Pop

Eurosong Derby Playoffs

Kat Stevens, having skillfully managed Slovenia into the Pop World Cup’s Round of 16, will be liveblogging the semifinals of that other, slightly more Swarovski-crystal-laden pop competition, the Eurovision Song Contest. It all kicks off tonight at 8pm on The Singles Jukebox.

And don’t forget that the polls are still open for Nigeria v Ghana and Cameroon v Spain in the Pop World Cup 2010. So go vote! And reduce the chances of another controversial result.

Update! Tom Ewing and Mike Atkinson will also be taking part!

Elisha Sessions in FT • 4 Comments

Great News For All Our Readers!

I am really excited about this one! For the last several years, Mike at Troubled-Diva has been running a fantastic feature called Which Decade Is Tops For Pops? The format is simple: the Top 10s from today, 10 years ago, 20 years ago and so on are run against one another, one number at a time – so first we hear all the No.10s, then all the No.9s, and so on. Votes are cast, tallied, and after much horse-trading and POP SCIENCE an answer to the featured question is arrived at (Here’s the feature as, er, featured at Troubled Diva).

Summer 1960: Kids prepare to battle the future in a time-spanning pop war.

Mike isn’t blogging so much at T-D now and felt it was time to shake the Which Decade format up. He offered to do it here. Since it’s a) a great idea and b) proven excellent fun, I was absolutely delighted to agree.

So as of next week, Which Decade Is Tops For Pops? 2010 will be appearing at freakytrigger.co.uk, alongside your regular pop features. The top tens of 1960, 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000 and 2010 will be abasing themselves to curry YOUR favour. History lesson, all-in pop wrestle and generational WAR all in one ticktastic feature.

Quite frankly, it is going to be BRILLIANT.

Tom in FT • 24 Comments

Pop World Cup 2010: Round of 16 Match 6 – Cameroon 3 New Zealand 1

This is the sixth of the eight matches in the Round of Sixteen – already! Neither Weston Debevec’s Cameroon nor Steve M’s New Zealand would necessarily be high on most lists of favourites for the tournament, but it’s not hard to find those who’ll rep for either nation as really major pop players. A fascinating game in prospect.

This match closes at midnight on Monday 10th May more »

Tim in FT • 21 Comments

The Freaky Trigger Top 100 Songs Of All Time No.16: EAST 17 – “House Of Love”

I’ll tell you what pop’s missing at the moment and that’s rivalries. Not feuds, we have plenty of feuds, there’s a feud a day on Twitter I think. Feuds are great but the emphasis is on the stars themselves and what they think or feel. Rivalries are different. They’re about the fans, about what stars mean on a social level.

The great necessary thing about rivalries is that if you’re an outsider they should baffle you a bit. Take That and East 17 – seriously? What’s the difference? They’re both boy bands right, both manufactured, you shouldn’t be listening to either of them, you should be listening to oh, I don’t know, Consolidated or something. And isn’t the rivalry all a hype thing anyway? I had those conversations a few times in 1993.

But hype is the brassiere of pop rivalries more »

Tom in FT • 8 Comments

A Chart For Every Day Of The Month

The Official Charts Company have launched their new portal, which (if you dig about a bit), offers week-by-week archived charts going back to 1960 with links to buy where such a thing is possible.

The centrepiece of the portal though is of course the charts themselves. All thirty-three of them. Yes, THIRTY-THREE. The OCC do an awful lot of work it seems and I suspect go mostly unthanked for it. So when you’re asked “Who’s at Number One?” you could happily answer any of the following: more »

Tom in FT • 7 Comments

How To Win A Pop World Cup

You may be loving the Pop World Cup (we hope you are!). You may be thoroughly sick of it (in which case – sorry! But we’re more than halfway through now). But I hope you’d agree that the basic question it’s asking – how do you represent a country’s music? – is an interesting one. Certainly in the comments boxes this year we’ve seen a lot more people expressing outrage or delight at the choices the managers’ AREN’T making as much as those they are.

Which can get pretty confusing. Too little Latin pop! Too MUCH afropop! Too Eurovision! Trying to be American! Novelty nonsense! Only the North Koreans sit serenely above this fray because nobody had any idea what to expect of them anyway.

As I said in a comment box this morning, the PWC asks a player to balance three things: their own music tastes, the music of the country they represent, and the preferences of the crowd. The precise weighting of these is what makes it tricky. But the tactics the players use point to more general issues around ‘pop’ and ‘world’ music. So let’s look at some of the strategies we’ve been seeing! more »

Tom in FT • 35 Comments

How Buzzwords Work (Maybe)

I was lucky enough to attend a fascinating talk hosted by Mark Earls at the RSA last night on “cultural evolution” – using evolutionary theory to examine the mechanics of how stuff spreads through culture. I then came home and found a great Nitsuh Abebe post on my tumblr dashboard about music critic cliches – when and how they’re used.

The link between these two things? One of the most interesting parts of the talk was when Dr Alex Bentley of Durham university showed some analysis of the spread of “buzzwords” in academia – how particular language choices move through a population. He was looking at the change in use of words like “nuanced”, “apropos”, or “agency” as well as more obviously loaded terms like “Marxist” and words like “retarded” (which academics tend to use to mean ‘slowed’). So of course I found this quite exciting, as it seems to me not wholly unlikely that the use of words like “ethereal” or “soundscape” might well spread in similar ways. more »

Tom in Proven By Science • 5 Comments

The Friday Fun Canon Discussion And Monster Poll

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 you love. You can interpret how strong an attachment you want “love” to be, of course.

The list of albums is from Acclaimed Music, a kind of ‘metacanon’ which lists the top 3000 albums.

To make it more interesting, answer these questions in the comments box:

1. What’s the WORST record on this list?
2. Which of the records you ticked did you love first?
3. Which of them did you start to love most recently?

Poll below the cut. more »

Tom in FT • 222 Comments

Pop World Cup 2010: Group H – Spain 2 Switzerland 0

The last of our 32 teams take the field of pop: Spain open their campaign against Switzerland. Spain’s Alberto is new to pop management at this level: his opposite number in the Swiss dugout is Greg Fanoe. Good luck to them both!

Voting for this match closes at midnight on the 11th March. more »

Tom in FT • 27 Comments

“Shiny Shiny”: Annotations

Shiny Shiny is an Pitchfork column by me about a fictional “CD Revival”, consisting of interviews with four of the movers and shakers in said revival and some editorial around that. Fictional because the column supposedly dates from 2022. Go and read it first!

This blog entry is an explanation of some of the references and underlying assumptions behind my little bit of sci-fi journalism. If the piece doesn’t make sense without it, I’ve failed, but it will hopefully be of interest to anyone who did enjoy the column. more »

Tom in FT • 8 Comments