It's been a pretty lively year for pop music, but haven't you felt that the ultimate jam of 2010 was still elusive? Well, it's finally revealed itself: if you listen to one track this year, make it
SOULJA BOY's "Anime." In it, the teen rap sensation reveals, straight-faced, that his swagger is as fresh as a goofball supernerd Japanese cartoon. Sample lyrics, transcribed as best I could:
"Oh my god, anyway/I'm ballin' up the avenue/anime swag and I'm throwing money at the roof/anime everything, anime [unintelligible] chain/herringbone gold platinum [dongs?] with them herringbone/all day every day/anyway I'm anime [etc.]"
But you really have to listen to it. If you just read the lyrics, you might imagine their being delivered with some sort of gusto. Not! The charm of the song isn't just in the pure idiocy of the lyrics — it's in the unbelievable incompetence of his flow. He sounds as if he'd freestyled it off the dome in one take after smoking two blunts, getting kicked in the head by a horse, and falling face first into a sloppy bucket of extra chromosomes. That's not to say I don't like it — it's seriously goddamned amazing. It's sort of like insane outsider art, but made by a rich, stoned teenager on a major label. I guarantee you'll never hear anything weirder and worse come out of a big-name artist. (Unless someone tricks you into listening to that new Liz Phair album.)
I was really hoping that some British band had an incredibly boss name, but it turns out it was just an ambiguous headline. NME.com told me: "Teenage Fanclub help Truck Festival celebrate its 13th birthday; Fucked Up and Pulled Apart by Horses also play final day of Oxfordshire event." That was super-rad until I realized that "FUCKED UP" and "PULLED APART BY HORSES" are two different bands. Argh! As a reputable chronicler of pop music, have I the authority to merge them into one?
JOE PERRY got in a motorcycle wreck recently, but he walked away unscathed. "I had visions of playing shows in a wheelchair," he told Rolling Stone. Sorry, Joe, but motorcycle wrecks aside, that's not too far off. Doesn't it seem that AEROSMITH are rocketing toward their dotage even quicker than the Stones?
The biggest adorable rock-and-roll human-interest story of the week is KINGS OF LEON, who got pigeon-pooped out of a St. Louis show after just three songs. (The pigeon situation had been pretty bad through the opening acts, but Kings called it quits after some poo made it into the bassist's mouth.) The most perplexing account comes from Billboard, which stated that the pigeons "unmercilessly divebombed the band with poop." Well, it's nice to hear that the shitting birds weren't entirely merciless.
Remember how we were all peeved at NEIL YOUNG when he kept insisting, for months, that his long-awaited Archives Volume 1 collection would be available only on Blu-Ray? Meaning no one would get to hear it? Well, he relented and released it in listenable formats. He learned his lesson, and apparently he learned it hard. According to his Web site, he's about to reissue some classic lost albums for his Archives Volume 2 set: "These albums initially will be released in vinyl from analog masters, as they originally were created for that format. So now is the time to get your new phonograph player. The new players, built with today's technology, are exceptionally good." I guess he doesn't care whether he's making you adopt a crazy new format or a crazy old one — one way or another, he just wants to make sure he releases his albums on stereo equipment you don't own.
DAIVD THORPE |dthorpe@thephoenix.com
