The long-awaited follow up
06 Apr 2010 Leave a Comment
in 2010, dance, lady gaga, music, pop, susan boyle, the fame monster, UK charts, Uncategorized
Firstly I must apologise for the long absence of new posts on this blog (has it really been three years? Time flies when you’re having fun…) I guess life got in the way, as it has a habit of doing. You know the score.
Anyway, so much has happened in pop during the past few years that I guess it would be worth doing a kind of retrospective here, before thinking about what’s new in the world of music.
Biggest name of the past three years has to be Lady Gaga. I am obsessed with Lady Gaga. Anyone who knows me is probably sick of hearing me bang on about her all the time, but I can’t help it. I think she is brilliant. The fact that the second album was half the length of the first yet still managed to be a better album just amazes me. All eight songs on The Fame Monster could be hits, though I really do hope that Dance In The Dark is released as the next single after the sublime Alejandro. I don’t know about you but I think good pop music should be catchy, and all the songs on that album pretty much define ‘catchy’. N’est-ce pas?
Other names and faces I’ve loved in recent times include Susan Boyle. She’s the easiest target for jokes going, which annoys me a bit because I think the woman is so darned lovely. Insanely talented as well. I Dreamed A Dream is not a bad album, as albums go. The trademark vibrato
gets a bit strained on the possibly misjudged Madonna cover, You’ll See, but as soon as you hear the title song, followed by Julie London’s soulful classic Cry Me A River, then later on the anthemic Up To The Mountain, you’ll know why she should have won Britain’s Got Talent. I’m guessing she isn’t going to have a long and illustrious chart career, but hopefully that won’t stop her from releasing more albums. Let’s face it, many of the biggest artists out there simply don’t have top ten hits. Part of me would love to see her go on stage, in some sort of glitzy West End production, though whether she would have the stamina is open to question.
What the hell happened to Leona Lewis? It was all looking so good three years ago. Spirit was number one in America and Europe, the singles were selling by the bucketload everywhere, and her face was unavoidable. Her star wasn’t meant to stop rising, but apparently it did when the disappointing Echo came out. A bad choice of name if ever there was one – because it was truly only an echo of the first album. Trying to repeat your initial success with the same formula never works, no matter who you are. Happy, an undoubtedly brilliant song, was undoubtedly a flop in the record company’s eyes, selling just a few thousand copies in America when it came out. America, the dream of all pop singers, had clearly become such an obsession for Leona’s management that the second album was almost doomed to fail there. Its success in Europe, on the other hand, could hardly be considered a failure, though as a project it ended up being forgotten all too quickly and there wasn’t even a third single from the LP. It’s upsetting, really. Like Gordon Brown I am sure Team Leona will attempt to soldier on, in spite of al the signs telling them to give up now. They got complacent, that was the problem. Every song on Echo was trying to be like Halo; the attempt was so shallow it was impossible not to see through.
Next time, I will analyze the latest offering from Scouting For Girls, who pulled off possibly the biggest chart upset of the year last weekend by knocking Lady Gaga off the top spot. I will find it very hard to forgive them for that, even if the lead singer Roy is cute.
