'UBIQUITOUS IRRITANTS' ...

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... the epithet applied in this week's Guardian Guide to Edith Bowman and Zane Lowe. Nice.

THE NEW BRITNEY ACCORDING TO WIKI

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"Break the Ice" is an uptempo-oriented electro track with heavily synthesized, breathy vocals. The song runs for three minutes and sixteen seconds. It is composed in the key of A♭major, and is set in common time. It is constructed in the common verse-chorus form. The spoken intro contains a dual meaning. She whispers "It's been a while. I know I shouldn't have kept you waiting. But I'm here now," which serves as an apology for being gone so long in the music industry, as well as away from her love interest in the song. The song speaks about a girl and a boy, with the former saying: "You're a little cold. Let me warm things up and break the ice." Spears' breathy vocals are layered when she sings "Hot Hot Hot Hot" in the choruses and sound similar to that of her 2001 single "I'm a Slave 4 U." She sings of the intensity of "breaking the ice", lyrically stating "You've got my heart beating like an 808". Midway through the song, she halts, "I like this part...", mimicking Janet Jackson's style in "Nasty". The heavy drum line drops and the song finalizes in a repeated chorus, with ad-libs included by Spears.

MODERNIST NEWCASTLE

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I reckon someone could make a good study of Toonian (popular) modernism. The following might be included:

RECENT POETRY CRAIC

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Sam Gardiner's latest collection is sweeeeeet:

Check out an earlier poem of his here.

Conversely, gave Vernon Scannell a go on the basis that he's one of those names people always bang on about: unreconstructed parochial shite.

GHOSTLY SWIM COMPILATION - CHECK IT (IT'S FREE, AND GOOD)

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Ghostly Swim download

(Milosh and Mux Mool tunes especially good).

WONKY POP - LET'S BE CAREFUL

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There’s an article in the Guardian’s Friday Review this week on the current Wonky Pop tour - Alphabeat, Leon Jean-Marie, Frankmusic – all of whom are reasonably engaging and interesting in their disparate ways (although, in true chart pop fashion, there’s a heap of woeful inanity to wade through before getting to the good stuff).

It’s encouraging to see these guys picking up on what must be the most simultaneously obvious yet still relatively unacknowledged fact of the century so far: that most commercial pop music (led by feeder genres such as nu-R’n’B and garage/twostep) is typically about ten times more futuristic and innovative than anything coming out of the indie/alternative scene. Swap you the Courteeners, Babyshambles, Kaiser Chiefs, Wombats, Foals and Bloc Party for Kelly Rowland, Britney, Robyn, Beyonce, Amerie and Lykke Li any day of the week.

However, caution must be exercised here. If the Guardian piece is anything to go by, this mini-scene is in danger of becoming a full-blown media cause celebre, which of course puts it in danger of being turned very quickly into a vehicle for all manner of inverse snobbery and capricious scensterism. As soon as the London music establishment gets involved, you can bet bandwagon-hoppers will seize on this eloquent musical avowal of pop, and use it as a pseudo-intellectual excuse for all kinds of lesser commercial artists to carry on indulging in shallow corporatism and cliché-ridden cheese (am I mistaken, or does ‘cheese’ just mean ‘shit’?), a sort of media-sanctioned get out of jail free card for conservative, unimaginative people everywhere.

Also, the conceit of the article – that pop is usually regarded as lightweight and unsophisticated - is fucking irksome, as well as being a commonplace so extravagantly time-worn and facile as to render the majority of the piece (which is largely spun out of this premise) entirely pointless. ‘There’s something deeply incongruous about finding Alphabeat in these surroundings [ie. the Cardiff Barfly]’ claims Alexis Petridis, as if a pop-crossover band has never dared to venture out of the comfortable arena/academy circuit. (Just to digress, Petridis may not be the worst music writer I’ve come across, but he is some way down there on my personal ratings scale, and I feel like I must take the opportunity to say, once and for all, YOU CANNOT BE A NEWSPAPER’S FASHION CORRESPONDENT AND AT THE SAME TIME EXPECT TO BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY AS A MUSIC JOURNALIST. Fashion is an inevitable and integral part of popular music, but music is not, as many people seem to have started believing recently, a marketing tool for selling clothes. British alternative culture has suffered terribly in recent times from the unscrupulous willingness of prominent cultural figures – Jo Whiley, Mark Ronson, Pete Doherty, Conor McNicholas, Lily Allen, Johnny Borrell – to treat independent music as just another branch of the style/consumption/celebrity circus, and equating fashion with music a la Petridis is in the current climate always going to seem like a complicit extension of this trend).

There is an obvious problem with nomenclature here – pop, pop music, popular music, have always and will continue to mean vastly different things in different contexts (what is popular is not necessarily pop, and what is melodic and well produced is not necessarily marketable, etc) - it all gets a bit ridiculous after a certain point. But broadly speaking, if you’re being consciously ‘pop’, you just need to make sure you don’t go too far down the commercial path, and ensure you keep in mind at all times the genuinely useful artistic aspects of pop music – populism, spontaneity, openness, fun, directness, immediacy, compression etc. At their best these Wonky Pop acts understand this high-art approach to pop very well, even if they're not anywhere near as accomplished as fellow Scandinavians Robyn and Lykke Li. You just hope all these artists are allowed the breathing space to keep mining this promising path.

... AND BACK DOWN AGAIN

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Conor McNicholas seems to have shat his socialite pants after last week's tentative foray into risk-taking adventurousness.

This week's NME cover stars:

Green Day
The Strokes
Coldplay

I HEART REVOLUTION (AND HEARTS REVOLUTION)

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These guys probably the best discovery arising out of the NME Future 50 feature:

Hearts Revolution myspace.

Some shallow fashionistic ravery here and there, but overall a laudably fractured and exhilaratingly distorted dance-pop, recalling all kinds of goofy, girly indie of yore (this compounded by the classic alt-rock referencing lyrics, now becoming pretty voguish, cf. Les Campesinos, Let’s Wrestle etc - and hopefully indicative of a revival of old-school indie ethics going beyond mere quirky nostalgia).

‘Digital Suicide’ (both myspace versions) - just lovely.

IF ANY PIC COULD TURN A MAN ...

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... this is it:

DAVID CAMERON AND REAL SOUL

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Have just discovered Rob Carmody's masterly Run Away Home blog via Simon Reynolds.

Particularly liked the following nugget on the 'Blue-eyed Soul'/'Real Soul' Leona/Winehouse/Duffy/Adele brigade:

'... as much the Cameronistas' preparing-for-government music as Britpop was for the Blairites (the US success of "Bleeding Love" in this context might be analoguous to that of "Wonderwall").'