billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - november 30, 2019 (VIDEO)

Oh boy, this was a total mess... and about the last time I'm properly rendering a video in 4K, because I'm not entirely pleased with how this turned out when it came to this timeline. Anyway, next up... not sure, as the schedule gets messy, but we'll see how it turns - enjoy!

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - november 30, 2019

You know, normally Billboard is a bit more organized when they delineate when their tracking year begins and ends - not this year. A lot of this is tied into some of the messiness that came when they adjusted their tracking week to be closer to current activity instead being so far post-dated, but since the calendar doesn't exactly correlate, this could well be counted as a 53rd week in this year... or the first next year. It's annoying, to say the least, but I'll adjust my records and thumbnail as we get new information.

the top ten worst hit songs of 2010 (VIDEO)

Well, this was a long time coming, but I'm happy this came out as loose and funny as it is. 

Next up... well, I put up a vote on Twitter and folks apparently wanted me to cover something else instead of AURORA and Silversun Pickups... so I've got a surprise in store. Stay tuned!

the top ten worst hit songs of 2010

...what, you thought these retrospective lists would only cover the best of the year? 

Yeah, eventually we were going to have to get here, and we might as well start with the first year in the 2010s left uncovered. But first, a quick recap of the chart trends of 2010, a year knee-deep in the club boom, somewhat evenly between the songs that believed the party would never end and those who were desperately pretending it wasn't happening at all. And what was telling was how both sides of that binary wound up on the best and worst lists, which you'd think would balance everything out. And yet that's where you'd be wrong, because the bad songs seemed to grossly outweigh the good in 2010 in hitting the lucrative balance between offensive, obnoxious, or just plain asinine. More to the point, it was also a year where flimsy production that's aged rather badly was everywhere on the Hot 100, and sometimes a song sounding like ass is all you need here.

Now granted, 2010 is one of those years where the factor of, 'Oh, this sucked, but nobody cares anymore so why revisit it', and that tends to be a hidden truth about the Hot 100 - bad trends age badly, but the songs are so disposable that nobody really cares all that much, which tends to paint the years as better than they might be. And while this is true for some forgotten crap, there'll also be hits on this list that somehow remain massive to this day, either because the artists are still celebrities - and probably shouldn't be - or the radio has entrenched them as staples because nobody with brain cells came in the day they decided on syndication. And again, the songs had to debut on the Hot 100 in 2010 - it's widely considered a pretty rough year for the charts, all the more tainted by the fact I personally spent way too much time in the club in 2010, so let's go back to the gungy afterparty rightly forgotten, and the morning hangover that somehow has not gone away, starting with...

the top ten best hit songs of 2009 (VIDEO)

Yeah, about time I got this done - enjoy!

the top ten best hit songs of 2009

So I'll admit to being surprised that this, of all things, is the next top ten people want me to cover. You'd think folks would want me to finish off the 2010s proper before going back to 2009, but there you have it.

But I get it, because while I'd struggle to call it the best of the 2000s, 2009 was a pretty glorious year. Not only did it showcase the birth of YouTube chart criticism, but it was such a potent year to cover! 2009 is widely accepted by most as the birth of the club boom, where the kinetic, rock-tinged pop of the mid-2000s picked up more layers of glitter and went to party hard, picking up a grabbag of whatever hip-hop had survived the ringtone era, whatever rock that was willing to party, and basically lock the placid country scene out of the clubhouse entirely. More to the point, it was impossible to not see 2009 as a year of reckless abandon: the economy had crashed, most of my generation was broke, and if we we didn't have money, we were going to party as if we did - it might have seemed bleak, but I think a lot of us were riding the contact high that came from a new president and a desperate desire to believe in hope... even if that contact high would lead to incoherent silliness and a hangover we'd only halfheartedly regret. But I'll say this: even if I've slowed down a little bit, it's hard not to miss the manic fun of this year, especially when there were so many great hits, so let's get things started with...

video review: 'masters of the sun vol. 1' by the black eyed peas

Hey, don't look at me like that, I didn't expect to think this'd be tolerable or passable! But hey, this was decent, I respect that.

Next up, probably Resonators and then... hmm, not sure, lot on the docket ahead. Stay tuned!

album review: 'masters of the sun vol. 1' by the black eyed peas

I'll say it right now, this feels weird.

And to explain why, we need to go back to the early 2000s, back to an era where mainstream-accessible alternative hip-hop having received a brief second wind in the late 90s seemed to be fading out again and where a hip-hop trio called the Black Eyed Peas were getting a bit of traction. They weren't a great group - the lyrics were undercooked and often felt like they were reaching for insight they could never quite achieve, but nobody could deny the hooks stuck with you, and by the time they added a girl group survivor named Fergie to their team, they started having chart success... and it was about this time their content took a sharp nose dive in quality. And while it would take the listening public until the end of the decade to pick up on it - the hooks were too damn infectious for them to give up too easily on them, especially as they pitched more organic hip-hop out for electro-pop for some of their biggest ever hits - by 2011 we as a culture were done with the Black Eyed Peas, and the group went on indefinite hiatus. Many folks thought the group was done, especially as group mastermind will.i.am released a solo project of which I thoroughly dissected before YouTube...

But now they're back. Fergie was gone, as well as any other producers - it was just will.i.am behind the boards for this - and they had promised a radical shift in sound, leaving behind the club-era electro-pop for something more downbeat, reportedly drawing on soul and jazz, something which apparently pissed off their label Interscope to no end. And more than that, The Black Eyed Peas wanted to get political again... and look, if I wasn't skeptical before, I sure as hell was now. I've long been of the opinion that bad or misguided political art can be damaging if framed in the wrong context, and I've never been confident in the lyrical skills or insight of The Black Eyed Peas... but without Fergie and those big pop hooks, their reach might wind up limited, and this just might wind up being a blip on the radar, a long-overdue comeback for the fans but barely a blip on the radar for everyone else. So okay, what did we get from Masters Of The Sun Vol. 1?