Calvin Harris - "Feel So Close"

[crash46]

Not sure why nobody's talking about this one, I've never heard of him or this song before but I checked it out and I'm pretty sure he's the next big indie sensation and he's going to conquer Alternative at the precise rate of one city at a time, before pop gets ahold of it and eats it up like Gotye and fun....

Uh...Top 50 on Alternative:
56 49 CALVIN HARRIS Feel So Close 90 72 18 0.744

(It got all of its plays from one station: KITS in San Fran. Good to know that it only takes one fucking station to get a song into the history books. .)

[Kurt]

...Are you being sarcastic?

[Devil Marlena Nylund]

Artie in disguise?

[Devin]

May 28, 2012 2:23:00 GMT -5 crash46 said:

... but I checked it out and I'm pretty sure he's the next big indie sensation and he's going to conquer Alternative at the precise rate of one city at a time, before pop gets ahold of it and eats it up like Gotye and fun....

Uh...Top 50 on Alternative:
56 49 CALVIN HARRIS Feel So Close 90 72 18 0.744

Um, this was already a Top 10 Pop hit and an international smash. I'm actually very surprised it reached that many spins on one obviously pop-leaning alt station to make the Top 50.

[jvandyck87]

KITS (Live 105 - San Francisco, CA) is not that pop-leaning though. It's also one of the few stations playing Jane's Addiction's "Twisted Tales", which if anything is on the more progressive/artsy side of alternative.

[Pipa]

Really, man? You don't even recognize his name from "We Found Love"? He was an indie sensation, before that song came around.

[Walking Contradiction]

I think crash46 might be busting our chops. But anyway, KITS has been sprinkling in some EDM songs lately as apparently there's quite a demand for it in San Francisco. I wouldn't expect this to catch on at Alternative stations nationally, but I actually think this song kinda fits. Not so sure about some of the other stuff they play, like Avicii's "Levels".

[thisbeautifulmess]

It's clear that crash46 is being sarcastic- I'm just trying to figure out if the responses are being sarcastic or serious.

[American Idiot]

I've been hearing this song for months constantly at work since they have the Pop Hits station on most of the time. I don't see how this belongs at all on Alternative.

[crash46]

Actually, the only argument I can make toward this track not belonging on Alternative is that it's five weeks away from being a pop recurrent. Especially if we're talking about the city of San Fran here; it kinda makes sense.

One station though. I don't know, just seems to me like this is far worse than the type of thing that would make a normal Pulse member use phrases such as "smh" and "I just can't at". I'm all for the return of the "regional hit"; those pretty much died off with radio's corporate takeover a couple decades ago, and were pretty fascinating when they happened. But to have one station doing 100% of the work is pretty low. Not a fraction as low as what Billboard has tried to pull over the years, but still pretty low nonetheless.

[Stefan85]

I'm surprised this didn't crossover faster with the guitar rifts in the chorus. ;) #sarcasm

Hypothetically, if this makes the top 40 here, will he become the first dance artist ever to make the Alternative chart?

[Pipa]

May 28, 2012 14:17:39 GMT -5 Stefan85 said:

Hypothetically, if this makes the top 40 here, will he become the first dance artist ever to make the Alternative chart?

Depends on your definition of dance. There's been plenty of alternative dance acts.

But when you have a playlist like this:

5 1 CALVIN HARRIS Feel So Close 90 75 15 0.7443
4 2 ALEX CLARE Too Close 89 76 13 0.7303
12 13 AVICII Levels 39 40 -1 0.3255
16 16 EXAMPLE F/LUDACRIS Changed The Way You Kiss Me 26 26 0 0.1975
38 33 BENNY BENASSI Cinema f/Gary Go 9 6 3 0.0213
76 38 SKRILLEX Scary Monsters And Nice ... 6 1 5 0.0382

I really have to give KITS a ಠ_ಠ.

[jvandyck87]

Scary Monsters And Nice Sprites should be considered alternative in my opinion.

[Phanarchist]

I Think KITS really must have horrible ratings or something. It's insane for any ALT station to play their top songs 90 times per weak.

[Walking Contradiction]

Yeah, I just looked at the chart, saw how many spins this song had, and wondered if anyone else added it. But yeah, 90 spins a week for your #1 song is closer to CHR territory than to what I'd expect from Alternative.

[Deleted]

I was bored, so I did the average of number of spins for the #1 song on each Alternative station (using last week's data as to avoid any Memorial Day effect) and found that the average was 43.5 spins. Meaning that KITS is spinning its top song 2x the average. Five stations had a top song spun below 30 spins and four stations (KITS-included) had a top song spun above 60 spins.

[Devin]

Lol, Top 50 on Alternative (again):

74 50 CALVIN HARRIS Feel So Close 106 56 50 0.755

KITS has this playing 90 times this week, while KUCD in Hawaii has this playing 16 times.

[Slinky]

I love Alt./Dance hybrids (a la early 00's WLIR) but the spin counts plus the general trainwrecky quality of KITS keeps me from being a regular listener. Last time I checked them out online, I heard a segue from one of the dance tracks (either "Feels So Close" or "Levels") to Staind's "It's Been Awhile". This would be a great time for an Alt./Dance hybrid given the available product, but that music doesn't work at all with grunge/post-grunge.

[Griftor]

May 28, 2012 14:17:39 GMT -5 Stefan85 said:

Hypothetically, if this makes the top 40 here, will he become the first dance artist ever to make the Alternative chart?

In the 80s and early 90s, bands like Erasure and Pet Shop Boys were mainstays. I would even consider Depeche Mode to be a dance act.

More recently, the late 90s techno craze brought acts like Prodigy and The Chemical Brothers onto the chart, a phenomenon that peaked when Fatboy Slim's "Praise You" climbed all the way to #2 in 1999.

So while alternative radio has avoided dance music in the last decade or so in favor of a cavalcade of post-grunge and active-leaning acts, dance music does have a history of success, and it seems to be cycling back around to prominence once more.