I only have to hear that Pitchfork and Consequence Of Sound like a song for me to doubt my own instincts. And absolutely, for me, popularity improves a sound. Lorde’s “Royal” is a perfect example where I dismissed it and dismissed it and though it took a live performance to turn me all the way around, its success was what had me wondering.
“Music writing isn’t sports writing, you don’t need to report on the ramifications of a manager being dropped or speculate on the next album. You can’t critique art that hasn’t happened.”
Spotify, in their infinite wisdom, compiled a year in music for me based upon the 149,043 minutes I spent on the music streaming service, or 248 hours, or ten days non stop. It didn’t particularly surprise, though it did make me wonder if they interpreted hip hop under the spot genre.
Lorde performs on, and curates this album, and her four songs here, a great all star parade at the top, an original that also gets a Kanye West remake in the middle, and a Bright Eyes cover at the end, lifts the dystopian YA soundtrack to places it never usually reaches. Chvches, Tove Lo, Grace Jones (!) are no slouches either – ALBUM OF THE WEEK – A
Seriously, why has pop culture focused so much on this part of the human anatomy lately? Is it the influence of some degenerated products of hip hop culture such as J-Lo, Iggy Azalea, Nicki Minaj and Miley Cyrus?
Flicker (Kanye West Rework) – Lorde – They seek him here, they seek him there, well here he is adding a heavy boom like a cannon behind Lorde’s chemically murmured “Yellow Flicker Beat”. – B+
Tenuous musical connection, true but try this from the MBL: “On Friday, two stations in the Bay Area, KFOG and KOIT, removed the song from their playlists for the duration of the World Series.”
The Replacements greatest song because it is its most inclusive song,so much so that a 16 year old from New Zealand recorded it to great acclaim because it fit, because “if being afraid is a crime we hang side by side” is an aphorism, it is an aphorism that has the particular inside it
“My blood is a flood of rubies, precious stones, it keeps my veins hot, the fires find a home in me”. A tough minded song of revenge, “I’m locking up everyone that ever laid a finger on me.” Lorde’s first new song since the breakthrough should put naysayers to bed,
It is very sad and no wonder she deals with contempt for the writers and interviews, the David Lettermans of the world, she can’t reject her family so she rejects the entire community of entertainment leeches that do what she least wants.
S she is really all over the eleven song album she is mostly singing back up and only gets Lorde-y on “Piece Of Mind” which, considering she didn’t wrote it, has the sort of shaking bigness we associate with her nowawdays
Okay, calm down, before calling Royals a good cow call, before concluding that Lorde would be number 1 in the cows’ top 40, we have to consider that may be (very probably) it is just the sound of the trombone that interests them. This guy should definitively repeat the experiment with another famous song and observe if he gets the same effect!
I’m still old and she still doesn’t care what I think . Which isn’t exactly the truth either, I don’t want to get “it depends what “is” is” on you, but you put two qualifiers in her comments. The first is “most” –clearly, in order to listen to 17 year olds MOST, she must listen to older people less than that, which is not not at all
A&E – Clean Bandit – After the success of “Rather Be”, I figured this classical plus EDM band were gonna be great but the New Eyes was a disappointed except the more you listen the less it is and the violins on this song are so great the track grows into a monster – A
How did Lorde discover Conor exactly? Well, that was easy:’ I knew about Bright Eyes because everyone at my school was obsessed with Bright Eyes. But I didn’t really have a supergood understanding of who you were. Then my current boyfriend introduced me to you — he’s an O.G., hard-core fan, like he had a forum in 2005 for you guys.’
Stenography, that is to say, the passing on of favorable publicity and hagiography, is the major business practice of the mainstream media. Having the temerity of daring opinion in relationship to power, or money or whatever the majority feels is great consumer stuff, went badly out of fashion in the last few decades
“The media will beg for free tickets to your show just so they can write about how much they hate it. I wish you could all see it. The whole things actually pretty funny.” Er, free tickets? Wow, that’s a little harsh? Writers are professionals, they go to shows to review them, it isn’t entertainment. Tickets are the tools of their trade.
That run from DJ Snake to the end is the best I’ve seen in months and months and months, all of it is good and Timberlake’s “Not A Bad Thing” is one of his greatest moments ever. As pure and as perfect a pop song as you will ever hear plus? It isn’t connected at the hips with a dog as it is on the album
The True Groove Allstars – The Cutting Room – March 11th, 2014 – Lead by Tomas Doncker and featuring astounding turns by Charlie Funk and James Chance, it put the band and label right at the center of the map.
The week belonged to Tomas Doncker’s True Groove All Stars, their two hour concert at The Cutting Room Tuesday night set the standard for all! A perfect compendium of real soul music that never stopped moving. Meanwhile, Lorde act her age if not older, at a simple, unadorned straight ahead gig at the dreaded Roseland that did her nothing but favors.
Crazy Little Thing called Love – Queen – I am no Queen fan, indeed, i always found them as disreputably shallow purveyors of glam, a somewhat shallow musical idiom at the best of times; but this straight forward little rocker stands out as the closet they ever got to a standard and it hasn’t aged a day – A+
Biting down or being bored, the real life exemplifier of her generation considers “Royalty” a question of consumerism and sex a matter of biting lips. And at Roseland, in a fine 70 minute dash through the album plus an excellent cover of Son Lux’s “Easy”, she began to feel comfortable with the craziness
How many times can I express my loathing for “Let It Go”, the standard formusical numbers is so low really ever since “Wicked” made the point and kept to it, that anything that rises from key to key to a full scale scream can be considered a power ballad, we have been heading for this place where everybody has given up on song for spectacle. An abominable, apocalyptic piece of crap.
Let Her Dance – The Bobby Fuller Four – It is to Bobby Fuller’s credit that Marshall Crenshaw’s cover doesn’t run the band out of town on a pole -indeed, as great as Crenshaw’s cover was, Fuller had all the highlights on this power pop early rock and roll triumph from the beginning – A+
John Legend performs the terrible drag of an “All Of Me” on the Grammy’s once and the next thing you know he has a top ten hits. Legend is Alicia Keys in male drag and he is just as boring a performer though not without a certain amount of charm, true. None of that charm is at work here. None of it.
It is one of the wonderful things about the record biz. Dan Smith was a bartender writing songs on his laptop two years ago, and one, based upon the infamous city, went onto his first album. Today his life is changed forever, he is a sensation, and whether I (or you) can stand the song is irrelevant, the man hit the jukebox jackbox. PS we don’t like the song at all.
Eric sold nearly 300K copies of his dog album, giving spoken word a bad reputation from sea to shiny sea. The thing is, when he is good he is not good enough and when he is bad he is the absolute pits. Come back “Jack Daniels” all is forgiven.
I Got The Reason – Conor Oberst And The Mystic Valley Band – A botched arrangement stops this from being one of his biggest triumphs; he knew what he had in the pounding Richard Manuel inspired piano and went too far. Still a masterpiece, of course – A
The charts, which, of course, have never been a beacon of good taste aren’t even an icon of success. I think we use it because, you know, otherwise we’d have no idea who’s is winning. Now we can only take a guess at best.
“I’ve been in some situations where people have treated me like a fascinating toy. You know, it’s just like an interesting kind of fun thing to have a play with. It’s very weird for me. I feel like a tiny baby. But it’s all relative: when you’re my age in particular, every year feels like a massive change. The difference between 15 and 17 is colossal for everyone.”
LL Cool J was bad last year and worst this year. The “Mama Said Knock You Out” in Tux and smile sprouted poorly written platitudes about music bringing people together. Really, I mean, really?? It was skin crawlingly insincere bullshit of immense proportions, I wonder how all these overfed over glorified nitwit pop stars can listen to this crap without throwing up
Vampire Weekend’s Modern Vampires Of The City is overrated and I love the album. Katy Perry’s Prism is overrated and I don’t like the album but neither are quite as overrated as these three, VW is better, KP is worse, but these three most overrated albums of the year are off the charts…
Popdust is probably my favorite music website, it looks like a dream and is wildly sarcastic and funny and fun. It obsesses over K-Pop and has better ears than Pitchfork; if Popdusts Top 20 songs of 2013 seems a little obvious, well, the whole point with pop music is that it be popular…
Tug Of War – Paul McCartney – Lost in the midst of time, and never rolled out even when Macca is looking for something to change up in his show and despite it appearing on Wingspan, there is a real tug to the song, a sweet sadness – A-
So this tour, her two nights at Roseland an instantaneous sellout by the way, is a victory lap or a farewell to stardom. Usually I can take an inspired guess but now I can’t because there is too much riding on what you can change up on the next album.
Pitbull is right back at the top after his phenomenal performance at Jingle Ball last week and “Timber” is the only song I’d listen to for, how you say, pleasure. I hate “Counting Stars” although I can hear how some other people might love it…
Sometimes you look at the charts and you say, ‘who are these people? I haven’t heard of one of them.” And other times you look at the charts and you say “Who are these people? Well, I know every single one like the back of my hand and they all suck”. 2013 has been a lousy year for music and this is a disgraceful chart.
Life Round Here – James Blake And Chance The Rapper – Haunting and beautiful, but of course that comes on the James Blake label, what doesb’t is Chance The Rapper, atonal rap so weird and in place – A-
Some time this summer when Passenger was blowing up he UK charts I predicted this would crossover Stateside and though, to be honest, I am not always exactly accurate in my predictions, this very appealing track was more than everybody gets it right once in a blue moon.
Hand it to Ke$ha on this one, she handles the chorus with complete confidence and smartiness and the song is a sweet nothing but Pitbull always mixes pop smarts with Latin American savvy.
Lady Gaga’s week, the new album is very very good, her best since The Fame Monster, even if I got “Dope” wrong in my review! We will see how the charts work themselves out but whether it is a smash or just a hit, it does not herald the end to anything.
This is the ultimate Ross song, and the most inspired use of the word
pussy ever, every verse works as a hook upon a hook upon a hook with Ross singing the hook on the space beat the beats – A
it is elegiac and heartbroken, it tears at the political fabric, and it tears at God, only to extoll us to “rise up” like the fire people rising through that tower forever upwards to eternity – A
Lorde sings it pretty well, she isn’t a twenty something, she doesn’t see it as a life sentence but a deadened teen cool moodiness, the swingin party here is a mood not a rope swingin
“The Monster” sales slide is owed to iTunes’ customers who opted to “complete” the “Marshall” album by upgrading their earlier purchases of “Monster” to a full album. Effectively, consumers who completed the album were returning a song
US House DJ Storm Queen follows in the footsteps of Avicii, with a heavy house pop song of wit and wonder. In other words: not bad at all.
The current issue of Rolling Stone was better. I can’t express my admiration for Weiner’s writing in the current Rolling Stone highly enough. The Lorde interview was good, nothing wrong with it, but the Paul McCartney interview was simply magical
“She is, in more than one way, a true heroine. She’s so normal- she’s not supermodel thin, doesn’t cake on makeup and sometimes doesn’t wear any at all, and has crazy hair. She’s free spirited in a way that’s not artificial and stupid.”
I know I’ve been writing “Applause” is good not great, but it is great compared to the rest of this crap and it is great in context, closing down ARTPOP
Hell, even Kelly is sucker punching us with a seasonal album and it may be ok, at least a coupla songs perked my interest, it isn’t even Thanksgiving yet!
