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avee-wavee · 5 months ago

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Reasons why you should stay alive

1. We would miss you. 2. It's not worth the regret. Either by yourself if you failed or just simply left scars, or the regret everyone else feels by not doing enough to help you. 3. It does get better. Believe it or not it will eventually get better. Sometimes you have to go through the storm to get to the rainbow. 4. There's so much you would miss out on doing. 5. There is always a reason to live. It might not be clear right now, but it is always there. 6. So many people care, and it would hurt them if you hurt yourself. 7. You ARE worth it. Don't let anyone, especially yourself, tell you otherwise. 8. You are amazing. 9. A time will come, once you've battled the toughest times of your life and are in ease once again, where you will be so glad that you decided to keep on living. You will emerge stronger from this all, and won't regret your choice to carry on with life. Because things always get better. 10. What about all the things you've always wanted to do? What about the things you've planned, but never got around to doing? You can't do them when you're dead. 11. I love you. Even if only one person loves you, that's still a reason to stay alive. 12. You won't be able to listen to music if you die. 13. Killing yourself is never worth it. You'll hurt both yourself and all the people you care about. 14. There are so many people that would miss you, including me. 15. You're preventing a future generation, YOUR KIDS, from even being born. 16. How do you think your family would feel? Would it improve their lives if you died? 17. You're gorgeous, amazing, and to someone you are perfect. 18. Think about your favourite music artist, you'll never hear their voice again... 19. You'll never have the feeling of walking into a warm building on a cold day 20. Listening to incredibly loud music 21. Being alive is just really good. 22. Not being alive is really bad. 23. Finding your soulmate. 24. Red pandas 25. Going to diners at three in the morning. 26. Really soft pillows. 27. Eating pizza in New York City. 28. Proving people wrong with your success. 29. Watching the jerks that doubted you fail at life. 30. Seeing someone trip over a garbage can. 31. Being able to help other people. 32. Bonfires. 33. Sitting on rooftops. 34. Seeing every single country in the world. 35. Going on roadtrips. 36. You might win the lottery someday. 37. Listening to music on a record player. 38. Going to the top of the Eiffel Tower. 39. Taking really cool pictures. 40. Literally meeting thousands of new people. 41. Hearing crazy stories. 42. Telling crazy stories. 43. Eating ice cream on a hot day. 44. More Harry Potter books could come out, you never know. 45. Travelling to another planet someday. 46. Having an underwater house. 47. Randomly running into your hero on the street. 48. Having your own room at a fancy hotel. 49. Trampolines. 50. Think about your favourite movie, you'll never watch it again. 51. Think about the feeling of laughing out loud in a public place because your best friend has just sent you an inside joke, 52. Your survival will make the world better, even if it's for just one person or 20 or 100 or more. 53. People do care. 54. Treehouses 55. Hanging out with your soul mate in a treehouse 55. Snorting when you laugh and not caring who sees 56. I don't even know you and I love you. 57. I don't even know you and I care about you. 58. Because nobody is going to be like you ever, so embrace your uniqueness! 59. You won't be here to experience the first cat world emperor. 60. WHAT ABOUT FOOD?! YOU'LL MISS CHOCOLATE AND ALL THE OTHER NOM THINGS! 61. Starbucks. 62. Hugs. 63. Stargazing. 64. You have a purpose, and it's up to you to find out what it is. 65. You've changed somebody's life. 66. Now you could change the world. 67. You will meet the person that's perfect for you. 68. No matter how much or how little, you have your life ahead of you. 69. You have the chance to save somebody's life.

#its okay #its ok to not be ok

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eurovision-revisited · 10 months ago

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Eurovision 2003 - Number 20 - Eiffel 65 - "Quelli che non hanno età"

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Are you blue? Da-ba-dee-da-ba-dai? Eiffel 65 were four years prior to 2003. After several of their own hits, perhaps not quite so earworm infested as Blue (Da-ba-dee), as well as remixing many other artists including Nek and S Club 7, they're pretty much at the peak of their fame and fortune.

Eiffel 65 are vocalist Jeffrey Jey, Maurizio Lobina and Gabry Ponte. Together they form a full-strength Italian Eurodance phenomena known throughout the charts of Europe. Their sound is far away from what Sanremo normally has in its running order, but like all the European competitions, the Festival di Sanremo does like to get a little experimental occasions. This year they invited Eiffel 65 to participate with Quelli che non hanno età (Those Who Are Ageless)

The song, true to form, is a Euroclub floor filler, with synth chords over a hard, hard dance beat, on this occasion accompanied by the strings of the Sanremo orchestra. Jeffrey lays out the manifesto about staying young and possibly becomes the singer with the most microphone hand swaps in Sanremo history. He does it almost every line.

The beat is so big that I'm amazed the Ariston theatre's audience aren't propulsively lifted from their seats to dance right there - how they managed to sit still through this I don't know.

Given it's non-orthodox genre for Sanremo it's not altogether surprising that it finished 15th of the 20 songs performed in the main competition this year, but by the end of it Eiffel 65 can claim to have been a Sanremo act.

For another three years, they performed as Eiffel 65 before Gabry Ponte left, and the remaining two were forced to change their name. The band have had an on-again off-again set of reunions since, with releases during their occasional reformations. Most notably, they reformed in 2023 to take part in Una Voce per San Marino, and to try to make it into Eurovision but could only finish 5th in the final.

#Youtube #esc #esc 2003 #eurovision #eurovision song contest #riga #riga 2003 #not a national final #Italy #Festival di Sanremo 2003 #Sanremo 2003 #Eiffel 65 #Jeffrey Jey #Maurizio Lobina #Gabry Ponte

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colorisbyshe · 1 year ago

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If you like music like that tiktok, do you have any recs?

I'm not gonna stick just to the ~sensual lady singer, wolfish male "rapper" songs but I guess I can give recs of the sort of same energy music from that era, like music that puts you in the headspace to accept that into your heart.

But if you want artists that fit the "sweet lady/sexy man" dichotomy, just listen to Aqua or Toybox. For aqua, fuck Barbie Girl, try "Roses are Red" or "Lollipop (Candy Man)" and for Toybox "Tarzan & Jane" or "Best Friend"

Or just look up DDR music

This list goes from closer to the request and then kinda hits scatter shot of just "90s and 2000s dance music... or songs tht remind me of 90s and 2000s dance music" so... whoops

"Dream a Dream" Captain Jack

Vengaboys. Come on now. I shouldn't even hae to tell you which songs

"Beijo" Morandi

"Electropop" Jupiter Rising

"Bumble Bee" Bambee

"Perfect (Exceeder)" MAson, Princess Superstar

"I see Girls (Tom Neville Radio Edit)" Studio B

"Distance (M-Flo Remix)" Hikaru Utada

"Candy Pop" Heartsdales

"What is Love" Haddaway (it's a meme but also it still fucks)

"Be My Lover" La Bouche

"Just About Enough" Sarina Paris

"You're my Angel" or "Heaven" DJ Sammy

"Kylie" Akcent

"Ike Ike" Hinoi Team

"Summerlove" S-Connection (also try the Scorccio Edit)

"Butterfly" Smile.Dk

"Chocolate Disco" Perfume

"Hit My Heart" Benassi Bros

"Come... (Into my Dream)" Foggy

This one is a stretch but it's one of my faves of all time "Starlight" The Supermen Lovers

"Temptation" Harisu

"House Baby (Verano Radio Edit)" C-Bool

"Daddy DJ" Daddy DJ OR "Dota" by basshunter (OR "boten anna" by basshunter)

"Time to Rock (Roberto Molinaro Radio Mix)" Gabry Ponte or "80s Stars" by Eiffel 65

"Mr. Saxobeat" Alexandra Stan

"At the End" or "Rapture" iiO or "Pressure (Alesso Radio Edit)" by Nadia Ali

"Believe" Nami Tamaki

"Somnambulist" BT

"Anima Libera (Sweet Edit)" Emi

"Bad Boy" Cascada

"Call on Me" or "Generate" Eric Prydz

"Out of Touch" Uniting Nations

Obviously, songs like "Better off Alone" and "Sandstorm" don't need to be said here

"I Could be the One" Avicii, Nicky Romero

"Gotta Get Thru This (D'N'D Remix)" Daniel Beddingfield

"Destination Calabria" Alex Gaudino

"Fancy Footwork" Chromeo

"Angels (Love is the Answer)" Morandi

That was jus ta fast skim through my music and whatever reminded me of ~that era but again it's a veeeery scattershot look

#i shouldve gone thru my high energy playlist but it's lunch time i gotta be eating LUNCH

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doatk-revote · 2 years ago

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ROUND 1 MATCH 8: HAMOOD HABIBI VS THE EIFFEL TOWER

(VICTIM 09 - HAMOOD HABIBI)

I hate this little stupid kid! He reminds me of my rat bastard little brother Manny.

Arabian media, arabfunny, and anything featured on the Hamood Habibi wiki (Khallik Behalak, Arabian Nights, 🎤🐢)

Sandbox titles & weird Minecraft videos (Minecraft, Terraria, Roblox)

Music popularized or frequently used on TikTok (Buttercup, Peaches, Dance Monkey)

Praise, sleep, waking up, clapping, terms of endearment, & bizzare or uncanny CGI (What A Beutiful Name, Blinding Lights, Honey, Honey)

(VICTIM 13 - THE EIFFEL TOWER)

I hate french people

French artists, house & culture (Justice, Daft Punk, Mr. Oizo)

Music by Eiffel 65 (Blue (Da Ba Dee), Move Your Body, Back in Time)

Music relating to buildings, landmarks, monuments, & specific locations (Castle On The Hill, Hotel Room Service, Tour Eiffel Sidérale)

Splatoon (Splattack!, Into the Light, Inkoming!)

#doatk #diary of a tourney kid

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kuwdoravids · 2 years ago

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Fanvid - Blue (multifandom)

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Blue source: multi artist: Eiffel 65 length/size/format: 3:30 52mb, zipped mp4 streaming: Vimeo password: pixie_vids download: right click save as

summary: I'm blue ah ba di ba da club vivid.

special thanks to rhoboat who helped me brainstorm 90% of the sources well over a year ago. ilu rho ♥

clip wrangling and suggestion help from: luminosity, absolutedestiny, sweetestdrain, trelkez, pipsqueaky, kiki_miserychic, bradcpu and renenet!

source beneath the cut

Source: The Abyss, Avatar, Avatar the Last Airbender, Aladdin, Alias, Alice in Wonderland, Angel, Arrested Development, Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes, Batman and Robin, The Blues Brothers, Blues Clues, The Blue Man Group, Braveheart, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, A Bug's Life, Captain America, Captain Planet, Care Bears, Cars, Contact, Doctor Who, Eragon, Fantastic Four, The Fifth Element, Finding Nemo, Firefly, Fringe, Farscape, Gargoyles, Gummi Bears, Hellboy, Hercules, Highlander, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Huckleberry Hound, Interstella 555, Laputa, Lilo & Stitch, The Lion King, Little Mosque on the Prairie, Legend of the Seeker, Monsters vs Aliens, Megamind, Merlin, The Little Mermaid, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, Mortal Kombat: Legacy, My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, Monsters Inc, The Muppets, Nausicaa, My Neighbor Totoro, Quantum Leap, Sailor Moon, Sanctuary, Sesame Street, Stargate Atlantis, Stargate SG-1, Stargate Universe, Star Trek: Enterprise, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Voyager, Sliders, The Smurfs, Sonic the Hedgehog, Star Wars Episode I: The Phantum Menace, Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, Supernatural, Superman, Thomas the Tank Engine, Thor, The Tick, Tiny Toons, Toy Story 3, The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Torchwood, Watchmen, The Wizard of Oz, Willy Wonky, X-Men 2, X-Men 3, X-Men: First Class

#vidding #fanvids #fanvid #fan video #fanvideo #year: 2012 #source: multisource

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haveyoulistenedtothisalbum-poll · 10 months ago

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Tracklist:

Lucky (In My Life) • New Life • One Goal • King Of Lullaby • I Dj With The Fire • Crazy • Faraway • I Don't Wanna Lose • Morning Time • Life Like Thunder • Back In Time • Johnny Grey • Brightly Shines • Losing You • People Of Tomorrow • Journey • 80s Stars

Spotify ♪ YouTube

#hyltta-polls #polls #artist: eiffel 65 #language: english #decade: 2000s #Techno #Europop #Italo Dance

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strangledeggs · 1 year ago

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Has Remix Culture Run Out Of Steam?

The short answer is "no". The long answer is...

A couple days ago, I was talking with @philippesaner about the failures of postmodern critical theory to come up with a viable alternative to liberal-democratic politics given all its critiques of the latter (this subject seems to inevitably come up at least once every time we meet in real life). The famous article he brought up that the title of my current essay here is referencing is of course Bruno Latour's "Has Critique Run Out Of Steam?" which if you haven't read and are at all mystified by why we would be discussing something like this in the first place, I'd recommend reading.

Anyway, around the same time (maybe it was even the same day?), my sister happened to show me Youtube music critic Toddintheshadows' 10 worst songs of the year list for 2023. A notable entry on the list that I hadn't heard prior to seeing the video was a song that was essentially a cover of Haddaway's "What Is Love?", kind of like that previous Bebe Rexha basically-a-cover "remix" of Eiffel 65's "I'm Blue".

That struck me as interesting, given that both songs seem exemplary of a current trend that takes the very simple approach of reviving an old song that was already a "proven" high-charting hit by doing the bare minimum work on it to get it considered a "new" song, then re-releasing it and watching it climb the charts again on the power of nostalgia alone. If it seems like I'm making this out to be a more deliberate process than you'd think it might be (instead of just a coincidence born of nostalgia for the 90s/2000s), that's because I have good reason to believe it is. This Pitchfork article from a few years ago pretty much predicted this exact phenomenon, as it details how venture capitalists started buying up the song catalogues of major songwriters with specifically the intention of marketing new songs based on the licensing of older, already well-known songs.

What does this have to do with Bruno Latour? Well, many of you may not remember this, but pop music (pop culture in general, I would argue, as we'll see through some other examples) went through its own moment of "postmodern theory" not long after the political theory took off mid-20th century. There were many different ideas tossed around for a while, some of them conflicting, but most of them centered on the deconstruction of the individual artist as a singular creative originator of things, much like certified post-structuralist Barthes' "death of the author" (actually, you could argue that Barthes' original essay was the first shot in this assault on the cult of the pop-star-as-creative-genius). This culminated in a fierce debate over what started happening with the birth of hip-hop in the late 70s, but especially the 80s and 90s. Early hip-hop was often heavily dependent on the DJ's use of "samples" of already-recorded music. This sparked accusations from more traditionalist musicians (nowadays we tend to call these "rockists", which isn't entirely fair because there are many rock musicians that appreciate the nuances of this debate and many outside the genre that don't) that hip-hop was a fundamentally unoriginal genre because it relied on playing "other people's music".

At the same time that early sample-based hip-hop was emerging, a new form of recording started to be sold, first in conjunction with hip-hop DJ culture but quickly expanding beyond these bounds. This was the format of the "remixed" song, which I won't bother to explain here because I'm pretty sure everyone is familiar with it at this point. Between the growing popularity of remixes and hip-hop, many of the traditionalists seemed to feel that we were heading towards a future in music where no one would bother to create new music again because we'd just plunder the same songs from the past forever, leading us into a creative dead end that would constitute the much-threatened, long-dreaded "death of music".

This is where the postmodern streak in pop music comes in. Speaking in response to these accusations of creative bankruptcy, the postmodernists pointed out that actually, all of music had been nothing but "remixes" from the start, since no one has a truly "original" idea and all new music can be traced back through the music that influenced it in a chain that only ends at our recorded history of music. This is obvious enough from genres like rock (which used the basic structures of the blues as its jumping-off point) and jazz (which often featured artists "quoting" other songs by playing their melodies mid-solo, a kind of proto-sampling when you think about it), but it could even be observed in how classical composers would take musical themes from popular folk songs and imitate each others' compositional structures.

The point of music, the postmodernists went on to argue, isn't to create something totally "original" anyway, since that's basically impossible. It's instead to simply create something "new", and "new doesn't have to mean that it isn't built on the back of some older work; "newness", in fact, comes from the new combination of older elements, which, placed in a new context, will now seem unfamiliar as a whole even if the individual parts are familiar. As Buck 65 says, and then re-constructs through a sample of someone saying the same thing at the end of his song "Leftfielder", "And you never heard it like this before".

The postmodernists were, I think, indisputably right, and for a while it looked like they had won this particular culture war. Hip-hop went on to experience a golden age of creativity through sampling and remixes (something reflected in reference-heavy lyrics too, as any hip-hop listener will notice). Pop music in general got a lot more explicitly self-conscious and self-referential. It was (and continues to be - we're not out of this era yet, despite what I might be implicitly foreshadowing here!) an interesting time for people like me who enjoy nerding out over "spot-the-reference" games, as well as debates over the relationship between form, content and historical placement of music.

But there is a dark side to the arguments the postmodernists made. If there is truly, as an ancient source claims, "nothing new under the sun", then maybe the answer to this is not to try and create new things (since this would be a waste of time) but to stick as close as possible to those things from past times that we know have already worked. This is an argument for aesthetic conservativism, which claims on some level that there are actually a finite number of "good" art pieces (songs, stories, poems, etc.) that we can create, and if we try and deviate from these, we will either end up accidentally reproducing a worse version of one of those "originary" pieces anyway, or produce utter nonsense that will be of interest to no one.

How deep this theory goes depends on who you ask. I would argue that the originator of this argument is as far back as Plato, who claimed that there were metaphysical "forms" constituting the "real" existences of all things in the world that were, in themselves, just defective imitations of those forms. This kind of thinking is reflected in psychoanalyst Jung's idea of "archetypes", different kinds of narratives that exist eternally in all human minds which can be seen as the blueprints for all other stories we tell each other. And this idea would be highly influential on comparative mythology scholars like Joseph Campbell, whose own book "Hero With A Thousand Face", which argued that there is only one real story humanity has ever told known as the "monomyth", in turn influenced George Lucas in the writing of Star Wars.

But it doesn't have to get that deep. To many who espouse some version of this view, aesthetic conservativism is simply a shorthand for commitment to "formula" in the arts. Many of these people wouldn't even go so far as to completely deny the possibility of entirely original art - they just think it's usually a waste of time, and that 99% of what's worth making is made by the use of a "proven formula" that works because we have evidence of it already working in the past. It's a kind of bastardized "scientific" approach to creating art, where you claim to create through "evidence-based" methods, but you only ever draw your evidence from historical data and ignore the possibility of current tastes changing. It's the approach of any screenwriter who's told you about how "Save The Cat" changed their life. What's kind of funny with these types is how many of them worship George Lucas; after all, they tend to value what's successful on the market over all else, and Star Wars is nothing if not that. So the ghost of Plato (and Jung, and Campbell) lives on in these "formulaic conservatives" even if most of them never get around to thinking that much about it.

Anyway, for the record, I think this philosophy of aesthetic conservativism is completely full of shit. I'll keep my own beef with Plato for the separate essay it deserves, but I will make my case for the pop postmodernists on this issue here: just because you can retroactively identify patterns of things that "work", doesn't mean those will be the only things that will ever function as art. For one thing, canonical tastes change over time, and what we considered to be a masterpiece 100 years ago isn't always the same as what we consider to be a masterpiece today. Further, I would accuse some of these aesthetic conservatives of a kind of reverse "forest-for-the-trees" view: they can't see the uniqueness of individual trees because they're too focused on the forest as a whole! While you can point out the similarities among different works across time, you can also point out their differences, which frequently lie in their specific details - combinations of which, I might add, come from the distinct circumstances of a sum of past influences that result in an ever-new "remixed" cultural product over time. You can, in fact, just produce minor variations on the same thing and end up with wildly different results as long as you know what to focus on. Case in point: though "Cool Hand Luke" might feature a similar story to that of Jesus in the Bible, no one would ever mistake it for the Gospels, and we certainly don't view those two things as equivalent.

This might seem like I'm nitpicking here, but taking the aesthetic conservative stance has real consequences for the kind of art that gets produced. Consider the movie industry, where this kind of thinking seems to have dominated for a long time; it feels like only now, we're coming out of a long winter of cookie-cutter superhero movies which, while certainly driven economically by IP licensing deals, were justified critically to many by the idea that they're constructed according to a certain "proven formula". It was a fundamentally backward-looking paradigm of culture, one that suggested that lazily regurgitating the same thing over and over again was not only all that was possible, it was desirable because it had already worked in the past! This is the same logic expressed in those interviews with the venture capitalists buying up song catalogues in the hopes that they can prey on people's nostalgia for already "proven" hits. And you might say they're transparently only in this for the money, so what does their logic matter anyway? But I'd argue that the financial victors of culture wars like this have a significant stake in people buying the logic of what they're doing on some level, because if everyone recognized what they were doing to be obviously bad, they'd stop consuming it and move on to something else.

I would contrast this aesthetic conservativism with a more "forward-looking" approach, one that uses the postmodernist cultural theory to look towards creating new combinations of things out of old things in ways that feel genuinely surprising. Think something like DJ Shadow's "Endtroducing.....", the first album constructed entirely out of samples, or more recently, 100 gecs bizarre genre-pastiches that leap from one sound to another with little warning. You'll note that neither of these artists sound like each other, or much else that came before them, despite taking obvious influences from the decades of music that immediately preceded them.

The change doesn't have to be that drastic, either. You could be a country-rock band playing in a 70s style, like the Drive-By Truckers, but you're experimenting with songform and subject matter for a change, or a rapper incorporating a slam-poetry influence into your flow like Noname or R.A.P. Ferreira. The point is that you can, in fact, make new music with a forward-looking approach, and there is something truly disturbing to the thought that the future of the industry might be several more years of covers of the already successful hits of yesteryear, like those of "I'm Blue" and "What Is Love?" If that's the case, then we might start to see a backlash against the postmodernist cultural theory, since those growing up in the current generation would only know it by means of this aesthetic conservativism which takes the conclusion that "everything is a remix" as a license to do the barest minimum of remixing possible for the safest return on investments. And what we might see then is a return to pre-20th century ideas of the sanctity of the individual artist's creation and "originality", which will simply throw more fuel on an already raging fire of support for devastatingly overreaching IP laws, which will ironically only make it easier for this phenomenon of re-animated Hits From The Dead to continue. Because you know who can afford to buy up that IP so that their own remixes are the only "legal" ones...

As a final note here, I wanted to bring up the original "Everything Is A Remix" guy, Kirby Ferguson, whose video essay series released under that title is still available in its original form here (it's just past the "updated 2023 edition", which I haven't watched yet). I first watched this series almost 15 years ago and I felt like the guy was basically summarizing everything I had been saying about the postmodernist theory of art at that point - nothing is truly "original", remixing isn't the same as "stealing", intellectual property law is a plague, etc. Anyway, I haven't kept up with what he's been doing these days, and taking a quick glance at the site, it looks kind of grim: he's got a dubious-looking course on using AI in art as well as several self-help-y looking ones on "unlocking your creative potential". I guess he had to make some money on his idea somehow (ironic, for a guy whose thesis kind of necessitated a destruction of the laws that allow people to profit off their ideas), but this is a bit of depressing direction to see him take. Anyway, check out the original videos if you haven't seen them, they make a compelling argument even if I think I would find it kind of oversimplified now (disclaimer: I haven't rewatched them at the time of writing this and am relying on my memory from almost 15 years ago, so I take no responsibility here if they turn out to actually kind of suck).

#Music #Music analysis #Remix culture #Aesthetics

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groovesnjams · 1 year ago

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47 / 50

"Sick To My Stomach" by Rebecca Black

DV:

Totally by chance both Rebecca Black and I happened to be in London when her debut album dropped, after a series of EPs and one-off singles with interesting collaborators on her part and a few years of MG and me talking about how she’s quietly built a catalog of bops. I’m still not sure exactly what to make of her career, but I watched as a packed crowd at Heaven sang along with album cuts that were less than a day old and absolutely lost their shit when she launched into the 2021 remix of “Friday.” Maybe that’s camp, maybe it’s just the equivalent of Eiffel 65 dropping “Blue (Da Ba Dee)” into a crowd of drunk millennials; Rebecca Black was able to follow up with the fantastic “Girlfriend”, which is more than most one-hit wonders can do. It felt like Black was a hometown hero returning after she’d made it, except she wasn’t actually home and her self-released album apparently never even charted.

It seems too early to say what any of this might mean: “Sick to my Stomach” is no “Anyway” (a modern classic), but it’s a catchy slice of the classic synthpop sound where Black’s found her sweet spot. “Sick to my Stomach” also isn’t a synecdoche for the State of Pop Music Today - it’s way too much of a slow build for both radio and playlists - nor is it emblematic of hyperpop - a genre that was over the hill even before Rupaul dropped a cash-in EP more than a year ago. Black's written a carefully observed, emotionally intense bop about self-examination and projection, a twist on the "I Want You Back" concept from the perspective of someone who isn't sure she does. The obvious reference point for a song like "Sick To My Stomach" is Carly Rae Jepsen. But that's less because of the lyric - Carly writes as if she’s conducting a dissection, while Black uses words like they’re blunt instruments - and more because of the visceral imagery, the detailed production, the diaristic approach. “Sick to my Stomach” even makes space for a striking middle eight, something Jepsen (like most pop singers in the streaming era) has slowly phased out in favor of an extra chorus. “Sick to my Stomach” might not be Black's strongest single, but it’s a sign that her personal bar is getting higher. Maybe at some point the rest of the world will catch up to that crowd in London.

MG:

Rebcca Black is the first, but certainly not, by far, the last of what I will call “The Billionaire’s Daughters” on our list this year. With most of them I feel pretty straightforward: why am I being forced to engage with this? But with Black it’s much more complicated. While it’s obvious that the only reason we’re aware of her new work at all is because of the viral success of her daddy-funded teen hit “Friday,” I genuinely do not think she’s daddy-funded any longer. She’s the child of two veterinarians, and while that’s certainly a soft and luxurious start to life, it’s not the leg up you get from being born to the “former executive editor and current publisher of the Wall Street Journal” or from attending a fancy school in England, which a preponderance of this list managed to do. And while “Sick to my Stomach” is fine and pleasant and nothing more, the way Pitchfork used the unremarkableness of Let Her Burn as permission to tear into her appearance and branding instead of the work itself makes me really angry. She’s about as much of an underdog story as anyone in her position could be but as an artist she’s amassed a mediocre catalog on average where “Sick to my Stomach” rests somewhere above the middle.

#gnjsoty2k23 #rebecca black #sick to my stomach #carly rae jepsen #eiffel 65 lol

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