Lyriscope - Nickelback's 'Rockstar'
Oh sure, you're all still singing along with Nickelback's triumphant sarcastic-but-not-really-sarcastic celebration of all things rock and star, but just how feasible is it that you could actually, y'know, BE a rock star? Leaving aside all issues of talent, sex appeal (it's a Nickelback song, after all), instrumental prowess, charisma (ditto), and the ability to pretend to sing into a camera without giggling, we need to find out if Nickelback's ideas of rock star life are actually physically achievable by humble Joes such as you and me, but not Nickelback themselves, as they are already most of the way there.
Sometimes, you hear songs in excruciatingly innappropriate circumstances to say things like "WOW, THIS IS AMAZING!". A funeral, say, or the dentist's or, while you're in the middle of snogging a fit hotty. There's no real helping you when this happens, you just have to hope you manage to not open your big mouth (or indeed close your big mouth, move it away from your kissyfriend's, and then open it again) until the situation has passed, accepting this sort of thing as part of life and que sera sera etc.
In musicals - film or stage version - the transition from the vaguely-realistic spoken and acted bits to the all-singing, all-dancing musical numbers is always an awkward affair. Your scene may begin with just two people talking to each other about the crazy situation they find themselves in, but that's not how it ends, let me tell you. Usually, one of them will ask the other to explain something which puzzles them, and the reply comes in song form, after a brief introductory line like "here, let me explain..." or "and it goes a little something like this...", or even "here's a song about that very thing, are you ready?". 
It's not really the ChartBlog thing to do live reviews all that often. Not because there's anything wrong with live reviews, it's just sometimes there's some really good stuff on telly, or a good book to read, or the sofa is really comfy and you can just feel a snooze coming on and...and...y'know...zzz
There's something I've always found very interesting about the chart performance of Sugababes singles. They're clearly a band who've built up a loyal fanbase over the years, and they're one of the few pop groups who enjoy continued commercial success hand in hand with critical acclaim. And yet - one foot wrong, and the record buying public makes darn sure they know about it. 
Ooh, interesting new lyrical premise! Take a famous song title which attempts to speak for many people at once, using the word 'we' (is it called first person plural? Something like that) and reduce it down to just one person, 'I', in a lyrically arrogant sort of way. 
There's a hoodwink afoot. People are trying to make things be things which they are not, and it's causing confusion, civil unrest, and worst of all, it's forcing people to make bad decisions about why they like what they like. And this will never do. Sam Duckworth - or, as I like to call him, Get Jack Johnson, Add Wig, Fly - has managed to appear in magazines as varied as MOJO and Kerrang!, by doing something which does not ROCK and is not CLASSIC ROCK, and I can't really figure it out. 
ChartSnipe: Duffy? Mercy? What is this, a No.1 record or a convention of the dwarves who lived next to the little house Snow White stayed in? What? You didn't see the other house? Well, I spose It didn't really feature in the film, that much, but there was Duffy (he's a bit rubbish), Mercy (can't spell 'Murky', is THAT dim), Dashful (always busy), Slappy (the bully, always has a cameraphone in one hand), Breezy (flatulent), Frumpy (needs fashion advice) and Sock (a bit of a knitwit). Maybe it'll be in the sequel... (FM)
Ahh! Thank goodness someone remembered that the best pop music isn't about sex, or dancing, or magic, or real life, or anger, or excitment, or polemic, or gloss, or angst, or escape, or sweetness, or idiocy, or darkness, or intelligence, or entertainment, or goosebumps, or genius, or being a balm for the soul or fire for the belly. It's about all of these things at once, contained within an extravagent gesture which hints at many deep and urgent meanings, without detailing a single one of them.
Ah, the drone...such a powerful musical tool, and the basis of a very high percentage of all the world's musical forms (if you include folk music, world music, and hip hop, and why wouldn't you? Mm?). It is deceptively tricky to use effectively too. You can either keep the same bass note and change the chords over the top, so there's some movement in the music, or you can invent a kind of circular pattern of notes which go around and around while the root chords shift underneath. 
Hey, remember when Same Difference were on the X-Factor and everyone thought it would be amazing if they won, if only because it would break that rubbish delusion some fans of the show have that the X-Factor is good for anything other than a quick cheesy fix of situation-based pop squee...remember that feeling? It sort of reached it's apex when the super-smiley brother-sister duo did their CBeebies version of 'I Don't Feel Like Dancing', and everyone who saw it thought the exact same thing: "Wow, we are in a place which is so far beyond silly that it...could...just...be...cool?" 
It may shock regular Chartblog readers to find out that I actually quite like The Cribs. 'Men's Needs' is undeniably a tune and there's something about their particular brand of jaunty indie comes out more art-rocky and less Chas 'n' Dave. And y'know, who doesn't like a bit of art rock now and again?
It's the end of a long night, and tensions are once again running high. The friendly competition between the various media peoples to get interview time with all the winners has started to stray into slightly less amicable waters, not that anyone will admit it of course, we're all one big happy family here. Having said that, it does seem to be time for some people to start thinking sneakily if they want to get face-time with an award winner. Take [unnamed radio station] who buttonholed Mika AND Sir Paul with the exact same scam. 
Welcome to my new office. Do you like? You will notice is is lacking in a few home comforts, such as...well...an office, but it's mine, I am here at the Brit Awards, backstage in a massive aircraft hanger which is divided up by endless false walls, all of which are covered in carpet. It's a bit like being a laboratory white mouse, only without having an ear grafted to my back, and you're not allowed to smoke in here, it's the one thing the security guards have been most insistant about. I think the carpet might be flammable or something.
...I am just going to HAVE to go to the Brit Awards again, and muck about backstage until someone pays attention and offers ChartBlog one of those nice silvery orange-juicers with the lady's head on. Surely we deserve it just for 
Has anyone else noticed the distinct similarity between Alicia Key’s latest album cover and that of Leona Lewis’s debut? They’re so eerily similar I’ve mistaken one for the other on several occasions now. Perhaps this is a conspiracy! They are the same person! I always thought it was funny how one’s name was an anagram of the other’s! Except that isn’t actually true, is it? And if anything, it’s probably just laziness on the part of whichever artist directors were responsible for their album cover shoots. Maybe even the same person did both. In which case never mind, eh?
The trouble with the video to Marilyn Manson's 'Tainted Love' - in which Manson leads a degenerate army on an invasion of a house party of clean-cut, preppy teen types and turns it into some kind of wild decadent gothic orgy - is that it doesn't have enough zombies in it, or fiery ninjas, or people having their arms ripped off, or adults choking on cat litter. Or actual teenage teenagers, come to that. The promotional clip for this song seeks to redress the balance in favour of The Youth, and as a result, it's a hell of a lot more fun. 
Fish-hooks have an extra backwards barb at the pointy end, which keeps the hook from coming loose from the fish's mouth as it leaps and jerks to try and escape the angler's net. Arrow-heads work on a fairly similar principle, only instead of making sure an ensnared animal can't escape, the idea is that you've gone to a lot of time and effort to put what is essintially a sharp stick into something (or someone, back in the dark days of yore), why not go the whole hog and make sure it also causes the maximum amount of damage when removed? 
It'd be too easy to dismiss this lady as another post-Winehouse cash-in. Another attempt by money-starved record labels to re-create a sales landslide which started a year and a half ago, by getting in a young female singer with impressive soul pipes, give her an authentic sounding Motown workover with a name producer (in this case Bernard Butler, who has some experience in this regard), and praying to God that 2008 isn't the year that everyone goes metal, or something. 
Whoah whoah WHOAH! This is getting a bit weird. First Westlife do a song and it's not the worst thing ever in the world ever ever, a possibility which seemed to be getting more and more remote with each passing year, and now Craig David is here with a new tune, and not only is it NOT all about Craig David and how good he is at getting freaky with girls, but it's actually (dare I say it? I do! I do!) QUITE GOOD!
OK, dance records are notoriously tricky beggars to review. Most of the sonic revelation happens quite early on, there's often not that much of a chorus to speak of, and it's really all about how it affects the parts of your body which are untouched by words (clue: feet, spine, arse). So instead of listing every synth-swirl and breakdown, I am going to tell you a story about how such a song came into being. 
Weird. There was me, begging for the Coral to go back to the sky-cracking madness of their first album, if they were going to persist in the painstaking re-enactment of '60s beat-group nonsense. And now here's the Rascals, also from Liverpool, also on Deltasonic records, also keen on the sounds of that magical era...and bringing along their own bag of dark freakery, which is the only justification for 'going '60s' in the first place. Are they reading my mind? 
Sometimes when you hear an album, there are tracks which totally blow your mind to the extent that everything else is completely forgotten and sort-of disregarded as 'not as good as [mind-blowing track].' Which is usually unfair but such is the way with music.
I know that we're really not supposed to focus on band names, since we've been scolded for this by commenters before, but come on now. There comes a point where you're clearly just being silly, especially when a quick googling reveals that Joe Lean is not, indeed, the name the singer was born with. It's obviously just an attempt to make Fraser and me attempt to outdo each other with our best Dolly Parton impressions. (Fraser won, as if there was ever any doubt.) Add that to the slightly odd pun in the single title, and it just feels like too much wackiness in one go.
ChartSnipe: Still no perch-off-knocking happening, I notice. Not to the No.1 slot, the No.2 slot OR the No.3 slot. No.4 is Rihanna coming UP the charts, even after being around for ages, and No.5 is David Jordan, who gets points for trying, and will probably go even higher next week. But still...where are all the unstoppable songs? We're already one twelfth of the way through 2008 and the charts still haven't recovered from the New Year yet. Someone release a novelty song about tweezers, quickly! (FM)
My Mark Ronson backlash really kicked off when he introduced this track on the radio as ‘my song’. Now, without needing to turn to postmodern theories on the authenticity of the original, and the mediated/re-digested nature of every piece of art that is produced in our little self-consuming world, I happen to believe that this is NOT his song.
Can you hold a mirror up to music? I know you can make music which sounds like a photocopy of other music, or an extra-super-enhanced digitally-remastered upgrade of other music, but can you actually reflect music? Is there such a thing as a mirror image of a song, one which contains all of the hallmarks, peaks and troughs of the original, but is somehow inverted, so that left is right, up is down, and cats are dogs? 
You will absolutely never guess what kind of musical direction the 'Life have gone in with their latest 'hot waxing'. I mean there are so many genres to choose from, and Westlife could have picked any one of them. Rock, pop, reggae, soul, R&B, hip-hop, metal, indie, crunk, new rave, dubstep, klezmer...it could be any one of these, or perhaps even something so new it doesn't yet have a name! You never can tell with this lot...
Next week is going to be a weird week for singles. There's stuff coming out, but not much of it, and the big hitters are quite thinly spaced-out. There's the Feeling, the Coral, Paramore, Simple Plan and Goldfrapp, and then a whole bunch of stuff which is either not very good (*cough*SmashingPumpkins*cough*) or worse, not interesting enough to write about. But, being an optimistic sort of blog, this just gives us the chance to shine a spotlight into the musty caves which lie just behind the mainstream, where tiny, fragile little songs lurk, half-blind and hairless, like baby otters. 
As any regular ChartBlog reader will already know, people say the strangest stuff when they're trying to explain how music sounds to them. Comparisons will be drawn, some people will claim a song sounds like a direct rip-off of another, and others just won't see the connection. Genres are thrown around with gay abandon, sometimes accurately, sometimes not, and again, one person's thrilling minimalist-funk-torch-dub-slowjam is another person's snoozy trip hop. And the thing is, because this is all about the effect a certain noise has on your personal eardrums, no-one can ever be said to be truly wrong, even when it's obvious that they really are. 
It's a shame so many pop stars choose to marry outside the industry when inter-pop marriages give us such an interesting cross-pollination of sounds, not to mention a possibility for part-time supergroups. It certainly seems to have worked well that Richard Jones from The Feeling married Sophie Ellis-Bextor, since he and bandmate Dan Gillespie Sells collaborated on my personal favourite song from her current album ('Love Is Here', if anyone's taking notes).
*Fires up YouTube clip, listens attentively*
Music does not work the way other things do. This we know. In chemistry, if you put together two volatile substances, they react against each other, or with each other, in exactly the same way every time (assuming other factors like heat, atmospheric pressure and whatnot are always the same). In cooking, dough plus tomato plus cheese always equals pizza (unless you burn it, obv). But in music you can put together what seems like a killer compound, made of the finest ingredients, only to watch it curdle and separate like hot olive oil in natural yoghurt. 
OK first of all, I'm very sorry about this picture. It's beyond disturbing, isn't it? But very necessary when you consider the topic of this afternoon's ChartBlog Lecture. As you will see, what we're examining today is what happens when you try and crossbreed new variants of pop from artists with an impeccable pedigree.
Ah, the '60s! A wonderful era for popular music. All the babies born to the returning soldiers from World War II were in their teens - and there were LOADS of them too - and all they wanted to do was frug to the go go beat of their latest fave rave beat combos. Their parents didn't like their long hair, but they were square, so who cared? And recording technology made a sudden leap from one microphone plugged into one tape machine (or disc-cutter) to complicated, layered recordings, rendered in amazing quality, and played on expensive equipment which the Dansette obsessives called 'hi-fi'. 