pop (and maybe art), narrowing the range of things expected of it, focusing on one particular use at the expense of a lot of others. This central idea goes unexplored and unexpressed in the actual column, which bounces around between a few texts and doesn’t get its shit together. Sorry!

26. Shiny Shiny: Answer piece to a great bit of journalism by Marc Hogan on the cassette revival, and an attempt at futurology. Exhaustive footnotes available elsewhere on Freaky Trigger. Bits of this suggest why I have never tried to write fiction, but overall I think it worked and I bet it all comes true sooner than I said it would.

27. Captured By The Game: My first attempt at writing about gamification, seen here in its olde English spelling w/an extra e. This is another column where two ideas which seemed to knit together in my brain – gamification and behavioural economics – didn’t really do so on paper. Partly because my understanding of the latter was very basic. The game stuff is good, though: people who are into gamification tend to think of it as people doing things the designers want, which makes you think that people who are into gamification really play very few games.

28. This Is A Gift: It Comes With A Price: 2010′s “music-lite” instalment isn’t really music-lite – it’s an essay on Phonogram, a comic all about music. A strange one to write in that it’s the only time I was 100% sure the creator of what I was talking about would read the piece. The idea here was one about literary style as magic: just as you read the dialogue in a modern Marvel comic and often find yourself thinking of particular TV shows (or screenwriters), the dialogue in Phonogram called particular British music writers to mind. What I wondered was how much these heuristics of style and critical thought created the fictional (and real) world. Did much of that come out in the column? Did it heck. Fun to write though.

29. Imperial: Another one of the column’s “hits” in terms of people referring back to the idea and (embarassingly) crediting me for it, not Neil Tennant. I wanted for ages to do a proper column on the PSBs but I did this instead, about “Imperial Phases” in pop. Re-reading it I was probably also thinking of that bit in Civilization where you get “YOUR CIVILIZATION IS IN A GOLDEN AGE” and you can discover everything really quickly. That is basically how they work.

30. Feed The Troll: A simple and hopeful message – don’t be a cock about people based on the music you imagine they like, take a chance and talk to them instead – spun out into a leisurely thousand or so words. The genesis of this was a feeling I should write about “extreme” music, but I realised I didn’t have anything useful to say about it.

In part 3! The column’s own imperial phase (well, ‘extension of the municipal boundary’ phase, at any rate)

So to celebrate five years of indulgence here is one last monstrous one: links and brief annotations for all 45 columns, spread over three posts.

1. Sing This All Together: The column was initially going to be called Sentimentalist, and I think I partly wanted to write about stuff which was too naff or emo or corny for usual Pitchfork coverage. I started off with Music Hall, having read one book about it (this would become a theme), and the Beatles, and the idea that what was lost when music became what we know of now as pop was a sense of participatory risk, loss of control of the message and the audience. Obviously I was thinking about the Internet as a return of these things, but for whatever reason I didn’t say so.

2. Spoiler Spice: A recurring trope in Poptimist was of the “uselessness of criticism” – said uselessness both an idea hanging in the virtual aether (criticism having been rendered ‘pointless’ by people’s ability to listen at once to songs) and something whose possibilities could be explored. This is a fancy way of saying that most of the second column – about whether pop could have “spoilers” and how critics dealt with that – is meta-criticism. It’s also the first one where I talk about the web a lot, and where it starts to become obvious that “Poptimist” doesn’t mean “into pop” but more “the changes in the ways we listen to pop are worth celebrating as well as lamenting”. Which is unfortunately less catchy.

3. Before The Giant Scorpions: “Can I write something mostly about comics?” I asked. “Sure”, Scott replied. I decided to allow myself one column a year which wouldn’t really be about music, probably thinking of the way Doctor Who has a “Doctor-lite” episode every year. Doctor Who was one of the things I never did a Poptimist column on. Another was The Moomins. But I was – amazingly – permitted to write a huge piece in an American music website about the British comic 2000AD and its aesthetics in the late 70s. This one is where I presented the semi-formed concept of “thrill-power” (basically a kind of condensate of awesomeness created by exploiting talent to the point where it can’t second-guess itself: from a labour relations point of view, this is bad news). From memory, the material about pop at the end is a bit of a fig-leaf.

4. What Do I Look For In Music Writing?: Slightly embarassing to realise I was repeating myself already – the paraphrase of Ian MacDonald here shows up in the first column too. This is more death-of-the-critic stuff, tackled head-on by offering a guide to what music writing does when it’s doing things well. As a defense of music criticism it’s pretty good: it was also a tacit admission I was never going to write descriptions of actual music as amazing as the ones I read. (The LJ post mentioned at the end – oh, the days of LJ – was by Hazel Robinson, who now writes for FT).

5. The History Book On The Shelf: The first of two Poptimist columns to be anthologised in a Da Capo Best Music Writing book, this one with a baffled mention in the forward where Nelson George made it clear he’d picked me for being an internet crazy who took ABBA seriously. I do take ABBA seriously, of course. This piece is about taking ABBA seriously. The problem with writing anything about ABBA is that you’re (well, I’m) under the shadow of Taylor Parkes’ magnificent essay on The Visitors (referenced in this piece) – the angle I wanted to come from here is the solid, rueful grown-up-ness of ABBA. It should be so blazingly obvious this essay is also about my feelings around being a “grown-up” that it goes without saying. Also: bonus Radiohead diss.

6. Are The Smiths Funny?: Having taken the radical step of actually doing some music criticism in the column I acquired a taste for it – this one is trying to tease out the complexities of fandom and what fans value in a band by thinking about The Smiths, and then suggesting that an awful lot of music conversation might be an attempt to bypass or post-rationalise our emotional connections to it. NEUROSCIENCE agrees with me on this, or so I’m told.

7. Bury The Past, Empty The Shelf: This was the first piece I got an angry blog post about, though I got a lot of positive reaction to it as well. Another recurring concept here: the non-hardwired, socially determined nature of taste, always ready to be played with, rebooted, or turned into a game. This was probably the first column I wrote with a greater awareness of who my readers actually were, which explains the very direct “addressing” of them, and also the attempt to gently troll them, asking them politely to take their record collection outside and have it shot.

8. Ape And Essence: A long feature on an advert which may well only have been shown in Britain – just call me “Mr Pageviews”. This is about how adverts which use music work as music criticism – I was desperate to get away from the standard piece about “music in ads” and selling out etc. I also used this as a test run for seeing if I could write about marketing and advertising and still enjoy it. (I could) (enjoy the writing, that is).

9. English Settlement: Probably the most dated of any Poptimist column, this is a postcard from the grim reign of Haircut Indie. It got approvingly quoted by Warren Ellis, probably because it confirmed his prejudices. The last paragraph seemed to confirm a lot of people’s prejudices to be honest, which is a shame because as a prediction it was way off base: the link between tasteful guitar rock and the British charts was rapidly broken and pop-grime soon ruled over all it surveyed. This is one of my worst columns – emboldened by having written quite well about one advert I dropped huge wodges of marketing theory on the readers and came across, in my opinion, as a bit smarmy.

10. Britney In The Black Lodge: or; The Blackout One. Maybe my most popular column. I’ve been asked a few times whether this was a review of Blackout which Pitchfork refused to run, and have seen this theory stated as fact on a message board. It is nonsense: I would never have pitched a review of the record because I assumed the site wouldn’t want one (I had no basis for assuming this, by the way). Blackout has become THE cult 00s pop record without any help from a “Best New Music”, anyway. It is possibly my favourite album of the last ten years, so I don’t actually want to re-read this piece and find I didn’t do it justice.

11. What You Hear Is Not A Test: I would like to thank Mark S now for the many times I’ve jumped on an idea of his and flogged it into the ground: hopefully always credited. Also in this discussion of the bullshit concept “the test of time”, an annoying trick I got fond of for a while of writing a couple of intentionally wrong paragraphs and then doubling back on them. I have no idea why I thought this was clever, since most people aren’t actually reading this stuff closely. And while we’re cataloguing mis-steps, another exciting Poptimist feature might debut in this column: the last sentence soundbite where I can’t actually work out what I mean. Those tics aside, it’s not bad.

12. The Rise And Fall Of The Festive Fifty: The second Da Capo anthologised piece, and one of my favourites too. There is a lot of nonsense written about John Peel – and carried out in his name – which bears very little relation to the experience of listening to his shows. This is a piece about polls, the relationship between audiences and DJs or critics (them again!), and ultimately failure – the failure of a tastemaker to carry an audience in a new direction more than once, which has been spun posthumously into success because of that once. (A couple of years later, Pitchforkreviewsreviews noted accurately that this essay was also about Pitchfork itself.)

13. How White My Shirts Could Be: I remembered this as being garbled – it’s not, though it’s another tilt at the windmill of fusing my “day job” and my music criticism and ends up clunky. The conclusions are a mix of stuff I’m proud to have said and stuff that now feels a bit naive.

14. Five Lost Worlds: Poptimist’s most complete failure! The idea here was to try and write a piece of criticism inspired by – pseud’s corner ahoy – Georges Perec’s A Void, which was composed without using the letter e. Punk would be my letter e, and I would write a column about punk, without mentioning it, by writing about five things that were reaching towards punk in the years leading up to it, but not pointing out the connection (the point being, erm… oh yeah! the point being to emphasise the lost-ness of the pre-punk world, the way we only make sense of it now with reference to punk, in the same way that it’s impossible to have any kind of fiction set in 1912-1913 without huge great THERE IS A WAR COMING future-ghosts hanging over it). Anyway nobody whatsoever ‘got’ this, because I wasn’t good enough to pull it off, and the piece went entirely unnoticed.

15. What’s Your Favourite Album?: Chastened by my brush with ambition I made sure this was a more accessible piece, a memoir and self-analysis of what having “favourite albums” meant and how I’d used the idea to define myself growing up. I remember it as being quick and sweet to write, and one of the times I felt like I’d felt when writing essays for Freaky Trigger years before.

In Part 2: Failed memes! Futurism! Folly!

Yes, it’s the Bob The Builder: A Christmas To Remember special, first broadcast in 2001 – NOT to be confused with the Bob The Builder: Snowed Under Christmas Special. In the latter the “machine team” learn a lesson about teamwork and friendship. In this they learn a lesson about GLAM ROCK.

The main plot of this special involves Bob’s twin brother Tom – never mentioned before or since, like all twin brothers in TV specials – who is a zoologist in the Arctic and wants to come and see Bob for Christmas. Will he make it home? The answer of course is YES, though – spoiler alert – only with the help of Chris Evans’ private jet, a curious choice of transport for a man devoting his life to saving the poley bears.

It’s not actually Chris Evans, of course, it’s Chris Evans playing a rock star called Lenny Lazenby, of “Lenny And The Lazers”. And here is the special’s OTHER plot, which is to do with this band playing a concert in Bobsville, but Lenny has laryngitis – OH NO! Who will step in. Perhaps the piano player “John”, who with a pair of starry specs and songwriting help from Roley the steamroller can achieve his destiny and become…

Ahem. Also worth watching out for if yr a fan of 70s rock: a scene-stealing turn from Noddy Holder as a roadie called BANGER. The best Bob The Builder episode? Very likely. It stands up to repeated viewings, and as the parent of two small boys God knows it’s had to.

In the poll below you will see the first-page results of a Google search for “the new rock n roll”, in order. Hats off to the magical SEO monkeys of theosophy! Comedy is still flying the new r’n'r flag, thanks to Jimmy Carr: everything else is testament to the enduring (albeit tongue-in-cheek) pull of one of the great bullshit phrases of the 90s. All you have to do is vote for which of these pretenders is the real thing.

Delicious pop memory: Tony Parsons casting this song as an outrider of apocalypse on some late night culture or news show. He read out the lyrics slowly, in a tone of profound regret – how far had we fallen when this.. this thing could stand in for pop?

At University by now, I was watching with friends, sprawled in chairs round a communal TV. Whatever our opinion of the song, there was a general feeling that Parsons was being a chump: if you draw a line between then and now, you’d better be pretty sure you really know what the “now” side means. And he didn’t. Yes, as Spitting Image said, “There’s no lyrics!” – clever wording there, good one, but who exactly was coming to this looking for those?

Of course it wasn’t just the newly-old who detested this. Ray Slijngaard’s “techno techno techno techno” – cut and looped from a longer rap – set him up as the chart’s most effective troll, infuriating a lot of people who’d set value on their ability to parse dance music’s genrescape. Anything “No Limit” did or didn’t owe to techno had been pounded into irrelevance by the time it reached the public. What’s left – and this is what Parsons should have spotted more easily – is riff-driven, lizard-brain jump-around pop, closer in goonish spirit to “Sugar Sugar” or “Rock’n'Roll Part 2″ or “My Sharona” than anything Derrick May ever touched.

Though like the best trolls, Ray’s got enough material here to argue the point with: those echoey hi-hat hits and the union of steam-hammer bass and rubber-ball synths carry the industrial, piston-powered aggression of Belgian rave. There’s even a cowbell somewhere at the back. But it’s the aggression of Gladiators on Saturday Night TV, of piledriver jumps off bouncy castle walls – a thin cover for boundless, romping joy.

A year of few number ones, though it took me an age to finish. My highest marks were 8 for Shakespear’s Sister and Charles And Eddie; lowest was a 2 for Wet Wet Wet. Onwards!

If there’s a single technique which – however unfairly – defines 90s and 00s soul music for the British public, it’s melisma, and if there’s a single record that cemented that link, it’s “I Will Always Love You”, at number one for a whole winter, by the end of which it was fixed as either one of pop’s all-time great love songs or one of its most reviled dirges.

Certainly it took me a very long time to scrape away that reflexive distaste and try and listen to the record fresh. There’s no denying that Whitney Houston uses the song as a vocal gymnasium, but the repertoire she shows off isn’t just note-bending and belting. She goes hushed too, clips syllables when she needs to, and lets words drain out into sadness as often as she sets them spinning. As a rule she sustains the “I”s – an unwavering blast of strength – and goes to polysyllabic bits at the end of each “you”, which seems fair enough since the you is the lover she can’t hold onto and must walk away from. Like most songs damned as melismatic showboating there’s plenty of thought involved: technique is hardly ever ‘just’ technique.

Certainly this isn’t an especially naturalistic reading. It became fashionable back then to praise the Dolly Parton originals as being subtler and more moving than Whitney’s Olympian approach. Maybe they are: they’re great records, easy to listen to and more conversational than Whitney’s cover. Dolly sings the song’s terrific, heartbreaking opening couplet – “If I should stay / I would only be in your way” – with matter-of-fact sadness: it bounds the song, establishing the singer’s love as doomed. Whitney – famously taking the verse a capella – breaks the line into five distinct phrases, broken puzzle pieces she’s refusing to fit back together because doing so would mean giving up. Dolly’s version is a tragedy – her love is also her cross to bear; Whitney’s is an elemental struggle, each bludgeoning crescendo a deliberate raising of the stakes.

It’s no fault of her performance that the arrangement can’t do it justice. After the initial coup of the naked verse the music tracks her in the most blundering way possible – bashing and flailing where she’s steely and graceful. Houston’s vocals don’t need the key changes and the stomping drums and they certainly don’t need that sax solo, but for all her strength she’s helpless against a greater force: this is a blockbuster soundtrack single and that’s what such things sound like. It means – despite Whitney’s flawless precision – I still find this single more bullying than beautiful.

Classicist pop often sacrifices quality for vibe. Shakin’ Stevens might have had the moves down but if “Oh Julie” had fallen back through time to the 50s it would have simply got lost in a flood of better rock’n'roll. The secret shame of the traditionalist is that they’re parasites on the present: they need time to have changed, or they wouldn’t stand out.

But every now and then something turns up which shrugs this problem away. “Would I Lie To You?” is classicist alright – when I first heard it I knew nothing of soul history, nothing of Philly, doo-wop, 60s pop-soul or anything else it might be nodding to, but I recognised it as something reaching backwards. And it didn’t matter: “Would I Lie To You?” would have been a hit in 1974 too.

No secret why: this is an irresistibly sweet record. Charles and Eddie have no edge whatsoever, they come over as total nice guys, and they don’t even have the “secretly a prick” vibe most “nice guys” end up with. It’s dreaminess all the way down: if anyone’s going to end up hurt it’ll be them, but that’s an unimaginable outcome as long as the record’s playing.

So how do they stop it becoming saccharine? I think the key is that the chorus is such a massive sugar hit that on the verses they can relax, play around, enjoy each other’s company – flirt a little, basically. When they’re trading harmonies, finishing each other’s lines, swooping and sighing at one another the “girl” becomes simply a fictional convenience. It’s all platonic, for sure, but it’s no surprise their origin story (carrying the same record on the subway) was like something out of a music nerd rom-com: few other records demonstrate the joy of mutually loving and making music so prettily.

This week – “Love and Heartache” – or as I anticipated DAWN OF THE BALLADOSAURUS. But was I correct? Well, not entirely…

NUVIBE: I have now learned Nuvibe is one word – though perhaps it is NuVibe? A question soon to be moot I’d imagine. I missed their discoish take on “With Or Without You”, the ten seconds of hightlights at the end suggested no need to catch up. They might survive another week, they might not – their main problem is that there’s a much better boyband on the show, which isn’t a good hand to play.

SAMI: It’s coming up on Popular, so I’ve listened to “I Will Always Love You” a fair bit recently. Sami gave it the full gale force 10 treatment – competent but a bit lacking in dynamics or personality. Harmless enough. This week the judges’ bitching was all about song choice – Gary, daring maverick that he is, had a go at Louis for his conservatism.

CRAIG: Craig’s odd, haunting voice seems to have lost all its idiosyncrasy under the mentorship of Barlow – this week he sang “Best Thing I Never Had” (cue much tutting from Kelly) with way too much mid-Atlantic rawk inflection, though also with a bit of genuine vengefulness and spite. Disappointing nonetheless.

JANET: Grab-bag of mannerisms on full display, of which the most annoying this week was her Bjorkian pronunciation of “Fall-Ling”. Tremulous stuff, nailing down her favourite status even more. Xmas is the twee-est time of the year, and post-Halloween it’ll be impossible to tell where the John Lewis Christmas advert ends and Janet begins.

FRANKIE: Much criticism of Gary’s song choice for Frankie – Coldplay’s “The Scientist” – which on the one hand, fair play, it’s a terrible song, but what can you do with Frankie? The song has a really truncated range and its phrasing is already See-Spot-Run so it was as safe a choice as you can get. “We know you can do better” said the other judges – there is zero evidence of this, so what they mean is “We know you’re not getting voted off but for god’s sake pull yr finger out”.

JOHNNY: Flashes of something intriguing amidst an overload of lazy camp – touches of Marc Almond this week. He’s a likeable performer, making the best of things – the falsetto on “Can’t Get You Out Of My Head” defeated him a bit – but you have to hope some of his torchiness can come through. It would be less “fun” but more interesting – fingers crossed.

MARCUS: So you have a contestant who’s chirpy, young, moves well, has a great smile – what better track for him than “Russian Roulette”? You’d almost think Gary was trying to get rid of him. He didn’t sing it badly but it’s barely coverable and he wasn’t engaged with the song at all (and why should he be). Baffling.

RHYTHMIX: This week’s biggest surprise for me, a go at “I’m Like A Bird” which seemed to play to the girls’ strengths – they sounded up for it, gave it some oomph on the chorus, the arrangement gave them plenty to do… a good time had by all. Probably as much Tulisa’s credit as the band’s, but they suddenly seem a lot less like dead weight.

MISHA: Very bold version of Charles And Eddie’s “Would I Lie To You?” which Misha took imperious hold of. Two weeks in and her performances are the biggest event of the show – she looks amazing, commands the stage, and brings out the best in the arrangers and designers. The only problem here was this particular arrangement faded a little post-chorus, leaving Misha not very much to do but strut around repeating the title until her two minutes were up.

THE RISK: Took an oily song – Bruno Mars’ “Just The Way You Are” – and did amazingly well with it. Again, because they’re talented, the arrangers can give them much harder things to do and the bet tends to pay off – some lovely harmonies here, a lot of intersecting parts. I only hope they sing a song I actually like sometime soon.

SOPHIE: Exactly what I feared from Love And Heartache Week – a passable slog through a dreadful ballad (The Calling’s “Wherever You Will Go”). Given her lugubrious performance last week, is looking very much like a one-trick pony.

KITTY: Somewhat of a division of opinions in the Ewing household over this – Isabel thought it was the best of the week, I just thought it was a lot better than I feared it was going to be. A version of “It’s Oh So Quiet” but – mercifully – stripped of most of the Bjork phrasing and turned into lung-busting glam rock, which seems to suit Kitty. She might be turfed out, but unlike Katie last year she actually deserves to stick around a bit.

PREDICTIONS! I think it’s between Sophie, Kitty and NuVibe – maybe Marcus’ song choice will put him down there too. Can’t see the judges losing Kitty if she’s in the bottom two, though. I’ll say NuVibe.

I’ve read a couple of round-up pieces – the one in Grantland was very good, for instance, and took the reasonable line that this gigantic relaunch talks the “new readers” talk but doesn’t really walk the “new readers” walk, blaming self-delusion as much as cynicism. This is surely true but just as surely unsurprising: superhero comics are too far down the fan-service rabbit hole for dramatic change to be tried or accepted. We’re looking here at renovation rather than innovation and the relaunch should be judged as such. But even on those terms some interesting patterns emerge from the blur of fists, explosions, lycra and first-person narrative.

One obvious issue with launching 52 titles at once is that the slow accretion of detail over time is replaced by the introduction of a lot of simultaneous stuff: the entire architecture of a fictional universe thrown up overnight. The result is that you can tell a lot about the line’s collective priorities by seeing which parts get most detail.

So you have a glut of secret organisations and conspiracies, but more than that you have a universe where loving attention to detail has been paid to its corporate structure. After reading the New 52 you might or might not be able to guess where Qurac (good old Qurac) is on the map but you could have a fair stab at reconstructing the upper ranks of the DCU’s Fortune 500. Waynecorp features strongly, of course, but much of the character work in Green Arrow seems to revolve around the conflict between his role as a tech innovator at “Q-Core” (a sort of DCU Apple I guess) and his crime-busting night job. Mr Terrific has a multi-billion dollar company too, and a big chunk of Superman #1 pivots on a new corporate HQ and owners for the Daily Planet.

Even leaving the fully corporate superheroes out, our protagonists are often pretty one-percenty, gilded youth for sure – one former Robin has a spiffy penthouse apartment, which he casually blows up; another is a self-styled outlaw but one with plenty of time for beach parties. What’s mostly absent, it seems to me, are underprivileged heroes, characters having a rough time of it*: there’s a break, conscious or not, from the 50-year Marvel tradition of hard-luck heroes. Superheroing in the new DCU is something the rich, gorgeous and smart do. Of course it would be remiss not to mention Grant Morrison’s ‘socialist Superman’ in Action Comics, but that’s set a few years behind the main titles: by Superman #1 Clark Kent is having high-level strategic conversations over print v digital media with the best of ‘em.

There’s rightly been a lot of critical attention paid to how these 52 comics frame and use their female characters, but the portrayal of masculinity is just as interesting. This is a universe whose Peter Parkers won: a post-Zuckerberg DCU stuffed with sexy entrepreneur geniuses who put on costumes in their spare time. Everyone’s clever, everyone’s well-connected, almost everyone’s a scientist. There are a sprinkling of gritty, regular-joe types but even they aren’t immune to upward mobility: Corporal Rock (soon to be Sergeant) wants to stay grounded with the men but his story opens with a high-up accusing him of basically slumming it.

Maybe this all comes back to those new readers. I wonder if DC are responding to – or just buying into – the fantasy marketers have constructed around the “Millennial”: a generation of makers, agile and self-sufficient (there are an awful lot of self-conscious “look it is THE INTERNET” bits in these comics). Whether that’s the case or not, it’s a weirdly shiny world they’ve built, one that feels bright and modern but also a little adrift from the times.

*EDIT: One of the four books I hadn’t read was Firestorm, half of whom is an underprivileged-ish guy. He’s also a genius who’s been given a world changing magic item science experiment and keeps it in his locker.

(This was originally posted on my Tumblr)

Tiny background detail: as with last year I’ve studiously avoided previous episodes, press coverage, etc, so I’m coming to these acts (and three of these judges) fresh with no knowledge of who’s who in the narrative around the show. Not that they don’t make it obvious! Here goes -

Feeble theme this week: “US vs UK”, a body blow to the many X-Factor acts who sing Ghanaian or K-Pop tunes. “Sing whatever you like week” fits the ‘twist’, viz each judge will have to vote one of their own acts off. Presumably the judges have a fair idea what their decision will be in advance, so the tension would come with favoured acts fucking up. But do they?

AMELIA: Ropey start to the live shows – teenager doing “rocked up” version of Billie Jean. Not for the last time it’s the phrasing that does a performance in – as we’ll see, the ability to keep pace with any song that pokes its nose above ballad tempo is in short supply this year.

JOHNNY: First of the Wagner/Jedward contenders, crossing Kenneth Williams waspishness with Charles Hawtrey scrawn – in other words, we’re meant to find him camp but there’s something compellingly British about him, a strain of variety show Britishness long dormant. He chirps through Cher’s “Believe”, which is lazy typing – if he sticks around he needs a Morrissey track.

RHYTHMIX: Another phrasing disaster on “Super Bass”. The logic seems to be that because Nicki Minaj does lots of different voices, giving her part to four different girls can work – but not a one of them can rap. Dreadful syllabic pile-up ensues.

FRANKIE: Teenage scamp/stud given “The A Team” by panto rockist G.Barlow (more on this later) – I’ve never made it all the way through this song in original form so I don’t have much of a handle on whether it’s actually piss easy to sing or whether Frankie’s reading of it is just completely lazy, a string of barely connected phrases, all sung with equal breathlessness. Nothing convinces.

SOPHIE: Gimmicky slowed-down version of “Teenage Dream”, the novel arrangement making for a convincing statement of belief in Sophie, whose voice is solid enough to carry it. First performer who you imagine could do something good, though this wasn’t really it – once you’d got the point the song drifted in the way most “slow it down” attempts do.

JONJO: Soldier, did a Kinks song, given squaddie-in-a-stripclub stage dressing by Louis (I assume), though he publically disowned the song choice afterwards: not a good sign for Jonjo one suspects. He looked a bit frightened. “You Really Got Me” worked for One Direction because it papered over their individual deficiencies – this guy just doesn’t have the oomph for it.

2 SHOES: Post-TOWIE novelty duo given the full, garish Walsh-style treatment Jedward got in their day. Precisely as good as Diva Fever. The performance? Doesn’t matter really, but as with Rhythmix, a group given a song (“Something Kinda Oooh”) with WAY too much pace for their ability. Barlow missed the point but was wholly accurate in his slam of “Romford karaoke”, right down to the joyful relief when the girls hit the bit they actually know.

JAMES: Another slowed-down cover version, this time of “Ticket To Ride”, prompting (at last!) a backlash from the panel who have realised what a low and corny trick this is to pull. Well, all the panel except mentor Gary B who said “he’s the only contestant playing a proper instrument” in a huffy fashion. They had indeed miked James’ guitar up and yes, we heard the two tentative notes he played loud and clear, thanks Gary. In truth the performance wasn’t as shonky as the judges made out, but the whole approach is exhausted (he says more in hope than expectation).

MISHA: At last a genuine highlight – a savage snap at “Rolling In The Deep” by a woman wearing a newspaper ruff and wireframe crown. Misha didn’t quite have the lungs for Adele’s chorus but she tore strips off everything else and when she “did a Cher Lloyd” and dropped a rap in the song it really worked. Poor competition, but this was the best presence, set, costume and performance of the night.

NU VIBE: Delivered the wild flights of imagination their name promised. Rare moment of shrewdness from Gary B, pointing out that the song choice (“Beautiful People”) was well picked for making sure we couldn’t tell whether or not any of the boys could sing solo.

MARCUS: The judges fell on Marcus like a puppy on a bone but I was pretty underwhelmed – possibly it’s that “Moves Like Jagger” isn’t much of anything song-wise, maybe it was just fatigue setting in. In my inattentive state Marcus seems like mid-series cannon fodder, but he might go out earlier if Gary wants to save Hat Dude.

SAMI: Affable Welsh belt-em-out merchant, made up to look about 10 years older than she is for a hoof through “Free”. It sounded to me like she lost the vocal thread a few times, and the whole thing seemed a bit of a wreck – but what do I know, the judges approved. Gary started playing a bit of “mind games” at this point – a good time to point out that the whole banter between the judges isn’t working yet: barbs go unanswered, opportunities for mock outrage are lost, it still feels like a bunch of people playing some kind of insane X-Factor role-playing-game.

THE RISK: “This Risk REALLY PAID OFF” etc etc – in fairness technically the best of the groups by some way – they all had something different to do, nobody fucked it up. A very long way from exciting: Tulisa has been dealt a bum hand getting the groups first time out, she’s making the best of it, and The Risk seem best placed to stick around out of sympathy. Oh, they did Plan B’s “She Said”.

CRAIG: Plump Liverpudlian, presented in the pre-show line-up very much as a comedy option, I’d love to imagine that he decided “sod that” and played it straight against the wishes of weight traitor G Barlow. Tearfully intense, pretty competent version of “Jar Of Hearts” (a song I didn’t know I knew) – like several of the tracks I got the feeling it had been arranged in a hurry and wasn’t much more than a chorus loop. Hard to get rid of on this showing though.

KITTY: Whether Kitty is as “controversial” as the intro painted her, you have to think she’s made few friends in the make-up department. Her post-watershed look – devil eyes, streaming hair – distracted from a ropey take on “Who Wants To Live Forever” which seemed off-key to my (admittedly untrained) ear. Outside chance of her doing something interesting, but I said that about Katie last year.

JANET: “You’re a one-off” quoth the inept Barlow – not strictly true, of all the contestants Janet is the one who most blatantly echoes an earlier semi-success viz Diana Vickers. Much “voice of an angel” praise here – her shyness carefully played up beforehand – but it left me cold and jaded. Obviously doing Coldplay’s “Fix You” didn’t help.

So – what to make of it? Hard to spot an obvious winner: I’m glumly assuming my taste for Misha won’t be shared by the public. The judges aren’t settling, they’ve got a line-up far inferior to last year’s, but the wheels aren’t in any danger of coming off yet. Getting rid of four of this bunch right away is a sound move.

My guess is it’ll be Lily, James, Rhythmix and Jonjo, but the “overs” is the hardest to call: Sami and Kitty are far from safe. If Nu Vibe went and Rhythmix stayed nobody would care, either. I will now go and check the betting to see if I’m remotely realistic.

The “End Of The Road” video presented its directors with a logistical dilemma: in a vocal group, what do the other members do when it’s some other dude’s turn to sing? The solution was a sometimes hilarious extended essay in mooching: glum faces, shuffling, shaking heads, three bros feeling the intense purity of their buddy’s pain before it’s their turn to face the camera and plead.

At one point something happens that’s become very familiar: one of the Boyz (or Men) sings, and the others sit beside him straddling chairs. This sequence also serves as a tip-off as to this track’s key inheritors – they may be the best selling R&B band ever (and this song Motown’s biggest-selling hit, astonishingly) but Boyz II Men’s true legacy in the Popular story is the slow boyband: four or five lads on stools, emoting in sequence.

Boyband performances of male earnestness tend to plod, but Boyz II Men are stronger, churchier singers, happy to push “End Of The Road” into grotesquely impassioned territories. Feelings bulge out through the tune like muscles on an Image Comics superhero – by the time I get to the absurd spoken word sequence I’m thinking “they can’t mean this stuff!”. But they do! Of course they do – the whole point of this music is the chicken game it plays with sincerity.

Still, I’m basically the wrong age and the wrong gender for it, and even if I wasn’t “End Of The Road” seems to walk a precarious line. If you listen to the utterly gloopy LP version, two minutes longer, the extra material – mostly more of that unremarkable production – pushes the track into complete incoherence. The single version is just tight enough to work, or it would be if there wasn’t something rather gross about the content: “It’s unnatural / You belong to me” – it’s pressuring and patronising (that smarmy “your first ti-eye-ime”) and for all the bravura slickness leaves me with a rather nasty taste.

One-hit wonders can catch time in a bottle like no other records, since there’s barely any career context to distract you from your memories. “Sleeping Satellite” feels achingly 90s, but its mix of busker’s strum, baggy backbeat, and surprise-attack solos isn’t itself typical of any trend – except maybe a vague cosmopolitanism that encouraged such mild genre-blending in the first place. Its one-off cousins are 4 Non Blondes, Lisa Loeb, Natalie Imbruglia even – awkward sincerity throwing cool pop shapes.

But Tasmin Archer’s track has a heartfelt push to it even the best of those songs lack. Listening to “Sleeping Satellite”, for a long time I couldn’t work out why Archer was singing such palpable gibberish as if it meant something intensely important. She’s really trying to sell this thing – her enthusiasm and commitment is what keeps the track from gumming up, and what makes the sudden Hammond freakout work too. The fault was mine, though. “Satellite” comes draped in riddles and convolution but I’d never gone much further in than “I blame you…” and assumed this was a break-up metaphor. And not, say, a record about a generation’s post-1969 existentialist crisis. As Jarvis Cocker put it, later and more sardonic: “We were brought up on the space race / Now they want us to clean toilets.”

This, it seems to me, is part of what “Sleeping Satellite”‘s articulating: a sense of disappointment bordering on betrayal that having dreamed of the Moon – or indeed, because it got there – humanity now seems confined to a slowly boiling Earth. This is potent, raw stuff and very difficult indeed to cover effectively in a pop song. And in truth Archer doesn’t cover it effectively – the song’s ambiguous and flowery, its emotional kick comes from Archer’s self-belief more than anything you can read into it. But I have to say I like the idea that she tried.

When superhero comics artists decide to become superhero comics writers it can go one of three ways. One is that they’re good at it. The second is that they decide to be “writerly” and you get flowery stuff like the old Todd McFarlane Spider-Man comics. The third is that they write impatiently, wanting the words to get out of fun’s way.

I have never minded this. If a superhero comic feels like the crude overheated frenzy of kids playing with action figures it’s surely doing something right or at least seems well-pitched to appeal to said kids. I got that feeling from Detective Comics #1, written and drawn by Tony Daniel. The dialogue is all foreshortened, bare minimum stuff – even his Joker is tersely mad, never witty. If you’re a 10-year old boy playing Batman you don’t fuck around with “plot” or “set-up”, you have Batman fight The Joker and then after that you have Batman fight The Joker.

So this is what Tony Daniel does. There is lots of fighting, stabbing, exploding, a dude gets his face cut off (would be spoilers to say which dude) – the face cutty offy bit might have been played as creepy (maybe was meant to) but the stacatto speech patterns make it all “WHOA HAVE YOU SEEN THIS??”, total playground pass-around contraband, the best example of Tony Daniel’s inadvertent mainline to the pre-adolescent male mind.

And something else, something I noticed first (and only) time through though it took a while to pin it down, the most genuinely unusual thing about the entire comic which can be summed up as: No hookers! One of the things that makes “mature” “urban” superhero comics such an embarrassment to read is the constant drooling trope of sex workers in peril. Putting a hooker – threatened or otherwise – into your street scene serves a multitude of purposes viz: i. shows setting is sleazy ii. shows comic is not for kids iii. ready source of victims for badass villain iv. lets artist draw girls v. expands artist’s mind: they get to trace from Suicide Girls as well as Sports Illustrated. Even my favourite writers are prone to lazy hooker scenes (when Grant Morrison was writing Batman there were a couple of crappy ones, of course it was a “commentary” on 90s comics you understand) and as thousands have noted the constant threat of violence against women is a depressing thrum-thrum-thrum undercurrent in most gritty superhero comics since the 80s.

But Tony Daniel doesn’t do that. I’ve not read his other stuff, I’ve not read his future stuff, and yes this is a very violent comic but the onscreen violence in it is something super-bros do to other super-bros: it doesn’t come off as misogynistic, more afeminine in that boyish “ew girls!” way – the only incursion of women at all is a scene where Bruce outsources management of his love life to Alfred, and it’s made clear he’s being a dick but also there’s an undercurrent of sympathy from the writer: he TOO wants to get all this CHARACTER SHIT out of the way so he can get more quickly to the DUDE ON DUDE FACE REMOVAL.

Let me be clear that I am not a 10-year-old boy and as such I thought this was a rubbish comic in many ways – there are a couple of very funny bits in which T Daniel suddenly remembers that he is writing DETECTIVE COMICS not No Face Comics so Batman’s internal monologue goes into criminology powerpoint slide mode as he does some DETECTING. But it was weirdly refreshing NOT to have to read about women being threatened, killed, assaulted etc in a story which 9 times out of 10 would have tripped merrily down that road without a second thought.

(Originally posted on my Tumblr)

*why yes, it WAS an all-male party, why do you ask?

Has an album ever spawned a weirder set of singles than Boss Drum? You got hands-in-the-air club confectionery (“LSI”), moody tribalism (“Boss Drum”), a twenty-minute spoken word piece by Terence McKenna – honestly, “Re:Evolution” alone would make it a contender. And then there’s this career-defining novelty, a cheeky but woeful pun stretched to song length, inventing Dickensian rave (and possibly more) along the way.

If The Shamen were ever serious about hiding “Ebeneezer Goode”‘s subject matter, their best hope wasn’t their bare-faced denials, it’s that no supposed Ecstasy song has ever sounded beerier than this one. The huggy spaciness of “Pro Gen”, “Omega Amigo”, and several summers of love is swapped out for a rammed pub party vibe: listening to it is like elbowing your way through a raucous crowd, and the bolshy “Eezer Goode! Eezer Goode!” chorus is more Oi than E. Something’s always happening – a twist of synth, a catchphrase, some smeared Happy Mondays-style guitar. The success of “Ebeneezer Goode” is generally pinned on a wish to tweak authority’s nose, but whoever scheduled this bustling, silly record to come out just before Freshers’ Week was a marketing demon.

Does it stand up? I think it’s surprisingly strong. It’s idiotic, yes, but it knows it’s idiotic and it sustains its conceit well and if you accept that you’ll have a good time with Eeezer and with this strutting, invigorating record. Back then, it made a star of Mr C and his preposterous geezer-hop: now, every second record in the charts boasts exaggerated London rapping. C isn’t the world’s most technically skilled MC, but that just made him more ripe for impersonation, and even if you couldn’t handle the flow you could manage a “naughty, naughty” or a “ya ha ha ha haaaa”. The sticking point might have been in assuming this single had much or anything to do with rave. With its good-time booziness, its music hall callbacks, its exaggerated characters, its student appeal and its cockney vim “Ebeneezer Goode” is really a cousin of and weird precursor to Britpop.

If you were to make a Eurodance drinking game, “Rhythm Is A Dancer” would have you under the table in one track. There’s Turbo B making a ninny of himself, of course, but also the wordless chanting, the house piano break, the echoed disco drums, the garbled english on the chorus, the vague mysticism, and most of all the general stateliness and spaciousness of it. Some dance music – the following Number One, for instance – sounded congested, like a party you’re having to shoulder your way through. But Eurodance always carried a sense of enormous vaulting spaces, the club as cathedral. That was the case in the Italo era – where the sparsity and echo in the track were often the source of cosmic or sci-fi metaphors – and it carried over into the lusher likes of Robert Miles. House music was just another ripple in that continuum of kitschy vastness.

The upshot is that “Rhythm” isn’t nearly as vulgar as I remember it – it’s higher minded, more spiritual, and being honest rather duller than I hoped it was. A lot of the memory of brashness comes from Turbo B and the – now notorious – “serious as cancer” lyric. It’s not a good line (according to a passing Steve M he nicked it off a US rapper anyway) but it’s certainly not helped by B’s delivery, hammering down the emphasis on “CAN-cer” as he’s running out of breath and room for the line. Terrible Euro-rap doesn’t always hurt a track – it can easily amp up the energy levels and make a song far more endearing – but Turbo B is too severe for that here. Even if he had hit on a good metaphor, serious is the last thing this record needs more of.

The good stuff first: Supergods is at its best when Morrison is intoxicated by comics, which he is a lot. He riffs creatively on the contrasting covers of Action Comics 1 and Fantastic Four 1, but his best material here is less concrete. Talking about his boyhood favourites – John Broome’s Flash, Weisinger-era Superman, Roy Thomas’ Avengers, Kirby’s New Gods, and Starlin’s “cosmic” Marvel stuff – Morrison’s writing goes into thrilled meltdown. He talks in the acknowledgements about the hard process of editing the book but these sections read like sheer first-draft enthusiasm. I can’t think of anything I’ve read which captures so well the mind-exploding power of comics when you’re the right age to really get hit by them.

One chapter of Supergods is called “Superpop” – reminding me of Nik Cohn’s Awopbopaloobopalopbamboom, that never-bettered story of pop’s searing adolescence. Morrison on form is as near as we’ll get to a comics Cohn, handing down rapid-fire judgements on anything that he remembers to include, with an authority born out of true love.

Of course, for the analogy to hold, Nik Cohn would have had to hit big in a new wave band and ride out the rest of pop’s history playing at the top of the bill. Morrison’s perspective is that of a modern superhero giant, one of the most well-regarded writers the mainstream has ever produced. The problem is that to many external eyes the mainstream comics industry looks fucked – in self-cannibalising decline for coming on twenty years – and Morrison is stuck in the cultural equivalent of the bottle city of Kandor, a place screenwriters and producers visit for a bittersweet while to draw nourishment from its glittering memories and age-old wisdoms.

That’s not to say he doesn’t a) still have one of the coolest jobs in the world and b) do it very well – but it means I take his arguments about the eternal relevance of the superhero with a progressively larger pinch of salt. Sometimes he’s on the mark – talking about the superhero as an idea that will endure forever and the likely immortality of its strongest brands. He’s also right that superhero stories are particularly suited to the comics page. But that doesn’t mean the status quo of superhero comics and films will endure – and Morrison seems conflicted about Hollywood’s current fascination with superheroes. On the one hand he points out – with some justice – that the movies are usually two to four decades behind the comics in terms of their interpretation of top-flight characters. On the other he’s clearly aware that the current health – possibly the existence – of comics Kandor is dependent on a superhero film boom that may well be a bubble. Neither of these really add up to his assertion – towards the end of the book – that “We won. Now what?”

An unconvincing book can still be a good one, of course – you don’t have to agree with Morrison’s theories to get a kick from the way he presents them, and he tells his part in the story – alien abductions, magical summonings and all – with brio and plenty of candid insight into how and why he wrote particular stories. He puts a great deal of stock in cyclical theories of culture and history but he uses them to feed his creativity: most people who talk about 11-year cycles (or whatever) do nothing other than smugly anticipate the next inevitable polarity flip of the trend – Morrison grabs the idea and starts creating comics to fit what he thinks is coming. He reminds me sometimes of Brian Eno – another intensely creative, unorthodox thinker in love with process: Eno used chance and game-playing, Morrison used ritual and magic (and occasionally pharmaceuticals), but they both funneled their discoveries straight into the work.

Deeply creative connectors can make good historians too, no doubt, but the lenses Morrison is using to look at comics – or even superhero – history are too personal and skewed to make the book’s dual identity as history and criticism work. The most obvious issue – Morrison’s somewhat high-handed treatment of Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster’s claims as creators of Superman – has got most of the negative press. The brushing aside of the Siegel/Schuster case isn’t as depressing, somehow, as the excited intimations that this was part of an inevitable cosmo-mystical sacrifice surrounding the Superhero’s birth.

But there are other frustrating lapses in detail – reading Supergods you’d be forgiven for thinking only Marvel, DC and Image had ever published Superhero stories after the early 60s. In terms of winnowing out the material to cover this makes some sense but it leaves out a lot of the joins in the story. So there’s no Turtles, no American Flagg (the Dark Knight section is screaming out for a mention of this), no Zot! or Nexus (humane, positive superhero comics in the midst of supposed 80s darkness). Factor that stuff in and it blurs the “Dark Age” and “Renaissance” even more – it’s already pretty much impossible to see why Brad Meltzer’s Identity Crisis (Superheroines get raped too!!) is part of the latter not a sleazy hangover from the former. Also, in a book about the world-conquering power of the superhero idea, it’s a shame there’s not more about how its gravitational force was felt in alternative comics – the way everything from 60s undergrounds through Love And Rockets to Eightball seemed compelled to offer some comment on superheroics.

Of course, if you’re reading for Grant Morrison’s freewheeling insights into his favourites and his own life and times, these will seem less than quibbles. And I’d say those are exactly what you should be reading Supergods for. As a critical memoir it’s a joy; as a critical history it’s frustrating and insubstantial.

“Ain’t No Doubt” plants its emotional flag in territories claimed and mapped by Phil Collins – that master of gangrenous wrath and bitterness lurking below blokery’s rumpled jacket. It’s break-up pop of the shabbiest kind; lies, quarrels and wilful miscommunication played out raw in front of us. On TV Nail played hard bastards, for laughs or drama or both – some of the intrigue of his pop career must have been seeing a more sensitive element in him, but I doubt the straight-talking, bullshit-calling narrator of “Ain’t No Doubt” came as much of a shock to the fanbase.

What’s rather more surprising is the music. Most of Nail’s records were thoroughly trad: gruff, measured rock and soul stylings, workmanlike performances enlivened by the odd Knopfler guest-spot. “Ain’t No Doubt”, on the other hand, is a one-of-a-kind meeting of pub rock and swingbeat: ruminative, finger-pointing spoken passages broken up by a two-fisted funk chorus that lunges at you like a closing time drunk. It would be an odd record if anyone had recorded it, but this really isn’t the style you expect a 38-year-old TV star to pioneer.

Here’s the really strange thing: it kind of works. The lurching production is so awkward, its singer so ill-at-ease, it makes Nail’s spoken passages rawer – this is a man happy to humiliate himself if it gets the message about his partner’s perfidy across. Contrast his lumbering with the smooth replies from the ever-professional Sylvia Mason-James, quite at home in this setting: it’s as if Jimmy’s barged into the disco on a girls’ night out to shame his lady, and we’re onlookers peeping through our fingers.

It’s also an unintentionally funny record, of course, and probably the most imitated of the year. And in the end it’s not a thing you’d want to listen to much: I couldn’t stretch to calling it good. But it’s interestingly, admirably bad in a way most TV-star records aren’t.

I’ve always found it hard to get a handle on Erasure. I end up filing them in the same headspace as ELO: remarkably successful, remarkably long-lived pop craftsmen who are generally – as here – enjoyable but only very rarely hit any sort of emotional or even conceptual payday. After playing all four ABBA-esque covers I couldn’t help myself: I cued up the Pet Shop Boys’ “Where The Streets Have No Name / Can’t Take My Eyes Off Of You” medley and had forgotten anything I might have liked about Erasure within ten seconds.

But they were never a poor man’s PSBs – there was something intriguingly different about Erasure, the way their two halves never quite gelled: Vince Clarke’s sleek, tidy, heads-down synthpop and Andy Bell’s roaming, reaching vocals. On their best singles the clash was productive – a track like “Drama” seems lopsided and unwieldy but it absolutely works: both men are fizzing and they end up going in the same direction. More often the potential was missed: on their worse tracks one or the other seemed bored.

The problem with ABBA-esque is that they both seem scared to cut loose and play to their strengths instead of the songs. Bell is subdued, in the shadow of Frida and Agnetha’s pristine takes. Clarke fiddles around at the edges of the tracks but only on “Voulez-Vous” shows much sign of wanting to strip them down and refit them. The whole project roars to life exactly once, when MC Kinky takes over for thirty delightful, crass seconds in the middle of “Take A Chance On Me” and shows the song a little creative disrespect at last.

The “Take A Chance” video, on the other hand, caught the tone of the next several years of ABBA revivalism: wigs out, tunes ahoy, kitsch as you like. Like most great pop bands ABBA fitted their time so well that they were utterly vulnerable to shifts and revisions in the meaning of that time. This was the high point, the crossover moment, in a long-building rehabilitation of the 70s, an acknowledgement that if it was (as The Face sniffed) “the decade that taste forgot”, maybe forgetting taste was a pretty smart idea? The 70s were proudly naff, therefore ABBA were proudly naff. I’m not against that – it opened up the space for the other sides of them to be remembered, and it’s quite possible that without the Bjorn Again-Erasure-Gold domino topple I wouldn’t love them so much now.

But this EP seems overshadowed by the rediscovery it helped spark – Erasure’s versions, zesty at the time, simply don’t touch the originals on any level. The songs are terrific, of course, and the record is in a different world of care and effort than a KWS. But if a singer as florid as Andy Bell can’t have fun with “Lay All Your Love On Me” then somewhere an opportunity is being missed.

Some good news, though: from October I’m switching to working four days a week, leaving a day entirely free for writing (paid, unpaid, long-term projects). If nothing else, that should stablilise Popular – hopefully it’ll lead to other interesting things too.

In the meantime, I hope you’ve had a good Summer, and see you here for the rest of it.

It’s hard to muster much love for “Please Don’t Go” – a barely adequate trot through a good song. “Begging” has never sounded so thoroughly rote. It’s a good example, though, of one of the nineties least-regarded, most revival-immune style, the generic dance cover version.

Dance music is notorious for its stylistic interbreeding, its rapid mutation: a music constantly in flux. Tracks like “Please Don’t Go” are what happens when dance stands still: the basic chassis of house music turned into a plastic mould that can be applied to any old song. From KWS to Mad House’s Madonna versions, any given 90s chart seemed to have a handful of these things in it. Pundits now complain about the effects of instant access to (almost) anything on popular culture, but let’s not forget that when people can remember something and not access it, the resulting gap doesn’t always produce productive mis-rememberings. It also produces cheap knock-offs. “Please Don’t Go” isn’t quite as deathly as the king of the dance cover version, Undercover’s formica take on “Baker Street”, but it’s never memorable. That this nullity got five weeks at the top says more about the immobile singles chart than any double-digit run.

A quick shout-out, though, to its notional double A-Side, the unremembered “Game Boy”, which is as near as we’re ever going to come to a hardcore track in Popular. As ‘ardkore goes, it’s poor, a collection of five years of weary dance tropes in search of even one good hook – Beltram-style hoover noises, house piano, cut-up vocal samples, a dubby bassline, none of them sticking around long enough to make an impact. It reminds me more of cover-mounted CD-Rs (“100 Banging Sounds”) on computer music mags than any kind of clubbing experience. But it’s there.