I'm Mr Blindside
It is a total lie to suggest that just because an artist is popular and sells a lot of records that you automatically have to like what they do. It is also a total lie to suggest that just because an artist sells a lot of records, it means their work is somehow flawed because they 'pander' to 'the masses'. That kind of thinking is just intellectual snobbery, and has nothing to do with how music hits the people who love it.
So, seeing as the truth of musical enjoyment lies somewhere between these two extremes, why do people get all bent out of shape if you find that someone who you really SHOULD like, bearing in mind how your tastes tend to work, leaves you totally cold?
Here's an interesting question: is it necessary to completely understand the lyrics of a song in order to fully appreciate it? I ask because the first time I heard this song was on the radio, accompanied by the DJ saying something to the effect of "whoa, the lyrics to this song are, like, CRAZY, I mean, what does it MEAN", and at first I fell into the trap. I've been googling high and low to look for the definitive interpretation of the song (and there are some unrelated but interesting links to follow as a result) and while the lyrics do seem to be provocatively obtuse, I wonder if looking for the hidden depths, truths and potential epiphanies in the words is rather beside the point here.
Note to all introverted acoustic singer-songwriter types...THIS is how you embellish your pretty ballad about the trials and tribulations of love over a long distance, if you want it to stand out from the crowd. You speed it up, make everything sound urgent, add some very loud guitars - proper METAL riffs too, nothing too arty. Then you get your drummer to do that double kick-drum thing, and mix it so it's louder than every other instrument. I've no idea why this is a good thing, but it's very METAL and that's what counts. 
Oh, Man From The Kooks
Information has reached the ChartBlog News Desk (by reading a day-old copy of the NME, admittedly), that Franz Ferdinand have abandoned the idea of recording their third album with Brian Higgins of Xenomania (hitmakers to the likes of Girls Aloud, Kylie and Sugababes), because of a clash of working styles. Which is a shame, because that always seemed like a bloody good idea for a collaboration.
So it's YOU who stole Goldfrapp's sexynthesizers, Mr Sparro. I hope you realise that because of your selfish actions, poor Alison and Will have had to pretend to be really into pastoral things. She had to HUG an OWL because of you, Sam. How do you think that made her feel? After dancing about with mirrorball horses and singing about nothing but sexy robots for two whole albums. I just hope you're HAPPY, that's all. 
You can't fault an interview with a singer who has just scored her first No.1 hit single, in which she claims her singing was heavily influenced by Su Pollard of Hi De Hi fame, and then goes on to castigate the UK music business for failing to know how to deal with black artists. 
I'm gonna keep this short, partly because I've got an Easter Egg hangover, and partly because, well, it's only the Courteeners. If they can't be bothered to write better songs, I'm not going to waste my precious muse on talking about them at length. It's pompous, self-righteous and annoying, I know, but there we are. 
OK, so after the blazing success that was creating a playlist of 
However I might feel about her music on any given day, I always maintain that we need more people like Mariah Carey in pop music. She's iconic in a way that so few people these days are: she's eccentric in the best possible way (I will always adore her for calling two of her albums 'The Emancipation of Mimi' and 'E=MC2'), she's unpredictable (personality-wise at least), and while the precise state of her sense of humour may be up for debate, she's sufficiently game to make music videos that send her up as the cartoonish male fantasy she might possibly be, and with Kenneth from 30 Rock in them to boot:
You probably know more of this man's music than you think you do, cos his song 'My Patch' has been used for loads of TV stuff here and there. This was the first single to come from his second album (it's eponymous, you know), which is due out on April 7th. There's another single out on the 31st called 'What U Gonna Do', but it doesn't have a video, and therefore doesn't really exist in any meaninful sense (apart from the sense scientists call 'hearing'). 
You've got to love a video like this from a band who have made their name being ultra-serious, ultra-swotty, ultra-intense about everything in this damned and frozed world. It sort of proves a point, bearing in mind these are clearly not the miserable whinging doom-mongers their public image would suggest they are. In fact, they seem to be perfectly nice people and not at all cold or remote. 
Kate Nash, to me and many other people in this world, is a figure of extreme hatefulness. She mixes irritating jaunt-pop with irritating faux-accented goodbad lyrics that tend to just be bad, her songs stick in your head FOREVER and their hateful jolly melodies find their way into your head as you stare at the supermarket fruit section and vow that you will never, ever buy lemons ever again if it does this to you.
The concept of renaming provocative and/or rude songs to make them more friendly has long been a source of amusement for me, ever since I discovered that the original title of the Black Eyed Peas single 'Let's Get It Started' was, in fact, 'Let's Get Retarded'. You can probably guess what this one may be called in its post-watershed life, and frankly if you can't then you really ought to think twice about clicking on the following link, but either way: . It's a little bit NSFW, let's put it that way. would almost certainly not approve. (That link is also a little bit NSFW, by the way. What has happened to the universe?)
True story, on the Envy And Other Sins MySpace page, the band claim to draw inspiration from the following things: Music. The Victorian Age. Stratford-upon-Avon. Gentlemen of the Realm. Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Damsels in Distress. Wrought Iron. Steam Power. Punctuation. Expensive Guitars, Sometimes Played Loudly. Unusual Rural Hobbies. H.G. Wells. Pianos. Clock Towers. Horse Power. Silent Movies. Ancient Pornography and Capital Letters.
It might be because Estelle's song looks quite likely to do well in this week's Top 10, or because the weather has taken a turn for the sunny after all those storms, but, try as I might, I can't seem to get it together to be snarky about much music this week. It's most unsettling. I mean here's a song which is, to all intents and purposes, just 'Crazy' by Gnarls Barkley played at double-speed, with half the chords, and a less memorable chorus, by Gnarls Barkley themselves. And yet I can't seem to find fault with it. 
It might just be a tone of voice thing, but this Wolverhampton beat combo are doing good things with a very NOW kind of formula. There should be something here to appeal to Enemy fans, Snow Patrol fans, fans of BIG MUSIC EVERYWHERE...but don't hold that against them. They also have a nice little Vampire Weekend breakdown section, and, as I said, a singer with a very appealing tone of voice. And if that sounds like I'm damning them with faint praise, well it's not meant to. This is ace! 
Do you know, it took me about three weeks to realise this fella's name is a pun on the word Florida? It's not even really a pun, it's just the word Florida with a space in it, and I STILL didn't spot it. Also, it's already a hit, so there's probably not much point in me casting an opinion into the abyss, for fear of being a) consciously irrelevant, b) deliberately provocative. The first is kind of soul-destroying, and the second is even worse. Settle down, chickabiddies, and I'll tell you for why...
To the untrained ear - mine - the first 30 seconds of this song sound just like Evanescence. Which made me wonder whether there's a crossover between goths and ravers? Are goths the dark yin to the light(stick) raver yang? If so, it must be fun watching the two tribes facing off in nightclub situation. 
I watched one of those 100 Most Something Somethings clips shows the other night, in which one of the rent-a-gobs was sounding off about the Welsh-language TV soap Pobol Y Cwm. Now, the person in question is Welsh himself, but clearly does not speak the language. He seems to have felt this gave him the right to have a good go at pretending to speak Welsh for the comedy effect, then dismiss the way actors on the show speak to each other as "gibberish", as if Pobol Y Cwm had just made up the Welsh language to annoy him personally. That is simply how loudly ignorance speaks in those sort of shows.
In this review I aim to examine the work 'This Song' by the Enemy, using a Marxist critique and my own poor attempts at witticisms. The musical content of this offering is, it must be noted, not its most extraordinary point, resting largely on a U2-influenced Coldplay-scape, spiced up with strong regional accents, either to capitalise on the current vogue for the appearance of grittiness, or maybe due to a certain inherent grittiness, if we are not to be entirely cynical about the endeavour which, I must admit, it is somewhat difficult.
There's only one thing I've ever wanted to ask Katie Melua, and it's not anything snarky or rude. Which is a surprise because her music has never really done anything for me. She always seemed like a very nice person though, self-depreciating, not overcome with diva-itis or a massively short fuse, and best of all, she seemed to be in on the gag that some of the songs she has been given by Mike Batt - the man who has written some of her biggest songs - are just preposterous. 
1: David Beckham
Do you think people who speak other languages get as much simple fun out of names as English-speaking peoples do? Are there pop fans in some parts of the world who are doing joyclaps right now because 'Winehouse' in their langugage translates into "toilet brush" or "spam towel" or "I am a sexy troll"?
No point saving all the great lost songs for one big roundup when we can just have a little think about them one at a time, right? This song is great because it becomes an entirely different song as soon as the trumpet comes in. And it's great because it's got a trumpet in at all! 
It's not often you get to see a rockin' band destroy a selection of cakes which have been baked to look like their instruments, is it? And yet this is what happens at the end of this song's video. It may LOOK like Gaz is about to trash his vintage red guitar, but when it comes to the crunch, it's been replaced by a gingerbread lookalike. So has the bass, in fact. The piano is made out of toast, and Danny's snare drum is a piñata full of popcorn.
It's all very well little Jamesy claiming he can carry people home - and he has had the army training, so maybe he's musclier than he looks - but there's something about being offered a lift by a man with a squeaky voice that makes you wonder if he's actually talking to a Borrower. Or maybe a rabbit, or a medium-sized house cat at best. 
Last night Madonna was inducted into the Rock 'N' Roll Hall Of Fame, an institution which gives credit to famous singers and bands from the past, if they have achieved a certain level of success and/or influence.
Tsk. This is just one more sign of the education system failing us all, you know. If five pop stars, presumably all with some adequate schooling behind them, can't even manage a smattering of a foreign language between them, what hope is there for anyone? You can't just swan over the English Channel and assume everyone knows English, you know. You'd think they'd at least try enrolling in an evening class or something.
To celebrate the fact that ChartBlog is officially 500 reviews old today, I want to open things out a bit, and try and share our collective musical knowledge, for the benefit of mankind. 
The best bits of Guillemots records always occur when the amazingly-named Fyfe Dangerfield opens up his flip-top head and howls an ecstatic gibber at the rising moon, while his band shout their favourite pizza toppings at each other (or something like that, anyway) in a exciteable fashion. They do it a surprising amount, and it never fails to raise a hair or two on the nape of the collective ChartBlog neck. 
ChartSnipe: Well, what a year it has been for chart action so far, eh? I mean here we are, it's the 11th week of 2008. That means a possible 10 (or 11, depending on when you start counting your weeks from) different No.1 hit singles. And do you know how many we have actually had? Just two. This one and Basshunter. And if tabloid reports are to be believed, the rest of the year belongs to the Beatles, once their back catalogue hits the download shops. Shall we make an appointment to meet up in the year 2009, and resolve to do a lot better then? (FM)
I have a really old iPod. It's one of those pre-colour, greyscreen, no-video jobs with actual buttons above the datawheel and a battery which struggles to last more than a couple of hours. It's so old, in fact, that it still has the ! in Panic At The Disco's name. I mean there's old, there's vintage, and then there's just plain out of touch with what is going on...and then there's my iPod. 
Diabetics, please tread carefully when enjoying the musical stylings of this band. While their music contains much that is good for you - vitamins, roughage, unsaturated fats, protein, omega 3 fish oils - there's an extra dollop of pure, refined white sugar. They may claim it's there for taste purposes, but really it's an unnatural by-product of their upbeat enthusiasm and general lack of what Lupe Fiasco would call The Cool. 
It takes a certain amount of petulance to spend a decent amount of your working life announcing (from a very lofty perch, I might add) that there are far too many 'indie' bands chasing the elusive post-Coldplay dollar - all of whom could perhaps learn to tone down the enormous reverb and the pretending to be overwhelmed with bliss, and to tone up the personality and verve - only to launch into a rabid froth when a band like Elbow come along, making a broadly similar sort of noise. 
Sport Relief is, musically, an odd charity phenomenon in the sense that its related singles are generally really quite good and audibly have very little to do with the whole endeavour. Possibly I'm basing this a little too much on the triumph of Rachel Stevens' 'Some Girls' but even so, I've looked up the rest and none of them are completely excreable, which as far as charity singles go is an exceptional run.
Oh great. Snow Patrol take a year off and NOW look what's happened. Here's OneRepublic with the same musical bag of tricks, only buried under even thicker layers of production sludge. And the interesting thing about this situation is it's very obvious that this is going to be a big hit. So pointing out the very clear similarities in style, tone, content, sound, point, usefulness and, and EVERYTHING is just going to irk the people who like it, and there's clearly quite a lot of them/you about. 
Just so you know, I wasn't down to review this single at all. I was meant to be reviewing Mystery Jets this week, but then 
You do have to wonder about the self-esteem issues of the man who hires two of the Pussycat Dolls to be in his new song, and then gets them to appear in his video wearing balaclavas. HE isn't wearing a balaclava, it's not like balaclavas are the new hot fashion item for women, or that Nicole and Keri look particularly amazing in balaclavas. So, is the only reason they're in balaclavas somehow related to making Mr Baland (unfortunate surname, donchathink?) look better? 
Oh man I LOVE it when a band suddenly become brilliant again, especially when there was never really anything wrong with them in the first place. You know how it goes, you love their stuff, it makes you happy, but suddenly, for no reason you can quite put your finger on, there's a distance between you and them, where you start to take their songs for granted. It can happen when other bands come along who seem a bit fresher, a bit more exciting, and you never fall OUT of love as such, but the urge to put their stuff on your playlist recedes a little. They become a band that reminds you of a certain time in your life, rather than a band you're eager to tell your friends that you're really into. 
The relationship everyone has with the name they choose to go by in life is a deep and complex one. If you're happy with who you are, or feel that the name your parents chose for you totally fits the person you have become - warts and all - you tend to leave it alone. However, if, for whatever reason, you feel that your name doesn't fit, you can always go looking for a new one. But how long do you spend trying on names until you come across the perfect one? It could take years. 