Gimme Anesthesia - January 2009

Okay, so I've decided to start a new monthly featurette called "Gimme Anesthesia." Essentially, what this shiny new bit will entail is a rundown of the most popular songs of the moment–the tunes you hear kids singing on the sidewalk, piping through the supermarket, blaring from rice rockets. The title, I might add, gently refers to the excrutiating effects of prolonged exposure to contemporary pop detritus (bleeding of the ears, vomiting of the mouth). In spite of this general truism, though, it'd be wrong to just ignore what the majority of our friends, neighbors, and co-workers are taking in on a daily basis. Good shit or bad, we're all listening to something. Plus, from time to time some of this stuff is actually pretty awesome (remember when you first heard "Crazy?" What about "Clint Eastwood?").

The plan is this:

Basically anything perched on the upper rungs of a legit "Top 40" list is fair game. Mostly we'll be drawing on the iTunes Store's top 40 downloads as well as some other charts (Billboard, off the top of my head). Also, fuck "ringles." Once we've done a fair amount of sifting, we'll narrow the current month's best top 40 hits down to its five most listenable tracks. The criteria for what constitutes "best" will likely as not evolve, but for now it'll be based primarily on a catchiness vs. listenability ratio (a highly precise scientific statistic, needless to say). Then, at the end of the year we take the 60 songs we've accumulated and draw up a final list of the year's top 20 popular hits. Still with me?

Anyway, this is as much an experiment as it is anything else. One problem that might arise is that there might not be enough new entries per month. We won't allow any overlap (i.e. a given track won't appear in more than one month of the year). As a result, I realize that this feature won't be an effective way of gauging the most popular song of the moment, but what it will do is chop up mainstream pop's corpulent, payola-fed body into more easily digestible chunks. Mmm...recycled...

As a final note, this year's early editions will probably feature several songs from 2008 that remain in high rotation. January 1st is, after all, a completely arbitrary date.

Here goes.

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GIMME ANESTHESIA JANUARY 2009


Photo from M

This is our first month and the choice wasn't easy, but the five songs you see below seem to represent the most listenable hits hopping right now. Rules are meant to be broken, so to set a precedent for the informality of this feature I've selected an unofficial release, Lil Wayne's "Yes," as the number one track. Plus, it's buzzworthy, Joe (key lyric: "You won't see the morning like Alonzo").

Britney Spears owns two entries because, well, her two songs have fairly interesting beats (dig those guitars on the first chorus "Circus") and she's our dark horse because of her eccentricities and track record ("Toxic"). I gave Kanye the three spot since he's such a huge player right now and the video for "Heartless" is pretty freakin' sweet (see below). Soulja Boy's not on here because I condone his immaturity in any way, but rather because Sammie's chorus is slick as a mo'.

No. 1 (Wild Card)
Lil Wayne - "Yes (Featuring Pharrell)" (Unofficial Release: 9 January 2009)
Written by: Carter/Williams [full credits unknown]
The Hype Machine Popular MP3 & Music Blog Tracks: 27

Yes - Lil Wayne & Pharrell Williams

No. 2
Britney Spears - "Circus," from the album Circus (Jive: 2 December 2008)
Written by: Gottwald/Kelly/Levin
Positions (last week of the month):
iTunes Music Store: 9
Billboard Hot 100: 9


Circus - Britney Spears -

No. 3
Kanye West - "Heartless," from the album 808s & Heartbreak (Roc-A-Fella: 24 November 2008)
Written by: Jones/Mescudi/West/Wilsos
Positions (last week of the month):
iTunes Music Store: 5
Billboard Hot 100: 4


Heartless - Kanye West

No. 4
Britney Spears - "Womanizer," from the album Circus (Jive: 2 December 2008)
Written by: Akinyemi/Briscoe (The Outsyders)
Positions (last week of the month):
iTunes Music Store: 24
Billboard Hot 100: 15

Womanizer - Britney Spears

No. 5
Soulja Boy Tell'em - "Kiss Me Thru The Phone (Featuring Sammie)," from the album iSouljaBoyTellem (Universal: 16 December 2008)
Written by: Sceffer, Way
Positions (last week of the month):
iTunes Music Store: 23
Billboard Hot 100: 44

Kiss Me Thru The Phone - Soulja Boy Feat. Sammie




This month's near miss: Beyoncé - "Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)"