“Soldier of Love,” Sade

I used to work out of this coffee shop in Bed-Stuy that was always playing 80s/early 90s urban adult contemporary over the speakers: Anita, Toni, Terence Trent, Whitney, Chaka, Luther, Sade. You could look out the window, across the street, at run-down old Brooklyn storefronts, the signs unchanged since the days of “Sweet Love,” and for a few seconds it was possible to feel like it was 1985. Then some new, incredible song would come over the speakers, and I would snap back into the now, Google the lyrics, download the shit out of that song, and, when I got home and was confident I was alone, sing and dance along to it, loudly, perversely, in a way that would frighten you.

I mention this because Sade’s got a new album coming out next month, and the single’s dropped, and – big surprise – it’s another perfectly executed epic love song. Ain’t nobody in the game can touch Sade on a track like this. Nobody. As befitting the lyrics, the song has a militaristic aesthetic. (This vibe is getting a little played out but I give it a pass because 1. The instrumentation is varied and innovative, and 2. This is Sade we’re talking about here.) The mood is tragic, like we’re marching down some perilous path, our lives uncertain. But this is how Sade has always seemed to view love – as a deadly serious endeavor. Even if you don’t agree, it’s hard not to get swept up in the way Sade presents it. As ever, her voice is rich, thick, pure, haunting, angelic: beautiful in every way. She looks and sounds just as she did in 1985,  when I was three years old, a period of my life I don’t remember but have the pleasure of imagining when I hear Sade Adu’s voice.

Related: Have you guys heard “Echo,” one of the singles on Kellz’z new album? It is hilarious.

Cascada, “Evacuate the Dance Floor”

Cascada is the name of the group, not the blonde girl who sings. Her name is Natalie Horler, and she’s German, and the other two guys in the group are DJ/producers, and they have eurotrash German DJ names that I can’t remember. With “Evacuate the Dance Floor,” together this trio dropped maybe the most average dance-pop song of 2009, a fiercely unremarkable and unoriginal piece of music.

The verse is a Britney crib job. The chorus is all Gaga laser synths. The bridge is a weird “cameo” from some rapper who looks like Bow Wow but whose terrible name is Carlprit. He sounds like Sean Paul doing an Eminem impression, and he opens his breakdown verse by saying, “Guess who’s back?” I was like, “Wait a second, is that Carlprit? He’s back already? I had previously thought he would not be coming back – what’s he going to do now?” Well, then he tells us, on his verse. Actually no wait he doesn’t. He just says a bunch of stuff about dancing on the dance floor. There seems to be some confusion among the performers on this song about whether the dance floor is a destination of fun or an area to be hastily abandoned. Then Horler says “Hey, Mr. DJ…!” through a vocoder and who cares about anything after that because we are dancing right and it’s best not to think very hard about the words why bother because we are having fun and words are only there to fill in the spaces we don’t really even need words right and if I do have to think about the words I prefer them to be words I’ve heard before like Hey Mr. DJ or Guess Who’s Back!!

2010 is going to kick ass. Enjoy:

“Birthday Sex,” Jeremih

“I Love College,” Asher Roth

“Hoedown Throwdown,” Miley Cyrus

“Waking Up in Vegas,” Katy Perry

“Kiss Me Thru the Phone,” Soulja Boy (I actually kind of like this song.)

“LOL,” Arab (this might also be the worst rap of the oughts)

“Small Town USA,” Justin Moore

I thought it was a pretty weak year for “indie rock,” the kind of year that makes me say things like, “I fucking hate indie rock,” even though the term “indie rock” is so vague and loaded that it’s pointless to use if you’re actually trying to make any kind of point, and even though lots of my favorite music would typically be filed under the category “indie rock.” Hmm. Not a good start to the post there. Let’s forge ahead.

Point being I generally did not get off on most of the indie rock that the tastemakers were pushing. But here are some actual indie-ish songs that I did like a lot. Songs I loved you could say. List:

“Laura,” Girls (video above)

“Hellhole Ratrace,” Girls

“1901,” Phoenix (Do they play this on the radio? They play it on commercials for sure.)

“Two Weeks,” Grizzly Bear (The only argument I have thus far been able to find for why this band is not unbelievably boring)

“This Tornado Loves You,” Neko Case (live on Letterman, sounding just as good as she does in the studio)

“Stillness is the Move,” Dirty Projectors

“John Lennon,” Arkells

“Blood Bank,” Bon Iver

“The Sweetest Thing,” Camera Obscura

“Easy,” Deer Tick

“This World Is An Open Door,” Franz Nicolay

“This Blackest Purse,” Why?

“Hunchback,” Kurt Vile

“Young Adult Friction,” Pains of Being Pure at Heart (Was a hater at first but this one won me over)

“You and I,” Wilco ft. Feist

“Useful Chamber,” Dirty Projectors

Two-thirds of these videos are pretty great, by the way.

I still think ‘Ego’ is super embarrassing.

New Midlake track.

Release date and info on the upcoming Titus Andronicus album, which is Civil War-themed(!).

Not…gonna…make….lame Growing Pains joke…….

Robin Thicke, “Sex Therapy”

The bottom line is that I am very simply not the type of person who would ever bump a Robin Thicke song of his own volition. In this regard, I might compare Thicke to John Lege;alskfjla;sdfjksdjfj

Sorry, I fell asleep there for a second. John Leg;aklsdfjaksdfl;dscj

My apologies. Ahem. John Legend is the artist to whom I was going to compare Thicke. Because both make music for women and, worse, the smooth, sensitive, romantic men who play these types of songs to impress women. (You might also know these men as Pussies.) Robin Thicke is very handsome and well dressed and rich-seeming, and he brings a Luther-Vandross-for-the-21^st-century R&B vibe to most of his songs, which are so classy, respectful, and safe that they might as well be open letters to the old whites who vote for the Grammys. His hushed falsetto is like a heat-seeking missile right into all the ladies’ hearts. I mean, this guy is just the worst – right?

But then there’s the fact that he writes and produces all his music, as well as music for Usher and Aguilera and Lil Wayne and a bunch of others; and he plays guitars, drums, piano. So fine. He is a well-connected musician. There are a lot of musicians out there. Is the music he makes worth a damn?

Well let’s see. “Magic,” though a Curtis Mayfield knockoff, was at least a passable-to-good Curtis Mayfield knockoff, and since that genre of music is the best kind of music ever invented in the history of music, how are you really gonna complain? And then there’s “Shooter,” his collab with Lil Wayne, where he was able to fuse their very different styles into a monster hit. Based on these two examples, I’d like to be able to say he’s more worthy of our musical respect than Justin Timberlake, his closest contemporary. But the playfulness exhibited on “Shooter” isn’t representative of most of Thicke’s work. Usually, as on new single “Sex Therapy,” he’s in slow jam mode, sounding like a cleaner and less crazy, but in no way better, version of R. Kelly – you can just smell the lavender candles, erotic lotions, and chocolate-covered strawberries. Timberlake at least takes legitimate chances with his sound, even if he’s not as cool as he thinks he is. Thicke dips into different genres but it’s almost always too cautious to be exciting.

In the official video for “Sex Therapy,” Thicke is surrounded by ridiculously attractive women, his beautiful blue eyes gaze longingly at the camera, and he proceeds to assure all the ladies out there of his most definite ability to fulfill any and all sexual desires they may harbor. His lovemaking prowess is unsurpassed, you see. Like Kellz, his songs sometimes start to sound like a spoof, like an Andy Samberg digital short. Um. Did I mention the song is called “Sex Therapy”?