pop focus time:

50 CENT – In Da Club-5

Yeah it’s another bitches and bling anthem concerning the intricacy of strip clips, but I shook my ass a bit, and he seems to really like hugs, and I can get behind a sensitive gangster.


BENNY BENASSI – Satisfaction 9

Kraftwerk and Prince make dance music for cyborg perverts, rocks so hard sparks fly from shiny metal bodies. That is before the female pleasurebot goes all BDSM, and I melt.

BEYONCE feat JAY Z – Crazy In Love- 3

The lyrics are cliched, the music is cliched, the dance moves are cliched. I blame Jay Z for destroying our favorite pop diva.


COLDPLAY – Clocks 2

The weepy and melodramatic nonsense a housewife hears in the record store while birthday shopping for an ungrateful son. She buys the album, think for the first time she was 17 she is cool. She isn’t.


DANNII MINOGUE – I Begin To Wonder 5

Not as good as her sister, which is why she has a record contract.

DIZZEE RASCAL – I Luv You 3

I do not understand the hype, is it the anglo masses desperately trying to prove to America they can make hip-hop too?

ELECTRIC SIX – Gay Bar-0+0

Fags are the new funny, and we really do enjoy pretending that this sort of novelty is funny so breeders won’t hurt us. There is something really scary about the idea of starting a war at a gay bar, considering the history and not to come across as humorless but the music works like one of those old vaudeville scores, nudging the ribs with a “isn’t this funny”

EVANESSENCE – Bring Me To Life

My hard rock friends tell me this is the best single to come from the genre in forever, and my Jesus friends say I should like this cause they love the lord. Every time it comes on the radio on the car or a public place I need to comment on how awful it is, and I think I’ m right. The only way to save this band is to put them in the one hit wonder rack and hope to god they go away.

FAST FOOD ROCKERS – Fast Food Song 6

Cheap novelty, making the food is sex metaphor for the umpteenth time, so why have I been humming it for an hour?

GIRLS ALOUD – No Good Advice 5

Growly female voices make my heart hurt with desire, and the electronic noise that surrounds it is genuinly intruguing.


JUNIOR SENIOR – Move Your Feet 10+10

Deeply Entertaining summer disco for the masses, no need to entertain ones head, purely for driving along, singing along, dancing, this years disco for early adapters.

JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE – Rock Your Body 8

He is my first pop star crush for a year, and the falsetto moves me like no one else’s ever did. As well, I do appreciate that he really seems to care about the girl’s pleasure, and for the first time in rock and roll I think that dance may actually mean dance. which makes the naked line obligatory and muted.

MADONNA – American Life 4

The most disappointing of the selections, what was innovative has become old, what was fresh has become narrow. The only way she can hook up with Missy is a gap ad and everyone but her knows the producers that she should work with. For the first time since the 80s I no longer care what she produces. (The odd thing is that the sung vocals, stripped of their annoying production seems technically strong)

PINK – Feel Good Time-10

When did Pink become my dealer for catchy sing along pop? When did she figure out when to make the perfect chorus? This must have come like a golden shower from Heaven, because something so perfect could not have contained itself in the studio.

PUNJABI MC – Mundian To Bach Ke 8

Living in Edmonton is to hear bhnagra on the edges, every class had a few Indian kids, and they would take you to the ethnic grocery stores with badly labeled tapes on a back shelf. You would pick one up and have the most complex rush since garlic Nan mopping up cheap curry. Purists bitch that it is not strictly bhangra, but anyone who puts the magic on hip hop radio deserves some credit—they should play this at the beginning of Post Colonialism classes, cause I cant think of a better example of east-west commerce.

R KELLY – Ignition (Remix) 4

Dull, overly sentimental, ego centered, the closest thing that hip-hop has produced to John Denver, which is a sentence I hoped never to write.


ROOM 5 – Make Luv 2

Painful in it’s utter banality.

SEAN PAUL – Get Busy 5

Dancehall is this summers exotica, which means that the best of the work is bleached so that suburban kids can treat it like mayo instead of ketchup for its french fires. Not bad but not fantastic.

TATU – Not Gonna Get Us 10

It is a post queer anthem of liberation, it is another fuck you I am a misunderstood teenage song, it is a discussion of media stars in an age that savages them, it is an ode to the spirit of the Russian people. None of this matters cause the music is deeply infectious, and then they all lez up not caring that the world is falling in love with them.

THE WHITE STRIPES – Seven Nation Army 5

The resurrected Loretta Career and does better pure balls out rock then most. I know that I am supposed to hate this, but really I find myself yelling, pogoing and doing other untoward things. Rewards the part of me that wished to air guitar, which is not something I usually admit to in public. Not the second coming of anything but not bad at all. It is very strange lyrically, with more interest in numerology then can be healthy, and a creepy sort of paranoia but it has restored Wichita as a great musical place name. (compare Tulsa)