30-Second Song Reviews | Top 40

I liked Wall to Wall, and it hit with a whimper. Kiss Kiss was so bad it made me speechless with rage and pity, and it was number one on the Billboard Hot 100. The third single from Chris Brown’s album Exclusive has charted very well, which make me kind of nervous. The way things have been going, the more successful a Chris Brown song is, the more damage I expect it to do to my brain.

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Continue reading With You - Chris Brown

I’ll be honest right now. I have never liked an Alicia Keys song. There, I got that off my chest. I acknowledge her considerable talent, but her overblown performing style and her tendency to squawk have always left me cold. And vaguely annoyed.

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Continue reading No One - Alicia Keys

You can almost drop anything with Timbaland’s name on it to the “fantastic” pile and get on with your day. But lucky for me, he stumbles once in a while, so that the excellence doesn’t have a chance to get samey. And Elevator, the second single from Flo Rida - it’s always dangerous, that second single, after the first was a smash hit - is a likely candidate.

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Continue reading Elevator - Flo Rida featuring Timbaland

A new Paula Abdul single, huh? I’m not sure how I feel about that. A former hit machine, Paula Abdul hasn’t had a Top 10 single since 1992’s Blowing Kisses in the Wind. (Which wasn’t a great song, actually, but it illustrates the time scale nicely.) Can sixteen years of low chart performance and ultimate retirement from pop music invigorate the talents of one P. Abdul? Or is it a mid-life crisis, the former diva’s version of buying a little sportscar and wearing a toupee?

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Continue reading Dance Like There’s No Tomorrow - Paula Abdul

I’m almost too old to provide useful commentary on Janet Jackson. It does reach a point, when an artist has been around as long as Jackson has and you’ve listened to her on vinyl, on cassette, and on cd, that you have almost too many points of comparison. And she’s so, dare I say it, venerable, that you can’t judge her against the pop tarts of today either. Or can you?

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Continue reading Feedback - Janet Jackson

I had completely written Mariah Carey off before her triumphant return in The Emancipation of Mimi, so I hesitate to do so now. And I’m probably not alone; I would imagine that Mariah Carey has a huge store of goodwill left over from her last album. Whether the lead single of E=MC² is good or bad.

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Continue reading Touch My Body - Mariah Carey

OneRepublic got a huge boost from Timbaland when he included their song Apologize on his Shock Value album. Their second single, Stop & Stare, is their first without the Timbaland golden touch. From now on, it’s life on their own as one pop-rock band among many.

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Continue reading Stop & Stare - OneRepublic

The words “songwriter-pianist” will feature in every mention of Sara Bareilles, and it remains to be seen if she will go the way of so many other ivory-tickling songstresses, who either fade into obscurity or devote themselves entirely to incomprehensible sung poetry. What is it going to be? A cute twinkle and then gone? Decades of paeans to her uterus? Or maybe something in between?

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Continue reading Love Song by Sara Bareilles

You expect certain things from a new song by Wyclef Jean. You expect a vivid political awareness, spiky articulacy, broad vision. You expect it to be cool, but you also expect it to hurt your heart a bit. As the lead track from the album Carnival Vol. II: Memoirs of an Immigrant, Sweetest Girl (Dollar Bill) has heavy expectations to address.

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Continue reading Sweetest Girl (Dollar Bill) - Wyclef Jean featuring Akon, Little Wayne & Niia

You can’t open a magazine without reading about Miley Cyrus, a Disney starlet from the television show Hannah Montana. Having no children, I have existed in a completely Miley-free bubble until this very moment. But I was forced to line-dance in high school because of her father, Billy Ray Cyrus, so I suppose that practically makes me family.

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Continue reading See You Again - Miley Cyrus

A hit country song that has been tarted up and re-released as a pop single, Taylor Swift’s Teardrops on My Guitar is a song about personal experience being marketed to within an inch of its life to create the kind of crossover success previous female country artists have enjoyed. It’s all kind of seamy and obvious, but none of that matters if the song is good.

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Continue reading Teardrops on my Guitar - Taylor Swift

The first single from his new album All I Feel, Ray J needs Sexy Can I to hit big. Big enough that he might no longer be referred to in every article written about him as “younger brother of singer Brandy“. Big enough that the first thought listeners have when they hear his name isn’t, “Didn’t he have a sex tape? Or several sex tapes?” Big enough that people will actually talk about the song.

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Continue reading Sexy Can I - Ray J

It’s so obvious. Take an American country music megahit… and cross it with German dance music. It will be fantastic. Or it might be the unholy demon spawn of a seriously diseased mind. It could go either way, really, and I’m not sure which I was hoping for when I turned on What Hurts the Most by Cascada.

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Continue reading What Hurts the Most - Cascada

I know where In God’s Hands by Nelly Furtado is aiming. I know it because it’s aiming at the same spot that her single All Good Things (Come to an End) was aiming at: poetic, ethereal, moving, vivid. But it doesn’t quite get there. Not at all.

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Continue reading In God’s Hands - Nelly Furtado

Never having been a fan of the Idol shows, I tend to approach any offering from winners and wannabes with extreme caution. I turn the song on with my brain wrapped in mental plastic wrap. I will not raise my hopes, in case it’s one of the Idol songs that sucks purple donkeys. And then I get to be especially pleased that No Air, by Jordin Sparks featuring Chris Brown, doesn’t suck donkeys of any colour at all.

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Continue reading No Air - Jordin Sparks featuring Chris Brown