Lily Allen is a master (or is that mistress) in the art of misdirection – while we’re all scratching our heads at her new country-music inspired song, Not Fair, Lily is singing sweetly about “spending ages giving head” which conveniently rhymes with “lying in the wet patch on the bed”.
While those lyrics put her in the running for “Perfect Woman” material, the hoedown video weirds me out completely. I think they almost did a little too good a job of transforming Lily into a country star from yesteryear, didn’t they?
Remember when Sara Barielles wrote Love Song as a protest to record execs who wanted her to do more ballad-y songs? Well, she’s been trumped by Amanda Palmer, who’s pulled out all the stops in an attempt to get RoadRunner Records to drop her.
Lovegame is another triumphant electro-pop gem from Lady GaGa. I’m slightly baffled as to where the ‘cherry cherry boom boom’ song went – didn’t we see a video for that a while back?
Anyway, apparently the video for Lovegame is causing palpitations among the guardians of public decency that are the censorship bodies. Well, GaGa has stepped things up a notch – she’s gone from ‘I’ll get him hard, show him what I’ve got’ in Poker Face to essentially wanting to ride his disco stick. Well, it’d be a shame to waste it, wouldn’t it?
In fairness, sometimes I think Lady GaGa boils down to essentially blonde hair and prominent lycra gusset. Which is what Madonna was a few years ago. I’m not sure the look works for either – GaGa has a shop mannequin look that’s sometimes hard to find sexy.
This is quite awesome, actually, because if you’ve ever really wanted to immerse yourself in a new band’s music, this makes it so easy. You can literally work your way through every Black Sabbath album – from Ozzy through Dio and get a real feel for them.
Just a heads up for any metal fan who’s maybe missed Sabbath. You can start chastising me now for not owning any of their albums…
I published my interview with X Factor finalist Eoghan Quigg yesterday, at the same time as the folks at PopJustice were commenting on Twitter about the quality of the album.
Now, I received my copy at the same time as they got their review copy. Up until this point, I’d maintained a stoic silence after being Eoghan’s harshest critic throughout the X Factor. At that time, I said that Simon Cowell stood to make more money from phone votes for Eoghan Quigg that he ever would in record sales.
Anyway, PopJustice released their review of the album yesterday, and it has perhaps the most perfect analysis of the song selection and production values:
Imagine the three worst reality pop albums you have ever heard. Let’s pick the Michelle McManus album, the David Sneddon album and the Journey South album. Imagine the combined badness of all those albums, then somehow imagine that ALL personality has been sucked out out. Then imagine that they kept on sucking, long after there all personality was gone, until there was a sort of personality prolapse. You are still only half way to understanding just how empty these recordings are.
Now, Unreality TV has received some criticism in our time about being so scathing about reality TV contestants. But when the quality is this poor, you can’t help but unleash the snark.
Music blog regulars will know that the Pussycat Dolls have thoroughly redeemed themselves with the (deluxe) Doll Domination album. Jai Ho conveniently repackages the end song from Slumdog Millionaire, giving Miss Scherzinger lead vocals and a background role for the composer, A R Rahman.
Jai Ho alternates between dramatic ethnic verses and uplifting pop choruses. Sure, they go a little overboard with the autotune sometimes (autotune is the modern equivalent of helium, isn’t it?).
My inclination is to crown this the best single the Pussycat Dolls have ever released, actually. The music is amazing. There are overtones of Beyonce and Shakira on Beautiful Liar, but ten times better. The video features the girls looking stunning and doing a fun Bollywood style dance routine. Don’t they look like they’re all having great fun?
