Frank Kogan

This'll no doubt by a xpost by the time I hit submit.

I'd forgotten Aqua, despite being the person who put "Lollipop (Candyman)" in my top ten of the '90s list. Aqua's beats might be too non-techno-aggressive to be bosh, though.

I think katstevens may be the person most responsible for popularizing the term "bosh" (at least in its poptimists use; I seem to recall that in the intertitles to the original Douglas Fairbanks' version of The Mark Of Zorro Don Diego's father always kept saying "bosh!" but I think he merely meant "nonsense," since in 1920 Eurodisco had yet to cross over to the U.S. in a major way). I don't know if Kat would endorse my view of the blah blah blah chorus as being essence du bosh, but I don't care; I think the blah-blah-blah chorus is the pinnacle of bosh, and I'll define bosh any way I want in order to get that result.

I would say that RedOne's aggressive bass push, which I don't always like, takes us near bosh (and rock, for that matter), and of course he's the producer of "Just Dance," "LoveGame," and "Poker Face." But GaGa still seems not "bosh," but something else. (Which isn't to say that she shouldn't be something else.) Didn't some of you decide last year on that ilX GaGa thread that she was old Belgian new beat?

You know, I've barely heard the Dictators. Beastie Boys certainly fight for your right to party, but in sound I'm getting them more "Kick Out The Jams" rather than "Wild Thing," which is to say not the garage Troggs punk I'm associating with "Blah Blah Blah" but the more reflective, probing punk that I wasn't calling "punk" until '77 of, say, the MC5 and the Stooges and Sex Pistols (was considering that not punk because I still associated punk with junior high school creeps playing tough, rather than thoughtful strong people probing toughness, not simply trying to act it out). Of course the MC5 covered the Troggs, but not very well.

(I'm not necessarily saying that "Blah Blah Blah" should be considered punk, by the way. Don't know how usable "punk" is as a term, anymore. Too respectable. But also, without anyone necessarily intending it, there was a sense in "Louie Louie" and "Wild Thing" that they were taking us at least a millimeter if not more away from where we'd been before, the very idea that these should be our anthemic party favors. I'd say that even Scooter has that sense. Whereas the Ke$ha party does just seem to be a niche and a cliché, the skank version of the L.A. thing, just more Hollywood Reporter and TMZ fodder. I wouldn't mind being wrong about that, though.)

people are pretending that nobody took Kid Rock or 3Oh!3 -- the former of whom I prefer to Ke$ha, the latter of whom I don't -- to task for singing about life as a big bumb party, because I thought people took them to task for that all the time

Not sure what you mean here; from the Jukebox thread a lot of the complaint about Ke$ha - at least a lot of Lex's complaints about Ke$ha - is that she's doing a boring old hat version of big dumb party, and he'd probably take Kid Rock and 3OH!3 to task for the exact same thing, and he did take Asher Roth to task for it. I mean, I don't think anyone's claiming that it's a breakthrough for Ke$ha to be taken for task for sounding like a big dumb party. Would seem to be an American perennial, the partying and the taking to task. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that supporters of John Quincy Adams took supporters of Andrew Jackson to task for dumb partying.

Shooter Jennings' "Daddy's Farm" ought to be part of this discussion, though that's a somewhat different strain of recalcitrance - the Blue Cheer strain, perhaps, mixed with Hank Jr. (whom I don't know nearly enough about). But in his way Shooter is as L.A. as Ke$ha is. --Sad that I didn't have enough nominations to get "Daddy's Farm" into the poptimists best of 2005 thing. By the way, while you weren't looking, Miranda Lambert and - finally - Ashlee Simpson got tracks that qualified for the next round of the best of the 2000s