Remember earlier this year when Pitchfork felt it necessary to actually review The Beatles' catalog? That was awesome. Is their any other website that could pull off such unfiltered pomposity in feeling they could actually say something new and worthwhile about The Beatles that nobody else had thought of in the past 40+ years? Just think, mankind once spent decades wandering the wasteland of a perplexing society, pondering an uncertain afterlife without the knowledge that Beatles For Sale rates a 9.3, or Please Please Me is a 9.5. Congrats, Animal Collective! You're better than the damn Beatles! Simply stunning.
Here's my point. There are times when you have to admit to yourself that you have little to add to the discourse of a particular topic. In the case of "Ignition," (the song with "Remix" in the title though there's apparently no non-remixed version), once John Darnielle constructed a list of 100 reasons to describe it's greatness, it became obvious that further dissemination would be clearly unnecessary.
In seeking out public testimonials, Darnielle actually came up with far more than 100 reasons, but his final edited list on his Last Plane to Jakarta blog is streamlined and formatted for the easiest read. Among my favorite points:
3. How is this song in particular a good "weekend" song? For starters, there's the delay in mentioning the weekend. Note a shitty "weekend" song, Loverboy's "Working for the Weekend," for purposes of comparison, which shoots its entire wad in the chorus's first line & then has nothing compelling to say.
54. There's the sudden change in vocal tone in the chorus, right at "mama rollin' that body" - where R Kelly reveals himself to be not just a consummate soul singer, but a pretty clued-in one. Loop that damned line. "Mama rollin' that body": who's that? It's not Kelly. I mean it is him singing, but whose moves is he copping?
58. Oh Christ it's Shaggy, where the hell did that come from?
87. but beyond the pop joy of "bounce bounce" it's the sound of beleaguered R Kelly, whose troubles are known to even a casual pop listener but are known well by exactly the people who he'd rather knew nothing about them: people like me, the people who bought TP-2.com even though it had one of the worst album titles of all time
The album featuring "Ignition" was not given a review on Pitchfork. But I for one, look forward to the year 2037, where I can sleep easily knowing that it's earned an 8.3. Bounce bounce bounce bounce bounce bounce bounce.
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