While those who are LUCKY ENOUGH not to live in Yurop can already enjoy Kylie’s video for “Get Outta My Way”, those less fortunate among us can just send Parlophone a meaty Fuck You with the help of Cee-Lo Green being awesome right below…
Verdict: Song and video are amazing, which is a good thing considering that the amount of cynicism behind Robbie rejoining Take That and releasing another Greatest Hits package has so far been somewhat overwhelming. So at least this makes up a bit. I like the looks they exchange throughout. And the ending. And actually everything about it.
Dayum, this is gorgeous and the video is WAY better than the actual official one, which consists of Not Much Really. The only thing about this remix I am not sure about is the farty Guetta synth.
Great song, great performance. Love what Jake and Ana are wearing.
It is a pleasure to post an advertisement for an album when it is 1) an amazing album, 2) a very funny advert. It really isn’t an advert, it’s a rather amusing… something… featuring Amanda Lepore, Jeff Stryker and Kelly Osbourne. (Not necessarily in this order.) I say watch it.
The best song on Christina Aguilera’s new album, “Bionic” is only available on the deluxe edition, thus rendering the standard edition completely useless. Buy the deluxe. Here is why.
“Birds of Prey”, produced by Ladytron, happens to be their best song ever, largely due to the fact Christina can actually sing — and in this particular song her usual “OOOH I HAS SWALLOWED SOMETHING” style is absent, but an absolutely gorgeous melody and understated production are present instead. Amazingness. And one of the reasons I have barely listened to anything else than “Bionic” in the last week.
Xtina’s new album, Bionic, gets panned by critics and fans left right and centre. In the meantime, I enjoy it an awful lot.
Perhaps the key to the album’s success chez Ray is that it sounds nothing like Christina Aguilera. Even her voice doesn’t hit the irritating registers too much. “Elastic Love”, in particular — the best track on the album, and a collaboration with MIA — could have been sung by more or less anyone. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here.
The album was advertised as enormous change and artistic evolution. The finished product isn’t that shocking; the Ladytron tracks got relegated to bonus track on deluxe edition status, Le Tigre and Peaches feature on a grand total of one (the same) song and most of the material is produced by the commercial heavyweights Polow da Don, Tricky Stewart and Linda Perry. The resulting record is one of those albums of the last 3-4 years that have no personality of their own, as they have been A&Red to death and sound more like a greatest hits type of collection than an actual record. (The deluxe edition crams 23 songs into a CD, 24 in the iTunes version. It isn’t humanly possible to create a coherent album of 24 tracks.)
The lyrics are shocking, though. Namely, they are shockingly bad. It’s like Christina decided that Janet Jackson has hit the right spot when she started writing songs about her vajayjay. By the process of listening to Xtina’s artistic reinvention our lives are enhanced by such gems as: “Is this me? You wanna get crazy? Cos I don’t give a WHAAAAAOUW!!”, “You know you really wanna (hey) wanna taste my woohoo/you know you really wanna get a peak, wanna see my woohoo” and “even though we made sweet love all night/I need sex for breakfast, feels so right”. Yes, dear. We get it. You have a constantly wet pussy. And then all of a sudden we hear a male voice talking to Christina’s son — “sing like mommy”, the voice insists, and we get a strange feeling that we are listening to Pedobear’s new favorite record.
So now that I listed all that is bad with the record? I suppose I should explain why I enjoy it. It is, frankly, dance music of highest quality. Dance music isn’t meant to be deep and poetic. It is meant to be about sex, love (remember Original’s “I Luv U Baby” the lyric of which consisted of the words “I”, “luv”, “u” and “baby”? That was dance lyricism hitting the ultimate perfection) and to be enjoyed at shallowest face value imaginable. All the bullshit about artistic reinvention, Christina? Cut it. Just admit it: you became Britney Spears with a WAY better voice. There’s nothing artistic about “Woohoo” and “Desnudate” and “Glam”. There is a bit of properly amazing artistically challenging music in “Birds of Prey” which I suspect is exactly the reason it was stuck in as a bonus track. This is art for people who take ecstasy every weekend and consider themselves to be liberated and special thanks to that — or, alternatively, it is cheap tabloid-like fodder for people who like to dance, sing out loud and be silly. That would be me. And so I love most of Bionic (with the exception of “My Heart” and perhaps some of the ballads). There is always space on my shelf for cheap dance music — and “Birds of Prey” is so good that had it been the first single, I would have bought into the “artistic reinvention” crap. So if you enjoyed Britney Spears’s Circus, Janet Jackson’s Discipline and Madonna’s Hard Candy, this is more of it, but even better than all those. If, on the other hand, you believe Christina is at her best on “Back to Basics”? avoid “Bionic”.
Download this: “Birds of Prey”, “Elastic Love”, “Woohoo”
I’m afraid I find it unintentionally hilarious (plus, it’s hard to imagine people on the bottom of the, um, pyramid enjoying it too much). Still, who knew group sex made Kylie SO HAPPY? And when she lets the dove out at the end, she looks soooooooo pretty. *swoon*
Exhibit A:
Thank you, thank you, I’ll be here all week… (Except for the weekend, that is, and I wish you a great one.)
Long title, innit.
When The Cardigans began, they sounded like jolly The Cure doing covers of Saint Etienne. Even though their second single was already called “Sick & Tired”, the depth of the lyricism left quite something to desire. “Sick, tired and homeless with no one here to sing for” confessed Nina, and we thought: oh yeah, that is the biggest problem homeless people face — nobody to sing for.
Their golden age came with, first, an appearance of “Lovefool” in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo & Juliet, then with “My Favourite Game” being featured in a Playstation game, with a violent car chase video getting played on MTV every 15 minutes. (To younger readers: yes, there was a time when MTV used to actually play music videos.) Then a duet with Tom Jones followed. And then they took four years off, and their career crawled and died.
“I Need Some Fine Wine” is their last top 75 entry in the UK, miserable #59 for the first (and only) UK release off their 2005 album Super Extra Gravity. There’s nothing jolly about it. It is a tale of a woman more experienced than she would like to be, despite the “pretty young girl” lyric; the man in the song is a dog, but the girl is a pitbull — she goes off any old thing, but he needs to be potty trained and, and to be nicer. She’s wasting her life, he’s saving the world, but it’s her who pulls the shots at the end, with the final “Sit.” uttered in contempt almost, contempt of a woman who doesn’t even turn her head, because she knows he’ll listen.
As a song, “I Need Some Fine Wine” blows out of the water anything The Cardigans did before or after (well, I’ll admit here not being fully aware of their album tracks…), and definitely improves on the early “jolly Cure with girl singer” premise. It is a shame it never managed to reach further than it did.
