Sky Ferreira: I Blame Myself

Despite 94 aborted albums and a career-threatening drug bust, Sky Ferreira is a very good pop star. Her music sounds, as one critic put it, like its been dragged through a hedge backwards. But what a hedge, readers. What. A. Hedge.

Her album Night Time, My Time is dirty and catchy and complex and scuzzy - full of electric guitars and the sort of "I don't give a fuck" attitude that Rihanna pretends to have, while simultaneously recording incredibly mainstream pop records with Calvin Harris. Night Time is by no means perfect, but that increasingly seems like Sky Ferreira's USP.

The standout song is I Blame Myself - a minimal electro track that sees Sky take responsibility for all of her bad habits. "I blame myself for my reputation," she sings, although you're never entirely certain she means it.

The video doesn't clear things up, but it's a damn fine watch. A hat-tip to The Wire and the gangsta rap videos of the 90s, it also features some whip-cracking choreography and (George Michael alert!) a parody of her arrest. Meanwhile, she looks like a young Madonna dressed as Chrissie Hynde singing a Debbie Harry song. Those are some big shoes but on Sky Ferreira they're a snug fit.

You have to watch it on this website until Friday morning. I'll update the blog as soon as the embargo lifts. Until then, here's a rubbish 15 second teaser.


PS: Some people have accused Sky of being racist because all the dancers in this video are black (???). In response, she posted a furious status update Facebook - it's a great read.

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Songs you may have missed: New Year hangover edition

Like the rest of us, Planet Pop has taken most of the last two weeks off, so there isn't much to catch up on. But the few videos that did trickle onto the internet all herald VERY EXCITING THINGS for 2014. Here they are, in all their multifaceted glory.

1) Katy B - Crying For No Reason
FACT: Katy B's new album is going to be excellent.

FACT: Her red jumper is very festive.

FACT: This video contains more lasers than a Bond Villain's toolshed.



2) Foster The People - Feels Like Coming Of Age
FACT: Foster The People have been working with Paul Epworth of "good music (and Adele)" fame.

FACT: Their song Pumped Up Kicks is the "sixth-largest selling alternative digital song of all time" whatever that means.

FACT: Feels Like Coming Of Age already sounds like an indie disco classic, based on this 45 second preview.


BONUS FACT: Here's a video of the full song in a live environment. It's pretty damned good.



3) Sky Ferreira and Ariel Pink - My Molly
FACT: Sky Ferreira's debut album Night Time, My Time is getting a proper release in the UK later this year.

FACT: It's been four years in the making. FOUR YEARS! "You have to go through a lot of hardship before you get what you want," she noted presciently on these very pages back in 2010.

FACT: This song, a cover of Ariel Pink's My Molly, isn't on it. But it should be.



4) SBTRKT ft Sampha and Jessie Ware - Runaway
FACT: All three of these artists are releasing new music in 2014.

FACT: SBTRKT played this at the end of his set at a New Years' Eve party in Mexico.

FACT: It only lasts a minute which, after all the self-indulgent eighteen-minute "jams" of 2014 (I'm looking at you, Justin Timberlake), would be a welcome new trend for 2014.




5) Boots - Haunted
FACT: Boots is the mysterious writer/producer who cropped up on the credits to Beyonce's album, contributing to 8 of the 14 tracks.

FACT: He signed to Jay-Z's Roc Nation label last June.

FACT: The reference tracks for Beyoncé's album used to appear on his Soundcloud (including his guide vocals).

FACT: All that's there now is this gorgeous, minor key ballad. I wonder if he'll keep it for himself?





6) Bounce - New Year's Eve Fireworks mix
FACT: OK, this isn't really about an exciting artist to look out for in 2014.

FACT: But the Fireworks mix was superb... Even the bit where they mixed Another One Bites The Dust and Blurred Lines.

FACT: You can listen to it "sans explosions" below, or go over to YouTube to see the pretty lights.

And that's not a bad haul so early in the year. Let's just hope Coldplay and U2 don't turn the year into one great yawnfest, eh?

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Why pop stars need to be likeable

Remember the Lady Gaga vs Katy Perry chart battle? It only happened three weeks ago, but that was before Miley Cyrus stuck her bum in the air and her tongue in a camera, and pop imploded.

So if you've forgotten, here's what happened: Applause and Roar were released in the same week, after a leak prompted Gaga to bring her single forward. Then Katy Perry won - massively.

In fact, Roar outsold Applause by a factor of 2:1 in the US.

People were surprised - but Buzzfeed's Matthew Perpetua had a fantastically insightful, concise explanation.

Part of the reason Gaga’s song is leaving audiences cold is because, like most of her material, the song is entirely about being Lady Gaga. To fully enjoy Applause you need to buy into her stardom and be invested in her increasingly elaborate mythology.

Perry’s Roar, on the other hand, is a thoroughly generic song about self-affirmation and triumph over adversity, and though you can map the details of her personal life on to it, it’s just as easy to imagine the song being about you. Perry consistently aims for universal sentiments in her songs, and this is a big part of why she’s had significantly more success on the charts. Her hits have less cultural baggage, and far more utility.

It seems so simple, doesn't it? Be likeable. Be relatable. But artist after artist gets it wrong.

Perhaps it's not their fault. We're trained, in a post-Madonna era, to think that pop should be edgy, shocking, exciting. But it's easy to forget Madonna's career hit rock bottom when she extrapolated the success of Justify My Love (naughty, sexy) into Erotica (joyless, debauched).

A colleague at Radio One told me last week that they have trouble playing Ke$ha's music because her trashy image "puts off" a large section of their audience. That's not just an assumption - the station relentlessly tests its playlist with focus groups of real listeners. So when their drivetime host Greg James calls Miley Cyrus "ludicrous", you have to wonder if he's been getting similar feedback on her latest career moves.

With that in mind, let's take a look at the Not The One - the new release from indie-pop kid, and Capitol Records signing, Sky Ferreira.

The song is absolutely excellent: A gritty, scuzzy electro-pop smash, with a guitar line chopped out of Duran Duran's Girls On Film. But she looks unkempt, stand-offish and wasted. She stabs a man in her video. And, with appalling timing, she's just been arrested on suspicion of possession of controlled substances.

The arrest aside, it all seems calculated to make her seem "cool" but instead she comes off as haughty and unlikeable. I hope I'm wrong and Sky, who has a truckload of pop gems in her possession, can sustain a mainstream career. After all, Rihanna shows it's possible to combine rebellion with mass appeal (although I still find her a difficult person to warm to). But somehow, sadly, I doubt it's going to happen.

Sky Ferreira - Not The One

PS: I know all of the examples above are female - but the argument applies equally well to Justin Timberlake and Robin Thicke. Their lyrics are broadly similar (ie misogynist), but Thicke comes off like a creepy sexpest, while JT does everything with a cheeky tip of the hat. The point stands: People want pop stars they can relate to.

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Misery pop overload

Get ready to sob uncontrollably, because pop music is having a massive sulky lipwobble. It's like that Harry Potter book where JK Rowling suddenly remembered teenagers can get sullen and self-involved, so every other paragraph said, "Harry was consumed with frustration" or "I just feel so angry, all the time".

If you're in the mood to wrap yourself in a duvet and stare vacantly out the window thinking about the sheer futility of existence, here's the perfect soundtrack.

ARTIST: WILLOW SMITH (yes, that Willow Smith)
Title: Sugar And Spice
Really deep lyric: "I tried to be Sugar and Spice, but I'm melancholy and can't do anything right"
Reasons to be cheerful: Samples Radiohead's gloomy Pyramid Song
Misery rating: 9/10




ARTIST: SKY FERREIRA
Title: Everything Is Embarrassing
Really deep lyric: "I've been hating everything"
Giving the game away: About 3'28" into her debut TV performance, Sky breaks character with a brief dance flourish. Hang on - she's not glum at all, is she?
Misery rating: 6/10



ARTIST: ALUNAGEORGE
Title: Thinkin' About You
Really deep lyric: "My eyes don't shed tears but, boy, they bawl"
Wet blanket bonus: AlunaGeorge are covering "boo-hoo" songmeister Frank Ocean
Misery rating: 8/10

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Terry the Tarantula makes his debut

...In the new video by Sky 'still going' Ferreira.

Co-written by Shirley Manson, the track is called Red Lips and it's a short sweet sugarkick in your earholes. The video is definitely worth a watch, unless you're at work, or suffer from a fear of spiders, or a fear of spiders in the workplace, or a fear of spider's faces, or music videos, or the internet, or squirrels.

Sky Ferreira - Red Lips


I might have made up the squirrels thing.

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The Single Life

It is Friday afternoon, and you certainly don't want to hear me wittering on with my "theories" and "jokes" about pop music. Here instead is a huge collection of videos for forthcoming singles and "jukebox classics".

I have arranged them by category. Select the one that suits your mood and press play. Or press play on them all at once for a groundbreaking mini-mixtape mash-up.

STONE COLD FUNK
The James Brown-produced, devilishly saucy Sweet Charles.

Sweet Charles - Yes It's You



MINIMALIST INDIE DISCO
Why, it's Nicola Roberts-collaborators Metronomy with their slyly groovesome new single The Look. How exciting.

Metronomy - The Look



SPARKLY ELECTROPOP
The "official lyric video" (urgh) for that Sky Ferreira track I was banging on about last week.

Sky Ferreira - 99 Tears



ANYTHING WITH KANYE WEST IN IT
Hooray! It's Katy Perry's expensive video for her underwhelming new song, ET. The CGI hooves are particularly unconvincing.

Katy Perry ft Kanye West - ET



ONE OF THE BEST SONGS OF ALL TIME
This was recorded at the first ever MTV Awards. It'd be fair to say they've upped their game in the intervening 20 years.

En Vogue - My Lovin' (Never Gonna Get It)



UNCOMFORTABLE-LOOKING INDIE BAND
My favourite is the feckless Shaun Ryder lookalike in the background.

Deerhunter - Memory Boy



SUPERLATIVE HIP-HOP SPIN-OFF VANITY PROJECT
This is Gnarls Barkley supremo Danger Mouse, with Jack White and Sergio Leone's spaghetti western orchestra. From a new project called Rome, which hits the shops later this month. Genuinely terrific.

Danger Mouse and Daniele Luppi - Two Against One starring Jack White



DAVE PEARCE O'CLOCK
It's a Freemason's mix of Yasmin's new single. It's "massive", or something.

Yasmin - Finish Line (Freemasons Pegasus Club Mix)




And now that I've exhausted a week's worth of potential posts in a single article, I am going to have some beer. I hope you have some beer, too.

Happy weekend,
mrdiscopop

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Ferreira Rocher

Last time we met Sky Ferreira, back in August 2010, she told us she had double-jointed elbows and a four-octave vocal range.

This was around the time the 18-year-old released One, a moody, oscillating feedback loop of electropop that slowly seeped its way into my iTunes most-played list - but never quite managed the chart impact it deserved, stalling at 64 in the UK.

So, what's been going on since then?

1) Sky's album, due in January, has been delayed :(

2) Calvin Klein has snapped her up as the "face" of its pants (and jeans and swimwear and perfume).

3) She has entertained Twitter with pearls of wisdom such as "My pigtails hurt".

But now, at last, there's some new music. Given that Sky's producer credits are a veritable who's who of brilliant pop (Greg Kurstin, Klas Åhlund, Dallas Austin, Paul Epworth, Bloodshy & Avant) this is a good thing.

Her new EP is called As If. It's out now in the US, but seems to have fallen down the back of the iTunes sofa in the UK. Nonetheless, the five-song sampler can be heard online until someone at Apple remembers to plump the cushions.

The lead track is Sex Rules, whose sparse and punchy 80s sound brings to mind Kylie's collaborations with Calvin Harris. However, it's a struggle to ignore the toe-curling, innuendo-laden lyrics... A task made inifintely harder by the presence of this lyric video.

Sky Ferreira - Sex Rules


Other tracks on the EP include the surprisingly-not-bollocks dubstep ballad Traces, and the bizarre 108, which is about having sex with a Centenarian. No, really.

But the standout track has to be 99 Tears, which is the actual sound of a teenager strapping 18 tons of semtex to The Noisette's Don't Upset The Rhythm and blasting it into hyperspace. I approve heartily.

Sky Ferreira - 99 Tears


Hopefully the EP will surface on UK iTunes soon!

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World inclusive Sky Ferreira interview

Well, I couldn't call it an exclusive, since Sky has spent the last week speaking to most of the major music sites (and some more obscure ones as well). But good for her. It's nice to see a burgeoning pop star making an effort - and her single, One, a brooding electropop melodrama is totally worth it.

Spurred on by her tireless promotional duties, I've worked my fingers to the bone (spent 10 minutes in Photoshop) producing an artist profile, like you used to get on the back page of Look-In. Cut it out, pin it to your wall, then read the interview below. Amazing.



Hey, Sky! How are you?
I’m good, how are you?

I’m great, thanks. So, how did you choose One as the next single?
Actually, I’m surprised the label chose this as a single – I thought they weren’t going to. It’s kind of a sad song. It’s about the feeling of being numb, and wanting to feel something.

Feeling alone even though you’re with somebody.
Yeah, exactly. And it's also about being – not in an abusive relationship, but being neglected by someone.

The songs on your MySpace page showcase a lot of different styles – from glam to punk and hip-hop. Were you just casting around to find the one that suited you best?
I wanted to do each track on the album in a different genre, but it didn't turn out that way. I love doing top 40 and I love hip-hop beats, and I love 80s and 70s and French music. There’s so many different things that I love and I’m trying to combine all of it.

But I think I have a sound – it might not be a specific sound, but melodically and lyrically there’s a pattern to what I do. And my voice is pretty distinctive.

It’s quite deep for a young singer.
That's because I started off singing gospel, then I was classically trained to sing opera. I was a soprano.

What’s your range?
It used to be four octaves. I don’t know what it is now – I haven’t done the opera training for about a year.

Do you have perfect pitch as well?
I try to!

Sky Ferreira - One

Read more »

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Hands up who thinks writing pop is easy

"I don't have to worry about any pop sensibility. I can write adult songs, and I don't have to worry about choruses and hook lines."

That was John Mellencamp, talking to MTV in 2001 about his important'n'meaningful Cuttin' Heads album.

I love the arrogance of it. The way he dismisses pop music as childish and incapable of meaning. The assertion that a chorus somehow devalues a song. The belief that difficult, challenging melodies and impenetrable musical interludes are better at evoking the giddy headrush of falling in love than, say, Jackie Wilson's Sweetest Feeling.

I don't want to write off John Mellencamp (Jack and Diane is a great American rock ballad) but his point of view is wearsomely common.

Pop music isn't just silly or frivolous or obvious - although it can be all of those things. Pop is also profound (What's Going On), surprising (Hounds Of Love), inventive (Groove Is In The Heart), challenging (Papa Don't Preach), political (Paper Planes), witty (Common People) and mournful (Teardrop).

It is also incredibly hard to get right.

If you don't have the indulgence of multiple time signatures, abrupt key changes and suspended 16th notes, you have to wrestle novelty out of the standard four chord sequence... Plenty of people have done it, as this brilliant, age-old internet meme proves, but it requires a lot more discipline than John Mellencamp would have you believe.

As proof, here are two songs that haven't quite managed to get it right. The first is the Saturday's new single, Missing You, which is the musical equivalent of a post-botox episode of Desperate Housewives. Everything looks like it's in the right place, but you can't shake the eerie feeling that something essential has gone missing.

The Saturdays - Missing You


Secondly, we have Sky Ferreira's One. Again, it has all the ingredients of a hit single in 2010: Sparkly synthesizers, a Rankin-directed video, and a lyric concerning robots. But the writers have made the fateful mistake of confusing a production gimmick for a melody, and the whole thing goes flat like a glass of coke in a cupboard.

Sky Ferreira - One


Let's clear up this argument once and for all with a quote by all-round genius and pop provocateur Robert Wyatt, who sums up the key point in one perfect sentence.

"Anybody who thinks pop music's easy should try to make a pop single and find out that it isn't."

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