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Tag: Lady GaGa

  • PAUL’S TOP 100 OF 2010 – PART 6: #50-41 “You came to celebrate, I came to cerebrate…”

    And the countdown marches on…

    #50
    #50: “YOU MUST BE OUT OF YOUR MIND” by THE MAGNETIC FIELDS.
    You have to love a guy unafraid to rhyme “on your knees, yeah” with “anesthesia”. A great song about not letting bygones be bygones sung in Stephen Merritt’s strangely incisive Eeyore deadpan. After releasing a their feedback heavy 2008 album Distortion, the Magnetic Fields returned with Realism the stripped-down acoustic yin to its predecessor’s clanging yang.

    #49
    #49: “THE SKY’S THE LIMIT” by JASON DERULO.
    Petty thievery never sounds so good as when Mister Desrouleaux swipes the essence of “Flashdance… What a Feeling” from Irene Cara. The best reinvention of an 80s soundtrack anthem this year. Which is not to say that the Black-Eyed Peas provided any competition with their insufferable “The Time (The Dirty Bit)”. Also: this song contains my favorite instance of the word “shawty”.

    #48
    #48: “TRIPPIN’ DOWN THE FREEWAY” by WEEZER.
    Although the song is about the persistence of a romantic relationship (and a woman’s awesome “Shirley Applebee” look) against all odds (and all guys named Kevin Green), it could be just as much about Weezer and their fans…
    I loved Weezer from the very start, but since their 1996 album Pinkerton, I’ve run hot and cold with them, and in the last few years, I’ve completely written them off (or thought I had). But they always manage somehow to re-justify their existence and re-justify my love. Example: This damn song. Gawd, I love it. It’s been in heavy rotation on my iPod all year. It made me love the band again. It also made me want to google Shirley Applebee. And then, once I did, it made me love the song and the band even more. Weezer and I are gonna be okay.

    #47
    #47: “ALL NIGHT LONG” by ALEXANDRA BURKE featuring PITBULL.
    The fifth season winner of Simon Cowell’s UK (soon to be US) singing competition The X-Factor, Alexandra Burke throws a wild house party. Although I like this version fine, the Pitbull-less version that appears on Burke’s debut album Overcome has a better build-up and you don’t miss the obligatory rap break at all.

    #46
    #46: “TELEPHONE” by LADY GAGA & BEYONCE.
    Before there was a video for this song, it was just a funny little song about not wanting take calls from a stupid boyfriend when you’re out dancing. I love the video, but it sort of overshadows a lot of what was fun about the song to begin with. Although it does give us some very quotable lines. “Once you kill the cow…”

    #45
    #45: “MARCHIN’ ON” by ONEREPUBLIC.
    “For those days we felt like a mistake, for those times when love’s what we hate, somehow, we keep marchin’ on.” This is a great song to listen to after you’ve spent most of an otherwise pleasant evening arguing about who’s more underappreciated and throwing Tupperware lids at each other.

    #44
    #44: “GRENADE” by BRUNO MARS.
    The guy who wrote “F*ck You” for Cee-Lo Green goes all Christ-like (with a piano instead of a cross) for the video for the second single from his debut album Doo Wops and Hooligans. Awesome lyric: “Tell the devil I said ‘Hey’ when you get back to where you’re from…” Ouch. Also, I love – LOVE – the drums in this song.

    #43
    #43: “BREAK YOUR HEART” by TAIO CRUZ.
    This song is all about its middle eight. If this were a countdown of songs I most loved singing along with, this song’s bridge (“Yeah! And I know karma’s gonna get me back for bein’ so cold…”) would be, like, #7. I deliberately chose the original sans-Ludacris version of the song because I think Ludacris distracts us from the super-awesome middle eight.

    #42
    #42: “THE FIRE” by THE ROOTS featuring JOHN LEGEND.
    Like the rest of their amazing album How I Got Over, “The Fire” is tenaciously, apocalyptically soulful. The video has some disturbing imagery, but despite its ambitions, it’s too incoherent to really work.

    #41
    #41: “CREDIBLE THREATS” by THE ONE AM RADIO.
    A nice little song about contemplating all of the possible demises that await us on a day-to-day basis. Things like turbulent airplanes, shuddering L-trains, and sudden floods of brakelights on I-5. Oh, and foreigners. This is also my favorite choreography of the year. The video was also released in a 3D version. And the 45rpm vinyl version of the single came with a set of 3D glasses and a download card for both the song (in various versions) and the 3D video for it.

    In the next installment: Because “one’s not enough”, an unbroken tie…

  • 2010 MTV Video Music Awards Play By Play

    Chelsea Handler
    We’re live! Ok, well, I’m kind of lying. I’m blogging this while watching the West Coast MTV feed, so it’s really the earliest I can watch this show. But those of you on the East Coast have already seen it. So you can either watch with me, or reminisce with me, whichever you prefer.

    Refresh every 15 minutes or so as I’ll be updating the blog as much as possible.

    I don’t know Chelsea Handler’s work well, but she has a little bit of buzz because of her talk show on E! and I guess that’s what happens when you get some buzz. You host the VMAs.

    – An Eminem performance to start the show? You sure are not very predictable MTV.

    – What I find hilarious about Not Afraid is that baseball players and fighters everywhere use it as their batter walk-up/entrance music. Don’t know they it’s about an addict who is trying to make a comeback? Or are they saying they’re former addicts?

    – I wonder if MTV knows that Recovery is a terribly overrated album?

    – I swear, if Chris Brown shows up on stage with Rihanna for Love The Way You Lie, I’m never watching MTV again.

    – Ok, he didn’t make it on stage. Thank the lord.

    – So far, Chelsea’s monologue consists of making fun of Taylor Swift, black rappers, Justin Bieber, and The Jersey Shore. In other words, it’s pretty lame.

    – At least one thing that Ellen DeGeneres got out of being a judge on American Idol is that she’s a presenter on the VMAs. I’m not sure that was a step forward in her career. Did Oprah ever do the VMAs?

    – Lady Gaga won the first award for Bad Romance and she walked up on stage wearing a peacock hair-do, looking eerily similar to Ellen DeGeneres’ faux hawk.

    – Is it bad of me that I’m rooting for Paramore to win the best rock video all because of my girl Hayley Williams? Damn, they lost. 30 Seconds To Mars won.

    – Kim Kardashian just introduced Justin Bieber. Too bad her boyfriend Miles Austin is sad that his Dallas Cowboys lost on Sunday Night Football. Ok, it’s not that bad that they lost. In fact, that made me kind of happy.

    – Justin Bieber is lip-syncing the hell out of Baby. He’s pulling a Joey McIntyre on us since his voice is probably changing on him these days. It’s about time.

    – He segued into Somebody To Love and I was just waiting for Usher to try and steal his swag. I also find it cute that whenever Bieber’s done with his performance, he ends with a drum solo just to show that he knows a little bit of music.

    – Don’t you just hate it when people use the word “myself” when they’re supposed to use the word “me”? I’m looking at you Trey Songz.

    – Remember when I jokingly said that I was waiting for Usher to steal Justin’s swag? Guess who’s performing next? I’ll give you a clue. His name starts with a U.

    – My man can still dance his tail off. He definitely owes a lot to MJ for the way he moves, but at least it’s not a complete jack like Chris Brown.

    – If Nicki Minaj doesn’t make it in rap music, she has a career in modeling for Apple Bottom jeans. Holy cow, you could see it from the front. She might as well change her name to Nicki Badonkadonk.

    – Florence Henderson is in a new group called Florence Henderson + The Machine? Isn’t she too old? What? It’s just Florence + The Machine? My bad.

    – Lady Gaga just won Best Pop Video and is wearing an outfit that reminds me of Missy Elliot’s rubber ball suit. She won for this video:

    – Taylor Swift is singing a song that might be inspired by the Kanye West fiasco from last year that I still believe to this day was party rehearsed. She should’ve gone the Justin Bieber route and lip-synced. She must be going through puberty too. Or else, her voice just isn’t very good.

    – Mary J. Blige is making my ears happy after Taylor Swift made them so sad.

    – And the Best Hip Hop Video goes too… B.o.B.! Woohoo! Ok, you knew Eminem really won.

    – Take J-WOWW’s boobs and Nicki Minaj’s rear end and you have a pretty cool comic book character.

    – Bruno Mars is on stage lookin’ like a Filipino Richie Valens with his hair all blown out. Finally. All it took was a red-headed white girl who can’t dance with a big voice and B.o.B. to join each other on stage to put together a performance that I really liked. You go Haley.

    – First Selena Gomez and now Victoria Justice? Disney Channel is making it hard for 14-year old boys I tell you.

    – Justin Bieber finally won an award and if you just started watching, you’d know it was his first. He couldn’t find his way to the stage and nearly went the wrong way after receiving it. Come on, he’s going through puberty! Cut him some slack.

    – Cher is on this show, damn near naked in 2010.

    – Gaga says the name of her new album is called Born This Way. Well, that sure is going to help dismiss those rumors that she has a pilly packer.

    – Kanye’s performing a song with a hook that goes, “Let’s have a toast for the douche bags, let’s have a toast for the assholes, let’s have a toast for the scum bags, everyone of them that I know.”

    – He also did some live beat mixing on stage. He was definitely the most intriguing performer of the night. I think he was even on pitch more than Taylor was. Check out the audio of the song below. Good night!

    Photo of Chelsea Handler shared through the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license.

    Update: Found Kanye’s performance. Here’s hoping it stays up.


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  • First Impressions: Marina and the Diamonds

    I have also decided I am the worst kind of artist. I think I am like a half-pop star. Too pop for indie & too indie for pop. Half way house, hellish doom.

    -Marina and the Diamonds.

    Marina and the Diamonds is not a band. It is the stage name of 24-year-old singer-songwriter-performer Marina Lambrini Diamandis. And I think I love her. Marina creates brilliant pop music, ready for the radio, but with an emotional intimacy and a sense of candor more fitting the confessional guitar strummers of the 70s. Incorporating both visual and vocal tics and mannerisms from a broad spectrum of out-there female forebears – the emphatic, naive joy of Bjork, the punk theatricality of Siouxsie Sioux, the faux-eastern European, new wave exoticism of Lene Lovich, the self-doubt and introspection of Joan Armatrading, and, what the hell, Buffy Sainte-Marie’s otherworldly trill – only without coming across nearly as forbiddingly weird as any of the above, and all while sounding like no one but herself. After several singles and EPs, her debut album The Family Jewels was released in February 2010.

    “Mowgli’s Road”

    Like Lady Gaga, there’s something visionary about what Marina and the Diamonds is, for it most certainly isn’t just Marina herself. Gaga may have her little monsters, but Marina addresses her fans as her Diamonds, which makes her stage name not just a play on her given name, but gives new meaning to the phrase “I’m with the band”, implicating those who listen to her music, who come to her shows, who read her (awesome) blog, who buy her branded lip paint and face gems, (and presumably those of us who write fawning admirations of her in their obscure little music blogs) as participants in this ongoing, open-ended musical art project. It might be a little easy to write off this idea of artistic audience-inclusiveness as a Gaga rip-off, but Marina comes by the concept independently, and this is pretty much where comparisons to Lady Gaga end. Where Gaga embraces her celebrity, taking a sort of pre-emptively self-exploitative stance and making self-consciously provocative videos to aggrandize otherwise often silly pop songs, Marina regards pop culture and celebrity – her own increasing celebrity especially – with caution and the kind of curiosity one might have for an exotic, potentially deadly tropical insect, fascination tinged with revulsion. An emotionally charged, cabaret-style cover of 30H!3’s “Starstrukk” has become a fixture of her live show (you can download it for free here).

    “Hollywood”

    While embracing instantly lovable pop melodies, her songs are full of challenges and manifestos in disguise. Her single “I Am Not a Robot” might be a reassurance to a social outcast boyfriend coming to terms with his baggage. But it also reads as a statement of artistic purpose, not just Marina’s, but her audience’s – and, simultaneously, a rebuke of the soulless-ness (not to mention joylessness) of Autotune radio pop fodder. “You’re vulnerable. You are not a robot,” she sings at the end of the first verse. She counters that charge with an empathetic chorus, “Guess what? I am not a robot,” and finishes with a question “Can you teach me how to feel real? Can you turn my power on?” With this song, she throws down a gauntlet for her vision of Marina and the Diamonds going forward. She’d rather be hated for her genuine two-thousand-and-late-ness than be loved by millions for a phony three-thousand-and-eight pose. Yes, I believe this makes her The Anti-Fergie. Thank Diamonds for that.

    “I Am Not a Robot”