Posts by Robyn Gallagher
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BTW, NZ History has a good run down of most of the music television shows over 50 years or so of New Zealand telly.
There comes a point in every older person's life when you discover that music telly isn't like it used to be in your youth, mainly because when all the videos being on YouTube, they're not the special rare gems that they used to be. The kids of today aren't going to have that experience. Yeah, they might stumble across a weird video, but their friend isn't necessarily going to have seen it at the same time. Unless they message their friend with the link.
Like, I remember when I was 12 and saw Sly and Robbie's "Boops (Here to Go)" one afternoon on Shazaam. It blew my mind with its weirdness and I remember discussing it the next day at school. What did it meeeean?
Here's another interesting thing - in American, streaming of songs now counts towards chart positions. This is one of the reasons why sexy music video are so big - for example the naked ladies of "Blurred Lines" and Miley's demolition erotica of "Wrecking Ball". It also means that James Franco and Seth Rogen's parody of Kanye's "Bound 2" video contributed towards the original's chart position, as does every video of fat bastard licking a sledgehammer while the original Miley song plays.
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That's Catherine McPherson interviewing the Fits, so I'd assume the show is the legendary What Now.
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What a spunky lady! Thank you for sharing this with us, and big Christmas love to you all.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Some Year, in reply to Russell Brown,
Read the teenage girls' tweets about her - she's shifted ideals of beauty in pop culture. It is quite a thing to carry.
Tweets are one big difference between Lorde and Gotye. When Lorde tweets anything, there will be a large number of responses simply saying "Queen". This is the sort of adulation that popstars like Miley and Beyonce and Nicki Minaj get. Gotye, meanwhile, is a more serious older dude musician with little mass appeal to teenz.
I think this is what's going to keep Lorde going and ensure she won't be a one-hit wonder in America. She's already done the song for the Hunger Games soundtrack and seems to be working on all sorts of intriguing secret projects with hot producers. In a way, Lorde in 2014 will be far more interesting than Lorde in 2013.
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I like her intelligence and love the way her hooks rise up unexpectedly, but until she's got drunk, got laid and fucked up like the rest of us she's not really talking to the likes of me. Not in the way that, say, Robyn does.
Chur, bro.
*ahem*
I miss that - when people would talk about how awesome Robyn-the-Swedish-pop-artist was and I'd pretend they were talking about me.
Anyway, this year I listened a lot to Yeezus by Kanye Kardashian-West. A lot of people h8 it - and the production is something of an acquired taste - but it's full of good songs with clever lyrics, though I had to top listening to it for a while because it is a very dark album.
I went to Napier last week and on the bus there and back I listened to Bangerz by Miley Cyrus. It's good! Don't worry, guys - in a record you can't hear twerking or tongue poking or sledgehammer licking so she can't hurt you. The album is full of bright, contemporary pop - just the sort of thing I'd expect from a 21-year-old. "F.U." is a stand-out track, which The Corner accurately described as having a "Jim Steinman-goes-dubstep showtunes vibe". Quality.
Also, Beyonce's album BEYONCE is good. It remains to be seen whether her surprise-album-and-videos trick will actually be the industry game-changer some are predicting. I mean, you pretty much have to be Beyonce for that to actually work - though the surprise album (sans videos) was a 2013 thing.
It's a very sexy album, but it doesn't go as far as, say, Madonna's Erotica, which managed to alienate audiences by being too sexy. Beyonce balances it out with some sweet songs, including a pretty good ode to her daughter.
Here's an excerpt from "***Flawless", one of the fiercest songs from the album. This is the song that also has a spoken-word definition of feminism. And that's a good thing to end the year on,
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That said, 'Wrecking Ball' just sounds like someone taking a shit.
Vile. "Wrecking Ball" is a great pop song. Miley knows how to do singles.
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Jesus chart summary/update:
"I'm in Love with Jesus"
Debuted 18 November at #29 (#5 in the NZ artists chart)
28 November - not in top 40, #19 in NZ chart."Jesus be our Everything"
Debuted 9 December at #24 (#4 in NZ chart) - an improvement on first single.
But this week it's dropped out entirely.Meanwhile that Benny Tipene Coke ad song (which is pretty and romantic) has debuted at #15 and I expect it'll stick around for the summer.
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"I'm in Love with Jesus" was in the charts a couple of weeks ago. This week Arise has the follow-up single "Jesus Be Our Everything", which doesn't appear to have a video yet. It's not as catchy as "I'm in Love with Jesus", though.
It's amazing that the church is big enough that its members can get a single into the charts. But then One Direction fans manage to get random 1D album tracks to number one, where upon they vanish from the top 40 entirely.
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Hebe earlier posted a link to the video for the Special AKA song "Free Nelson Mandela". I discovered yesterday that New Zealand was the only country where the song reached #1 in the pop chart. It was a top 10 hit in the UK, Ireland and a few European countries,, but New Zealand was the only country that managed #1 - three weeks straight in the winter of '84.
The song was the first time I became aware of Nelson Mandela. I was only nine at the time, and even though I lived in Hamilton and had been aware of the Springbok tour protests (and the dad of the boy at my school who rang up anti-tour supporters and blew a whistle at them), I still didn't know what it was all about.
The song made me aware of things, with the "Sun City" protest song by supergroup Artists United Against Apartheid keeping the momentum going and filling in more gaps the next year. ("We're rockers and rappers united and strong / We're here to talk about South Africa we don't like what's going on" - Run DMC)
It's easy to think about the 1960s as a golden age of political and protest songs, but the '80s didn't do a bad job where it counted, slowly chipping away at the badness.
Also - it says a lot about New Zealand that "Free Nelson Mandela" was followed at number one by "One Love" by Bob Marley.
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The old railway line, Gizzy, 2010.
