A Deeper Context: Scissor Sisters Daringly Sizzles

Scissor Sisters. This band defines rad. Their campy, over-the-top and glitzy personas are blended so greatly together that Freddie Mercury would have been satisfied. Talking about Mercury, the band’s lead singer Jake Shears shares the same spirit of him along with inspirations from David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Madonna and of course Elton John. Female lead singer Ana Matronic is also as glam. She’s the mother version of Lady Gaga, but with the bow-down-to-the- fierce bitch attitude. Matronic doesn’t sing much in the group, but her emitting Grace Jones’ nature gets her enough attention and demand on stage when she’s hyping the crowd up with her slick vulgar choice of words.

As for the music, their sound is certainly eclectic. You can hear sounds of glam electro rock from the 80’s where Andy Warhol would have probably taken them as his residence muse band at the factory. Even though their fame in America has been dismal because of the conservative issues (not New York and LA though), but the rest of the world has embraced them. Thank god. Their sound throughout the three studio albums they have released has been a hybrid of glam electro rock with some parental advisory cartoon like sensibilities. So yes, your under 15 child may not be socially qualified to be listening to them talking about rough sex and they instead should go back to their Disney Channel gods or Mr Bieber. With their first two albums Scissor Sisters and Ta-Dah, it was rather a twin-like creation. Both of them shared the same vein of sound explained earlier. However, their latest album Night Work is more cohesive and conceptually has more maturity to their sound and presentation even they are still trying to get listeners to dance and get shit-wrecked. Credits go to executive producer Stuart Price who I worship. I dream one day he works with Gaga and create a new level of music magic.

I favored their debut single Comfortably Numb because it was a time where I remembered my dad got so excited to introduce them to me and I was amazed how diversify he was. I mean, my dad’s fucking traditional with fucking traditional morals and for him to introduce a band where the lead singer sings in jockstraps and S&M leather outfits was just WTF? What The Fuck? Oh, but forgot, Jake Shears is really similar to Mick Jagger and Jagger is my dad’s musical god. This song was a full-blown electronic glam cover version of Pink Floyd’s classic that put them on the map. I still find it amazing that the band had the guts to release a cover song as their debut single. But it paid off! This song didn’t really radiate their upbeat essence. It was more moody and formal. I must agree I wasn’t too crazy about this song at first when my dad introduce me to them in the car on a Sunday afternoon going to brunch, but years later I’m musically hallucinated on them. The video itself was also sick. It had this deep neon green Matrix-esque ocean theme going on with everyone floating around in 80’s Bee Gee Saturday Night Live flamboyant outfits with sea animals swimming around them. I thought it was fucking genius, different and effectively inexpensive. It was a good stepping-stone for them to project their artistic vision.

But my favorite single from them so far has to be Fire With Fire. The Glastonbury-ready tune had hints of inspirational Elton John lyrics and vocal production set along with mild electronic beats underlying the main simple pop-rock beat. It was a different moment for Scissor’s Sister. It was a comeback for them in a more poised and well-mannered way, which disappointed some, but I was in to it. The video became my favorite of 2010. The video embodies my taste, creative vision and the life I live and want to live in the future. The streaks of sleek glam lights in New York City set during a loneliness night just gives me Goosebumps and a rush of emotion every time I watch it. It was like this epiphany moment for me where sometime we can’t really wait for acceptance from others about our identity, but instead we have to be fucking brave and live life through our own judgments and wants. Very deep stuff. I know. Next.

What they do next will be interesting. I don’t expect them to change much, but I want them to elevate themselves by maybe hiring more mainstream producers and try to produce a top 40 hit single worldwide. They had a global hit minus USA with I Don’t Feel Like Dancing, but I want them to conquer America and put it in their faces. When it happens, it’ll mark a new social change in American music history and prove why U2’s front man Bono has once declared them has "the best pop band right now".

A Deeper Context: Femme Fatale = Britney's Elevation

Britney Spears. Femme Fatale. After listening to Ms. Spears’ seventh studio album, the world can rejoice that she’s back better than ever. Musically. Not visually. The disc is jammed packed with heavy feel good sounds merged with European dance vibes against light industrial and cheeky sonic sounding elements. I feel that Britney has a more eclectic mainstream dance sound comparing to Gaga where it’s more limited, but more classic sounding. With Britney it works for the moment, but not timelessly. Vocally, Britney also explored a wide range of variety like always. She has flirty moments. Bitchy moments. Seductive moments. However, her voice was heavily computerized and a ballad would have shown her ability.

The first song on the disc is the addictive Ke$ha penned Till The World Ends. I was reluctant to it at first, but have been listening to it like crack right now. It has this rejoice dance apocalyptic sound to it, which the video also portrayed. Both the video and song was down right a Britney classic. It played with what the world loves her for. It doesn’t sound or looked desperate of her trying to be unique. Britney is iconic because of this. Yes, her dancing in the video is still disappointing, but she shows hope. Britney’s management was also clever in releasing an official remix version featuring Ke$ha and the fucking fierce Nicki Minaj (Britney's Summer Tour special guest), which I must that it was a bold move and new marketing strategy to get the song even higher on the charts since it’s predicted to crack the Top 5 on Billboard Hot 100 for the first week of May. Still, the original is my choice.

Another standout track is the infectiously bitch-cute How I Roll. It’s actually my favorite from the album and it's somehow strange because I'm not a huge fan of album filler tracks and usually gravitate towards the singles because they catchy, but somehow this song worked its magic on me. Bloodshy and Avant produced it (Toxic and Piece of Me) and they created this soft electronic Robyn-esque meets diet Hip-Hop beat with Britney sounding really flirtatious even though she sings one line “You can be my thug tonight” when it sounds like “You can be my fuck tonight”. Sexual innuendos lyrics again from Brit-Brit. Clever!

Bloodyshy and Avant also produced another amazing tune titled Trip To Your Heart. Britney goes really romantic here while the beat is really European house ambient electronic influenced. What she is able to capture here is a down-to-earth persona which is infectious and proves why she’s one of the most genuine singers. And don’t be fucking lame by using her crazy-antic past as excuses. She’s gone through a lot and this song gives fans like me tears.





Criminal is also a song where Britney prevails musically. Here she’s channeling her Nelly Furtado and her approach of going completely Top 40 without sounding like Britney. Don’t be confused. It’s just not a "Britney can only do this record", but rather a song anyone could do and get a hit with it. It’s an amazing song. Mid-tempo jams with a simple percussion bombastic beat are what top the chart these days and this song is one of them. Please release this Britney!





I was also excited to hear Will.i.am production of Big Fat Bass, which was so-so. It had this good BEP club feel to it, but it wasn’t too electronic for what Will.i.am has being doing for his group which is a positive direction because this song gelled with this album's vibe well. It was a Britney song made for Britney and not a Will.i.am song sang by Britney. However, it was very frustrating at times to continuously hear the same melody played over and over again since It’s the longest song in the album with 4:45 minutes. Recycling melodies isn’t going to change the world climate.





However, sadly, with tears, Drop Dead (Beautiful) is a stupid lame-ass song. It destroyed the disk cohesiveness for greatness. Firstly, to feature this unknown artist Sabi who isn’t special in anyway was fucking annoying and the beat was this amateur urban beat sound that I wanted to vomit. It’s call ear vomit. Ear vomit is when you want to ASAP take out your earplugs or change the song instantly before you have to enter music ICU. Britney or whoever really missed the mark here because all of her deluxe album version songs were a million times better than this song.





Overall, this album highlighted Britney’s iconography and why she’s pushing the boundaries with pop music. Executive producers Dr.Luke and Max Martin showed great chemistry with Britney in making the CD cohesive in most part, but that each song has it’s own identity. Plus, it was nice to see Britney in a positive state-of-mind throughout the disk and that she wanted to give the world a feel-good vibe with this disc. This is stepping to right direction for Britney. But a bit of more promotion for the album would generate the Britney-level sales (it’s gone platinum already, but Britney is triple platinum level) and please please please please just fucking dance. Do you want me to capitalize it to show the importance? DANCE. Do you need the extra exclamation mark? DANCE! Underline it? DANCE! You are known as a dancer and right now the world knows you as a lip-singer and I’m sure you’re not happy with that.  Here is my evidence and please not be bias if you're a Britney fan and make excuses after excuses for her.

Don’t give me death threats Britney fans. Just speaking the truth. Ok, I’ll stop now before this post will get more sour.

A Deeper Context: The Born This Way Factor

Lady Gaga. Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta. Born This Way. I wanted to write about this song since the very first minute I heard it and just be fucking melodramatic in telling how it has changed my life and has become the soundtrack song of my life. But I waited. I waited till now. Being already played over 400 times on my iTunes+iPod- it explains something. I must say I was quite critical seeing the lyrics at first. With the words being so direct and socially vulgar with race and gender issue- I felt Gaga might have been too ambitious too soon. She’s not like Madonna where there’s already many albums and materials released that can back up her legendary status. However, what has happen with this song? You Google it. Yes, I admit it sounds like Madonna’s late 80’s Express Yourself and Vogue, but listen up fucking lame haters….there’s a big difference between imitating and inspiring. Music is a universal language that is created by the inspiration of one another and this is no difference here. People should give Gaga props for bringing electronic dance music back to Top 40 and big again. She paved a new pop-dance pathway for our generation and we’re going to continue to bring her down by one song, which I must say have saved millions of live? Just be positive that Express Yourself and Born This Way are telling you to embrace your uniqueness and love the uniqueness of others.

On the music production side, Born This Way has a hybrid of Electronic, Pop, East European Industrial and even Gospel accent sounds, which is blended to ear orgasm perfection. Producer Fernando Garibay and DJ White Shadow was able to capture the 90’s empowering vibe that artist like TLC, Whitney and MJ achieved so immensely. It was all about how you could injected inspiring lyrics to a radio commercial song, make it ready for the clubs and just wants you to go out onto the streets and be who you want to be. I also applaud the fact that this song is actually lighter in tone compared to her previous 


hits like Bad Romance, Telephone and Poker Face even if the message is universally groundbreaking.

Now moving on the music video. Lady Gaga…7:20 minutes. Nick Knight direct it. Laurieann Gibson choreographed it. Nicola Formichetti styled it. Little Monsters like us just died. Died because the fierceness, ferociousness and ‘Gaga is one motherfucking legend’ness. I mean, this is visually stunning yet again. I don’t know how this woman does it. To create this concept of giving birth to a new race was just...Gaga please adopt me. At least I know I’m whole-heartedly belonged to this race. I credit Andy Warhol and Michael Jackson as my creative gods, and Gaga certainly proves she’s the goddess here. She somehow knows how to push the commercial art boundary into fine art so effortlessly and has so much sentimental symbolisms. However, being unbiased, I feel this video might be too avant-garde for the normal public right now. It’s not like the Bad Romance video which had the right pop-music video elevation ingredient. This video might have taken the abstract art imagery too far. It’s not wrong, but I feel some people may be put off by it. What Gaga has to do now is to somehow lighten the visual imagery of her next videos and maybe put its mentality more straightforward like Telephone and Paparazzi. Still, I’m so fucking excited for her directorial debut for the Judas music video. I expect nothing less than spectacular.

Her Grammy Awards performance of the song was a like eye-ecstasy for me. I’m still high from it. It was beyond words. Gaga and Gibson somehow played the minimalistic route with the performance concept which was too clever. They let the song speak for itself. The choreography was also a master class. It has this unique-tailored for Gaga only stamp to it, but it’s still modern with the Willow’s Whip My Hair tribute. Gibson choreographs for everyone in the business from Diddy to Katy Perry, but her work with Gaga is always on a new level. It’s like what Brian Friedman does with Britney Spears (8 years ago though). The performance’s music arrangement was also interesting. It had this weird church organ breakdown in the middle, which shows that Gaga can fucking sing! She’s not those lip-synching pop queens I can officially declare.  Now there was the Hussein Chalayan Egg Vessel that Gaga made her historic grand entrance. This was just pure wackiness meets the God of genius. Gaga whores for attention, but the attention is for her artistry and not about going to an LA club, get plastered and then receive a DUI.

On a side note, I have to highlight that Gaga released a country-road version of the song to mark the song’s sixth week reign on the Billboard Hot 100 and the new version could instantly be featured on a Clint Eastwood Cowboy movie if he decides to make one in this new era. It has this psychedelic-murder-esque meets light Bruce Springsteen blue-collar sound to it which feels like your epically lost in the Nevada desert. Hopefully, it’ll receive some airplay on country radio.

Born This Way has changed my life and this song defines who I am. I don’t belong to a gender or race group mentioned in the song, but I live through the spirit of the song in embracing my inner-self and who I am as a human being. But what human being that is will remain within myself. I’m too complex as a person. It’s a fucking waste of time for you to question me. 

A Deeper Context: Nicki Minaj Works in the Electronic-Pop Era

Nicki Minaj. I will admit that I’ve always had the tendency to hate pure rap music. I just can’t stand the idea of listening to music where someone just speaks really quickly with no melody, but of course the classic hip-hop records with the damn catchy chorus usually sung by female singers I could buy into (P.Diddy’s I’ll Be Missing You featuring Faith Evans is one my fav). But you know the pure rap lyrics about having “fuck festivals all day all night in countless position and fighting in the projects like tough thugs” aren’t my forte. Maybe I don’t live that type of lifestyle that’s why (I grew up having my parents working in the hotel industry and providing me a damn materialistically fortunate childhood). Then came along Miss. Minaj and everything changed. This woman is saving hip-hop period. She has the ability for me to sit and listen to her whole debut album Pink Friday including the controversial track, Roman’s Revenge featuring Eminem, and just get musically fucking high. People may argue that Roman’s Revenge is a very hard-hitting pure rap track, which yes it is, but it’s Minaj genius of having many outer-egos (die for Martha), which gives her music the entertaining factor.

Roman's Revenge by FlyTy19
What’s also clever about Miss. Nicki is that she’s embracing the current music trend that many old-school rappers are failing to commit (except Jay-Z and Eminem). Nicki is also using pop-electronic beats as the basis of her songs while still fully rapping on her songs which then of course Top 40 radios will find more acceptable. Also, there’s this conspiracy theory in the early 00’s when hip-hop was dominating the charts that pop was shit. But now when pop is back, hip-hop is seen as shit. However, Nicki is merging the two genres together and creating groundbreaking records. It’s exactly the same thing Missy Elliot was able to do during those supreme years of hers and having this crossover appeal. This crossover appeal phenomena also works well for Nicki because she’s taping into new fan bases by being featured on tracks of other artists such as Rihanna who is probably the Queen of Top 40 radio right now. There’s also no denial that Minaj’s popularity has intensified because she’s playing the Gaga cards in trying to be always talked about with her image and create this personality, but like Gaga, they both have the talent to back-up and not taken as a phony. Plus, many rappers (Lil fucking lame Kim especially) is trying to whore for attention and get a few headlines by attacking Nicki, but when an artist is featured on a Kanye West track with Jay-Z and Eminem decides to collaborate on their debut album (also being a female), it tells something special about her. If she does win Best New Artist  in 2012 at the Grammys (she will get nominated 100%) then she’s Queen and Lil’ Kim+ Missy (I do love Elliot very much) can dig their graves.

A Deeper Context: Robyn’s the Supreme Underrated Artist

Robyn. I’m half Swedish; so excuse me for being slight bias. Maybe really bias, but who cares? Back to Robyn. Why isn’t she the biggest singer right now and selling out stadiums all around the world? I mean, her music is like what crack was to Whitney Houston (Ok, I know she’s sober now, but the voiced is still majorly cracked up to nearly the point where Ke$ha would get a standing ovation at the Grammy’s) for me. It’s addictive, it’s emotional and it puts you in this tranquility place when the pop-electronic beats are still rapidly attacking your ears. Why? Because Robyn has been a genius creating this “Tears on the Dance floor” musical movement where it’s turning into a pop-cult. We associate pop music to Top 40 radio and Miley Cyrus singing like a horse, but Robyn has managed to make her “Pop” type of music elevated into this culture cherished by club kids and people who says “I’m proud that computer produced pop music can heal my soul”. Listen to the lyrics of her first single from the Body Talk album, ‘Dancing On My Own’ (the song on Gossip Girl that Chuck fucks Blair on the piano in Season 4), on full volume and you could literally shed tears. I know I had my moments. It’s sad. It’s therapeutic, but it gives hope for you to say to your soul destroyer “Fuck you. I can live. Will live and live in the most positive human mode possible without you. So fuck you again”. It’s the same with her second single from the Body Talk album, ‘Hang With Me’. The song has a more positive outlook on life with its bouncy beats, but still the lyrics are inspiringly deep. Robyn just really knows how to capture this raw emotion with her really plain pop vocals. It’s just magic you can’t describe frankly.



Every music magazine praised her in 2010 and I’m praising her and pimping her out on Facebook like crazy with countless posts (maybe I have only 150+ friends and I’m not the ‘I need 700 friends to validate my popularity’ type of person), but she’s still a no one. Only Europe and New York City gets her where she’s playing Radio City Hall this year (aim for Madison Square Garden!). The issue with her is simple-her music is too glam sophisticated. Her music is build on creating a vibe with the club scene in mind, but Top 40 music today are music which are produced commercially for people driving their cars to Rodeo Drive for lunch, but then turns into a club hit. Look at Rihanna or Ke$ha. They hire top-notch mainstream producers who craft instant hits. However, Robyn is experimenting with Swedish producers like Kleerup to create sounds that you sort of need to have an intellectual liking for electronic music. What's also special about Robyn's sound is that she subtly fuses many old-school sounds of funk, hip-hop and disco from the 80's that still sounds relevant today and this translates into her live stage persona which I describe as an intense swagger with grimy yet acrobatically sultry qualities. Still, Robyn recorded a track called ‘Time Machine’ with über mainstream Swedish producer Max Martin (Britney’s go-to producer) and the final result was fucking irresistible. It sparked this new pop record which I believe could finally give her the crossover appeal to mainstream territory if she does decides to release it.


Some may say that her silent popularity could be because of her live concert skills are too club-orientated…. Watch. Lady Gaga could be shaking.