The version of Arcade Fire’s “Wake Up” on the Where The Wild Things Are trailer edits out the song’s peak line, that scornful frustrated sad “I guess I’ll just have to ADJUST”, spat full into the face of nast[…]

One of the really glorious bits of early-decade fusion pop: a Neptunes beat, a dancehall star, a supersweet pop-R&B chorus from Mya, everything bubbling and blending in the summer heat.
But that beat! The Neptunes could be frustrating, especiall[…]

I’ve never really cared about the Dixie Chicks beyond this record, and I had to look up what they did that was so terrible. So I don’t like “Not Ready To Make Nice” (embedding disabled) because of its political relevance, but […]

A few weeks back The Lex alerted me to this as part of a raft of stuff he was calling, somewhat reluctantly, “post-dubstep”. Not his coinage, but I was immediately heartened. Not only was the music excellent I also knew that no matter wha[…]

In the pre-MP3 era (viz. the mid-90s), remixes of non-dance, non-hip-hop artists worked as follows.
1. The artist or their label would get somebody to do a remix. This was usually the Chemical Brothers, but occasionally the Aphex Twin or Fluke would […]

Autotune-slathered teenpop from 2000, just to reinforce how the technique has basically been in favour for the whole decade. 3LW could sing, though – as the long interlacing vocals on the coda prove, especially that “No more! No more!&#82[…]

The signature sounds of the 00s pop boom – all those staccatos, pizzicatos, clicks and bubbles – fix this track in its era even as the central, taunting string figure calls further back to long-ago good times, now soured. “Hit Em Up[…]

This is one of the great contemporary London songs for me, one of the small cross-genre epics the city throws out sometimes, like “Weekender” or “Avenue” in the early 90s – not through any particular lyric but something […]

One of the most contentious threads I can remember on ILX was over a blogpost by Ultragrrrl claiming that My Chemical Romance were “this generation’s Nirvana”. OK, the thread was contentious more because Ultragrrrl herself was a div[…]

Perhaps icons inevitably try to upstage each other. Madonna, given the chance at a 007 theme song, is provoked into her most radical 00s single. Also – to be fair – one of her most divisive: it got abuse both from Bond purists who deteste[…]