1. Mariah Carey - "Cruise Control": assumes slang 'n' dialect from wherever the fuck she likes, keeps it so cool that you barely even notice. I'm wondering if I could successfully suggest some kind of crazy-split between her former melismatic insanity over less batshit material and her near one-note minidiva moves obscuring and cooling off the weirdness. Missing link for me of course would be all of the stuff between these two poles, which very well might see both happening at the same time. Mariah's never exactly lacked WTF, and her WTFness seems more self-conscious these days (like in "Touch My Body," which is a little too self-aware to work as well as it could for me). So maybe this split isn't all I'd like it to be cracked up to be.
2. Solange Knowles: Some sort of inverse of Beyonce, a bruised and "fragile" sorta gal who doesn't want to get her heart broken. EXCEPT she's got the same slickness as Beyonce so the difference is mostly conceptual and not so much in the singing itself. She doesn't sound bruised and fragile. Not sure if actual bruises would make her more interesting or less -- rhythm and bruise! Which R&Bers do the confessional thing without batting an eyelash? I imagine Jordin Sparks could do it, but I'm not sure if she has yet (don't think so, though "Shy Boy" and "No Air" both skirt it in different ways -- former in low-key "I need a nice guy" content and latter in subject matter but not so much execution, which is outta whack but not exactly "bruised").
3. I really don't understand why I keep returning to Taio Cruz. He's giving me nothing to return to except competence in a genre I don't usually like that much. Maybe it's a time/place thing.
4. Revisited the Veronicas' second album and for the first half thought I might be egregiously underrating it -- by the end I thought I had it about right score-wise, just not with enough fair listening. I called 'em "cartoons" in an exchange recently, and only the second half of the album bears that out -- the first half is equally earnest and gorgeous.
5. I'm really fearing that Lil' Wayne's new album is all clever, all brain and no guts. It loses steam the more I listen to it, and I've stopped chuckling at some of my favorite one-liners. Might be a problem that the most memorable thing about it at this point is the "wooo-wooo-wooo" human police siren chorus in a track that (according to my CD) counts as a bonus (which is weird because it's weaved into the middle of the album), "Mrs. Officer."
6. Jimmy Draper writes that he's disappointed with '08 albums so far, and I'm not in total disagreement, though I like the Dolly Parton album better than he does.
7. Mike has a good post about gossip and other thangs over at Clap Clap (his posts have been pretty consistently awesome lately -- real "I'll make my own column" stuff). Reminds me of part of an exchange I had recently about my general avoidance/ignorance of fansites and magazines when it comes to teenpop stuff -- I said I usually consider it context and not source. I guess I can just say that again here -- I'm fascinated by the road he's on, but I'm not really invested in it. For one thing, I usually just don't understand the schadenfreude element of a lot of celebrity gossip culture, so when I weave it into my own little "narratives" or whatever you wanna call the makeshift canon-chiseling process, it looks markedly, and maybe to an outsider bizarrely, different from how it's widely perceived. It's like the points of gossip as mere facts to use as fairly as anything else -- I don't privilege or condemn it, just kind of use it as it suits me. And I'm not really "in conversation" with the gossip industry, either. But that isn't to say I don't think that thinking about it this way isn't interesting, and it probably makes a heckuva a lot more sense to yr avg. gossip knower-abouter than, say, integrating Ashlee Simpson tabloid and personal info into her persona (usually appropriately, and more fairly than most commentary on her, but not in any obvious or widely acknowledged way). Which is maybe to say that Mike can do bread and butter where I'm usually doing some weird novelty pastry chef shit.
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