Yet Another Year In America February 25, 2010

Peas do what Haiti couldn't, displacing Ke$ha at the top. Rihanna hits the chart again, but not with the song that would seem to be her album's obvious next single, "Te Amo," an excellent combination of lilt, catchiness, and burning regret. Maybe she or the record execs fear that its subject inhibits popularity: a woman coming on to Rihanna, with Rihanna not merely letting her down gently but also feeling empty for not being able to reciprocate, trying to enunciate "I love you" herself by pondering the other woman's "I love you." If the lesbian thing had been done for titillation by a Ke$ha or Britney or Katy the audience'd find it no big deal, but my guess is that the seriousness of "Te Amo" potentially makes it too disconcerting, even though the motion of the song is breezy enough.

( Rihanna )

( OneRepublic )

Familiar riffing about Ashlee, Lindsay, and Taylor

Alfred Soto claimed over on a Justin Bieber review thread on the Jukebox that "In our many, many teen-pop discussions we rarely discuss the interaction of sexuality and the singers' self-representations" (he also claimed that gay male critics preferred male singers, which certainly didn't accord with my experience, or that of anyone else who commented). Anyhow, I took this as a challenge to engage in familiar riffing about Ashlee, Lindsay, and Taylor. You can click the link for context; here's what I wrote:

( Familiar riffing about Ashlee, Lindsay, and Taylor )

Georgia sky

Most of what I said in the previous post is stuff you've heard from me before, probably better in the earlier versions. But here remarkably I've got something I haven't said before about "Tim McGraw":

The opening lines go:

He said the way my blue eyes shined
Put those Georgia stars to shame that night
I said, "That's a lie"

What's going on (on that back road late at night) is that she knows the guy is on the make, she's letting him know she knows he's on the make, but in her heart she wants to believe it all, believe in the stars and the guy and in the beauty of whatever comes.