Music Industry Shift

[Pulse]

jcmf3 said:

I have a problem with this, as many know, since "pop" stands for "popular", but even with its accepted meaning, I disagree. 

Did you forget about Bad Day and Youre Beautiful

[MusicJunkie]

leigy said:

Um...Would someone explain to me WHY people are saying that Rihanna is an urban act. Has she even charted on Urban...She's definately not gotten great support from rhythmic really, All of her songs are pop hits because they're pop songs...Not R&B. If she had redhear or was Chinese would you guys consider her urban then?

I agree with you. Rihanna receives almost all her support from pop only.

[Pulse]

leigy said:

Um...Would someone explain to me WHY people are saying that Rihanna is an urban act. Has she even charted on Urban...She's definately not gotten great support from rhythmic really, All of her songs are pop hits because they're pop songs...Not R&B. If she had redhear or was Chinese would you guys consider her urban then?

Well, her first two singles were urban, but yeah, I dont get why people call her urban now. There is nothing urban about SOS and Unfaithful

[COW COW COW COW COW COW COW]

How were her first two singles Urban?

'If Its Lovin' That you Want' was Carribean pop, there was no urban in it at all...All of that song's support came exclusively from Pop radio. It made the top 10 on Pop 100 and only made #36 on the Hot 100.

[Pulse]

It was actually Top 20 on the Pop 100. The song charted on Rhythmic and R&B too. The song is poppish, but I think people group it into urban the same way they group Sean Paul's stuff as urban

[COW COW COW COW COW COW COW]

Sean Paul is URBAN compared to Rihanna...

[jaxxalude]

jcmf3 said:

vanishing89 said:

-Adult Contemporary hits crossing over more frequently.

Huh?  Name a song that first charted on AC and then crossed over to pop this year (e.g., What Hurts The Most doesn't count...).  Are you actually implying that acts like Rod Stewart, Phil Collins, or Michael Buble even have/will crossover?  I see no evidence of this.

James Blunt's "You're Beautiful", Daniel Powter's "Bad Day, KT Tunstall's "Black Horse & The Cherry Tree".

[Love Plastic Love]

To a lesser extent, even Anna Nalick-Didnt breathe hit Hot Ac before rebounding on Pop?

And I agree about Rihanna being more pop. Her music does work ok on RHY, but the music isnt really urban.

[JCMF3]

jaxxalude said:

jcmf3 said:

Huh?  Name a song that first charted on AC and then crossed over to pop this year (e.g., What Hurts The Most doesn't count...).  Are you actually implying that acts like Rod Stewart, Phil Collins, or Michael Buble even have/will crossover?  I see no evidence of this.

James Blunt's "You're Beautiful", Daniel Powter's "Bad Day, KT Tunstall's "Black Horse & The Cherry Tree".

Huh? AC radio was WAY behind on those songs. Are you talking about Hot AC? Because that is probably where the confusion is...

And even there, I am pretty sure KT Tunstall and possibly James Blunt charted on AAA before Hot AC. I don't know about Daniel Powter though...

[JCMF3]

thepulse said:

jcmf3 said:

I have a problem with this, as many know, since "pop" stands for "popular", but even with its accepted meaning, I disagree. 

Did you forget about Bad Day and Youre Beautiful

No I didn't. I don't consider those "pure pop." How do you put something like James Blunt's You're Beautiful in the same category as Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys, or 98 Degrees?

[spooky21]

jcmf3 said:

thepulse said:

Did you forget about Bad Day and Youre Beautiful

No I didn't.  I don't consider those "pure pop."  How do you put something like James Blunt's You're Beautiful in the same category as Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys, or 98 Degrees?

Why not? It doesn't appear that everyone here have an accepted and standard definition for "pop". The Beatles were considered "pop", would you put them in the same category as Britney or the Backstreet Boys?

J

[jaxxalude]

New York Times

Imagining a Summer With a True Hip-Hop Hit
By KELEFA SANNEH
Published: September 7, 2006

This much is clear: “Weekend Girl,” by Cam’ron, is definitely not the song of the summer. True, it’s a glorious hip-hop love song, playful and clever and sweetly nostalgic. And true, as one fan noted online, it “sounds so perfect with ur roof put back and during the night time.” But here’s the problem: it’s not a hit. In fact it hasn’t been officially released, which means that as far as the music industry is concerned, it doesn’t really exist. And it can’t be the song of the summer if it’s not in heavy rotation on hip-hop radio. Can it?

As for the real winner, the season just ended, the numbers are still being crunched, and the not-quite-logical arguments are still being formulated. Shakira’s “Hips Don’t Lie”? It topped Billboard’s Hot 100 chart back in June, then stayed near the top all summer. Nelly Furtado’s “Promiscuous”? It spent six weeks — more important, six weekends — at No. 1. Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy”? It’s the kind of likable left-field hit that’s hard to root against, though its audience wasn’t quite as big. A case can be made for all three. (There might be some people who would add a fourth song to the list: Fergie’s late-breaking chart topper, “London Bridge.” But — since we’re on the subject of not-quite-logical arguments — those people are insane.)

Those three contenders all have something in common. None of them is purely hip-hop, but each one features a hip-hop veteran. “Hips Don’t Lie” has a reggaetón beat and some laughably inept rapping from Wyclef Jean, who got his start with the Fugees. Ms. Furtado’s song is a collaboration with Timbaland, who long ago proved himself one of hip-hop’s greatest producers ever. And Gnarls Barkley is the quirky but pop-friendly project of Cee-Lo, once a member of the pioneering Atlanta group Goodie Mob. This has been an odd few months, then, for hip-hop, which was the sound of the summer but not, exactly, the genre of the summer. And it’s been an even odder few months for hip-hop radio stations, which had to figure out whether or not to play these halfway hip-hop hits.

It’s hard to resist a monster hit of course, but there’s something odd about watching hip-hop radio stations — and to a lesser extent BET — following paths blazed by pop radio and MTV. Aren’t hip-hop radio stations supposed to stay one step ahead of the mainstream?

The problem has been especially acute in New York, where the two main hip-hop radio stations — Hot 97 (WQHT-FM, 97.1) and its younger, less streetwise rival, Power 105 (WWPR-FM, 105.1) — have been experiencing something of an identity crisis. Hot 97, in particular, used to sound as if it were broadcasting from the center of the hip-hop universe, and something about the station’s frequency sounds especially good when the weather is warm and car windows are down.

When New York hip-hop was hot, Hot 97 came to seem synonymous with summertime hits. “It’s All About the Benjamins,” the 1997 Puff Daddy single, included a station-specific plea: “Ain’t nobody’s hero but I wanna be heard/On your Hot 97 every day, that’s my word.”

That was almost a decade ago; nowadays Southern hip-hop rules, though New York listeners haven’t fully embraced it. So if you turn on Hot 97 or Power 105, you’re likely to hear lots of R&B, a bit of reggae, the biggest Southern hip-hop hits, a few New York tracks and a bit of mainstream pop. And from time to time this summer you might have heard Shakira, Ms. Furtado and Gnarls Barkley.

Their three halfway hip-hop songs are all more than halfway great. But taken together, they helped make New York radio that much duller. Our hip-hop stations are supposed to be pugnacious, brutally competitive, slightly knuckleheaded. And summer is when we need them more than ever.

That brings us back to “Weekend Girl,” which is precisely the kind of song we needed — but didn’t really get — this summer. The song doesn’t appear on Cam’ron’s most recent album, a rough-and-tumble (and, if you’ve got the patience, rewarding) CD called, “Killa Season” (Asylum/Atlantic). Instead, “Weekend Girl” (sometimes known as “Weekend Love”) started making the rounds on mixtapes and the Web, about a month ago. (It can be streamed from nobodysmiling.com and hiphopgame.com.)

Perhaps every city makes them differently, but in New York a summer song should be hard and soft at the same time. “Weekend Girl” samples the S.O.S. Band’s airy 1984 R&B hit of the same name, which was built around a lame — but somehow charming — excuse: “I’m a weekend girl/And I don’t have time on the weekday.”

To a rapper of course that sounds like the perfect, low-commitment relationship. And in the first two verses, Cam’ron reminisces about puppy love, filling the lines with typically unexpected words and rhymes:

No hassle, heifer. Did we battle?
Never.
We went Easter shopping, copping
them pastel leathers.
From Gimbels we gained, make it
simple and plain:
I wanna nibble on your ear,
rekindle the flame.

He dismisses long-term romance with four words (“Intimate? Not my sentiment”), but there is something sweet about Cam’ron’s offer of a weekend getaway: a man who specializes in one-night stands is proposing a three-night stand. Most summer relationships start casually, but they don’t always end that way; in fact, they don’t always end at all.

“Weekend Girl” also helps explain why an obsession with charts and sales and seasonal superlatives isn’t as irrelevant as it might first seem. Imagine if “Weekend Girl” really had been the song of the summer, instead of a mixtape obscurity. Imagine it booming out of cars and topping the charts and revitalizing the local radio stations. Imagine it as the soundtrack to months of blue-sky block parties. (As long as we’re imagining, we might as well imagine a little less rain.) That song, in a totally different summer: would it sound the same?

[jaxxalude]

The Mercury News

Springsteen aside, pop music has been mostly oblivious
By DAN DELUCA
Philadelphia Inquirer

Justin Timberlake is doing the anxiety-ridden post-9/11 world a huge favor.

He's bringing "SexyBack."

Have the Sept. 11 attacks had as profound an effect on pop music as they did on geopolitics?

Yep. They've made it sillier.

Not exclusively, of course. Along with a parade of Pussycat Dolls and "Promiscuous" boys and girls, there have been serious responses to the tragic events of that clear blue day. The most impressive, by far, has been Bruce Springsteen's "The Rising," which did its inspirational best in 2002 to make sense of the rubble left behind.

That Brucean effort to address a full range of emotional responses to unimaginable catastrophe - grief, rage, empathy - is significant for its ambition, and for the universality of its songs, which hold up well as they describe a long-gone time when Americans were united, not divided, by the calamity of 9/11.

"The Rising" is also noteworthy for its singular, album-length focus on the event. But plenty of other rockers and rappers and country singers have used individual songs to respond to, and shape, the dramatically altered global landscape.

Neil Young has expressed two sides of the post-9/11 coin: the we-need-to-kick-some-butt anger of "Let's Roll," his 2001 burst of machismo inspired by United Flight 93, and "Living With War," his 2006 reminder that that, indeed, is what Americans have been doing.

That sense of a world on edge has been expressed by Oakland, Calif., agit-rappers the Coup in "Pick a Bigger Weapon," most amusingly in the song "BabyLet'sMakeABabyBeforeBushDoSomethingCrazy."

Punk and country singers haven't let the changing world go unnoticed. Dear departed femme rockers Sleater-Kinney took on conformity in 2002's "Combat Rock." "Hey look, it's time to pledge allegiance," Corin Tucker sang. "Oh God, I love my dirty Uncle Sam." That skepticism has shown up in albums from underground and mainstream acts, from the Thermals and Erase Errata to Pearl Jam and Pink.

Sept. 11 patriotism has been good for country music. While the Dixie Chicks have lost fans for their outspokenness, flag-waving stars like Toby Keith have gained them, and Gretchen Wilson has prospered by brandishing her red, white and blue-collar bona fides.

But while each of those acts has its following, pop music has largely remained blessedly oblivious.

The post-9/11 period has also been the era of the airhead heiress and the ascendancy of "American Idol," the rise of Jessica Simpson and the success of the "NOW" hits compilation, music for the ADD generation.

Hip-pop band the Black Eyed Peas scored their initial success with a vague plea for understanding called "Where Is the Love?" but really broke out with the lowest-common-denominator inanity of "Don't Phunk With My Heart" and "My Humps." And the band's singer-rapper Fergie keeps that streak alive with "London Bridge," a creatively challenged dollop of sexual innuendo that is No. 1 on Billboard's Hot 100 this week.

But wait a minute: Isn't pop music supposed to be about escapism, anyway?

Sure. But with all the turmoil in the world, it wouldn't seem unreasonable to expect pop music - the sound of youth culture - to reflect that. That the violence and uncertainty spanning the globe would find some more sublime expression than Daniel Powter bemoaning that he's had a "Bad Day."

The point of comparison, as always in matters of socially conscious musical history, is the '60s. While it's worth noting that, back in the day, it wasn't all Jimi Hendrix and "All You Need Is Love" - Dean Martin and Petula Clark had hits, too - there's no denying that the Vietnam War made pop music come down with a severe case of seriousness.

Nowadays, as a result of a 9/11 domino effect, we're at war in Iraq and Afghanistan. But with no returning body bags on view, no follow-up attack on U.S. soil (yet), and, most important, no draft threatening to put unwilling middle-class American kids in the line of fire halfway around the world, pop music is free to keep the bad news out of sight, and out of mind. And concentrate on important stuff, like bringing sexy back.

[JCMF3]

spooky21 said:

jcmf3 said:

No I didn't.  I don't consider those "pure pop."  How do you put something like James Blunt's You're Beautiful in the same category as Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys, or 98 Degrees?

Why not?  It doesn't appear that everyone here have an accepted and standard definition for "pop".  The Beatles were considered "pop", would you put them in the same category as Britney or the Backstreet Boys?

J

Actually, you are solidifying my original point about "pop" music. I consider many different genres and artists to make "popular" music. But, when people think of "pure pop", they generally don't include artists like Nickelback, Snoop Dogg, etc., even though these artists have catered to the "popular" audience.