Umlauts:

A few words about that new Rachel Stevens single, then

I won't post an MP3 (Argentinian cough S Club site cough cough), but I have a few things that need to be said about this.

1. How wonderful is it that we're living in an age where throbbing electro-pop that sounds a little bit like DURAN DURAN melodically is considered an absolute dead-cert for chart success to mitigate for the relative failure (Number 10) of one of the best electro-pop singles of the decade? It's like we're being completely spoiled here!

2. The 1-minute clip that was going around last week was good, but the whole song would be nothing without the whooshing, rocketship-taking off break in the middle with the ooh-ooh-oohs over the top of it. We already knew Rachel knows punctum, but here, the delicious moments are all courtesy of the backing track, which is a novel change in direction.

3. When you consider all the names behind this - people associated with quality pop for the thinking poptimist cum fascist, and the presence of people obsessed with shifting units, it really must be thought that this is the sort of stuff that IS going to be a commercial force fairly soon if not precisely at this point in time. Doomsayers may feel free to speculate what third-generation-Xerox-copies of this will be horrible and clog the top 5 six months hence from the end of this sentence.

4. "So Good" as meta-pop. No, no, no. It's not bloody meta-pop. Putting "meta" in front of everything is just as bad as using "action" as a verb. STOP IT. Ditto all the people smirking about "stand the test of time" because it's Rachel Stevens and she's not a proper artist and nobody will remember her in 10 years time. Not all pop songs are about the singer's bloody life. Allusions to the wondrousness and resilience of self are no more meta-pop than when some R&B singer goes on and on about how sexy he/she is and how gigantic their knob/tits is/are. I could go on and on about how the best songs like this work because you can read them both as discrete pop-texts or enclosed narratives AS WELL AS statements about "the biz" but then I realised that I would be vigorously advocating Aimee Mann, whose last record was really disappointing, and not half as good as this Rachel Stevens album is going to be.

Someone leak "Crazy Boyz" now, please? I've got some French R&B and some industrial J-Pop to listen to while I wait, but I'm getting impatient.

posted by Edward O @ 7:07 PM