December 31, 2006
26 singles of the year/"melodic range"
As ever, the singles list excludes songs that appear on the albums list for this year (though, idiosyncratically, it doesn't exclude songs that appeared on last year's list (Miranda Lambert) or are likely to appear on next year's list (M.I.A.). Moreover, the list is generated from iTunes play counts aggregated from all the sugarhigh! terminals, modified by a simple algorithm that accounts for song's release dates (so that "Wunderkind," e.g., added on January 8th, places lower than "Hell Yeah," which had nine fewer listens but wasn’t added until June 23rd. The main thing this algorithm does is count how many listens a song got in the first week, first month, and over the entire span, and then calculate both a song’s rate of “decay” in popularity, and what the stock analysts would call its “beta”: its relative volatility. This equation is highly proprietary.
1) "Do It To It," Cherish feat. YoungBloodz. See note here.
2) "Too Little Too Late," JoJo. Best achievement in melancholy AutoTune since Cher. Machines sing with more feeling than people. When Donna Harraway and Kathryn Hayles talk about the posthuman, this is what they mean. Best-case scenario, that is.
3) "18 Dummy," The Federation. In a year in which the hyphy movement the truly euphoric subgenre, The Federation were its purest product and greatest failure. The album long whispered to be in the can never came out, the movement failed to find a focal point once everyone realized E-40 was on some other melange, and we were left with nothing but a few impossibly great mixtape singles that left us wondering what exactly the Federation was: indie-undie little label localism from California's unlikely Central Valley gone wild? Production whiz kids passing them off as superthugs? "I'm from Fairfield, that's where my mind stays — strapped in my backpack, nothing like Kanye." No doubt.
4) "Unwritten," Natasha Bedingfield. You’d know if you saw the video. Free indirect gospel presented as elevator music.
5) "Check On It," (Beyonce ft. Slim Thug). Though this appeared on a Destiny's Child hits collection, it remains officially credited to Beyoncé. The main writer is, get this, named Angela Beyince. Could who does what get any more meaningless? Er, except to the accountants.
6) "Promiscuous Girl," Nelly Furtado feat. Timbaland. Furtado is more of a Simpson than an Aguilera, vocal skills-wise. But lesser artists would have wilted in front of this beat, even recycled as it is from a better Xzibit song; Nelly steps in there and holds her own, and that's all it takes. Quite possibly the best-natured song of the year (and, as we know from the long version of Aaliyah’s greatest moment, good-natured rumbling is really what rapper Tim Mosely should stick to).
7) "Tim McGraw," Taylor Swift. Sounds sort of like everyone else. Isn't.
8) "Hell Yeah," San Quinn (feat. E-A-Ski). "Yep yes si with a hell in front of it."
9) "Wunderkind," Alanis Morissette. We here at sugarhigh! are awful. Just terrible.
10) "Ain't No Other Man," Christina Aguilera. GIven that, jazzercizing in abeyance, this is basically a concept album about how much she digs her new husband, we can conclude that Jordan Bratman is pretty much one good single's worth of one good man. See album review here.
11) "Get Drunk and Be Somebody," Toby Keith. Without much by way of inventiveness, and an attitude more than a worldview, Toby Keith has turned out to be one of the most insistent, playful hit makers of the decade, ever since he grew out of his youth, filled out his baritone, and hit his stride with 2000's "How Do You Like Me Now" — as a sure thing, he's somewhere between Nineties Sheryl Crow and Nineties Tori Amos. See note here.
12) "I Don't Feel Like Dancing," Scissor Sisters. It is a fundamentally good thing that someone decided their project would be to marry the queer rock classicism of Elton John and the queer glam underpinnings of early disco; they leapt for the BeeGees and landed on Leo Sayer and that's just fine by us. Hey Williamsburg, you should try to enjoy this a lot; it's the only payback you have coming for enduring the misery of the Fischerspooner years.
13) "New Strings," Miranda Lambert. A song so clear that children youtubing their versions from their bedrooms to the world can see right through it.
14) "Standing In The Way Of Control," The Gossip. See note here.
15) "Fast Cars And Freedom," Rascal Flatts. Everyone talks about how country "is really old-fashioned melodic pop-rock," which is still a way of liking country while pretending not to like, you know, country. Except in the case of Rascal Flatts, which is really old-fashioned melodic pop-rock.
16) "Bumpin' My Music," Ray Cash. More fun.
17) "One," Mary J. Blige feat. U2. Pet Shop Boys, Johnny Cash...this is not the first great U2 cover, and it won't be the last. There's a reason for that: however swell the songs might be (and this is one swell song), Bono can't sing. His vocals are thin and mawkish and have a stident need to be liked, and each of these covers provides a massive benefit, be it Neil Tennant's yearning irony or Johnny Cash's singular gravitas. Mary J broadens out the tones to the Baptist breadth to which they always secretly aspired, and gives them an emotional thickness that, well, Bono doesn't have and she does, in spades. Secondary lesson in all this: The Edge may be more of a genius than we thought.
18) “Life Ain’t Always Beautiful,” Gary Allan. See note here.
19) "Men And Mascara," Julie Roberts. Ballads are easier to write than uptempo numbers, but much much harder to sing.
20) "Call Me When You're Sober," Evanescence. Listen, no one is more annoyed than we are at the capacity of self-righteous religious zealots to write good melodies.
21) “With You,” Jessica Simpson. One of the two best guitar loops of the year, along with some track in the middle of the Clipse album.
22) “Irreplaceable,” Beyonce. Looking forward to comparativist study of the way this last syllable is pronounced by Mick Jagger (“Respectable”) and Beyonce. Also: as sugarhigh! adviser Chris Nealon notes, “does she know her album is named Bidet?”
23) “The Way I Live,” Baby Boy. Fun.
24) “Fergalicious,” Fergie. At first it’s hard to know which crude Eighties triumph of trocheeic dimeter this is ripping off mercilessly; if it seems at first like “You Be Illin’,” but when the double-time electro kicks in halfway through, one twigs to the fact that it’s ye olde “Supersonic,” by JJ Fad. The metre varies for effect here and there (most peasingly in the “try an’ tell”/”clientele” rhyme), but mostly it’s intent on its extended, virtuosic trochees: “FERgaLIcious’ DEFiNItion: MAKE them BOYS go CRAzy” and on and on.Ever since rap’s rigid vocal metricality yielded to the conversational vernacularity of hip-hop — that is, ever since rap’s Rakim-midwived modernity — few songs have paid as much attention to classcial lyrical beat patterns as this, one of the most precise songs of the times.
25) “It's Okay (One Blood),” The Game. As close as sugarhigh! has ever come to voting reggae.
26) “XR2 (turbo mix),” M.I.A. Well, where were you in ’92? This is “The End of the World As We Know It” or “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” or maybe Joe Brainard’s “I Remember,” except redolent of M.I.A.’s Londonized machine nervosa. The proposition that all memories can be stored in acronyms used to seem like a fact about the music biz (who here remembers Reunion’s “Life is a Rock”?) but now seems like a fact about memory in these times, in some way a kind of negotiation with computers and digitization — which is to say, a lyrical negotiation with the formal and technological history of pop music itself. As a final note: those still wondering about the derivation of Maya’s foundational quasi-word “galang” (Who the hell is hunting you/in your BMW?”) might wish to spend some time with sub-sub-Tom Clancy author Jack Buchanan, who has a novel titled M.I.A. Hunter/la Gang. We don't make this stuff up; we just report it,
ON MELODIC RANGE IN POPULAR MUSIC
Sometime in the Nineties — say, after "Waterfalls" and well before "No Scrubs," to use the TLC calendar — mersh R&B narrowed its melodic range. It didn't necessarily use fewer notes (though this was often the case), but chose notes from within a narrower scope in any given song. Largely gone were the transcendent/ludicrous ascents and resolves, the struggle/release/euphorias of "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" or "Man in the Mirror"; the duotone themes of "No, No, No, No" and "Say My Name" carried the day.
This condensation was meant to convey coiled sensuality, tense menace, moral seriousness. In part it borrowed these sensibilities from hip-hop, the center of authority in popular culture. One might argue that the structures of tune in American pop float between forms where affect is largely conveyed by speech, and where it's indexed to variations of melody keyed to the Western scale: upper limit country, lower limit rap, as Louis Zukofsky surely meant to say.
In the event, R&B was successful enough in expressing its revised set of feelings that it had a dialectical effect on the entire Billboard Hot 100. On the one hand, a new genre arose immediately for the express purpose of rescuing melodic range: this got named teenpop, and its genius took up the explicit project of extending the melodic scope of the Top 40 through complex modulations, moments after R&B narrowed its own scope. But on the other hand, the new significations of R&B, every time someone in an adjacent genre was feeling, well, dippy, they could emulate the move to refashion themselves as mature, controlled, serious.
And so, for example, when Mariah Carey of the famous range, of "Dreamlover" and "Fantasy" and "Emotions," needed to indicate she was no longer Glitter-y and/or crazy, she stopped down to the minimal palette of "Shake It Off" and etc. And when Britney, who had become synonymous with teenpop, needed to "grow up," she just repeated history: the passage from "Oops..." to "Slave" tells the story of modern R&B again, offset by a few years, with the naked significatory intent that had always been her stock in trade. The genius of "Toxic" lies exactly in how much it manages to do within the late phase's restrictions, between the low ceiling and high floor.
Shifts, of course, never happen all at once: uneven development, three-steps-forward and two-steps-back, little gestures here and there, these turn out to have been key junctures in a story that the market is trying to tell. And this is the story that "Irreplaceable" begins to narrate. It's a good song, not a great one; nobody thinks its within seven rungs of "Crazy in Love" on the ladder of the Ideal Pop Song. That song had decent range as well, but it also had other things on its mind, and returned relentlessly to the three-note theme. "Irreplaceable" seems to have as its main purpose the restoration of melodic range to pop. That it found traction with an audience that had proved itself indifferent to the far-narrower B singles that preceded it is the most telling fact — not in the least in that it demonstrates how Beyonce had better dance to the tune of the times, having lost the imperious capacity to make the times dance to her own tune.
That song answered by the finally far more appealing "Too Little Too Late," by JoJo, which hauls out Cher's AutoTune (and here we recall that "Believe," sung by a gorgeous octogenarian, was a pivotal moment in teenpop's story, collapsing the tween and disco audiences into a coherent mass) to describe explicitly the new opening-out, as the song modulates from its close opening melody into the full, ecstatic chorus via the machine, as if to suggest it requires industrial force to put that gloomy history in the past, as if that set of melodic moves was too little and it was too late for that indeed — at which the song turns to recalibrate itself, not without a melancholy sense of loss, to the deliriums and euphorias that had once sounded like a natural condition