The Grammys blew like it always does, but at least we all had a good laugh.
With that said, it'll now take nothing short of a rainbow rasterbation of some impossible Kurt Cobain / Jimi Hendrix hybrid to spark my interest in a televised awards show. My biggest complaint was that the two performances featuring Lil Wayne were dull as hell. Where was "A Milli?"
Okay, so the fact that smiley-faced mom and dad rock swept at the podium was pretty unremarkable. As for Radiohead's castrated romp alongside those regimental nothings from the University of Spoiled Children, let's just pretend that shit never happened.
In retrospect, the whole thing just seemed rushed, with distracted performer/presenters caught up in a flurry of bad jokes and Twitter jitters. Personal highlights included Katy Perry's descent to the stage in a gilded banana capsule, Kate Beckinsale, and Gwyneth Paltrow.
If I could've written the program, it would've run like this:
Al Green featuring Raphael Saadiq and Q-Tip "We Fight We Love" / "Let's Stay Together"
Katy Perry featuring William Shatner and a bunch of fruit "I Kissed A Girl"
Estelle featuring Kanye West "American Boy"
Weezer featuring Michael Jackson live from Qatar via satellite uplink "Everybody Get Dangerous" / "Dangerous"
Adele featuring Christian Bale "Chasing Pavements" / "No, Bruce, let me finish!"
Paul McCartney featuring Dave Grohl, Keith Richards, and Prince "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" / "Scentless Apprentice"
Lil Wayne featuring Marilyn Manson "Prom Queen"
A Tribute to Prasad & The Patils: Ne-Yo, Jamie Foxx, Smokey Robinson and Stevie Wonder "Blue Moon" / "Moonlight Bay" / "Death Blow"
Goodbye Old Yeller The Public Execution of Coldplay by Sarah Dupuis
Requiem: M.I.A. "Paper Planes"
Radiohead featuring Chali2na and Amplive "Reckoner" / "Reckonerz"
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.
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
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
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
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
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
A trend that appears to be resurfacing these days is the hip-hop artist crossing over into rock music. Kanye insisted that 808s & Heartbreaks was a pop album and that certain emotions within his heart"couldn't be expressed through rapping". Under the alias Percival Fats, Lupe Fiasco has started a rock outfit known as Japanese Cartoon which lists such indie dignitaries as Hunter S. Thompson and Joy Division as influences. The whole project reminds me of Gorillaz sans the originality and authentic British accent.
It now appears that artiste extraordinaire Lil Wayne is joining the fray:
According to up-and-coming Canadian hip-hop artist Drake, Lil Wayne has been hard at work on a rock-oriented follow-up to last year's blockbuster Tha Carter III "Wayne's coming out with a new album, it's a rock album. A complete rock album," Drake said, before explaining his new direction was partially inspired by Kanye West's ambitious new record, 808s and Heartbreaks
Awesome. Rock and roll is officially cool again with trailblazers like Lil Wayne at the helm. We can likely attribute some of this newfound interest to the phenomena of plastic instrument music games. I, for one, welcome our new musical overlords if it means more of this:
Let's all give a round of applause to the meanest shredder since Fred Durst!
