During the 00s pop boom there was much talk of “blankness” as a vocal quality – the kind of competent, unaffected but largely inexpressive singing women like Rachel Stevens do on their records. This was making a virtue of necessity […]

(This is the second part of a piece on managing long blog projects. The first part is here.)
Popular’s main strength – and I’m very proud of this indeed – are its regular 50-post comment threads that are lucid, civil, wide-ranging, full of he[…]

In September 2003 I started a blogging project: six years later, I’m halfway through it. It seems like a good time to put down in writing what – if anything – I’ve learned through doing Popular: what I got right and what I got wrong.
Not the […]

Obviously when bassline house poked its way into the 2007 charts what I hoped – and I wasn’t alone – is that this heralded UK Garage 2.0, one of those convergences of dance music trends, pop, and sales that lights up the Top 40 for […]

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[…]