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Pop Rock Nation

Tag: Paul Lorentz

  • Sunday Seven: Loving The Aliens

    Here’s a dirty little secret about what’s on my iPod:  I, almost exclusively, put singles on it.  It’s probably not the most appropriately music-snobby approach, but it serves a couple of purposes.  One:  it gives me a strict, easy-to-adhere-to criterion for editing down a library of more than 20,000 mp3s (3200 CDs, 400 LPs) to fit onto an 80 gig iPod.  The other purpose is that at the times when I’m listening to the iPod – at work, on walks, at the gym – I want some easy – meaning familar – listening.  Now, just because something was a single doesn’t mean it was popular (or if it was, that it still is today), and just because it’s familiar – easy – listening for me, doesn’t mean it is for a whole lot of others, so there’s still plenty of obscure shit to be heard.  And, of course, every rule was made to be broken.  Or bent.  For instance:
    1.  “It’s Alright” by Chicago (1986)
    Never released as an A-side in its own right, this lively Bill Champlin song about a consolatory one-nighter, which originally appeared on Chicago 18 was certainly worthy.   My first concert (actually my first three) was Chicago touring behind Chicago 18 and I remember this as one of the few new songs the band trotted out between classics like “Saturday in the Park” and “25 or 6 to 4” (which they’d recently re-recorded as 18‘s introductory single).  The song was an instant sing-along, even with the older audience, and I always felt it deserved to be a single.   Alas, it merely turned up as the b-side to Chicago 19‘s third single “You’re Not Alone”.  As further proof that this song might have been a contender for single consideration, check out this (obviously lip-synced) television performance of the song.

    2.  “Abracadabra” by The Steve Miller Band (1982)
    This was the song that introduced me to the Steve Miller Band.  It also came out right around the time that I was really starting to pay attention to the radio (as opposed to playing the hell out of my parent’s records and having my older sister make mix tapes for me from hers).  I think it was the number one song the first time I ever listened to Casey Kasem’s weekly Top 40 broadcast.  (Incidentally, Chicago was near the top at the same time with their comeback single “Hard to Say I’m Sorry”, the song that introduced me to them.)
    3. “Everlasting Love” by Robert Knight (1967)
    Not as popular as the early-disco-era version recorded by Carl Carlton (it was also covered by Gloria Estefan in the 90s), Robert Knight’s “Everlasting Love”  – a Top 20 hit in its own right – boasts punchier, more accented vocals and a fatter horn arrangement.  Otherwise, the two versions are so similar that at a quieter volume, their indistinguishable.
    4.  “I Saw the Light” by Todd Rundgren (1972)
    I like a lot of Todd Rundgren’s work as a performer, as a producer, and as the leader of the band Utopia, but I love very little of it.  I like this song.  That is all.
    5.  “No Other Love” by John Legend (2008)
    A nice reggae-tinged song from his fine third album Evolver.  Nothing mindblowing here, but the fact that John Legend not only exists, but thrives in today’s AutoTuned pop and R&B marketplace is cause for hope.  He did a bit of campaigning for Barack Obama this fall.  Maybe the President-elect could invent a cabinet post to appoint John Legend to.  Secretary of Soul?
    6.  “Another World” by Hoodoo Gurus (1989)
    One of the great, unsung bands to come out of Australia in the 80s, the Hoodoo Gurus released this adorable, and oh-so-catchy love-song to an extra-terrestrial as the second single of their fabulous 1989 album Magnum Cum Louder.  Awesome stuff.

    7.  “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” by Pat Benatar (1980)
    Last week, I picked up a new compilation from the Numero Group called It’s All Pop, chronicling the brief and disheartening history of a Kansas City indie label called Titan Records.  Formed by a couple of friends in the mid-70s, Titan’s complete discography amounted to six (beautifully packaged) 7″ singles, and a label sampler LP.   It’s a fascinating story, with some pretty good music to go with it, but one thing I noticed was that there were no women!  Where are all the girls in power-pop (besides in the song titles)?  (Actually, one of Titan’s most notable acts was a quartet from Nebraska who called themselves The Boys and dressed themselves in a – err, gender-ambiguous manner.  Courage, my friends, courage.)  But, oh yeah, Pat Benatar.  “Hit Me With Your Best Shot”.  You could never fit Pat Benatar’s work into a subgenre as narrowly defined as power-pop, but “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” is the quintessential (girl-)power pop song.
    And thank you, Paul, for taking us on a trip through your iPod! I’m jealous because you have more music than me, though. Join us next Sunday when (hopefully) we’ll have another guest take us through their music collection on the Sunday Seven!!!

  • You Think She’s Crazy? She’s Got Your Crazy! I Love This Crazy! Britney’s Circus

    What a difference a year makes in the life of Britney Spears. It’s almost impossible to conceive that at this time last year, the pop princess career was a sad, sick joke of a thing – her ability to sell records apparently inextricably linked to her ability to make tabloid headlines.  Her 2007 album Blackout was essentially the house that TMZ footage built and her pathetic appearance on that year’s VMA broadcast has become legendary for its sheer godawfulness.  But in 2008, just in time for her 27th birthday, Britney’s already back with her sixth album Circus – another cheeky title that suggests she’s well aware of what people say about her, and totally prepared to own it and bend it to her will.  (And, yes, she seems to say - because a lot of folks wouldn’t believe her - she actually has one of her own.)

    As with all of her previous records, it would be easiest to dismiss Britney’s latest album as the latest segment of a written-as-it-happens VH-1 Behind the Music special.  The songs sound autobiographical, but they were all written by the expensive hired help, who, we might imagine, are just as eager as Britney to make their own mark on what exactly it is to be Britney Spears.  And Circus arrives with a readymade storyline and a set of talking points that Britney and her handlers (including her family) have been oh-so-willing to deliver in various televised outlets with the kind of zealous discipline even the most seasoned politician could be proud of.  The message being that Britney knows that her life has been a publicly staged trainwreck for the last few years, but now she’s back, she’s in control, she’s calling the shots, and that the tabloids need her more than she needs them (a direct reversal from last year, when a sleeve note thank you to the National Enquirer would have seemed in order).  Nevermind about that conservatorship.  And oh yeah, she loves being a mom.

    All of this, of course, comes sweetened with a heaping tablespoon of “Superstar!” hubris – the new album’s song “Kill the Lights” opens up with a radio announcer promoting Britney from the rank of pop princess to Queen of Pop.  But the unexpected and, frankly, pretty miraculous thing about Circus is just how irrelevant all those talking points and all that braggadocio become in the face of the music itself.  And that starts with the album’s lead single.

    Where Blackout‘s opening single “Gimme More” functioned mainly as a tonic for the Britney-starved (and, resultantly, died a quick death on the charts after a surging debut), Circus actually opens with a genuine hit in the form of “Womanizer”, the sort of unshakable pop single that made Britney famous to begin with – a song with all the hooky, turbo-charged tenacity of a Chihuahua puppy just discovering the power of its own unleashed genitalia, all pink and rocket-shaped and shameless.  If “Gimme More” was a mirage of what fascinated us (musically speaking) about Britney, “Womanizer” is the real deal, repetitive to the extreme, but with a feral sense of sexual vengeance, all set to Blade Runner sound effects, wailing Star Trek sirens, flashy fluorescents and hot pink neon, a pornographic video arcade in song.

    Britney’s voice is, as always, punishingly digitized, but the song’s motor runs on a seemingly omnipresent chorus which relentlessly juliennes any semblance of literal or grammatical sense, reducing the song’s lyrics, such as they are, to a sequacious set of vaguely evocative phonemes which, while virtually meaningless in and of themselves, ultimately start to function as the proteins that make up the DNA of a wildly potent audio-virus dead set on world domination.  And that, more than the lyrics, is what sells the song’s storyline.

    Far more convincingly than any MTV documentary, popular sit-com guest spot, or lucid morning talk show interview could, “Womanizer” makes the case for Britney’s successful re-emergence as something more than just the tabloid wreck of the year.  That it does so largely without actual, sensical words says as much about Britney – who, in person, is actually no less self-reflective and articulate than, say, former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin (and has better comic timing to boot) – as it does about the production talent she surrounds herself with – namely Britney vets like Danja, Bloodshy & Avant, and The Outsyders, along with Dr. Luke and Benny Blanco and the usual battalion of Swedes.

    There’s always been something mutually parasitic about Britney’s relationships with songwriters and producers, but more than ever before, those relationships are starting to look and sound like real symbiosis.  And Circus finds that symbiosis working at something that sounds confrontationally sexy and club-ready with less of the effortful lewdness that marked (and marred) much of Blackout.  (“Mmm Papi” is a notable exception – Gwen Stefani could probably make it work.)

    You won’t find song lyrics printed in the booklet of Circus and that’s fitting, because at its best (and it really doesn’t get much better than “Womanizer”), the most durable pleasures of Circus are almost pre-verbally abstract, purest sound and rhythm:  the electronic bass throb of the Guys Siggsworth-produced ballad “Out From Under” with its Ginzu-sharp synth-cymbal contours; the layers of vocal textures, spoken, sung, chanted, and “produced” on “Kill the Lights”, the way her voice becomes a mutilated sample of itself in “Shattered Glass”, to say nothing of the way it effortlessly sidewinds its way along a yo-yo melody against a digital-celestial shimmer on that song’s verses.   “Leather and Lace” rides easy on little more than a simple syncopation and a deceptively organic thumb-popping bass-line that sounds, thrillingly, like something stolen from a Kool & the Gang session, circa 1980.  (Eat your heart out, Maroon 5!)

    “Unusual You” is a gorgeously understated science fiction groove – shades of the shivery Norwegian technopop of Royksopp – and with a surprisingly intimate, emotionally complex lyric (“Didn’t anyone tell you / you’re supposed to / break my heart / I expect you to / so why haven’t you?”).  But that song’s a transcendent exception on an album where mere words are rendered, at best, superfluous:  there’s nothing the lyrics of “Blur” say that the foggy nocturnal atmospherics – the muted, quivery guitar arpeggios, and the glowing, fairy-like flittering of the synthesizers – don’t convey vividly on their own.   It’s telling that the song that relies most heavily on its lyrics – the album closing “My Baby” – is the album’s only real dud.  Of course, most Britney devotees will forgive the track since it’s the only one Britney gets a writer’s credit on, and it’s clearly written as a celebration of her children, but – call me petty – I can’t get past a couplet like “I smell your breath / it makes me cry”.  (And my Inner English Professor bristles when she sings that she’s “like a performer” on the title track.)

    But, seriously, that’s my biggest complaint about Circus, and frankly, the album seems to get better every time I listen to it.  The obvious argument against it is that it’s not really Britney’s music at all, but her producers’.   Which is fair enough, I suppose.  Except that she’s the one financing these producers and serving as their muse, providing a common thread of inspiration from the album’s opening ballsy squalls to its tender, murmuring conclusion.  And the fact remains that regardless of the source, Circus – as its title would suggest – is a multitudinous, electronically pulchritudinous spectacle for the ears.  It’s Britney’s best album so far, and, frankly, one of the best start-to-finish pop albums I’ve heard in a long time.  (If only I could say the same for Pink’s new one… sigh)

    If you’re up for forking over a couple of extra bucks for the deluxe edition of Circus, you’ll be rewarded with a pin-up poster, a bonus DVD containing a digital photo album, a less-than-revelatory, 15-minute making-of video as well as the “director’s cut” of the “Womanizer” video.  You’ll also get three bonus tracks on the main CD – well, two really, since “Radar” is recycled from the Blackout album, but they’re both as good as anything on the main disc.  “Rock Me In” is a frantic-tempo spacey-new-wave-disco groove that’s got “single” written all over it, and “Phonography”, with its clever wordplay (on a Britney song!) and its sleek, confectionary retro-synth-pop textures, is, by far, the best tribute to phone sex this side of Nicholson Baker.  Both songs make the additional splurge for this surprisingly splurge-worthy album well worth it.

  • Commercial-isms: Lee Jeans vs. The Cars

    Usually, when a company is willing to fork over the licensing fees to use a classic pop song in a commercial, they’ve made some kind of connection between the song’s lyrics and the product they’re selling – even if it’s just a catchphrase removed from its context.  I always thought it was funny how the Disney Cruise ads discreetly cherry-picked Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life”.  But the new ads for Lee Jeans dispense with lyrics altogether in their use of The Cars’ awesome new wave hit “Let’s Go”.  Instead, they pitch an Obama-worthy message about their jeans’ utilitarian qualities and modest price points (as opposed to designer jeans with triple-digit price tags) over the Cars’ distinctive synth-meets-guitar, retro-futuristic hook.

    But just as we expect to hear the dearly departed Benjamin Orr sing “she’s runnin’ away”, or the song’s rallying call “I like the night life, baby!”, or even the handclaps that punctuate the chorus – clap! clap! clap-clap-clap! clap-clap-clap-clap! – or the sci-fi laser show instrumental break that follows them, the poor commercial’s over. This song is the very definition of power pop and I’d be hard-pressed to come up with another song which packs so damn many delicious hooks into three little minutes.  So while it’s nice to hear the little bit of “Let’s Go” we do hear, it’s hard to fight my gut feeling that the song’s been squandered on this ad.
     
    Of course, this got me thinking that “Let’s Go” – one of the Cars’ best (certainly my personal favorite), but maybe not their best known (with “My Best Friend’s Girl” serving as the title of a current multi-plex romantic comedy) – is now 30 years old.  And the ad seems to be appealing to people maybe just out of school who are too old for their parents to be buying them clothes, but too broke to be forking over more than 20 or 30 bucks for a pair of jeans.  That is, twentysomethings.

    And I’m guessing that most twentysomethings, even if they’ve heard of the Cars (maybe from their parents!), probably have no clue what the song is that’s playing behind this ad.  It just, y’know, sounds sorta cool.  I hope I’m wrong about that, but an informal survey of a couple of my officemates born in the 80s (and who are both fairly knowledgeable about 70s and 80s music) suggests otherwise.  Neither of them knew the song, and both only had a passing familiarity with the band who produced it.  I might as well have been asking about the Routers song of the same name, a guitar instrumental from 1962 to which the Cars’ hit makes a couple of obvious musical allusions.  (If the song had been recorded today, they might’ve used samples.)

    Personally, I have very specific memories of “Let’s Go” that go back to the daily after-school trip we’d take each weekday to pick my Dad up from work in Kenosha.  Whenever I hear the song, I think of riding in an AMC station wagon with the sun setting over Hwy 50 at its interchange with I-94, the Brat Stop restaurant (before it burned down and was rebuilt), and the Factory Outlet Mall, which was new back then.  And I remember thinking that it was by E.L.O. on account of the violins on the verses, and Benjamin Orr’s Jeff Lynne-style falsetto flourish on the chorus.  The ad’s target audience might not care, but that’s just the point.  It’s weird and sad to hear such a fantastic song used in a way that presupposes listeners’ indifference to it; to hear it gutted of most of its intrinsic excitement and reduced to little more than semi-stylish background music for an ad about, y’know, cheap blue jeans.