The Most Artificial Song Ever

Barbie Girl. Duh.

She Makes My Nose Bleed by Mansun. Possibly the most cold, calculated and unemotive 'rock' song ever.

matt- what makes you say that? I don't like mansun but you have to hear all or 'rock' to say that.

(q prompted by schlegel in 1800 saying that '[the new mythology] must be the most artificial of all works of art, for it is to encompass all others')

Julio - it was just a horrible, horrible, cold song with one of the worst titles ever to boot.

Of course, this is all assuming you swallow the adage that 'artificial'=bad and 'real'=good, whatever those two terms mean.

"Complicated". Obviously.

Milli Vanilli, "Girl You Know It's True"

Paula Abdul & MC Skat Cat, "Opposites Attract"

Alanis Morrissette, "Thank U" (possibly the worst song of the 90s)

how about "fake" not strictly as plastic/ insincere (tho we can talk about that too cos i've got no idea what i wanted this thread to be about) but artifical as aware of its own artifice? barbie girl kinda qualifies, as in 'ha look this is a shiny pop song about shiny pop ephemera, we're all going to forget about it in ten years, this name is writ in water etc' (tho obv barbie will never die and the plastic dolls will take eons to biodegrade, meaning however violent the cultural shifts from now till forever, we'll live with a constant mattel© spectre over all our souls

uh now where was i? oh yeah once in a magnetic fields thread i think we talked about the stephen merrit hataz seeing something too self-consciously constructed in his music, as if reflection was an enemy of meaning- you either lived in the moment or thought abt it.

tiredness is becoming my central and very boring excuse for not joining the dots on anything, but i'm gonna use it again to segue into my next question and then to throw out possibly interesting bits in the hope that this thread'll evolve further when i wake up tomorrow: in the into to my edition of ulysses, the above schlegel quote was used to illustrate how he kinda predicted modernism. now attempted literature-music parallels are pretty much limited and fairly useless (not to mention probably rather r****ist), but if we're using something like that def of artifical then is the closest music/sound relative to the encyclopaedic novel 69 love songs or 'intro introspection'/every bootleg ever? do you get more of a thrill outta hearing xtina vs the strokes or teenage lust with rusty disco edges? can you, while listening, really completely separate the two? is the latter harder to achieve, if so, why?

lately i feel that a lot of what i'm loving about music has to do with undrawing and redrawing lines between the emotions i suspect the song will allow me and the emotions the song tells me to have and the emotions i want to have and the emotions i can coax out of both of us.

do you feel 'safer' in the arms of a song/sound that makes noises like it understands what you want it to do, or would you rather find unexpected acceptance in unfamiliar territory? (insert link to 'sad hip hop' thread, i think that's kinda relevant in some ways here)
i think there's a pleasure in taking what first looked like a square block and through some process (be it intimate engagement or eyes-half-closed distance) reshaping it so it fits into the circle hole.

maybe more tomorrow if any of this is coherent enough to provoke anything

i haven't heard "girl you know it's true", but if the fact that its a milli vanilli song is the qualifier for its artificiality, then why not n'sync's "girlfriend"? or "digital love"? or like any love song ever? how much of a semblance of 'meaning it' does a song need to say something convincingly meaningful about anything? 'the light 3000' sounds more heartfelt to me than 'there is a light that never goes out', and its sung by what sounds like a digital frog (no not britney)

i feel like i'm just reiterating very 'duh' things that veteran ilmers have been posting for years in reply to variations of "i can't believe i like [pop song x]!", so i'd really like robin and dom and swygart (and matt's kinda done it, but with that HUGE 'if' attached) to qualify their choices

Aretha Franklin - "R.E.S.P.E.C.T"

Bob Dylan - "Like a Rolling Stone"

anything by Jimi Hendrix

What about the works of MC Hawking?

"Girl You Know It's True" was the obvious "first into your mind", choice: there IS something about seeing old videos and knowing that they weren't actually in the studio yada yada that pushes it beyond the songs Mitch mentions

"Opposites Attract" - similar reasons: just the apotheosis of the irrelevance-of-who-was-actually-singing (nobody knew who did the rap, Abdul was routinely outsung by backing singers) in a certain sort of late 80s pop

"Thank U" - just such a repellent outpouring-of-emotions that, crucially, you feel NOBODY COULD EVER REALLY BELIEVE

artificial --> w/artifice --> trickery/craft = guitars that don't sound like guitars?

also sometimes I wonder if I have an artificial (read 'constructed', not 'fake') framework for listening, which allows me to have 'real', visceral responses to music (if the unmediated response really exists in any way)

i'd like to see a thread with the subject line "I can't believe I (don't) like liking [pop song x]!"

maybe the shaggs are the most non-artificial band evah, but listening to them is an artificial act

if ilm is intellectual intimidating, it's cos "i like pop music" = "i see light where others see none" (="i see real where others see fake")
('others' in this case refers to the majority of people talking about music online)

"Complicated" is artifical because it's so calculated. I mean, there's been military campaigns less precise than that song. Every single thing about it is intended to hit every button possible on the "oh, I'm so alternative" scale. I refuse to believe that Ms Lavinge, or the rentamodels in her video, are anything like this IRL. It's fake, but so are movies.

Gang Of Four- "Anthrax"

today i played 'a stroke of genius' for a 'discriminating listener' (well not to sound too dismissive but she gets all the 'cool' cds like the avalanches and the strokes and royksopp from her boyfriend) and a look of absolute horror came over her face (an almost exact transcript: 'oh no! IT'S SHAKIRA! NO WAIT, IT'S CHRISTINA! OH NO!!")

NKOTB - step by step. that breakdown where everybody is talking seems so calculated, like we are supposed to picture the new kids having fun while they are reciting their clever little lines.

"Red Light, Green Light" or possibly "Yummy Yummy Yummy" or "Sugar Sugar" or hell Bach's Invention #4 feels like a very smart computer wrote it for that matter.

Ah. I just went for that cos of the video.

This is easy - "Hey Jude"

is it too late to put "and why" at the end of the subject line?

wait that wouldn't read right...

oh you know what i mean

oh come on.. Jennifer Lopez..or should I say j-Lo's" jenny from the Block"

b-b-but she says herself, "I'm real"!

X-Ray Spex - "Art-I-Ficial"

The first thing that popped into my head when I read the thread name was Cher's "Believe", followed closely by Daft Punk's "Da Funk".