O Song, are you leading me on?

Tim Byron calls upon 2DayFM, Ariel Levy, Jon Snow, to explain ‘Blurred Lines’, a song made by a man who, when asked if the video is degrading to women, replied “Of course it is. What a pleasure it is to degrade a woman.”

America: this will probably be your #1 single in a month and a half! After all, a month and a half ago in Australia, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis’s ‘Can’t Hold Us’ knocked Pink and Nate Ruess’s duet ‘Just Give Me A Reason’ off the top; this just happened in the US. So yes. (Predictably I talk about feminism and ‘good girls’ and why female fans might want to be liberated by Robin Thicke and co.)

New #1 single in Australia. I write about it at The Vine:

There’s an appeal to what Daft Punk does that goes beyond fans of dance music. Their ‘we’re robots!’ schtick gives a context to their music that makes still sense outside of a club or dance music festival, where a lot of dance music does not. Daft Punk, after all, go around in robot-like helmets, have songs called ‘Robot Rock’ and generally sound a bit robotic. This kind of thing is not new (guten tag, Kraftwerk!) but it’s effective in establishing a clear identity. There are a variety of reasons in the modern world why we might like to put on a robot mask; like robots, plenty of us do repetitive chores, and there’s a certain mythology of robotic efficiency and accuracy; robots get stuff done, they don’t give a shit. They’re anonymous. And ageless.

Things what I wrote for the Vine

Number Ones - Passenger ‘Let Me Go’ - a new #1 this week by the British guy who transplanted to Australia. Was sort of exciting to find out that it was recorded at Linear Recordings, which is a beautiful studio that I recorded at with 4 different bands before I moved to Queensland. I don’t quite understand why it’s a #1, but that’s not new! 

Music Reader - The Strokes, Avicii, Tyler The Creator, cunnilingus in rap - The career arc of The Strokes; Avicii’s rise and rise; what happens when all of your bandmates are killed in an accident; is the Harlem Shake a tool of The Man?; What does it mean to sound “good” in hip-hop?; Profiling Thor Harris of Swans; why are the Rolling Stones still big enough to headline the Glastonbury Festival?…

Recent Vine Articles, etc

I’ve been slack at updating o-song, clearly. Since the last time I updated I have written these things for the Vine:

According To Study: Do your Facebook likes prove how smart you are? (Someone asked me last night if I was giving royalties to Ben Goldacre - which is, you know, fair point. Maybe I’ll eventually collect them into a book called Bad Psychology. Though this study wasn’t so bad.)

Number Ones: Macklemore & Ryan Lewis (feat. Ray Dalton): ‘Can’t Hold Us’ (Yup, third straight Macklemore single to go to #1 in Australia. Australia being a very white place and all. In the end, this bit of writing’s less about Mackelmore and more about how people use music. My little brother said on Facebook that he was reading about Uses and Gratification Theory for a sociology(ish) class, and then saw me post this on Facebook, and figured it would be a nice fun thing to read as a break. He then discovered to his horror that it was simply more of the same.)

Music Reader: Amanda Palmer, David Bowie, Alyssa Milano, Meat Loaf (Last week’s Music Reader linking to awesome stuff written by Ian Rogers, Mike Barthel, Marcello Carlin, etc)

Music Reader: Justin Timberlake, Napster, My Chemical Romance, Bluejuice (This week’s Music Reader linking to awesome stuff written by Lindsay Zoladz, Brandon Soderberg, and Aidan Moffat)

Other things:

• I enjoyed this article at The Awl about John Polidori, who (mostly) wrote the first modern vampire story, and who was the member of Lord Byron’s posse who they picked on.
• The series on The Lock Pickers at Slate by Tom Vanderbilt was very enjoyable.
• This one on the super rich in London and who they are and how they live was alternately fascinating and depressing.
• The Will Schaff artwork (and the story behind it) for the upcoming Jason Molina tribute covers album thingy is sad and beautiful.
• I starting giving lectures in first year psych at UQ this week, which was fun, and this year I’ve been writing an online music psychology course for Griffith University.
• Have started Skype-ing with friends in Sydney to have conversations about #1 singles in Australia in the 1990s, which has been lots of fun. It’ll be a podcast before too long, and I’ll probably promote it here a bit.
• This new Low album is very good.

Yup. Number one in Australia. For better or worse, the Australian charts are entirely based on sales, according to ARIA, so this deserves to be #1 just as much as Macklemore. 

There was really only one way I could go about writing about ‘Harlem Shake’…

(this one has cameos from everyone from Tom Ewing to @seinfeldtoday, and lots of my Facebook friends who I thank again!)

A new P!nk number one that I have written about. It’s a better song than ‘Blow Me (One Last Kiss)’, and I still have it stuck in my head, but it doesn’t really make sense as a duet, and Ruess and P!nk don’t sound believable singing together. (Also, I compare it to Starship’s ‘Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now’.)

Doing the Number Ones is funny sometimes - you only get to write about the songs that hit #1 in a particular week. But other songs end up selling lots, and so are perfectly good things for me to write about from my usual angle. And so it’s fun to talk about about the other songs in the year-end Top 20. This 20-11 edition features Taylor Swift, The Script/will.i.am, too much Maroon 5, Ed Sheeran, Matt Corby and Carly Rae/Owl City.

New #1 single in Australia - “Same Love” by Macklemore and co - is (as far as I can tell) the first protest song to get to the top of the charts here in almost a decade (and I mean, that was ‘Where Is The Love’ by the Black Eyed Peas). I’m sure you’ll be shocked to discover that I spend a lot of my regular Number Ones column for The Vine writing about same-sex marriage in Australia and homophobia in hip-hop. 

What with ‘Thrift Shop’ being a hip-hop song about going to op shops (‘thrift shop’ is such American parlance), there were always going to be interesting cultural veins to mine in the song, between Macklemore’s POV and the various economic reasons why hip-hop culture might want to signal wealth. So I say things like this:

The hipster has the time to look through the thrift shop to find the right outfit; the time to research obscure genres of music; the time to research where the best coffee is. I think it’s this implicit having-of-leisure-time that irritates many people about hipsters (especially if the irritated have the 60-hour a week high-paying high-stress jobs they need in order to put their 3 kids through school and secretly wish they had the time to complain about the difference between dubstep and brostep etc). Anybody can go and buy a gaudy, expensive-looking handbag or coat. Shops selling that stuff are easy to find. But to find a dress that fits within your aesthetic in a thrift shop is going to mean you’re spending lots of time and effort (ironically there’s now plenty of boutique thrift shops where other people have done that searching for you, and the exorbitant amounts of money they charge reflects the time you would otherwise spend finding it). 

I also discuss how the song is basically mostly a Flight of the Conchords song. The best bit is the post in the comments by Alyx, the Vine’s editor who very often writes about fashion, pointing out that $50 Gucci t-shirts are probably fakes. 

New #1 single in Australia, which I wrote about for the Vine. I found this one (the finale song by an X-Factor winner) distinctly unmemorable. I still can’t really remember how it goes after listening to it about 8 times. I suspect it won’t be #1 next week. I mean, it’s so unmemorable that I compare it unfavourably to LMFAO.