Tim's overflowing bounty of 2010 pop riches extravaganza thread

it also has 'try again tomorrow' which is like alternate-universe popism smash

ok theres a thread for this

that whole sub-genre of post-Dilla scleroto-rap (and by extension scleroto-soul), whose aesthetic valorisation of queasiness is largely lost on my cloth ears.

aww

(i have no idea what you mean but "scleroto-rap" though?)

GIVE ME YAHZARAH OR GIVE ME DEATH TIM

just kidding, it'd be awesome if you love her song as much as I do but I love your selections and the blurbs so far.

"why dontcha call me no more" is still my #1 jam this year. i'm with you here, moka.

Lee Foss - U Got Me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rioaDZtTJYo

This year it felt a bit like the nu-disco moment finally passed into its autumnal phase, symbolised (and certainly assisted) by Aeroplane's catastrophically misguided album, and more generally a certain sense that everything this style can do now has been done, and exhaustively. I'm not ready for this shift though. My favourite moment dancing this year was to a Classixx DJ set a few months ago, on the first hot day of spring, as the sun was setting. Classixx are hardly disproving the suspicion that the strip-mining of the nu-disco aesthetic is completed; it's more like they simultaneously summarise and popularise a perfected aesthetic, seizing on its most unashamedly joyous qualities and then juicing them up further, until the sound is so ridiculously utopian that half the fun of being on the dancefloor is simply acknowledging that you're all participating in a somewhat cheesy reenactment of drug-enhanced bonding (which makes them sort of like the Moonbootica to Aeroplane's Get Physical).

I don't know if Classixx did or didn't play "U Got Me" that day, as I only discovered it about a month later, but it chimes in perfectly with Classixx's vibe of trapped-in-amber ecstatic lassitude: its round-bottomed R&B-disco strut and twinkling sparkle-melody imagining a world where no-one ever saw the point of moving beyond Evelyn King's "Love Come Down" (similarly, the highlight of the Classixx set was a still unknown to me edit of Madonna's "Lucky Star" that seemed to stretch on forever). Ironically,"U Got Me" samples Keith Sweat's "Twisted", which is nineties not eighties, but itself inhabited a pretty syncretic slow-jam soundworld - smoothness, the right kind of smoothness, never sounds out of time or place. As with Mark E's "R&B Drunkie" (whose sample source was similarly younger than it seemed) what "U Got Me" seems to admire in R&B is precisely its lack of concern about being revivalist or not being revivalist, which frees it up to achieve this kind of "the past is the present" endless summer vibe more easily than dance music per se.

This inherited lack of concern with timeliness ends up being a positive in my book, if only as a point of contrast: at a time of obsessive pointillist sound design and intricate vocal cut ups, it's refreshing and even charming to hear a tune so heavily invested in the densely smeared dazzle of French House: the yearning sampled vocals of "U Got Me" wrap around your ears like fairy floss, light as a feather but voluptuously thick as molasses. Moreover, the hint of R&B boogie in Foss' straight-jacketed slo-mo house groove provides such a useful short-cut to sexiness: whereas much otherwise very similar nu-disco can end up jetissonning sex in favour of pure loved up vibes, "U Got Me" treads the line perfectly, as happy to soundtrack a risque champagne-fuelled pool party as it a packed dancefloor in a field at sunset.

I'm into this ^

A+++++++++++++

and yeah classixx sense of like, revivalism should never be joyless & hidebound & generic & liberarianesque is exactly why they're so good. They handle music like pop DJs

also yeah 'love come down' is a really good exemplar of where this style is coming frmo!

last post then im headed out for real -- i need to do this 'holding back on my hottest secret jams till y-e' thing haha

Yeah it occurred to me this thread might look like that at times! It's more a case of me not tending to hang out much on rolling threads other than funky house sceptics...

that is dope imo

yes "u got me"! glad someone else loved it, it got tumbleweeds when i posted it on the house/techno thread (apart from some cunty vahid snark). love the b-side "happen for a reason" too - j-hud sample!

lee foss himself is pretty hott too

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Ak20vFIRM5U/Sxeknr1PhoI/AAAAAAAAAHg/bbqZaRfKllA/s320/LeeFoss.jpg

Wish he IS hot...

the sound is so ridiculously utopian that half the fun of being on the dancefloor is simply acknowledging that you're all participating in a somewhat cheesy reenactment of drug-enhanced bonding

This is a perfect way of putting it, some of my best 2010 dancefloor memories (or yacht deck memories, to ratchet up the cheese factor that little bit more) have come from exactly this feeling.

Been jamming that Lee Foss EP for a week solid. Enjoy these roundup threads Tim!

Naughty Raver - Tease Me (After Dark Mix)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwsPtmMJtY4

"I love you so much... I'm feeling so hot... You got me goin'... You know ya hit the spot..." Like a lot of the classic early vocal (but only tenuously songful) 2-step garage, "Tease Me" seems rather ambivalent about its own desire, the diva's throaty declarations sounding pavlovian and probably drug-fuelled in their compulsive repetition - this quality was itself picked up from early house I expect, but if so then secretly and mostly unwittingly, a phenotype thrown forward several generations to emerge in a particularly attractive black sheep. The relationship between 2-step and UK funky is rather more straightforward, and I've grown used to stumbling across at least a couple of tunes each year that resurrect the former's capacity for jittery 3am amyl nitrate vibes, tracks whose sexiness and darkness aren't merely co-existent but actually interchangeable. In that regard this tune could easily sit next to Steve Gurley's remix of Lenny Fontana's "Spirit of the Sun" or DJ Klasse & Richie Boy's "Madness on the Streets", which is about as high praise as I can think of.

Naughty Raver's productions are almost always characterised by his gorgeously textured beats, which clutter and stretch out with a rolling fluency that's almost unparalleled, so naturalist that even though the drums here almost entirely follow a two-bar loop I slip into thinking they're playing in real time, alternating between fluttery bongo patterns and hard-hitting snares filled with marvelous fractional hesitations, as if the rhythm itself is suddenly profoundly uncertain about its own amorous adventures (see also, if you can find them, his rather harder percussive work-outs "Drama" and "Sticks & Stones", for the same vibe flipped from druggy-lust to panic and mania respectively). Naughty Raver's drums capture so much of what I love about funky's approach to rhythm, the way they walk this tightrope between organic fluidity and total alienness, beyond which they can achieve a sort of tumbling inevitability, the beats always pulling you forward into themselves with a logic of its own, as if the producer himself couldn't interrupt the groove if he wanted to.

On the After Dark mix of "Tease Me" (his sexiest tune, and certainly his most successful vocal tune by some distance), he adds an unsettling xylobass riff that's warped to sound as if the tune's heaviness has already busted your speakers. The first time I heard it I actually wondered if something was wrong with my copy. This general trick, which is so cosmically boring (by virtue of over-iteration) in drum & bass or dubstep now, magically regains its effectiveness in such a sexually charged setting, the seduction of "Tease Me" creating a context in which breaking the machine is once again an enticing concept. Rather than simply build on a monolithic insistence on punishing hardness, it becomes another weave in the tune's so-wrong-it's-right lust-overdrive, the sonic heavy petting turning claustrophobic, sucking the air out of your lungs.

Hot Toddy - Won't Let Go

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkW1W9yDGq8

In retrospect the thing I loved most about electro-house (perhaps more properly electro-disco) circa 2004 was how widescreen and expensive sounding so much of it was: relatively simple, unhurried grooves using all the tricks available to them to seemingly encompass the entire world within their simple reiterations - less tunes to get lost in than to hide in, taking comfort in the overwhelming purity and monomania of their high-gloss logic. I guess I'm a sucker for that vein of blown glass perfectionism, tunes that for a short while give your live a sense of narrative arc by virtue of their delicately spiraling structures of build and release.

Those days are gone, but Hot Toddy (who it seems has been brilliant forever, or at the very least since 2004's "Mind Trip" which is when I belatedly discovered the dude) carries forward something of that sound in his various tributes to disco, deep house (see last year's beautiful "I Need Love"), balearic and boogie - the latter receiving particular if hardly surprising emphasis on his 2010 album Late Night Boogie. This stuff sounds huge and expensive and arguably not much else, though the snapping beats and obese bottom-end bass certainly help to prevent the album from sounding like a mere distillation of Metro Area-derived mid-00s material - not to mention, am I wrong to suggest, a certain relaxed hands-in-the-air joie de vivre, the syncopated drums in particular dispelling that slightly fussed-over vibe that even gorgeous disco-revivalism can sometimes exhibit. In this regard check the groaning funk of "Freekend" and sighing rock-disco of "On the 1AM" especially: tracks whose almost careless seeming opening rhythms make their eventual skyscraper pinnacles seem even more remarkable.

I chose to single out "Won't Let Go" because ironically its relative subtlety makes it more approachable, at least in the sense of being more in line with other dance music of the past half decade or so, sly and sexy and smooth and slinky whereas in other places Hot Toddy comes on all bold and brash and brightly coloured. Here it translates into a smoother disco rhythm, languorous female vocals ("I'm like a predator around you"!!) and a gorgeously unfurling acid bassline that bubbles and percolates throughout with a slowly generating intensity that on the one hand is acid 101 and yet on the other, as is so often the case, still sounds better than any sound ever made by humans. It's so great to hear a real slow-burner like this again, a tune where every second of the seven minute groove seems to build so naturally and inevitably on the moment before it, with no switch-ups or surprises or sudden leftfield breakdowns, just a rising sense of intensity like a deep tissue massage on the dancefloor. For Hot Toddy, sudden surprises in themselves are somehow gauche, an admission of defeat even, like your original idea wasn't good enough to see it through. Which is not a universal truth by any means, but seven minutes isn't so long that he can't keep you convinced while "Won't Let Go" is playing.

Album cover is dope as well IMO:

http://i1.soundcloud.com/artworks-000002250166-p32jj5-crop.jpg?149483

that would look ridiculous if it didn't have a "smoky" haze over the design -- which i suppose fits the title, and actually makes it look incredible, tbh

Gayngs - Faded High

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLMeNzcWljM

Gayngs got a bit of hype for being an indie group playing with R&B, which is one of those endorsements that can do more harm than good - it either makes one suspicious or sets in train expectations or standards of judgment that can't possibly be met (most obviously, indie vocals generally simply aren't in the same game as R&B let alone league). In most cases the link is really one of shared resonances - an interest in rhythm and atmospherics and softness and a very vague notion of "soulfulness" that white pop-rock has trucked with (albeit intermittently) for ages anyway. It helps to remember that the rock music that R&B singers and producers seem to love most is Phil Collins and Coldplay.

Gayngs don't sound an awful lot like Phil or Coldplay either, though the distance isn't massive. If I had to construct a lineage I'd point to 10CC's "I'm Not In Love", some Peter Gabriel and (especially) Roxy Music's Avalon, through to more recent stuff like Junior Boys at their least energetic and (especially) A Mountain Of One - gauzy, genteel mood music whose interest in non-rock musics is partly a desire to fill the vacuum that emerges when you realise that you don't, in fact, want to rock. The first A Mountain Of One EP in particular points the way, with its mixture of atmospheric pop balladry and balearic mist and ringing guitar work. That band soon veered off into an obsession with the least successful of their (initially) numerous stylistic affectations, over-produced patchouli scented noodle-rock. Gayngs have maintained the balance of the first AMO1 release by trying to keep all of its divergent impulses on foot at all times, each track offering some configuration of forlorn synthesiser padding, dolorous but warm basslines, lonely guitar solos, ghostly multitracked vocals and usually a descent at some point into claustrophobic loops seemingly derived from another tune entirely.

Many people have heard "The Gaudy Side of Town"; along with "Crystal Rope", "Faded High" is my other favourite and also much less typical of the band's sound, not least for the dominance of female vocals (though not, I must stress, with any relationship to R&B). "Faded High" is less a song than a series of ideas held together by the song's relatively driving beat and shimmering synth chords, which make it the album's most upbeat song. One of the things I like about Gayngs is how their vocals seem to emerge from and sink back into the music easily: on this song you can hear random snatches ("I keep my heart in a jar", "you're breaking every rule I make", "you say you'll keep your cash, your fingers crushing mine, your gorgeous touch", "I want your body on...") but then they subside into chromatic colour, another synth line - at one point early on, perhaps my favourite of the entire album, the vocals actually transform into an aching little synth hook that's never repeated.

"So far so indie" you might say dismissively, but I think what distinguishes Gayngs somewhat is that everything here, even the (somewhat) noisy sections, sounds so thought out and landscaped - gauzy and even fogged over it might be, but this very soft haziness has been sculpted so lovingly, reminding me of The Blue Nile's Hats or even the second disc of Kate Bush's Aerial (though, to be fair, it's not a patch on either of those albums - how could it be?). Like a lot of the artists I've mentioned, its overstuffed voluptuousness will be off-putting to some, but I felt like this year I didn't hear as much indulgent music as I've become used to, and Gayngs went a long way toward correcting the balance.

Mr Mageeka - Different Lekstrix

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrAG8faeC7o

I first heard "Different Lekstrix" in an eventually legendary Marcus Nasty set from November 2008. I believe that this set also was the first place in which I heard Devine Collective's "House Girls 1" and Lil' Silva's "Tribal Land", and is as close to a Rosetta Stone for the next two years of hard, MC-ready funky as you'll find. I didn't actually ID the tune until some time after that, probably not long before I wrote a review on my blog in the second half of last year. Back then the producer was called Mos' Wanted; this year the tune finally got a release under the moniker of Mr Mageeka, which sounds too interchangeable with Doc Daneeka for my liking, but whatever.

It's still that November 2008 set that finds "Different Lekstrix" in its most winning context: simply put, this is a tune designed for MCs, to delight them with its unpredictable clicks and whirs and slithery bleeps, to provide a spongy and flexible structure in which they can play with rhymes and counter rhythms of their own. It loses something as an instrumental tune, but only enough to downgrade it from life-changing to excellent, and I imagine that even if you hear it here for the first time you will be able to discern the ghost of vocal patterns etched into the groove like game trails. Like a lot of funky tunes designed for MCs (which is basically all instrumental funky) you don't really need more than about 3 minutes of it, but those first 3 minutes are marvelous, a constantly warping and mutating assemblage of pings, pops and panicking computers in a groove that feels like it's made of wire mesh, full of holes yet tightly woven.

In terms of sonic forebears it's hard not to hear LFO's Frequencies in the tune's slightly sickly bass riffs, but rhythmically "Different Lekstrix" is its own beast. If its release on the Numbers label implies that it might be on some kind of post-dubsep crossover ish (and certainly it's gotten some attention in those quarters) the groove stakes out a different territory, its patchwork construction built from the constant of a 4X4 kick and then an ever-changing riot of what I'm tempted to call percussive punctuation: skittering snares, shuffling hi-hats and alien-sounding claps which arrange themselves around the kick with a subtle grace that is both "house" and yet utterly distinctive sounding. As always with funky, the trick here is how odd-sounding you can make the house groove sounding without actually breaking the link. If you haven't got inside the music's logic it's possible that you simply won't hear the groove here as anything special; once the logic clicks, it's like a beautiful accent that you can't get enough of, the openness and oddness of it making you want to find a complementary response, be it vocally or physically. The jokey youtube video clip above actually gets this collaborative quality of the track perfectly: it's what you do with "Different Lekstrix" that makes it so compulsive.

I have trouble thinking of Different Lekstrix as straight funky because it's so much more textured than a lot of it, and I've heard it popping up in weird places this year - in Ivan Smagghe and Ramanman sets for one thing and certainly in other techier contexts as well.

Mr Magieka is a wizard from 1980s British children's books, fwiw:

http://www.puffin.co.uk/static/images/mr_majeika_circus.jpg

incredibbblle! i love that!!!

Storm Queen - Look Right Through

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAKq5wlMhGs

It seems like there's usually at least one great storming male diva house throwback tune each year - last year, of course, was Azari & III's "Reckless With Your Love", which not only was excellent as a house tune but also was to my mind is one of the great diva-house songs, and a song that simply wouldn't make sense delivered in any other style or manner. Like a lot of music that hits me thematically as well as viscerally it's the kind of thing that makes me wish I made music. But then diva vocal house has that effect quite often, the short-circuit between surface dazzle and hidden depths so irresistible that even people who stumble on seeming superficiality elsewhere intuitively understand its logic - it's the kind of music, in short, that brings out the best in its listeners fully as much as its makers.

"Look Right Through" (produced by Morgan Geist) isn't quite as fine a song as "Reckless With Your Love", but that's an unfair comparison: "Look Right Through" is lesser only in that it seems content to be a charming, impassioned, exhortative diva anthem about unrequited desire, carefree in its classicism - though formally, of course, it's heartbroken, resentful, oddly philosophical. But these traits emerge in classicist male diva house like hereditary features, inevitable and right-seeming as your right arm. Of course who's to say that there isn't a similarly moving deeper story lurking underneath: as far as I can tell the singer shifts from a drug addict or drunkard lover to a series of one night stands to a realisation that everyone in the world takes him for granted. Shit gets pretty real in this song.

Still, in some ways "Look Right Through" is more track than song: so much of the delight of this tune inheres in its ceaseless mutation, moving restlessly from rudimentary house percussion to shimmering, shivering synth chords and noodly arpeggios and bumping bass, before a bleepy breakdown that in no way preprares you for the tune's sudden headlong plunge into booming, bottom of a well bass at the four minute mark, as the diva wails "am I a piece of glass in your mind??" From there the tune almost disintegrates into murky dub-house, before those nervous synth-chords suddenly emerge, flittering above your ears as delicately as ever. It's great dancefloor trickery, and in the club "Look Right Through" provokes ever greater displays of enthusiasm from dancers with each shifting articulation. I think part of it is sheer surprise: "Look Right Through" is so musically and performatively generous in a style that hardly requires it, you could churn out endless derivations of "Love Won't Turn Around" and everyone would lap it up, but instead Geist and his diva Damon Scott shower you with hooks and ideas like it's the last chance they'll ever get.

the tune's sudden headlong plunge into booming, bottom of a well bass at the four minute mark

one of the moments of the year 4 real

i'm surprised to see "different lekstrix" here though, i like it and the way it decorates sets, but i'd never think to highlight it particularly.

storm queen is definitely one of my tunes of the year.

mine as well, great write up Tim

On the After Dark mix of "Tease Me" (his sexiest tune, and certainly his most successful vocal tune by some distance)

man i am quite happy to let you take your destined place at the head of the queue for any tune titled "tease me (after dark mix)" but let's not throw the baby out with the sexy bathwater - 'show me' is at least on a par (i prefer it personally) and if i was to really nitpick then even his andriah and hannah liston mixes could hardly be said to have been even vaguely unsuccessful at what they were trying to achieve.

none of which is to say 'tease me' isn't brilliant, of course. although i do still think something's wrong with my copy :/

the way it decorates sets

bait not to be risen to btw

In retrospect my Mr Mageeka blurb looks like I'm spending a lot of time staking a priority claim. My point was more how songs can change their meaning and context, going from "awesome track that the MCs lit up in a radio set" to refined-circles-crossover-tune with the likes of Ivan Smagghe (which makes sense) - and how this can be especially dramatic when the tune is only released at the end of this process because it's the final incarnation that gets codified by and large.

I agree with lex to an extent (though I'm not sure whether/how dismissive you intend "decorates" to mean, lex?) w/r/t the tune making more sense in the mix, though I think it makes even more sense with MCs, and that was really the point I was trying to make, that this tune which can function very differently in different contexts and with different connotations still seems to function most effectively in the first "incarnation" that I was aware of.

Also I obv can't make a radio set from November 2008 a track of 2010 even if it deserves celebrating every year.

I'm hoping that one of the side benefits of this process (which is restricted to tracks available as proper standalone releases) is that it will demonstrate how much funky actually was released this year.

Ramadanman in 2010

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utvgs27fT4U

In the second half of the year I felt haunted by Addison Groove's "Footcrab", which seemed to follow me to every bar and club: a bloodless attempt at dubstep/juke fusion which is dislikable less for being actively bad than for the chasm-like disjuncture between its rep and its actual quality. Ramadanman's "Work Them" was effectively the same track, or at least the same idea: a post-dubstep tune riding thin, densely programmed 808 beats, looped duo-syllabic vocals and a sudden and incongruous swerve into moody synth chords (a shit just got real moment so that you know you're listening to serious music). How come I like "Work Them" so much then? Probably the answer is that Ramadanman is just flat out better at this whole thing of setting up a rendezvous with another genre.

He certainly has form: "Blimey" from 2008 was probably the best attempt (of many) to evoke the headwrecking rhythmic splendour of mid-90s jungle within a dubstep context; last year's "Wad" (under the Pearson Sound moniker) remains far and way the best conscious stab at UK funky by an outsider, while "Justify" (with Appleblim) was a marvelous piece of syncopated deep tech-house. The results are sometimes just "good" rather than mindblowing: about the only reason to get enthusiastic about the "Work Them"-like "Glut" is that it's much better than "Footcrab"; "Don't Change For Me", which sounds like a slowed down version of the Foul Play remix of Omni Trio's "Mystic Stepper", is more admirable for its attempt to recapture jungle's ecstatic early days than it is actually adorable; "Bass Drums" is actively boring. But Ramadanman's hit rate remains surprisingly high for such a risky approach, I suspect because he's interested in rhythm first and foremost: one gets the sense with all his best moments that the very first thing he worked out was what implications the desired fusion would have for the groove, and while his tunes aren't always entirely spare, I suspect the best of them could be stripped down to just the drums and would remain pretty enthralling.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yREkHjH0sVk

With some exceptions, both dubstep and its satellite "post-dubstep" zones have tended to de-emphasise setting up a rolling groove and focus more on how both to stage it and interrupt it: big "drops" in mainstream dubstep; sudden switch-ups, cut-ups, collisions and overwhelmingly detailed high-end sound design for the rest. On "Work Them" and its even sparer, more jittery and compulsive cousins "Grab Somebody" and "Mir", the interest in 808s has little to do with such techniques or even a "hey guys!" nod to juke and similar genres; instead, it's all about the opportunities these sonics afford for scintillating, meticulously crafted groves the roll, snap and shudder with a hypnotic intensity that's endlessly listenable. Ramadanman doesn't shy away from high-end sound design either, but he tends to relegate it to the role of sympathetic supporting star - on his gorgeous remix of Jamie Woon's "Night Air" he basically adds nothing to the original except a delectable syncopated house rhythm and a now warm, now ominous bassline. The groove is the thing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2jW6GnseoE&feature=related

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XovlxaHBD0Y

His remix of Spark's "Revolving" is maybe the track from this year that is most representative of all these different qualities, its phasing vocal loops and alternately booming and whirring beats making for perhaps his most lush attempt in this new post-juke vein, a more expansive version of the recent "Blanked"/"Blue Eyes" single as Pearson Sound. The melodies he uses here - part stereospanning vocal samples, part quasi-trancey synth arpeggios and sweeping strings - are unabashedly pretty, almost straightforward; the vocals are cut-up a little, but more in the manner of standard mid-90s house than the post-Todd Edwards slice and dice grandiosity to which we've become accustomed from just about everyone. All of which makes the sudden plummets into mindboggling beat work - beats that seem to change and mutate constantly, ceaselessly, but also imperceptibly, throughout the entire track - all the more effective. Such is the rigorous intensity of Ramadanman's grooves that he can afford to dispense with the fear of the obvious that would plague so many others in his position.

love "work them" but you didn't mention my favourite ramadanman trax of 2010 - "grab somebody" and most of all "your words matter" with midland (and indeed its a-side "more than you know" - SO pretty. tim i think the prettiness you require in r&b, i require in club music (unless it's some machinic audion ish, obv)

ramadanman & midland - your words matter

that spark remix is pretty amazing though

(i fear the original, she sounds like yet another fucking british quirkstress)

I did mention "Grab Somebody", albeit briefly. It and "Mir" and "Work Dem" are all favourites of mine in that minimal 808 style but I couldn't talk about all of them in detail. Yeah I'm actually afraid to check the Spark original!

I think the "Your Words Matter" release is like the one Ramadanman record from this year I haven't tracked down yet.

oh yeah i did clock the "grab somebody" mention, i was referring to "your words matter" then added "grab somebody" to the sentence and um didn't edit

You're right though in the sense that it deserves more singling out. But I felt like the above post would like a bit overboard Ramadanman fanboy already.

tim i think the prettiness you require in r&b, i require in club music (unless it's some machinic audion ish, obv)

I should temper this statement perhaps: with particular R&B performers it's more like the pretty tracks are the gateway for me to enjoy the rest, it's what I hone in on first.

Which might be the same for you vis a vis club music?

The Cast of Glee - Teenage Dream

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E46BhMIRujI

In my world of young people, songs on Glee sit somewhere between a bootleg (in the 2001 sense) and an official remix in terms of legitimacy as songs, which means if they're good and/or popular enough they can overtake the original as a definitive version. What makes a Glee cover version good and popular? I can hold forth on the former and speculate on the latter, but the truth is that I'm often confounded by which ones catch on.

Solo songs are easiest to parse, with the castmember mostly echoing the original performer and standing and falling on how good a job they muster (my favourite effort remaining the fierce version of Jazmine Sullivan's "Bust Your Windows" from one of the earliest episodes). Meanwhile, Glee usually manages good group numbers with songs that radiate what you might call "staged sincerity", because that's exactly the vibe the Glee group are good at giving off themselves by and large. So, while it could never replace the original in my heart, their "Don't Stop Believing" chooses its source material well, perceiving in the idiosyncratic anthem the capacity to become more glassy and architectural (more, in essence, like "We Built This City (On Rock 'n' Roll)") while losing little of its lustre (I have a nascent theory brewing that the mid-to-late eighties was the golden age of staged sincerity that is worth expanding elsewhere).

Far less successful are the too-frequent mash-ups, which reduce everything to a single-entendre by foregrounding the staged spectacle and evacuating the sincerity. In cases of songs with some level of heart, the results can be distressing - combining "Umbrella" with "Singing In The Rain" does active violence to the complex emotional poise of the former song, while drowning the cheer of the latter in theatrics. This is Glee celebrating spectacle for its own sake, but spectacle without the desire to communicate something other than itself is empty, and comes off as self-impressed more than anything else.

"Teenage Dream" falls into the first category of staged sincerity, though it's slightly more complex than that. For one, Katy Perry effectively already is a Glee character who simply happens to exist in real life (though her dodgy singing voice might have prevented her landing such a position), and it's hard to imagine "Teenage Dream" becoming more staged-sincere than its original already is. This is both the charm and for some listeners the shortfall of Katy's version: its slamming, percussive choruses, its sledgehammer-pop sonics, its slightly bittersweet harmonised bridges, all add up to a pop song so monolithic that you'll love it if you love the idea of monolithic pop on principle, and find it wanting if you want pop that sounds remotely like it's by, about and for real people.

The Glee version reintroduces humanity, you could say, though not in the ways you might expect. This all-male version recasts the song as ostensibly smug, smarmy (homoerotic) flirtation in the "I know you want me" vein, a confident peacock strut of vocal dynamics and OTT gestures and moments of deliberate, almost heavyhanded coyness. Beneath this (and you don't have to watch the show to figure this out - in fact I haven't even seen this episode), it's a gesture of friendship based on the ridiculousness of everything it ostensibly is, its peacockiness a kind of inverted truthtelling. And beyond that, in the fingersnapping pop of its rhythm, the sighing sweetness of its harmonies, the "why hasn't anyone done that?" trick of vocally mimicking an EQ filter sweep, it's a celebration of pop's armoury of such tactics, and the way that these have a meaning, a resonance independent from their verisimilitude to reality. "Teenage Dream" is the right choice of song to cover because, like Jessica Simpson's "I Think I'm In Love With You" before it, works as a generic pop song about such tactics. In that regard it doesn't matter whether the flirtation is true or false, what matters is how well it's sold, and good salesmanship is itself a kind of generosity. While spectacle for its own sake is empty, spectacle as a means of reaching out, of crossing a space by means of shared language, can feel like the opposite. Less about staged sincerity, then, and more about the sincerity of the stage.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO >>>>>>>>>>>>>:(

(my favourite effort remaining the fierce version of Jazmine Sullivan's "Bust Your Windows" from one of the earliest episodes)

nononononoNONONONONONONONONONONONO TIM HOW CAN YOU

glee is definitely one of my least favourite things ever, fuck glee fuck it forever

maura on glee otm: http://blogs.villagevoice.com/music/2010/12/the_20_worst_so_17.php

Yes but the "Loser" cover really was awful (as were all of the funk episode performances). By no means am I saying Glee is an umambiguous force for good.

i'm saying it's an unambiguous force for BAD - every single thing i've heard from it has been completely dreadful, and it never ever seems to end