jane dark's sugarhigh!

top 25 songs of 2009 in a single entry

25) "Where I Stood," Missy Higgins. And so Chick-Alt, spun off from the Modern Rock radio format to accommodate first chick-alt performers (Alanis, Tori, Sarah) and then an an imagined audience of alt-chick consumers, has come to this: an imitation of Anna Nalick imitating Leona Naess imitating lesser Liz Phair divided by Miss McLachlan. Which is still okay with us, still better than Kate Nash, but really: at what point does the arc of decay call for another Joni Mitchell? Soon, we hope. Soon.

24) "Know Your Enemy," Green Day. If your favorite Green Day song is "Warning," you may just like this one. If you thought that Green Day's politics was ever something other than Capital D Democratic, you will perhaps feel betrayed by the posturing — which is not simply empty but can't even be bothered to pretend to radicality, and is in fact indicative of the same corporate humanism that is the default mode of the pop marketplace. Which is to say, this band could be your president. Remember Dookie? Remember the public option?

23) "Blue Jeans and a Rosary," Kid Rock. Best Elton John song in a couple decades. Full title: "Guess That's Why They Call it the Blue Jeans and a Rosary."

22) "Pony," Far. Gin-u-ine kleine nachtmusik.

21) "American Ride," Toby Keith. Truth be told, we will look back one day in the not-too-distant future and see that Toby Keith stands astride this decade like good ol' colossus, from 2000's "How Do You Like Me Now" and "Country Comes to Town" all the way through this song. We count at least 14 good singles in that span, none of them better than "I Love This Bar" except maybe for "Get Drunk and Be Somebody" or "As Good as I Once Was"; populist drinking songs that Garth Brooks abandoned offer Toby at his bestest. But of course the spiritual core of the oeuvre is the Njal's-Saga-in-a-Ford-truck revenge fantasies — "Beer for My Horses," "The Angry American," etc — to which this song serves as a sort of coda or explanation, laying out the amusement park thrill of riding our high-spirited roller coaster of contempt and hubris, charged with the promise of imminent and justified violence. The genius of this song is to persuade you, via deploying the substitute word as an off-rhyme to open the chorus, to hear the punchline as "I love this American Right, gotta love this American Right." Alt title: "Minority Report."

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.

15) "Solitary Thinkin'," Lee Ann Womack. Aside from the fact of being a remarkable vocalist, Womack is distinguished for how briskly (in the relatively slow time of the genre) she has run the official country life cycle of classic sounding debut, pop crossover, lost audience, return to roots. (Okay, Dolly's already done the whole cycle twice, but she's special). To see the authority of this steel cycle, let's look at the semi-official listings. Here's wikipedia's breakdown of Lee Ann:
Music career
* 2.1 Country music stardom: 1997 — 1999
* 2.2 Pop crossover success & career decline: 2000 — 2004
* 2.3 There's More Where That Came From & hiatus: 2005 — 2007
* 2.4 Return to music: 2008 — present
Now, just for the sake of comparison, here's the other LeAnn:
Music career
* 2.1 1996: Blue
* 2.2 1997–2001: Pop crossover
* 2.3 2002–2004: Popularity decline
* 2.4 2005–2007: Return to country
* 2.5 2008-Present
Notice how Miss Rimes spends seven full years on crossover/decline, while Womack limits it to five? But what's rarest about Womack is how thoroughly she's pulled it off (the jury's still out on Rimes); she'll never hit as pure as "The Fool" again, but Call Me Crazy (released in 2008) is likely her best album. This song is rifted with beautifully-observed moments, as when she calls her ex and just listens to it ring — "a lonesome serenade." This, however, isn't even the album's best song. Hell, it isn't even its best song about hanging out at a bar at closing time and calling your ex.

14) "White Liar," Miranda Lambert. Adjacent to Womack, this comes from another disc, Revolution, that would make the sugarhigh! album charts if such a thing existed — a welcome return from the sophomore disappointment of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, albeit still suffering from an incoherent production scheme or lack thereof. The standout track is non-single "Love Song" (which along with the album's title suggests there was some unspoken contest about generic and clichéd titles), but this song manages to concretize all the album's inconsistencies into a forward-driving tension held together by the invention of the title, and ending with a slick swap of angry for exultant.

13) "Zero," Yeah Yeah Yeahs. If, back in the day of Karen O shouting "as a fuck son you sucked!" over and over, you had to guess whether she would end up eight years later as a reliable altish hitmaker with a feel for the dancefloor, or burbling annoyingly on the twee indie rock soundtrack of a movie with little purpose other than to argue that twee indie rock is too the true sound of the inner child we all deserve — would you have guessed both?

12) "Liztomania," Phoenix. Les Shins (no relation to La Chinoise), with chorus structure by Squeeze.

11) "Do What You Do," Marz feat. Pack and Mumiez. We are pretty sure that our reasonable and intelligent friend Alexander did not really mean to argue that 2009 was the year hip-hop died, despite making it too easy to take him as having done so. We believe that, had he a different venue and word count, he might have made the more reasonable case that hip-hop has so successfully insinuated itself into the genome of global culture that it is finally unclear as of about now what one talks about when one talks about "hip-hop." Gosh: disco is dead too, but people still go to discos in Beirut and Bayreuth and Bay Ridge and when they are there, they doth disco. Similarly, hip-hop. But the consequence of this success has been that hip-hop is less and less identifiable as the Sound of Black America (which hasn't been the main consumer of the form for a while, certainly not during this millennium). Simultaneously, or even dialectically, the main Black American forms of rap and r&b have turned away from the characteristic soundsets of hip-hop: said sounds can no longer signal cultural particularity, even as a seeming. We can't really have a world in which Miley Cyrus, Buraka Som Sistema, and K'naan set it off on the left y'all and set it off right y'all, while at the same time hip-hop still sounds like an underpass of the BQE on a Saturday night. We can however have funky funky car commercials with rodents driving around, which we take to be a shorter and funnier essay than this one about the universalization of the music. Where once were gangstas, now there be hamstas.

10) "Shuttin' Detroit Down" John Rich. On matter of national crisis and national shame, as usual, country shoots first. That doesn't mean one likes the aim (cf. Keith comma Toby), but there's something remarkable about how quick is the draw. In mid-November of 2008, the CEOs of Chrysler and GM arrived in Washington to request bailout money — in private jets. By January, the dwarfier half of Big & Rich had recorded this song. The chord progression's pretty prêt-a-porter, but it's hard not to be captivated by a song that draws its lexicon equally from talk radio (Wall Street vs. Main Street, etc) and from political economy, from whence it conjures with impressive clarity the distance between "the real economy" and finance: "pardon me if I don't shed a tear," runs the leadup to the chorus, "they're selling make-believe, and we don't buy that here." It's a wonder he doesn't mention fictitious capital. And then the chorus:
Cause in the real world they're shuttin' Detroit down
While the bossman takes his bonus pay and jets on outta town
DC's bailin' out them bankers as the farmers auction ground
Yeah while they're livin' it up on Wall Street in the New York City town,
Here in the real world they're shuttin' Detroit down.
...and then it goes into the specifics of retirement accounts! Equally remarkable for its subtlety and strangeness is the transfer that goes on almost unannounced, wherein the "real economy" is equated with the farmer who works the land — a core assumption of the genre, one might say — against the fancies of New York City bankers, but the opposite of Manhattan turns out to be not some agricultural scene, rather Motown. These places turn out to be fully swappable, because they are both the negative of fictitious capital. It's like he totally gets it about where value comes from. I mean really.

9) "Summer Nights," Rascal Flatts. Every few minutes for the last decade, some person writes a review about how "country" is now basically southern rock pretending to be country music. They generally proffer Rascal Flatts as an example. Dear all those persons: you are having a problem with your standpunkt. Why would you not simply point out that southern rock was just basically country pretending to be rock music? Meanwhile, Rascal Flatts is no closer to Daughtry than Loretta Lynn was to Gene Chandler.

8) "Last Call," Lee Ann Womack. See previous entry, #15. This one's even better.

7) "Bulletproof," La Roux. More to come on La Roux. Obviously they sound sort of like Yaz but with better bass lines. Digressively: when was it that white American people first saw that the bass could be a lead instrument? We suspect it was during the good part of that movie Stop Making Sense — you know, the part with Tom Tom Club.

6) "Tik Tok," Ke$ha. Something tells us her lip gloss be poppin. Kesha's (and Lil Mama's) producer Dr. Luke had another good year, having also worked on "My Life Would Suck Without You," Flo Rida's "Right Round," and others (though we must admit, the best Luke songs — such as this one — often require the assistance of boy genius Benny Blanco). Luke seems to have worked more or less alone, however, on sugarhigh! #5 song of the year. Teaser!

5) "Party in the USA," Miley Cyrus. A couple years back, sugarhigh! promised that Miley Cyrus would surely, sooner or later, succeed in buying a terrific song (but that in the meantime her position in the country arena had already been taken by the little-known Taylor Swift). And so, finally, she has. As mentioned earlier, this is not the first contribution to the countdown by producer/writer Doctor Luke, an American carefully trained in the ways of Swedish songcraft a la Max Martin, which is to say, hip-hop inflected synthpop for 14-year olds, a/k/a "the sound of the last 13 years since Robyn Is Here."

But this tradition and crew are not the only indications of the song's profoundly ambivalent relation to hip-hop. It's hard, no, impossible to enjoy Miley's disavowal of Jay-Z, who appears in the original lyric as the auteur of "my song." Britney plays the same role in the second verse, which Miley has seemed fine with; how could she not, given Britney's role in the Cheiron story? But Miley would claim not to have ever heard a Jay-Z song (really? really?) and shortly take to replacing "Jay-Z" with "Michael" in live performance. Like Michael the song, already a curious melange, turned white. Whatever, girl. It's a fab track, yeay you, and you are condemned to performing "Can I Get A..." as an encore for all of 2011.

Regardless, no amount of disavowal can efface the song's telltale heart. The song begins with a bright, superclean electric guitar loop with a bounce beat underneath, as Miley flies into LAX for a party, and there she is rolling through the streets singing "Welcome to the land of fame-excess." We are 18 seconds in, and a male backup singer punctuates her line with a "whoa!" It's hard to think of a single-syllable word as having a particular inflection, but it does — and if you want to hear the exact same inflection, you should listen to the "hey" that punctuates Nelly's "Ride Wit Me." It first comes rather at the 19 second mark, male backup singers punctuating the phrase "oh why do I live this way?" That song, you will recall, begins with a bright, superclean electric guitar loop with a bounce beat underneath, and involves driving around various places. And when Nelly flies into town for a party, it's in New York. Totally different.

Well, so what? The structure of a hit song is based extensively on the structure of another hit song; neither big news nor crime. And it does so while simultaneously avowing/disavowing the theft (through the displacement of Nelly onto Jay-Z, and then the banishing of same); this is interesting if you are at all like us, but scarcely front page news. If anything, it's a nice footnote for Eric Lott. But it is perhaps a useful reminder of something important about 2009, which is what "post-racial" really meant. It certainly didn't mean that structural, systemic and overt racial discrimination had come to an end — unless one ignores all data except for the outcome of a presidential election, which we admit was a popular undertaking. Black people, and other people of color, still had to bear the burden. The phrase meant that the US was post-racial for white people (to be more specific, as this must seem obvious to many, it meant that the US was post-racial for Miley's core audience). The debt for centuries of theft was finally put paid, rendered invisible. Or so was devoutly hoped, and pretended — a pretense with the power of reality.

The concept doesn't mean that Nelly is now free of any markings, but rather that Miley is, in that sense of free. This is the politics of the "death of hip-hop" — it survives but beyond politics, without the power to signal difference, marginalization, race. Or to phrase things anther way: we are post-racial to the extent that an incredibly elaborate set of determinations has got us to the place where a song can be at once entirely dipped in the language of hip-hop and come out of the river shining of country grammar.

4) "Show Me Love (live)," Robyn. Strictly speaking, this song is at least a dozen years old, and was already a hit in the US, peaking at number seven. In its original form it bears almost the full lineage of modern Swedish pop: produced by Cheiron Studios founder Denniz Pop and his protegé Max Martin, it was written by Martin and Robyn herself, then about 17, who would be the proof of concept for arguably the most successful pseudogenre in history (especially if one uses the metric of biggest opening sales figures, where it dominates the category). Its lyrics could at times be spoken by the genre itself to its planned audience, announcing its global intentions and making its demands: "this love I got for you could take me round the world — now show me love." In short, "Show Me Love" is teenpop's DNA and battlecry both.

For all that, Robyn managed to fall into a narrative even deeper than teenpop: little girl lost a l'industrie. Her teendom timed out; purgatory followed. Failed at old sound, failed with new sound, dropped from primal teenpop label Jive in 2004. Started own label to release peculiar sweet-tart electro, started hanging out with Swedish hipster acts like Teddybears and Kleerup, recorded EP, and in 2007 got a Universal distribution deal for full-length Robyn, which would easily make the sugarhigh! Top 10 albums of the decade. It's like Bjork for music lovers. Oh snap.

What then to do about those old hits, now as old as their target audience had been? Robyn is not the first to confront this problem, though precious few return from child stardom to be thrilling artists as adults. And precious fewer take the aesthetics of youth as an explicit problem to be worked through, rather than rejected (we see that all the time, cf. Vanilla Ice's metal phase). Adult hipster Robyn is that rare bird, an intentional sublation of herself — rescuing what remained charged, and returning it as something deeply different, antagonistic exactly insofar as the earlier material has been preserved. This is a narrative of artistic development itself, of course, though rarely is it played out so clearly in a single artist. And this is what's striking about Robyn, this and the songs.

So it's only right that in performance starting with the recent tour (sugarhigh! concert of the year 2008) Robyn would return to "Show Me Love," not as a joke and not as a concession to her audience, which doesn't actually require that of her. But return to it changed, as if stripped clean by the sandstorm of a dozen years: just a minimalist series videogame series of bleeps with a hint of steel drum to the intonation, and an unadorned direct vocal style — all of which renders the song "more serious," sure, but also brings forward without apology the brilliance of the writing, the nuanced torque which interlocks the verse and chorus: an arrangement that shows the song doesn't need an arrangement, doesn't need orchestration and dance and etc, that it is a beautiful and delicate love song after all, that it was always the real it was faking, and thusly do the years yawn and collapse.

There are several live recordings of reasonable character — though the best of them, on AOL Sessions, is not always available. A hi-rez version was finally included on the U.K. version of Robyn last year; Amazon actually blocks US residents from downloading it, even if you'll pay! Friend-of-the-blog Rob White downloaded it for us, at cost of 99 pence, and sent it along. That was in early 2009, hence the song's appearance here.

3) "Battlefield," Jordin Sparks. Perhaps its deadening to try to show rigorously how a song pulls of its non-rigorous effects, but this song sure does a lot of heavy lifting in a compact space, and the trick it uses its pretty neat. Here "heavy lifting" is twice-meant: in the three minutes of main action, there are an implausible number of lifts. This is achieved largely within the confines of verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus; indeed, it's exactly because the song offers itself as the most familiar version of American Song Form, the one we know in our marrow, that it's hard at first to notice its eccentricities, and for the same reason its variations are so so effective.

The first variation is the length the prechorus, the passage that repeats itself as each verse leads into the chorus. The prechorus is longer than the uneven quatrain it follows, and in fact has two parts, lifting first from the verse at Both hands tied behind my back for nothing... and then again at I never meant to start a war — so the ascent to Why does love always feel like a battlefield, a battlefield, a battlefield? (x 2) is actually the third ratcheting-up of melodic intensity. So: four melodic parts, in a systematic climb. That's not including the quatrain of bridge in its familiar spot in place of the third verse, ("We could pretend that we are friends tonight...").

This fills the three minutes before codas and fade. Well, not quite, and that's the drama part. There is yet another part packed in there, an extension of the second and third choruses; call it the postchorus. It's brief, but it allows yet another lift, queued by a dramatic shift to a capella and an obvious multiplying of the vocal. Four climbs while maintaining the lineaments of the American Song Form is really extraordinary , and gives the song its powerful sense of surfeit, which is itself in tension with the martially regulated beat that always registers a little weird in love songs anyway (cf. Alicia Keys, "No One," itself a rendition of Whitney's "Your Love Is My Love"). The rhythm and the basic shape say control, structure, limits; the sheer number of ascents and the surplus of hooks signal excess, profligacy, unconstraint.

Of course this wouldn't matter so much if they weren't good hooks, but they are, and the songwriters (a combine called "The Runaways" plus the OneRepublic frontman) must have known it; you don't waste that many hooks unless you know the song is a killer. And of course it wants marking that the postchorus, the moment of excess that marks and makes the song, is the only moment Sparks throws down, the song's moment of truth which obliterates the apologetic and regretful disavowal of remainder: better go and get your armor.

As if anything could stand against a song with enough hooks to batter down all Chinese walls.

2) "Talking Hotel Arbat Blues," Handsome Furs. It would be Number One with a bullet if this list were for Clash ripoffs — or really Joe Strummer circa Trash City with a little less swing and a little more taut clarity: the band, after all, is two people (the husband on leave from Wolf Parade) and the sound is pretty much all scaffold and no building.

But the story concerns a building, or a few. Sugarhigh! caught the song for the first time at the end of this short film (which reminds us that in some regard the finest musical moment of the Fall of Occupations was this one, not for the song but for its performance: the mind boggles at such revolutionary cuteness, enough to make one want to live).

So it is something like contingency that sends the song this high on the countdown, as it just happens to turn its attentions to the significant activities of the year. It takes five seconds: eight quick kicks with accompanying claps, and then we were standing in the center of the occupation. OMG, so were we! And then it says, caught between the ground and the great gray sky. If you were there on November 20, it's just sort of weird — the sibylline accuracy.

This all serves as a salutary reminder that in the Top 25, context is the 26th tune, and can make all the difference. But it can't make a song out of nothing, and "Arbat Blues" makes the most of its formal clarity to reach after rhetorical simplicity as well: I don't know but I've been told, every little thing's been bought and sold, the chorus repeats and repeats.

It's stupid and true just like a pop song should be, and it's our stupid and true, and while we're waiting around for the next Coup record, we'll take it. Loud, please.

1) "I'm Not Your Toy," La Roux. So melodies this good come along a lot less than once a year, which doesn't entirely get at what's so compelling about the song (though it goes a long way).

There's something seductive about how easily it wears its borrowed clothes, like the Oscar Wilde reference that Chryssie Hynde quoted long ago but which returns here changed, the scene moved from a gutter to a rooftop, the stars now just sky — the distances are a bit closer, but the chasm no less grand. Indeed, the opening simile is supernally romantic: "love, love is like a stubborn youth that you'd rather just deny." But it doesn't overplay the gesture: one doesn't quite notice the song's lace shirtcuffs at first, peeking out from beneath its angular jacket.

Meanwhile the skipping electropop track contrives any number of dry sounds without sounding the least bit dry overall; indeed, it seems like a sort of experiment in how much romantic effulgence one can suggest in such spare quarters.

The voice is the special effect, finally: for all of the music's plonking itself down in generic (albeit superb) Eighties British synthpop with indications tilting toward Yazoo, Elly Jackson has little of Alison Moyet's belt. It's perhaps even a little vexatious how assertively she sounds like Jimmy Somerville of Bronski Beat and Communards, one of the divine voices of the Eighties, great enough that he eventually had to challenge himself with Sylvester covers. There's something...off...about a woman capturing male falsetto, even when the woman has committed herself to an androgynous Tilda Swinton-plays-Tin Tin kind of look. It lacks the abandonment, the distortion and simulation — finally, Jackson's quite remarkable voice can't lay claim to the queer pathos of Somerville, of "Smalltown Boy" or "Don't Leave Me This Way."

But then, what did it mean for Somerville to cover that song, bringing forth the longstanding gay iconicity of Diana Ross? It may be that La Roux stands on the far side of that precise act of revelation — not restraightening it, but trying to recapture the particular and fierce vulnerability of late disco. For beneath the bubbly motion of the song and beyond its historical fillips is a kind of vulnerability that has few points of comparison in the current pop landscape, but seems exactly right for the moment: humanly, economically, politically. New Romanticism and queer pathos as precarité you can dance to, that's it. But it is not a maudlin vulnerability, puddling on the floor. Something like a warning, a broken rooftop dance party in preparation for a struggle to come. This year's gonna be like that. Better go and get your armor.

Posted by jane at January 9, 2010 12:59 AM | TrackBack