Welcome back! Like last year, we’re taking on the BBC Sound of 2012 longlist — the parts of it we haven’t covered, at least. But first, to ring in the new year, a palate cleanser…
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[4.09]
Michaela Drapes: This is exactly how I’ll remember 2011: shrilly mediocre, with occasional, albeit brief, flashes of brilliance. So, it comes as no surprise, really, this is the first Earworm mashup to date that I didn’t have the urge crank and repeat for a few days. Which is to say, the sooner I can forget the painful, crenelated treble of this mix, the better. Points given for two nice surprises, though: The first being the minimal Gaga quotient, and second, the slot machine jangle of the “Float On” sample that rides out the end of the mix via the outro for “The Show Goes On”. Somewhere, Isaac Brock is #winning, I think.
[3]
Alfred Soto: As a stew this is thin gruel. As a scrapbook it’s like staring at photos of your friend’s ugly children. As a mash-up it’s impervious to rhythm and clubfooted.
[2]
Edward Okulicz: Pop in 2011 already felt like it was devolving and becoming more simplistic. As such, this 2011 melange is both inessential and a horrifying teaser of what may come in our worst nightmares — pop already feels like a bunch of tics and disconnected lines thrown together artlessly. Doing it artfully (and this is mightily impressive) doesn’t solve the problem. And on top of that, so much fucking Katy Perry.
[3]
Iain Mew: Don’t you hate it when you’ve called someone over to listen to something really cool and both grinned at it for a bit, and then you realise that its novelty value has been expended and there are still minutes to run? The choice is either to bail out or hang on awkwardly to the end and neither seems like a great plan.
[4]
Jer Fairall: The problem with tinkering with pop texts to shape them into some kind of zeitgeist-y meaning is that the best ones have already done this. Recession-era malaise? Cee-Lo already had this covered quite well to begin with. Apocalyptic rumblings on the dance floor? Britney didn’t even give us lines that needed reading between. All this does, really, is elevate the garbage (Katy Perry, LMFAO) into a conversation it is unworthy of, yet as a composition, it must be said that these shards all snap together with surprisingly deftness. Want to know what 2011 sounded like in five easy seconds? Just jump straight to the dubstep wobble that follows Adele’s powerhouse wail of “we could have had it all.” Actually understanding why the year that was sounded the way it did, however, requires more concentrated listening than this.
[6]
John Seroff: DJ Earworm’s annual pop milkshakes tend to remind me of the will-it-blend meatloaf, Pepto-Bismol, Colt 45, banana and Fritos dare-you-to-drink-it gross outs of junior high. They’re both good at bringing people together for a few cheap shared laughs but the flavor lingers longer than you’d like and you’re gonna have a hard time keeping that mess down.
[3]
Katherine St Asaph: It’s less that the United State of Pop series has outlived its fun and more that pop in 2011 already was a mashup, shuffling vocalists occasionally between Luke and Max and Guetta but otherwise pumping out the same workmanlike bosh. So DJ Earworm substitutes thinkpiece keywords for stylistic wows: the apocalypse (ahem), whistling, dubstep, Adele. He’s still swamped by his copies and hype.
[5]
Brad Shoup: Earworm’s 2009 Billboard mix was his first with a conceptual throughline: pop as bomb shelter. The 2010 edition took an identical tack; now it’s in the damn title. One of my first thoughts was: when you invoke apocalypse this forcefully, where else can you go? But that ignores the nature of pop demographics, and denies the possibility of multiple apocalypses. “Sometimes it lasts, but sometimes the world goes boom,” note Adele, Britney and Katy, and since that’s less a narrative (something many, many music writers sweat to provide every winter) than an axiom, I can deal. Still, it really is a chore to groove to USoP tracks, concerned as they are with constructing sentences and dividing attention among a USA for Africa-sized cast. The non-vocal elements (the earworms, if you will) get shorter shrift, which leads to baffling omissions. Cee-Lo’s piano, for instance, must have been too bouncy for the theme, but it’s more ‘2011’ than Bruno Mars hissing “fire“. Instead of a true look back at a year’s chart hits, DJ Earworm gives us a tribute to a general feeling.
[4]
Pete Baran: Did we ever dream that mash-ups could be this well constructed? I guess we did, and probably assumed that the result might be something like this where any semblance of the original tracks beyond the banal are left (Earworm likes the songs, the songs that go boom). Not to be used in any way to judge the quality of 2011 as a whole (else Katy Perry appears to win 2011), but as a fun track in its own right, I’ll listen to it with a smile whenever it turns up.
[7]
Alex Ostroff: I’m a fan of the general conceit of these things, but Earworm set a high bar for himself with 2009’s Blame It On the Pop, which manages to simultaneously work as mash-up, zeitgeist and a song in its own right. Since then, it’s been diminishing returns, even as the dominance of Dr. Luke, Guetta et al. has theoretically rendered the charts even more mashable than before. Too few of the artists besides Rihanna get enough time to be recognized, let alone get an extended spotlight. Cobbling together every phrase from six different sources is clever, but it’s also confusing. Plus, the “I got that pop/dance/rock’n’roll” trick was clever the first time around. Basically, what I’m saying is that the most inspired moment the United State of Pop will ever have is neatly and perfectly inserting Beyoncé’s “but I never really had a doubt” in between two clauses of ‘I Gotta Feeling’.
[4]
Jonathan Bradley: Perhaps it’s just a result of the drab LMFAOzation of the upper ends of last year’s charts, but DJ Earworm’s Class of 2011 Yearbook is formless and uncentered in exactly the way his previous efforts weren’t. There are too few of the moments of tension and sonic conflict that gave earlier iterations of “United State of Pop” their compelling emotional tug. I count two here: the first being the snatch of Lady Gaga’s vocal from “Born This Way,” the second Adele’s in “Rolling in the Deep.” When these mixes are wonderful, it’s because they use pop to box up a year’s emotional resonances along with its cultural ones. For the sake of the past twelve months, I hope Earworm failed, not 2011.
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