CHRISTINA AGUILERA - "Beautiful" 27 Nov 2019 One of the notable things about “Beautiful” is that having written it, Linda Perry wanted to keep it for a proposed solo career – it was one of her “personal”…
CHRISTINA AGUILERA ft REDMAN - "Dirrty" 7 Sep 2019 Christina Aguilera’s album title, Stripped, has an obvious double-meaning, one she’s been keen to point out to interviewers. Stripping off, yes, clearly, but also stripping back, removing the layers of…
CHRISTINA AGUILERA - "Genie In A Bottle" 7 Dec 2014 When surface-similar acts emerge at the same time, there’s an urge to paint them as rivals – not just personally but aesthetically. A pop moment becomes such when you have…
Read Harder Challenge (3 of 24): DATURA 4 Feb 2018 Datura, or a Delusion We All See by Leena Krohn (Read as part of the Book Riot Readharder challenge 2018. Category: A single-sitting book.) An anonymous woman in an anonymous…
Lost Property Office 2-6: Monster Fun Annual 10 May 2013 And we are back, season two of the Lost Property Office limps stridently forward having survived a complete clearout, reorganisation and a system put in place. Which is better for…
Lost Property Office 2-5: The Bread Of Life 5 Mar 2013 So the great clear out happened. WHat went from an Aladdin's Cave of the lost and misplaced briefly had bare shelves. We even got rid of the duvet. So the…
S CLUB 7 - "Bring It All Back" 2 Nov 2014 Simon Fuller claims that the idea for S Club 7 came to him the day after the Spice Girls fired him. It’s a typical bit of entrepreneurial storytelling – the…
8 Jun 2010
Here we are, at last. Here we stand at the summit of Pop Football achievement, looking back at 63 matches: some wonderful, some perplexing, some illuminating, very few boring. We’ve heard so much pop, enjoyed so many marvellous moments, and we have 30 losing managers to thank for all their research and taste. Never mind […]
30 Dec 2005
#222, 20th August 1966 DIGRESSION: For Christmas I got Never Had It So Good, the first part of Dominic Sandbrook’s huge new history of Britain in the sixties. Here’s what he says about the project: “This book seeks to rescue ‘from the enormous condescencion of prosperity’…the lives of the kind of people who spent the […]
12 Mar 2010
People in the Popular comments boxes are talking about “the canon”. I’m always quite curious as to which bits of the canon have ‘taken’ with a broadly pop-positive audience such as we have here. So here’s a poll, very easy to fill in, just say which of the Top 50 albums OF ALL TIME EVER […]
5 Jan 2019
“Greetings! It’s me, 90’s summer dance craze The Macarena. I’ve never really gone away, as you must surely know: the muscle memory of hand flips and hip wiggles is ingrained into the very fabric of your DNA, to be passed down to your heirs and their heirs for many centuries hence, waxing on and waxing […]
22 Jan 2009
This is a graph – done by anatol_merklich off the Poptimists LiveJournal community, so massive thanks to him – showing the number of new entries in the UK singles chart for each year from 1952 to the present.
1 Sep 2002
I don’t think much of the idea of ‘guilty pleasures’ but there’s guilt and there’s guilt, isn’t there? There’s guilt for something you might be doing wrong – breaking some invisible law of taste, maybe – and that guilt you can and should kick aside. But then there’s guilt for the things you have done, […]
11 Oct 2006
The discerning televisual fan will be aware of the vacuum currently residing in the schedules between the 7.30pm end of Hollyoaks First Look and the 9pm commencement of Ghost Whisperer. There are only so many times one can flick between Puff Daddy jiggling next to the Lead Pussycat on TMF and the startlingly abhorrent animated […]