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Pop Rock Nation

Category: Pop Rock International

  • Big in the UK: “All Night Long” by Alexandra Burke

    Hey all, remember Leona Lewis? You know, the 2006 winner of the Simon Cowell-headed British talent search show The X-Factor (which Cowell plans to bring to the U.S. later this year)? The British Mariah? “Bleeding Love”? Can it be that “Bleeding Love” is only three years old? Can it be that only two albums into her kid-tested, mother(-and-Cowell)-approved career, and despite an appearance on the soundtrack of one of last year’s most talked-about movies (the song “Happy” featured prominently in ads for Precious), she’s already adrift in has-been territory? There are a lot of plausible explanations – lack of raw talent, not one of them – for Lewis’s premature fade-out. The fact is, she’s sorta boring. And, despite the rubber-stamp of Cowell, who’s ever harping on the virtues of currency and relevance, Lewis is really neither. She’s a pretty cipher with a voice, now lost in a crowd of Autotuned provocateurs.

    Two years later, in 2008, Cowell anointed another pop starlet, then 20-year-old Alexandra Burke – The British Beyonce, maybe, maybe, fingers-crossed maybe? – as that year’s X-Factor winner, beating out stiff competition from crowd favorite Diana Vickers (who’s done quite well on the UK charts since then) and biracial boy band JLS (whose J.R. Rotem-produced single “Everybody in Love” has been flirting with American radio playlists for the last several months without quite breaking). Burke’s winning performance, yet another cover of Leonard Cohen’s revered but oft-abused 1984 classic “Hallelujah”, a song that, due to an intimately overwrought mid-90s cover, fans of the tragic singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley regard as a sacred religious text. Angry at the blasphemy of a common pop singer’s – nay, a common reality show competitor’s -performance of the song, British Buckley fans declared a sort of download fatwa against Burke the week her single version of “Hallelujah” was released, urging the rockist faithful to download copies of Buckley’s version in order to keep Burke’s from debuting at number one on the charts. Not only did the Buckley campaign fail, but Burke’s single sold a record-breaking 100,000 plus downloads in its first week.

    Compounding the irony: Alexandra Burke didn’t really care for the song. As is the case with many (most) Idol winners, that first single sailed on the ardor of a television audience; it’s success had little to do with the direction (specifically, a penchant for Euro club bangers) Burke would take on her debut album. Overcome, released in the U.K. late last fall, boasted collaborations with producer-of-the-moment RedOne (who, she’s said in a recent video blog that she is back in the studio with) and her first non-X-Factor related single, “Bad Boys” featured a guest spot by the reigning king of the club-ready (read: irresistibly empty) rap, Flo Rida. Her latest, which stormed the British Top 10 earlier this month is a great little retro-disco flavored number called “All Night Long”, featuring Miami rapper Pitbull. It seems only a matter of time before Cowell launches Burke here in the States (maybe he’s saving her for the American X-Factor debut). Given that Europe and the U.K. are already three singles deep into Overcome, it’s likely that if and when the album does show up here, it will, like Taio Cruz’s just-released Rokstarr, be a reconstruction of the British album – more a “greatest hits so far/what you’ve been missing” set than a proper debut.

    So here’s what you’ve been missing. For the video of “All Night Long”, Alexandra Burke invited a bunch of pals over to her place (presumably) for a night of music-fueled debauchery, armed them all with video cameras (a la Bon Jovi’s “Bad Medicine” video), and reports back with the results, crayola sunglasses, metallic sequined eyelids, alterna-drag queens and all. Pitbull appears poolside in what appears to be a pre-taped address to the freaky, freaky congregants.

  • Big In Germany – Idol Edition: “Superstars” Mark Medlock and Mehrzad Marashi Are On A Boat

    Back around maybe the second or third season of American Idol, when the show was becoming the established pop cultural phenomenon it is today, we started hearing about similar shows being developed by Lord of the Idols Simon Fuller and 19 Entertainment in other countries like Sweden and Poland and Indo(friggin)nesia. To date, there have been approximately 30 various Idol-esque franchises created around the world. I remember reading around that time about Kurt Nilsen, the first-season winner of Idols Norway – just how cool he seemed. He was a guitar player and unlike earlier seasons of American Idol, he could actually accompany himself on the show. I don’t remember that I ever heard him sing until he did a duet with Willie Nelson on the song “Lost Highway” in 2008 (at which point I was duly impressed), but I remember thinking that he sounded like – well, like an artist. Specifically, the kind of singing-songwriting-guitar-playing artist that our own American Idol showed seemed to hold in contempt.

    It’s easy to trash the pop we Americans produce because we’re fairly buried in it. And just like any landfill, you can bet that there are a few treasures in that giant mound of refuse (future ski-hill?), but the smell from the rest of it is way too powerful – even if we thought the Hope Diamond were buried in it, would that be enough for us to throw on the haz-mat suits and go digging? Instead, we see from a distance pretty flowers growing on what looks like a majestic purple mountain shrouded in the soft fog of an early spring morning, and we think: All those international Idol competitions are actually producing, real, good, legitimate stuff. Or at least better than that awful Kelly Clarkson that we’re stuck with. She’s never gonna last. (Editorial Note: This is my 2003-4 self speaking. In gross ignorance. I didn’t watch any of Season 1, and Clarkson hadn’t put out Breakaway yet, which I contend is one of the best start-to-finish pop records of the last decade. Carry on.)

    But maybe that majestic purple mountain is really just another gigantic, disgusting, depressing landfill, and maybe its shroud of early morning spring fog is really just a cloud toxic fumes rising out of it.

    Maybe it’s just my deeply ingrained musical Europhilia, but I think it’s always easy to fall into thinking that Europeans are just naturally more artsy than we are; that they’re more willing to hear songs in languages other than their first, more open to genuine weirdness in the name of art; and thus, easier to romanticize their Idols – Kurt Nilsen, for instance – as more talented, more legitimate, more worthy. But in 2010, American Idol‘s metamorphosis from mere singing competition to artist farm team is complete, a metamorphosis that probably began around the time of Taylor Hicks‘s win in Season 5 (the show’s peak ratings season, by the way) and has culminated with the coronation of an Idol, Lee DeWyze, not so very dissimilar from that chunky (for a Scandinavian) blonde troubadour from Norge; and this against Crystal Bowersox, a very white girl from Ohio, with white-girl dreadlocks, a serious Janis Joplin jones, a long-standing residency at one of her local pubs, and really bad teeth, who not only writes her own songs, but writes them well enough that one of them was actually featured in an Idol video package last week. American Idol has become the very epitome of the Idols I’d always imagined all those Euro Idols to be. (And yet, this season, I couldn’t have been less interested in watching it.)

    Meanwhile, the most recent winner of the German Idol equivalent Deutschland sucht den Superstar , 29-year-old Iranian-born singer Mehrzad Marashi has just released the follow-up to his debut, show finale single “Don’t Believe”, which is still charting in Germany’s Top 10 this week. The song, “Sweat (The A La La La La Long Song)” is a pop-reggae duet with openly gay former Superstar winner Mark Medlock, the German franchise’s most successful winner to date. If you are still harboring any romantic notions about the presumed artistic superiority of the artists developed by international (read: non-American) Idol franchises, let the video you’re about to see be your reality check.

    BTW: Marashi’s the one whose ridiculous, Guido-er-than-thou facial hair doesn’t form the weird trident points on his chin. And did I mention Medlock’s gayness? Also: Andy Samberg should sue.

  • Big in Europe: Plan B “She Said”

    Not to be confused with a German band who mined a far less confrontational hybrid of hip-hop and soulful pop in the mid 1990s, Plan B is the wildly ambitious British singer-rapper-actor-producer-aspiring filmmaker Ben Drew, whose 2006 album Who Needs Actions When You Got Words?, a record as nightmarish, epic, and unstoppable as a British Petroleum oil spill, elicited breathless comparisons to artists as varied as Eminem, Justin Timberlake, and Damien Rice. Like Eminem, Plan B knows how to tell a good story, but where Mr. Mathers’ rhymes are self-referential and reek of embellished memoir, Mr. Drew writes mostly bleak and bloody urban fictions centered around drug addicts, gang-bangers, and other assorted denizens of East London’s early-21st Century underworld.

    His latest album is a sort of Northern Soul opera called The Defamation of Strickland Banks, and while the record has been lingering at the top of the British pop and soul charts since its release in April 2010, its second single “She Said”, four minutes of achingly tense but oh-so-old-school-groovy courtroom intrigue, has been storming the pop charts all over the mainland as well. Drew takes a cue from Mark Ronson’s pointedly organic strings-and-horns productions for Amy Winehouse, but here that treatment feels more about advancing a sinister plot – heightening the song’s tension – and less retro-for-retro’s sake. A big band underscores the song’s insistent syncopations and Drew’s pleading vocals like a musical judge and jury nodding along with the defense’s arguments while quietly forming their rationales for a guilty verdict they’d long since unanimously decided in their heads.

    “She Said” may evoke nostalgia, but it doesn’t do so cheaply or lightly. Plan B may know Eminem’s name, but Strickland Banks suggests that Ben Drew has spent a lot more time with his parents’ Smokey Robinson records and that he’s never taken those Lenny Kravitz posters down from his bedroom wall. This is not backward looking music. This is, rather, almost surely what Maroon 5’s next album is going to sound like. Only not as good. (And I sorta like Maroon 5. Just sayin’.)

    The song’s also supported by an instant classic of a video, and Drew is apparently working on a short film of the same title to accompany The Defamation of Strickland Banks which will likely incorporate the videos for record’s singles. If “She Said” is any indication of what the final product might look like, I’m totally in line for the DVD.