In other music news, the new J Stalin album, Prenuptial Agreement, is AMAZING. It’s the best hip-hop record I’ve heard in a long time, probably since The College Dropout. It’s great enough that there’s a rapper called J Stalin; it’s really icing on the cake that he produces tracks as great as, say, “Red and Blue Lights.” One thing I find interesting about the album, and probably one of the reasons I like it so much, is how much some of its synths and beats sound like grime, particularly certain Ruff Sqwad tracks or some of Target’s productions for Roll Deep. This occurred to me a little bit when I heard Philthy Rich’s recent album, but it’s really true of J Stalin. My favorite track on the album, “G in me,” is a great example of how well this grime-hyphy movement works. I guess where grime took dance music and moved towards hip-hop, J Stalin is moving in the other direction, but I’m glad they both end up in such a great place, musically.

The title of this post comes from J Stalin’s “Rockin Wit Da Best”; I hope it’s the Trotsky reference it appears to be. Also, when did people start using the expression “hot mess”? I don’t think I’d heard it six months ago, and now it’s the title of songs by Ashley Tisdale and Cobra Starship (who I was going to call “incomparably shit,” but of course their shitness is precisely comparable to that of 3OH!3), and crops up in a couple of tracks on Prenuptial Agreement and Animal.

What is it about Kesha that disorients people’s critical faculties? I suppose the Uffie comparisons sort of make sense, inasmuch as they’re both young women sort-of-rapping over electro-ish beats (the difference being that Kesha has funny lyrics and tunes). The same logic I suppose might lead to the Lady Gaga comparison’s, too, although the connection here is much more tenuous. The closest comparing the two might get to illuminating might be a SATs style analogy: Gaga is to New York as Kesha is to Los Angeles; the combination of a party-trash aesthetic and naive, heart-on-the-sleeve self-psychologizing is endearingly Californian. The comparison that’s most bizarre, though, is the suggestion that “Tik Tok” is a rip-off of Kylie’s “Love at First Sight”; well, the riff has a kind-of similar rhythm and contains a few of the same notes.

More than the desperate reaching for comparisons, though, I’m surprised by the vitriol of some of the reviews of Kesha’s album. I wonder if, say, some of the Amazon reviews aren’t a kind of rockist return of the repressed. Perhaps this is the truth of the Lady Gaga comparisons: a displacement of the criticisms of inauthenticity or shallowness that are so often leveled at pop artists, which people however feel somewhat uncomfortable leveling at the enthusiastically supported Gaga. Of course, Kesha isn’t anything like as interesting as Gaga, but her record is generally quite entertaining, especially the slightly 8-bit “Kiss N Tell,” and the Daphne and Celeste-esque “D.I.N.O.S.A.U.R.”

I wonder if part of the reason for the Gaga comparison is the paucity of American pop music to compare to. Or, rather, the disavowal of the relevant pop music, the R&B and hip-hop which Kesha’s electro-ey beats were surely influenced by. If you want a comparison, a  much better one would be Menya, though Menya are significantly better than Kesha (their funny filthy tracks are filthier and funnier, and their introspective tracks more affecting). Also, it’s clearly a sign that I’ve been reading too much Hegel that Kesha singing “I am in love/with what we are/not what we should be” makes me think of the preface to the Philosophy of Right.

Recent twitter discussion of Lady GaGa, sparked by this article in the New Statesman, revealed quite a lot of ambivalence about her. I, on the other hand, at some point last year stopped being ambivalent: the young homosexuals of the internet are, in this case, quite right in their enthusiasm. There’s certainly something rather obvious about her sort-of-vaguely-Warhol-gesturing vision of pop as spectacle, but I’m increasingly less concerned by this, although whether this is because she has genuinely transcended these influences, or because I’ve simply decided that this doesn’t matter, I’m not sure. Read more↴

Thinking some more about the decade just ended, one thing seems clear: Girls Aloud were the band of the decade; indeed, I can’t think of any other group that’s even a contender. Well, as long as by “band of the decade” we mean, if not the best band of the decade, the band that encapsulated the most positive aspects of the decade. If “band of the decade” simply means the band most symptomatic of the decade, of course a much more depressing candidate appears: U2. U2 are certainly the worst band in recent memory, and I think are strong contenders for worst group in the history of popular music (reading Phonogram recently reminded me of the existence of Heavy Stereo and Northern Uproar, onetime bywords for terribleness; but, in part for that very reason, they don’t approach the apocalyptic awfulness of U2)

Thinking about what might be an album of the decade, Read more↴

I’ve recently seen various “album of the decade” lists; the first I think I saw, and certainly the worst, was the NME’s. Still, the terribleness of that list does have the benefit of honesty—no-one could possibly argue on the basis of that list that the first decade of the twenty-first century was anything other than “a bloody awful decade for popular music.” The existence of these various lists did encourage me to look back at what had actually happened, musically, in the decade. One interesting thing I discovered is how out of sync the internal chronology of my memory is with actual linear time; did Supreme Clientele really come out only a year before Is This It? The former seems to come from a now impossibly distant past, while the latter is still all too present.

The other thing that occurred to me is that this past decade has been full of the strange deaths of pop genres. Read more↴

Cheryl Cole’s new song is really quite incredibly good:

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It reminded me of something about pop music that occurred to me when The Saturdays’ album came out. I thought, while listening to the album, that it sounded like the Sugababes, which then struck me as odd, as there are obvious ways in which the group are more like Girls Aloud. But while their may be some stylistic similarity between Girls Aloud and The Saturdays, there’s what seems to me to be a more important difference of affect, adds some further distinctions to the concept of cold pop. Read more↴