When the Sugababes shed Keisha a few weeks ago, I was a bit worried for the catty one. Not cos she can’t look after herself, and not because she’ll be poor. But rather because the old idea that you have a successful career in a boy / girl[…]

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[…]

What he said.[…]

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[…]