JUAN RODRIGUEZ DOESN’T LIKE WHAT HE HEARS ON ITUNES, BUT THE TOP TRACKS STILL HAUNT HIS DREAMS.
Juan rodriguez goes looking for hits – and finds trouble – on the itunes bestsellers list,
Uh- oh. I’ve got that sinking feeling. It’s not supposed to be this way!
Let me explain. Over the last few months I’ve been buying songs that entered the Top 10 list on iTunes, as an experiment into finding out what appeals to the great public, and why. On first listen, I didn’t like any of them — what did you expect? I’m an elitist critic! — with reactions ranging from loathing to merely “meh.”
So here’s Wake Me Up! by a guy called Avicii — never heard of him — and the thing opens with some furious acoustic guitar strumming, à la Richie Havens at Woodstock. “Feeling my way through the darkness / Guided by a beatin’ heart …” Well, duh: he wouldn’t be feeling anything if he didn’t have a beatin’ heart. “They tell me I’m too young to understand / They say I’m caught up in a dream / Well, life will pass me by if I don’t open up my i-yieyes / But that’s fine by me.” What exactly does he mean here? That he’s fine if he does or doesn’t open his eyes? No time for a definitive answer, because out of nowhere comes a thumping dance beat with a cheesy synth vamp that sounds like 40 years ago, and the chorus: “So wake me up when it’s all over / When I’m wiser and I’m older / All this time I was finding myself / And I didn’t know I was lost.”
OK, when the Four Tops roared “Shake me, wake me when it’s over” in 1966, the soul was nightmarishly inspired, desperately urgent. But this Monsieur Avicii retains his composure, every precious word pronounced as if he’d graduated from Diction 101, oddly bland. “I tried carryin’ the weight of the world / But I only have two hands,” and then I started cracking wise: Please, God, do not give him more hands, because he’ll try carryin’ the weight of the cosmos!
And yet, there I was days later, having ingested the song at least half a dozen times, and I found myself — I truly hate to admit this — mouthing the chorus in my mind. “Wake me up when it’s all over …” I mean, I hate this song. It’s so wimpy, there’s no poetry to hang onto — which is the huge problem with so much Top 40 product. But I couldn’t get the damn thing out of my head! And I asked myself: Is this the celestial jukebox’s ultimate revenge? “Life’s a game made for everyone / And luuve is the prize.” Or is it price? The price we pay for living in a world where these moronic hits spew out of cars, taxis, stores, restos?
They say cream rises to the top. So does you-knowwhat, in the cesspool that is the Top 10. And so we’re deluged by you-shot-me-down songs, I-will-rise-up songs, I-will-always-love-you songs. The kind of inept revenge or wont-get-fooled-again twitter you can get for free on, well, Twitter, set to synthesized Muzak.
Next up, I hear this lyric:
“I’m friends with the monster that’s under my bed / Get along with the voices inside of my head / You’re trying to save me, stop holdin’ your breath …” Hey, I know that voice — it’s Rihanna’s! I might’ve heard her, here and there, for a grand total of 15 minutes throughout my cloistered life, and yet I know that voice! Which raises the uncomfortable question: Am I just Pavlov’s dog — a record-industry mark reacting blindly to mere recognition?
After Ri’s intro in The Monster, Eminem comes in with his doggie bag of rap clichés: “I ain’t much of a poet” — you got that right, chump — “but I know somebody once told me to seize the moment and don’t squander it.” Good advice, but there are problems here: “I wanted the fame, but not the cover of Newsweek / Oh well, guess beggars can’t be choosy” — damn! “Wanted to receive attention for my music / Wanted to be left alone in public, excuse me …” Give this man a dunce cap!
“With what I gave up to get, it was bittersweet / It was like winning a used mink.” Huh? The Used Mink Sweepstakes? Has he gone off his rocker? “Ironic ’cause I think I’m getting so huge I need a shrink / I’m beginning to lose sleep: one sheep, two sheep …”
Doth Em protest too much? (Hey, bub, if you’re worried about your ego, enter the ministry — or better yet, flip burgers.) Or is he cleverly targeting a fan base eager to identify with a star’s “dark inner thoughts”? Leading your humble servant to ask: Is all this Top 10 fodder just part of a huge shell game?
Co-writer Bebe Rexha confessed to Vibe that she was in “a dark head space. Figuring out where you are in life and trying to make s--t work for yourself. … I was just trying to get out of a depressed phase. … It’s such a special song. I know when (Eminem) heard it, it spoke to him. … You get to the point where you’re like, I’m just doing me and if people don’t like it, then it is what it is.” The allpurpose excuse: “It is what it is.” It’s a hit.
Before I caught her on the MTV Video Music Awards,
I couldn’t distinguish Miley Cyrus’s voice from any other femme fatale’s. Now I can, thanks to her “risqué” twerking and brushing Robin Thicke’s crotch area with a giant foam finger — the notso-fickle finger of fate, as it turned out.
The incident scandalized many, and set a record for the most tweets per minute (360,000). Maybe she was stoned; she told Rolling Stone a few months ago that “weed is the best drug on earth,” calling it, along with MDMA, a “happy drug.” But we digress.
The controversy set up the public for her next sin- gle, Wrecking Ball, another wretchedly overwrought ditty that I admit to knowing almost by heart.
It starts with a synthesized keyboard motif, curiously recalling the intro to Supertramp’s ’70s oldie Dreamer (pop music being the original recycler). Then her pipes take over with a prime example of the Twitter School of Lyricism, so handy when lamenting some lost love (now creep). “I came in like a wrecking ball / I never hit so hard in love / All I wanted was to break your walls / All you ever did was wreck me.” Whoa, talk about ultimate metaphors! Yet incorrigibly catchy, if mind-numbingly maudlin.
If the name Ella Maria Lani Yelich-O’Connor doesn’t ring a bell,
try Lorde, a notso-sweet 16 when her debut single, Royals, became the first song by a New Zealander to top the American charts. The song’s theme — you don’t need to be rich to be a Somebody — has been around since 1962’s Phil Spector-produced Uptown, by the Crystals. (At first I took Royals literally, as maybe a protest against the likes of Will and Kate — no such luck!)
Her mom is a prize-winning poet, so, Lorde told the New Zealand Listener, “we’ve always had so many books, and that’s always been a big thing for me, arguably more so than music.” What kind of books? Harlequin Romances? Am I being snooty here? No, because I like this song, sort of.
Backed by synthesized “jazzy” finger-snapping and sparse bass lines, Lorde declares: “I’ve never seen a diamond in the flesh / I cut my teeth on wedding rings in the movies / And I’m not proud of my address / In a torn-up town, no postcode envy … We don’t care, we’re driving Cadillacs in our dreams …” (Life could be a dream, sh-boom, sh-boom?) “And we’ll never be royals / It don’t run in our blood / That kind of luxe just ain’t for us / We crave a different kind of buzz.”
Talking about luxe and buzz, she signed a deal with Sony that allowed all her songs to be used as TV ad jingles. Thus BBC Sport played another single during the Wimbledon women’s tennis final, cleverly titled — wait for it — Tennis Court. Brilliant!
Inspired spiritually and business-wise
by the science of demographics (teen romance) and the science of sound (notes and words with minimal syllables that hit the target beat), so many bestselling songs seem made to order for everyone, so long as it’s the lowest common denominator. Seems I, too — highbrow critic? Rockin’ rube? — am among them, because why else would I find these mostly banal tunes so damn catchy? The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind — or, rather, the airwaves, through sheer repetition.
The hits keep comin’! Katy Perry is the ultimate teenpop queen of multimedia. Indeed, her third fragrance, Killer Queen by Coty, hit department stores in August, coinciding with the release of the emphatic single Roar. Here, Katy means business. “I used to bite my tongue and hold my breath / Scared to rock the boat and make a mess … I guess I forgot I had a choice / I let you push me past the breaking point.”
After those lines, I muttered, “I can’t, I can’t,” and clicked off before I got to the crescendo refrain: “I got the eye of the tiger, a fighter, dancing through the fire ... and you’re gonna hear me ROAR louder, louder than a lion.” The song is a collection of New Age therapeutic clichés skimmed from the animal world and Pop Psychology 101 — a roaring hit!
Finally, there’s Pitbull and Ke$ha
dueting on Timber, as in falling for you. Rapper in a lightweight mood meets lightweight popster. Actually, hip hop is used merely as a mild signifier for “street” here — nothing provocative. Alas, it’s catchy as hell.
But all is not well with Ke$ha. She may have chutzpah spelling her moniker with a dollar sign — or maybe just honesty — but she’s complained to her producer that she wants to create more, um, substantial fare.
No way, the Man says — you’re positioned right where we want you. (That goes for us listeners, too.) Don’t touch that dial.