Any knucklehead with DSL and a laptop can now make an electronic track. With a half hour of clicking and fiddling, you can sample enough cheesy beats and mashups to clog arteries from here to Berlin. Simple dropdown mouse maneuvers can transform electro tracks into progressive house tracks (from dry and synthetic to wet and gushy), rhythm tracks can be tempo-tweaked with an upward toggle to change a Timbaland beat into a Chromeo one. Add some T-Pain-esque pitch-correction vocals to your between-
Pop music often gets a bad rap for being disposable or vapid, and in many cases that's true. (Katy Perry, Danity Kane and the Pussycat Dolls, step right up!) But every year, a few irresistible bits of innovative ear candy rocket up the charts and seep into our subconscious. The following ten singles saturated the Top 40 -- or what passes for hit-oriented radio in this topsy-turvy musical climate -- while proving that accessibility doesn't necessarily preclude creativity.
Local Beefheart-style rockers Organ Failure have recorded a parody of M.I.A.'s late-blooming smash "Paper Planes" with a Santa twist. The Sri Lankan indie-rap star's Clash-sampling hit gets turned into the Santa-hustlin' jam "Christmas Wrapping Paper Planes."
"Paper Planes" was everywhere this year. We heard it in movie trailers, grocery stores, women's clinics and senior centers. Anywhere with a radio, really, it seemed at one point.
Organ Failure's version will be stuck in yo
Photos by Kim Douglass
Puff-paint, splatter-paint, welcome to the hospital - the sterility of a trash heap greets you. Santigold = the moment hipster-embraced globalism became a commodity, and why globalism doesn't matter anymore; i.e., we're all the same.
Seeing her at House of Blues is like trying to wash away your sins with a loofah made of mud-splattered porcupine. Is this some kind of joke? It's Socrates on the set of 90210, papier-mache pigs flying in a platinum-dipped sky.
Each Wednesday, Rocks Off arbitrarily appoints one lucky local performer or group "Artist of the Week," bestowing upon them all the fame and grandeur such a lofty title implies. Know a band or artist that isn't awful? Email their particulars to introducingliston@gmail.com.Carlie Thompson​
With regards to our bubbling electro scene, we're not sure there's anybody better than wonderfully enigmatic Houstonian, by way of St. Louis, Shina Rae. Rae bleeps, boops, bounces and chirps all through her d
