news flash: music on the radio sucks

This may be a sign of my impending fogeyness, but several popular songs right now annoy me greatly. Mind, this is so often the case with rap music that I don’t even include it in “music on the radio that I might enjoy” (see A Short History of African American Music—thank you, Lil Wayne :P), but often I like pop music because it sounds similar enough to my favorite stuff by Röyksopp, Blue Foundation, and The Knife with its beats and synth-pop sound.

The first song that makes me cringe is Party in the USA by Miley Cyrus (?!). I started to hear Party in the USA the other day on the radio and didn’t realize what it was, but when I heard some lyric about “I’m at the club, they see me in my taxi”, I had to change the station. What is the obsession with singers talking about going to the club? I don’t care. There are only so many ways you can talk about being at a club, and all of them have been done, and they’re all stupid. I wish they would drop this lyric trend.

Loba/She Wolf by Shakira sounds all right, but the video is just dumb; I think it was meant entirely to show off Shakira’s admittedly awesome body (and, naturally, she dances around in a club in some parts; at least she doesn’t feel the need to sing about it). I think she would have looked better in this t-shirt though… It sounds much better in Spanish, in part because the lyrics flow better than their English counterparts, but also because I can’t understand half of what she says, so I don’t notice how dumb they are. I think a combination of Twilight and my fascination with the Anita Blake series back in high school has made me completely bored with lycanthropy.

And, finally, what is the appeal of I Gotta Feeling by Black Eyed Peas? It’s sooooo repetitive. That’s awesome that tonight’s gonna be a good night, but could you just say it once and then STFU? Move on, tell us something new; write some better lyrics. Granted, it’s not meant to stun you with its lyrical profundity, but when the lyrics are so repetitive that it gets annoying and distracts from the pleasant bass beat, it’s time to mix it up a little. According to the MetroLyrics page, it took six different people to write that song. Six. I cannot fathom how it took six people to craft that pile of lyrical crap. Thanks to the awesome image generator at Wordle, you can see a visual representation of how often particular words are used in the lyrics:

Thanks to Wordle.net for the image, SongLyrics.com for the lyrics

Wordle takes text as input and generates an image such that the more often a word is repeated in the given text, the larger that word appears in the image. As you can see, “tonight’s”, “gonna”, “good”, and “night” get repeated a bajillion times. :P You’ll notice I even gave Black Eyed Peas the benefit of the doubt by not adjusting lyrical spelling to merge “woo-hoo” and “woohooo” into one word, even though of course when you hear the song, the two sound exactly the same. “Wait, didn’t he just say that? Like, two seconds ago? Like, fifteen times in the past thirty seconds?”

</end crotchety radio music rant>