Read the first half of our recap of the Top 20 highest-selling Oz singles for 2011 here on TheVine.
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10 – J-Lo feat. Pitbull – ‘On The Floor’
(#1 for 3 weeks in March & April,
TheVine's review is here)
Our brains naturally find beats and rhythms almost irresistible. Of course, we learn to inoculate ourselves, to resist this because of the sheer amounts of music we’re exposed to every day – we’re no longer the kids at the front of the stage who’ll dance to anything; the hunter returned from the hunt. Because music is omnipresent in modern life, its natural power has become dulled. In modern society, music now often works as an emotional (and social) regulator, as something we listen to as a work of art, moved on from being the base result of a primal urge, meant to inspire similar. And so we’ll happily fall asleep to music that, 60 years ago, would have gotten you thrown out of dance halls for being too loud and suggestive.
Critics and discerning musical listeners now attempt to hear music as art – we’re interested in what the music says about the world; about the artist and about us. For this kind of listener, social context and artistry enriches the music, as well as meaning to perpetuate its basic function. There is often art and social commentary in popular dance music; there was a ton of it in Lady Gaga’s ‘Born This Way’, for example. But if you listen to ‘On The Floor’ from this artistic point of view, it’s not going to do much for you.
Snobs will think ‘On The Floor’ is as banal as can be. But if all dance music really has to do is be good for dancing (and perhaps remind you of that other good time you had dancing, hopefully to this song perhaps), then you can’t really blame RedOne, Pitbull, and J-Lo for scientifically targeting that nucleus accumbens deep inside our brains - the small, spongy bit that responds in primal approval whenever we throw ourselves around a dancefloor, to loud music and amongst like-minded humans.
9. Jessie J feat. B.o.B. – Price Tag
(#2 for 3 weeks over March, April & May)
In the chorus of the song ‘Price Tag’, Jessie J claims that
‘we don’t care about the price tag, we just want to make the world dance’. The song was produced by Dr Luke, and it does come across as some sort of big statement, as if Dr Luke and his compadres feel the need to defend their chart dominance – it’s not that he’s money hungry, he just likes to make dancing people happy.
Interestingly, this sentiment is one that the kind of people who love and buy chart pop music
want to hear, judging by it being the 9th biggest selling single of the year. A lot of pop fans would say that they just want to dance to the music – they, of course, don’t want to believe that they are being cynically catered to by a cynical music industry. Pop fans are aware that snobby music elitists despise what they listen to, but they want to believe that the music they like has a good heart to it.
Yet, it’s hard to escape the thought that an entirely cynical Dr Luke has written an entirely cynical song pretending to be ‘real’ in order to pander to dumb pop fans who want to believe there is heart in his music. After all, it’s pretty expensive to promote a single, to get it on the radio and TV. And so a record company is not going to put serious money into getting the song heard by the general public unless it’s a pretty good bet that it’ll make some serious 'ch-chang-chang' and 'bl-bling-bling'. This means that, in order to get onto the dance floor, in order to make the world dance, a song
has to at some level be about the price tag. And Dr Luke
is a professional.
8. Lady Gaga – ‘Born This Way’
(#1 for 1 week in February,
TheVine's review is here)
Born This Way' clearly works as a dancefloor filler, it has the requisite thumping 'four-to-the-floor' disco beats, and the synth stabs and electronic gurgles that permeate the song sound pretty convincing in this context. The song has an ambitious ADHD kind of arrangement - it rarely goes 20 seconds without introducing something new or abruptly changing tack. As a song, however – a collection of melodies and lyrics – I'm less convinced. This kind of hyperactive arrangement needs a pretty solid base to work off, and I'm not sure 'Born This Way' has that strength.
To my mind, it has two major faults. Firstly, the lyrics far too often sound like they've been awkwardly shoehorned into the track – the stresses and emphases in the words don't match up with the stresses and emphases in the melody. You can hear this most prominently in lines like
“I'm beautiful in my way” in the chorus, for example – the way Gaga sings
“beautiFUL” where most English speakers would say
“BEAUTiful” makes the line sound a bit awkward and ungainly, which is not what you want when you're earnestly singing about beauty.
Secondly, the chorus is a bit underwhelming. A great pop song almost always has a great pop chorus, and Lady Gaga's discography is full of them -- see 'Bad Romance' or 'Poker Face'. The chorus in pop is usually meant to soar away from the rest of song – it should sound different to the verse, it should be catchier than the verse, and it should feel climatic. In 'Born This Way' the chorus feels fairly static – it's too similar to the verse. It's not that much catchier than the verse, and it doesn't feel like a climax the way that it should. In fact, there's a harmony vocal that Gaga sings
against the chorus melody later on in the song, which sounds to me like it would have been a better chorus melody, with more jumps and excitement about it.
7. Pitbull feat. Ne-Yo, Afrojack, & Nayer – ‘Give Me Everything’
(#2 for 6 weeks in April & May)
It’s not every day you compare Pitbull to 1970s power pop band The Raspberries, but there’s a lot about ‘Give Me Everything’ which is reminiscent of The Raspberries’ 1973 tune ‘Tonight’. Both songs have a chorus which prominently repeats the word ‘tonight’ as a hook, and both songs, with their repetitive ‘tonights’, are lyrically attempting to convince females to sleep with them in the very near future.
Amazingly, considering Pitbull’s often dubious sexual ethics, the Raspberries’ song is even more dubious. After all, the Raspberries’ lead singer Eric Carmen sings that his girl
‘looked too young to know about romance’, and states that
‘I’m making love to you tonight/ You’re gonna love me too tonight’. Which is at least creepy and possibly illegal. In contrast, Pitbull’s only trying to convince you lovely women in the club over there, to have sex with him (which is plainly what he means by asking you giving him everything). Because, who knows, the world could end tomorrow. In a way, I’m surprised that Pitbull didn’t fill the video full of Mayan imagery and delay releasing the song until later this year.
6. LMFAO – ‘Sexy And I Know It’
(#1 for 8 weeks in October, November & December;
TheVine's review is here)
Redfoo claims with a straight face that ‘Sexy And I Know It’
“…is a song about being sexy, feeling confident about yourself. And that is the attitude of Redfoo/Skyblu. We are probably the sexiest dudes on the planet, and, you know, the girls can’t stand it.” This is adult music, in a variety of ways; the ‘party rock’ in ‘Party Rock Anthem’, for example, may well be taken as slang for cocaine. And ‘Sexy And I Know It’ isn’t a million miles away from a bunch of other ‘confident bro’ dance tunes, like Enrique Iglesias’ ‘Tonight (I’m Fucking You)’ or Pitbull’s ‘Hotel Room Service’. All of these tunes are intending to suggest that the singer is, indeed, so sexy that the girls flock to them like nerds flock to queue for new iPhones. But these songs have plenty of adult female fans too; plenty of women are apparently attracted to confidence (according even to Pitbull himself), and sometimes are only dimly aware of the fine line between confidence and arrogance/smarminess.
But I’m pretty sure a 9 year old just thinks ‘Sexy And I Know It’ is meant to be ridiculous. Because, for the 9 year old, adult sexuality as portrayed in the media, in deodorant commercials and so forth, is pretty ridiculous in the first place. And, as Freud argued, the things we find funny are very often the things we are deeply uncomfortable with. And most 9 year olds would be deeply uncomfortable with how sexualised pop culture is -- not having gone through puberty, they’re not going to ‘get it’, just yet. If the things that make us uncomfortable are also basically the things that make us laugh, ‘Sexy And I Know It’ may well appeal to the same childish sense of humour as books with titles like
Zombie Bums From Uranus.