"I Am My Own Mommy, The Fuck!" (Top Singles, One-Third Through 2018)

[koganbot]

Closed my 2017 Top 100 on March 3, giving myself a sigh of relief that "Gummo" and "The Race" were near misses and I wouldn't have to write about them. But here those guys are anyway, 6ix9ine and Tay-K, sure things on this list for "Billy" and "After You." And I still haven't done my writeup for 2017. Probably don't have much more to say about

Comments

Er, how much did I care about the Backstreet Boys anyway, and how good were they really? pt. 2

[koganbot]

Actually, Backstreet Boys and *NSync are still Subjects For Further Research If I Ever Get Around To It.

"Everybody (Backstreet's Back)" was transcendent, and "I Want It That Way" and "Quit Playing Games (With My Heart)" were faultlessly tuneful while still having punch, but I find fault with those two anyway for the singing having not nearly enough punch or push or character - character not always being musically wonderful, but the girl confessional wave that wiped out Backstreet - Pink, Michelle, Avril, Ashlee, Lindsay, Aly & AJ, Taylor, Miley, Demi, Selena - was a lot better for it, more powerful and individual and engaging. Blanks can be effective depending on what musical elements seep through the blank. But blanks usually don't out-do the passionate, specific, and idiosyncratic.

There's some relevance here to the general failure of modern-day cute boys to deliver the passionately idiosyncratic etc., often keeping them low on my lists.

Justin Timberlake eventually came through as idiosyncratic and powerful and beautiful, for a while, and *NSync's "I Want You Back" out-transcends "Everybody (Backstreet's Back)" but - as a commenter in the poptimists lj-community pointed out regarding *NSync's "It's Gonna Be Me" - Justin sounded like a goat. (I did think his solo work successfully set the caprine element aside.)

Christgau, in his Backstreet Boys piece, which praises the Backstreet Boys for symbolically empowering their fans, says, "A competing Spice Girls variation that didn't end up trailing hordes of eight-year-olds would balance the gender politics nicely." I'd add that TLC - black, sexual, and did reach the white teen nice-girl masses - had already changed the teenybopper game, nice girls now listening to girls, and not just to singer-songwriter sensitive girls but dancing, hip-hop inflected girls; later in the decade Destiny's Child followed this up and provided a model for Pink, who inserted singer-songwriter into it and then threw out the model and changed the game all over again with "Don't Let Me Get Me."

Re: Er, how much did I care about the Backstreet Boys anyway, and how good were they really? pt. 2

[koganbot]

So, maybe Ninety One are the best boyband since the Bee Gees.* We'll see how Ninety One develop a body of work; on just two EPs' worth of music, I'd rate them three great songs, which is a lot ("Su Asty," "Айыптама," and "Ah!Yah!Ma!"), with most everything else good to very good, covering a range that says they can potentially go anywhere.

*Bee Gees hit me strong when I was thirteen, but I didn't end up caring that much. They did turn out a catalog that included some first-rate stuff. In fact they're a Subject For Further Research too, since I basically only know their excellent U.S. debut LP and the disappointing couple of singles that came with their next album, and then the second flowering a decade later right before and after Saturday Night Fever. And "Woman In Love," a Streisand ballad that Barry Gibb created a great shivery Bee Gees-style chorus for.