It really irritates me how in the Pluto song “Hey Little” there’s a line that goes “did you remember to wash behind your ears”, but the dude who sings it (I think it’s Mr Borich) mispronounces “ears” as “airs”.
If you want to know how to pronounce ear in a rock song, please listen to “Lust for life” by Mr Pop – he snarls it out like “eeeeee-aaaaaaah!”.
Thank you.
I like the revisionist history that says that Duran Duran’s songs were actually really meaningful. Like, “Girls On Film” was actually about the exploitation of models. Yes, ok.
Why don’t they just be honest and admit that the songs were just about stuff that sounded cool to sing. Like, what was the union of the snake? Yes.
I got excited when I saw the band on TV arriving at the airport. I’d love to see them and Mr Williams live, but I can’t afford it. Excuse me while I weep.
Oh, I’ve made a blog for NZ Idol! I realised I’m obsessed with it already, so instead of putting all my Idol crap in here, I’ve got a separate place for it. I’ve called it NZ Idle (ha ha!) and have cleverly photoshopped the NZ Idol logo. Hopefully it’ll be a refuge of wit in (what will soon become) a sea of illiterate hysteria.
Today I heard on Mai FM that Scribe’s debut album “The Crusader” has gone double platinum. In New Zealand this means sales of over 30,000.
Victoria Beckham was dropped by Virgin records after her debut album sold less than 50,000 copies. Her new single will be a double A-side with one pop and one hip-hop song. Er, perhaps she needs to get Scribe working with her?
I was delighted to read that Ms Paris Hilton has been having much naughty hotel room fun with Mr Robert “Millsy” Mills, one of the “Australian Idol” final ten. They were photographed having a pash on a hotel balcony, after blearily emerging one afternoon.
This is what has been missing from “Australian Idol”. One of the best things about “Idol” shows is the sudden fame that the contestants get. Gareth Gates, second place getter in the first British “Pop Idol” famously lost his virginity to large-bosomed glamour model Jordan when she was four month’s pregnant.
“Australian Idol” finalists Shannon and Guy are nice, but don’t seem to be getting up to any mischief, so I’m glad that Millsy’s done the right thing.
Oh, and I so love Paris Hilton. She is the living proof that you can never be too rich or too thin, or even too blonde or too sluttily dressed. She is a globe trotting party girl and I love her extravagance. I hope Millsy wasn’t a dud root.
P.S. I saw “Matrix Revolutions” today. The previous film “Matrix Reloaded” raised a whole lot of interesting questions and possibilities, but “Revolutions” didn’t seem to answer or explore many of them. It seemed like a hastily concocted conclusion, that had a few parts that felt like reruns from “The Matrix”. When the film concluded, I was almost expecting a bunch of Ewoks to appear and break into celebratory song and dance. I was disappointed because it could have easily been a much better film. And it so was not worth $14.
I bought “Justified” from The Warehouse in Hamilton. I would have supported one of the incredibly cool independently owned record stores such as Big Tones, or maybe Tracs, but The Warehouse was cheapest – $29.95 vs $34.95.
I took the case up to the music counter to get the disc. There were two girls working at that counter. One of them was like, “OMG! We should listen to this one next! I woke up with that song in my head!” and the other one was trying to be all cool and was like, “Justin Timberlake tries to be like Michael Jackson”. So I was like, “Yeah, but he does it better than Michael Jackson does these days.”
I paid for the CD and lingered in the nearby women’s clothing section while the girls played “Like I love you”. All around me people were subtly moving to the beat. A Warehouse employee was sorting out underwear and putting it on a rack. I heard her singing along.
It was joy.
Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Nsync
When I was 16 years old, the age when most girls listen to music that they later regret, I had reasonably good taste. I was hip, I was cool, I was alternative. I listened to gangsta rap from groups like NWA, I’d wag school and go and hang out in the park with my friend listening to Sonic Youth on her Walkman. None of that teenage pop music for me, thank you very much.
Then ten years later I was in Sydney walking around Darling Harbour, doing a little bit of sight-seeing. I walked past the Imax theatre and something caught my eye. A large poster proclaimed “NSYNC: Bigger Than Live!”. Yes, that’s right. It was an Imax movie of an Nsync concert. This excited me, so the next day I went back and saw it and something changed in me.
I’d never really paid much attention to Nsync before. I’d had a passing interest in fellow boyband the Backstreet Boys, but the only thing about Nsync I knew was a few lines of choruses and that The Face magazine said they weren’t very charismatic.
But seeing that concert movie, seeing them singin’ and dancin’, I found myself liking them. Really, really liking them. This scared me. I tried to fight it, tried to deny it, but it was still there: Nsync excited me.
Back in Melbourne I was idly looking around in a record store. I found myself browsing in the “N” section. Somehow – and I don’t have any conscious recollection of doing this – I ended up buying “No Strings Attached”. That was going to be it, but a few hours later, in another record store, I found myself buying Nsync’s latest CD, “Celebrity”.
I listened to them both a lot. “No Strings Attached” has a few tracks which always get skipped, both ballads, one by Richard Marx, the other by Diane Warren. But other tracks delighted and even shocked me. One of my favourites is “Digital Get Down”. It’s a lame title, but the song is essentially about cybersex. The idea is that there’s this dude who lives away from his girlfriend and he watches her masturbating on her web cam. They also have phone sex. Try listening to that song in bed, in the dark, at night. It’s interesting.
I totally love “Celebrity”. There’s only one track I don’t like all that much, it’s a ballad with guest harmonica from Stevie Wonder (confirming that he’s never done anything good since the ’80s). But every other track is pure pop heaven. Even the big wedding ballad is ok. It’s dirty pop, a recently coined term to describe what I guess is pop music but with an edge (doesn’t that sound lame?).
On “Celebrity” Nsync have written or co-written over half the songs on the album and they don’t suck. One I really like is “Game Over,” which samples sounds from Pacman (how cool is that?). There’s also “Up Against The Wall” which is about seeing a fine young lady at a night club and humping her. There’s also “See Right Through You,” which includes the lyrics “These games they gotta stop/About to get pissed off”. Humping, moderately bad language, it’s all there.
Hey, I know all their names! There’s Justin (Britney’s boyfriend), JC (the really hot one), Lance (the serious one), Joey (the goofy one) and Chris (the funny one). Chris is my favourite. I think it’s important to have a favourite.
So it’s come to this. I’m 26 years old and I like Nsync. I sort of came out as an Nsync fan at Fray Day in Melbourne. I’m taking a further step here by again admitting my love for Nsync. I can not keep it a secret any longer.
It might be really uncool to admit this, but, hi, my name is Robyn and I am an Nsync fan.
I was in a shopping mall and I walked past an appliance store. Something caught my eye. There were two walls with about three rows of different models of TVs and they were all playing the video to the Backstreet Boys hit single “I Want It That Way.”
I stopped in my tracks, turned around, went in and spent the next three minutes and thirty three seconds pretending to be checking out the TVs when instead I was checking out the Backstreet Boys.
I don’t take pride in this. I felt like an alcoholic chugging down cough syrup and pretending to have a really sore throat. Yeah, I was really interested in those TVs. So interested that the only thing I can remember is that most of them were silver and there were some really big ones and other ones were small.
So the Boys did that sensitive brooding in front of an aeroplane, singing that song about how they could never love the girl because they want her too much, or whatever it’s about.
Oh yeah, I suppose I’d better reveal who my favourite Backstreet Boy is! It’s pretty much a process of elimination. Howie D is out. He’s like the Tori Spelling of the Backstreet Boys (I fell over and scraped my knee when I was looking at a poster with Tori Spelling on it instead of the pothole in the footpath). Brian’s pretty cute, but he’s married, ditto for Kevin. So it comes down to AJ and Nick. It’s a tough decision. Nick’s got the whole pretty boy thing happening, but AJ has the bad-boy-finger-bang thing. Oh no! I can’t decide!
So, in conclusion, I really dig the Backstreet Boys and N*Sync (or however you spell their name) are a bunch of wussy girlie girls. And that makes me larger than life.
It’s quite fashionable to dislike the Spice Girls. I’ve had discussions with people who dislike the Spice Girls and I’ve asked them what’s wrong with the group. The response is usually along the lines of “They’re crap”, “They suck”. So I ask why the Spice Girls are “crap” or “suck” and the answer is “because they… because they just do”.
I was listening to bFM, the local student radio station, and the announcer had just played a remix of “Who do you think you are”. He said he’d give away tickets to an Everything But The Girl concert for the first caller who identified the group. It took about 15 or so calls guessing all sorts of bands, before someone called and correctly answered. I think the idea of a station like bFM playing the Spice Girls was a bit too much for some people to comprehend.
For the last five years popular music has been dominated by so-called “alternative” music. Guitar-based songs that came to replace the excessive monsters of rock that previously dominated music. “Alternative” music became a genre known for its no-nonsense approach to music. Bands like Nirvana performed songs with honest truthful lyrics, songs that made social comments or explored themes that were previously untapped.
But that’s all gone now. The music scene is changing. Electronic-based music is becoming more popular. Even the previously guitar-based Smashing Pumpkins are releasing very electronic songs.
So along come the Spice Girls. And it feels good. They’re not singing songs of woe and angst, they instead sing about subjects that are more real to the average person. The average teenager can’t really relate to a song about how the singer’s record company makes him feel like a whore, but a song about putting a boyfriend in place strikes more of a chord.
The Spice Girls’ debut album “Spice” reminds me of Madonna’s second album “Like a Virgin”. The songs aren’t heavy political issues, but life is not always heavy. They’re not manic depressives feeling suicidal, so singing about death would be silly.
The group also embraced some feminist politics, with their “girl power”. This might seem contradictory to their image as sexy babes, but what I think it signifies is that they can wear what they damn well please. In other words,”Girl power” does not have a dress code.
But it can not be denied that the Spice Girl’s physical appearance has won over a lot of males. Their appearance in bikinis on the cover of the March ’97 The Face might have made the magazine a little more popular than usual, but didn’t change their music. Back in the early 1980s the Go-Go’s appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine in their underwear, but that didn’t make their music any worse or better.
The band, particularly Geri, is known for supporting the British conservative party. This is rare in rock. A lot of artists support popular, but decidedly liberal political causes. For a band like the Spice Girls to come out on favour of conservative politics is quite phenomenal.
Emma is undecided.
Geri is a supporter of the Conservative party.
Mel B is the anti-christ, oh I mean Anarchist.
Mel C is a Labour party supporter.
Victoria is a Conservative party supporter.
So I don’t think the Spice Girls suck, nor do I think they’re crap. Their music is great, not perfect, but they do what they do very well. There’s nothing wrong with their music. Leave the angst, pain and suffering to artists like Alanis Morrisette. The Spice Girls are going to have a good time.