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.

Oh, and of course...

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

Sheena is a Punk Rocker by the Ramones, which is one of the landmark singles which ensured that punk would become a subversion of the pop formula rather than a rejection of it, and without which none of these Undertones or Green Days would have been possible.

Someone has to mention...

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Walk Like an Egyptian by the Bangles.

Complete with engagingly daft lyrics, dance actions which any muppet can attempt with amusing results and a Funki Poppi Chown (TM) !

Also, I contend that the perfect pop song must have a slight aura of naffness about it so that you always feel just a little guilty admitting you like it. Without this, it might well fit into some other genre besides pop - and that would never do !

Recently became very fond of...

[condign.livejournal.com]

Leslie Carter's 'Like Wow'. This has to be the perfect pop song, or at least Bubblegum Pop, in that it says nothing interesting with a happy-clappy beat and does so in the standard amount of time. Maybe not the best pop song, or even perfect, but perhaps... the essence of a pop song, what you get when you distill bubblegum pop down to its happy silly sticky essence?

http://www.stlyrics.com/lyrics/shrek/likewow.htm

This, incidentally, was what inspired my recent burst of poetry.

[verlaine.livejournal.com]

The Auteurs did a song called "The Rubettes" (on their "How I Learned To Love The Bootboys" album), in which they took "Sugar Baby Love" and poured their usual poisons into it. I love it (the rest of the album isn't great, unfortunately).

Got to keep thinking about "the perfect popsong". Does it have to be something I actually *like*, or can I declare something to be a perfect popsong on the grounds of being vapid, saccharine, and ultimately detestable?

Sugar Baby Love

[(Anonymous)]

I am indeed reading, and I did indeed cite that as the perfect pop song. I tried to chose just one track to give that accolade to after someone else suggested a Britney track. Though of course it's a very wide field.

And yes, I too have difficulty defining the term!

-- Richard (briefly coming out of lurk mode)