I’ve been lurking here for weeks, reading the back catalog and I’ve finally caught up right as you’re hitting my middle school years. This song came out when I was 13, and I frequently listened to it on my hot pink iPod nano. I’m so excited for the next few months of this column. Everyone always thinks their teenage years were the peak of pop music.

Watching a barb who made an account just to post in this thread lose their mind in real time is the most entertaining part of this whole thing to me.

The semiotics of Mims reminds me of this bar chart:

This is an absolutely staggering achievement of a record. I remember the first time I put it on, in 2006: my housemates were absolutely rapt within 20 seconds of that opening lick of “Farewell Transmission” and asked me to turn it up – way up. It doesn’t drop off.

And speaking as someone who’s overcome pretty gnarly depression, that “Almost no one makes it out/you’re talking to one of them right now” line in “Almost Was Good Enough” has really resonated over the years.

i fixed it

Hey friends, just wanted to apologize for not being around lately; travel and a Wi-Fi outage are the cause, and work had me out of the house this morning as well. I will definitely be back this coming Monday with my usual “Crilley’s Categories” shenanigans. Hope you’re all doing well, I’ve been missing this TNOCS community, big time!

1. This is a US organization speaking about a US state’s policy. It has nothing to do with parliament or NHS. Our healthcare system is so different here, there’s not even any purpose pretending the two are similar. Stop being reactionary, and learn how to discuss actual issues without just trotting out the empty sloganeering you hear in your bubble.

2. What “the vast majority” feels in regards to other humans’ civil rights is moot. My right to exist is not predicated on whether you want me to or not. Learn what an “Appeal to Consensus” fallacy is and how to not make them when forming an opinion.

3. Trans men exist, too. Non-binary people exist, too. Intersex people exist, too. Try to make a point without pearl-clutching whataboutism. Hell, it’d be better if you could even listen enough to hear our point before you just assume you know enough about it that the opinion you had before you learned anything was correct.

4. Trans women are also “daughters, wives and mothers.” There is no epidemic of male abusers pretending to be female to assault women. Do you honestly think that the kind of person who would commit a felony in public cares about which bathroom they’re “supposed” to be in anyway – something that isn’t even a misdemeanor? Also, many, many trans women “pass” as cis, while many cisgender women appear fairly masculine. There are now more recorded attempts of cisgender women being harassed by transphobes for using the women’s restroom than the ridiculously small number of men dressing as women for access (and last time I checked, those were all cisgender men!).

5. You’ve clearly never held an actual in-person conversation with a person you knew was trans. Stop projecting your lack of real-world experience onto everyone else. Conservative ideologies like yours are the likeliest to come from those who have never lived more than 25 miles from the hospital they were born in. Don’t project your ignorance onto others.

Have you ever considered how much arrogance it takes to say anything you just said? You have no clue whatsoever who you are talking to, and the fact that you can pretend they’re “cocooned in [their] little online safe spaces” doesnt make it actually true. If you actually had anything resembling a point, though, you wouldn’t need to hide behind so much cowardly bad faith just to piss off those who disagree with you. Do you ever ask yourself why your entire viewpoint is predicated on emotional misrepresentation of reality?

FWIW, the idea of “safe spaces” isn’t that we’re all timid little shrinking violets that need to be surrounded by positivity at all times and are unaware of anything outside of them. It’s that we live in the same world you do, where people like you actively work to make our lives utterly miserable. Safe spaces aren’t about burying our heads in the sand, but getting a moment or two of reprieve from the abject hell that is the rest of our lives dealing with people like you.

When you die, do you want to feel like you made the world a better place, or do you want to breach the void knowing you made it worse?

Only two songs with the word Glamorous in the title have ever reached the Hot 100. The other one, as you probably already know, is by Sheila E

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Zqtl8azCs8

Anyone scrolling through the Hot 100’s archives from this time will notice something rather bizarre about this song’s journey to the top: despite having reached the top 10 just four weeks after its Hot 100 debut, it immediately began plummeting precipitously after its arrival into the region, dropping from number 9 to 33, then to 55 the week after that. An observer lacking context might at this point assume that the song was a flash in the pan that was on its way out, but then it exploded back to number 8 and rushed to the top the following week.

The reason for the strange trajectory was a bit of an experiment that labels were trying at the time. For decades, labels worked under the assumption that sales of a hit radio single were bound to cut into album sales. While evidence to support this was mixed (it was probably true for some artists and not so much for others), in the ’90s especially the labels increasingly schemed of ways to ensure that a radio hit would either be available to purchase as a single under limited circumstances or that it wouldn’t hit retail at all, forcing customers to opt for the album instead. After the American retail singles market died out in the early 2000s, this ceased to be so much of a concern, and labels could work singles up the charts through airplay alone. Even following the advent of the iTunes store, labels would frequently work an album’s lead single to radio while withholding its availability on iTunes — they wanted the single to sell well enough to achieve an impressive chart peak, but not so well that people wouldn’t consider the album once it dropped. Rihanna’s “SOS” is one example of a song whose digital availability was entirely suppressed until its parent album came out, at which point it exploded from number 34 to number 1.

“Glamorous” is, as far as I can recall, the first prominent example of a label deciding to remove a hit song from the digital edition of an already-released album in the hopes of spurring people to purchase said album in full. This is why it plummeted so drastically on the Hot 100 for those two weeks, and the quick reversal of that decision is why it surged back to the top so quickly afterward. Did the gambit work? Maybe. The album did ascend on the albums chart a bit during the time of the experiment, but it had been ascendant anyway (probably because the song was breaking out). That the scheme didn’t last long suggests to me that the label was perhaps hoping it was going to work better, and that in the meantime they weren’t entirely happy to see that airplay gains wouldn’t keep the song from nosediving down the Hot 100.

Despite the mixed success of that scheme, that wasn’t the only time it was attempted for a major hit! In 2008, Estelle’s classic “American Boy” had spent about 4 months gradually scaling the chart and was just on the cusp of entering the top 10 when her label decided to attempt the same strategy, yanking it off iTunes and sending it tumbling from number 11 to 37, then 57 on the Hot 100. The absence of “American Boy” from the digital album did not induce customers to purchase the full album so much as to instead purchase a literal karaoke cover (!!) of the song by ‘Studio All-Stars’, which accordingly reached the Hot 100 for the three weeks that the real thing was missing from iTunes. After its restoration to the iTunes store, it promptly sailed back to its peak position of number 9, and as far as I know that was the last time this stunt was attempted for a current hit. One notable exception: the same summer that “American Boy” was a hit, Kid Rock’s insistence on withholding his entire catalog from digital availability in America kept “All Summer Long” from reaching as high as it certainly would have, and also enabled two karaoke covers (this time by ‘Hit Masters’ and ‘The Rock Heroes’) to reach the Hot 100, with the former ironically out-peaking the real song.

In America you never know which 20’s you’re getting. 2020’s, 1920’s…1820’s…it’s a lottery really

I’d like to consider myself an open-minded person, and today was a great day for coming around and truly understanding that:

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1.) Nicki Minaj was the NUMBER ONE rated female rapper of all time by Billboard last year and NUMBER TEN when mixed with men, a list NO OTHER FEMALE RAPPERS PLACED ON

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2.) YOU CAN’T NAME ANYONE ELSE WHO HAD A BIGGER 2022 THAN NICKI

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3.) Rappers write raps