The new Taio CruzMcFly single “Party Girl” now has an official video. There’s a lot of blood, vampires, and torsos. As a video clip, it’s generally a winner.
But what of the song? Incredible and forward-thinking, or generic as hell? I’ve been all over the place with this song. One minute I’m really into it and the next, I’m hitting skip. Is this going to age really well or has it already aged? The jury is still out on the track I think; hopefully the album offers up a few sounds that don’t seem so blaringly obvious as “Party Girl.”
Perhaps it’s also time they stopped writing songs with “girl” in the title? Just a thought.
Look, if there’s an extended version made available my mind will be officially made up.
So next week sees the official release of the new HURTS album, “Happiness.” Not since Moloko’s “Statues” have I been more moved by a record; from start to finish, there is something incredibly poetic about the whole thing; the songs, its structure, the irony in the title; this is quite probably the album that’s going to dethrone the Scissor Sisters of their Album of the Year crown. While I try and figure out what it is exactly I want to say about this majestic record for a future review, I thought I’d bring your attention to the long players best moment right now.
Featuring our beloved Princess, Kylie Minogue, “Devotion” pierces through with thoughtfully depressing lyrics, incredibly well landscaped backing vocals, and one of the biggest, proper-use-of-the-word ‘epic’ closings I’ve heard in a song for some time. I can’t stop listening to it, yet never want to hear it again. Beautiful, gut-wrenching, and not a dry eye in the house the first few times you listen to it.
The best lyric? “Forgive my thoughts when I’m asleep, forgive these words I’m yet to speak… I feel so ashamed.”
The second best lyric? “Inside the heart of every man, there lies a lust – you understand. And I’m just the same. When all the love has gone away, and passion stares me in the face… Could I walk away? Here’s hoping, you’ll help me to be brave.”
The best bit? Kylie’s ad-lib’s during the epic closer; they’ll set the waterworks off if the song hasn’t already for you at this point.
I need to see this performed live, and soon. I’m full of hope that HURTS hit off here in Oz, and that “Devotion” – a deserving Number 1 – gets a single release that propels them even further into greatness and success.
iPod shuffle is a strange, wonderful thing. Aside from blowing my mind to pieces the other day by playing three songs – in a row – about Penises (!!) (Gillette’s “Short Dick Man”, King Missile’s “Detachable Penis” and then Mickey Avalon’s “My Dick” – for fucking REALS), tonight it brought The Faders back into my direct line of attention.
“No Sleep Tonight” would have perhaps worked a little bit better had it not been sung by this lot and rather given to Sarah Harding as her debut solo single. The song is a pretty big pearler (so much so that Molly from The Faders went and recorded a solo version after they’d split) and would have done Sarah Harding very nicely. I’d BELIEVE her when she says she’ll be getting no sleep tonight. Molly McQueen on the other hand; definitely napping.
For best results, avoid watching the actual video clip (which is several hundred shades of utter shit) and just look at this picture of Sarah Harding being Rock ‘n Roll at a Rock Concert as The Faders audio plays.
Cor blimey they had a set of mugs on them, didn’t they?
Meg Washington is an incredible Australian pop lady, and after a run of really amazing singles and EP’s she’s finally releasing her debut album. “I Believe You Liar” is released through Mercury/Universal on July 30th and could end up being one of the years best if the new single is anything to go by.
This is the new Washington video clip. The song is called “Sunday Best” and it ticks just about every box on my list both visually and musically. I saw it last night on Rage, our late-night music show here in Oz, and was pretty blown away. Ridiculously fun and incredibly well put together, best I’ve seen from this country so far in 2010, so there you go.
I interviewed Meg a few months back and she was one of the most refreshing and hilarious people I’ve ever had the honour of speaking to. I’ll try and find the transcript and post it on here next week, but in the meantime I’m just going to watch “Sunday Best” again and hope that a higher quality audio of it arrives on YouTube soon.
Popjustice posted the new Kid Sister song “Daydreaming” as their Song Of The Day today. It’s a cute slice of electro-rap (I suppose) that, as Popjustice themselves have sort of pointed out, is probably more of a pop song than the last round of Kid Sister material. I was lucky enough to chat with her a few weeks back, so I thought I’d pop up the interview…
Shopping for her brothers birthday dinner, Kid Sister (whose real name is Melisa Young) frantically tries juggling between two acts; getting all the necessary ingredients for the celebratory dinner, whilst making sure she answers my questions. It tends to fall on its arse though on more than one occasion.
“I’m so sorry!” she says with a cheeky laugh. “I’m shopping for my brothers birthday party, trying to focus on two things at once! Doing the interview and also attempting to buy food, just when I think I’ve mastered it I confuse myself and end up talking meat.”
The dinner-talk, which is something that is brought up twice more during our chat, is a topic that is never discussed for too long. No matter how unfocused Young claims she might be as she walks through an inner-city Chicago supermarket aisle, she’s quick to revert back to whatever it was I’ve asked about her day-job as a pop star.
Melisa’s beginnings as Kid Sister began, funnily enough, through a connection with her Big Brother, who was a local DJ. “Well, I started off just jumping up on stage with my little brother,” she says, “as he was doing his DJ parties at these really small venues around the city of Chicago, so it just started from there. Just started with me, you know, really impromptu, jumping up in very grimy places (laughs).”
The propellor of fame and success took her in with one swift swoop. Before she could take a step back to evaluate what was going on, she had Kanye West knocking at her proverbial door and MTV poking a microphone in her face.
“My first interview, like, ever, I didn’t even have one of these, my first interview was for MTV. So if that’s how it starts, you’re like – oh alright, I’m in for something wild (laughs) and crazy. It was just a really rapid exposure.”
Kanye West came into the picture after A-Trak, who had produced the Sister song “Pro Nails”, played him a few of her demos. Kanye West, in typical Kanye fashion, loved the song so much that he told Trak he wanted to be on it. Next thing you know, Melissa and Kanye West are making a video together.
“Oh, it was more than crazy, all of that!” she says with a laugh. “More of a whirlwind than I would have ever imagined happening to me in any field. You know I wasn’t a professional musician before, about three years ago I was doing odd jobs. To try this for the first time, really professionally try it, and then to have someone like Kanye jump onto my song, was really unbelievable.”
Indeed the jobs before Kid Sister came along were odd, but perhaps none more surprising than her work in a few independently funded major motion pictures. “I have a degree in film, yeah. Film was very gruelling and I really don’t have any interest in working on any movies [again],” she adds, seriously. “Even if you’re the actress the hours are long, but if you’re a member of the crew the hours are unbearable. So no, no interest whatsoever (laughs). They’re incredibly brutal. So I’m just concentrating on the one thing, if you concentrate on so many different things at one time you just end up doing them all in a really mediocre way so. To concentrate on music is really my goal.”
Listening to nothing but classical music “till I was about 11 or 12 years old”, Young finally discovered the gifts of house music before entering her teens, and likens the discovery to one of the movies that influenced her music tastes in the first place, The Wizard of Oz. “You know when it goes from black and white to colour? Yeah, that’s what discovering house music was like.”
With her film degree playing no part in her future – for now – Melisa turned to music, something that had always played an enormous part in her life, but something she never though she’d ever be able to make a career out of. Which is perhaps why it took so long for her debut album, Ultraviolet, to see the light of day.
“I wasn’t doing it professionally,” she says. “I was just doing all of this, for fun you know? But when someone like Kanye West gets on your song, and you’re just a kid who’s partying her you-know-what-off in the club (laughs), it doesn’t occur to you that it’s an actual job. That you need to be working on this, it just doesn’t occur to you. I wasn’t working towards some, like, goal, and I was certainly not being groomed by some group of record label executives. That’s not the kind of artist I am. I was just a girl who liked to go to parties, and a girl who had a background in music but never though she’d ever be able to do it professionally. And now I need to stop speaking in the third person because that’s creepy! (Laughs) It wasn’t obvious to me that this was going to be my career, so I wasn’t working for anything. And then it was all systems go… but it took a while to get to that point!”
When I ask her how someone manages to work with A-Trak, Cee-Lo, Kanye West, Steve Angello, Herve and Sinden – to name but a few – on their debut album, she gives me this frank and to-the-point response. “It’s kinda like this. I never had to go to anybody for beats. I always had the luxury of having really good friends who were excellent musicians and who were really visionary. So I’m in a fortunate position to have those people surrounding me, and that’s kind of how those collaborations came across.”
Now that she’s more than aware of being able to pull off the whole music-as-a-career thing, she’s incredibly excited to be working on her debuts follow up, which she’s already started to record for.
“Yep, already recording for it!” she says with a half-laugh, half-sigh. “I’m so, so overwhelmed right now, I mean I’m touring, I have to think about the album, and I’ve started to work with DJ Mania, it’s slow going, but – oh God I’m totally trying to concentrate on talking to you but also to buy food (laughs) – okay, what I’m trying to say is, working on the album but also working with other people on their projects. But I’m getting beats coming in every day, I have one from Boys Noize that’s come in – there’s lots of stuff going on!”
It’s been a number of years since the whole world was talking about a music video clip as much as they have been GaGa’s “Telephone”. And whilst it may not exactly have anything on the superior “Bad Romance” video before it, it still offers up a whole lot more than almost any video clip being force-fed to us today, let alone the last few years.
We seem to be living in the age where music videos are an event once again, or, rather, and perhaps more specifically to the point, Lady GaGa’s videos are now an event. It’s something it seems everyone is interested in seeing; to the fans, the casual music listener, even the haters and people who listen to “real (boring) music”. The “real music” listeners watch it with gusto so they can bitch and moan later about how awful it and pop music is and why we should treat all pop stars like Hitler treated the Jews. In order to make such outlandish claims like this to match their super-tight black jeans and matching Libertines t-shirt, they’ve got to see the film clip so it looks like they have some kind of Indie leg to stand on during arguments with people like me about the video. At the end of the day though, they’ve sat down and watched that video clip, knowing full well they’re going to hate it. How long has it been since a pop star has been able to achieve that, and on a global level? You have to give GaGa kudos for that alone.
The near-10-minute epic extravaganza is, from the horses mouth, a social commentary on the American obsession with consumerism. But there’s some wild pop culture references sprinkled throughout too that are more than worthy of being mentioned. The use of Uma Thurman’s stolen ‘Pussy Wagon’ from Kill Bill was a direct loan to GaGa from Quentin Tarantino and drives the obvious mark Tarantino’s movies made on GaGa throughout the spliced-up-wonderment of “Telephone”, Beyonce’s nickname of “Honey Bee” also being a reference to “Honey Bunny” from Pulp Fiction, to the leopard-skin costume worn toward the end which seems to pay direct homage to the movies of John Waters and his cross-dressing star Divine.
The clip seems to have strum up some controversy, MTV have actually banned the video. Everything from the ‘lesbian’ kiss, a censored snapshot of GaGa’s Vadge and the death of an entire diner all playing a part. But that hasn’t stopped the drove of millions logging onto YouTube every day to watch it in high definition on their computers. The only thing MTV have really been relevant for in the last 5 years has – let’s face it – been “The Hills”, and the fact that they’ve banned the music video, in the digital age we live in now, means fuck-all what it used to back when artists NEEDED MTV to show their clips. It’s not detrimental any more and I find it funny how the media have, naturally, jumped all over the banning like it is of some actual relevance.
As for the video itself, obviously I really like it. The real surprise is just how much of a great actress Beyonce really is; she obviously follows instruction incredibly well – every scene she is in – absolute gold. This video has made her instantly more likeable to those of us who’ve perhaps been a little unimpressed by her output of late. She completely got it; there’s nothing that comes across as forced from her either which only adds to the charm of this video.
Kudos to Jonas Akerlund, the director, for doing such a stellar job too. There are moments, in particular when Beyonce is in a bedroom, alone, and GaGa in her jail cell, where the special effects and – to a point – even the placement of things around the room remind me very heavily of this Madonna video, also directed by Akerlund. Some might say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but I actually enjoyed seeing Beyonce’s head being twisted to-and-fro ala Madonna in “The Beast Within.”
Some criticism has been made that the clip has nothing to do with the actual song. And whilst I agree to a point that it’s a little disappointing, it’s certainly not as disappointing as it would have been had we been given some stock-standard boring video clip set in a nightclub. I’m falling asleep just thinking about it now.
It might be an over-the-top vanity affair here, but who cares? Why are we lashing out at Pop Stars – of all people – for being vain if this is the kind of final product we’re going to get from them? Maybe there’s a line blurred with the degree of Vanity GaGa puts forward in her work and the degree of vanity every other pop star puts forward that people just can’t quite differentiate between. Luckily for them, it doesn’t look like GaGa’s going anywhere anytime soon so, perhaps, they’ll get to see that line for themselves and finally get it.
Whether you love her or hate her, love the clip or despise it, chances are you’ve seen it in full by now, and you’ve probably seen it more than once too. Anyhow, why not watch it again?
