Essential MP3 for your New Year party

DJ Earworm's mash-up of Billboard's Top 25 singles of the year has become an annual staple. This year's edition, featuring Lady Gaga, Eminem and Usher eeps the quality threshold ridiculously high... even if there's a little too much Ke$ha for my liking.

DJ Earworm - United State Of Pop 2010

You can download the MP3 from DJ Earworm's official website for tonight's festivities. And if you like that, you should also check out the mix he did for Capital FM's Summer Ball in June which, if anything, is even better.

DJ Earworm - Like OMG, Baby

Those of you looking for something a bit more "credible" could also check out Magnetic Man's excellent Essential Mix on Radio 1's iPlayer page [link here] or Gilles Peterson and Thom Yorke's spiffing 120 minutes of politics'n'chat'n'music, which the Beeb repeated earlier this week. [link here]

And with that, I bade farewell to 2010 and look forward to seeing you all in 2011. Hope you have a great night! Mrdiscopop

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2010 in crap lyrics

Next week's rundown of my top 10 singles and albums of 2010 (why do it before the year ends?) will confirm what a great year this has been for music. From Robyn's rat-a-tat pop attack on the nation's hearts and dancefloors, to Gil Scott Heron's thoughtful, composed reflections on heritage and death, there's been a lot to celebrate.

Lyrically, though, it's been a rough 12 months. We don't need pop music to win Pulitzer Prizes, or even aspire to being educational, but it would be nice if people could adhere to the basic rules of English. And so I present to you the Discopop Directory year in crap lyrics. Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy ride (unless you're not in a car, in which case just don't make any sudden movements. You might knock over that coffee mug).

WORST GRAMMAR: Take That - The Flood
"There was more of them than us / now they'll never dance again."

Oh, Gary. "Was" is the singular variant of the past participle of the verb "to be". You must know that the correct word in this context was "were"? The clue is in the fact that there was more than one person not dancing again (a line I'm pretty sure you've stolen from George Michael without really understanding what it meant).

THE PERSISTENT SEX PEST AWARD: Taio Cruz ft Ke$ha - Dirty Picture
"Take a dirty picture for me / Take a dirty picture / Just take a dirty picture for me / Take a dirty picture."

Dear Taio Cruz, if she still hasn't sent you a picture by now, it's probably safe to assume she's not interested.

WORST INTERNAL LOGIC: JLS - Love You More
"On day four and five and six I don’t know what you did."
"Day five you spent it with me."

I suppose the only way these two lines could make sense is if the girl had been seeing all four members of JLS separately, without any of them ever finding out, even after they'd recorded the song. Which makes them a very special kind of stupid.

MOST GIBBERISH IN AN ALBUM HAILED AS A CRITICAL MASTERPIECE: The National - High Violet
"It's a terrible love and I'm walking with spiders."
"I was afraid I'd eat your brains / cos I am evil"

This is perhaps a little unfair - as The National's Matt Berninger does provide one of the year's best topical choruses in Bloodbuzz Ohio: "I still owe money/ To the money/ To the money I owe". But High Violet contains too many other examples of a lyricist striving for twisted, gothic melodrama and coming up with schoolboy ghost story nonsense. My favourite is probably: "I defend my family with my orange umbrella". This is what the NME considers to be "a goldmine of pithy insight".

THE TRUTH SERUM AWARD: Sugababes - Wear My Kiss
"I'm just a pretty little thing that'll make you wanna sing."

AKA The "beautiful robots standing alone prize", this is the moment when The Sugababes finally shed the last veneer of credibility and admitted that they were mere pop puppets, gyrating mirthlessly for your pleasure. A sad end.

THE PROFESSOR BRIAN COX AWARD FOR MIS-UNDERSTANDING THE PROPERTIES OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM: Katy Perry - Firework
"Boom, boom, boom / Even brighter than the moon, moon moon."

The moon is a solid lump of rock, weighing an impressive 7.3477 × 10²² kg. It is not a source of light, merely reflecting rays from the sun. So it can't be bright. That's why there's an eclipse when it passes between the earth and the sun. Like, duh.

THE 'I'M A TOTAL STUD, ME' AWARD FOR LACK OF SELF-AWARENESS: Professor Green - Need You Tonight
"It's just a song, in real life this would never happen to me / I am a pimp. Women chase me, I do not chase women!"

The conceit of Need You Tonight - man pines after girl who treats him like dirt - is the one saving grace of a record that rhymes "stereotypical man" with "stereotypical man". But Pro Green wastes all the sympathy we may have had for him with the clumsy, delusional pay-off.

Over on the BBC's peerless ChartBlog, Fraser McAlpine imagined how the rap continued after the fade out: "...and not just ugly women either! Really hot women! Like I can go into a club, right, and all the hot women will be all over me and all the munters and the boyfriends will all disappear suddenly like magic. It's amazing, I've even seen CCTV footage of it happening..."

LAMEST ATTEMPT AT COURTING CONTROVERSY: Enrique Iglesias - Tonight (I'm Fucking You)
"You know my motivation, given my reputation / Please excuse me, I don't mean to be rude / But tonight I'm fucking you."

Taking what Cee-Lo did with the tongue-in-cheek profanities of F**k You and using it for evil. A foetus would consider this song immature.

THE 'OH PLEASE JUST FUCK OFF' AWARD: Travie McCoy - Billionaire
"I’d probably pull an Angelina and Brad Pitt / And adopt a bunch of babies that ain’t never had shit."

This song could have been cheerful and optimistic. A dreamer's anthem for the times your paycheque doesn't quite stretch to the end of the month. But Travie trips up on his own guilty conscience and tries to justify why he, as a wealthy man, dreams of earning more. So he promises to sort out the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, end the recession and adopt some needy babies. It's so insanely crass and irksome, it makes me splutter with indignation. And don't even get me started on the fact that he changed his name from Travis to Travie...

WORST ATTEMPT TO CROW-BAR THE WORD 'SARCOPHAGUS' INTO A SONG: Kanye West - Monster
"Have you ever had sex with a Pharoah? / I put the pussy in a sarcophagus / now she claiming I bruised her oesophagus."

Do I need to say any more on this one? Actually, yes, because a few of you got in touch to protest. First up, I concede it's a great rhyme. But it feels like Kanye has accepted a dare, like when we used to dare classmates to use words like 'plinth' or 'bumhole' in an exam paper. And that's why it earns its place in the list... If you've got any more suggestions, stick 'em in the comments section. I'd love to hear from you.

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Anticipation builds for James and James

They may not be able to afford a decent photographer, but these two men are being tipped for big things in 2011.

On the left we have Mr James Blake. I've written about him a couple of times (here and here) and yesterday, his forthcoming, self-titled debut album leaked online. Polydor instantly issued a "we will hunt you down and beat you with a cricket ball in a sock" warning to everyone who'd received a watermarked copy of the record. And also to some people who hadn't, just in case.

Still, leaks are a sure sign of feverish anticipation - and not without reason, because James Blake is officially "a good thing". His roots are in dubstep, but he has much broader horizons. Incorporating soulful vocals, twisted samples, and bowel-tickling bass, his songs are at once abstract and full of emotion.

I haven't downloaded the leaked record because I am an honest person (and also because my PC has gone nuts). But here's a video of him performing album track The Wilhelm Scream at the Royal Northern College of Music last week. It's sublime.

James Blake - The Wilhelm Scream

The man on the right is another dubstep-but-not-dubstep artist called James... He is 27-year-old Jamie Woon, a Brit-school graduate whose mum used to sing backing vocals for Stock Aitken and Waterman.

His oeuvre is dusky, sepia-toned electronica, and his current single is the gorgeously sedative Night Air.

Jamie Woon - Night Air

Isn't it nice to see the return of intelligent, emotional dance music?

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It's a hip-hop Christmas, yo

Ahh, Christmas. The snow is on the ground, the trees are festooned with decorations and little orphan children are pressing their noses up against my window, watching hungrily as I scoff yet another mince pie. Go away, orphan children! These mince pies are not for you. Scram! Skidaddle! And try to find yourselves a precocious ginger friend. She will be adopted by a bald millionaire who'll take pity on the orpanage and save you from your lives of grime and penury. Just like in that movie.

Anyway, one thing Christmas is definitely not associated with is hip-hop. Yet, here is Snoop Dogg, trading Gin And Juice for Mulled Wine and Figgy Pudding. He's reading the classic Clement Clark Moore poem, 'Twas The Night Before Christmas, for reasons that I have yet to fathom.

Snoop Dogg - A Christmas Story

It doesn't end there, either. Without any real explanation, someone has forced their grandmother to read out 50 Cent's vile, offensive tweets to a backing track of Christmas music (it would have been better if they'd hired some Ho Ho Ho's - crap joke ed). This one is not safe for work.

Grandma reads 50 Cent's tweets

Let's round this off with a honest, clean Christmas tune from the old skool. There aren't many good festive raps, but this 1980 classic is one of them...

"People let me tell you about last year, when that dude came flying over here". You gots to love Kurtis Blow.

Kurtis Blow - Christmas Rapping

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Kelly Clarkson - please don't spoil this song

When I hear new Kelly Clarkson material, it's always with a sense of trepidation. Although her voice is always supple and powerful, she's too often let down by mediocre material and tinny, blustering production.

However, this new song - You Still Won't Know What It's Like - sounds like it could be a good'un. First mentioned on her twitter account in October, Clarkson wrote it with her long-time musical director Jason Halbert - someone who should surely know his way around a Clarkson vocal by now.

As performed last week at the A Night For Hope Benefit Concert in the States, it's a low-key, acoustic ballad. Over brushed drums and a mournful muted trumpet, Clarkson recounts an unspecified, life-changing trauma that she needed "a year to recover" from. The opening lines are typically cheery: "When you hit the bottom, when you're left with nothing, when you can't tell the difference, you still won't know what it's like." It's relentlessy, remorselessly downbeat.

If the finished track retains this arrangement, it could be her Everybody Hurts. The danger is that it'll suddenly gain a thudding RAWK guitar line that tears Clarkson's nuanced, tender performance to shreds.

Let's cross our fingers for a bit of restraint, then, eh?

Kelly Clarkson - You Still Don't Know What It's Like

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"People throwing dinars at the belly dancers"

So goes the tremulous opening line of PJ Harvey's Written On The Forehead, which appeared online a few weeks ago to herald the mercurial singer-songwriter's return.



It's a lovely track - Harvey's haunted vocals drifting past an obscure reggae sample (Niney The Observer's excellent Blood And Fire) like a ghostly, abandoned rowing boat.

However, there are more direct songs on her new album, Let England Shake.

Next out the gates is The Last Living Rose, a straightfoward electric guitar strum with an ambling, drunken drumbeat. Harvey paints a picture of England in decay - "a filthy mess of ages and battered books" - but makes it clear she thinks of it as a place of refuge and comfort. It almost feels like a love song.

The video has been shot by photographer Seamus Murphy, combining performance footage, still images and video from a 5,000-mile road trip he took around England. Apparently, he's made short films for all 12 tracks on Let England Shake. On this evidence, they'll come together to form an understated, hypnotic companion piece to the album when it comes out on 14th February.

I can't wait.

PJ Harvey - The Last Living Rose

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