Songs Implicated In Bullying Scandal (Top Singles, Five-Sixths Through 2016)

[koganbot]

I feel emotionally battered by the election, feeling simultaneously vulnerable and malicious, as if I'll be attacked for anything and nothing and I run constant fantasies of going back and settling old scores

Comments

Synchronicity

[skyecaptain]

Weird, I just posted a singles list and then clicked over to Koganbot to see if you'd updated, only to find your singles list! A lot of overlap, though I have a lot of listening to do still.

I'm having something similar to the complicated experience that you're describing, but with music that my students play constantly in the classroom. So I know how it "plays," but I'm not convinced that it puts me meaningfully closer to the audience (I mean, teaching them does that, but the music itself is really more part of the backdrop; and I still like this music for me and as me, as one usually does I think). Funnily enough the ones they like the most I tend to think are merely OK, and often the ones they think are really corny, or wouldn't even think of as standalone "songs" (like "Steal Her Man," which is first and foremost a video dance craze) I think are great.

Re: Synchronicity

[koganbot]

I learned of "Steal Your Man" from your blog, of course. I've got more of your stuff than Chuck's because you made a playlist and he didn't.

I notice that my highest-rated video dance-craze track, "Do It Like Me," is only a billion views behind the Whip/Nae Nae song, which was my favorite video dance-craze track last year.

("You" in this comment is Dave, and his list is here.)

Re: Synchronicity

[jeff_worrell]

Thanks for the nudge.

You now have a playlist too.

Only the top 33 so far (and two of those are missing and a third is not available in UK, but that's a higher hit rate than last year - either that or I'm getting better at finding songs that don't use the Roman alphabet).

I've made it collaborative so others can add more if I don't get round to it.

Re: Synchronicity

[koganbot]

Thanks, Jeff. My YouTube playlist is ever-expanding, too; already has another six. (And maybe I just never learned the Spotify basics, but I find YouTube vastly more user-friendly.) The only two missing from YouTube are the Britney pre-release promos.

Do you have a list of your own?

[belecrivain]

Apologies for responding to only part of your entry and not the whole (will be digesting the whole for a bit longer), but: I get the sense that K-pop mostly comes from the mainstream and is geared towards cheerleader types and jocks more than to the freaks and the greasers (to use ancient terminology from a different part of the world). To unpack the sentence "K-pop mostly comes from the mainstream" a bit: I think the whole apparatus that gives us K-pop is definitely "mainstream" and "geared towards cheerleader types and jocks" given its heavy government involvement (and to get more details I'd have to reread The Birth of Korean Cool, but I don't think "heavy government involvement" is a controversial statement at this point). Given the whole idea of "soft power" and the Hallyu Wave as top-down marketing (propaganda) enterprise, one could even go so far as to classify K-pop promotion as a sort of expansion of the growth machine, and the growth machine from Molotch's first definition of it was cheerleader- and jock-based, in a way. (

[koganbot]

In my high school the greasers and freaks didn't conflate, in fact hated each other, even if they had a lot in common. To be oversimplistic about class, the freaks were the sideways middle-class and vaguely leftish while the greasers were working class and pro-the-war and racist at that. But this was, like, in 1970, and the situation was not nearly so simple, of course: the numbers were probably more like 70%-30% as to the working-class and middle-class origins of the greasers, and probably the reverse for freaks and jocks. And the more impact the freaks had the more the greasers and the jocks-cheerleaders took on freak characteristics, while the freaks' successors tended to veer glam or punk. And the greasers were succeeded by grits and then burnouts, and many of them switched on the war and some probably sincerely tried to switch regarding race; and the original "burnouts" had been freaks. Or something. I hardly know how it all played out once I graduated. Did you ever see Dazed And Confused? The dope-smoking quarterback in that

Fact checking

[koganbot]

Er, it was Joey's stepfather who was Lester's psychotherapist.

[koganbot]

Glad to see you made a playlist of your top singles, which I'm linking here for the benefit of people who don't see your lj.

Creatures of the night with sweet melodies

[davidfrazer]

Have you heard Good Time by A.de, which was produced by Sweetune?

There's also Rainy Day. I don't know if Sweetune produced it, but it has that Kara vibe...

Re: Creatures of the night with sweet melodies

[koganbot]

"Good Time" has an '80s Madonna dance feel.

One of the many defects of my list is that I didn't hunt down the No Tiers tracks in the way I have in years past. Maybe after the election. (Not that I'm doing anything active in the election. Just worrying, fretting, brooding.)

[askbask]

Wow these Serebro girls put out some good songs this year. I usually find one or more catchy Russian pop stars every year, but I have very little knowledge of the context of any of it. I live in a country with part of its border neighboring Russia, but I know very little of how their pop culture fits in Russian daily life, who listens to this and that artist. I tried to read up a little in the wake of t.a.t.u - there were a few groups who like them oddly mashed up social commentary, political symbols and shock factor - I remember one who nicked the 'two girls making out' thing but in the videos were these portraits of big leaders of history. Anyway, catchy songs

[koganbot]

Serebro have been consistently good for years, but I don't know whether or not there's more Russian dance-pop greatness where they came from. Maxim Fadeev may just be an exceptionally good songwriter and producer. I haven't yet explored his back catalog.

I liked Nyusha's Naedine, which I think I first heard on an end-of-year ILM Spotify playlist for 2012. Nothing else by her has stuck for me. (She's got a woman-warrior look in this year's video.)

MC Doni is an Uzbek who's now part of a Moscow rap scene.* He seems to have a knack for mixing good pop hooks into his hip-hop.

*Assuming there are Moscow rap scenes. I don't know.

[sub_divided]

...and then there was Charles Kelley XD