I got more fuckin' hits than a disciplined child

Continuing my trip back through the 2010 album charts.

24/10/10 : Disc-overy - Tinie Tempah

I remember Tinie from back in the day - he did that nice one about the stars.  It always struck me as rap written for people like me - designed to convince me that I'm still in touch with the streets whilst I quaff a fine Burgandy in my St Albans mansion (I'm always doing that).  I can't say I've listened to anything from the lad in ages though, so let's see what I think now.

Yeah - it's people-pleasing rap featuring loads of guest singers and tuneful choruses.  The track I remembered was "Written In The Stars", but "Pass Out" and "Frisky" were also on the radio loads at the time.  I can imagine it being played at volume in quite a few BMW and Audi estate cars at the time.  And yes, it's easy to mock but I also didn't mind it at all - I suspect Tinie wasn't aiming his music at me, but I doubt the kids overly went for it.  If you liked Eminem's duets with Emilie Sande or Rihanna from around this time, then this is probably going to hit the spot as well.  My main quibble about the album is "How are you supposed to pronounce the title?".  If it's "discovery" then why the hyphen?  But if it's "disc ovary" then it sounds like an unpleasant medical condition...

We're at #3 in the charts this week on his third week of a SEVENTY EIGHT week run, having peaked at #1 in its first week - lordy this was more popular than I remembered!  The rest of the top five were Kings Of Leon (a new entry), Robbie's best-of, a re-entry for The Beatles Red Album and Katy Perry.  I'm also going to mention The Beatles' Blue Album re-entry at #6 (they must have been made available on digital or something) and the next highest new entry is Ali Campbell's Great British Songs, which sounds unpleasantly Brexit-y.  But I have to state that I have no idea what his position on this, or anything else, may be - except that he hates everyone else in UB40 and performed his own UB40exit.  And is, of course, back in UB40 these days.

Back to Tinie, Wikipedia tells us that he wanted to make this album really raw (spoiler alert - it isn't) and lists the guest artists as Kelly Rowland, Ellie Goulding, Labrinth, Emeli Sandé, Eric Turner, Wiz Khalifa and Swedish House Mafia.  It also gives us the bizarre fact that "Simply Unstoppable" was released as a single featuring Katie Taylor, the Irish bozer.  OK.  The album did well commercially though, getting to #21 in the US and it was #29 in the UK year-end chart and held in there at #28 in '11 year-end chart as well.

"Customers also listened to" Dizzee Rascal, Flo Rida, Rudimental and Example - all of whom have made similar sounds at some point in their careers (and I don't mind Rudimental at all).  And I don't mind Tinie either, although I can't say there's a lot here to drag me back to it - there's some hooky choruses but that's about it.

17/10/10 - Not an album for me, I'm afraid
31/10/10 - Nope, I still don't get it

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I saw your mum - she forgot that I existed

Image
Continuing my trip forward in time through the album charts 22/12/23 :  Stick Season - Noah Kahan Well, this week surprises us on a couple of fronts.  Firstly, and probably the least expected, this is possibly the album I've heard most this year - because obviously I'm a massive Noah fan. Well, it might not surprise you to hear it's not me but my delightful daughter - but you might be surprised to hear just how much my youngest absolutely LOVES Noah, particularly given his folkiness.  She's got tickets to see him next year and (excluding festivals) they're the most expensive gig tickets I've ever bought.  But despite having heard the album loads, I've never actually listened to it, so I'm interested to see what I make of it on a one-on-one basis. You know what - the headline is that, having actually listened to it I can report that, at least in places, I liked this way more than I previously did.  I listened to it over headphones for the first time and t
Read more

She's got a wicked way of acting like St. Anthony

Image
I've done The Guardian's list of the top 50 albums of the year for the last three years and (mostly) enjoyed it, so here we go again with this year's list .  Last year I'd previously met ten of the list - it will be interesting to see whether that is repeated this year.   #50 : Crazymad, For Me - CMAT Coming off halfway between Jenny Lewis and Self Esteem, Dublin’s CMAT sets life’s greatest embarrassments to ritzy country showstoppers – the musical equivalent of piling your beehive high to distract from your tear-reddened eyes. On her second album, she tots up the price she has paid for her bad boyfriends, self-subjugation and knowing avoidance of less-than-romantic realities, always with mordant humour rather than self-pity: “I’m just some stewardess who feeds your pets / And does your dishes and pays your rent,” she sings on the delicate, harmony-heavy Such a Miranda. For all that she has lost in these songs – pride, love, literal cash – her perspective remains a firm
Read more

Croopied in the reames, shepherd gurrel weaves

Image
Continuing my trip down The Guardian's   top 50 albums of 2023 #30 : The Age Of Pleasure - Janelle Monáe Monáe’s last album, 2018’s Dirty Computer, saw the high-concept pop star returning to earth after several albums of space-age fantasia, showing a softer, fallible side for the rest time. Its songs were still divided into three categories – Reckoning, Celebration and Reclamation – indicating an artist who hadn’t quite let go of the structural safety rails. But on The Age of Pleasure, Monáe is resolutely grounded in pursuit of a new kind of body high. To the decadently rendered diasporic sounds of reggae, dancehall and Afrobeats, she hymns pleasure and desire, connecting (as did Jessie Ware also did this year) sex as self-empowerment and celebrating the kaleidoscopic nature of identity. Or, as she puts it on Phenomenal: “I’m lookin’ at a thousand versions of myself / And we’re all fine as fuck.” I have experienced a couple of Janelle albums and I found them somewhat inaccessible -
Read more