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3 Songs: “5-Car Pileup On the Failway” Edition

For the past two posts, I’ve crossed over from my usual obscure fare and talked about mainstream pop music; first with the stuff I legitimately felt guilty about liking, and then the stuff I love without shame. I was going to go back to my planned schedule for 3 Songs, but it turns out I have even more to say about the stuff I will never ever make you guys sit through on my show.

See, pop songs fall along a continuum of stupidity, and my reaction towards them follows a similar path. There’s the popular-but-well-made stuff, like Adele; there’s a brand new grouping of artists who get called “indie” (to the snobbish amusement of assholes like me), like Imagine Dragons or Fun. There’s the mainstream stuff that everyone likes, and then on the other side of the bell curve things start to get interesting. Pop music is traditionally some of the simplest stuff to write and record, and its stars are more product than person. But the increasingly outrageous celebrity culture in America has caused desperate, deluded, or otherwise deranged musicians to release songs that are almost dadaesque in their atrocity. When pop music goes bad, it goes bad with spectacular insanity.

I’ve been meditating on the notion of these irresistibly awful songs ever since Avril Lavigne released her new music video for “Hello Kitty” last week. I won’t link it here, but if you haven’t heard it, go find it. See how long you can last. I can’t continuously bear that train wreck for more than 45 seconds, but I’ve gone back to the music video a handful of times since my initial viewing. Why? Because despite the fact that I am mortified on Lavigne’s behalf, I’m fascinated by just how much of a clusterfuck the entire venture is, from start to finish.

So today’s 3 songs are more examples of that schedenfreude-driven rubbernecking that I can’t seem to tamp down. I loathe all three of these songs, and I’m sure you will too. It’s not even like “Blurred Lines” was for some people, where they liked the melody but hated the lyrics; I hate everything about these songs, but they repulse me in such a way that I can’t not look at them.

Courtney Stodden – Reality

I’m not usually a reality TV or tabloid fan, but I’ve been a little bit obsessed with Courtney Stodden ever since she burst onto the scene a few years ago. She wasn’t a Laguna Beach alum or even a Teen Mom; Stodden was famous because she married a 51-year-old D-list actor while she was only sixteen. Courtney and her hubby Doug Hutchinson were the best sort of tabloid train wrecks: absolute lunatics with no connection to reality, convinced of their own importance and totally incapable of feeling shame. The oversexed Courtney celebrated her eighteenth birthday by getting several plastic surgery procedures, creating this music video for “Reality”, and then filing for divorce—and trying to get into porn (hilariously, porn said thanks but no thanks). “Reality” isn’t as offensive musically as the other two songs in this post, but it entrances me as the nadir of a girl’s delusions, fueled by money and sex and the promise of fame. It’s almost profound in its shallowness—but then she starts writhing around in pigtails against a backdrop of candy.

Cher Lloyd – Swagger Jagger

This Brit X Factor contestant is just something else. Words genuinely fail. She samples motherfucking “O My Darling Clementine”. I watch this video and feel like I have to challenge this whippersnapper to a cool-music-walkoff or something. I feel better because it reaffirms that I’m an adult with adult tastes. I just…goddamn watch this, it’s like a day at the circus for free.

Avril Lavigne – Girlfriend

Yeah, this isn’t the first time that Avril’s pulled this shit. After her relatively mature sophomore album Under My Skin (which I genuinely don’t mind), Lavigne seemed to be growing out of her punk-princess Sk8erboi phase. Then came 2007’s Best Damn Thing, in which she ran right back into her immature high school rebel role, slammed the door, and never ever came back out. Best Damn Thing‘s lead single, “Girlfriend”, was just a cavalcade of tired cliches, by a woman who was already too old to be singing about it. But nonetheless I’ve watched the music video a whole bunch of times, because, like Cher Lloyd above, I look at Avril and think man, she is trying so hard to be cool, it’s a little adorable. I am so glad that people like Stars, The New Pornographers, and Emily Haines came around, because it proved that Canadian women could make amazing music. The world moved on, Canada moved on, and Avril Lavigne has stayed exactly where she was when she debuted at eighteen. One of us is winning at life, and it isn’t the girl dancing in a school bathroom set.

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3 Songs: “Guilty Pleasures I’m Not Really Guilty About” edition

In my last post, I talked about some of the songs I’m legitimately embarrassed to love. This post has no such pretensions of shame; these three songs are just freakin’ fantastic.

Christina Aguilera – Candyman

Christina Aguilera has worn a lot of hats in her time—bubblegum pop princess, sultry vixen, robot, reality show host—but it was extraordinarily refreshing to see her transformation from Dirty to Back to Basics in 2006. The Xtina who humped a water hose during an (ostensibly) pro-woman anthem was gone, replaced by a jazzy, classy lady perfectly suited to wield that belt-happy voice. “Candyman” was a huge hit, and with good reason. I love it because it uses the aesthetics of WWII-era girl-group pop, which is such a rare and refreshing nostalgic throwback. That particular Boogie-Woogie-Bugle-Boy thing always gets points with me, and Aguilera absolutely nailed it at every turn—the Andrews Sisters-style harmonizing, the horn section, the scat-solo vocal bridge, the military cadence backing track, and especially the music video.

Mika – Grace Kelly

Okay, so picture this: you’re at the movies, at the IMAX to be exact, sometime in 2007. After the onslaught of ads and pre-film filler (Guess the actor! It’s always Tom Hanks!), the lights go dark and the screen comes to life with images of a whimsical party, driven by an infectiously energetic piano hook. A young man with tousled brown hair and a supermodel pout steps up to the microphone and begins to sing a catchy pop tune—and then, as the song shifts into its chorus, he opens up his mouth and belts in a falsetto that sounds e-fucking-xactly like Freddie Mercury.

Such was my initial experience of British pop star Mika: the music video for “Grace Kelly”, randomly tossed on the IMAX pre-film reel. I went out and bought the entire album, and it remains in my collection to this day. Listening to Mika’s music feels like being bombarded by a bunch of very excited 10-year-old rainbows; he’s not subtle in the slightest, but he’s also a shameless and earnest embodiment of everything pop music should be. I still listen to “Grace Kelly” because it’s a reminder that, despite what every understated indie folk group would have you think—music is supposed to be joyously, simply, unironically fun.

P!nk – Funhouse

P!nk (fuck it, Pink) has managed to maintain a fairly consistent level of rebelliousness throughout her decade-plus career and still make pretty damn good music. Where Avril Lavigne’s teenage look-at-me-I’m-wearing-a-tie angle got ridiculous as soon as she became old enough to rent a car, Pink has graduated successfully from teenage quasi-punk to your cool Harley-riding aunt, and maintains a sense of humor about herself that allows her to recover more easily from her failures. The title track from her 2008 release, which came after her separation from husband Cory Hart, was full of anger and woman-scorned wrath as only our lady of Missundaztood can do. It’s got energy and bounce while still being emotionally honest, and it’s accompanied by a pitch-perfect music video featuring a piano-playing cameo by No Doubt’s Tony Kanal. Can’t go wrong with a burned-out house crawling with creepy masked weirdos; it’s the very definition of catharsis.

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Track Listing – April 26

I had a great time in studio with Travis from The Auricle! We talked about film studies, art history, and lots more, and played some absolutely wonderful music. Check out his work at theauricle.bandcamp.com/, and follow him on Twitter here!

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3 Songs: “Cheesecake Brownie” Edition

There are some guilty pleasures that I’ll cop to without shame. I’ve seen every episode of American Dad, for instance. Or—here’s a good one—somewhere in my CD files, I still own the ska-filled soundtrack to the Digimon Movie. With the digi-rap. I’m not even kidding.

But there are also guilty pleasures I actually feel guilty about. I call these cheesecake brownies, because while you know they’re awful in every conceivable way, you just can’t say no. And because I apparently do not worry about ruining my reputation as a credible music snob, here are three of my truly guilty pleasure songs.

We Are Young
Once upon a time I actually owned 3OH!3’s first album, mostly because a guy I had a crush on liked them and I was 20 and that’s what 20-year-olds do. The two dudebros behind 3OH!3 are almost pathologically stupid—for proof, just look at how many times they’ve collaborated with Ke$ha, never mind the fact that their biggest hit is both sexist and ableist—but “We Are Young,” the first single from their sophomore release, has just the right drum beat to appeal to the part of me that still thinks like a dance choreographer. That’s actually a common theme in a lot of my guilty pleasures, including the next one:

Safety Dance (Glee Version)
Oh, gawd, I KNOW. I know. Believe me. I’m a music critic, a pop culture scholar, and have been a member of actual choirs since the tenth grade; I know Glee is fucking ridiculous. But the first season was a legitimately fun little exercise in jukebox musicals, and I downloaded the songs from each week’s show just like everyone else. While I eventually abandoned the majority of those homogenized kidz-bop covers, the Kevin McHale-helmed version of The Safety Dance remained. I love the original—who doesn’t?—but the Glee take on it is snappier, less minimalistic, and just a little bit quicker in tempo, and conveys a truly joyful sense of energy. I still plan to choreograph a dance piece to this version, and I don’t care what anyone says; it may be Glee, but they did this one right.

Rockin’ the Suburbs (Over the Hedge version)
The original Rockin’ the Suburbs is a scathing and on-point criticism of privileged white guys, because Ben Folds is actually a pretty talented lyricist. It calls out the hypocrisy of the misery bemoaned by the upper-middle class, who have so much more going for them but are always the first (and loudest) to complain when things don’t go their way. Then Folds rewrote it, and several of his other songs, for a shitty Dreamworks movie that starred William Shatner.

The new version of Rockin’ the Suburbs is just as homogenized as you’d expect; instead of blistering social commentary on privilege (ya’ll don’t know what it’s like / being male, middle class and white) it’s far cutesier in precisely that Dreamworks way, where it’s not offensively stupid but can’t possibly be intelligent (Don’t freak about the smoke alarm / Mom left the TV dinner on).

Then, at around 2:15, something magical happens. Because that’s when The Shatner Himself appears on the track, and segues into an absolutely brilliant monologue that perfectly captures the passive-aggressiveness of suburban neighbourhood life. For over a minute and a half we get to listen to Captain Kirk talk about house plans, mowing the lawn, and anger management classes, and it’s just fucking amazing, I can’t even. It’s worth every second of pop blandness that surrounds it.

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3 Songs: “We Came From the Internet” Edition

I, like most people, get a lot of my music from the internet. This was especially true before I became a radio host; nowadays I’m able to access an overwhelming amount of fantastic new albums thanks to CFUV’s library, but before that my music discovery process usually involved an internet radio site and the Shuffle button. The quality of suggestions varied depending on the sites; Grooveshark, Last.FM, and 8Tracks are all okay, but usually not much more than that. I maintain that Spotify has the best radio algorithm out of every possible service, but it’s tough to access in Canada.

The point is that I’ve found a lot of music via our beloved series of tubes. Here’s three of them.

Nebulullaby – Sean Lennon and Charlotte Muhl
This song comes from a collaboration project by Joseph Gordon-Levitt and his hitRECord site. I joined up hoping to work with some people and instead ended up incredibly intimidated. But I found this gorgeous, gorgeous song, with its equally twee music video, and I’ve loved it ever since. How can you not? The astronomy subject alone is outstanding, but the fact that the video references Georges Melies just catapults it into favourite song territory.

Anna Sun – WALK THE MOON
One of my first Spotify finds. It’s a peppy, fun little song that’s completely pretentious, but in the best way. It was available on the Suicide Kitteh karaoke listings when I went to Seattle, so you know it’s Hipster certified. And I say that with all the love in the world.

Walter Reed – Michael Penn
In my first year of university I used a music streaming/discovery service that had a minimalist interface and pink lettering. I have no recollection of what it’s called—-it’s not Hype Machine, it’s not Last.fm, it’s not I really don’t know—but I remember that my username was ‘Elphaba’ and that I discovered this song there. It was one of the first I put exclusively on my brand-new iPod, and was never burned to a mix CD. It’s not the most memorable of songs, necessarily, but I like the flow of the melody.

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Track Listing – April 19th

Not much to say this week. It was a rough one, emotionally, but I liked the music a lot!

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Show Listing – April 12

It’s delayed, but now it’s here! This is the show listing for last weekend, when I had Matt and Shane from The Fast Romantics join me for a chat. It was a fantastic time and they’re a talented bunch! Track list after the jump. For more info on the band, go check them out at fastromantics.com