Pop

In June, a 20-year-old man called Jahseh Onfroy was murdered after leaving a motorcycle dealership in Deerfield Beach, Florida. Onfroy was a rapper, who recorded under the name XXXTentacion, and he had become extraordinarily successful — his two albums had reached No. 2 and No. 1 in the US, despite moderate sales, because of the amount of online plays they had received. The day after he died, my social-media timelines were full of music writers discussing his death, and the tenor — from those with kids, at least — was clear. Post after post noted that XXXTentacion was a nasty piece of work, and few should mourn him, yet the

Early in 1987, a middle-aged woman approached me on the record counter of the Slough branch of Boots. ‘What do you have by Ladysmith Black Mambazo?’ she demanded. Nothing. Boots in Slough wasn’t big on South African isicathamiya choral music. ‘Well,’ she suggested, ‘you really ought to get their records in. They’re going to be huge.’ She was wrong, but I knew why she was so sure. Ladysmith Black Mambazo had been among the standout guests on Paul Simon’s Graceland, released a few months before. Graceland made Simon, by my reckoning, the first pop star who had emerged from the rock’n’roll era to make a major cultural impact across three

Imagine living Taylor Swift’s life. She has been staggeringly, life-dominatingly famous since she was 17. Not for a single moment in her entire adulthood (she’s now 28) has she been able to do any of the everyday things the rest of us take for granted. No wonder, then, that so much of what surrounds her seems so peculiar. No wonder her last two albums (2014’s fabulous 1989, last year’s rather less fabulous Reputation) have been dominated by songs about how other people perceive her life: every thing she does, as she is well aware, goes through a filter. She sings not about her love life — her relationships with the

Grade: B Another load of SJW moppets keening over 1980s synths. ‘It only takes two seconds to say: I don’t agree with white supremacy,’ they told the Guardian. Chvrches, a Scottish trio relocated to New York, are led by the elfin and relentlessly concerned Lauren Mayberry. The Eurythmics fronted by Owen Jones, then, kind of. Just what you wanted, isn’t it? Chvrches have never had a hit but they do have a presence and reputation, acquired through endless gigging. They haven’t had a hit because their songs are not very good, if we’re honest. With this new album they have tried very hard indeed to change that by bringing in

Grade: B+ One of my favourite songs from the 1990s was about a Chinese adulteress forced to walk around town with a decomposing dead dog on her back. ‘Slow Dog’, from Belly’s debut album Star, was mental and frenetic and possessed the kind of berserk and glorious chorus most bands would kill for. The rest of the album wasn’t bad either — the sincerely odd ‘Gepetto’ and the lowering, nagging almost-hit ‘Feed The Tree’ the best of a very good bunch. How would you define Tanya Donelly’s oeuvre, other than as delightfully idiosyncratic? Alt-rock, obvs. Maybe neo-psychedelic post-grunge shoegazey power pop. Either way, it was too good to last. After

Grade: D– Kylie has a place in my heart for having made the second-best single to feature the chorus ‘na na na na na na na na’. The best was Cozy Powell’s ‘Na Na Na’ (all the better for being capitalised), but Kylie’s magnificently vacant synth pop disco lament ‘Can’t Get You Out of My Head’, written by the ubiquitous Cathy Dennis, ran it close. Everything else the pouting Aussie sockpuppet chanteuse has done has been utterly excremental, so credit to the lass for maintaining a certain consistency with her latest album Golden. It has received half-decent reviews in some quarters, but only, I suspect, from people who have either

Grade: A Yay, people with a modicum of wit. They come along so very rarely these days. A decade on and that punky, guitar-driven power-pop funk has long since been expunged. Singer Alex Kapranos expressed a wish for Franz Ferdinand to reinvent themselves — and has turned to the same source inspiration as did their recent collaborators Sparks when they, too, needed a swift reboot at the end of the 1970s: Giorgio Moroder. But Kapranos and co. have laced those metronomic German beats with camp glamour and swirling, unpredictable melodies — and, of course, the frequent touch of Bowie. This is a disco-pop album. But even at its dumbest —

Grade: B– Hey, here comes Justin, the ‘President of Pop’ and ‘one of the greatest all-around entertainers in the history of show business’, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Sheesh, shows how far a white man can go by pretending — pretending very, very hard — to be black. Maybe there’s a market in the States for the black and white minstrels after all. ‘Off to Alabamy with a banjo on ma knee’, etc. It’s at times like these I’m with the SJW kids on the subject of cultural appropriation — but only because I can’t stand this tripe. This is Timberlake’s first album in almost five years and it’s awful,

Grade: D– You’re in a minicab, on the way home from some bash that was considerably less pleasing than you had anticipated. The driver has the radio on and this limp, witless, landfill R&B crap is hammering into your sinuses. You want to tell him to turn it off right now but don’t because you are too polite, too aware of sensitivities. You want your driver to like you. I don’t know why. You sort that out with yourself. But anyway, that stuff on the radio — it’s actually Portsmouth’s gift to the world of music, digging like a maniac into the enamel of your teeth. Craig David, recently reinvented

This has not been an appalling year for pop music — it was better than 1984, for example, and 1961. Simply put, it was a year in search of a direction, one foot planted in 1980s cheese or bombast, the other still dipping its toe into the now mind-sapping boredom of EDM, with the occasional nod to a middle-class version of hip hop, a once garish and interesting subculture now utterly subsumed by the mainstream. And so everything rather swathed in both blandness and uncertainty — a year, then, without edge. Odd, really, considering the political climate. The biggest-selling albums of the year so far have come from the ubiquitous

Grade: D+ I was suckered in by the brio of Taylor Swift’s first big single, ‘Love Story’, despite the clunking lyrics, which one forgave because of her youth. Just a nice slice of maybe overproduced FM country rock with a simple, but effective, chorus. Forgive me. I did not see the monster she would become. The morphing, over nine years, into a hideous colossus, a purveyor of ever more derivative and anodyne Kardashian pop. Music built not upon a compelling melody or rhythm or slice of lyrical wit but upon the exploitation of the image she has built for herself (cleverly enough, it has to be said). She has spent

Grade: A The old Tulsa sound was a rather agreeable low-key, shuffling, blues-inflected rockabilly — primarily J.J. Cale and Leon Russell. Which then somehow mutated into the anglophile pop of Dwight Twilley. Here’s the third wave of it — probably the best yet, much though I admire all the aforementioned. A strange lady, St Vincent — in real life plain ol’ gender-fluid Annie Clark from Oklahoma. And this is another rather wonderful album from the woman. She may be this decade’s Prince, for the breadth of vision and the invention and crucial ability to wring melodies out of the dead ground. Here and there the listener must navigate around slabs

To get a reminder of how strange the 1970s were, there’s no need to plough through lengthy social and political histories. Go instead to YouTube, and watch the public-information films made for schoolchildren. Take Lonely Water (1973), in which Donald Pleasence provides the voice of death, stalking careless children and dragging them to a watery grave. There’s Apaches (1977), in which kids playing on a farm suffer various recondite forms of agricultural death (falling under the wheels of a moving tractor, drowning in slurry). Or try my personal nightmare, The Finishing Line (1977); a school sports day, played out on a railway line, which ends with the traditional sprint through

Grade: B+ Number one. Everywhere, just about. You have to say that the man has a certain sureness of touch. Hip enough not to be quite mainstream, rock enough not to be quite pop. The knowing nods — to Depeche Mode, Eno, 1970s post-punk and 1980s grandiosity and always, always, Bowie. Fifteen years on from James Murphy’s first excursion in these clothes and the man from New Jersey, now grizzled and greying, has come up with an album as good as any he’s made — which is a qualified nod of admiration: I often find his tunes too eager to please, the neatly corralled stabs of funk a little forced.

The most compelling pop singers in music right now — at least in the branch where pop singers still play guitars — were on stage last week. The 1975, fronted by Matty Healy, finished the tour in support of their second album, a US and UK number one, with a headline show at the Latitude festival, the chosen spot for recreational drug-taking by kids who have just finished their GCSEs. Ezra Furman played his most prestigious London show yet, appearing at the Barbican as part of the 20th anniversary celebrations of his label, Bella Union. Healy and Furman are very different — the one a genuine popstar, the other off