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?

I’ve been listening to Kate Nash’s “Foundations” quite a bit recently. It’s another fine entry in the recent genre of housing-market related tracks (”Life For Rent,” “Everything’s Just Wonderful”). I’m slightly in awe of her accent, too; surely no-one’s Rs are naturally that non-rhotic?

Listening to MIA’s new album, I’ve been wondering what it is I find so creepy (and not in a good way) about her records. Possibly clarified for me slightly by the track “Grapes” which claims to feature Three 6 Mafia but appears to be a version of Nump’s Bay Area hit “I Got Grapes.” Hearing the area where I live incorporated in MIA’s third-world chic is definitely disconcerting. Not that there aren’t some enjoyable tracks; “20 Dollar” and “Paper Planes” are rapidly growing on me, and “Jimmy” is very nice indeed.

In other news, I’m wondering if “Jellyhead” by Crush (which could have been a 90s video war contender if I’d remembered it) is about the difficulties of going out with someone addicted to Temazepam?

Via Jessica, a marvelous French pop song. My French isn’t good enough to be entirely sure what it’s about, but I suspect the influence of Fourier:

Quand ça m’plaît plus j’efface tout et je recommence
Avec d’autres maisons et d’autres animaux

These “autres animaux” appear to include a bird, a goat, and a crocodile; un autre crocodile or, would it be too much to suggest, a counter-crocodile? Which, in a roundabout way, makes me think of Fourier’s exemplary materialism. Only an idealism that saw human beings as separate from nature would posit a social revolution that excluded the “natural.”

I’m probably not the right age or in the right place to really get New Rave; but still, it seems like a remarkably pointless movement. Hadouken range from alright to quite good, I guess, though “Liquid Lives” seems a bit like a poor man’s Audio Bullys.

More baffling are The Klaxons. “From Atlantis to Interzone” starts of like a pleasant enough rave revival, then turns into fucking Franz Ferdinand for no clear reason. Well, the reason becomes a bit clearer on listening to their awful cover of “Not Over Yet,” which appears to be an attempt to produce a dance record for people who don’t like, or perhaps have never heard, dance music. “We loved that song, and wanted to play it on guitars,” they said, apparently. Well, OK, I guess; but why on earth would anyone want to do that?

A day when the Spice Girls are rumored to be reforming seems like an appropriate time to mention my surprise that, according to Google, no-one has made the obvious “zig-a-zig objet petit a” joke. Or maybe ten years ago it didn’t occur to anyone to use a global computer network to disseminate such a mediocre gag.

In other Spice Girls news,  I was interested to find an article on Girl Power that says a lot of what I had vaguely imagined might go into a theory of Marxism-Britneyism.