Pop Music Club

Lady GagaOne of the latest buzz on the Internet is Lady Gaga and Beyonce's new music video for the song "Telephone",  called, "Lady Gaga - Telephone ft. Beyoncé" It is stunning visually. Gaga fans have called it awesome. Like Gaga, it is a little risqué. Actually, it is quite risqué. Watch it here. Read more

Gorillaz should not be relevant anymore. A mixed genre virtual band founded in 1998 should have gone the way of rap rock and "Kill Osama bin Laden" Flash cartoons. The fact that their new album Plastic Beach is so good defies the very laws of pop culture. If the loose musical collective had made a record that sounded like their first two, I doubt anyone but old fans would even be interested. The album they actually recorded isn't a major departure by any means, but it's also not a rehash of things we've heard before. Instead, it's a confounding mix of old and new, a simultaneously fun and meaningful exercise in collaboration and ingenuity.

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Erykah BaduLast night, (3/3/10), I had the good fortune to watch the beautiful, Grammy award singer, Erykah Badu, on the NBC show,  "Jimmy Fallon Live". She performed "Window Seat,"  the lead song from her new album, New Amerykah Part 2: Return of the Ankh.

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While the big centers for art and music remain in notable locales like New York, Los Angeles, London, Tokyo and Berlin, the most impressive, innovative and important music has often come out of smaller, less well-known places. The most famous band in history hailed from Liverpool, a disproportionate number of huge bands came out of the quirky college town of Athens, Georgia in the 1980's and recently there has been a significant boom in top-notch music coming out of Austin, Texas. Back in England, the country's propensity for non-London centers of modern sound has continued to blossom. Like the small but powerful influence of the town of Bristol in the late 90's with bands like Portishead, today there is an electronic renaissance going on in Southend-on-Sea, a former resort in Essex. Along with Crystal Castles, British Sea Power and Klaxons, one of the most exciting bands to come out Southend in the past few years is These New Puritans.

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Some bands have a fully-formed sound right from the start, but the truth about a lot of very popular artists is that they didn't really find their unique style until they had a few albums under their belts. In time, I think people will see Belle and Sebastian as one of those bands. Like R.E.M., Depeche Mode and The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Belle and Sebastian didn't find its best music, the music for which they'll be remembered, until they grew out of an early period of experimentation. By 2001 the band was ready to make the best music of their careers, though it would happen to be without Stuart David or Isobel Campbell. Read more

At some point in the mid to late 1990's, a select few musicians rediscovered the gentle campfire folk the likes of which Simon and Garfunkel perfected decades earlier. It wouldn't be until the earliest days of the new century that anyone would call this resurgence relevant, though. After the sunny, increasingly electronic sounds of the 90's wore thin, audiences became receptive to clever souls with acoustic guitars, many of whom recorded in their living rooms a la Nick Drake. All of a sudden The Shins, Iron & Wine and Wilco were appreciably big. Perhaps the most important and one of the earliest examples of this movement is Belle and Sebastian, a bunch of Scottish kids who practically invented twee. Read more

Everything about Japan is a condensed version of what happens in other cultures. Tokyo is a city of cities, equal parts Manhattan, Las Vegas, Paris and Hong Kong. The country villages are like a bullion of provincial charm. And as for Japanese pop culture, it too operates on a much more intense, insular level than its counterparts in the West. Take the music scene in Japan in the 1990's, for instance. It was a sort of artistic renaissance in every sense of the word. Not only was there a boom in the number of unique artists in the recording studios of Tokyo, Hiroshima and Sapporo, there was also a refreshingly international flavor to the clear influences of the artists. For the first time in the history of pop music, Japanese artists made a splash beyond their own borders.

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Earlier this week I made my case for why the English anarcho-pop group Chumbawamba ought to be considered more than just a one hit wonder from the 90's. Today it's all about the pudding of that proof, a small introductory playlist for anyone interested in Chumbawamba's sound outside of their Top 10 gracing "Tubthumping". The ironic part is that most of the band's material doesn't sound a whole lot like their hit. Really, it's just a tone-setting intro track. Most of Chumbawamba's music is considerably more lyric-heavy (not to mention smarter). Though they've been putting out albums since the mid 1980's and released their most recent LP in 2008 with a new one on the way later this year, so far the strongest period for Chumbawamba was between 1992 and 1997 with a block of four albums.

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If you turned on the radio in 1997 (back when radio was still relevant to the music industry) you undoubtedly heard "Tubthumping", the unusual, infectious pop hit by a band with the goofiest name since Mott the Hoople. That band was Chumbawamba and after the millionth time "Tubthumping" played in the background of American lives we'd pretty much written them off as a one hit wonder just like most of what was on the pop charts. The truth is that Chumbawamba was never supposed to be a Top 10 dance act and for the past thirty years they've had a career that reflects that sentiment. Really, all one hit wonders fall into one of two categories. Most are artists who only had one good song in them, others are talents whose better music got overshadowed by their hit. Chumbawamba falls into the latter variety, though most folks who heard "Tubthumping" don't know that.

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Alright, I give. That lovey-dovey holiday is just a stone's throw from this dreary Thursday afternoon, so I'll play that old love song game. I don't know why I'm so averse to the idea of songs about love. Maybe it's because there are far too many songs that imagine they're about love when really they're just about sex, a crush or the cynical pursuit of easy record sales. It may also have to do with the fact that my childhood took place during what is certainly the worst time in history for music, the late 80's and early 90's. All those terrible slow dance songs a la Michael Bolton, only to be somehow overshadowed a decade later by the rage-inducing tones of Celine Dion. I shudder just to think of it. I'll grin and bear those memories for today's feature, a few love songs that actually qualify as good music.

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