Weird. People normally put on the ridiculously fake-looking moustache and glasses to sneak back in after they’ve been kicked out.

I’m still basking in that Greta Van Fleet review on the other site.

Tell me more about this Radio Head

‘John Lennon predictably hated “Hello, Goodbye,” calling it “three minutes of contradictions and meaningless juxtapositions.”’

You sure he wasn’t talking about Imagine?

Glad to see he’s able to free up some time from his undoubtedly busy girlfriend-beating schedule.

Is it though

He’s so “troubled” and “controversial.”

I agree. With Madonna, one always had the impression that she was a very strong personality and was consciously creating different personas and imagery from record to record, like David Bowie (although Bowie was his own songwriter).

With Britney, there was the sense that there was a huge behind the scenes machinery from production to marketing that Britney was the on-camera presence for. It was frankly disgusting to me at the time how when they first started marketing her they went both ways with supposed innocent, clean image and made a point of stating she was a virgin, while also fetishizing the “lolita” factor of an underage girl in a catholic school uniform. Then each record after, she needed to show more and more skin and carry more phallic snakes, etc., to keep people’s attention. You could just tell her handlers were riding the cash cow for all it’s worth by playing a media striptease with her dignity, and claiming it was her “empowering herself” by “owning her sexuality”, when in fact, a woman’s body and sexuality is the most marketable commodity associated with femaleness. The fact that Britney’s mental health began to fracture in this media shitstorm was a predictable outcome from the get go.

I have no nostalgia for this, and while I won’t deny the author does, is entitled to it and doesn’t need to be worried all the time about it, it also doesn’t make me happy that preschoolers were a rich market for this kind of media.

To me, this song and the surrounding era represented a huge shifting point in popular music. The shift had probably less to do with public tastes than it did The Telecommunications Act of 1996, that changed rules in television, radio and newspaper ownership, allowing consolidation between a few companies, especially in radio. In the late 1990’s, it became easier and more convenient to standardize playlists and dictate what product people were conditioned to consume, than to give the same platform to musicians and songwriters who were creating music as a more organic outgrowth of local music scenes and their own inspiration.

As recently as 4 or 5 years before this song, pre-fab pop like New Kids on the Block and Debbie Gibson, were considered cheesy and laughable. So, it was akin to seeing people get brainwashed to see basically the same formula suddenly become dominant again. At the time, we thought, “Well, this is a fad that will be laughable in another 3 years or so.” Well, that didn’t happen.

Britney or someone else like her, is a better business model for corporate media than the Lillith Fair-types/ female songwriters of the 1990’s, whether that’s Sarah McLaughlin, Jewell, Sheryl Crow, 4 Non-Blondes, Indigo Girls, Ani DiFranco, Fiona Apple, Natalie Merchant (and many more), plus women like Bjork, Hole, L7, Elastica, and many more. Look at the Lilith Fair lineups and surprisingly there are people like Erykah Badu, Lauryn Hill, Missy Elliot, India Arie, etc., there was a lot of female talent who wrote their own material and had an artistic voice.

I’m going to directly quote from Father John Misty (Josh Tillman), who has worked for Beyonce and Lady Gaga, where he questions whether the image of “badass, strong women” that we get in our pop music is actually feminism or just an image from a bloodsucking machine:

“What I see in certain corners of the musical intelligentsia right now is the idea that pop music is rooted in feminism. But this industry is horrible to women. There’s just so little dignity. I know half a dozen women in the industry, and it does treat them like human cattle. Around the Nineties, the industry decided it didn’t want to work with artists anymore because they’re a pain in the ass. They realized, ‘We just need people with dreams of being a pop star. Not people who work to make music – people who submit to anything it takes.’ This hilariously incoherent idea that feminism is the byproduct of that world drives me insane.”

This is the Britney model, it’s profitable, and it has never left us.

As to the song, Max Martin is a pop craftsman and has the ability to create an ear-worm. However, he is a terrible lyricist, as he is not a native speaker of English. In the title lines, both “I Want It That Way” and “…One More Time” represent misunderstandings of how people actually speak to each other in English. In the case of “Hit me baby, one more time”, he supposedly was trying to say something like “hit me up, call me again”, but there’s a big difference, people did say “hit me up” at the time, but not just “hit me”. That’s why TLC turned down the song, as African-American women who already had clout, a strong voice and sense of self, they said, “Hell no, we are not going to say ‘hit me, baby one more time’!” Britney was plucked from obscurity and placed into the machinery and didn’t have the clout or maybe the savvyness to demand a lyric change, or really to say no to anyone who was facilitating her rise to fame and fortune (but also taking a big cut for themselves.)

In terms of late 90’s history, anyone seriously interested in this period or who lived through it and wants a little more insight into how and why we got a lot of the music and entertainment we did. There was an interesting PBS Frontline documentary made around 2001 about how corporations like Viacom that owns MTV did market research on teens and sold them reductive archetypes that became identities, this explains the female Britney, male Limp Bizkit archetypes that were shoved down our throat at the time. It’s called the Merchants of Cool. (Lucky for me independent music was very good in the late 90’s and I learned to seek it out) https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cool/view/

Remember when “polarizing” meant “this folk singer’s voice sounds like he deep-throated a sandpaper dildo” and not “this rapper beats women, stabbed people, and almost killed a gay man for looking at him”?

Those were nice days.

Whenever you talk shit we just want to pinch your adorable little cheeks.

@Tom

The Beatles – All You Need Is Love – 3/10

The Monkees – Daydream Believer – 7/10

oh, so we’re doing movie reviews now?

The real funny thing is how Radiohead fans react. Who gives a f*ck! It is just an opinion. BTW Oasis “Slide Away” is better than any Radiohead tune. Maybe “House of Cards” but… no.

What a beautiful example of the most purest U.S white trash culture. Lovely album indeed. Very enjoyable with a big chicken wings bucket and a 5 litres gulp.

9? For a song that they didn’t even write?

Well I actually just repurposed my jamiroquai dildo after I lost the fuzzy little hat…