December 21, 2008
singles of the year countdown, 30 to 21
30) “16th Avenue,” Sunny Sweeney. Both better and worse than the original. Lacy J. Dalton can’t really sing, but boy did she figure out what to do about that. This version is just…pretty, plus it’s a near-perfect song. Around here we do not turn our noses up at that.
29) “Bleeding Love” & “Better in Time,” Leona Lewis. Platinum voice, X Factor champion, robo-star, etc etc: All more or less irrelevant. Leona Lewis was called into being by Mariah Carey’s abandonment of her early pop stylings, and by nothing else. Lewis basically provides followups to “Dreamlover” and “Vision of Love,” sequels which arrive so late that they can only be about recovering from the pain of those earlier loves. Indeed, Leona Lewis’s entire had love, threw it away, was in wilderness, confronted my mistake, am now beginning to recover schtick is in fact a narration of Mariah’s career and its relation to her initial style: you just have to replace the word “love” with “huge smash hits.” This works pretty well as a general shorthand in pop music.
28) “Blur,” Britney Spears. The eccentrically phased, wobbly and betimes vaguely Middle Eastern sound with distantly pretty melody calls back to JT’s “What Goes Around” — both of which feature production work by Danja, though Timbaland’s work on the earlier song makes it a few notches better (last year's Number Five). But there is herein an awfully hinky calculation, insofar as this song meant to summon up the spectre of Dick In A Box Office Gold at the same time conjures he matter of date rape. All of which is to say, if this song doesn’t appear on an episode of Gossip Girl in the New Year (“What Goes Around” made the pilot), Britney will be pissed. And you don’t want that.
27) “Speakerphone,” Kylie Minogue. Here we offer only the most minimal meditation on the secret relationship between speakerphone and Auto-Tune, that euphonious pair of technologies both based around the electronic flattening of sounds toward a programmed mean: well, as no one has yet noted about Auto-Tune, isn’t that the very effect of the Top 40 in the first place, and ever was?
26) "Start A Band," Brad Paisley & Keith Urban. There is much to say about this good-natured bit of fluff by country superstars with fake-sounding real names. Couldn’t “Urban Paisley” be a whole new musical style (not in evidence here)? Couldn’t “Paisley Urban” be a good name for a character on Gossip Girl? But the main point here, we believe, is that this particular song, in which the virtues of becoming a rocker are extolled over the shredding of denims and dual guitars, and said virtues are indeed proffered as wisdom by “my sister’s rock star boyfriend”…well, these songs used to be rock songs by rock bands, did they not? This issue will return, especially when we reach Number One on the countdown.
25) “Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It),” Beyoncé
24) “Cleaning This Gun,” Rodney Adkins. In the rare year in which Toby Keith’s album has little to recommend it, a space opens for jocular assholes of lesser stature.
23) “All I Want To Do,” Sugarland
22) “Around The Bend,” The Asteroids Galaxy Tour. Surely it’s a bit hard to believe that the last remaining music store in my town has sections for happy hardcore, bleep, and “vocal,” but still lacks a section for "Apple Commercials," which is perhaps the only profitable genre to arise in the last couple of years.
21) “Paralyzer,” Finger Eleven. Charted in ’07, Gossip Girl soundtrack in ’08, radio play to this present moment. This song’s singular achievement is to show the musicological link between Franz Ferdinand and Led Zeppelin, which is not easy and which it does with unpleasant clarity.