Mid-Year Lists 2010

[koganbot]

Mid-Year Lists 2010

Singles First Half 2010: "Blah Blah Blah" is the big hairy dance-mess that's dancing over the world, while Aggro and Dizzee are the only other representatives here of 2010's dance-pop mess. Not enough country on this list, and at this time of year that's usually my fault, but this time I think it's country's. (Probably not enough dancehall or hip-hop or kuduro either, but vuvuzelas are represented.)

1. Ke$ha ft. 3OH!3 "Blah Blah Blah"
2. Selena Gomez & the Scene "Naturally"
3. Princesa "Más Fuego"
4. DJ Sbu "Vuvuzela Bafana"
5. I Blåme Coco ft. Robyn "Caesar"
6. Intocable "Estamos en Algo"
7. Lil Wayne ft. Eminem "Drop The World"
8. Dizzee Rascal & Florence + The Machine "You Got The Dirtee Love"
9. Didi Benami "Play With Fire"
10. Wiley & Chew Fu "Take That"
11. Little Big Town "Little White Church"
12. Didi Benami "Rhiannon"
13. M.I.A. "Born Free"
14. Hurts "Wonderful Life"
15. Rihanna "Te Amo"
16. Martina McBride "Wrong Baby Wrong Baby Wrong"
17. Wiley ft. Emili Sandé "Never Be Your Woman"
18. Sade "Soldier Of Love"
19. 2NE1 "Try To Follow Me" (a.k.a. "Follow Me")
20. Katie Melua "The Flood"
21. Dizzee Rascal "Dirtee Disco"
22. Sophie Ellis-Bextor "Bittersweet"
23. Tinie Tempah "Pass Out"
24. SNSD "Oh!"
25. Aggro Santos ft. Kimberly Wyatt "Candy"
26. Plan B "She Said"
27. Lena "Satellite"
28. Trace Adkins "Ala-Freakin-Bama"
29. DJ Zinc ft. Ms. Dynamite "Wile Out"
30. Cali Swag District "Teach Me How To Dougie"
31. Laura Bell Bundy "Giddy On Up"

New year's irresolution: I did not begin the year by saying to myself, "2010 will be the year when I actually like a Katie Melua single."

My tracks list (as opposed to this singles list, though with huge overlap) is over on poptimists.

Country Singles First Half 2010:

1. Little Big Town "Little White Church"
2. Martina McBride "Wrong Baby Wrong Baby Wrong"
3. Trace Adkins "Ala-Freakin-Bama"
4. Laura Bell Bundy "Giddy On Up"
5. Kenny Chesney "Ain't Back Yet"
6. Brad Paisley "Water"
7. Jaron And The Long Road To Love "Pray For You"
8. Sarah Darling "Whenever It Rains"
9. Jake Owen "Tell Me"
10. Randy Montana "Ain't Much Left Of Lovin' You"

Albums First Half 2010: Hmmm. I think I've listened to a grand total of eleven new albums. Now, hearing a lot by a performer can definitely enrich my understanding of that performer, albums at times can feed and grow wonderfully as tracks interact, etc., but I'm swamped in music coming at me from all directions, and I just don't know where people get the time. Here's my list so far:

1. Ke$ha Animal
2. Marina And The Diamonds The Family Jewels
3. Princesa Más Fuego

New Year's Resolution: "Will this be the year I finally fall for Allison Moorer as I always expect to but never do? Probably not."

On first listen, the SNSD album is shiny and smooth on too many of the nonsingles, but shiny and smooth can often have delayed impact and this may be a grower. Probably occupying fourth place at the moment. In quick listens neither Holly Miranda nor Kelis bathed me in warmth. Need to listen to Traband again to remind myself of who they are, where they're from, and what they sound like. I haven't listened to Kylie yet; not at all bowled over by Sleigh Bells singles, but haven't made my way to the album. And there's still a danger that if I don't find a lot I like, the Heidi Montag alb will make my top ten.

Video: Here's a vid:

"[PV]　Perfume - ナチュラルに恋して 2010.4.14発売！" (Watch on YouTube)

h/t Mat

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

More than twenty years ago, an influential article in the Harvard Business Review stated that the age of globalization would eradicate all vestiges of indigenous cultural tastes and replace them with homogenized products and services. Characterizing local consumer preferences as befuddled and idiosyncratic, the author had this advice for global corporations: “Instead of adapting to superficial and even entrenched differences within and between nations, it will seek sensibly to force suitably standardized products and practices on the entire globe” (Levitt 1983: 102). Scholars have effectively countered the idea that cultural diversity will be completely submerged by globalization in their ethnographic accounts of what actually happens to rationalized products and services at the point of consumption. There are modifications to business practices and offerings, as in McDonald’s in East Asia (Watson 1997), and local responses to transnationally circulated images, as in bridal photography in Taiwan, which is
“full of Taiwanese agency” (Adrian 2003:12). Condry (2000) shows how American hip-hop is mediated in Japan thorough local sites and language. These and other studies illuminate the manner in which borrowed elements are given new meanings, uses, and values when they arrive at a new cultural setting (Howes 1996), highlighting the agency and innovation enabled by consumption activities (D. Miller 1995). Anew focus on breasts as an aspect of female beauty, which I believe is linked to American beauty imaging, nevertheless did not result in massive numbers of women going to surgeons for implants. Instead they seek noninvasive alternatives, including prayer at a Shinto shrine. The ways in which beauty is formulated in Japan are complex, and there are at least four dimensions that take us beyond simplistic notions of uninvited homogeneity and avid imitation.

One point to keep in mind is that some contemporary beauty practices reflect indigenous ideas. Pale skin was valued during the premodern period among male and female nobility, but over time the white face became a marker of ideal womanhood for middle-class women (Ashikari
2003). Contemporary Japanese consumption of skin-lightening products is linked to ideas with their own local history, so to claim that a desire for pale skin is merely a new form of postwar deracialization brought about by hegemonic Euroamerican beauty ideology is a failed analysis based on a belief that the West is always in an ascendant position. Within the Japanese beauty industry, many products and services, including knowledge about skin care, are described as superior to foreign ones by virtue of their presumed status as natively Japanese.

A process of cultural blending has been going on for more than a century, as Japanese have engaged in creative syncretism within mass culture forms since the 1800s. During the prewar period, people of all classes were actively struggling over the meanings, symbols, and images they encountered through consumption of new mass-produced goods, which even then were not synonymous with global homogenization. During the 1920s Japanese scholars began the study of “modernology ” and were producing analyses that worked against a simple dichotomy between West and East (Silverberg 1992). This process continues today, as many forms of beauty meld East Asian and foreign (most often Euroamerican) ideas. Tobin (1992) uses the idea of “domestication” for this phenomenon, but I think the concept of creolization formulated by Hannerz (1987) also provides a framework for discussion of this dimension. Creolization (I also use the terms syncretic and syncretization in this book) is a process of cultural interpenetration, an intermingling of two or more discrete traditions or cultures to form a unique outcome. One example is an aesthetic salon treatment called the Royal Hawai‘ian Facial, which includes face exfoliation using a small electrical unit that looks something like a mini-sander, a beautifying device I doubt was a traditional part of Hawai‘ian massage.

[(Anonymous)]

In addition, it is not only that “outside” ideas are combined to create new creolized forms. Together with creolization is co-occurrence of the Japan-created Other and a reinvented notion of the traditional in unblended coexistence. Goldstein-Gidoni (2001) presents a refined thinking about the processes in which the foreign and the local interact through examination of patterns and changes in the modern Japanese wedding ceremony. What she describes is neither cultural homogenization nor creolization, but rather a complex domain where imaginary or contrived Western and Japanese constructions commingle. The artificial wedding cake and fake chapel are Japanese abstractions of Western ritual, and the traditional Shinto wedding is not rooted in legend but is a Meiji-era (1868–1912) invention. Similarly, “French” or “South Asian” beauty industry goods and services often do not “arrive” in Japan but are created there. Thus we find an aesthetic salon treatment based on Western astrological signs and Shiseido’s faux-French Clé de Peau Beauté series of skincare products. Aesthetic salons are always busy inventing putatively indigenous beauty treatments, such as the Ama Massage, named after Japanese women shellfish divers. Despite its venerable Taoist name, the Yin Yang Five Elements treatment originated in the minds of the marketing staff at an aesthetic salon, not in the ancient Chinese past.

(end of quote)

I think this process is the same, and you could check how American R&B goes in South Korea or France from “originator” to specific bits that fit with the local thing… But there are scholar books about reggae, hip-hop, hardcore rock and jazz in Japan, so probably they could give you a better framework than what I can do…

[koganbot]

I knew Laura Miller slightly when I lived in San Francisco - assuming it's the same Laura Miller, and given her interests and writing style it probably is. I'm impressed with her thoughtfulness here.