Another Year In America February 12, 2009

[koganbot]

I'm a hem an' a haw, an uncommitted maw, just sittin' on my borderline, wastin' time.

Eminem, Dr. Dre, 50 Cent "Crack A Bottle": Catchy enough for a tick, but depressing anyway in its lack of imagination. I wrote about this already on poptimists and I'm not inspired to write more. BORDERLINE TICK.

Dierks Bentley "Feel That Fire": I like this guy's get-out-of-town cheerfulness, but it's missing a lot of its light and cheer this time. Forced motion. Not bad, but I don't get why this is the first non-Taylor country track to cross Top 40 in two months. BORDERLINE NONTICK.

The-Dream "Rockin' That Thang": Slow mush, and enticing wiggles down in the beatbox, but with vocals that sit placidly rather than dreamily. Once again, sex is boring. NONTICK.

OK, for Dierks newbies, here he is at his best, in full canter.

Comments

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Ahhh I LOVE that Dream track! It's one of my favourite singles of the year - the sound is just so impossibly LARGE, that massive, anthemically swaying synth line and those cavernous drums. I love The-Dream's vocal too, it's like he's awed and powerless in the face of all the hugeness. Tim F's write-up is brilliant, obv.

It's probably the album of 09 I'm most hyped for - 'Let Me See The Booty', 'My Love', 'Stripper Love' and 'Right Side Of Ya Brain' are all A+ too.

[koganbot]

Could you cut and paste Tim's comment? I'm no Facebook man.

Don't know what it is about The-Dream. "Ditch That" grabs me by the throat, a lot of the rest passes me by. On this one, I like track, but want more from the center.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

'Ditch That...' might be my favourite Dream track in isolation but I always skip it when I listen to Love/Hate. Anyway:

Tim Finney (Australia) wrote on 11 February 2009 at 12:40

http://www.sendspace.com/file/wd05rv

Okay, so thus far Glamour Pop Group is a bit repetitive - didn't I talk about The-Dream last year?

Except nothing last year sounded quite "Rockin' That Thing", a song which so incomparably expands the archetypal blissed out R&B slow jam into a feast of intergalactic largesse that it struggles to be confined by the term "music" anymore. Okay, I'm a bit tipsy and exaggerating, but listen and you will get where I'm coming from. Enormous thudding drums and monumental synth-horns that could have come from an old Swizz Beats single are instead marshaled in the service of a love song of almost unbearable sickly sweetness, and the resulting conjunction of the marshall and the marital demands a video clip with The-Dream as a soldier arriving from home from war to greet his impossibly booty-equipped girlfriend.

As a singer The-Dream is moving towards some utterly zen place of beatific wonder, the vocals becoming less nuanced and the lyrics less specific because shade and chiaroscuro would undercut slightly the utopian air of satiation that surrounds this song. Instead, he hovers in almost inhuman falsetto, gently intoning placeholder platitudes: "Girl I'm in love with you baby, and I want you to know: that I'm hooked on your body and I'm tryin 'a be yours..." In this sense "Rockin' That Thing" stands in relation to The-Dream's first album in much the same manner as Taylor Swift's "Love Story" does to her first album: sacrificing some of the previously winning idiosyncracy in the service of the nobler cause of capturing the platonic ideal of romance. Except that while both tunes are consummate, "Rockin' That Thing" also has that amazing, otherworldly synth-horn airiness to remind you that underneath it all The-Dream is still an evil genius.

Also check out "My Love", dude's new collabo with Mariah - totally generic and yet 100% top marks.

[koganbot]

Many thanks. This is beautiful. Now I'll have to relisten.