Today's time waster

[venta]

A while ago a friend of mine said that he considered The Rubettes' Sugar Baby Love[*] to be the perfect pop song.

I'm not sure what I would suggest...

A perfect pop song would need to be short (a good example of how being too long can spoil a song can be found in Kenickie's Punka - a great song, I think, but would be so much greater if they'd had the sense to stop about half way through).

I think it wants a chorus, almost by definition. And has to be something you can dance about like a twat to, if you're so inclined. Probably something you can recognise within the first bar and a half, across a dancefloor...

Any thoughts ? Defining "pop" is, of course, left as an exercise for the reader.

[*] at least, I think he did. Richard, if you're reading, am I right?

Comments

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

There She Goes, the Las. Of course.

I refuse to put an apostrophe their name on principle. But nevertheless it is a small and perfectly formed pop ditty.

It loses out on the "dance like a twat" criterion, though, as does Love My Way by the Psychadelic Furs. Never tried to dance to Paranoid by Green Day, but it might work.

Maybe Teenage Kicks, the Undertones. However, I think that if you make the dancing criterion genuinely important, you have to look to Tainted Love (Soft Cell's is the version I'm thinking of).

More recently, we can consider Envy by Ash (or, if we don't like that, Girl From Mars or Kung Fu can stand in). Fell in Love With a Girl by the White Stripes also ranks highly in last year's offerings, and I'm told there's a band called The Strokes who are very much into the classic pop song format. In Too Deep by Sum 41? Not sure.

Obviously there are any number of songs that I hate which are perfect pop entirely by design. Messrs Stock, Aitkin, Waterman, Holland, Dozier and Holland are responsible for many of them, and Britney has some under her belt. Unless that's her skirt, I can never be entirely sure.

[triskellian]

Britney has some under her belt
Speaking as a person who has involuntarily been treated to most of Britney's hits over the last few days, I'd say she has precisely one perfect pop song under her belt (or skirt, if you prefer). But I do think it's a rather good perfect pop song. Although I'm aware that you will forever think less of me as a result ;-)

[addedentry.livejournal.com]

When you've got the one perfect pop song, why mess with the formula? I've bought it several times over...

[triskellian]

Oh, no, I reckon she has three songs, of which one is much, much better than the others, but sadly it's the one she's only released once. One of the others is OK, but the third one, which seems to make up the vast majority of stuff she releases, is utter rubbish <sigh>

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

Duh, sorry, Basket Case by Green Day. It's not called Paranoid at all.