QOTSA Channels Goo-Era Sonic Youth

I was looking for Queens of the Stone Age videos to see if I could figure out why QOTSA feels like a solid band to me while Forever the Sickest Kids, operating in a nearby genre, feels so thoroughly shlocky. But I was diverted by another issue: isn't it wild how the verse of this QOTSA song sounds exactly like a Sonic Youth outtake from the Goo period? The phrasing is exactly what Thurston Moore would have used, and the somewhat monotonous melody too. The chorus is maybe a little more pop, though not a whole lot.

Adventures in Extremely Bad Commerical Autotuned "Power Pop"

Good lord. Forever the Sickest Kids mug and hop, acting out all the appropriate "rock" gestures to accompany their synthetic shitstorm "Woah Oh."



I can see why this would be successful . . . as a deodorant ad. I can also see why it would work as an act in a package of bands of a similar type, since one would not need to focus too closely on any particular aspect of the music. Sometimes, though, it's hard to see what it is in a band that ever allowed it to get to a level of professional success in the first place. This is no less bogus and packaged than Hannah Montana or MBLAQ, for example, and in many ways it's considerably more cringe-inducing because of the faux-rebelliousness that these guys attempt to display as part of their aesthetic. Was there a point in their career, perhaps several years ago, where there was sincerity in the songcraft, or has it been this way always? Hard to say.

Incidentally...

Is there any time in the last 15 or so years when rap artists were not complaining about "the state of hip hop"? This relentless whining about how bad the music business is, how shady record companies are, and how weak the current musical fashions are has got to be one the biggest lyrical cliches in the genre.

Grieves - The Elliott Smith of Hip Hop?

I'm just going to embed this without even listening to it, because I heard another tune by this dude and thought it was great. Kind of a random connection to this guy: reading about the rock band The Hold Steady (whom I also like) on Wikipedia, where the lead singer mentions that he is a fan of Brother Ali from The Rhymesayers, so I'm like "who are the Rhymesayers?" ... Rhymesayers website has a tune from Grieves, Grieves is on YouTube, etc. Random connections. White guys doing black art. The potential for cheap commercial bullshit, see Justin Bieber in the previous post. But it seems to me, based on 90 seconds of one song, that Grieves is real.

I wish, though, that people doing hip hop could get beyond the sort of gestural vocabulary of hip hop, if that makes any sense. This tune (okay I listened to it now) is intensely painful, right? So why is this guy gesticulating like he's the Shit on Toast? I mean, yeah, that's what rappers do. But it's sort of a stylistic cage, is it not? (But what else would ya do, on the other hand? Might be kind of strange to make head-nodding music and not acknowledge that you're feeling it.)

Unedible from Griff J on Vimeo.

Here's the first tune I heard. How fucking great is this? Sad too. Reminds me of one particular point in my life, but now that I'm old and boring my pains are different and more vague.

Justin Bieber - File under White Teen R&B

Will Justin date a fan? That was the question that caught my eye on a copy of Tiger Beat when I was buying some crap at Best Buy this week.

And of course, being an old fart, I was like, "Justin Timberlake? Huh?"

But no, Youth Decoder. Justin is Justin Bieber. He's a white kid who -- get this! -- sings in a black style and uses black jargon, like "shorty." Totally unprecedented!

Anyway, he is massive. If you don't know who he is, it's just because you are old and boring. A canadian kid born in 1994, Bieber is, I guess, 15 or 16 right now. Wikipedia says he is "the only artist in Billboard history to have four singles from a debut album chart in the Top 40 of the Hot 100 before the album's release." And he chills with Usher. So dang, yo.



One other cultural trend that has to be noted. I'm sure it makes Brian happy that everybody in every fucking video ever made these days is talking on the phone or sending a text message or something, but seriously, what the hell is so compelling about cell phones? Is it really that exciting?

Apparently it is.

MBLAQ

Damn, I wasn't going to keep posting, but then Brian upped the ante. So here's my response, another Asian act: MBLAQ, which, as Wikipedia notes, is "an acronym for Music Boys Live in Absolute Quality" and, as Wikipedia does not note, has the word "black" in it when you say it out loud, which signals just how ruff and tuff these guys are.

MBLAQ are from South Korea and they are headed up by the singer Rain. I guess most of this song is not in English but that chorus -- "Oh Yeah" -- speaks the universal language of cheezy pop. I have to say that I kind of love this video. It's incredibly ridiculous but so unapologetic in the way it collides and robs from and recycles various genres of dance music that it kind of succeeds on its own demented terms.



Question: did the guy in the middle at the start of the video get his pants from MC Hammer?

Note, incidentally, how aspects of this video (e.g. the weird dripping black ink, shot in black and white, at the beginning and end) seem to be drawing from the same vein of quasi-gothic/S&M inspiration as (and/or just plain biting the style of) Jay-Z's video for "On To the Next One," below. But as with every other aspect of the style of this group, the gothic thing is just sort of alluded to in passing, without any particular intensity. It sort of looks, in fact, like some art director just decided to tack on some random "drippy black ink" bits to the start and end of the video in order to ride the "drippy black ink" cultural current, in spite of the fact that this motif is never incorporated into the body of the video.

KE$HA

Kesha (pronounced KESH-uh) described her dress sense as "garbage-chic" to Entertainment Weekly and named Keith Richards as her fashion inspiration. She told Vibe that comfort was most important to her with her fashion choices. She has been noted for her party girl image and told the Herald Sun that "[w]hether people like me or not I just don't care." She went on to say that she was on a "one-woman war against pretension and that she felt people cared too much about how they appeared.

Paul Lester of The Guardian called her "the degenerate Hannah Montana" and stated that "her whole shtick appears to be predicated on the idea that she's a rebel in American Apparel." When asked about being a role model, Kesha said that people could look up to her in some aspects, but not everything. "I do think it's an important thing that happiness and the amount of money you have are mixed. There's absolutely no correlation, because the happiest times of my entire life have been when I didn't have $2."

On the dollar sign in her stage name, Kesha states that she was being ironic, in that she does not believe in placing an emphasis on earning money. It came about after her Flo Rida collaboration achieved success worldwide; and yet she did not receive any money to show for it. When asked about being compared to Lady Gaga and other artists, Kesha said "[a]ny time you want to compare me to a successful woman, I'll totally take that." She got a dollar sign tattoo on her hand for the same reason. Kesha's first tattoo was that of an anchor given to her in Cuba.

I personally find that the first line to the song Tik Tok is in my head more often than I'd like to admit. I also find her antics in the second youtube clip below to be INSANELY annoying.

TIK-TOK

LMFAO

LMFAO is a grammy-nominated electro-hop group from Los Angeles, California that consists of DJ/rappers Redfoo (Stefan Gordy) and Sky Blu (Skyler Gordy). Both artists are related to Berry Gordy—Redfoo is the son of the Motown Records founder and Sky Blu is his nephew.

The group's name comes from an Internet conversation that Sky Blu had with his grandmother. LMFAO is currently signed to Interscope Records. They have a single titled "I'm in Miami Bitch" (alternate title "I'm In Miami Trick") which peaked at #51 on the Billboard Hot 100.

Their second single, "La La La," debuted at #61 on the Billboard 100. Their third single "Shots" has currently peaked at 68 on the Billboard Hot 100. LMFAO also provided the opening theme to Kourtney and Khloé Take Miami and Jersey Shore.

My dear readers, I present to you LMFAO:

BoA - Energetic

Okay I gotta get back to work. This choreography looks a lot like Paula Abdul somehow. But I have no complaints about the song, which is fairly happening and has some great production. Apparently this woman (Beat of Angel, or BoA) is the shizzle dizzle in Asia. The wonder of autotune/vocoder vocals renders her voice so synthetic that's it's sort of a global hip hop dance sound.

Check the choreography in Eat You Up, below, too. I can't decide if it's comically stale or refreshingly retro.

Question: why is it, in these videos, that there is always a white guy with an old hat as one of the backup dancers?

Hannah Montana

I'm going to have to think about this a bit. Glowsticks. Ugg boot-style footwear. Emerging sexuality. Somewhat provocative movements, but a certain amount of restraint. "I'm just like you." Hmmm.

Jerking and Getting "Geeked Up"

Okay. Here we obviously have a reaction to the violence and negativity of the last 20 years or so of hip hop, and also an attempt to be sexy and fresh. We have a stylized, repetitive dance. So far so good. The New York Times wrote about jerking back in November of 2009, which probably means that the trend is passe at this point.

The music is, one is tempted to say, pretty bad, pretty lacking in groove. But the kids like it, and it does have a certain something. One thing that seems worth noting: this New Boys tune has basically no musical bottom end at all (it does have some sort of subwoofer-rumbling "doom doom doom" sound that you can hear at times if you slap on headphones, but there's nothing resembling a melody) but *it sounds kind of good over shitty computer speakers* and that's where most people are going to be listening to it. The tune by Swagg Kidz, below, has a better groove: the bass uses two whole notes.

Jerking musicians use the term "geeked up" a lot, which seems to be a play on the drug culture term "geeked up," which Young Jeezy used in a tune. I think "geeked up" here is probably a little bit mixed in with the mainstream meaning of "geek" as a nerd or a dweeb, since the Jerking trend overtly invokes a kind of faux-innocent middle-Americanicity.