I am in London. In the past week I have seen more rain than in 9 months in Spain. There was hail on Tuesday. Even though the weather is ridiculous, I will say though that there is nothing quite like dancing in the rain to half a dozen different remixes of "Umbrella," as I did on Saturday.
Also, I have little to do. Yesterday I played tennis for the first time in probably 3 years. I have been watching Wimbledon, or more specifically I have been watching Novak Djokovic. For 5 fucking hours of nailbitingness during which I spilt yoghurt all over myself.
Heck yeah.
I also watched the absolutely ludicrous but brilliant French thriller Tell No One and the slightly less ludicrous Live Free or Die Hard or Die Hard 4.0 as it is known in this country. Maggie Q! Now it is 7 am and I have been watching performances from the 2007 BET awards on dailymotion, because they are awesome. Keyshia Cole + Kelly Rowland = goddesses.
Good. Serviceable. Jack White is a talented guitarist. The new stuff sounds unremarkable and they played too much of it. Hotel Yorba and Seven Nation Army were good but I can't bring myself to muster any excitement for them. well, I vehemently I hate "My Doorbell." Justice
By the time the White Stripes were ending, I was aching to discover what was going on in the tent behind us because it sounded like it was going off whatever it was. D.A.N.C.E., waters of nazareth, we! are! your! friends! you'll! never! be! alone! again! so come on! so come on... justice were great.
hmmm... I'm still undecided about Girl Talk. On the one hand I think he's got the potential to be a genius, on the other hand I think he's a quack. Anyone can do what he does. I think the Barcelonins were a little confused. I loved that he played snippets of all the best pop songs this year - Lil Mama, Clipse, Ciara, Avril, R Kelly, "got my vans on but they look like sneakers" and was a little surprised I didn't hear "Umbrella ella ella ey ey ey" somewhere in there, but the thing is they were only snippets. Half the time I found myself trying to rack my brains to see if I could recognize what the snippet was but then it moved on to another one and another one and another one. And there wasn't even that much fluidity between the samples either. It was too much. I couldn't relax and have any fun.
afterwards I had work at 8 am. I didn't get to sleep until noon although I had a few moments of shuteye in the train station.
divendres 1 juny / Friday 1 June
Woke up and headed straight to the metro. I’d missed loads of bands already.
A lovely little band of instruments. This was the only band I watched sitting down. Beirut reminded me of good old Klezmer. This is obviously a good thing.
I will say this – the keyboardist whatever he was on was probably the most entertaining thing at the whole festival. The singer had a lot of energy as well. From what little attention I still pay to the scene, Maxïmo Park are one of the better British indie bands to emerge in the past few years. And weren’t there an awful lot of singles of the first album as well? Well all of them were pretty good.
I'd never heard of him before. But he was recommended by one of the people in my group so we went. But he was loads of fun. Whereas Girl Talk felt like a little kid on speed running rampant in a CD store, DJ Yoda was more mature, on less potent drugs, less eager to impress, and was thus easier to enjoy. His samples weren’t all ultramodern and they weren’t all 2 seconds long.
YAY! Mad Brazilians toilet papered themselves and the audience and then proceeded to rap and scream over "The Final Countdown" (Have they been watching Arrested Development?) in unintelligible but soothingly aggressive Portuguese. I loved their attempts to speak Spanish to the crowd. Strangely not many other bands actually tried to get the crowd to interact with them but Bonde Do Role got us all singing along and waving our hands. I was going crazy for them while lesbian friend was drooling over tiger striped leotarded Marina.
Hot Chip were mighty disappointing especially after mad Brazilians. I am a big fan of their work to date but it just didn't translate to a live setting. I know they’re all music nerds and all but they didn’t exude any emotion or excitement to be there.
Diplo slipping in "Over and Over" in the middle of his set was way better than anything during the Hot Chip performance. The sun rose during his set. So yeah he proved why he has such a hot reputation, but I enjoyed DJ Yoda more, to be honest.
Didn't get home until 7 am.
dissabte 2 juny / Saturday 2 June
Woke up and headed straight to the metro. I was mad I missed Ted Leo.
I think I finally get the Long Blondes love. They were lovely live - and the duet was the between the guitarist and Kate the charismatic vocalist was the best thing ever. And they ended fantastically with that song that goes “19, you’re only 19…”
They were surprisingly loads of fun. In fact one of the top 3 of the weekend. What little I knew of their discography had convinced me to go and watch them. I knew “Do the Whirlwind” and “It’s 5!” and they even more fun live than recorded. Like their music, the band themselves were giddy with excitement, they were really throwing everything they had into those cowbells and the triangles. In fact they seemed like a bunch of monkeys. “It’s our first time in Spain… It’s very surreal… It’s our first time performing for such a huge crowd… It’s our most fun concert ever, etc., or so they told the audience – but the audience certainly responded in kind.
Patti Smith is over 60 now. I wasn't expecting anything. I didn't know any of her music. I now think Patti Smith is a god. When I saw Sparks late last year, I thought they'd be the oldest people I'd ever see. But Patti's older but she's still going at it with all the vitality of, say, Bonde Do Role. She had a magnificent voice. She sounded graceful, she sounded melancholic, and she sounded furious. She definitely still sounded like a rebel rocker. She went off about the war and how we had to change the world, but she did it in a dignified way and stopped short of making me roll my eyes. And she knocked the crowd out with her cover of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” And yes, I realised I did know "Because The Night."
I was eating pizza and heard the Soulwax Ravelight Remix of Robbie Williams' sublime "Lovelight", and thought screw The Good, The Bad & The Queen and we went over to see Shitdisco instead. It turns out it was just a DJ set, but it was a fun one.
After waiting endlessly to see Battles and to no avail, and having missed Sonic Youth, Grizzly Bear were Yellow House was one of my favourite albums last year so I was excited to see them. They sounded a lot like the record. They were lush. A nice respite from the loud and insistent rock and dance music.
After endlessly waiting again to see Battles (this time I was lectured to about Don Caballero), I only got see them for a while but they were off the heezy. Sadly, I got dragged away to the disco tent to
As I am trying to learn French and Spanish, I am naturally disposed to bands that sing in Romance languages, and Malajube didn't disappoint. Perhaps because of my as yet fruitless search to find a successor to mclusky, I projected my imagination of what would be a French Canadian version of mclusky onto Malajube, because they did sound like they had that special, wild spunk of mclusky. So yeah, a French Canadian version of mclusky, which means I enjoyed them immensely.
Sadly Kevin Barnes didn't perform in the nude as he has been known to do. But he did have elaborate costumes including one where he had to climb up a ladder in order to put on the costume. It seemed odd and unnecessary. Otherwise it was nothing short of spectacular. Psychedelic pop isn't exactly my thing but they sure know how to put on a fantastic show and get everyone in the Apolo jumping up and down. They did a wonderful cover of Suffragette City during the encore. A perfect end to a crazy weekend. 18 bands, and it could have easily been more.
= amazing. Having experienced The Beyoncé Experience, I can die happy. It was everything I could have hoped for and more. Costume changes galore, pyrotechnics, sexy dancers, female empowering Tracy Chapman lookalikes backup band, the whole kit and caboodle, nothing at all was left to chance. Did I mention that B'Day is the album of 2006? I don't know what I was on when it came out in September and I was like, eh. It is the most incredible pop album ever. And she performed every song to perfection, lustily writhing on the floor to "Suga Mama," reenacting the famous Britney-aping MTV Awards performance of "Ring The Alarm," teaching us all her dance moves in “Get Me Bodied,” freaking all of us with her flagwaving anthem "Freakum Dress."She even rolled out a Destiny's Child section that included "Bug A Boo!" "Bills Bills Bills," "Bootylicious" and her imploring us to say her name. And the she ended with an impossibly tearjerky rendition of “Irreplaceable” where she used her hands to form the shape of a heart while she weepily pointed to the audience as she was alternating between melismatic heaven and hell. The music stopped and she sang a Spanish verse a cappella. The audience was so shocked it was eerily silent.
This was the shit that even Primavera couldn't top.
My French friends were all overly optimistic and thinking that Shakira would be the invited guest, but that would have been way too much for me. I would've died there and then.
Oh yeah, there's another massive music festival in Barcelona in 2 weeks. I don't think you can handle that.
I interrupt my somewhat irregular musings about pop to talk some politics.
A most extraordinary thing happened in Hong Kong this week. One of the most prominent pro-Beijing politicians there committed political suicide. Ma Lik, the chairman of the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong (a much derided name, or the DAB for short), complained to journalists that Hong Kongers weren't patriotic enough because we still believed that there was a massacre at Tiananmen Square in 1989. According to him, there was no massacre and the fact that we accepted this version of Chinese history which had been spoonfed to us by "gweilos" (white people), meant we weren't patriotic and mature enough, and thus would continue to be denied universal suffrage until at least 2022.
He went to explain his reasoning behind why there was no massacre: "How could people say bodies were minced under the tanks? Has anybody tried mincing meat under tanks? We should find a pig and see if we can mince it." Great. Because nobody's ever proved that it is possible to mince pork with tanks, it is therefore impossible that there was a massacre. I love the logic that these lefties use. (Our political spectrum is a little different from the rest of the world). Even the low estimates from the Chinese government say at least 200 students and soldiers died the night of June 3rd / the morning of June 4th 1989, while most media estimates put it at around 2000 to 3000 deaths. He went on to call for better national awareness education. The type of education where they have in China, I assume, where a recent PBS programme revealed that none of the students at Peking University knew what the image to the left was. That's shocking in so many ways.
My reaction was first anger, followed by schadenfreude, followed by a tinge of sadness. Do we have to be brainwashed into believing there wasn't a massacre before we are allowed democracy in Hong Kong? Is that what the leader of the party with the highest number of seats in our legislative council is saying? Well, by denying the existence of the massacre, Ma Lik has basically committed political suicide. His remarks have been heavily condemned, and his own party has apologised and distanced itself from him, while he's gone into hiding in Guangzhou. It seems all that he has done has stir up the discussion of the massacre on the eve of its 18th anniversary and this year's candlelight vigil in HK is probably going to be quite well-attended. Hong Kongers ain't gonna forget it.
From my cursory following of Hong Kong politics, Ma Lik has always struck me as a moderate pro-Beijinger, unlike some of his more repugnant colleagues. His rant was most unexpected and what makes me sad is the fact that he went off like that, despite reporters at the meeting urging him to desist from his rant, meant he really did feel that way. It is also probably quite reflective of the way lots of people in Hong Kong think as well, but do not dare publicly state it. The saddest thing though is that whilst denial of the Tiananman massacre is considered somewhat taboo in Hong Kong, denial and ignorance is de rigeur in the rest of China.
Most curiously, however, was the fact that the story was at first picked up by only three of the dozen or so papers in HK - the South China Morning Post, Apple Daily, and Ming Pao - which, despite their faults, are really the only papers worth their ink. It used to be said that Hong Kong had one of the freest press in the world, but the self-censorship that is happening now is increasingly alarming.
***
In my Spanish class here, I seem to have established myself as the requisite joker in the class - and sometimes my jokes fly over everyone's heads. The other day, we were learning how to use the subjunctive to talk about the future as in "Cuando me paguen, me comeré una jirafa." (When they pay me, I will eat a giraffe) One of my example sentences was "Hasta que mi país sea una democracia, no podré volver allí." (As long as my country isn't a democracy, I will not be able to return there). This drew sympathetic gasps from my classmates, who were all liberal Europeans and hitherto unaware there was a political refugee amongst them. I had to explain that what I said wasn't actually true, but that my country was indeed not a democracy.
It seems odd that I am in fact eligible to vote for the mayor of Barcelona and in the municipal elections here but can't vote for the leader in my own country. And it looks increasingly possible that might not happen until 2022 at least. In the runup to the Battle between Sarkozy and Royal, one of the Spanish papers had its first 12 pages devoted solely to the French elections, and reading it made me sad that I've never voted in my life. OK, if I had gone back to Hong Kong during the legislative council and district council elections, I could have voted but the elections mean so little, as more than half of the councils are appointed anyway. ARgh, HK politics always depress me.
I'll write about my current fascination with reggateon next.
About 2 weeks ago, I found myself jumping hysterically up and down in a sea of sweating bodies, all shouting simulatenously "Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!" Although I was previously ambivalent at best towards this 9 minute + LCD Soundsystem romp, it was another story when it was being performed live. The frenzy and the elaborate build up was palpable and I never wanted it to stop despite my being utterly worn out way before it reached the climactic finale. It was the best moment of a night chockful of superlatives.
Like most of the crowd, I knew all the lyrics to the new album, despite it being out only a few days. And to my surprise, my favourite songs on the album, the slow and admittedly sappy ones, were far from my favourite performances. Rather I came to see what I thought were the lacklustre songs in a new light with James Murphy's fervent singing and cowbelling. It was especially hilarious when the crowd screamed along "we are North American!" in their Spanish accents and there was a general hurrah when he sang about the parties in Spain going all night.
And them parties really do go all night. And boy do my feet pay when I go bopping until 7 in the morning. Of course, most people don't really go out until 2 in the morning anyways. Two weeks after the LCD Soundsystem concert, I returned to the same place for a concert that didn't start until 3.30 am.
The concert itself was the most horrendous thing ever. I somehow got cajoled into going to Samantha Fox (not the pornstar, but rather an aged popstar in her 40's trying to cling on to her former glories). Her set was quite painful but mercifully short - she struggled to sing in tune, she insisted on singing songs from her new album which nobody had heard and nobody wanted to hear, she oafishly pretended to get it on with her ugly dancers, and even her "I love you Barcelona" exclamations sounded desperate. Aside from a few rare moments, most of the gayboys were looking at their nails.
Perhaps I'm being uncharitable here, as she was before my generation and I had really never encountered her before. I knew she was more famous for her bust than her music, but hey, Paris Hilton's album wasn't bad. And as a "pop fiend" (or so my sister labels me), I can't really bemoan a popstar for not being able to sing well - it's just one part of a package. And I'm sure I'll be a lot more forgiving of the current crop of popstars when they're way past their heyday, as I've come to know them inside and out. I'm sure I'll still love Kylie and Xtina when they're 50 and still narcissistically touring, I'll download everything Patrick Wolf does even if he is only just playing ukelele on the latest Scott Storch-du-jour album, I'll stick with Girls Aloud and Sugababes through subpar solo albums and doing-it-for-the-money-only reunions galore, and I'll buy whatever Beyonce and Ciara (video) compilations and retrospectives the record companies decide to release. Once a popstar has entered my pantheon, he or she is thus unimpeachable, come sex scandal or sex change. If I can preemptively exonerate my beloved popstars from whatever sins they may commit upon the musical world because of the current record of aceness, perhaps I could forgive Samantha Fox's egregiousness by delving into her past contributions to the world of pop.
And so I delved into Samantha Fox.
With the aid of good ol' Youtube, I discovered that in her heyday she was not that bad at all. Yes, her voice leaves much to be desired. Her work with the Stock Aitken Waterman laboratories are what you would expect of them, servicable pop that sound much better in the videos than when she performed them. Some of her songs even have an 80's hair metal tinge to them. There were a few highlights:
Touch Me (I Want Your Body) sure ticks lots of the boxes of a lost 80's pop gem - denim, leather, hair, sexy moaning, air-punching, electric guitars, lyrics about "full moons" and "heartbeats" and the saucy line "Like a tramp in the night, I was beeeeggging for you to treat me body like you wanted to... ah ah ah..." When she performed it that night, it was probably the sole moment when almost everyone was happy, even though it was nothing compared to the version in the video.
It turns out, however, that Samantha Fox can be seen as something of a musical pioneer. These days everyone from Madonna to Bjork are fighting to work with the likes of Timbaland and The Neptunes. But how many (white) pop stars were working with hip-hop producers in the mid-80's? I'm willing to bet close to zero. Samantha Fox though, of all people, was collaborating with hip-hop producers Full Force. It resulted in the unbelievable Naughty Girls (Need Love To). The video is a comically confounding relic of a period past - what are those guys wearing? Why is a white girl cavorting with those black men in denim? Is she rapping!?!?? OMG that spoken word breakdown - "No More Fun & Games Of The Mind!" It's shocking yet remarkably prescient of the ubiquitous presence of rappers on all the pop songs that aim of urban credibility today. It is odd to think that that woman I saw the other night who had lost all sense of good judgment was so groundbreaking in her day. It is a shame she didn't perform this or any of her Full Force collaborations when I saw her, but then again it is probably a blessing, as she would most certainly have massacred them.
Finally, there is the wonderfully titled Hurt Me! Hurt Me! (But The Pants Stay On) (That girl sure loves the parentheses). Another sublime Full Force production, it has some great guffaws, Middle Eastern sounds, and the great "Hurt Me! Hurt Me!" chorus to sing along to and, not to mention, the somewhat twisted take on sexual politics.
Last week was Chinese New Year. I celebrated by going down to the carnival in Sitges. It was fun. I have pictures somewhere. Enough about my inane life though, and onto more pressing matters at hand - like what the heck is going on with Italian politics, why Segolene Royal is tanking, and cheers all round as there is finally a contested election in Hong Kong, albeit one that is already decided.
Awards shows The great thing about not living in the States anymore is that I didn't have to force myself to watch the Grammys on TV. The bad thing is, because I am obsessed with awards shows, I end up watching them on Youtube anyways. Thankfully, nobody decided to upload the entire ceremony onto Youtube - unlike the Brits - so I only had to put up with the performances and not the speeches.
Some observations: 1. I've said it numerous times before, but Christina Aguilera is amazing, utterly amazing. Not many things on youtube give me the shivers but she absolutely killed (in a good sense of course) that genderbending performance.
2. Mary J. Blige is also quite amazing. Even though she seems to be spouting cliches all the time, all the emotion and power she invests in her singing overrides that and fills me with warm and fuzzy.
3. Having said that, Mary J. fails to rescue Ludacris' attempt to be socially conscious from being tripe. The ending with the little girls and the candles makes it seems like Ludacris has unsavoury messianic pretensions.
4. Why does Justin Timberlake get to perform twice - and three songs at that? Is it because he's willing to whore himself out to a stupid American Idol Grammys competition? And what happened with bringing sexy back? He was anything but sexy - terrible tie, terrible suit + sneakers, terrible closeup, he should've taken his cues from T.I. Also, you must have seen the laughably horrible "What Comes Around.../... Goes Around" video by now, and in case, you are like me quickly losing faith in JT, go download the awesome Sebastien Leger or Wookie remixes now!
5. Chris Brown is a great dancer and all but really if he's not going to be exhibiting that adorable lisp of his then there's little point of him performing at the Grammys. Not only does he not perform the infinitely superior "Yo (Excuse Me Miss)" instead of "Run It" but he also botches the incredible "I can definitely show you things that's gonna have you saying that I can't be 16" line.
6. James Blunt, Rascal Flatts = execrable.
7. Corinne Bailey Rae + John Mayer + John Legend, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Beyonce = snoozefest. Also Carrie Underwood should not be singing anything other than "Before He Cheats."
8. Gnarls Barkley do the flight crew shtick yet again for the umpteenth time.
9. The Police, Dixie Chicks = they were alright.
10. Shakira = yay, even though it is "Hips Don't Lie."
The Brit Awards were an absolute waste of time, although it did expose to the world that stupid people certainly still do exist in the form of Joss Stone.
Oh well, there's always the Oscars tonight.
Great things on youtube As you can probably tell, I spend an awful amount of time wasting my life away on youtube. This is of course time which I cannot afford to spend, so in the end, I never get enough sleep to be awake during the day.
But it is all worth it for the treasures on youtube:
1. Robin Thicke & Lil Wayne perform "Shooter" on Leno
This is quite old - Rachel Weisz was promoting "The Constant Gardener" - but it's only just been uploaded because Robin Thicke is finally achieving chart success - he's become the first white guy in decades to top the R&B charts - with the sickly sweet "Lost Without You" - sure to be a smash in the bedroom. But "Shooter" totally blows that out of the bedroom. Beau sent an mp3 to me a year ago and since then I've been listening to it every other day, and have been putting my hands up randomly during the day because I'm singing along in my head while I might be in the middle of teaching a class. Robin and Lil Wayne complement each other extremely well, which is evident in this performance. I love it when Robin goes "shoo shoo shoo shoo shoo...ter" and Weezy goes "Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr..."
2. Maneater the way it was meant to be performed
This came from popjustice. Those crazy brits have crazy tv shows.
Merry Christmas / Feliz Navidad / Bon Nadal from Barcelona. Yes, that is a picture of George Bush defecating. There is a rather peculiar Christmas tradition here in Catalonia; in the nativity scene, amongst baby Jesus, the Virgin Mary, Joseph, there is a figurine nonchalantly installed in a corner. It is the caganer (literally, the one who shits). He usually takes the form of a peasant with a red hat. But nuns, Presidents, football players, Osama Bin Ladens, always with their pants down, are pretty common as well. None of my Catalan students have been able to provide adequate explanations of the presence of this intriguing little fella, but there is something quite strange about the Catalans and their scatalogical obsessions. Instead of Christmas stockings, they have the cagatio (the shitting log). A log is covered in a blanket and the children beat it with sticks and sing a song that goes "if you don't shit well, I will hit you" and presents come out of it. Needless to say, I am quite enjoying my time in Catalonia.
My Christmas has been great. I had latkes and played dreidel. I also discovered that the TV in my apartment has ten channels of music videos. I have been sitting in front of the TV for the last two days, drooling.
It astounds me that even though bouncy pop music constitutes roughly 79% of everything I think about, “Roscoe” by Midlake is my most listened to song of 2006. Indie Americana from Denton, Texas, isn’t exactly my thing. But, for lack of a better word, and because when it comes to music I really am quite inarticulate, the song is just gorgeous. The melody is gorgeous, the arrangement is gorgeous, the guitar solo is gorgeous, the voice is gorgeous, and the harmonies are gorgeous. Even the vaguely nonsensical lyrics are gorgeous: “Whenever I was a child I wondered what if my name had changed into something more productive like Roscoe, and born in 1891…”
Last night, I saw them play at the Razzmatazz here in Barcelona. Them Catalonian hipsters were out in force because even though the room was quite small, it was extremely packed and boiling. It wasn’t exactly the liveliest of concerts, although it did inspire a drunken interpretive hand dance from the guy next to me. However, the songs were entrancingly great: the room went crazy when they played “Roscoe,” “Head Home” went on forever and more but I didn’t want it to end, and “We Gathered In Spring” was a wonderful closer. With the screen showing clips from period dramas, and lyrics about the simple country life, it felt like I was being transported back to the 19th century. It was lovely.
Oh, and I love my job, by the way. In the mornings and afternoons, I teach highfliers at La Caixa, the bank of banks in Barcelona. I have had a few lessons in a boardroom on the 21st floor (skyscrapers are non-existent in these parts), which had an amazing view of the city. The students are all quite advanced, so most of the classes end up being discussions about politics. I go from this to either 4 year olds or 13 year olds. In the case of 4 year olds, I have to do lots and lots of singing, writhing around on the floor, and taking crayons out of their mouths. They are quite adorable, but they seem to be just discovering their ability to spit. I wonder if they actually grasp the concept of languages or if they just look at me and think I just talk funny. Nevertheless, I am constantly amazed whenever they are able to produce any word or phrase in English. My class of 13 year olds is in a sleepy village in the hills, which is a welcome contrast to the city. At nights, I teach adults, beginners and intermediate. This is perhaps most rewarding, because some of them will come up and say how much they’ve enjoyed the class. Sometimes, of course, they will appear to be deathly bored. I, however, haven’t been bored yet.
I taught 8 year olds today. That wasn't so good. I'm so used to twentysomethings who don't have to go to the bathrooms every 5 minutes. Twentysomethings who shout proudly "present perfect continuous" when you write a sentence on the board: that, my friends, is music to my ears. Twentysomethings with whom you can plan and solve murders, in English, of course. The thing is I think I might be teaching a class of 5 year olds until June next year. I'm sure they'll be lovely, as children inevitably are, but right now I've got butterflies in my stomach. Oh god, I'm talking in idioms.
And so, I go and console myself with pop. Always reliable. Always shiny. Always stunning. This year, as I've asserted a few times already, it's been even more stunning than usual. So much so that even artists who I have disliked have produced some of the most glorious pop songs that I can do nothing but obsess about.
Beyoncé - "Irreplaceable" Confession: The much-loved "Crazy In Love" did nothing for me. Solo Beyoncé, in my humble opinion, does not hold a candle to the triumphs of Destiny's Child. Her new album is an exhibition of the ferocity of Beyoncé's pipes in all sorts of over the top frenzies, most notably jealous rages, which is entertaining at first but quite tiring after awhile. Thankfully, it is saved by the gorgeous ballad "Irreplaceable" with the readymade "to the left, to the left" dance. It was written and produced by Ne-Yo and Stargate - who also did the infectious "So Sick" and the surprisingly moving Rihanna ballad "Unfaithful" which nonchalantly equated infidelity with murder. But it is Beyoncé's performance which really takes the cake - she relaxes her pipes, melisma and emoting to give a nuanced performance in which she tries to deny her love for the man who thinks he's irreplaceable. She beseeches him not to ever think that he's irreplaceable. Of course the implication of the song is that he is irreplaceable to her. The complexity of it all blows my mind.
Omarion - "Ice Box" Omarion. HA. One of the boys last year at Children's Village thought Omarion was the greatest singer on earth. As much as I wanted to impart to him a musical education, I was supposed to be reading with him, and I really had no idea how to convince him that the greatest person on earth was not Omarion out of B2K, despite the fact he was in "You Got Served." I don't think I can remember any of B2K's songs and I'm usually quite good with the boybands.
But Jesus, how many times have I listened to "Ice Box" in the past 3 days? Zillions. "I GOT THIS ICE BOX WHERE MY HEART USED TO BE!!! I GOT THIS ICE BOX WHERE MY HEART USED TO BE!!!" is a most ridiculous lyric but it's so much fun to scream along with. Omarion is so great on it - he breathlessly handles clumsy and verbose lines like "girl I really want to work this out cos I'm tired of fighting / and you really obviously want me the way I want you" while exuding the perfect amount of heartbreak. Omarion has been pouring his heart out to me every night before I go to sleep about his troubles with a girl. And it's so great that I've even been inspired to download his previous single "Entourage" and I feel like buying the album and sending it to Jermaine wherever he is. Timbaland, who chimes in with "I'm so cold, I'm so cold, I'm so cold" because, you know, an ice box is cold, has had an amazing year producing Justin and Nelly Furtado (6 awesome singles and counting from her album alone) but really tops it off with this. download
Robbie Williams - "Lovelight" Robbie Williams is like the biggest popstar in the world outside of the United States, as it is often explained to Americans. He has created some great pop songs in the past - "Angels," "Old Before I Die," "No Regrets," and "Rock DJ"- but he's been coasting it for a while now, having created nothing but boring crap since 2000. His new electro-heavy album though has confused fans and critics alike - people either seem to love it or hate it. I mean, he raps on the album's first single "Rudebox". I found it quite endearing actually, but the followup "Lovelight," I'm pretty positive is going to set the world (minus the US) alight. It's got an 80s groove and George Michaelesque vocals but it all comes together in an amazing way that makes me want to do a twirly dance. It's actually a cover of a song I've never heard of. Robbie has roped in ultrahot right now Mark Ronson to produce it. Ronson and Timbaland are in a fight to be producer of the year, having also worked on the lovely "Littlest Things" from Lily Allen, Xtina's new album and...
Amy Winehouse - "Rehab" Amy Winehouse is a little scary-looking but we'll let that pass, but she's got a voice and demeanour that's been nurtured by years of ciggies and drinks and drinks and drinks, and drugs, most probably - hence the title of the song. She never did have the songs in the past to match her frankly quite fascinating persona. But with a chorus that goes "try to make me go to rehab, I say NO NO NO" + brass + blast from the past vibe = Brilliant.
I'd even add The Fray's cable car song except it's pretty old now and Fergie's "Fergalicious" to the list if it didn't completely fly in the face of my theory that everything that is wrong in pop music today can be attributed to one of the members of the Black Eyed Peas, but that song is just so marvellously bonkers that I have to admit I love it. Toodles.
Hello and welcome to my blog. That's me right above, on top of, reflected in, superimposed onto, intertwined with, infused with, what have you, with that lovely little plane there. It was in the Hong Kong airport. I love airports. Anyhow I'm in Barcelona right now, teaching English. But that's enough about me. Let's talk about Jamelia.
Jamelia has come a long way since the oddball opera-sampling "Money" came out in 2000. Since then, she's been through motherhood a few times, stood Usher up, worked with Chris Martin before Timbaland and Jay-Z said it was fashionable to do so, and now she is back. Well she was back about a month ago when her lite-rock single "Something About You" was released but now she is truly back because "Beware Of The Dog" is hopefully finally going to lay those oft-tossed around "2nd rate Beyoncé" dismissals into the ground where they belong. Rihanna might have started this trend of pilfering from 80's electro with "S.O.S. (Rescue Me)" but Jamelia has taken it to somewhere else altogether with her nicking of the "Personal Jesus" riff. She is unrelenting on this, as she bangs on to her ladiez about some skeezy man who is "dirty to the bone," and boy does it pay off, because it is a stomper that is all kinds of awesomeness.
The video was finally released yesterday, it's a bit "Maneater"ish + sleaze. I quite like it, although the beginning is a bit like the hilariously banned Cassie video. OK back to lesson planning and job interviews for me.
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