If people want to spend time grilling Obama for unfortunate turns of phrase, wouldn’t it be better to talk about Clinton’s “kitchen sink strategy”?

The new tATu single “220″ has apparently been causing some controversy among fans, which is pretty incomprehensible, as it’s wholly excellent. I don’t think I’ve mentioned their last single, either. I saw somewhere that they thought its video carried an anti-abortion message, which is disappointing; we may have to count them out as leaders of the cybernetic communist revolution. It’s a pretty great video, though, all giant concrete structures and soviet goth uniforms:

I think the only thing that could make Girls Aloud better would be if they started filming their videos in Britain’s decaying industrial heritage.

In other music news, two great Alabama 3 remixes.

Once upon a time, I suggested adopting Britney’s image as a kind of collective anonymous identity for protests, rather like a more stylish version of the white overalls. In her last video, Britney herself adopted the idea, although admittedly in the struggle against the paparazzi, rather than against global capitalism.

And in her new video, we get even closer to my imagined tactic, with an animated Britney Spears versus riot police.

So, although shaving her head may not have ended up marking her conversion to militant radical feminism, perhaps we can still hold out some hope for Britney the revolutionary.

I hadn’t realized until I was back in England over Christmas, but I kind of miss Radio 1. At least during the day, the playlist still has a vague remnant of a kind of public-service universalism, which is very different from the rigid demographic separation of American radion stations. Of course, given the state of pop music at the moment, this does mean that 75% of the time they’re playing Chas and Dave shite, but the rest of the time it’s ludicrous dance music and/or the fantastic new Kelly Rowland single (which is not even being released over here), and the contrast is so appealing its almost worth listening through the crap.

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I wonder what the chances are that Girls Aloud will release “Control of the Knife” accompanied by a video featuring them all in braces and two-tone trousers? Probably not, really, all that high. It’s just as well I’m busy writing a paper on the welfare state, otherwise I might have accompanied this post with a photoshopped picture of Girls Aloud as Bad Manners. Instead, I’ll have to leave you with this YouTube clip:

That’s from 2006; Buster Bloodvessel’s lost a hell of a lot of weight, no?

Damn, the new Girls Aloud record is out, and I still have a post to write about Britney’s album. With “What You Crying For” and “I’m Falling,” Tangled Up gives Blackout some unexpected competition for “Best early-90s hardcore record of 2007.” Well, I suppose it’s not totally unexpected from Girls Aloud, but I wasn’t anticipating the bassline from Britney’s “Freakshow” (well, it’s more a bass noise than a base line), or “Get Back,” ignominously relegated to being a bonus track.

These are both Danja tracks, of course, and, great though they are, I wonder if it wasn’t maybe a mistake for Britney to use Danja so heavily on the album. It invites comparison with FutureSex/LoveSounds, which I’m not sure does Britney any favors.

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There must be someone employed by Jo Whiley whose job it is to think up the worst possible misinterpretations of songs, so that unlucky pop stars get to perform them in the Live Lounge. Girls Aloud, the best pop group in the world right now, perform “With Every Heartbeat,” one of the best songs of the past year and a natural fit for GA’s style. And I don’t think it would be possible to come up with a worse version:

A while back, I was listening to Le Tigre’s “Deceptacon,” in which Kathleen Hanna performs the hysterical subject demanded by contemporary gender roles, and it occoured to me that this would be a good direction for Britney Spears. Everyone thinks she’s mad anyway; why not embrace that madness?

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I’m probably not the first person to come up with a variation on this macro to celebrate the new Britney Spears single (though it’s surprisingly difficult to find immediately recognizable pictures of her which don’t lead to 100% wrongness when you superimpose the words “GIMME IT” on top of them). It’s really very good, although in the genre of famous‐person‐sings‐about‐not‐liking‐being‐famous I don’t know if it’s as good as Lindsey Lohan’s “Rumors,” or, of course, Britney’s own chef‐d’œuvre, “Lucky.”

I was listening to the Happy Mondays the other day and was struck by the thought that WFL (which I’d believed to be a kind of hedonistic bragging - “I ordered a line / you formed a queue,” etc) might actually be a dialog between the crassly capitalist and their others (”Is there nothing else you can do?” / “Well not much, I’ve not been trained”). Possible material for the theory of proletarian resentment?