Pop
January 7th, 2009
I will get back to liveblogging the Pitchfork 500 very soon, but in the meantime a SPARE COPY of this excellent tome has come into my possession. If you want a chance of winning it, you can enter Freaky Trigger’s first ever* PRIZE COMPETITION**.
What do you have to do? Well, as you probably know by now the book in question contains short - 200 words or so - pieces on what the Pitchfork editorial crew consider to be the best 500 songs of the last 30 years.
So the competition is simply to write another piece in this format*** and send it to me at freakytrigger@gmail.com. The competition will be judged on the persuasiveness of the entry, taking into account the amount a reasonable judge (i.e. me) might NEED to be persuaded. In other words, given an entry that fully persuades me that Britney Spears’ “Piece Of Me” is one of the best 500 songs of the last etc etc and an entry that makes a fair stab at doing the same for “Dancing In The Moonlight” by Toploader, I will choose the latter. The winning entry***, and probably a few others, will be published here, or perhaps witheld to replace recalcitrant entries in the Top 100 Songs Of All Time.
*that I can remember
**NB this competition is not licensed by Pitchforkmedia.com or the publishers or anything like that: it’s just because I’ve got a spare copy. Other prizes might be thrown in but they won’t necessarily be very good.
***it doesn’t have to be “in the style of Pitchfork” or anything silly like that. Just throw something together, don’t waste too much time on it!
****to be announced after the closing date, which is erm lets say THE END OF JANUARY!
Posted by Tom in Pop |
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22. Blue Pearl - (Can You) Feel The Passion
If Rage’s ‘Run To You’ was filled with tame but uncomfortable references to knobbing within a loving relationship, then Blue Pearl’s contribution to Rave ‘92 is a steaming pile of mortification, the heavy-breathing being explicit enough to send good little Christian Kat scrambling for the fast-forward button. … read on …
Posted by katstevens in Pop |
3 Comments
January 6th, 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.
The final drop-off is for 2009, where there’ve only been 3 new entries so far, so the last relevant data point is the one before that - 2008 - which shows a dramatic fall from 2007, but on an already declining recent curve. The number of new entries in the Top 75 last year is less than half what it was in 2004. … read on …
Posted by Tom in Pop |
6 Comments
January 5th, 2009
(#478, 18th April 1981)
In some ways Bucks Fizz’ Eurovision triumph is pop’s equivalent of England’s 1966 World Cup win. It encouraged a certain complacency in the victorious nation, who began to convince themselves that not only was the competition eminently winnable but that this famous victory had established a formula for more. For passion, grit and English physicality read bubblegum, camp and dollybirds having their skirts whipped off. There the parallels break down. The subsequent failure to win the World Cup has become something festering, a cultural fixation in its own right that Popular will collide with in due course. Not winning the Eurovision Song Contest has only recently started to niggle in English minds, and the response is often that it’s not worth winning. … read on …
Posted by Tom in Pop, Popular |
61 Comments
January 3rd, 2009
I made a resolution today to post an MP3 every day here. (I would happily do it on FT, but server space and bandwidth forbid) Sorry, it’s yet another link with my stuff on: I do have an internal what-goes-where architecture, honestly.
Posted by Tom in Pop |
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January 1st, 2009
The forty best tracks to be a UK Top 40 hit for the first time last year, as judged by me.
SONGS WHICH ARE AMONG MY FAVOURITES ALL DECADE BUT CAME OUT IN 2007
MIA - “Paper Planes”
Britney Spears - “Piece Of Me”
SONGS WHICH ARE AMONG MY FAVOURITES ALL DECADE AND ACTUALLY CAME OUT LAST YEAR HURRAH
Wiley - “Wearing My Rolex”
Goldfrapp - “A&E”
SONGS IN WHICH HUMAN INTERACTION CONFUSES ROBOTS AND MAKES THEM SAD
Kanye West - “Love Lockdown”
Ultrabeat ft Darren Styles - “Discolights” … read on …
Posted by Tom in Pop |
15 Comments
December 20th, 2008
I’m away for Christmas this year so there won’t be any more Popular entries until 2009. (There might be other FT content though!) I had hoped to put one more song up before I left but my indecision has taken me from behind and so my metaphorical skirt will remain on until the New Year. See you then, and have a great Christmas!
Posted by Tom in Pop, Popular |
14 Comments
December 18th, 2008
A quick recap!
This is a series of posts “liveblogging” the Pitchfork 500, reflecting the book’s dual purpose as criticism and playlist. The ground rule is that I do the writing in real time as I listen to the music: no edits after that (except of typos). Posts in this series are intermittent, because I don’t have a lot of uninterrupted writing time.
Disclaimer: I write regularly for Pitchfork and contributed a dozen pieces to the book. I have no insider knowledge of how tracks were selected, had no say in the selection, and any commentary on the book’s purpose etc. is purely speculative.
In this episode: Reggae gets its first look in, and the awkward squad of post-punk gives way to mutant disco… … read on …
Posted by Tom in Pop |
4 Comments
On two separate news reports last night I saw it mentioned that - if the Facebook campaign to get Jeff Buckley’s “Hallelujah” to No.1 is a success (or a near-miss) - this week we might see the first instance of the same song being No.1 and No.2 in two different versions. This would be historic, said a dude from HMV.
Except, as all Popular readers doubtless know, the claim is COBBLERS. … read on …
Posted by Tom in Pop |
10 Comments
December 17th, 2008
(#477, 28th March 1981)
The last time “This Ole House” came up, a commenter on ILM quite rightly pointed out what I somehow hadn’t twigged – that it’s a song about dying. Of all songs on that theme, it’s surely one of the most stoical in its way – a joyful “whatever” in the teeth of advancing decrepitude. Liveliness was about all Shakin’ Stevens had going for him, but goodness he worked it.
Shaky sidesteps new wave and new pop and reaches back to the rock’n’roll revival that played such a part in the mid-70s’ charts. That had a cabaret tinge and so does he, but there’s an energy in his pastiche that – at this stage anyway – keeps it bearable. His other great advantage over fellow revivalists was knowing how to present that energy on video – on the clip for “This Ole House” he’s in perpetual motion and as the song cuts from room to room to roof it’s like Shaky’s dancing with the house itself.
Posted by Tom in Pop, Popular |
39 Comments
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