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top 40 coundown: 2008

40) "Warwick Avenue," Duffy
39) "Kristofferson," Tim McGraw. Does this mean Kris Kristofferson has to make a song called “Taylor Swift”?
38) "Low" (Feat. T-Pain), Flo-Rida. We got v. v. tired of this song, but the numbers don’t lie. They’re like hips that way.
37) "All Summer Long," Kid Rock. The strangest song of the year. Listen, there are plenty of songs that steal a phrase or a lick and don’t mention it, cf. “Hell Yeah.” And there are plenty that steal a lick and make a big deal of it, like Warren Zevon’s “Play It All Night Long,” which manages to stick its nose in both “Southern Man” and “Sweet Home Alabama.” But has there ever been another song that steals two riffs — which basically contribute the entirety of the musical track between them — and mentions one, but not the other? That’s exactly what happens here: our man Bob Ritchie can’t stop remembering “Sweet Home Alabama” but (in a very odd coincidence) completely forgets the fact that his song’s main progression, rhythm and instrumentation come from a totally different song which just happens to resemble the Skynyrd classic but is by, wouldn’t you know it, Warren Zevon: “Werewolves of London.” The whole thing is just beyond weird. And why does it have to be 1989?
36) "Let Me Think About It (remix)," Ida Corr. And meanwhile, I’m stilllllll thinking.
35) "Come On Over," Jessica Simpson
34) "Going Down to Cuba," Jackson Browne. What is the most tawdry thing about this song? That it’s topical? Liberal? Topical and liberal? Is there in fact anything worse that this: “Maybe I’ll go through Mexico, old Jesse Helms don’t have to know; anyway all the allies of the USA travel to Cuba everyday”? It’s enough to make you want to kill yourself or go back in time and vote for McCain. But insipid and clumsy quatrains are a dime a dozen, you know? Lovely ones are few and far between. And so Warren Zevon’s best producer gets us about four minutes in: “I’m gonna drink the Ron Anejo (no no the mojito)…and walk out on the Malecón — in one hand a monte cristo and in the other an ice cream cone.” Shoulda always been that way.
33) "Don't You Know You're Beautiful," Kellie Pickler. “Kellie? It’s some guy on the phone. He says he’s Martina McBride’s lawyer?”
32) "Breakfast In Bed," Shelby Lynne. There’s something funny about doing a Dusty Springfield covers album. That something is that a lot of Dusty Springfield’s songs were already covers.
31) "Love Don't Live Here," Lady Antebellum. This shares DNA with so many other songs it would be pointless to name them — oops, Hal Ketchum’s “Hearts Are Gonna Roll” — but this doesn’t make it one tine bit less pleasing. You don’t have to make it new, you have to make it good. Which ain’t easy.

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.

20) “Chicken Fried,” Zac Brown Band
19) “Change,” Taylor Swift. This is the least “country” sounding song on the solid front-to-back album, and hence finds itself stuck in last-track-ville. It’ll be a hit single anyway, in part because it declares young Taylor’s willingness to be the next Shania Twain (which is not the worst idea, given the immensity of her charm and the timbre of her voice), and in part because it does an excellent job with the minigenre of the perfectly contentless rebel song, geared to the vast audience that knows it’s supposed to to be rebelling against something but isn’t quite sure what: “…because these things will change” she says, “can you feel it now? These walls that they put up to hold us back will fall down. It’s a revolution, the time will come for us to finally win.” It’s never once stated what things are at stake, or who the us and the them are; rather it hails its audience unerringly by not specifying anything further than “They might be bigger but we’re faster and we’re never scared.” Tweens, and Democrats: it’s really an ideal song for the Inauguration. You know: change, revolution. In the video, when she hits the chorus and throws an almost-fist in the air, she looks far from small and agile: a skinny white radio tower.
18) “A Milli,” Lil Wayne. See comment on Number One (forthcoming).
17) “Discipline,” Nine Inch Nails. This band has now been making good songs, albeit few and far between, for 19 years. By way of comparison, the Beatles made good songs for 8 years, and the Rolling Stones for 16 if one includes Tattoo You.
16) “No Air,” Jordin Sparks feat. Chris Brown. Yeah, but where’s Kelly Clarkson? No, seriously, is she in Simon Cowell’s basement or something?
15) “Go Hard Or Go Home,” E-40 feat. The Federation. Plucked from one of ‘06’s top albums and dropped onto an ’07 soundtrack to become a single in ’08 and make the case for the lesser-know DJ Wes as heir to Rick Rock’s hyphy throne, it was all we had in advance of the new 40 Water album which was due out in November and just…vanished.
12-14) “Sorry,” Buckcherry; “Love Remains The Same,” Gavin Rossdale; “We Don't Have To Look Back Now,” Puddle Of Mudd. As we have argued elsewhere, all rock genres end in the power ballad. What we missed is that, after the power ballad, there is the just-plain-ballad, all that’s left of the great white hope of the Nineties, glam, grunge, modrock. There is no aesthetic distance between these songs and, say, Xtina’s “Beautiful,” except they’re not quite as good. But what is?
11) “What Kind of Gone,” Chris Cagle. If the bridge really began “is it the kind of gone where she’s atom bombs, coolin’ down she’ll come around,” as we believed for about a week, it woulda cracked the Top Ten.

10) “I’m Me,” Lil Wayne. See comment on Number One (forthcoming).
9) “Party People,” Nelly feat. Fergie. Nelly and Fergie are exactly the same kind of talent, with the same ferocious desire to be down, despite being Vegas to the depths of their immortal souls. They should make many many songs together.
8) “Sounds So Good,” Ashton Shepherd. She keeps getting called a “classicist,” which is almost always a curious category, indicating an appeal to some canonical-but-lost value. But which one? The sound is scarcely a throwback to Lynn or Cline, Parton or Judd, or even Reba, for that matter. It’s probably closer to the truth to say that Shepherd is Gretchen Wilson if Gretchen Wilson could sing and wasn’t so proud of herself for her faux-militance and camouflage bikinis. It’s still hard to believe we had to take that humorlessly ludicrous shit seriously, but if Ashton Shepherd is the recompense, maybe it was worth it.
7) “That Song In My Head,” Julianne Hough. Apparently she is a very good dancer. She is not a remarkable singer, but this song is so well-written that even a mediocre dancer could have charted with it; Hough goes after it with her best Deana Carter circa “We Danced Anyway,” and it’s plenty good enough.
6) “Hot 'N Cold,” Katy Perry. Well, after years of top songs by extraordinarily unlikeable and heinous guys, I suppose the gals deserve a turn or two thousand. As a footnote, a notable moment of 2008: “I Kissed a Girl” hits number one the same week that gay marriage is (briefly) legalized in California. Katy Perry should forced to donate a thousand hours of public service getting Proposition 8 overturned. So should Lil Wayne.
5) “Get Back,” Demi Lovato. The thing to understand about Pink and Avril Lavigne is that their self-positioning-via-insult-of-bubblegum-divas schtick is not simply disingenuous unto hypocrisy (as our man Alexander notes gently here). What Pink and Avril ignore most significantly is that they are all part of a singular process, the great peristaltic motion of the biz. They are working for their supposed antagonists, working for the industry as a whole to open up new markets for Disney pop. Their historic mission is to make the world safe for Demi Lovato to make songs considerably better than theirs, and indeed to make the best “rock” song of the year; Demi is possible not despite but because of Pink and Avril, bad faith and all.
4) “Fascination,” Alphabeat. A little Katrina and the Waves, a little Cure, hmm, David Bowie’s young dudes but not quite all of them, a little Human League plus Animotion plus Roxette and, as one site has it just right, “Gay or Europop?” Already dropped from their major label, 12/20/2008. Uh-oh.
3) “Rocks In Your Shoes,” Emily West. Boy howdy did this song go nowhere. Thumbnail theory: it’s too well-written.
2) “Untouchable,” Taylor Swift. The original, by Luna Halo, is the kind of machinically angular mess that has one foot in jackass Red Hot Chili Peppers and another in the neo-new-wave dance rock that fell like a pestilence on the land shortly after the millennium. In short, "Untouchable" is in the first instance perhaps the most awful song one could imagine on short notice. This cover, conversely, is patient, delicate, and implacably beautiful, which gives one pause about what musical genius might be.

1) “Paper Planes,” M.I.A.; “Paper Planes” (Diplo Street Remix feat. Bun B & Rich Boy); “Paper Planes” (DFA Remix)”; “Straight to Hell,” The Clash; “Swagga Like Us,” T.I. and Jay-Z (feat. Jay-Z and Lil Wayne)

First things first: from an ’07 album, “Paper Planes” strikes us overwhelmingly as the song of 2008, and not at all because it seemed to haunt every third film soundtrack, and not especially because the "Homeland Security Remixes" were released this year with their sequence of astonishing versions, each of which reorients the song in its own way and still fails to elude the song’s massive, centerless gravity. It is the song of 2008 because it was good to listen to during the peak of the financial crisis. It is the song of 2008 because its sheer presence — not its subject, but its circulation — was both symptom and diagnosis of the situation. It is the song of 2008 mostly because the song in one form or another became improbably ubiquitous and then some, moving a million digital downloads, crossing demographics, reaching the bourgeois and rocking the boulevard. It wasn’t as popular in absolute numbers as any number of songs, but its relative popularity reverberated as a mysterious surplus. And that surplus, the condition of possibility for "Paper Planes" to exceed itself, is the surplus of 2008: a surplus of misery, of the awareness of misery, of the awareness of misery as an outcome of inevitable systemic fuckage, and of the dawning awareness that it must change. This is the moment of optimism is that otherwise dread-laced toomuchness wound sinuously through public space in a song whose hook was a semiautomatic and a cash register blent together into a single motion, the coordination of power that scales to every level — and who could decide if that sound was the corner or the world, Bun B and Rich Boy’s scrapey game or DFA's digitized assay of impersonal, imperial force? Both, duh — it was about how collusion, coercion, shake-ya-ass synchronization get solicited at every stratum, for better and mostly for worse.

Let’s call it hegemony funk.

The song was local-global all by itself, that’s the thing. In that sense it is at once a splendid ambassador for Kala but is at the same time not of it — the album depends on each song being a partial moment and motion in the album’s larger circulation, its situation, and “Paper Planes” works all by its lonesome: a failed song, a great single. This results in real critical problems, as it happens. For example: there are several great moments in “Paper Planes”: my favorite is the moment in which Maya sings, in her inimitable sing-song, “sum-sum-summer-summer…” chirpy and upbeat, echoing a million other pop odes to summertime, somewhere amidst The Jamies’ “Summertime Summertime,” The Cars’ “Summer,” and maybe T-Squad’s “No Sleep Til Summertime.” And then she finishes the phrase and you realize she was saying something else all along, “some some some are some are murdered, some are some are let go” and that the song has just whipped you around the sharpest turn a piece of music can make, delight/death, pop/polemic, and that every moment of this song is just as extraordinarily thought out….and as we said this is a real critical problem, because to identify M.I.A. by moments is to get it wrong, she is the only person making records that matter, not even albums but systems, structures — the album is dead, that’s for sure, and it has to get smaller like singles or bigger like the world picture. This is the intensifying logic of the local-global, of the patch of history we are watching burn, and not much music has been up to the challenge, not much has succeeded at both reaches. Maybe only her.

The Oughts will surely be discussed as music’s balkan decade, when the center of the industry could not hold, and microgenres and distributed communities imagined and mapped onto each other — and that story won’t exactly be wrong. But it will be missing some crucial shit. For one thing, this claim is probably more significantly true about the Nineties. The Eighties consolidated themselves under the rule of Michael Jackson, Madonna, and Prince, and for a hot minute it looked like the Nineties would form an ellipse around the foci of Kurt and Dre, but both of them biffed it in their own ways and it was about then that the Modern Balkanized Era began. But that story, a little bit right, is wrong too — or, rather, it’s true from a particular position which still, to this day, does a pretty decent job of passing itself off as no position at all, just common sense. In fact, and we guess this is the point if there is a point, the story of decline and disintegration since 1994 is not the story of pop music in general but pretty much the story of rock. For of course the counterstory of hip-hop’s increasing permeation, coordination and domination of the Western market is equally true, and the mutations within hip-hop proper are massive and astonishing and nothing compared to the mutations within r’n’b, soul, rock, teenpop et al to adapt themselves so they could breathe in hip-hop’s atmosphere. What mostly retained its own genealogy was, clearly enough, country, which continued somehow not to be “pop music” (perhaps for this very reason). As a result, much of what had come to characterize rock had no choice but to flee into country, not the least of which would be the guitar solo, the long melody line, the sing along chorus, ripped jeans, and the narrative of starting a band. Country hasn’t become rock, as some like to say by way of explaining to themselves why they are willing to discuss country now; it has absorbed that part of rock that hip-hop didn’t. And so the last thing we mean to say is that the last decade of what gets bracketed under “pop” has seen titans, less than a handful but that’s about right, and not a one of them is white. And but maybe for Timbaland (and he remains a strange case, since the charisma of the performer remains real when we are talking about “mattering” in this social sense) you can find them all on a single song from 2008. None of them are named T.I.

Indeed, by now we can all probably admit that T.I. is third-tier at best, struggling to keep pace with Slim Thug and Keak da Sneak. Thus he stands out like a sour thumb on what is basically his own song, “Swagga Like Us.” Sugarhigh! has never much liked Kanye — for all his track appeal, we prefer writers who can write and rappers who can rap — but the shadow he has cast over the short millennium, well, one ignores it at one’s peril, and Mr. West deserves a little swagger. And yet. There are probably only three pop stars who can legitimately look back on the last decade and declare “No one on the corner has swagger like us,” and two of them are Jay-Z and Lil Wayne, for all the former’s lost glory and the latter’s allergy to the studio system. Finally T.I.’s absurd keyboard pomp made sense as something more than the survival of Procol Harum as a darker shade of pale: coronation music for the last kings standing. So: Jay and Weezy peer out from “Swagga Like Us,” astride the decade like the twin collosi of Memnon, but they don’t open the song, or close it down, or provide the hook. No, natch, that duty falls to M.I.A., sampled from “Paper Planes,” because "Swagga Like Us" — more or less a failure but at the same time very close to being the truth of the last ten years — would have no claim on the truth without her.

Posted by jane at January 2, 2009 09:10 AM | TrackBack