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. more »
Tom in Popular • 45 Comments
(Crossposted to Tumblr)
This week – “Love and Heartache” – or as I anticipated DAWN OF THE BALLADOSAURUS. But was I correct? Well, not entirely… more »
Tom in FT • 6 Comments
I have now read 48 of DC Comics’ “New 52” launch titles and a bunch of the second issues: when I’ve finally slogged through the lot of them I’ll post some kind of belated quality scorecard maybe, but I don’t know if the quality of the books is the most interesting thing about them. (Unshocking summary: some are good, some are bad, some boast interesting ideas, some have an air of jaded competence, only one has – and this will live long in the memory – Rob Liefeld being asked to draw Barack Obama.)
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. more »
Tom in FT • 3 Comments
(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? more »
Tom in FT • 2 Comments
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. more »
Tom in Popular • 50 Comments
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. more »
Tom in Popular • 57 Comments
Detective Comics #1 (2011) (DC Comics)
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. more »
Tom in FT • No Comments
Applied to pop, this question – discussed at some length in the pub last night – proves surprisingly complex. “Dylan” was everybody’s obvious answer* but the more we thought about it the less sure we were about this. So I throw it open to the Freaky Trigger readership and wish them joy with it. more »
Tom in FT • 84 Comments
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. more »
Tom in Popular • 86 Comments
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. more »
Tom in Popular • 81 Comments
