Ed Note: With a great many news items over the past week, this article's publish date was pushed back a little. More fool us. As of today, 'Mr. Know It All' has been trumped by the latest offering from LMFAO. As such, the article has been slightly edited to reflect this. Stay tuned for the analysis of LMFAO. Again.
--
Kelly Clarkson
'Mr. Know It All'
(RCA/Sony Music Entertainment)
Lat week ‘Mr. Know It All’, by Kelly Clarkson, was the new number one single here in Australia. It replaced
Gotye & Kimbra’s ‘Somebody That I Used To Know’ after 8 weeks. It was Ms Clarkson’s first number one single here, although she has been a regular feature in the charts since 2003, with eight top 10 singles (e.g., ‘Miss Independent’, ‘Since U Been Gone’).
Oddly, ‘Mr. Know It All’ has thus far been more successful in Australia than in other places in the world – in the U.S., it peaked at #17, in Canada at #24, and it hasn’t even charted in the U.K. The song was written and produced by a team including Esther Dean (who co-wrote ‘S&M’ by Rihanna, ‘Super Bass’ by Nicki Minaj, and ‘Firework’ by Katy Perry) and Brian Kennedy (who co-wrote ‘Forever’ by Chris Brown and cowrote and produced ‘Disturbia’ by Rihanna). Presumably the song was written in a writing camp like the one discussed in
Zoe Chace’s NPR article on making of the Rihanna song ‘Man Down’, where producers with backing tracks, lyricists and melodicists get together for the express purpose of creating commercial magic.
Mind you, I was surprised to find out ‘Mr. Know It All’ was written and produced by the kind of people that write R&B bubblegum tunes like ‘S&M’ or ‘Super Bass’, because it doesn’t sound like that stuff. A
recent Guardian piece by Peter Robinson argued that pop in 2011 is moving away from ‘LOLpop’ (e.g., LMFAO, Rihanna, David Guetta) towards what Robinson termed ‘the New Boring’: unflashy traditionalist stuff with acoustic instruments and heartfelt un-effected vocal performances – think Adele or Bruno Mars. The New Boring is often quite samey, level music, with no real sense of climax in the song; the music is content to set a mood and then stick to it. To put it another way, the New Boring is pretty plain white bread kind of stuff – the most adventurous it gets is sometimes putting some butter on top!
Surprisingly, given what he calls the genre, Robinson argues that the New Boring is a good thing; it’s a cold bucket of water on the charts at a point where, let’s face it,
numerous artists need hosing down. And perhaps the professional songmakers behind ‘Mr. Know It All’ are experts at smelling the commercial winds? Certainly, ‘Mr. Know It All’ is the third number one in a row that is an adult contemporary ballad about failed relationships, after
Adele’s ‘Someone Like You’ and
Gotye’s ‘Somebody That I Used To Know’. The last time that LOLpop was at #1 was as long ago as June.
However, ‘Mr. Know It All’ isn't quite New Boring; it's more accurately Old Boring. Remember all that vaguely-angsty adult contemporary pop that sold a lot of records around the mid-1990s? Think ‘Hand In My Pocket’ by Alanis Morissette (see below),
‘Bitch’ by Meredith Brooks, or
‘Torn’ by Natalie Imbruglia. That's the Old Boring, and that’s what Clarkson's ‘Mr. Know It All’ reminds me of. There’s still an audience for the Old Boring; a friend who works for one of the major labels told me recently that Alanis Morissette’s
Jagged Little Pill still reliably shifts a healthy amount of copies every week, the same way that
Harvest by Neil Young does.
Alanis Morissette - 'Hand In My Pocket'
So why does ‘Mr. Know It All’ seem like the Old Boring? Firstly, there’s the lyrics, about spurning a man for his presumption – a classic example of the kind of angsty empowering vaguely-feminist lyrics that run rampant through the female-fronted examples of the genre. Secondly, I am fairly certain that, as a 14-year-old, Clarkson fairly regularly sang songs like ‘You Oughta Know’ into a hairbrush in front of her mirror. You can hear it in the slight wildness in her voice that co-exists with the classic soul vocal techniques she won
American Idol with. But the clincher, the #1 reason you know that ‘Mr. Know It All’ is trying to do the Old Boring: if it wasn’t, why on Earth would it feature that same slightly funky drum loop that was the bane of adult-contemporary pop in 1996?
To be fair, ‘Mr. Know It All’ does have some nods to the last 15 years, most obviously in the kind of half-synthy half-guitary background noises and thumping kick beats that in 2011 evoke Coldplay (while I’m categorising adult contemporary acts, it seems to me that Coldplay’s career started after the end of the Old Boring - they’re probably best labelled Middle Boring or Approaching-Use-By-Date Boring). But these nods aside, the song reminds me of
Simon Reynolds’ book Retromania, where he argues that things like the overwhelming mass of reissues and remasters, the dominance of classic hits radio, and the repeated nostalgia-fests in the music press are discouraging people from making innovative new music. Listening to ‘Mr. Know It All’, it’s hard to disagree with him. After all, right now, the 1990s are making a commercial comeback – albums by Nirvana, Blink-182, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and even Lee Kernaghan are floating around the top of the charts at the moment. Bands like Custard, Ben Folds Five, and Pulp have reformed to general acclaim. Chart pop like ‘The Edge Of Glory’ by Lady Gaga sounds a lot like
1990s Eurotrash pop. With all that going on, we shouldn’t be surprised in the slightest that the number one single sounds like 1996.
Weirdly, while Kelly Clarkson’s music now sounds like the past, it once sounded like the future. Her 2005 hit ‘Since U Been Gone’ ended up being one of the more critically acclaimed pop songs of the decade – even Pitchfork had it as their #21 song of the 2000s. It also ended up being the blueprint for later Max Martin/Dr Luke collaborations like Ke$ha’s ‘Tik Tok’ and Katy Perry’s ‘California Gurls’, and thus sounds a lot like 2010 to me. It still sounds less dated than ‘Mr. Know It All’. Are Kelly Clarkson and her producers the Doctor Who and TARDIS of pop, able to move both forwards and backwards in time?
(Continued next page)