Post by raliverpool on Oct 8, 2011 14:03:14 GMT 1
Sorry, Adele, but Someone Like You has ushered in The New Boring
The absence of Lady Gaga at this year's Brits accidentally opened the door to Mumford & Sons and an Ed Sheeran-fronted new wave of beige pop
Peter Robinson
The Guardian, Saturday 8 October 2011
www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/oct/08/adele-new-boring-ed-sheeran
All pop scenes have their defining moments. Britpop's was the Blur v Oasis chart battle; with punk it was the Sex Pistols at the 100 Club; for the late-90s pop scene it was Britney Spears looking at a school uniform and thinking "oh, that'll do". You might trace pop's current big thing back to 15 February this year.
Two days earlier, Lady Gaga had launched her Born This Way album campaign at the VMAs in LA by turning up inside an egg. In a move she has since regretted, she didn't come to perform at the Brits: instead of stealing the show, she gave it away. This year's Brits – with wins for Mumford & Sons and Laura Marling – was defined not by Rihanna's explosive hits medley or Take That's cast-of-thousands riot police performance, but by a woman, accompanied by a piano, banging out a ballad.
"WOW!" host James Corden wailed afterwards. "Wasn't that amazing? You know, you can have all the dancers, pyrotechnics, laser shows you want, but if you sound like that all you need is a piano." Forty-nine million YouTube views suggest that Adele's gut-wrenching performance still hits the mark. But watch the performance again and this time wonder how much better it might have been with, as per Corden's suggestion, "all the dancers, pyrotechnics, laser shows you want". As it happened, Someone Like You became 2011's first pop phenomenon. In LA, Gaga had hatched out of an egg to symbolise rebirth. By not bringing a ludicrous stage show to the Brits, she ensured that the main arrival that week was of a genre which has gone on to define 2011: The New Boring, a ballad-friendly tedial wave destroying everything in its path.
Now, of course, it's not directly Adele's fault that, for instance, by the time this year's X Factor boot camp rolled around, every white male contestant appeared to be attempting the self-consciously excitement-free vocal style of Tom Waits in a Strepsil famine. Nonetheless, just as Blur, Oasis and Pulp did not pen songs for Menswear but must shoulder at least some of the responsibility, there is culpability here. Let's not forget that Someone Like You's co-writer Dan Wilson had previously penned hits for bore-off allstars Semisonic, Josh Groban and Dixie Chicks, so the tune's general non-danceability must have been intentional on Adele's part and she must, sadly, accept and wear the Queen Of Boring crown. It is a crown made of SOLID BEIGE.
Ed Sheeran combines Radio 1's twin obsessions of authenticity (acoustic guitars!) with cool (he collaborates with urban people!)
At a point when Old Boring heroes such as Coldplay and even Leona Lewis have moved on to the dancefloor, the next generation of boring is now taking root in the charts. While Adele may have smashed down the doors, The New Boring has found its posterboy in acoustic guitar-bothering singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran.
Sheeran's music is like a combination of every friend-of-a-friend's band whose pub gig you have ever witnessed, and while most of us learn, during our 20s, how to sidestep these social disasters it is less easy to avoid when wedged quite so far up Radio 1's A-list. And it is no wonder the nation's favourite was quite so keen to embrace Sheeran: he combines the station's twin obsessions of authenticity (acoustic guitars!) with cool (he sometimes sort of half-raps and collaborates with urban people!). The music is – well, a David Guetta club jam it most certainly is not, and his album "+" is a 12-bore shitgun (13 if you include the bonus track). His breakthrough hit The A-Team (which, like James Blunt's first big hit, was about a girl on drugs) seemed pitched somewhere between Blunt and Jack Johnson (Sheeran cites Damien Rice in his lyrics). Cherub-faced Sheeran is a confusing prospect: for instance, in You Need Me I Don't Need You, he goes to great lengths to establish that he is a singer-songwriter who writes his own songs (except all but only four songs on his album are co-writes), and who proudly declares "I didn't go to Brit school" (although he did audition to be in ITV1's Brit School-inspired jazzhands turkey Britannia High). It may seem odd that Sheeran is so desperate to lay claim to his lyrics when they include clunky disasters like "Suffolk sadly seems to sort of suffocate me", "I'm up an' coming like I'm f***ing in an elevator" and the epic "I've never owned a Blu-ray, true say" but one thing is certain: when borepop princess Birdy covered The A-Team for Fearne Cotton's Live Lounge that five minutes of music stirred up a vortex of boredom – a boretex, if you will – whose anniversary will be solemnly remembered by generations to come.
The most interesting point in the Someone Like You saga came a few days after the Brits when even Kiss 100, a station not often inclined to play anything below 128bpm when a club-lolz raveathon will do, sensed a shift in the public mood and plonked the tune on its daytime playlist.
At the start of 2009 the Guardian Guide ran a piece about how landfill indie, the bloated genre that gave us Scouting For Girls and the Pigeon Detectives, had become so unwieldy that there wasn't a V Festival lineup big enough to cope with its myriad hangers-on. It collapsed and left the door wide open for La Roux, Lady Gaga and electronic pop to storm into the charts.
Two-and-a half years on, that exciting new wave of non-acoustic electronic pop has mutated. The global pop sound is now, thanks to David Guetta, Pitbull, Taio Cruz and a cast of thousands attempting to recreate their partyvibezzzz, a swirling mass of mindless, in-the-club party records. It reached its nadir this summer with the release of Champagne Showers by LMFAO Feat Natalia Kills, an intensely bad piece of antimusic so alarmingly awful that it rather made you wonder whether all music should in fact be banned.
Thanks to The New Boring, a ban was not necessary. The New Boring has become the cold bucket of water, the ice age, the guy in bare feet in the corner of the house party imploring revellers to JUST CHILL OUT! Hold that Birdy-does-Sheeran cover close to your chest: it may just be boring enough to neutralise 2011's absurd parade of LOLpop party hits. It might reset pop. For some of us this will be an extreme test of tough love – and this is very upsetting to watch – but we must allow The New Boring to take hold, to flourish. It's a good thing, in the long run.
Do you agree ("so here's to you Mr Robinson") or disagree with the editor of popjustice.com on the music that has come to define 2011?
The absence of Lady Gaga at this year's Brits accidentally opened the door to Mumford & Sons and an Ed Sheeran-fronted new wave of beige pop
Peter Robinson
The Guardian, Saturday 8 October 2011
www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/oct/08/adele-new-boring-ed-sheeran
All pop scenes have their defining moments. Britpop's was the Blur v Oasis chart battle; with punk it was the Sex Pistols at the 100 Club; for the late-90s pop scene it was Britney Spears looking at a school uniform and thinking "oh, that'll do". You might trace pop's current big thing back to 15 February this year.
Two days earlier, Lady Gaga had launched her Born This Way album campaign at the VMAs in LA by turning up inside an egg. In a move she has since regretted, she didn't come to perform at the Brits: instead of stealing the show, she gave it away. This year's Brits – with wins for Mumford & Sons and Laura Marling – was defined not by Rihanna's explosive hits medley or Take That's cast-of-thousands riot police performance, but by a woman, accompanied by a piano, banging out a ballad.
"WOW!" host James Corden wailed afterwards. "Wasn't that amazing? You know, you can have all the dancers, pyrotechnics, laser shows you want, but if you sound like that all you need is a piano." Forty-nine million YouTube views suggest that Adele's gut-wrenching performance still hits the mark. But watch the performance again and this time wonder how much better it might have been with, as per Corden's suggestion, "all the dancers, pyrotechnics, laser shows you want". As it happened, Someone Like You became 2011's first pop phenomenon. In LA, Gaga had hatched out of an egg to symbolise rebirth. By not bringing a ludicrous stage show to the Brits, she ensured that the main arrival that week was of a genre which has gone on to define 2011: The New Boring, a ballad-friendly tedial wave destroying everything in its path.
Now, of course, it's not directly Adele's fault that, for instance, by the time this year's X Factor boot camp rolled around, every white male contestant appeared to be attempting the self-consciously excitement-free vocal style of Tom Waits in a Strepsil famine. Nonetheless, just as Blur, Oasis and Pulp did not pen songs for Menswear but must shoulder at least some of the responsibility, there is culpability here. Let's not forget that Someone Like You's co-writer Dan Wilson had previously penned hits for bore-off allstars Semisonic, Josh Groban and Dixie Chicks, so the tune's general non-danceability must have been intentional on Adele's part and she must, sadly, accept and wear the Queen Of Boring crown. It is a crown made of SOLID BEIGE.
Ed Sheeran combines Radio 1's twin obsessions of authenticity (acoustic guitars!) with cool (he collaborates with urban people!)
At a point when Old Boring heroes such as Coldplay and even Leona Lewis have moved on to the dancefloor, the next generation of boring is now taking root in the charts. While Adele may have smashed down the doors, The New Boring has found its posterboy in acoustic guitar-bothering singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran.
Sheeran's music is like a combination of every friend-of-a-friend's band whose pub gig you have ever witnessed, and while most of us learn, during our 20s, how to sidestep these social disasters it is less easy to avoid when wedged quite so far up Radio 1's A-list. And it is no wonder the nation's favourite was quite so keen to embrace Sheeran: he combines the station's twin obsessions of authenticity (acoustic guitars!) with cool (he sometimes sort of half-raps and collaborates with urban people!). The music is – well, a David Guetta club jam it most certainly is not, and his album "+" is a 12-bore shitgun (13 if you include the bonus track). His breakthrough hit The A-Team (which, like James Blunt's first big hit, was about a girl on drugs) seemed pitched somewhere between Blunt and Jack Johnson (Sheeran cites Damien Rice in his lyrics). Cherub-faced Sheeran is a confusing prospect: for instance, in You Need Me I Don't Need You, he goes to great lengths to establish that he is a singer-songwriter who writes his own songs (except all but only four songs on his album are co-writes), and who proudly declares "I didn't go to Brit school" (although he did audition to be in ITV1's Brit School-inspired jazzhands turkey Britannia High). It may seem odd that Sheeran is so desperate to lay claim to his lyrics when they include clunky disasters like "Suffolk sadly seems to sort of suffocate me", "I'm up an' coming like I'm f***ing in an elevator" and the epic "I've never owned a Blu-ray, true say" but one thing is certain: when borepop princess Birdy covered The A-Team for Fearne Cotton's Live Lounge that five minutes of music stirred up a vortex of boredom – a boretex, if you will – whose anniversary will be solemnly remembered by generations to come.
The most interesting point in the Someone Like You saga came a few days after the Brits when even Kiss 100, a station not often inclined to play anything below 128bpm when a club-lolz raveathon will do, sensed a shift in the public mood and plonked the tune on its daytime playlist.
At the start of 2009 the Guardian Guide ran a piece about how landfill indie, the bloated genre that gave us Scouting For Girls and the Pigeon Detectives, had become so unwieldy that there wasn't a V Festival lineup big enough to cope with its myriad hangers-on. It collapsed and left the door wide open for La Roux, Lady Gaga and electronic pop to storm into the charts.
Two-and-a half years on, that exciting new wave of non-acoustic electronic pop has mutated. The global pop sound is now, thanks to David Guetta, Pitbull, Taio Cruz and a cast of thousands attempting to recreate their partyvibezzzz, a swirling mass of mindless, in-the-club party records. It reached its nadir this summer with the release of Champagne Showers by LMFAO Feat Natalia Kills, an intensely bad piece of antimusic so alarmingly awful that it rather made you wonder whether all music should in fact be banned.
Thanks to The New Boring, a ban was not necessary. The New Boring has become the cold bucket of water, the ice age, the guy in bare feet in the corner of the house party imploring revellers to JUST CHILL OUT! Hold that Birdy-does-Sheeran cover close to your chest: it may just be boring enough to neutralise 2011's absurd parade of LOLpop party hits. It might reset pop. For some of us this will be an extreme test of tough love – and this is very upsetting to watch – but we must allow The New Boring to take hold, to flourish. It's a good thing, in the long run.
Do you agree ("so here's to you Mr Robinson") or disagree with the editor of popjustice.com on the music that has come to define 2011?
