January 01, 2010
top 25 songs of 2009: 16-20
20) "Boom Boom Pow," Black Eyed Peas. While we wait around for another Fergie album (and, along with M.I.A. and Robyn, Fergie is the only album sugarhigh! would actually wait for, given the fact that Lil Wayne makes sure you don't have to wait around for an album), we are more or less satisfied with her sixteen here, "I'm so three-thousand-and-eight, you so two-thousand-and-late" etc; meanwhile, we admit that supreme nitwit will.i.am is far less annoying on the jock of Cybotron as passed through nineties techno than he is on the campaign trail, and manages to come up with a very pleasing kick drum sound, dry as styrofoam and twice as heavy.
19) "Sometime Around Midnight," Airborne Toxic Event. Best band named after something in a DeLillo novel? Certainly the best pocket opera of the year, as if we could burn off all of our adolescent sentiment in five shameless minutes. If only.
18) "Outside My Window," Sarah Buxton. Such a nice melody we still don't know the words.
17) "Already Gone," Sugarland. Still not the Dixie Chicks. Still better than everybody else.
16) "Paparazzi," Lady Gaga. The Madonna comparisons are hysteria pure and simple, about as sensible as insisting that Ne-Yo is the new Michael Jackson; our friend Lady has scarcely, um, diverted the course of global culture. At the level of social performance it's more like Sigue Sigue Sputnik does Paris Hilton, a meta-riff on fame as the ironic outcome of wanting above all to be famous. Or one could narrate Gaga as a successful version of Princess Superstar, who was too scrapey and off-axis to take "Bad Babysitter" or "Jam for the Ladies" to the peaks they deserved (are you aware that Princess S has an album called Now Is the Winter of Our Discotheque? You totally should be). Or we could narrate Ms. Germanotta as a much-superior substitute for Katy Perry in the single slot set aside for white pop princesses with retarded-huge hooks, a high school theatre geek vibe writ massive, and media-machined sexual quirks. But none of these is quite right as formal comparisons go. "Eyeliner and cigarettes...this photo of us don't have a price...loving you is cherry pie." It could almost be a Duran Duran song. In fact, it could almost be "Rio": "Cherry ice cream smile...I've seen you on the beach and I've seen you on TV, two of a billion stars, it means so much to me." Funny, that. Funny because the form of the classic Gaga song, "Poker Face" or "Paparazzi" or whatever, is entirely Duran Duran: the way-underplayed verse featuring a tensely constricted affect spooled inside a set of changes anchored by minor chords (and/or sevenths), and then the obliterating major lift, basement to the heavens, pouring all the hooks into the chorus to which the song will eventually give itself entirely. That Gaga periodically dresses like Barbarella only adds to the pool of affinities — but what's finally most interesting is the way that both Gaga and Duran Duran are obsessed with looking and being looked at, with the fraught overlap between the erotic glance and celebrity, and how it carries a promise of violence, how that violence is always part of "pop" even when — especially when — it is disavowed, which is of course exactly what "Paparazzi" is about, as is the entirety of The Fame. Alt album title: Girl On Film.
Posted by jane at January 1, 2010 03:38 AM | TrackBack