My Tasteful Year?

I'm being bowled over by taste this year. Well, not bowled over -- my knees are buckling a bit. Anyway, can't really put my finger on why, but all I want to listen to so far this year is that Spoon album, Gil Scott-Heron, and the new Massive Attack record. Oh, and occasionally Peter effing Gabriel.

Not sure what's going on; may just be a slow start to the year (none of these albums have a crack at my Top Ten). On the other end of the TASTE spectrum, the only stuff that piques my interest on the new R&B comp from Tapemasters is no-chaser Super Cheeze, like "Blame It"- and Dream-derivative (mostly for the "ooh-ooh-ooh" hook -- "we in the club like ooh!" hmmm) "In the Club Like" by RL (who?) and Black Dada's race-Flo-Rida-to-the-bottom (<--pun! Hahaha BOTTOM!) "Round Round" ("she makes that booty go..."). Both unknowns to me, both will either be non-starters or #1 on Billboard for twelve weeks, as is now customary. (BTW, I'm guessing that's "Dada" like daddy not Dali? Also, I think I'm going to pronounce RL like "Karl.")

Quite enjoying the "Get Ya Money Up" remix with Nicki Minaj who has been on 100% fire for...what, about two years now? BIG BALL DADDY NO ELPHANTIASUS.

I like that Lloyd ("Get a Room") is slowly turning into a cartoon character. And I don't mean in the way that R. Kelly is a caricature of himself, I mean like a Tex Avery character. Rolling tongue on the floor, eyes popping out. Promising development; I need to give him a little reevaluation. He's the only good thing about "BedRock" -- though conceptually I like Gudda Gudda trying to do the worst rap verse ever. I have high (low) hopes for him!

I talked about my two taste(ful) extremes with Scott Woods -- teenpop is a good barometer for this sorta thing; I have separate compartments of my brain for straight bubblegum (A*Teens) and what is, essentially, fairly tasteful stuff (much of the confessional oeuvre). And now I think after crystallizing in one genre it's starting to spread out to new pastures. Teenpop itself [of the bubblegum variety, anyway] seems a bit dried up -- or it may be that its little niche heated up just enough to bleed into main-er streams, so that I'm picking the teenpop and confessional etc. bits out of other musics without finding an obvious source. Perhaps it has something to do with TRL going off the air, I dunno.

Nicheification goes both ways -- as much as it seems that "we" are retreating to our corners, what may once have been corners are also bleeding into the center, so it's simultaneously harder to find the center and track the niche. I love it -- you know what strands you're looking for and read them out of a giant knot. But I think that it's possible that song-listening and track-keeping has become somewhat exhausting, and I'm falling back on some pretty boring stuff as my standards for long-play listening.

Hey, speaking of song-listening, EVERYONE SHOULD BE PARTICIPATING IN THE POP WORLD CUP. Don't have much to say yet, been following along fairly passively thus far, but it's great fun as always.