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Pop Rock Nation

Author: Paul Lorentz

  • Big In Europe: Stromae’s “Alors On Danse”

    When I was a kid, most of the music I loved best was coming from Europe, and so I loved it when Casey Kasem would occasionally mention on his weekly American Top 40 broadcasts which songs were topping the charts in places like Belgium and Norway (and, yes, of course, the U.K.). Most of the time, this would be in the context of introducing a song that was a current hit in the U.S. Example, “Coming up on AT40, the hit by the Austrian native Falco that’s currently number one in Romania, Italy, Poland, The Netherlands, and Czechoslovakia.” I always thought it was fascinating not just that, you know, Romania could have a Top 40, but that songs I knew could be on it. And that Casey Kasem knew what was on the Romanian Top 40. In my head, I imagined Romanian 11-year-olds like myself sneaking out of church (did they have church in Romania too?) to sit in their parents’ cars and listen to Casey Kasem count down the Romanian Top 40.

    The downside of this all was that sometimes, Casey would announce the number one hits in these far-flung locales, but you wouldn’t get to actually hear them. Later on, I realized I could go to the library in Kenosha and they would have a copy of the current Billboard, and Billboard actually published the top 10s, 20s and/or 40s of various international territories, which was all good fun to read. But it always ended up in the disappointment of unrequited curiosity. Even if I’d had the money to buy a Fra Lippo Lippi album out of sheer Billboard-chart-induced curiosity, where was a kid in small-town Wisconsin supposed to buy it? And certainly no radio station was going to be playing it. Sad. And it just wasn’t right, because as it turns out, the difference in radio air-playability between Fra Lippo Lippi (who never had an American hit), and, say, Johnny Hates Jazz (who had a couple) is pretty negligible. Perhaps, after a-ha, U.S. labels and radio stations had decided that they had met their quota of break-out Norwegian pop acts.

    Today’s musically-obsessive, internationally-minded, geographically-stranded pre-teens no longer have this issue. You don’t have to go to Kenosha to read the latest copy of Billboard. You can go to Billboard.com. And once there, and once you’re curious about, say, the number one hit in Europe that isn’t a hit here (yet?), you can go to YouTube and watch the video for that hit. And so, with that, I’m introducing this occasional little column called “Big In…” where I spin- err, embed – the hits of exotic locations. (Sadly, Billboard.com does not publish the Romanian Top 40.) First up is the current number one hit on the pan-European chart. It’s by 25-year-old Rwandan-Belgian rapper Paul van Haver, better known as Stromae. It’s called “Alors on Danse”, and it’s accompanied by a very cinematic split-screen video that only magnifies the song’s message (in French) of dancing in the face of existential boredom. Oui, baby!

    [Update: So, okay, Universal Music France is mean. Click the link below to actually see the video]
    Stromae \"Alors on Danse\"

  • The Band Played… “Poptones.” The Continuing Adventures of Public Image Limited in the American Midwest

    I’ve been waiting literally 20 years to see the band Public Image Ltd, the jagged-post-punk-dub-arty-dance-pop-with-something-to-say juggernaut led by former Sex Pistol John Lydon. The last time the band played Milwaukee was in the fall of ’89. They were touring behind their album 9 at the time, and had a near brush with the U.S. pop charts with the song “Disappointed”, which, if I were to rank my personal favorite singles of all time, would probably fall somewhere in or near the top 10. (Along with their signature classic from 1986 “Rise”.)

    After their next album together (1992’s That What Is Not), PiL sort of disappeared for awhile. Aside from a John Lydon solo album, there have been no new records from the band. But while there still isn’t a new album from the group, it would be incorrect to say that there has been no new music. Lydon has reconvened the band for its first U.S. tour since 1992. Last night, I saw them play at the Pabst Theater in Milwaukee and it must be said that even though their set list leaned heavily on songs from the group’s 1979 album Metal Box (or Second Edition) – generally, and rightly, considered the group’s masterpiece, and truly a pivotal album of its era – the music felt very new, and the performances very now. Listening to the band re-animating their back catalog, I was again struck by how rhythmically, atmospherically, and emotionally complex these songs are, and how well they rebuked the joker a few rows behind me who shouted “Pretty Vacant!” (and laughed at his own stupid joke) as the band took the stage.

    Not only have songs like “Poptones” and the freaking glorious “Albatross” remained relevant, they’ve actually become more so over time, and when the band closed its set with an increasingly bass-heavy (at Johnny’s chanted urging) take on the song “Religion”, prefaced with a pop quiz (“These are not trick questions!”) on the Pope, the Catholic church, and justice (Milwaukee is one of the epicenters of the current pedophile priest scandals), the outrage and the rebellion were absolutely palpable. (And not just because the ridiculously/wonderfully amplified bass was rumbling our Pabst Blue Ribbon filled bellies.) If there had been a picture of the pope in the room, the bass alone would have vaporized it.

    It’s true the band is comprised entirely of graying and/or paunchy fifty-somethings – PiL veterans Lu Edmonds and Bruce Smith, along with bassist-extraordinaire Scott Firth (whose resume includes work with both Elvis Costello and the Spice Girls). It’s also true that they played a slew of obvious fan favorites, like the opener “This Is Not a Love Song”. But let’s make at least this much clear: This is not an oldies act. This is not a greatest hits show. It’s a 2010 show by a 2010 band with 2010 things to say; and though this is a band that spoke to the high school social outcast 1989 Paul Lorentz, this is a band that kicked the ass of the mortgage-paying-cube-dwelling-slightly-more-socially-appealing-father-of-two 2010 Paul Lorentz.

    A quick note about the audience. The apparent median age of the pit audience was 47 and a half. The average weight I’m guessing was about 245. There were more chins than scalps with hair. It was, without exaggeration, the oldest, fattest, baldest pit I’d ever seen. In fact, it was an audience I felt young in, which is an increasingly rare phenomenon, and this gave the proceedings another (however accidental) layer of subversion. The truest punks and rebels of the Milwaukee metro area now look like (and are) grandparents. I myself had a bit of a curmudgeonly moment during the band’s entrancing, alternately meditative and cathartic performance of “U.S.L.S. 1” when an overly flirtatious douchebag and the Taylor Swift lookalike he was trying to make (the only twentysomethings in the audience?) wouldn’t shut up, and I asked them to take it to the lobby. They didn’t immediately comply, but they were clearly not there to see a band play a show (or maybe they were there to see Maroon 5 – oops, easy mistake), and were not long for the place.

    After Lydon firmly admonished those in the pit to keep their beers and their bodies off the stage, Lydon affirmed that Public Image Ltd was at the Pabst Theater to enjoy themselves, and they proceeded to do just that for a couple of hours. Throughout the show, Lydon was equal parts den-mother, coach, guidance counselor, rebel warrior, nation-builder, and incendiary device, and he took on each of these roles with an uncompromised joy and unflinching conviction. Reputation for confrontation notwithstanding, Lydon proved a most gracious frontman for an audience that was often either overly polite or (especially later in the show) just plain pooped.

    One of my favorite moments in the show was the band’s take on the 1989 single “Warrior” , in which all of those roles came together in a single song. The chorus of the song says “I’m a warrior. This is my land.” In concert last night, Lydon virtually declared the audience and the band together a new nation-state; but he also touchingly proclaimed the U.S. his adopted country (he’s becoming a citizen), repeatedly mentioned how nice it was to see smiling faces in the audience (and by extension the U.S.), and rejected self-pity and complacence. At the end of the song, he asked “Are you a warrior?” The audience replied with the predictable noises. Lydon chuckled in response (I’m paraphrasing), “Well, yes, kind of relaxed warriors.” It was more sweet than judgmental, but it was clearly both. It was good to see his smiling face too. I hope to see it again soon.

  • Hot Chip: The Anti-Anti-Boy Band

    The guys in Hot Chip are only too aware that they are not high-school locker pin-up material. But that has never stopped the quintet of English synth-nerds from fancying themselves as the kinds of cheek-boned pop idols guys like me followed avidly in the pages of Smash Hits 25 years ago. Over the last 10 years, they’ve become indie darlings while perfecting a dance pop sound that, for hipsters, comes dangerously (and for me, deliciously) close to something you might hear on Top 40 radio with their fantastic latest album One Life Stand.

    In the hilariously confounding video for the album’s second single “I Feel Better”, an alluring Auto-tune seduction over skipping beats and syncopated synth-strings, the guys play on the notion that they sound like Top 40 but aren’t by portraying themselves as Britain’s Next Boy Band. Six-pack abs and blank supermodel eyes abound! In fact, the parody is so dead-on that it actually fools one of the video’s commenters (“Don’t like boy bands, that said I think English ones are Much better than American ones.”). Those who actually know Hot Chip know immediately it’s a joke, but then the video turns on itself and the joke gets weirdly violent. Only then the video turns on itself again. And gets weirdly violent again.

    Maybe the band is making fun of boy bands, or maybe they’re paying tribute to their own Inner Boy Band, or maybe the band is just video-game laser-zapping the notion that there’s any meaningful distinction to be made between the pop of Hot Chip and the pop of, say, Taio Cruz. And if there is a meaningful distinction to be made there, we need to be ready to see that distinction erased. Interestingly enough, the video implicates, and destroys, not just “Hot Chip” (the boy band), and “Hot Chip” (the resurrected boy band with new lead singer), but also the audience for both (including the real life Hot Chip, who get zapped around 3:25), which is obliterated with the cold efficiency of War of the Worlds martians.


    Hot Chip – I Feel Better
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