Prefab Sprout are a band that have been around since the late '70s, yet they have never achieved the level of attention they so richly deserve.
Lead singer Paddy McAloon is a naturally talented songwriter, and Cars and Girls, released in 1988 from the album "From Langley Park to Memphis," is one of his crowning moments. The song is one of the catchiest I have heard, with simple-yet-memorable riffs and vibrant, dynamic vocals.
It is an upbeat, energetic track, but it also has a lot of hidden meaning. McAloon wrote it as a response to Bruce Springsteen, whose lyrical style he saw as narrow in terms of song themes; hence the line, "some things hurt more, much more, than cars and girls."
Ironically, it became a cult hit as a driving song, and made its way onto various compilations of that nature.
The thing I love about this track is that it manages to project its anti-materialistic message whilst still managing to show great musical craft and thought. The drums set the beat and tempo, and the vocals and riffs all work so well. The vocal ad-lib at the beginning and end sums the whole piece up, and I often find myself whistling it to myself without consciously realising it.
Prefab have a huge back catalogue and even a long-time fan such as me discovers new gems every so often. There is much to hear and admire, and even after 20 or more years, they still retain their timeless quality.
Boom and Pow. Two words that make me think of the 1960s Batman series featuring Adam West. The series renowned for its use of descriptive words to accompany Batman or Robin knocking seven bells out of some henchmen.
Despite these nostalgic memories, the Black Eyed Peas song "Boom Boom Pow" has nothing about it that I would ever want to remember, except how attrocious it is.
Music and talent are both at a premium here. The lyrics are ridiculous to the point of meaningless. They are mainly summed up by the repetition of the following phrase: "Gotta get that boom boom boom." I am sure I could dig up plenty of long-dead corpses with better lyrical talents.
These terrible lyrics are accompanied by a monotonous looping quasi-techno beat. Basically someone pressed a couple of buttons on a computer and, hey presto, the song was done.
But what about the vocals? Surely they are alright, despite being constrained by the tiny vocabulary on display? Alas, even they have been auto-tuned beyond recognition. What we get to hear is akin to a techno robot medley.
The sad thing about this track is that it is clearly just there to make a quick buck. There is no thought behind it, no talent on display - just a tediously repetitive beat with equally tediously repetitive lyrics. This from the same act that made "Where is the Love" in 2003, a song loaded with meaning, even if it was contrived and patronising.
And despite all this, there are people who will have bought and downloaded it. It's enough to make you write off the human race and hope to be abducted by aliens just to escape it.
Listening to this beautifully haunting song, you may be thinking that it sounds strangely familiar. That's because "Dreaming out Loud" was featured in the recent Panasonic 3D TV advert that was broadcast nationally (which can be seen here).
The artist is a relatively unheralded British songstress by the name of Sally J. Johnson. As this song shows, Sally has a wonderfully pure voice that seems so effortless. It is a crime that so few people have heard of her because she has undoubtedly got the talent and voice to make some truly exceptional music.
Hopefully the Panasonic advert will make people's ears prick up and want to know more about this fabulous, Leicester-born singer.
Dreaming out Loud is a song of simplicity and gradual building up. It starts with her sultry, ethereal voice accompanied by a soft piano, before other elements enter the fold such as a lovely bass and a drum beat and a string arrangement. It shows some excellent musical craft and feels like an aural massage, gently soothing the ears as it goes, giving the listener a sensual experience.
Thankfully, the song is now on iTunes, along with the rest of Sally's EP, "The Beacon Field." Of course, all these tracks were self-penned and show a real love of music that is so much more than the soulless, greed-obsessed industry that dominates today's charts.
Sally has a fantastic website, which is full of information and examples of her work as well as being one of the best-designed sites I have come across. Even her biography and news sections are as thorough as one could hope to see.
If you want to discover something new today, do yourself a favour and check Sally out. She has many more songs to offer, and could be one to keep track of for many years.
Since it's Friday, I felt there was only one song (in the loosest sense of the word) that I could use for the first daily instalment of FTM. Anybody who uses Twitter and / or Facebook can't have failed to hear about a young girl by the name of Rebecca Black, and her song "Friday."
In fact, It has become so infamous that it has prompted parody videos such as this amusing attempt (which ironically is better than the original, though that doesn't say much):
Now I know that Rebecca is only 13, and this post is not going to blame her for this abomination. Rather it is the industry and the way the media swarm around vulnerable young girls like her.
Produced by a company called Ark Music Factory, Rebecca's parents apparently paid $2000 to allow their daughter to live her dream by recording a song and starring in an accompanying video. That's right - they willingly paid two grand to have this trash produced. I'd rather give my money for an assisted suicide.
Originally posted on Youtube, Friday quickly became a viral hit, spreading all over the internet and attracting huge media attention. Social networking sites went into overdrive and as a result, Rebecca Black has found herself in official music charts around the world and on iTunes.
The song is ostensibly about a teenager's perspective on life and how he or she would enjoy a typical weekend. However, the lyrics were penned by an adult, namely Patrice Wilson of Ark Music Factory. Mr Wilson clearly had a poor education if the limit of his creativity led him to write, "Yesterday was Thursday Thursday, today it is Friday Friday...Tomorrow is Saturday and Sunday comes afterwards." It almost sounds like a terrible spin-off of Sesame Street.
Other big themes Friday tackles include eating a bowl of cereal and the tortuous decision over which car seat to sit in. Even
And if that wasn't bad enough, we are tortured yet further by a totally unnecessary, egotistical section in which another Ark Music Factory idiot plays up to every major stereotype of African-Americans by spewing out an incomprehensible rap, whilst dressed like a gang-banger and driving an ostentatiously-flash sports car.
So within a matter of seconds, we move from a 13-year-old girl's car seat-induced anguish to a gangster who looks like he's out to perform a drive-by shooting on some poor "homie." So Ark Music Factory not only charge $2000 to produce a song that sounds like it was written by a feotus, but they also insist on polishing their precious egos by hijacking the resulting project.
With many calling it the worst song ever written, poor Rebecca has been opened up to some despicable abuse from people who don't even know her. The industry that took her parents' money in order to make a fast buck amidst a media storm have allowed their young "starlet" to endure the most awful and hurtful comments because their skills at song-writing and video production are so abysmally bad.
This is not music, not even close. There is zero talent on display here. Even a drunken SingStar party filmed on someone's phone could easily outmatch this corporate drivel. If anybody truly cares about music anymore, they will steer well clear of this diabetes-inducing garbage.
In my introductory post I stated my aim that the two songs for each day would be the same genre, or at least similar. However, after conducting some initial research, in order to plan for the first few days, I quickly realised that this would be unfeasible.
My musical tastes are my own, which means I know more about certain genres than others. Therefore when certain songs that like to call themselves "urban" crop up (presumably because everybody else has fled to the rural countryside to escape such aural atrocities) my lack of knowledge of the genre means a suitable match is highly unlikely, especially as I will need 730 songs per year.
That is not to say I will simply neglect them. Indeed I plan to cover every corner and every genre around (including Austrian folk). Instead I will simply write about one song for each of my categories, regardless of how alike they are. After all, this likely to be as much a voyage of discovery for me as it is for my reader(s).
Sooooo...from tomorrow the fun all begins so watch this space.
So here it is - a brand new blog. Facing the Music was an idea I had after I was listening to the radio and became increasingly frustrated at the rubbish many of the stations were playing.
This made me ask myself a question: why is modern music so crap? It struck me that the charts these days are full of identikit pop and what trendy people like to call "R 'n' B," despite such "music" having absolutely no elements of rhythm and blues, which the name stands for.
Whenever I have radio stations on that play mainly modern songs, I often don't realise when one song ends and another begins because so much of today's popular music sounds identical.
Of course, that is not to say that there isn't any talent around anymore. It's just that genuinely good music requires a bit (or in some cases, a lot) of digging to find.
This is where Facing the Music comes into the equation. The idea of this blog is to focus on two songs every day. One will highlight what I see as the tragic nature of modern "pop" and the identikit, manufactured nature in which it is produced. The second will be an alternative contemporary song of the same (or at least a similar) genre that is a lesser-known but infinitely better with vastly more talented musicians.
I intend my critique to be as scathing as necessary, so expect a lot of personal bias and possibly a few curses to boot! The idea is to show how the corporate nature of the industry today is stripping away talent to reduce songs to no more than meaningless trash that even a feotus could produce, in order to make a quick buck. It will also showcase bands and singers that have relatively little attention, but who have bags of talent.
I'm open to suggestions from anyone as to which songs should be in each section. If you hate modern chart music as much as me, get involved, feel free to comment and perhaps even get offended when one of your favourite artists gets a drubbing on this blog!
