Power Hour (Weekly Playlisticle Blog)

[ListenToItTwice]

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The first time I made a playlist, I was about 10 years old, and I sorted every track on every Kidz Bop album I owned (my mom wouldn’t let me buy the real stuff) into a countdown ranking. #1? Smashmouth’s “All Star.”

Anyway, I still love to create playlists. Whether it’s a career retrospective for one of my favorite artists, a tool for my friend’s half-marathon training, or an ode to Autumn, the right playlist can set a mood, take you back to a certain time and place, or just get you through a workday.

The concept of this blog is simple: a different playlist every week, each on a super-specific theme, roughly 60 minutes in length, and accompanied by my commentary. This is Power Hour.

[ListenToItTwice]

Week 1: Grammys/VMAs Crossover Hits

The MTV Video Music Awards are often regarded as the “Anti-Grammys.” The Grammys are a little stodgy; the VMAs are irreverent. The Grammys play favorites; the VMAs honor new and rising artists in a big way. Whereas the Grammys try to find their big moments in the performances, the VMAs want you tweeting about what happens in between: the “Miley, what’s good?” and “Now imma let you finish” moments.
But the Venn Diagram does have a middle zone, represented by this week’s playlist. These are works that were awarded by both shows, organized into a Power Hour.

(Click link for full article and playlist!)

[ListenToItTwice]

Week 2: Rent-a-Rapper

Don’t get me wrong; I love and respect rap music. Most of the best lyrics of the past 30 years were rapped, not sung. It’s the one place in popular music where artists are still consistently innovating.

That said, some rap is cheap. Some rap is tacky. And some of this cheap, tacky rap is plugged into a perfectly good pop song and lets me down as I’m holding my breath through the second verse, thinking, “Please don’t be the rap version.”

(Click link for full article and playlist!)

[ListenToItTwice]

Week 3: Unusual Namedrops

The celebrity namedrop is a staple of popular music. From a nod to the Rockefellers in “Puttin’ on the Ritz” to Judy Garland singing “Dear Mr. Gable,” the gambit has been around for decades. Depending on how you use it, it’s an effective way to put a timestamp on a song, to show that you’re hip to what the kids are into, or to taunt a rival musician.

(Click the link for the full article and playlist!)

[ListenToItTwice]

medium.com/power-hour/alleged-backmasking-power-hour-8f981b0c0b04#.al4cqo6l5

Backmasking is the intentional use of reversed recording in a song, often leaving a hidden message in plain sight.

Due to a phenomenon called pareidolia, in which the human mind is capable of finding patterns where none exist (like faces on the Moon and Jesus in a dog’s anus), backmasking is often imagined in songs where no such technique was used.

This week’s Power Hour combines songs that make open use of backmasking with songs that do nothing of the sort (but have been followed by rumors to the contrary), culminating in a playlist that should by no means be played backwards in a dark room.

(Click the link for the full article and playlist!)

[ListenToItTwice]

medium.com/power-hour/floppop-power-hour-14884add2ba6#.5vujvhonj

The songs on this playlist were all major commercial failures, though not necessarily in the same way. Some had pretty good chart peaks, others had notable cultural impact. But, had the stars aligned, they all could have been so much bigger. (And, for a handful of them, it would have been deserved).

(Click the link for the full article and playlist!)