jane dark's sugarhigh!

closure

High school student by day, hijacker by night.

"His stated intent was to hijack the airplane and commit suicide," said George Bolds, an FBI spokesman in Memphis, Tennessee. "He did indicate he intended to die in Louisiana. It appears he had a ticket to Louisiana." [...] The teen wanted to crash the plane into a Hannah Montana concert in Lafayette, Louisiana, two CNN television affiliates in Nashville, WSMV and WTVF, reported, citing unnamed sources...

historical process, how it works

Ze more Michael Jackson seems supair-crazie, ze more we talk about what a jeanyoose zat Quincy Jones ees.

even more albums of the year: five final paragaphs

If one were mandated to name a country album of the year, it would likely be Taylor Swift, but not without competition from, for example, Keith Urban's quite lovely if badly-titled Love, Pain & the Whole Crazy Thing, which was on and off and not quite crazy enough, but had a slew of tremendous songs, including "Won't Let You Down," "Faster Car," "Raise the Roof," and the outsized "Stupid Boy," which sometimes seems to be the singer talking to himself, sometimes to the ex of his paramour, which is to say that the song is haunted by the specter of Tom Cruise, to whom the song's title could not possibly do justice.

Kelly Willis has sort of become the country's Jennifer Jason Leigh, who didn't win the Oscar when she shoulda, and has since wandered or been shouldered ever closer to the margins of the genre, of success, and of artistic viability — oscillating between brittle recapitulations and aimless experiments. Willis could've been a platinum Grammy factory in '93 or '99 and has drifted ever since; this year, with Translated From Love, she has has come up against the shoals of something sweetly eccentric and alluring and not that far from the American songbook's desolation row. The opener, "Nobody Wants to go to the Moon Anymore" is a little rockabilly and a lot Tin Pan Alley and much of the remainder — almost all of it quite a few paces slower — keeps its Tin ear. These are songs that deepen with frequent listening and cut more sharply late at night, especially the title track, "The More That I'm Around You," and the cruelly clear "Stone's Throw Away," arguably the prettiest and saddest song of the year.

But in some strange way, the album of the year was Google. We don't mean that at all, but we do mean something. The only artist who could compete with M.I.A. this year was Lil Wayne, and you could sort of squint and pretend he had an album this year, but that's dubious and even if it weren't, Da Drought 3 is no album of the year. All of this shows exactly how weak the concept of album has become; if you've been following the adventures of Dwayne Michael Carter, Jr., you know that he's reveling in the album form's current volatility, which makes him seem somehow heroically don't-give-a-fuck in much the way that the the early days of Napster made Metallica and Dre look like narcs with saurian brains the size of cashews. Wayne's 2007 output of mix tapes, fake leaks, real leaks, radio drops, guest 16s and remixes may stabilize in '08, but that might be too bad, since the discrete moment-by-moment mode seems to allow his talents a chaotic creativity that trad albums tamp down. It's not just a production model, it's a way of thinking, a way of conceiving of one's art. And for Wayne at least, it's a better way.

It nonetheless begs what is basically a software question: shouldn't there be some program with which you can essentially scour the digiverse via some Boolean headhunting (Lil Wayne AND >100sec AND >192kbps AND 2007 BUT NOT Kanye: 70 minutes) and get all such tracks bundled together on your hard-drive an hour or two later? There sort of is. Seeqpod is not the sort of warez that survives, being balky and having limited, inexact targetability and, most significantly, sharing with imeem the fatal flaw of giving you only a stream. The days of every pop music listener having a 24/7 fast pipe are still too far off, and such streaming platforms are little more than fairly customizable radio stations that are neither as stable nor accessible as old-fashioned broadcast, and make the labels perfectly happy. No, we're talking about an aggregator program with fine-carving finesse that actually produces, oh, let's just call them "bundles," that you can play from a hard drive, a iPod, even burn to disc. This is probably the best near-future for the album.

Given that an iTunes Store search and a few clicks is the smoothest current bundling method, it does seem a bit silly that they shouldn't become the label (wth Jay-Z rumored at the head). But the genie isn't going back in the bottle, and paying Apple by the track for your bundle just makes you seem like a barney. The software closest to doing the superaggregating work of scouring the whole world of hard drives is obviously Google; they say they're not a content company, but so does Pirate's Bay. You could be listening to a GoogleBundle of Lil Wayne, accribitzed via a few keystrokes, within six months if Google so desired; it's hard to imagine this won't be explored. But it won't be explored by Google, since they won't find a business model that fast. So someone else will using similar tech, and then they'll be the new record label, and finally those'll be the new records for a little while.

another album of the year...and not: five-paragraph essay

One always wishes to be generous. So we will make a generous assumption about the gushing over Miranda Lambert's 2007 album, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, by various of our finest critics and the Village Voice year-end poll in general. We will assume these are apologetic makeup votes for having missed the yacht on Lambert's superb, delightful 2005 record Kerosene, which is to Crazy Ex-Girlfriend as Appetite for Destruction is to Use Your Illusion II. So it goes: a blown call a couple years ago, and a little guilty retroactive dap.

It's a little hard to maintain that generosity of spirit, given further information: most tellingly, the way Lambert's appearance on all these '07 year-enders tends to hold the place of country music in general. The Voice poll is exemplary: all those voters, all that eclectic and well-informed taste, and Lambert's is the only country album to make the long list (no, the Krauss/Plant album doesn't qualify, thanks). That's not a story about Lambert so much as about the limits of music critics, and the kinds of value judgments that everyone not-so-secretly agrees on.

The critical effusion in re the entirely decent Crazy Ex might be a makeup call, but it's also evidence that said critics are neither thoughtful nor informed about the genre — that they don't fashion their jobs description to include keeping up with an American music which features an almost identical popularity to hiphop, according to SoundScan. Theres a technical name for this practice of deciding before hearing: one might call it "pre-judging," or, in common parlance, prejudice. At least Jody Rosen's heard of Brad Paisley.

Here's a thought problem. What if we were to devise a category and limit it to country albums by women? Or even just by blond women — no, wait, let's limit it to blond women who write most of their own material, got started as teens, and released a country album in 2007? Even if we narrow the aperture down to that very tiny category, Miranda Lambert is in a tough fight for runner-up, with Kelly Pickler. And neither of them is particularly close to Taylor Swift, whose debut album Taylor Swift isn't as good as Kerosene (which might be a once-in-a-decade disc), but is a whole lot better than this year's models, with three songs that could've made the top singles list except that one of them made last year's and got a lengthy writeup about the next generation.

Which is to say: Swift's been around, and all over the radio long enough that music critics should be all over her. Except they don't hear that frequency. One fears they'll be playing catchup again, or taking notice of her now that she's covering Rihanna and Beyonce in concert, which will somehow do more to establish her talent and credibility and general fun-to-listen-to-ness than any number of terrific country singles could do. And so they will end up voting for her next album by way of apology, while missing out on any number of popular and beloved albums of 2009 that also happen to be aces all the way down. Which will turn out to be a sort of embarrassment for said critics, just like this year's Lambert votes.

more albums of the year

M.I.A.'s album and vibe had such a mindshare among our pals that more than one person suggested to us that they heard it underneath Blackout, especially in the song "Toy Soldier." One could certainly imagine that as an an Arular title, though the track sounded far more like Betty Boo, and Britney could do a lot worse. Either way it's a fine song, one of five or six on the darkly rollicking gallop, ending with the fine r'n'b slogroove "Why Should I Be Sad?"; whoever sings those little Princesque asides ("Britney let's go," "hey baby, what's your name?") is sort of a genius. Miss American Dream herself has a narrow but weirdly fascinating vocal talent: a sort of aggravated coo that slips as easily into talk as song. It's a style perfectly confabulated for an album whose emotional content is I fucking hate K-Fed and the paparazzi, all of whom I feel responsible for. Except that the style has more or less been with her from the jumpoff — oh baby baby how was I supposed to know that something wasn't right here? — a passive-aggressive purr so extreme it tilts immediately into sado-masochism. As a style, it's better suited to the production gifts of Monsieurs Bloodshy & Avant than to that of Señor Danja; he makes her sound too cold. Justin actually does a better job with such chilled precision, while Christina's vocal style is hot (but not le jazz hot, please), and Fergie has herself a louche cool. Whichever way, it's interesting to see the Western world's great producers and its former Mouseketeers circling each other looking for a fit, a hit, a meeting of the minds. This has been the core activity of pop music for almost a decade now, it's going away less than you think, and when things break right, you want a piece of it.

This should have been the year when hyphy took over; instead it couldn't find a direction. This allowed certain facts to come clear — most notably, that hyphy doesn't quite have the sudden explosion of talents that often appears around such energetic new movements. There are quite a few entrancing microphone stylists beyond E-40 but, alas, no genius producers beyond RickRock, and that sets limits on how far things can go. RR can get hectic or roll slow, and he finally delivered the Federation's album, Whateva, which suffered from incoherence and skits but still had some of the best loops and hooks hip-hop could come up with this year, including the perplexing "From the Bay," which is about something or other or it isn't about anything but what the title sez, but has one of the few tracks to have the stones to model itself on "Ante Up."

Our local music clerk was discussing Tupac's productivity of late: "once you're dead, you can really shut out the bullshit and focus more on the music." Elliot Smith is dead, and Neil Young hasn't done much of interest in about 18 years, and both released great records this year. New Moon tosses up 24 unreleased tracks recorded between 1994-97, most of which are appealing and a couple of which are beyond bittersweet: "See You Later" and "All Cleaned Out." "Got a choke chain," begins the former, instantly recalling "Rose Parade" — but the rhyme comes quicker. "Got a choke chain, made out of Night Train," and that's a nine syllable couplet snapping back on you quickly and painfully as the aforementioned choke chain, so that later when he slows things down, it's all the more attenuated: "See you later...see you later...if I see you at all."

Meanwhile, Neil Young released a set from some joint in Toronto, Live at Massey Hall 1971, and seriously, pretty much any 68 minutes he recorded between 1969-75 could be released now and be an album of the year. In this case it's an acoustic set and he strums "Cowgirl in the Sand" down to about four-plus minutes and it seems just right, which is some kind of magic trick. Remember when he was going to release, like, a 100-cd set from his crazy collection of masters and you started setting a few scrubby bills aside every month like a Christmas account so you could gaffle the barn-sized box when it came out, you waited and you saved, and then the months became years and you spent the Neil's Fucking Archives Stash on three and a half hours of cocaine, and that was maybe six years ago? Meanwhile we're still waiting.

In the last 18 years, most of Neil Young's best music has been made by Uncle Tupelo and its offshoots — less so Tweedy's Wilco and more so Jay Farrar, under his own flag and that of Son Volt. So it's fascinating that The Search, Son Volt's best album since their debut, spends the least time yet in Young country. It even visits Williamsburg, for the (gulp) haunting "L Train," which is almost as violet-mooded as "Methamphetamine," the song that precedes it. These two lulling tragedies answer the early ravers, "The PIcture," and "Action," which ends somewhere closer to Road Warrior territory: "Gasoline junkies, feral diesel fiends, looking for action on the mercy wide road." Seriously, if someone from Uncle T has to be publishing books of poetry, maybe we could arrange a little switch.

album of the year: the five-paragraph essay

Kala is not the album of the year because it has three great songs (“Bamboo Banga,” “Bird Flu,” “Paper Planes”) and at least three very good ones (“Hussel,” “XR2,” “World Town”). Neither is it album of the year because it’s more interesting than the sum of its parts, a more body’n’mind moving listen if one goes straight through, an album as the concept endures (weakly, it seems). Those facts have something to do with it — but Kala is the album of the year because it is the soundtrack of a world turned upside down.

For decades, “world music” has basically been reggae.* Not in the sense of accent on the three, but as a structure of feeling: songs of freedom punctuated by melancholy domestic plaints, built on a foundation of rhythm guitar and percussive lilt, with a sense of patient endurance and occasional exhortation. A liberal-progressive politics of hope with a beat you can nod along to, convivial both to doobie and dinner party. That in fact describes the other current hero of world music, Manu Chao; you’ll notice that his international breakthrough, Proxima Estacion: Esperanza, is practically named “Politics of Hope.” Manu Chao is excellent, and he is also reggae — sometimes in fact, and always in feeling. He released an album this year with stacks of cred and critical air support and it tanked. And for all its particular failings and delights, it tanked because it required the fantasy of reggae: that the world out there is going to love us into changing; is going to be stalwart and righteous til we get it; that we’re moving forward together, especially if we’re cool and progressive and down; that a better world is not only possible but is seven hugs and four joints away. This was never true; the “world music” we liked sure helped us pretend it was anyway. No more. At a minimum we need a new fantasy, though we suspect here that we’re getting a little closer to the real. The world fucking wants us dead.

Kala might be thought of as an attempt to destroy the softimism of world music™. Hands up guns out — represent now world town. The album moves past the bubbly syncretism of Arular; goes looking for beat and a form and a hook for the enraged new world and finds a proliferation of each, which is its wonder. Listening to “Bird Flu,” one has to suspect Maya’s been reading (or reading about) Monster at Our Door, the Mike Davis conjecture about the eventual arrival of deadly H5N1 influenza at America’s doorstep. It’s the exact kind of thing that Brooklyn sharpies who are also expats twisted on geo-social hard times like to read on trans-oceanic flights. You listen to the nervous squawks and fearsome, irresistible clatter of the track and you think, that’s not a song, that’s a revenge fantasy. And quite brilliantly, it locates blowback not in the romantic figure of some lone terrorist, but in global structure itself: terror as an inevitable outcome of evil voodoo poured relentlessly into the world-system. In Davis’s account, bird flu when it arrives won’t be an exotic catastrophe we couldn’t predict, but America’s bad faith returned to it after a mutating tour of the planet of slums, the world-ghetto. Funny thing is, that describes Kala exactly.

After all, the album opens not in the depths of some necrojungle around the horizon, but on Route 128 when it's dark outside, Roadrunner Roadrunner! That’s not just the beginning, it’s also the end. Roadrunner has her radio ooonnnnn, and the beat is beaming in from a Tamil movie soundtrack. Roadrunner is listening to M.I.A. and she’s back with a bamboo banger; she’s knocking on the doors of your Hummer Hummer. The song, and its album, have no time for your liberal-progressive pot-smoking ass, no space for your medicinal groove, no vision of freedom and no politics of hope. It is the bad faith of the U.S.A. returned to it after circling the globe, and that is what world music is now, and that is what M.I.A. has to say to you.

The album is certainly a bit resistant, even pleasurably recalcitrant: a pop challenge that finally wants to live under your skin. The question is, what alien life can it smuggle in there. M.I.A.’s döppelganger remains Neneh Cherry, she of the multi-ethnic world-ghetto avant-pop, flying hiphop as a flag of convenience. The first difference is time: Neneh and Maya are poised exactly on opposite sides of the Great Rest, 1989-2001, that brief one-power fantasia while the structure of global imperial conflict shifted from “Cold War” to the current conjuncture. This is not to conflate M.I.A. too easily with “terrorism”; this would be foolish and casual, merely the millionth desperate equation of cultural commodity with political action (if there is a hope remaining in M.I.A.’s world music, it is exactly the hope surviving in some part of her audience that culture can still have political force). But by the same token, it would be foolish and casual to find such gestures merely empty; to imagine that an artist who has had exposure to actually existing terrorism (here we recall that the Tamil Tigers invented suicide bombing) means nothing by raising its spectre, or means the same thing as someone without such experiences. To suppose such a thing is little more than a strategy of containment, as if the thrust of history itself could be parried because "Galang" was in a Honda commercial. That's a way of trying not to know something; Kala is a way of trying to know. One may of course decide for oneself that if it’s got a good beat and you can dance to it, it can’t be the sound of the world turned upside down; this is finally to decide that pleasure must be empty by definition. That ain't music's problem, it's yours.

* Our man Alexander notes rightly that the distinction between conventional world music and Maya's was sketched judiciously in this article; we mean to add only some remarks on the historical substance of the shift, and the particularities of political affect that underwrite it — in short, to grasp something about specific conditions that the music is after.

pop07: the year in singles

Sugarhigh! top 40 singles of 2007, in reverse order. We assure you, "pop07" has no relation to "Popo Zao." Some explanatory information at bottom.

40) Blue Magic, Jay-Z feat. Pharrell. "Niggas wanna bring the Eighties back, it’s okay with me that’s where they made me at.”
39) Give It Up, Twista feat. Pharrell
38) Lip Gloss (Remix ), Lil Mama feat. Pusha T. Advice to DJs: set this up with “Studio Hair Gel,” by Barcelona.
37) No One, Alicia Keys. Welcome back, Alicia, we missed you. But not very much. Mostly we missed Whitney Houston, so much so that we will pay you to reproduce her last great song with a few cosmetic changes.
36) Give It To Me, Timbaland feat. Nelly Furtado & Justin Timberlake. Since around "Same Ol' G," listening to the best Timbaland songs has created the effect that you were suddenly hearing better — like putting on your glasses after walking around the city without'em for a week. In this sense, pace "Amazing Grace," it is a religious experience.
35) Tambourine, Eve feat. Swizz Beatz. See note here.
34) A Little More You, Little Big Town. You'll be hearing this name again.
33) Alamo, Hal Ketchum. Hearing this song for the first time, performed by the writer (Gary Burr) rather than the mild Mr. Ketchum, was the musical high point of the year for sugarhigh! We actually exclaimed, sitting at the bar of the Bluebird, “I love songwriting!” when he hit the bridge.
32) Things That Never Cross A Man's Mind, Kelly Pickler
31) Rehab (Remix), Amy Winehouse feat. Jay-Z. “My hero’n flows, more lethal than Marilyn’s nose.” If anyone really understands this, please email janedark [at] janedark [dot] com.

30) D.A.N.C.E (MSTRKRFT Remix), Justice. Justice: part of the elaborate global mechanism, often using parallax, for measuring the greatness of Daft Punk. Latest results: really fucking great.
29) Men Buy The Drinks (Girls Call The Shots), Steve Holy. Lyrics are not the leading reasons to dwell in country music (that would be the fact that the best vocalists, and most deft melodists still working in versions of the American songform, go to ground in Nashville). Indeed, the lyrics are often the reason people stay away, perhaps out of distaste for the home’n’hearth Christian nationalism, xenophobia, and gender smackdowns. In this, country mirrors hip-hop, the other indigenous American musical form still with a pulse — though hip-hop, with characteristic incisiveness, has exchanged nationalism for violence + conspicuous consumption as if there was an equals sign between them, which there is. But another vexation with country lyrics is their famed cleverness: if you don’t like sledgehammer puns based around clichés and stock phrases, there will be blood. But if you have it in your heart to find these moves occasionally charming, you will be repaid on the radio. Beyond the title, this song starts in the Garden with Eve, who wouldn’t cha know it, “was wearing one of those low-cut leaves.” Ouch.
28) Hillbilly Deluxe, Brooks & Dunn. Their first pop-charting single was country’s follow-up to “Achy Breaky Heart,” which makes it the exact same age as Hannah Montana. It made sugarhigh!’s year-end list too, which might be some kind record.
27) Famous In A Small Town, Miranda Lambert. A pendant to Gossip Girl, the year’s best dramatic television show. See also forthcoming note on albums.
26) Takin' Off This Pain, Ashton Shepherd. You know what’s fascinating about “Jackie Blue,” by the Ozark Mountain Daredevils? Like many songs, it has two parts, A and B. A comes first, of course, and is all minor-seventhy and unresolved; B shifts to a major key, with an incredibly satisfying resolve to the tonic. Except that B has different lyrics every time, while A has a repeating lyric when it comes around. The structure of the words tells our brain that A is the chorus, B the verse; the music and our expectations of song structure tell us the exact opposite. And this is never mentioned, or settled. This is why the song is so tremendously haunting. “Takin’ Off This Pain” just starts with the chorus, which is smart enough, because the first line kills.
25) Wrapped, George Strait. See note here. See also forthcoming note on albums.
24) Every Mile A Memory, Dierks Bentley
23) White Kids Aren't Hyphy, MC Lars
22) Fast Like A Nascar, Kafani feat. Keak Da Sneak. See forthcoming note on albums re The Federation.
21) Big Girls Don't Cry, Fergie. A good year for “big girls” on the chart. You wouldn’t really have picked Fergie to make an oblique companion piece to “To Sir With Love,” replacing crayons and pearls with jacks and Uno cards. Stacey Ferguson now has more good singles than The Strokes. Or Kanye.

20) Lean Like A Cholo, Down AKA Kilo. So lean back, lean back.
19) Fall, Clay Walker
18) Joyride, Jennifer Hanson. Not as good as “Joyride” by Roxette, a quality this tune shares wif all but about 30 songs in history.
17) More Than A Memory, Garth Brooks. FOS Carla: “It's an Elton John song! But it needs Elton John.” We half-agree; Garth’s secret has always been the melancholic crypto-piano ballad, but he has his own mastery. Nobody goes all tacit and doubles the vocals for a phrase better than Garth. He’s shameless. Indeed, this tune reminds us of the Brooks oeuvre’s zenith, “Shameless” — which was written by that Long Island Elton John, name of Billy Joel. What goes around goes around (interlude).
16) Bleed It Out, Linkin Park. As Local H once said, all the kids are right.
15) Gotta Work, Amerie. See note here.
14) Love You, Jack Ingram. Year’s best Jack Ingram.
13) Isn't That Everything, Danielle Peck. Year’s best Sara Evans.
12) Rockstar, Nickelback. This song, basically a sequel to Dr. Hook’s “Cover of the Rolling Stone,” is probably about the same bpm as “How You Remind Me,” but — like every Nickelback single since the debut — it feels a whole lot slower. This is probably because you can hear every move, every rhyme, every change coming with thudding certainty, and you just lay back in the cut waiting for it to go down. This leads us to the perhaps-obvious conclusion that the experienced speed of songs is in part an effect not of their rhythm but their novelty, which is perhaps useful for grasping the connection between speed and novelty in the long 20th century of railroads and modernism. I’ll have the quesadilla.
11) Big Girl (You Are Beautiful), Mika. Big boys are from Mars. Big girls are from Mercury.

10) Tennessee, The Wreckers
09) I Feel Like Dying, Lil' Wayne. Remember how Q-Tip was always swearing he was the abstract rapper, abstract poet, et cetera? It didn’t make all that much sense, because leaving your wallet in El Segundo was concrete like Jurassic 5.
08) Roosterspur Bridge, Tori Amos. The best auto-pastiche of the year. Not to be sneezed at: auto-pastiche is one of the main genres of popular music. It’s all Nickelback has, and they’re pretty good. But not as good as Tori.
07) Over It, Katharine McPhee. As Alexander pointed out, JoJo’s “Too Little Too Late” with the notes in different places. Which is true, on the so-what tip.
06) I'm With The Band, Little Big Town. See note here.
05) What Goes Around.../...Comes Around (Interlude), Justin Timberlake. JT has a certain kind of song, of which this is the best yet, that sounds like a million dollars on a crying jag, as seen through the impossibly glossy black of a plasma screen, pivoting across a pyramid of Quaaludes from self-indulgent misery to a killing spree, and you sort of can’t imagine how come every pop song doesn’t sound exactly like this, except no one else comes even close to the JT vibe, which is saying something.
04) Our Song, Taylor Swift. See note here.
03) Crank That, Soulja Boy Tell'em. Snap music’s follow-up to “Lean Wit It, Rock Wit It” and “Do It To It” was the world’s follow-up to the Macarena and the Achy Breaky. Blame it not on the sunshine nor the moonlight, neither the good times. We are begging you, kind sirs and madams, to blame it on the boogie.
02) Watching Airplanes, Gary Allan
01) Piece Of Me, Britney Spears. Least explicable thing in this song of endless thrills is her decision to pronounce the word “derriere” in that St. Louis vernacular tone we know so well from Chingy and Nelly: dairy-urr. An unaccountable wigger moment, lyrically spliced up against the word “Philipines,” it suggests a transnational, transracial nowhere which is nonetheless organized by visions of Britney’s ass, a piece of which we apparently want. See note here.

A note on measure: unlike our film listing, which includes all first run movies seen in the theater, pop07 includes only songs we've loved at least a little. The results were tabulated by adding all the numbers from various iTunes displays and judiciously accounting for a minimum of in-dash listening; and then applying a proprietary algorithm which balances against the track's release date over the span of the year, taking into account the roll-off curve called "getting tired of a song." This method remains imperfect in much the ways that a subjective tabulation might (it has a slight skew for songs released late enough that their roll-off would happen in 2008), but is our best approach to objective recording.

A note on eligibility: historically, if a single makes the sugarhigh! list, the disc from which it's drawn is prohibited from that year's album list, and vice versa. This idiosyncrasy, in addition to broadening the field, was designed to protect the sense of singularity which is a crucial quality of songs on the singles list, and of our experience of them. However, this is a sort of watershed year. Because we are slowly abandoning the album list altogether (in part because the world is abandoning the album form, in part because it doesn't express much about our listening practices, and in part because we've opted out of the year end polls), the distinction makes less sense; it is preserved to the extent that, for example, we did listen to M.I.A.'s disc as an album. However, in reducing the album list to a unified prose note (forthcoming), we've mentioned therein the strength of certain albums which contributed singles to this list.

more teaser, less firecat

As much as we love Bobby Christgau and believe him to be not just decent but heroic, Latifah's had it up there with "democratic vitality." We assume he is not referring to any recent candidate's debates, and means something about the energetic breadth of the year's music. We find ourselves curious as to what traits distinguish this empirical phenomenon as "democratic vitality," rather than, say, "the current regime of niche marketing."

And voting Kala numero uno at the same time? The cognitive dissonance could just kill a man. Stay tuned for our year-end note...

the five paragraph essay: "it's britney bitch"

It's Britney bitch: so begins the new Britney Spears album, before moving swiftly into that most vacuous of subgenres, songs about the perils of fame. It's not that such songs risk hypocrisy or narcissism (really, so what?), but that, since pop songs are defined by their own popularity, the active choice to make a song about nothing else is an entirely hermetic act. Such songs are pure, and empty. They practically guarantee a failed artist, and/or bad faith, and/or some atrociously awful shit. This is stuff people believe about Britney anyway, so it is perhaps even more curious that she reaffirms such ideas by pursuing this course — never more than with the second song, "Piece of Me." One would be forgiven for assuming it was awful. It's probably the song of the year.

The song rolls along on a sick dollop of bassy synthesizer, superfake handclaps, and the occasional loop of an uncertain, yelping voice. Much of the credit surely belongs to the production/writing team of Bloodshy & Avant, and the track deserves to be listened to at full aural resolution, really fucking loud. The lead vocals are processed into orbit through a dozen shifting filter arrays. Backup vocals, meanwhile, are handled by Robyn — no small irony, as she a) is historically great in her own right, and b) was the obvious genius Swedish teenpop market test for Britney herself. But Ms. Spears's performance is brilliant, and it would be a shame to miss the exact form of its brilliance.

We are aware that aesthetes who generally don't concern themselves with the Top 10 universally prefer, among all Britney songs,"Toxic"; this fact is indeed a verdict on that song, though an ambivalent one. "Piece of Me" shares certain qualities with "Toxic" (also a Bloodshy & Avant production, along with Cathy Dennis) such as a somewhat narrowed melodic range that gains its momentum from the bass rather than the chord changes. Nonetheless it is a better song than "Toxic," less artsy, more banging, less for listening to and more for giving in to. That's not to say it's her best song; it's perhaps Number Three after "...Baby One More Time" and "Oops...I Did It Again."

"Hit Me" (as we prefer to call it) and "Oops" are united by something more then ellipses: a fact so obvious that it has scarcely been remarked. The former, lead single to her debut, is entirely masochistic; the latter, lead single to her sophomore disc, is entirely sadistic. We trust a rehearsal of the lyrics is not required here. This striking — and finally peculiar — fact has been easily forgotten within the seemingly ceaseless tempests of the Britney datastorm. But "Piece of Me" reactivates the charged oddity with gusto. Her lyrics, of course, concern themselves with the media's concern with her. The verses seem to involve self-description. "I’m Miss Bad Media Karma, another day, another drama" begins one, a nice rhyme that turns out to be two halves of furthers rhymes, the less-compelling "Guess I can’t see the harm in working and being a mama." But without much pomp, this narration slips into a subtle inversion. By the chorus the phrases, still in the first person, now simply accept the tabloid hysterias as her real names: "I’m Mrs. Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, I’m Mrs. Oh my God that Britney’s Shameless" (even nicer rhyming, at the level of the concept). And here in the chorus, these ventriloquized phrases, mocking but irrevocably self-loathing, are now punctuated by the punchline, like so: "I’m Mrs. Extra! Extra! this just in (You want a piece of me), I’m Mrs. she’s too big now she’s too thin (You want a piece of me)."

And that's the genius part. With each repetition of the punch line, she shifts the inflection such that it takes on both its meanings in alternation: first as assertion about her opposite number's desire (you want a piece of me), and then the colloquial threat about her own urge, one we all know from barfights on television (you want a piece of me?). In her own song — entirely designed to confuse the question of who is speaking — she manages to appear, via a single phrase, as the subject and source of violence, abused and abuser, in a way that makes the distinction itself seem to shimmer and shift. It's a song in which she gets to be masochistic and sadistic both at once, her whole history in 210 seconds, Hit Me Baby Oops. And in turn she offers this condensation and confusion as a verdict on the media and, finally, herself. Freakishly smart, with a bounce a mile high.

welcome message

Hello. It is possible you have arrived here from the corp-blog of Sasha Frere-Jones, who has very kindly linked to this venue. If so, we should mention at least three things.

Regular readers can go back to tapping fingers, waiting for Michael Clayton review or thoughts on new Nickelback single. "I'll have the quesadilla. "

1) Sasha is a real inspiration; his own non-corporate site is the blog I've had bookmarked longer than any other, because he is a smooth operator and clever and insightful and cares, and is at least sometimes not a punch-puller, which puts him ahead of really most people who make a living from writing about culture for the publics.

2) We're not sure we fit much of that description ourselves, except for "cares." We are not sure what we do here. We think all the time about movies and poetry and pop music, because we like to; and all the time about politics and history, because there's no thinking that could happen outside those paul walls anyway.

3) Maroon 5 do not actually sound "a bit like Hall and Oates with a heavy Stevie Wonder fixation" nor are they "sneakily good at what they do." That might be a more plausible series of thoughts if it described Jamiroquai, except that the Jamiroquais are looking far (far, far!) up at Hall'n'Oates, and at their best were maybe "surprisingly half-decent." Maroon 5, conversely, is a sneakily awful Jamiroquai tribute band.

while lady sov and the streets slept...

...some rig called Modeselektor — in the midst of a chopped and bitmapped post-two-step dance track — tossed a kind of capsule analysis of a certain stratum of Brit nationalism, somewhere among the yobs and swells, chavs and bogens, with a precision that either the Ess-Oh or Mike Skinner would give a finger for:

There are many others sorts what haven't got a clue / they don't do pilates they shoot up in the loo / they got surround sound / a Rottweiler hound / they don't want the Euro replacing the Pound

— "Silikon" (feat. Sasha Perera)

"curves in all the right places"/a propos

On the day of Anna Nicole Smith's death, it seems worth mentioning that the catchiest song of the last 12 months is certainly Mika's Queen-inspired rollick, "Big Girl (You Are Beautiful)." Album not yet released; song available for download here.

26 singles of the year/"melodic range"

As ever, the singles list excludes songs that appear on the albums list for this year (though, idiosyncratically, it doesn't exclude songs that appeared on last year's list (Miranda Lambert) or are likely to appear on next year's list (M.I.A.). Moreover, the list is generated from iTunes play counts aggregated from all the sugarhigh! terminals, modified by a simple algorithm that accounts for song's release dates (so that "Wunderkind," e.g., added on January 8th, places lower than "Hell Yeah," which had nine fewer listens but wasn’t added until June 23rd. The main thing this algorithm does is count how many listens a song got in the first week, first month, and over the entire span, and then calculate both a song’s rate of “decay” in popularity, and what the stock analysts would call its “beta”: its relative volatility. This equation is highly proprietary.

1) "Do It To It," Cherish feat. YoungBloodz. See note here.
2) "Too Little Too Late," JoJo. Best achievement in melancholy AutoTune since Cher. Machines sing with more feeling than people. When Donna Harraway and Kathryn Hayles talk about the posthuman, this is what they mean. Best-case scenario, that is.
3) "18 Dummy," The Federation. In a year in which the hyphy movement the truly euphoric subgenre, The Federation were its purest product and greatest failure. The album long whispered to be in the can never came out, the movement failed to find a focal point once everyone realized E-40 was on some other melange, and we were left with nothing but a few impossibly great mixtape singles that left us wondering what exactly the Federation was: indie-undie little label localism from California's unlikely Central Valley gone wild? Production whiz kids passing them off as superthugs? "I'm from Fairfield, that's where my mind stays — strapped in my backpack, nothing like Kanye." No doubt.
4) "Unwritten," Natasha Bedingfield. You’d know if you saw the video. Free indirect gospel presented as elevator music.
5) "Check On It," (Beyonce ft. Slim Thug). Though this appeared on a Destiny's Child hits collection, it remains officially credited to Beyoncé. The main writer is, get this, named Angela Beyince. Could who does what get any more meaningless? Er, except to the accountants.
6) "Promiscuous Girl," Nelly Furtado feat. Timbaland. Furtado is more of a Simpson than an Aguilera, vocal skills-wise. But lesser artists would have wilted in front of this beat, even recycled as it is from a better Xzibit song; Nelly steps in there and holds her own, and that's all it takes. Quite possibly the best-natured song of the year (and, as we know from the long version of Aaliyah’s greatest moment, good-natured rumbling is really what rapper Tim Mosely should stick to).
7) "Tim McGraw," Taylor Swift. Sounds sort of like everyone else. Isn't.
8) "Hell Yeah," San Quinn (feat. E-A-Ski). "Yep yes si with a hell in front of it."
9) "Wunderkind," Alanis Morissette. We here at sugarhigh! are awful. Just terrible.
10) "Ain't No Other Man," Christina Aguilera. GIven that, jazzercizing in abeyance, this is basically a concept album about how much she digs her new husband, we can conclude that Jordan Bratman is pretty much one good single's worth of one good man. See album review here.
11) "Get Drunk and Be Somebody," Toby Keith. Without much by way of inventiveness, and an attitude more than a worldview, Toby Keith has turned out to be one of the most insistent, playful hit makers of the decade, ever since he grew out of his youth, filled out his baritone, and hit his stride with 2000's "How Do You Like Me Now" — as a sure thing, he's somewhere between Nineties Sheryl Crow and Nineties Tori Amos. See note here.
12) "I Don't Feel Like Dancing," Scissor Sisters. It is a fundamentally good thing that someone decided their project would be to marry the queer rock classicism of Elton John and the queer glam underpinnings of early disco; they leapt for the BeeGees and landed on Leo Sayer and that's just fine by us. Hey Williamsburg, you should try to enjoy this a lot; it's the only payback you have coming for enduring the misery of the Fischerspooner years.
13) "New Strings," Miranda Lambert. A song so clear that children youtubing their versions from their bedrooms to the world can see right through it.
14) "Standing In The Way Of Control," The Gossip. See note here.
15) "Fast Cars And Freedom," Rascal Flatts. Everyone talks about how country "is really old-fashioned melodic pop-rock," which is still a way of liking country while pretending not to like, you know, country. Except in the case of Rascal Flatts, which is really old-fashioned melodic pop-rock.
16) "Bumpin' My Music," Ray Cash. More fun.
17) "One," Mary J. Blige feat. U2. Pet Shop Boys, Johnny Cash...this is not the first great U2 cover, and it won't be the last. There's a reason for that: however swell the songs might be (and this is one swell song), Bono can't sing. His vocals are thin and mawkish and have a stident need to be liked, and each of these covers provides a massive benefit, be it Neil Tennant's yearning irony or Johnny Cash's singular gravitas. Mary J broadens out the tones to the Baptist breadth to which they always secretly aspired, and gives them an emotional thickness that, well, Bono doesn't have and she does, in spades. Secondary lesson in all this: The Edge may be more of a genius than we thought.
18) “Life Ain’t Always Beautiful,” Gary Allan. See note here.
19) "Men And Mascara," Julie Roberts. Ballads are easier to write than uptempo numbers, but much much harder to sing.
20) "Call Me When You're Sober," Evanescence. Listen, no one is more annoyed than we are at the capacity of self-righteous religious zealots to write good melodies.
21) “With You,” Jessica Simpson. One of the two best guitar loops of the year, along with some track in the middle of the Clipse album.
22) “Irreplaceable,” Beyonce. Looking forward to comparativist study of the way this last syllable is pronounced by Mick Jagger (“Respectable”) and Beyonce. Also: as sugarhigh! adviser Chris Nealon notes, “does she know her album is named Bidet?”
23) “The Way I Live,” Baby Boy. Fun.
24) “Fergalicious,” Fergie. At first it’s hard to know which crude Eighties triumph of trocheeic dimeter this is ripping off mercilessly; if it seems at first like “You Be Illin’,” but when the double-time electro kicks in halfway through, one twigs to the fact that it’s ye olde “Supersonic,” by JJ Fad. The metre varies for effect here and there (most peasingly in the “try an’ tell”/”clientele” rhyme), but mostly it’s intent on its extended, virtuosic trochees: “FERgaLIcious’ DEFiNItion: MAKE them BOYS go CRAzy” and on and on.Ever since rap’s rigid vocal metricality yielded to the conversational vernacularity of hip-hop — that is, ever since rap’s Rakim-midwived modernity — few songs have paid as much attention to classcial lyrical beat patterns as this, one of the most precise songs of the times.
25) “It's Okay (One Blood),” The Game. As close as sugarhigh! has ever come to voting reggae.
26) “XR2 (turbo mix),” M.I.A. Well, where were you in ’92? This is “The End of the World As We Know It” or “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” or maybe Joe Brainard’s “I Remember,” except redolent of M.I.A.’s Londonized machine nervosa. The proposition that all memories can be stored in acronyms used to seem like a fact about the music biz (who here remembers Reunion’s “Life is a Rock”?) but now seems like a fact about memory in these times, in some way a kind of negotiation with computers and digitization — which is to say, a lyrical negotiation with the formal and technological history of pop music itself. As a final note: those still wondering about the derivation of Maya’s foundational quasi-word “galang” (Who the hell is hunting you/in your BMW?”) might wish to spend some time with sub-sub-Tom Clancy author Jack Buchanan, who has a novel titled M.I.A. Hunter/la Gang. We don't make this stuff up; we just report it,

ON MELODIC RANGE IN POPULAR MUSIC

Sometime in the Nineties — say, after "Waterfalls" and well before "No Scrubs," to use the TLC calendar — mersh R&B narrowed its melodic range. It didn't necessarily use fewer notes (though this was often the case), but chose notes from within a narrower scope in any given song. Largely gone were the transcendent/ludicrous ascents and resolves, the struggle/release/euphorias of "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" or "Man in the Mirror"; the duotone themes of "No, No, No, No" and "Say My Name" carried the day.

This condensation was meant to convey coiled sensuality, tense menace, moral seriousness. In part it borrowed these sensibilities from hip-hop, the center of authority in popular culture. One might argue that the structures of tune in American pop float between forms where affect is largely conveyed by speech, and where it's indexed to variations of melody keyed to the Western scale: upper limit country, lower limit rap, as Louis Zukofsky surely meant to say.

In the event, R&B was successful enough in expressing its revised set of feelings that it had a dialectical effect on the entire Billboard Hot 100. On the one hand, a new genre arose immediately for the express purpose of rescuing melodic range: this got named teenpop, and its genius took up the explicit project of extending the melodic scope of the Top 40 through complex modulations, moments after R&B narrowed its own scope. But on the other hand, the new significations of R&B, every time someone in an adjacent genre was feeling, well, dippy, they could emulate the move to refashion themselves as mature, controlled, serious.

And so, for example, when Mariah Carey of the famous range, of "Dreamlover" and "Fantasy" and "Emotions," needed to indicate she was no longer Glitter-y and/or crazy, she stopped down to the minimal palette of "Shake It Off" and etc. And when Britney, who had become synonymous with teenpop, needed to "grow up," she just repeated history: the passage from "Oops..." to "Slave" tells the story of modern R&B again, offset by a few years, with the naked significatory intent that had always been her stock in trade. The genius of "Toxic" lies exactly in how much it manages to do within the late phase's restrictions, between the low ceiling and high floor.

Shifts, of course, never happen all at once: uneven development, three-steps-forward and two-steps-back, little gestures here and there, these turn out to have been key junctures in a story that the market is trying to tell. And this is the story that "Irreplaceable" begins to narrate. It's a good song, not a great one; nobody thinks its within seven rungs of "Crazy in Love" on the ladder of the Ideal Pop Song. That song had decent range as well, but it also had other things on its mind, and returned relentlessly to the three-note theme. "Irreplaceable" seems to have as its main purpose the restoration of melodic range to pop. That it found traction with an audience that had proved itself indifferent to the far-narrower B singles that preceded it is the most telling fact — not in the least in that it demonstrates how Beyonce had better dance to the tune of the times, having lost the imperious capacity to make the times dance to her own tune.

That song answered by the finally far more appealing "Too Little Too Late," by JoJo, which hauls out Cher's AutoTune (and here we recall that "Believe," sung by a gorgeous octogenarian, was a pivotal moment in teenpop's story, collapsing the tween and disco audiences into a coherent mass) to describe explicitly the new opening-out, as the song modulates from its close opening melody into the full, ecstatic chorus via the machine, as if to suggest it requires industrial force to put that gloomy history in the past, as if that set of melodic moves was too little and it was too late for that indeed — at which the song turns to recalibrate itself, not without a melancholy sense of loss, to the deliriums and euphorias that had once sounded like a natural condition

eleven albums of the year/"generationality"

1) Scritti Politti, White Bread Black Beer. See review here.
2) E-40, My Ghetto Report Card. Standing on the shoulders of children who are standing on the shoulders of grown giants, one of whom is him.
3) Nadiya, Nadiya. See notes here.
4) Ghostface Killah, Fishscale. The most curious thing is how many enthralling details there are on an album which offers as its main appeal the fact that it could just go on and on with its endless nonsense and soulspace shuffle without anything in particular mattering very much. What did Q-Tip say, "Infinite on my mind every minute"? Yeah, that, exactly inverted: moments in the midst of the infinite.
5) Justin Timberlake, FutureSex / LoveSounds. See review here.
6) The Wreckers, Stand Still, Look Pretty. When teenpop loses interest in broad melodies, broadly melodic teenpoppers will build a home in the country.
7) Charlotte Gainsbourg, 5:55. Somehow this all makes Zero 7's aping of Air: A French Band make sense by reversing the Channel crossing. Or: never has anyone sounded so much like Sarah Nixey. Especially a French person.
8) Clipse, Hell Hath No Fury. Four years ago, it took the Neptunes' sounds to make sense of Los Bros' crude'n'curious style; herein, the favor is duly returned, as the real Yin Yang Twins' brutal intricacy provides a context for Chad'n'Pharrell's astringent loops to sound once again like minimalist elan rather than dispirited sparsity. Moreover, moments like these explain why popular culture as a general sphere is such a remarkable place: it's where you can still be too raw and too literary at the exact same time, via the very same gestures, and sell only 78,000 out of the box. Hubert Selby, Jr. should be so lucky.
9) Dixie Chicks, Taking the Long Way. See review here. Their least lovely studio album since Natalie joined is still about three songs better than most of the year's popular country albums. This is a fact both about the year in country and the actual greatness of the Dixie Chicks. Natalie Maines, by the way, is one of the greatest singers. Ever.
10) Tori Amos, A Piano. A bunch of tracks that anyone who cares already has, and a few they might not, which is just fine as long as the music's basically free (what's up, allofmp3.com!) Kind of nutty: "Dolphin Song." Kind of slept on: "Sweet the Sting." Kind of unbelievably great: "Ode to my Clothes."
11) Pretenders, Pretenders (reissue). Sometimes a reissue is just reminiscence. Sometimes it's rear-view mirror magic. The live version of "Stop Your Sobbing" is, in some degree, quite predictable, with its slow, emotionalized vocal first passage eventually opening out into a full-force charge. And yet, leaving almost no cliché unturned, the song succeeds in sounding like a torn, tragic elegy in advance for James Honeyman-Scott, who reaches into the solo and fearlessly tears up his own funeral.

NOTES ON GENERATIONALITY:

[We do not claim any Christgauvian/Archimedean overview of the year in music, nor is this note particularly relevant to the Albums List, as opposed to the forthcoming Singles; we're just putting things in places distributively]

Every year bears some traces of generational shift. Sometimes it takes the form of Oedipal agon; sometimes it appears as a necessary refurbishing of the industrial machine along its cycle of planned obsolescences; and sometimes it seems to be little at all until long after the fact: a novelty hit that turns out to have founded a genre; an ignored debut that revivifies a form; a star's album that stiffs a little, secretly presaging the unremarkable moment when a whole cohort loses its juju.

Generationality happen. The market requires it, as do Ezra Pound, Sigmund Freud, and Machiavelli. More interesting in any given year is where it happens, and what that says.

This is not to say that it's always surprising, and this year it wasn't surprising at all. It didn't happen much in rock, unless the fermentation of emo as the ubiquitous form of guitar-combo pop counts as a generational shift, which it really doesn’t, and didn’t produce much good music (you miss Fall Out Boy now, bitchez, don't you?) The best moment of the year in emo was probably the truly stupendous mono-argyle on that Panic! At the Disco guy’s top hat.

Conversely, hip-hop made a big point of generational shifts, most notably via Jay-Z finally getting out of the rap game. This millennium’s pantomime retirements were ways of sustaining his spectacular rule, his justified domination of hip-hop’s centrist regime; only an actual yawn-worthy album could have removed him from the throne, and he finally obliged. Meanwhile, though it may just indicate a clearing of the golden throat and mind, this was the first year in memory that Missy Elliott, the other best rapper alive, didn’t do something that was complete and absolute genius, and in fact didn’t really do anything at all.

The vacuum in the national consciousness wasn’t filled by longtime critical demi-gods like Cam’ron or his Dipset dudes (snooze), nor the even-more-fetishized second coming of The Clipse; it was filled by actually juvenile fellows who figured out how to turn the local sound of southern rim cities just enough toward the center to consolidate national audiences. What was once a few frontier scenes is now the capital of the hip-hop century, stretched along the length of the Southern Smile: it starts in the Bay Area’s hyphy movement, dips down through Houston, New Orleans, Atlanta, and rises again to complete the grin right there in the syncopated surf of Virginia Beach that laps against the decaying wood paneling of Teddy Riley’s old 48-track analog console.

Plenty good hip-hop from elsewhere (peace to Miami, and to The Game, probably the most pleasing total cartoon poseur since Robbie Williams) — but the generational action is along that Smile, which might be a grimace, concealing a confederated grill from whence shines the brightest diamond, Lil Wayne himself, who clarified the whole situation by being the first person ever to say he was better than Shawn Carter and mean it. Meaning it doesn’t mean you’re right. Yet.

The generationality of country was kinder and gentler, natch, but even tidal shifts seem dramatic on a molasses sea. Johnny Cash was really really dead, Garth supernally irrelevant; meanwhile, Carrie Underwood morphed from up’n’coming talent to king of the world over what seemed like no more than weeks, and ex-pop stars and their backup singers were going country just like Alan Jackson promised, and Taylor Swift...well, Taylor Swift.

By country’s measures, Tim McGraw is still a pretty young thing: he showed up a while after Clint Black showed up a while after Randy Travis showed up a while after George Strait showed up, and George Strait’s still making hits on the regular down at the Young Country station. For what it’s worth, Tim McGraw is five years younger than Trace Adkins, who made everyone and their mother throw up in their mouths a little with last year’s “Honky Tonk Badonkadonk” (maybe that’s what Missy’s doing; she’s gone country, if she wasn't there already). And yet, there was Taylor Swift, born a month after the border between East and West Berlin was opened, treating Tim McGraw like a distant memory in arguably the best country single of the year (its competition was “Leave the Pieces,” by Michelle Branch and Jessica Harp, twenty-something escapees from teenpop’s decadent era).

“Tim McGraw” is more or less a rewrite of Deanna Carter’s “Strawberry Wine,” firmly in the long country tradition of adolescent summer love narratives; it’s delicate and quietly pissed off, a feeling that keeps converting to melancholy by the end of every bar, so that it can’t figure out if it’s truer in the first or third person, and the final gesture reads as both a romantic bid and a knife-sharp kissoff, albeit impossibly sweet. Part of its mystery, what kept the song alive all year long, was the way that that Tim McGraw shows up: “when you think: Tim McGraw, I hope you think my favorite song, the one we danced to all night long, the moon like a spotlight on the lake.” This is not like Garth giving props to an unknown Chris LeDoux; it's the forced conversion of a star to a legend. Converted to hip-hop years, it's like misting up when you say, "Remember way back when we used to listen to Juvenile?"

In this single gesture, Tim McGraw — not yet 40, about Jay-Z’s age — is banished to the realm of the dead, like Johnny Cash or Sinatra or Billie Holiday, surviving only in recordings and myths, a totemic figure whose recollection, whose absence, gives structure to the lives of the living. For real, how did she think she was going to get away with that? Or, more importantly, by what manner of magic did such a curious idea allow the writing of a perfect song?

It’s worth noting, lastly, that as hip-hop has smiled southward, country has inevitably forwned north: Gretchen Wilson’s Illinois home was just a forecast of Taylor Swift’s roots in Wyomissing, Pennsylvania. This is not to say that they don’t remain worlds apart, alas for Cowboy Troy. Progressive critics often want to note that people listen more widely across the genres than the imagination of encamped culture warriors suggests, and at a literal level this is true; that doesn’t mean that poptopia is a beautiful rainbow coalition. Folks are still real good at choosing the cores and borders of their own identifications, and merely indulging in the rest; the idea that all commodities are equally available turns out not to have collectivized the nation. This is why the “rockist” debate persists, even if a lot of critics like Justin Timberlake’s album.

Meanwhile, to put the matter crudely, generationality happens where genres are both historical enough to have generations, and alive enough to be worth renewing. That aliveness is, of course, as much a story about money as about other kinds of emotional or libidinal investment. That hip-hop and country were the scenes of substantial generationality this year in one ways tells us what we already know: that these are the leading forms of indigenous music here in the hegemonoculture, where the greatest investments are made. Or at least it reminds us of that, since we seem to be so good at forgetting it every fifteen minutes. It’s not just that these musics are popular, and thus abstractly “populist,” and so should be reckoned with on those grounds; it’s also that they’re the most musically vital, the living forms, and if one’s way of measuring songs can’t recognize that, it’s the measure that’s got to go.

notes from all over-esque

§ An unlikely-but-welcome source for Kelis remix mp3s: Franklin Bruno. In case you hadn't heard, Mr. Bruno has of late switched blogs from semiprivate Imagined Slights to semipublic nervous unto thirst, in what seems to be a sort of experiment in the fate of the diaristic and the materiality of the fantasy audience.

§ I challenge you: Michiko Kakutani's review of the new Thomas Pynchon novel seems calculated to clarify the enduring fog of her dislikes into an incisive moment, a hat in the ring of Best Insult Review Ever. The opening graf:

Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, “Against the Day,” reads like the sort of imitation of a Thomas Pynchon novel that a dogged but ungainly fan of this author’s might have written on quaaludes. It is a humongous, bloated jigsaw puzzle of a story, pretentious without being provocative, elliptical without being illuminating, complicated without being rewardingly complex.

Study questions: When did Michiko ever argue in favor of the "rewardingly complex"? Also, who here thinks Michiko really ever took a Quaalude? (Maybe back when it was Mandrax; anyway, tell your copy editor that brand names take a capital letter near the start.) The review itself, naturally, reads like a the sort of imitation of a Dale Peck review that a dogged but ungainly fan of that hatchet man's might...well, you get the idea. We have no judgment of its judgment, having not read the novel under review; however, such is scarcely necessary to point out that the review's stance that Mason & Dixon is Pynchon's masterwork puts the opinions expressed therein within a particular frame to which the term "contrarian" can't quite do justice. "Dumb" seems closer, or the less wieldy "still panicky about modernism." Such dumb panic leads to its share of howlers, inevitably: "The problem is these characters are drawn in such a desultory manner that they might as well be plastic chess pieces." Linger over that for a moment, won't you? If you find something odd about "drawn" and "plastic chess pieces," that may be a mixed metaphor you're sensing. They don't look like chess pieces, after all. Now, we here at sugarhigh! would have at least hoped that someone — family dog? Quaalude dealer? — would have noted, pre-publication, a passage that appears just three paragraphs earlier. In a flurry of insults familiar from the books sections of third-tier college papers worldwide, Kakutani has already proclaimed that, while Pynchon's novels usually treat characters "merely as pawns in the author’s philosophical chess game, the people in “Against the Day” are little more than stick figure cartoons." So you mean they're not chess pieces? But you said....! Ooh the surgical virtuosity — and they say the drugs don't work anymore. A truly vicious review will have to achieve more clarity than this, one fears; it feels less like a hit piece than a condensation of decades of Kakutani's ambient hostility and cultural anxiety into, well, a poorly-written instance of ambient hostility and cultural anxiety. Not less foggy, just less of it.

§ Conversely: anyone and everyone can get a free subscription to the latest print-at-work literary micro-omnibus (omni-microbus?), The New-York Ghost, with the greatest of ease, by visiting here. The most recent issue starts with the paranoid rantings of some New Yorker who feels certain his life has been pirated away into a character in the season's literary succes d'estime, pardon our French. Highly regarded.

logicbomb

If one were looking for reasons to be leery of Slate article "Jay-Z Versus the Sample Troll," a good clue might be found in the casual background assertion: "George Clinton is otherwise known as the King of Interplanetary Funk and, along with the late Rick James, the world's most famous funk musician." No offense, Mr. Brown! None taken, we're sure.

But this is not the article's topic. It's a discussion of how "sample trolls," like "patent trolls" before them, hustle about acquiring rights to pieces of music for the express purpose of suing or settling with musicians (or their corporations) who have sampled these pieces, or hope to. The example in this case is Bridgeport music, which just turns out to be some guy named Armen Boladian, after an easy buck:

Since 2001, Bridgeport's shotgun approach has led to many dismissals and settlements, but also two major victories. First, in 2005, Bridgeport convinced Nashville's federal appellate court to buy into its copyright theory. In that case, Bridgeport Music v. Dimension Films, the defendants sampled a single chord from the George Clinton tune "Get Off Your Ass and Jam," changed the pitch, and looped the sound in the background. (The result is almost completely unrecognizable—you can listen to it here). The Sixth Circuit created a rule: that any sampling, no matter how minimal or undetectable, is a copyright infringement. Said the court in Bridgeport, "Get a license or do not sample. We do not see this as stifling creativity in any significant way."

Righteous outrage etc etc. No argument here. But Tim Wu's version of the story proceeds from quite an odd assumption:

The trolls are turning copyright into the foe rather than the friend of musical innovation.

This is a troubled assertion on the face of it, since it assumes something that millions of hip-hop (or music) fans are far from certain of: that copyright is, as a general rule, a friend of musical innovation, insofar as (in the case of hip-hop) the original copyright control of sampling raised massive barriers-to-entry for hip-hop artists, corporatizing the genre and, by many accounts, bringing an end to the form's era of innovation.

Assumptions aside, there is a more pernicious (and more comedically absurd) error in this claim. It proposes that there is no logical connection between the abstraction of "copyright" and the concrete fact of Bridgeport. This is self-apparently false from the perspective of logic, and from the perspective of law. Indeed, the author eventually wends his way to this realization, realizing that people tend to take advantage of laws to make money, rather than using them as vague suggestions about honor. At which point he proposes this or that sort of legal patch. But even in this motion, he turns back as if magnetized toward his basic orientation: copyright is good as long as it isn't perverted. If it could just be made to serve individual artists and not corporate profit-takers — a few small changes, and this little problem will be behind us.

There must be a word for this. For this invocation to never think systemically, historically, at all costs. Surely there is some term for the belief, against all evidence, that laws legislating ownership of ideas, and right to profit, do not tend toward enriching the wealthy while increasingly disenfranchising the remainder? There must be some kind of concept for the ability not to have this thought, and thus to experience the legal system as independent of the people it serves, as being indeed fundamentally disconnected from its manifest outcomes? For assigning each increasingly generalized episode — S&L scandal, Enron, WorldCom — to the bad faith of bad individuals? To not knowing history as having a directionality in which the law participates? No, really, we can just fix it with a patch! We can extract the bad apples!

There's got to be some kind of name for this, like we have a name for phantom limbs and snow-blindness...

white bread black beer

Once upon a time there was a boy named Scritti, and though this was a strange name, nobody teased him, for he had a beautiful voice, and a falsetto that was like honey injected into the veins. And he grew up with the desire to make jangly pop music woven from strands of romance, left politics, reggae, post-structuralist theory, black soul, and everything resting in the sentence, "the music of the Beatles and Bowie prepared me for every subsequent adventure, intellectually, politically, aesthetically, structurally."

One day a funny thing happened to Scritti, because funny things happen to everyone in history. As he was figuring out his jangly pop music and bringing discreet pleasure to several people, pop music itself became less jangly, in part because digital technology favored a sharper snap in general, and in part because it was part of a constellation that would eventually be called hip-hop. And Scritti liked this sound very much. He heard Michael Jackson and Run-DMC and it was good. So it came to pass that instead of giving this historical development the Heisman and insistently making a now-nostalgic jangle, Scritti made some romantic black-soul-loving pop music with digital snap, and brought indiscreet pleasure to many many people.

But this didn't make Scritti especially happy, and what's more, his headlong romantic leap into history's fastest pace meant that autumn would come as swiftly as summer, and before too long he found himself in a cool season with winter coming on. And so he retreated to the gloomy Usk Valley to spend a season drinking ale and thinking about what to do next.

A season turned into a few and then into many, as they tend to do when one is brooding in the gloomy Usk Valley, ancient kingdom of Gwent, where the coal miners mine coal and the years pass. And still Scritti puzzled over what to do next, or not. After a long while he came to an idea, and it grew and grew. His idea was that, though he had taken up the sonic snap that has so entranced him in the early Eighties, he had not truly taken up the hip-hop that he greatly loved.

And so it came to pass that Scritti walked out of the Usk Valley sometime near the end of the second millennium according to the Christian calendar, and released an album that featured his beautiful soul falsetto equally with several extremely minor pseudo-hip-hop characters, who had perhaps been chosen because they were open to nearly-forgotten intellectual Welsh pop singers with leftist leanings, and affordable by production budget of same, rather than because of their excellence. Though this strange brew had its moments, it was somewhat confusing to have pseudo-hip-hop songs which were also lovely falsetto parables involving Heloise and Abelard, and everyone was confused, Scritti not the least.

Perhaps the greatest confusion was the last song on the record, "Brushed With Oil, Dusted With Powder," which was the prettiest song but at the same time a ballad, and a remarkably gentle, soothing ballad at that, with no pseudo-hip-hop elements in the music, though the sweetly breathy lyrics did concern rides in police cars and, in some haunting manner, the song seemed to be taking place in the beauty of the Usk Valley and the scenario of American hip-hop at the same time. This was a true oddity and there was no way to make sense of it, but that seemed okay because it was the last song on the album and they are understood to be outside-the-work, and forgiven their incoherence, as a general rule.

After the last inconsequential song ended, some more years passed.

In those years a strange idea took hold in Scritti's mind. The idea was this: that the inconsequential, beautiful song was in fact the key to everything, or at least the key to his next album. He would make an entire record with no minor or even major hip-hop characters, but one charged with his love of early Eighties hip-hop, and his melancholy distance from it. But it would be an album of rock so soft that "soft rock" couldn't do it justice, and album that would make Quiet Storm radio formats feel like they might need to calm down a little and maybe attend a yoga class. It began with Scritti sighing "the boom boom bap...." But he did not sound like KRS-One, he sounded like Scritti but older, honey dipped in morphine on a slow drip.

It was like the dream of Brian Wilson that Brian himself could never really approach, of an easy listening album that was at the same time a work of genius. And if Scritti was occasionally compelled to murmur the the titles from an entire Run-DMC album in a distantly pretty bridge, or coo angelically to the effect that punks jump up to get beat down, sounding exactly as if he was blessing the beasts or inventing a lullaby for a child who had been dead for two decades, well, this was the sense of the album, though sense was not very much at stake. Something else was, though it was hard to be sure what, exactly, and this mystery was the album's greatness, or perhaps it was the invention of a previously unknown category of pop music, or the way a voice can trace its own history, and the relation of the individual to history, or how it felt to live in a beautiful and perfectly numb present, at the edge of a hole into which years and things one loved kept falling.

futuresex / lovesounds

"Slash fiction" takes its name from the slash in "K/S": a subcategory of Star Trek fan fiction given over to desublimating the deep love between Kirk and Spock. The slash, that is to say, might be imagined as the blade that cuts out the mediating stuff separating the pair in the televised version; at the same time, it's the third term which separates the K and S, even as it opens the path to a lil consummation. As a linguistic mark, it takes the place of what keeps them apart while allowing them to come together — it's the slash between men. As a sign-function, it's almost helplessly suggestive of the more humanly-charged role of the woman in Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick's famous analysis of triangulation:

[Between Men] attempted to demonstrate the immanence of men’s same-sex bonds, and their prohibitive structuration, to male-female bonds in nineteenth-century English literature…[The book] focused on the oppressive effects on women and men of a cultural system in which male-male desire became widely intelligible primarily by being routed through triangular desire involving a woman.

— (Epistemology 15).

Surely this structural relation must have been on someone's mind in titling the current Justin Timberlake album. The two worlds of the title themselves don't do much but remind us that, though Justin sings and dances like a somewhat mechanical King of Pop, he'd rather be a Prince. But the slash tells a different story: the story of K/S, and of Sedgewick. The album itself, both in its sonic intertwinings and lyrics, is almost entirely about the great love between Justin Timberlake and Tim Mosely, who basically sing, rap and murmur romantic, sensual phrases to each other for about an hour, climaxing mid-album with the slinky, beautiful "What Goes Around...."

The album, that is to say, is J/T porn. Of course, per the analysis, this erotic drama must be disguised by the presence of a woman — so literally a figure rather than a person, or even a character, that she is named, in song after song, "Girl." She exists not at all, except as a convenience so Justin and Timbaland can rub up on each other in the sweetest and most lubricious ways; it's actually quite romantic, and probably better queer disco than Alcazar, Infernal, or Gnarls Barkley.

louder than luv

Here's a nifty article by sugarhigh! special friend Joe Gross, on some material issues in popular music.

Disclaimer: though this has no bearing on Joe Gross's general excellence nor the importance of this field of inquiry, we feel compelled to note that when we attended a discussion on this topic a few years ago at EMP, we discovered that, contrary to the refined and well-corseted majority, we preferred the highly-compressed reissue of Led Zeppelin II to the original.

the long tail

When sugarhigh! considers the white male artists of the post-WWII era whom we find most thrilling and exemplary, three stand clear: Jean-Luc Godard, John Ashbery and Bob Dylan, artists we sometimes have great dfficulty confronting because the certainty and power of their stuff theatens a kind of despair at one's own efforts.

The casual isomorphism of this troika's aesthetic narratives in evident: despite working in media and places with distinctly different relations to pop, each has been starkly prolific (albeit with celebrated pauses in their individual output), remaking their fields in the period from 1955-65; each has responded to the inevitable fading of their mass-critical star with continued and sometimes accelerated production, clear into their current advanced ages.

Of course, the differences are just as notable (and more media-specific): the way Ashbery's critical ascendence didn't come for two decades, while Dylan and Godard took each less than a handful of years to reach the apex of their fields. Or Godard's almost invisible prolixity; in the United States, how many of the 49 titles he's directed since Letter to Jane have we had a fair chance to see, especially if we don't inhabit a town with a film festival? Or Dylan's late pause, after his serial religious conversions and Eighties dreck, to ponder over ancient ballads and return as a resecularized Tiresias, "momentarily returned to life and warmth and allowed once more to speak, and to deliver its long-forgottten message in surroundings utterly alien to it"?

Alright, that was an extremity; we enjoyed it. Still, it's the kind of extremity Dylan has demanded and received in spades, these last nine years and three original albums. So the least we can do is note how the singing is a lot better on this one than the last two.

The previous pair were defined by Dylan's croak; not quite tuneless, but impelled to let us know that he was a figure beyond the mere conventions of hitting notes, or trying to hit notes. These activities were for strivers, not immortals; the very measure of hiss historical greatness became the simple fact that he could miss, avoid, ignore the niceties of notes, and still win the Voice critics' poll. It would be pleasant to suggest that this gesture was somehow a throwback to his early years, when he was often written off as a hopeless, tuneless vocalist — something we now understand to be exactly false. He was, rather, singing differently, inventing a counter-style, and "Highway 61," much less "Visions of Johanna," now sounds deeply tuneful. We do not suspect anyone will make that case about "Million Miles."

So we must be appreciative that he's dropped the And You Shall Know My Importance By My Indifference schtick, and returned to a more sanguine vocal style, riding the melodies of old Western swing forms with a pleasing laissez-faire. Alas, that's the only pleasing thing about this album which is otherwise remarkable only for its boredom-induction: what a freakin' yawn. Nothing — nothing — of Dylan's greatness remains, and why should we expect it to? Or, more pressingly, why are we so compelled to pretend that it does? This can no longer even be compared to Bob Dylan; it would be dull and slight for a Lucinda Williams albm, and she hasn't been interesting in more than a decade. It's looking up at Ryan Adams, and sugarhigh! doesn't care for Ryan Adams. There are no especially bad songs (though the inevitable way-too-long last song is a bit of a groaner) but, far more substantively, there is nothing close to a good song, even a throwaway on the order of that burlesque he tossed to Sheryl Crow before desperately repo-ing for a lesser take, lo this last millennium.

Nothing here is worthy of invective, alas. At some point, in twent of 50 years, it might be productive to explore what conjuncture of forces allowed smart, serious people to hear this as pleasing, good, even great music. This is not to suggest that valuing this album is any more or less aribtrary and subjective than enjoying Bjork or Cam'ron; it is, rather, the particularities of this case have more to say about something like cultural momentum, and historical attachments — ideas which read interestingly against the suppositional temporariness of popular culture.

back to basics

Back to Basics forms a sort of complement to the White Stripes. Battening on to African-American musical traditions from the pre-rock era, they proceed as if that could make post-rock music good again. The difference is that the Stripes see the pop miscegenation as the problem, to the solved via purification: a staggering, hypocritical misreading both of musical history and their own role in it. Christina Aguilera is more interested in looking back through the miscegenation to choose her parents from a rattle-bag of race music, and then let the process of pop impurity run its course accordingly from those reimagined beginnings, to see what it can do. To say that this demonstrates that Christina Aguilera is eleven times smarter than Jack White — not canny, not "pop-savvy," but actual-synthetic-reasoning smart — will surprise only the few remaining humans who haven't yet understood that the talented lad Jack White is, alas, a moron.

None of this is to say that Xtina's retro-soul-chanteuserie is news, even for her. As the Village Voice review for her last album noted four years ago:

For 10 songs, Christina Aguilera's record is aggressively boring, unless you're fascinated by her half-repressed yen to remake "I Put a Spell on You" as it might be done by the Velveteen Rabbit.

There's something faintly amazing about taking the weakest idea on a record (none of the hits, you'll recall — "Dirrty," "Beautiful," "Fighter," "Can't Hold Us Down" — partook of this investigation) and deciding it must become the full-blown conceit for the next album. This is a bit like De La deciding after their debut that the follow-up should be all skits. It's just not likely to work; having a concept is not the same as having a good concept, or understanding your own strengths. The best that can be said is that the conceit is largely irrelevant: the album has three good songs, which is about what one would hope and expect from your basic Aguilera product (though the last had five or six; in a decade, we'll see that as a wild exception).

Buried beneath all that jazz and discourse, however, is an interesting drama: there seem to be two discs exactly so that they can confront each other face to face. Disc Two is the Linda Perry disc; she co-wrote every song on it, and this has been widely noted. Considerably less-remarked-upon (though Sasha touches on it here), Disc One is the Kara DioGuardi disc; she co-wrote every song but one, though the's often credited lower down the list. But don't let that fool you; this is because the producer is credited second after Xtina in each case — then, on all three of the disc's excellent songs ("Aint No Other Man," "Slow Down Baby," "Without You") comes Ms. DioGuardi. One can hear her willing the project's conceit to work, even if it means rewriting "I'm Free" and Welsh one-hitter Donna Lewis.

By now you will have done the math. If the album has three good songs total and the first disc also has three...the second disc is left with zippo. It's deeply awful. This brings us no pleasure, as Linda Perry is one of the facts that has made popular music great over the last half-decade. But in this staged but unstated confrontation between the two popstar whisperers (a perfect phrase stolen from Garrett Kamps) who have underwritten much of the Top 40 since, roughly, 9/11 and the end of the High Teenpop Era — in this competition conducted through the medium of Ms. Aguilera and contrived historical style, DioGuardi turns out to be the girl with the most cake.

how often will we get to say 'end of an era'...

...and really mean it?

the golden age of arpeggiated guitar ballads

It remains a sort of remarkable fact that, in the long history of guitar rock, the two great ballads based around an endlessly repeating arpeggio, "Every Breath You Take" and "Missing You," were both released in the same year — so close together that one probably couldn't be a copy of the other. The third greatest comes only four years later.

the dozens: bombs over blogdad

Thirteen songs worth stealing. Sort of.

12) Nâdiya, "Tous ces mots." In the summer of 2003, the French-Algerian chanteuse had a disco-rap hit,"Et c'est parti," of such starts-with-a-boxing-bell, string stabs'n'horn blares, "na-na-na," thumping obviousness that it took days to notice, with gathering amazement, its subtlety. "Et c'est parti," it begins, a French stock phrase meaning "And here we go," but also sounding suspiciously like a stock bit of oldschool, "Hey, say party!" Next came "pour le show," a cunning, almost-unnoticeable slip into franglish, and then "le stade est chaud," which translates as "the place is hot," but enunciated so as to be identical to "let's start the show," and really the whole opening gambit is just unbelievable, Zukofsky's Catullus to a disco beat. The big hit from her new album, a piece of glam-soul bombast called "Roc," is negligible junk in comparison, but her other 2006 single, "Tous ces mots," almost holds its own. The musical bed is perversely, energetically insipid, with "Separate Ways" synths, revving engines 'n' squealing tires, a metronomic rhythm guitar going nowhere fast. But somehow she supplies the song with an implausible urgency, racing through the franglish ("I don't wanna go — contre le macadam," she says, liquidly triangulating her markets) with athletic exuberance, like a sprinter — which, oddly enough, she once was, the French national champion at 16.

11) U.S. Air Force, "Bombs over Baghdad." Hate the war but love the warriors. Mention with great frequency that poverty is, in effect, a stealth draft. But remember also that all the soldiers at the beginning of this graymarket promo clip for death take equal part in the charming call'n'response that opens this salute. Meanwhile, the video is, at the same time, like a joke about how much traction there is in denying the political, as Andre 3000 did about this song in 2000: "That’s where the title came from, like really, like "Don’t beat around the bush.” Our first single, we were trying to let people know we weren’t playing around at all. That’s what it meant.” Good luck with that.

10) Dixie Chicks, "The Long Way Around." The first single "Not Ready To Make Nice" (fifth-best song on the album) is "Heart of Gold" with an extra minor thrown down the shaft. "The Long Way Around," on the other hand (second-best song after "Lubbock or Leave It"), is like a gradeschool primer about the content of form: Look! Their friends from high school, with their circumscribed lives, get two dull chords repeated claustrophobically. Observe! How the introduction of the "I" is accompanied by a new minor chord, to indicate both difference and said difference's difficulties. Notice! How the chorus, with its story of departure and rambling freedom, passes through the minor chord to arrive at the heretofore withheld major, inhabiting for the first time the breadth of the key, giving the complete and spacious feeling of the "long way around." See also! The simplest ideas still work, at least a little.

9) Field Mob feat. Ciara, "So What." "So what" indeed. A track of such indifference that it reads like an experiment in how little you can do and still have an appealing song, which is perhaps a way of saying that Jazze Pha is still in the zone even when he's sleeping, and that Ciara, who so recently still seemed like a sort of convenience, Jazze's Aaliyah without the emotional reserves, now seems like the queen of all summer afternoons for the foreseeable future.

8) Jessica Simpson, "A Public Affair." A is for Autotune, B is for Bubbly Bassline, C is for Chic guitars; Daisy Dukes makes it work via the Janet Jackson retreat into breathy undersinging™, letting the machines and studio whizzes do the work at which they excel, without undo interference. Much has been made of the, er, similarities to "Holiday"; if we're on the subject of genius Eighties art-disco delivered by less-than-gifted vocalists, we hear those opening bells and think ABC just the same — not the alphabet, the band. Shoot that poison arrow, it'll be so nice! Trevor Horn, Nile Rodgers, fifteen minutes and an eight-ball; you'll gonna get something like this, and like it.

7) Big & Rich, "8th of November." This surprisingly standard-issue tragic survivor's story, marred by cliché ("like a dark evil cloud, 1200 came down on him and 29 more") still has some curious resonances among Vietnam veteran tunes. It's far more stately than precursor "Still In Saigon," Charlie Daniels' least likeable hit. The guitars' elegiac backward skirl invokes a quite different song to which this is a sort of pendant, "Copperhead Road" (the death knell of the New Traditionalist's heroic period, wherein Steve Earle's memory-moored vet has returned home to be a paranoid pot-grower, a taking-up of the family's anti-authroitarian moonshining tradition that is at the same time grimly memorial of his training so recently sponsored by those same authorities — "I learned a thing or two from Charlie doncha know; you better stay away from Copperhead Road"). But amidst all this history, certain details of "8th of November" keep tugging at stray brainstrings: the funereal/anniversarial ballad form, the date, the number 29. And these finally to the formal heart of the matter: it's a remake of a song set exactly a decade and two days later. As one memorial website summarizes it, "November 10, 1975. The Edmund Fitzgerald — 29 lost." Huh. History's just so...weird.

6) Jake Owen, "Yee Haw." "You take yer alright, you take yer can't wait, a lot of bring it on, and some damn straight, you mix it all up with some down home Southern drawl, y'all, you got yer yee-haw. "

5) Fergie, "London Bridge." London calling, speak the slang now. O Ambivalence of culture! Will you never end? Despite the numerous allusions — Fifty's rhythmic "I don't give a fuck"; Nelly et al's "urra" for "every"; hints of Masta Ace and Luke Skyywalker — as a total event, this song is part and