Master Class: Beyoncé’s “Visual Album”

It was the mic drop heard ‘round the world.

Beyoncé’s sudden, stunning announcement that she had not only recorded an entire new album while on tour, but released it at the exact moment it was announced, in the absence of any advance publicity and nary a clue of its existence, made the news rounds late last night and into this morning. As expected, social media exploded in mass hysteria. For music lovers, this was the equivalent of an atomic bomb, consuming and destroying everything in its path. Imagine if the Beatles went on the news unannounced in 1968, carted in a crate of LPs, said “this is Abbey Road. It’s available as of right now. Enjoy,” then left.

Today, the “normal” process of promoting music these days is for artists to Tweet the existence of a single, whether or not it was already sent to radio or made available. Publicists work overtime to ensure maximal exposure for their client. In the late twentieth century, we waited with bated breath for the radio to play a newly-announced song, or hope and pray that a bootleg would make the rounds and we’d pass them around on cassettes or white-label CDs. I remember the promotion behind Madonna’s radio premiere of “You Must Love Me” from the then-to-be-released Evita, which was met with a collective shrug from the record-buying public. People waited for the product from the superstar. It was expected that we would accord it respect. Nowadays, artists are at the mercy of the public, each trying to command attention over the sound and fury until such time that everyone was talking over one another, and the audience stops caring. Justin Timberlake and Lady Gaga did this more than once this year, and both attracted negative publicity (in Justin’s case, it didn’t hurt his album sales, but in Gaga’s situation it was decidedly more detrimental). The artists didn’t let their music speak.

Beyoncé’s masterstroke is that she pushed the entire work directly into the marketplace. Why just Tweet that there’s a song available in advance of an album and making videos in a rush after the singles were pushed out? Here are some ways in which the new album has radically subverted the rules of the game, and reflects how we consume and discuss music. This is not an evaluation of the disc’s artistic merits (lack thereof), but an exploration of how we regard this particular artist in the celebrity ecosystem.

Go directly to the marketplace. There’s this terrific article in The Guardian explaining that Bey went directly to the audience. It’s the equivalent of her showing up in the middle of a crowded mall, setting up a kiosk, and quietly waiting for people to appear and buy out her stock. There was no advance publicity, no built-up anticipation. One could argue that Beyoncé’s been on tour for most of the year and that would be publicity enough, but she never betrayed the fact that this album was being made at that time, let alone released. We would have expected an album at some point in the future, but traditionally it would not be in the middle of the tour, and certainly not while she’s still promoting material from her last album two years ago. It’s even more rare that she chose to do so during the all-important fourth quarter of the year, when people buy music in greater numbers than the rest of the year due to the holiday rush.

Silence = respect. Consider the multitude of artists who contributed to this album: Frank Ocean, Justin Timberlake, Pharrell, Timbaland, Sia (the most unexpected collaborator of all) and her mercurial husband Jay-Z. She’s stacked the deck with tremendous talent and not a single one of them have breathed a word. It’s a testament to how she is so respected that she commands such respect. Virtually every other artist has had a track “leaked” (intentionally or not), but nothing was said here to anyone. Perhaps they didn’t even know, and assumed it would be released a year from now, after the tour? This release was so sudden and unexpected that for once, Wikipedia didn’t have any information on the album – not even a page – within an hour of the disc’s release. Given how so many celebrities plead for “privacy” and yet are photographed leaving their yoga class, here is a request truly met and accorded respect.

Silence is louder than Tweets. While the likes of Madonna, Gaga and Miley madly try to get people to pay attention by espousing on everything and nothing at once, we hear relatively little from Beyoncé. Even her self-directed (and deceptively “intimate”) documentary Life is But a Dream conveys little substance of her private life. Contrast this with Mariah Carey, who has been on TV almost every day this week broadcasting from her well-appointed Manhattan home. What has Bey said about this? Absolutely nothing, other than a Facebook post, and singular pictures on Instagram and her Tumblr. She’s busy with her tour, you see, and tending to motherhood. For someone everyone talks about, it’s curious that Beyoncé herself says so little, yet what she did with the stealth album drop said a lot.

The single does not command the marketplace. It’s no secret that there’s not much money in purchasing music. The public buys the singles they want at a fraction of the entire album cost. Single purchases far outweigh album sales, and committing to downloading a full disc is a greater commitment from the public. (The real money is in tours, anyway.) By dropping the album with no advance publicity and not identifying one particular song as “the lead single”, the sudden onslaught of new music is too much for her public. We can’t just buy the one single and wait two months for her to announce the next one: there is no single. This way, we have no choice but to listen to the entire work and determine for ourselves what the standout tracks – should there be any – truly are. Consider that Lady Gaga’s “Applause” was met with derision and relatively mixed reviews in advance of her latest work. Despite being a hit single, her latest disc artPOP is selling respectable but hardly spectacular numbers, by superstar standards. For the press surrounding her Vegas show, the once-indomitable Britney Spears’s new platter has anemic sales. It can be argued that the lead single hurt the album by tainting its image prior to release. Beyoncé went through a similar situation when “Run the World (Girls)” was met with a relatively soft commercial reception prior to the release of her 2011 album 4. By dropping the entire disc at once, she neatly sidesteps this negative publicity, and compels us to return to old patterns of buying entire albums.

Image control. Beyoncé is not the first artist to release an entire video album accompanying each track (including non-singles) with a clip. That would be Annie Lennox, who did so for 1992’s landmark Diva album (for which she won the Grammy for Best Long-Form Music Video). However, the release of the disc as a concept “visual album” with bonus videos, feeds into our fascination with Mrs. Carter. To keep herself in the conversation by saying so little, we then look into her Tumblr and Instagram to determine if any of the images in the videos were silently released in her sites. Did she leave clues? Was she hiding a secret in plain sight, and nobody caught on? And therein continues the virtuous cycle: Bey’s killer instinct and business sense helps her understand when people are weary of celebrity, and when to back off. The combination of the album and video compilation maximal release is both manifestation of ego and maximal output all at once, forcing the viewer and listener to judge the work on its own. Not for nothing is she supreme in imagecontrol.

Confirmation of iconic status. Beyoncé is also not the first artist this year to do the stealth album drop. That would be David Bowie, whose The Next Day turned out to be one of the year’s very best discs. The difference is that Bowie preceded the disc by shipping a single to radio, then released the album a few months later, with little to no other publicity accompanying it. It still hewed more closely to the "traditional" publicity pattern than what Bey did. Only an artist with a captive audience would dare try it. There are a few who may pull off this trick, and Bey proved she is one of them. What's breathtaking about her strategy, more so than Bowie's, is that she dropped in the midst of her tour, a time that is so exhaustive and all-consuming for her professionally that one would not imagine she would have the time or energy to create an entire new work that some artists take an entire year off to produce. True to form, the album crashed on iTunes several times due to the overwhelming sudden demand.

The music itself. Is it any good? Is it bad? Is it great, or both? At this point it becomes a moot point. All the emotion surrounding anticipated new music and its actual release have been truncated and amalgamated overnight into the span of just a few short hours. The stealth drop of the album has neatly sidestepped all of the discussion by presenting the music as-is, compelling fans to buy it and completely avoiding the tide of potentially negative publicity (and yes, it’s pretty damn good). The videos clearly have ambition, scope, scale and budget to carry out her vision. It is a celebration of the artist and her life, confessional and dramatic. Perhaps this is the wave of the future, pop music as grand opera?

In any event, I’ll be spending copious amounts of time studying this work, deciphering clues and gaining insight into at once the most public and yet enigmatic musical artist working today.

Open Letter: Why Eduard Khil’s “Trololo” Should Be the Christmas #1

Every so often, a wondrous Internet meme of a non-lexical, nonsense song becomes earworm. A prime example is Adriano Celentano’s “Prisencolinensinainciusol”, a gibberish tune that topped the Italian charts in 1972 and has garnered millions of views on YouTube. That was my nonsensical pop music obsession of 2011. For 2012, there is no better candidate than Russian crooner Eduard Khil’s “Trololo”.

Initially titled “Я очень рад, ведь я, наконец, возвращаюсь домой”, the late Khil’s non-lexical Soviet pop sensation gained notoriety when it became an Internet meme in 2009. The title translated into English means “I Am Glad, ‘Cause I’m Finally Going Home”. How it came to become known as “Trololo” was because of the way it sounds. Here’s what the original sounds like:

Note that the song has, at the time of this writing, fifteen million views to date.

It garnered a minor cult following, including a joke on Family Guy:

There’s even a continuous ten-hour – yes, ten hour – loop of the song in a single YouTube clip, which you can see here:

It is in fact the only song by Khil available for purchase at the (non-Russian / Eastern European) iTunes store, where for 99 cents once can have the pleasure of listening to this musical nonsense nonstop.

We are about six weeks out from the infamous chase for the Christmas Number One on the UK music charts. Past winners of this title include vaunted pop classics by Paul McCartney, the Spice Girls, Whitney Houston and Pink Floyd. For those readers unfamiliar with the concept, this is a cultural phenomenon in Britain, a time when a mad crush of artists releases Christmas-themed songs and sing-song-y power ballads in a bid to see who will end up on top of the musical pile during the biggest sales period in the music industry for the entire year. Only sales in the week leading immediately up to Christmas Day counted towards the total, so timing is crucial.

In the last decade, the Christmas Number One single has been dominated by reality singing competition winners, such as Girls Aloud (who saw “Sound of the Underground” launch their successful career in 2002), Alexandra Burke and Leona Lewis. There have on occasion been songs that were released as explicit cash grabs that have nothing to do with the holiday, such as the Teletubbies’ theme song and Bob the Builder, some of which top the chart but often came up just short. Then there was the successful 2009 Facebook-enhanced campaign to get Rage Against the Machine’s anything-but-Christmas-y “Killing in the Name” to the top, which was started as a joke to counter the commerciality of the whole enterprise but actually became the Christmas Number One (I may or may not have purchased a copy).

There is now a campaign on Facebook to get Eduward Khil’s “Trololo”to the top of the Christmas charts in the UK. Here’s why it should be on top:

True to the whole enterprise, there’s a huge Novelty Factor. Like comically ironic candidates like Rage Against the Machine and the insipid Teletubbies theme song (which was an unconsciously ironic choice), it’s the idea of taking the piss out of the whole occasion, with its seriousness and sentimentality, that makes it such a great idea.

It kinda sounds like a Christmas song. Sing “Trololo lolo” and what does it sound like? “Falalalala”. Reader, the gibberish rhythm makes it, combined with the instrumentation, almost sound like a forgotten Christmas classic, complete with orchestral sweep and chimes that make this sound like a Russian Bing Crosby. Okay maybe not that far, but it’s a musical facsimile, nyet?

It would be really, really funny. Having seen the Christmas Number One parody storyline in Love, Actually many, many times, I have been waiting for a blatant attempt at the coveted title with a song that mocks the insincere warbling of pretty young pop stars. Plus, an added bonus would be that the idea of having this top the chart would make musical executives rip out their hair in frustration. Can you see Simon Cowell having a fit that a decades-old record beats out his latest X-Factor investment, the one that was going to buy him a private island next to Beyoncé’s and Jay-Z’s?

Universal appeal. It’s the kind of “universal” record that the record companies try to get to appeal to everyone with the Christmas Number One releases. While the Spice Girls had three back-to-back-to-back titles from 1996 to 1998, non-English speakers would not be able to fully appreciate their singles. “Trololo”, however, is perfect in that anyone anywhere can sing along and enjoy it. Plus, it offends absolutely nobody (except aforementioned record company executives) and language is not a factor. You could play this to anyone of any race, age, religion, gender, political affiliation, sexual orientation, nationality or ethnicity and they would get it. I always wondered: in that old 1972 commercial “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing”, what song would the singer like to teach to sing? It sure isn’t Michael Jackson or “Express Yourself”, because it’d be too tough with the language barrier. Just throw “Trololo” on and have everyone sing, and you could bring about world peace. Heck, for those opposed to pop music as being “too westernized”, let me remind you: this is a pop record from Soviet Russia. (This also explains Eurovision.)

If you can buy “Gangnam Style”, you can buy this as your next earworm. Self-explanatory.

So if you’d like to teach the world to sing, have a laugh and get a perfect score at karaoke while getting caned at your parents’ place, get “Trololo” to the Christmas Number One! And remember: you can only buy it during the week leading up to Christmas in the UK, so that the sales count.

With thanks to our friends at Gay French Riviera for the tip!

Summer Song 2012: Loreen’s “Euphoria”

Last year, I wrote about the importance of the summer song. Identifying a song with the summertime is part of growing up and follows us into adulthood. Hearing that one jam brings back specific memories of a time, a place, a person. You can taste, see, hear and almost feel everything around you in that place and time just by a couple of bars of that song. Think of what happens whenever you hear any of the following summer hits and see if they conjure memories: 

1986: “Venus” by Bananarama
1987: “I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)” by Whitney Houston
1991: “Everything I Do (I Do It For You)” by Bryan Adams
1996: “Killing Me Softly” by Fugees
1998: “Ray of Light” by Madonna
1999: “I Want It That Way” by Backstreet Boys
2002: “ Complicated” by Avril Lavigne
2003:  “Crazy in Love” by Beyoncé

2007: "Umbrella" by Rihanna
2008: “Viva La Vida” by Coldplay
2011: “The Edge of Glory” by Lady Gaga

One cannot predict what makes a summer jam or what will stick in the memory long after you pack away the beach umbrellas for the winter. But my choice for one of this year’s summer jams is a rarity, as it could also be crossover hit from the Eurovision Song Contest: Loreen’s “Euphoria”.

Originally a contestant on the Swedish version of Pop Idol in 2004, Loreen was born Loren Talhaoui and went on to forge a successful career as a TV presenter without releasing a proper music album. That’s about to change, as her Swedish chart-topper “Euphoria” won this year’s Eurovision Song Contest ahead of the heavily-favoured novelty track by the Buranova Babushkas.

Within hours of winning, the song blasted to the top of the UK iTunes chart. Within a week, it had topped over a dozen other music charts across Europe and was poised to make its mark on the official UK chart in the top five, giving Loreen an instant blockbuster smash single. That’s not surprising given that “Euphoria” received first-place votes from a record 18 of 42 voting countries in the contest, and only two of the 40 did not award it any points at all (and that’s only because Sweden couldn’t vote for itself).

And remember what other Swedish Eurovision champion went on to conquer worldwide charts? A little group known as ABBA, in 1974, with “Waterloo”.

Let’s examine what’s so great about “Euphoria”. It’s a trance-inspired dance track that, at first blush, sounds like just like everything else in vogue on contemporary hit radio. But listen again a little more closely, and you can see that it’s constructed so that it opens with minimal instrumentation to showcase Loreen’s vocals. She’s quietly whispering, questioning why a simple moment of joy is fleeting. But as the chorus builds, the beats kick in and the full vibrato of her glorious voice comes through loud and clear. There is no guest rap, no name-checking, no self-referencing. There is only a voice and a beat.

Sound Advice: on Shirley Bassey’s “Get the Party Started”

For those younger readers out there, the name Shirley Bassey doesn’t ring much of a bell. However, if I were to play you her two signature tunes from the James Bond films – “Goldfinger” and “Diamonds Are Forever” – you will hear that voice and know that singer, for no one else can utter that voice that suggests images of jewels slinking their way seductively out of a velvet pouch.

Having been absent from the music scene since her heyday in the 1960s and 1970s, Dame Shirley spent much of the 1980s and 1990s focusing on charity work and undoubtedly living off the residual income from her immortal recordings. Then, in 2006, she recorded a big, brassy version of P!nk’s smash record “Get the Party Started” for a Marks & Spencer commercial. It contains a slightly halted, almost spoken-word utterance of the opening verses before belting into a powerful crescendo.

Dame Shirley, eschewing the trend of aping youth in the name of commercial art (are you listening Madonna?), instead embraces her signature sound. The cover has big, sweeping brasses with a drum machine that grooves without wearying out the listener in a frantic attempt to party! Hard! Right! Now! The effect is a bold cover that can easily be remixed and made into a dance-club smash (if you want to party hard right now). It could be played as ambience at a more sophisticated lounge or social mixer. Or it could provide the perfect soundtrack to New York Fashion Week while models float about in the latest by Tom Ford or Mary Katrantzou. Although Bassey’s version of “Get the Party Started” doesn’t have the bouncy R&B-inflected youth pop of P!nk’s original smash, it does have what P!nk’s doesn’t have: a sense of occasion.

The popularity of Dame Shirley’s recording lead to the release of a 2007 cover album bearing the same name. To round out the album and flesh out its theme, the recording is big on interpolating brass and drum machine, giving the album grandeur and sonic sweep worthy of a dame. While not every song pops the way her cover of “Get the Party Started” does, there’s plenty to accompany your evening. The list of covers includes a saucy “Big Spender”, a worthy interpretation of Grace Jones’s “Slave to the Rhythm”, a suitably earth-shattering “I (Who Have Nothing)” and yes, another Bond cover, “You Only Live Twice”. The album, in a sign that music consumers still have good taste, became a Top Ten hit in the U.K. This was when she was 70(!!) years old, looking and sounding as beautiful and regal as the day she first blasted her way onto the airwaves nearly half a decade earlier.

And laced through the recording is that big, magnificent voice. Yes, Dame Shirley is still a belter and can indeed get your party started, whatever the occasion. There is nothing like a Dame.

Eurovision 2012: Russia’s Buranova Babushkas

With the impending return of spring comes, across Europe, the first signs of an annual ritual casually making itself known on the cultural calendar once again. That’s right, it’s the Eurovision Song Contest, which I spotlighted in a piece you can read more about here. 

Russia first participated in the Eurovision Song Contest in 1994 and has competed continuously every year since 2000. They even hosted the competition in 2009, as part of the reward for winning the Contest the previous year. They take this contest seriously there. With the increasingly larger presence in the global market Russia continues to occupy, it follows that they would attempt to participate in the cultural climate, as well. They’ve largely stuck with English-language hits to generate greater appeal and potential crossover success on the pop charts. Russia has done well in the last decade and a half, winning in 2008 for native pop singer Dima Bilan’s pan-European smash ballad “Believe” (which included a memorably bizarre appearance from Olympic champion Evgeny Plushenko), and placing in the top three five times total. At one point, the faux-lesbian pop duo t.A.T.u. came in third, around the same time that they briefly enjoyed American success with their hit “All the Things She Said”. Last year’s entry, Alex (Vorobyov) Sparrow’s “Get You”, was even produced by RedOne, the man who co-produced Lady Gaga’s blockbuster album The Fame.

A word must be said about the selection process for each country’s entry. Usually left to their own devices to choose the entry, the winner is often selected by popular vote, depending on the nation. While the Russians have generally favoured high-gloss pop music, their selection this year is downright bizarre. The winning entry is Buranova Babushkas and their song “Party for Everybody”, which was chosen by the public over returning favourite Bilan and t.A.Tu.’s Julia Volkova and their blockbuster duet, amongst others.

For those of you who speak Russian, yes: “babushka” as in grandmother. These eight women hail from a tiny village called Buranova in Udmurt Republic in the Urals. Having competed in the Eurovision selection contest in 2010, these grandmothers came third in that national competition and have won the right via public vote to represent Russia at the big contest in Baku, Azerbaijan in May. The song isn’t even in Russian, but in Udmurt, with the chorus in English. My Google skills tell me that the non-English lyrics generally sing of the routine in daily life in that village: kneading dough, lighting the oven, laying out tablecloth while waiting for the children to come home. It is light years away from the flush of new wealth in cosmopolitan Moscow and is much closer to the simpler existence in small villages in Soviet Russia (or one might imagine).

Let’s face it: this selection is the American equivalent of choosing notorious American Idol also-ran William Hung to represent the country, should the U.S. actually participate in Eurovision. They are not professional singers by any means, nor are they accomplished vocalists, with the production overwhelming the voices and a beat that could have come from having a karaoke machine make love to a drum machine. The costumes are traditional and are likely hand-made. And yet, as with so many reality-show contestants, the Buranova Babushkas have a compelling back story. Their only purpose for entering Eurovision is to raise awareness and money to build a new church in the village of Buranova, which numbers only 650 in population. And let’s face it, it’s rather endearing to hear this story and watching them dance with abandon, much like this remarkable Mandarin remake of “Bad Romance” with seniors. I’m just saying that they likely don’t prioritize public opinion other than for the purpose for which they came to Eurovision. Plus, after the first minute or so, the clip is immensely catchy.

How will the Buranova Babushkas fare at Eurovision? Just remember that Alex Sparrow’s entry was designed to win the contest outright, given how American it sounded, and it placed fourteenth. Also remember that an outright bizarre entry like Verka Serduchka almost claimed pole position in 2007.

Sound Advice: on “Je Suis Malade”

Just in time for Valentine’s Day, I’ve decided to post not the usual songs of love and devotion, but about exquisite romantic misery that can only be borne out of all-consuming love. It’s the kind that’s not healthy for you.

The classic French pop song “Je Suis Malade” was first written and recorded in 1973 by French singer Serge Lama. An overwhelming popular and critical success for Lama, the single brought him his first gold record in France and became known as one of his signature songs. Covered by a whole host of European artists, perhaps the most famous rendition in the modern era remains Lara Fabian’s 1994 version, which became an immense success and a signature song for her, as well.

It is not just a song where the speaker misses someone. The song is a catalogue of all the manifestations in which romantic love creates illness and deprivation. It is not enough for the singer to merely talk about the moon, June and spoon in rhyming couplets. “Je Suis Malade” shows how the singer, translated from the original French to English, no longer dreams or smokes, feels dirty and ugly without the lover, feels abandoned like a child in an orphanage. The romance, for the singer, has no pleasure or joy. There is only despair from an all-consuming love that at once feeds and feeds at the speaker, slowly ebbing joy away, leaving only exhaustion, resignation and a final cri de coeur that commands the lover to listen, and make a definitive declaration of anguish.

For some, it may be overwrought, but this goes beyond the usual romantic sentiments one may find in adult contemporary radio. “Je Suis Malade” is not a romantic journey, nor can it be considered a mere love song. It is the soul’s cry to all the winds, the four directions, the depths of the earth to the limitless outer spaces, that there is nothing more than incurable despair. Love is the devil, love is an all-consuming disease that loves one completely sick. Literally, the word “malade” could be interpreted not just as an illness, but also as a state of fact that the singer is completely heartsick. If you have any compassion at all, you would listen to the rendition by Lara Fabian and beg her to stop or to have someone put her out of her misery but you can’t, for her performance of the single is so singularly emotionally and sonically majestic that you can’t help but listen and wait for the final glory note. 

A popular song across Europe, the single has unfortunately been butchered mercilessly by reality show contestants hoping to become the next (insert country name here) Idol or X-Factor victor. This does nothing to take away from the original song’s potency, nor that of the remarkable cover by Lara Fabian. While it’s certainly not healthy to live the kind of love, it is certainly an antidote to declarations of love by positive affirmation. What other love song would drive one to such despair and yet still announces to the audience, “Listen, this person is in love, no matter how much it hurts them”?

In addition to the version by Fabian, the piece works well as an interpretive dance. Have a look at the free dance for this season for Canadian ice dancers Kaitlyn Weaver and Andrew Poje. Looking at this dance, one cannot help but be swept up in the body language between the two, the anguish and the final pose where she is on the ice, begging him to love her. Weaver’s tears are real and, while you may joke about figure skating, one must not forget that it is itself also an art form and another type of theatre.

With that in mind, consider the next song of love you hear, and wonder if any will compare in its depiction of all-consuming love will compare to “Je Suis Malade”.

Road Show: Portishead on Tour

[Ed. N.: This post originally ran on July 13, 2011, and is re-published to coincide with the band's current fall 2011 tour. This post also includes new tour dates, appended below.]


Sometimes, nothing hurls you gob-smack into the middle of your youth like hearing from an old favourite band. In the spring of 2008, the Blogger gleefully heard that the long-dormant, presumed-defunct mid-90s British trip-hop combo Portishead were releasing their first album of new material in over a decade. Suddenly, the writer shed all layers and armour of his presumed adulthood and opened the closet door (pun intended) to an awkward adolescence defined by sexual anguish, bad complexion and an unfortunate amount of flannel.

Portishead’s landmark disc, 1994’s Dummy, swept onto our shores with the emo movement, well before emo was even a catchphrase. Its numbing, sonic landscapes provided a lushly enveloping cocoon as turbulent as our feelings. Lead singer Beth Gibbons’s faraway vocals may have sounded disconnected at times but would descend into whispered anguish so potent it hardly dared to unleash its full force for fear that it might smash your stereo to smithereens. The chilling, spooky lead track “Sour Times (Nobody Loves Me)” brilliantly married a seemingly runaway snippet of old Hitchcock score with a fractured, hurried beat that somehow made for a brilliantly gruesome aural death match. The song laid siege to my Discman (remember those?) for several months in the spring of 1995, winning the prestigious Mercury Music Prize along the way.

“Sour Times” was accompanied by a haunting video with a now-cult-iconic image of Gibbons being interrogated in the bowels of MI-5’s office. Its juxtaposition of musical elements and the accompanying clip almost dared the listener to tell us just how awful we felt about ourselves at the time. How we felt at the time was a closely guarded secret, as personal and potent to us as the whereabouts of certain political renegades are to heads of state. Such experimental fare had maximal impact on MTV and radio at the time, but would have no room for the crass “reality” swindle and shallow, cookie-cutter contemporary radio that currently pollutes popular art and the public consciousness.

A decade passed after Portishead released their acclaimed second disc in 1997, and promptly vanished. In particular, they developed on their self-titled second disc the drama and orchestral sweep which would later inform Third. In particular, the magnificent, gut-wrenching “All Mine” that is nothing less than a shriek of passion from the depths of romantic misery and possession.

Take a listen and maybe you’ll see understand how it wouldn’t be out of place in a modern updating of Wuthering Heights.

They left behind a musical legacy evident in works by trip-hop artists like Massive Attack, who continue its evolution of sound long after the public was distracted by more disposable fare. Proof of Dummy’s lasting popular impact was immediate when, within nanoseconds of posting the news of the tour's announcement on Facebook, three of the writer’s friends wrote to proclaim their love for this remarkable band. Such swift declarations of love from a decidedly uncommercial, almost obscure British band speaks volumes on Dummy’s remarkable, lasting visceral power. Gibbons and company had cut through to the emotional core of its audience when first released and unwittingly held onto it. If the album were not as effective, then it would not have brought about such spontaneous adoration.

Pop Art Confessional: Enya

It all started when The Blogger was very young. One day, after plowing through music videos in the early 1990s on MTV, back when MTV used to play music (yes, such a time existed not too long ago), I was taken aback by the sight of an angelic, impeccably dressed woman moving in slow motion, opening her mouth to emit a sound that is clearly her voice dubbed about two hundred times over to make her sound like a choir of seraphim. So this is what God must have intended an angel to sound! The video must have had something to do with it: waves belonging to no ocean in particular crashed over beaches while calla lilies magnified several times in height bloom menacingly yet serenely in the background behind the temptress. The woman calls to me like the sirens to Ulysses, on his way home to Penelope. This … was “Orinoco Flow”. This was Enya.

And I couldn’t help myself. It seemed so innocent and yet so wrong! I would go to the record shops (back when they had records – Ed. Note: I feel old), gloss carefully over the latest bestsellers by Nirvana, U2, Boyz II Men and Pearl Jam, I would glance to see if I saw anyone I knew from school. Then, tiptoeing to the New Age section, I would carefully run my fingers with one eye on the door to the shop to see if anyone I knew would wander in, and plucked out the incriminating copy of Watermark. With my selection in hand, I cupped the disc in both hands and hurriedly dashed to the register, only mumbling a polite thanks as I flung my money on the counter, demanding to have my purchase brown-bagged and running with my head down out of the store, hoping no one would have seen me.

But what sweet, sweet temptations the siren offered to me! I started to think of the sounds of Enya as being almost vaguely sensual, but in a non-threatening manner. If this is what lovemaking must be like, I thought, then no longer will women close their eyes and think of handbags, nor will men have to close theirs and think of England in the middle of Business Time. All they need conjure is the sound of the siren Enya to call to them and they can get to that post-coital cigarette a lot faster.

This wasn’t something that I could deny about myself. It felt right. I was uncontrollably attracted to the sounds of Enya’s music. I couldn’t control it and it wasn’t a choice. But I couldn’t live a lie and hide my love. I would have to face my toughest critics’ judgments, sooner or later.

Pop Rewind: the MTV Video Music Awards

With the VMAs taking place this coming Sunday, it’s time to contemplate the videos up for the title of “Video of the Year”. They are:

• Adele, “Rolling in the Deep”
• Beastie Boys, “Make Some Noise”
• Bruno Mars, “Grenade”
• Katy Perry, "Firework"
• Tyler, the Creator, “Yonkers”

Each of these is noteworthy and represents creative breakthroughs for some nominees (Tyler, the Creator), commercial breakthroughs for others (Adele) and a long-running history of making great clips (Beastie Boys). I hope that MTV chooses well, as they have in the past.

Here are ten notable past winners for Video of the Year, each of which has blown out the solar plexus at one point of another, and some of the worthy  clips they beat in the year of their victories. Whoever wins has a lot to live up to ... 

1987: Peter Gabriel, "Sledgehammer"

Beat Out: U2, “With or Without You”

1993: Pearl Jam, "Jeremy"

 Beat Out: Nirvana, “In Bloom”; Peter Gabriel, “Digging in the Dirt”, R.E.M., “Man on the Moon”

1995: TLC, "Waterfalls"

Beat Out: Michael & Janet Jackson, “Scream”; Weezer, “Buddy Holly”

1996: Smashing Pumpkins, "Tonight, Tonight" - 

Beat Out: Alanis Morissette, “Ironic”; Foo Fighters, “Big Me”

1997: Jamiroquai, “Virtual Insanity”

Beat Out: Nine Inch Nails, “The Perfect Drug”; No Doubt, “Don’t Speak”

Together Again: Janet Jackson’s Number Ones Tour

[Programming note: original article ran June 11, 2011. This piece is running to coincide with the upcoming August 26 concert in Vancouver.)


The Blogger recalls his first-ever concert. On June 9, 1990, he attended Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation Tour. It became, at the time, the highest-grossing debut concert tour of all time. The Blogger didn’t care that he was sitting far in the back and watching Janet storm across the stage as a well-dressed military ant dancer. He didn’t care that production values dwarfed in the unfortunately oversized stadium (there were thousands of seats still available). He was just so darned happy to be there!

The Blogger has had the pleasure of seeing Ms. Jackson (if you’re nasty) live at least three more times since: on the janet. tour in 1994, the All For You Tour in 2001, and 2008’s RockWitChu Tour. Janet remains, Nipplegate or not, his favourite Jackson (sorry Michael). 

Ms. Jackson returned to the road this year for a scaled-down tour supporting her greatest hits double-disc set Number Ones, and showcasing her sets in a more toned-down setting. For those of us who grew up watching Janet dance out from under her brother Michael’s shadow and blaze onto the international stage on her own power, and watch her try to return from the Super Bowl Incident, any occasion to see Janet is a trip down memory lane. Here are five reasons why Janet Jackson still matters.

1. Janet dances her ass off. In an interview with her late, great brother Michael, he took one look at his sister in the 80s when she was heavier and said “lookit that butt!” Yes Michael, we can see it, but not because we’re ridiculing its size: we’re seeing it because she can shake whatever yo’ mama gave her. A Janet Jackson concert is an occasion for the world’s biggest dance party. Like Madonna before her, Janet made her name as a first-class dancer who happened to have a penchant for a great hook and melody. The fact that she has co-written every single one of her hits in her entire career speaks to her passion for the marriage of song and dance, and it’s her words – and therefore her conviction – that compels her to move. It’s guaranteed to make you move, too. 

2. Janet sings all her old hits in concert! Say what you will about her admittedly thin singing voice: Janet doesn’t lip-synch. She doesn’t need a back-up tape of her come-hithers and harmonies for those nights when she doesn’t feel up to it. You can hear every breath in her body and see every bead of sweat when she’s on that stage, and that’s from singing everything. This lady works hard. Janet has a vast array of nearly three dozen global Top Ten singles spanning the last quarter-century (it has been 25 years since her groundbreaking R&B album Control first stormed into the pop world). She understands that her fans have different favourites charting the span of her entire career, and she intends to give them the respect they deserve by singing every last hit, even if she has to blend them into medleys to fit them all in. 

The tour’s set list includes such early singles like “Nasty” and “When I Think of You”; iconic club-stompers like “Escapade” and “Rhythm Nation”; more mature work such as “That’s the Way Love Goes” and “If”; and sing-along favourites like “Together Again” and “Let’s Wait Awhile”. No one goes home from a Janet Jackson concert complaining about the songs she didn’t sing. And this time, with no new material to promote, the show is full of nothing but the hits! Everybody wins! 

Modern Film Classics: “Madonna: Truth or Dare”

For Dolce

Madonna turns fifty-three today. Fifty-three!

Although she has dabbled in low-key activities since the conclusion of her epic Sticky & Sweet Tour in 2009, and with Lady Gaga reigning supreme over the pop music scene with Adele and Katy Perry, the power of Madonna’s influence must be reiterated.

Madonna became one of the first contemporary pop musicians whose work has produced a sub-field of gender studies entirely onto itself. Leading feminist writer Camille Paglia wrote extensive academic essays on her. The Vatican all but called for her excommunication. MTV, back when it played nothing but music videos, at once revered her and punished her, as she has become the most-awarded MTV VMA Award winner in history and also one of the very first to have her work banned from the network (that would be the videos for “Justify My Love” and “Erotica”).

1990’s Blond Ambition Tour was the concert tour that cemented her iconic status. Intended to cross-promote her blockbuster Like a Prayer album, its follow-up I’m Breathless, and her starring role in her then-paramour Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy film, it was the cultural phenomenon of the summer. When she premiered the Gaultier-designed cone bra in 1990 for her tour, it was one of the first instances where underwear was outerwear, and proved so iconic that the garment is on permanent display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Gallery. Until then, no one would ever think of wearing just a bikini top and bare midriff as a stage costume. The tour was so controversial that it prompted protests in Rome, almost landed the singer in prison for public obscenity in Toronto, and yet was so highly reviewed as performance art that it became the highest-grossing concert tour of the year. Hell, even Gorbachev – yes, Gorby!! – went to see her show, even though the Soviet Union was still alive and well. (To this, Madonna quipped: “Warren [Beatty]’s gonna be so jealous that I met him first! Hah!”) Rolling Stone magazine named Blond Ambition, despite being released at the start of the decade, the “Greatest Tour of the 90s” in 1999. The tour has become legend, especially since Pioneer signed an exclusive contract to release the concert tour recordings on Laser Disc only, and thus it is not available on DVD. Random clips have been uploaded onto YouTube, but the only place to see high-quality clips of some of these performances are in Truth or Dare.

Madonna became the single most powerful woman in show business. And everyone has, ever since then, tried to follow or out-do her: Gaga, Katy, Britney, Ke$ha, Rihanna, Christina, Gwen. Everyone. And if you asked any of them to name a musical influence, they would each say Madonna.

Truth or Dare, theatrically released in 1991 after a third album in a year and a half, was the document of the concert tour that burned through pop culture. In an era before the Internet became prevalent, the fact that Madonna was letting cameras follow her 24/7 to produce an all-access, no-holds-barred documentary, was unheard of. Camera phones and YouTube were but twinkles in their developers’ eyes. This was as close as we could get to reality TV at the time (asides from Cops on the Fox Network). Twenty years ago, this all-access documentary was considered the ultimate reveal. It’s still a cinematic powder keg twenty years later.

Love is King: Sade Live in Vancouver and On Tour

I was warned about attending this show by a close friend who is a major Sade fan. He said “prepare to be taken away. If you have any emotion, bring a tissue”.

Make no mistake that the crowd gathered at Rogers Arena on Saturday, August 13 in Vancouver is not your usual big-arena collective. The crowd skewed older, but testifies to the lasting power of Sade’s sultry sonic output. For those of you whose memories of “vintage” pop music date as far back as Jennifer Lopez’s J. Lo album in 2001: yes, Sade is still a big-name act and one of the few lasting acts in contemporary music. It’s just that their music will never date as badly. Want more proof that people still buy their work? Their last studio album, Soldier of Love, opened at No. 1 in the US last year and sold a million copies. Got it?

That is also not to say that the audience was sedate simply because the vibe was decidedly downbeat before the set started. There was a conspicuous absence of hallucinogenic drugs and no yahoos were dancing around, shrieking drunkenly. None of that is needed, not at a Sade concert. However, the crowd’s benign façade melted away as the house lights were dimmed and the strains of “Soldier of Love” came over the speakers, the audience rose as one to welcome the band. Once Ms. Adu took the stage in a fitted bodysuit showing off a remarkable physique, everyone at Rogers Arena lost their collective minds.

I should clarify that Sade is not just the stunning, alluring singer known as Helen Folasade “Sade” Adu. It is also a collective comprised of founding members Stuart Matthewman, Paul Spencer Denman and Andrew Hale. If you look through the band’s history, their many music industry prizes include a number of Grammys, two of which were awarded to the best vocal performance by … a duo or group. The band is simply named after her and she is the frontwoman for this long-running collective. This is the key to understanding that Sade is a classy outfit and they put on an elegant show. For the purposes of this review, I will refer to Sade Adu the singer as simply “Ms. Adu”. It would be strange to refer to her otherwise as “Helen”, at least within this context.

The first proof that Ms. Adu is a sophisticated lady and that this was a classy affair was right after the opening number, when she addressed the audience by saying that their long absence from the city was not a reflection of how the band felt about Vancouver. She praised how beautiful Lotus Land was, thanked us for coming, and promised us a show. This was at 9:45. To show us that she meant it, we were still screaming for an encore by the time her set ended at 11:45, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

The band ripped through an elaborate back catalogue dating back to their debut album, 1984’s Diamond Love. To keep momentum up after the glorious start, the opening strains of “Your Love is King” brought lovers near and far closer together. At one point I thought that there would be a mass exodus of couples from the venue before the show ended, not a reflection of the show’s quality, but a testament to the band’s lasting power to make some of the best baby-making music ever recorded. Adu’s remarkable voice was an instrument so fine it is the equivalent of a 1683 Stradivarius: an extremely rare, classic instrument that only grows finer and achieves greater clarity as time goes by, and deserves the utmost respect.

Sound Advice: Hi Fashion & “I’m Not Madonna”

Meet the new dance pop duo Hi Fashion.

Formed by the members Jen DM and Rick Gradone, this duo is a deliciously catty pop machine that may very well be performance art in disguise. Every one of their singles could have been collected from the ruminations of the most attitude-filled, delusional drag queens. A creation called “Amazing” pretty much sums up the entire “I don’t care if you don’t like it because I’m amazing” fantasia that, although could have been mined entirely from a transvestite’s internal monologue, might easily have danced out of any reality TV show’s participant’s mouth, masking a deep-seated insecurity and possible psychosis. (Why else would they agree to be on television, dummy?) It’s the duo’s delirium that sets them apart from any other dance or pop acts.

The band’s videos remind me of old 70s and 80s Japanese commercials, but acted out by gender-bending transvestites in faux Amy Winehouse beehive hairdos and Stevie Nicks’s Goth night outfits. The only proper reaction to any of these videos is the following question: “is this on purpose?” (They also remind me very much of Eurovision and most of Eastern Europe’s ideas of what is supposedly cool.)

But their crowning glory remains the dance club smash “I’m Not Madonna”.

This is a knowing, winking but extremely savvy pop single that trumps any self-referential attempts by the Jersey Shore kids. Why? Because their brand of irony is rooted in a need to self-deprecate that is hampered by the fact that they think they’re being smart. The protagonist in “I’m Not Madonna” has the delusion without the irony, and that makes the entire performance that much more exciting and accomplished. They’re not doing it to seem smarter than they already are, and the hell with anyone with doesn’t like it. It reminds me of what Amy Poehler said to Jimmy Fallon during a rehearsal on SNL, when he told her to stop a gag because he didn’t like it: “I don’t fucking care if you don’t like it!”

Before I discuss this sooner, please listen to their Soundcloud here and then join me after the jump.