Results tagged “pop”

I'm a fan of The-Dream, the producer-turned-singer who was born Terius Nash and is responsible for pop gems ranging from Rihanna's "Umbrella" to Mariah's "Touch My Body". His solo albums have been genuinely entertaining and well-produced, a fact that is particularly fortunate given that nearly all of the catchiest choruses to his songs contain expletives that can't be sung on the radio. The-Dream's excellent debut Love/Hate, in particular, demonstrates this trait. (Listen to the samples to hear for yourself!)

However, a few days ago, I was recommending The-Dream's work to my friend Ben since we share similar musical tastes, and I was surprised to hear that he had been reluctant to listen. Ben was balking because, as he correctly pointed out, the extraneous hyphen in The-Dream's stage name is annoying.

Then I realized: The-Dream is one of the first successful pop acts in the world to have deliberately incorporated search engine optimization into his stage name. (If you're fortunate enough to not be familiar with the practice, SEO is the effort that many people put in to making their content easier to discover on the web. It's part necessary evil, part spam-inducing cargo cult.)

You see, without the hyphen, "The Dream" would have been almost impossible to find on Google or iTunes or YouTube before he got famous. In fact, unless you have a fairly distinctive (at least in English-speaking parts of the world) name like I do, this can be a common challenge. But I posit that the hyphenation of his name made him unique enough to be easily discoverable even before he had hit songs. Simply showing up when people are searching for music or videos is a pretty important part of getting your name out there if you want to be a big star.

I used to make predictions on my blog years ago, but one of the ones I forgot to write down was that Google would influence business names just like the Yellow Pages did. Instead of naming yourself "AAA Plumbing" so that you are listed first, you'd make sure you were easy to search for on the web by naming yourself The-Plumber, presumably.

Semi-related:

• Defining One's Identity Online, from 2005
• Privacy Through Identity Control, from 2002

A little more than two decades ago, popular music was under fire by Tipper Gore's PMRC, the Parents' Music Resource Center. Tipper was aghast at popular music's coarsening of the public discourse, especially because a young Karenna Gore had played Prince's Darling Nikki at a party full of politicos. Scandal! Naturally, this meant war! Or, if not war, then censorious legislation!

But Prince didn't really give a rat's ass about arguing for freedom of speech back then; He just toured the country inflicting good music on people. So it was left to Frank Zappa to fight the good fight. Which he did admirably, as evidenced by this clip of Frank Zappa on Crossfire:

In case you needed more evidence that the good die young, Frank Zappa left us in 1993. Meanwhile John Lofton, the voice of the absence of reason featured in this Crossfire clip, has embraced his extremism and is now blogging on some creepy website. John has gone from not liking the same music as me to feeling that I'm not American. But it's okay, I bet Frank Zappa would tolerate me.

Four years is a long time in pop music, but that's how long it's been since Justin Timberlake's "Like I Love You" heralded his launch as a solo singer and led the parade of singles from Justified. But it's summertime, time for hit singles, and this time JT's got "SexyBack".

It's not an instant classic; Neither was "Like I Love You". Part of the reason for this is that modern music marketing for massive artists holds that the best practice is the counterintuitive habit of not always leading with an album's strongest single. Instead, the label will put out a strong first single, especially one that plays to deeper demographics that form an artist's core. For many artists, this takes the form of a club-oriented track, a dance remix, a guest appearance on a mix tape, or in rare cases, promo-only singles that don't even end up on the album. (Beyonce's cover of 50 Cent's "In Da Club" was probably the best example of this, helping to set up "Crazy In Love".)

Of course, the jaw-dropper from Justified was "Cry Me a River", one of the great pop singles of all time. Hearing Nick Lachey's similarly-themed based-on-a-public-breakup "What's Left of Me" reminds us how truly abysmal such a song had every reason to be.

So, Justin's leading with a club-oriented track that features (the increasingly prominent) Timbaland and a female vocal buried in the mix that sure sounds a hell of a lot like Janet Jackson. Of course, given Justin's falsetto, this could just be a processed version of his own voice, but the nod to nipplegate would be a savvy way of giving the single a bounce when the "secret" leaked out. There's also rumors that Nelly Furtado, having been around the studio when the album was made, might be the voice in question.

And of course, these are the two factors that most influence the single: Justin effectively lost his black pass during halftime at the SuperBowl, and his vocals on this track are dramatically different from anything he's done before.

Timberlake, of course, lost his permission to appropriate for having distanced himself (or at least appearing to) from Janet in the wake of the nipplegate scandal. There was a halfhearted attempt by Gwen Stefani to get some credibility with black radio on her own solo album, but essentially there are almost no other white artists who get significant airplay on black radio. The argument's been made that this credibility made Justin Timberlake's most direct pop ancestor George Michael rather than the obvious Michael Jackson, but I think the parallels are thin. (I say that as someone intimately familiar with the entirety of all three of their solo catalogs.) It remains to be seen whether Timbaland, returning from their work on Justified, will lend him enough credit to overcome the resistance this time around.

Then there's the vocals. Timberlake's press tour (and the EPK for the new single) both have him touting people like David Bowie as influences on the heavily-distorted lower range vocals on SexyBack. And sure, if you try, you can squint your ears and hear the echoes of Faaaame in the track. But in the context of the song, Timberlake comes across sounding like nothing so much as J.C. Chasez, his former N*SYNC bandmate, whose own solo album closely followed Justified's release, if not its climb up the chart.

Not to question Timberlake's sincerity in listing his influences, but given how cannily he's managed both the production and promotion of his work, his nod to artists whose careers peaked commercially before he was born indicate that he might have a broader game in mind. In fact, now that even the stodgiest corners of the music business have acknowledged the influence of the online independent music media, it might be an attempt to push them even further out of their usual indie rock corner and into a fuller embrace of unabashed pop singles.

The song works, although the James Brown-style shoutouts to "take 'em to the chorus" and "take 'em to the bridge" seem forced. As interesting as the single, though, is the idea that Timberlake is shaping his messages around the record to appeal to the Pitchfork or ILX crowd, tipping his (now-retired?) fedora to their favorites in order to curry their favor.

It's no great revelation that popular music has largely shifted to a producer-centric culture, and though this is true not just in hip hop or house music, as discussed earlier, those were certainly two of the biggest influences. If you want to talk about great producer-centric music of the last twenty years or so, though, you owe it to yourself to visit the catalog of Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. (Sadly, the best web resource on the duo, an old fan club site, is now offline. There's a web archive record of it.)

There's way too many of their songs to get into a full overview of their catalog (I have at least 250 of their songs in my collection), but at least I've got good starting point for n overview now. George had sent me a link to Stylus magazine's forum on Jam & Lewis' singles, which is like a link directly to my iPod's cold little heart. I love Jam and Lewis because they're such obvious and talented culture vultures, appropriating and approximating virtually every style of pop music. Sometimes it's in service of an artist whom they're producing, but honestly sometimes it sounds like they're doing it just because they have the guts and chops to make it work.

So just to append my two cents to the Stylus overview:

• Sounds of Blackness' "The Pressure" is still one of my favorite songs any time I'm trying to feel motivated. I was always self-conscious about that because it's the ultimate cheesy house song, but fuck it. It's just a good song.
• It is of course impossible to mess with Janet's "Rhythm Nation". Jam and Lewis clearly see the "Thank U Falettin' Me Be Mice Elf Agin" as the funkiest backing track ever, and if it ain't, it's certainly tied for first place. They sampled it here, they sampled it on a remix of Michael's "Scream" (see below) and they all-but-explicitly reference the track in nearly all their production on the Rhythm Nation album. I'm pretty sure that, the song dating to 1989, they didn't clear the sample. That means that Janet denied her brother some royalties, since he owned the publishing to the song at the time. He still owns half, so maybe he gets a nickel when you buy the record.
• I had always mistaken Michael's "Scream" for merely overproduced until hearing the instrumental made me realize how well-produced the record was as well. All this depite the fact that "Scream" sounded dated right out of the gate, a thin retread of "Jam" from Dangerous. You kind of can't listen to the song without hearing the sound of a video that cost too much. Much better is "Scream Louder", Jam and Lewis' remix of Scream built on top of, you guessed it, the rhythm track to Sly's "Thank U".
• "Go Deep" was the first Janet single since before Control that wasn't a total ass-kicker. Frankly the song was boring, and with Velvet Rope having tons of really interesting production, a song that sounded like Janet trying to sound like Aaliyah was a weak way to go.
• Johnny Gill still scares the shit out of me, and his signature single sounds more like a threat than a come-on; Please, Johnny, don't hurt 'em! Rub them correctly!
• Now this is a Janet single, "Someone to Call My Lover". The Jermaine Dupri remix is stupid but stil catchy as hell, but the original single with its America sample over Miami bass beats is still just too smart to ignore. The drums on this track were done by Alan Richbourg, who did a lot of the beats on Velvet Rope, and listening to that album, you could almost hear him saying "I've been listening to Björk lately." Which is a good thing. I was very happy to hear him get a chance at going to bat on a single, although sadly the promotion on the record was kinda weak. With pop artists, you always want the single to do well because that means you're more likely to get some cool remixes or b-sides. Plus Janet finally stopped her series of Great Samples From Adult Contemporary Female Singer-Songwriters of the Seventies.
• The SOS Band always kind of messes with my mind, and I think the Stylus comments on "Just Be Good To Me" capture that sense nicely.
• "Cherrelle - I Didn't Mean to Turn You On" I saw this song mentioned on the page and actually said "Haaaaaaaay" out loud. That's how I feel about this song. How great is this song? Not merely great enough that even the late Robert Palmer could make a hit out of it, but that Mariah Carey's Prince-style cover of it in 2001 made for the only listenable song on the Glitter soundtrack. Now that means you've got a good song. And the best part? Jam and Lewis themselves produced that cover. Jam and Lewis, of course, started their careers working for Prince. It all comes full circle. Need to continue the circle further? Ponder the fact that Palmer's version of "Addicted To Love" inspired Prince to create "U Got The Look" on a dare, to see if he could make his own version but still chart as a pop single. Prince tends to win his bets.