web analytics

Pop Rock Nation

Blog

  • American Idol Season 11 – Who Makes The Top 6 For Real This Time?

    As I wrote last night, America must’ve been smokin’ that stuff last week when Jessica Sanchez was nearly eliminated before Jenny Lo and company decided to save her. But there is no save this time. Will America be smokin’ that stuff again?

    Here’s my top and bottom 2 from last night:

    Top 2
    1. Skylar
    2. Joshua (edges out Phillip by a some chest hair)

    Bottom 2
    1. Elise
    2. Hollie

    I fear that my droopy faced girl Elise is going to be eliminated tonight.

    Here’s what I wrote on my Facebook page tonight in Elise’s honor:

    Remember her when she was on fire!

    The top 7 sing Dancing In The Street. I’m not sure I’ve seen skinnier jeans than the ones Colton is wearing. If he was dancing in the street in those, he’d get got. They’d have to cut the muskrat off his head too.

    Ryno brings Joshua and Hollie to the center. Joshua is rightfully through to next week. Hollie is in the bottom three.

    There’s been a Taylor Hicks sighting! He looks no older than 65 years old. He introduces Kris Allen, a most definite mistake-winner. Adam Lambert has more talent in his wig than Allen has. And Lambert doesn’t even wear a wig.

    Allen is doing a pretty darn good Enrique Iglesias impersonation with this song.

    Skylar and Elise are next to center stage. Elise might as well just walk to hang out with Hollie now. She basically said that she thinks she gets the harder critiques because the judges know she’s older and thinks she can take it. How about because you didn’t sing well last night? I know, I know. Elise is my girl. And yes, she’s in the bottom three.

    At this point, I fear for Jessica Sanchez’s life because of last week. If the world was fair, Colton and his skinny jeans would be in the bottom three. He was third worst last night.

    LMFAO is on stage for whatever reason. Barry Gordy must be proud.

    Colton, Phillip, and Jessica are in the center. Jessica is safe! Phillip is safe! The muskrat is in the bottom three. Colton is probably going back to safeland soon. Nope, Elise is safe! My droopy dog. I don’t have to pour out some liquor for her tonight.

    Holy cow! Colton has been eliminated. Hollie is the Teflon Don this year. Wow. I shouldn’t be surprised as I thought Colton was one of the worst three last night, but I just figured the teenie boppers would save him.

    Goodbye Colton, see you on the flipside.

  • Commercial-isms: Volkswagen Passat vs. Madness “It Must Be Love”

    Commercial-isms: Volkswagen Passat vs. Madness “It Must Be Love”

    It Must Be Love

    Always much more popular in their native Britain, the seven-man new wave ska band Madness are mainly (and somewhat erroneously) known here as a one hit wonder. That hit, “Our House” which hit the Billboard Top 10 in the summer of ’83, remains a staple of 80s party playlists. It’s a great song, but it’s tended to overshadow the rest of the band’s copious singles catalog from their classic 1979 45 “One Step Beyond” (The best instrumental single of the 70s? Oh yes, probably.) to quirky numbers like “Baggy Trousers” and the so-adorable-so-heartbreaking “My Girl”: “Why can’t she see, she’s lovely to me, but I like to stay in and watch TV on my own every now and then.”

    Madness “My Girl” (1979)

    “My Girl” was the second of more than a dozen top ten singles the band had in the U.K. But it took four years for the band to get any airplay here. After “Our House” finally broke the band to a big American audience, instead of releasing a new song as the follow-up, they reached back into their catalog for one of their most beloved previous hits, “It Must Be Love”, a cover of a 1972 song by folk-pop singer-songwriter Labi Siffre which went to #4 in the UK in 1981. (This selection only made sense in that the group’s self-titled U.S. debut album was essentially a greatest hits compilation – Labi Siffre was even more unknown to U.S. audiences than Madness was. He still is.) “It Must Be Love” wasn’t a total flop – it still managed to break into the American Top 40, but it never made it into the second hour of Casey Kasem’s weekly broadcast. Nevertheless, it remains the band’s second-biggest American hit, and until Volkswagen started airing commercials for the new Passat, it was mostly forgotten, even by the 80s kids.

    Madness “It Must Be Love” (1981)

    Madness’s cover of “It Must Be Love” was and remains Labi Siffre’s biggest American hit. Most of his albums weren’t even released in the U.S. until the last couple of years (and even then, only by digital download. You want a hard copy, it’s gonna be an import.) That said, Siffre does share a writing credit on Eminem’s 1999 single “My Name Is…” due to the fact that it samples Siffre’s 1975 song “I Got The…”, a very sexy song with one hell of an awesome breakdown. At that time, Eminem was getting a lot of flak for his apparent homophobia. Ironically, it was the openly gay Siffre’s bassline and electric piano hook from that sexy, sexy mid-song breakdown that anchored Em’s first really big hit. Check it out:

    Labi Siffre “I Got The” (1975)

  • New Single! Keane “Silenced by the Night”

    New Single! Keane “Silenced by the Night”


    ''Silenced by the Night''

    My main problem with the British band Keane is the same problem that I have with photographs of autumn landscapes: the prettiness, the infernally unquestionable prettiness of it all. It’s so freaking easy to love what a Keane song sounds like that it almost feels like you’re missing something, like you’re falling for something that somehow isn’t quite real. Like you’ve ridden a fake elevator to the top of a skyscraper and the view from the “observation deck” window isn’t really the actual view, but a projection of the beautiful view you believed you were riding up the “elevator” to see.

    It seems so simple to love a Keane song, and yet my relationship status with the band has always been “It’s Complicated.”

    That said, in the eight years since the release of their very, very pretty album Hopes and Fears, we’ve seen some of their singles – especially the lovely “Somewhere Only We Know” – become virtual standards for their generation. That song didn’t make the U.S. Top 40. Nevertheless, it’s been performed by American Idol contestants, and it was featured in an episode of Glee last year. I hate to admit that it took seeing a very pretty Darren Criss very prettily serenading a teary-eyed Chris Colfer to convince me there’s more to “Somewhere Only We Know” (and, by extension, Keane) than just the pretty.

    Glee Cast/The Warblers – “Somewhere Only We Know” (2011)

    I think Keane themselves have entertained a similar, uncomfortable skepticism regarding their music’s prettiness and after their gloriously moody sophomore album Under the Iron Sea, they’ve done a little sonic wilderness-wandering, trying on some newer edgier sounds on their third album Perfect Symmetry and even collaborating with rapper K’Naan for a couple of tracks on a 2010 EP called Night Train, finding only intermittent success in the process.

    The band is getting set to release their fourth full-length album in May. The album’s called Strangeland, and if its first single is any indication, it seems Keane are making peace with the pretty. “Silenced by the Night” sounds exactly like something off of Hopes and Fears, with sun-dappled keyboard lines, and a soaring vocal by Thomas Chaplin on the chorus. Even thematically, it feels like a sequel to “Somewhere Only We Know,” with lyrics about a guy finding renewed strength and refuge in a relationship, “’cause baby, I’m not scared of this world when you’re here.”