Something Comes Along to Intervene
by Scott Hardie on May 23, 2010
I've been enjoying "Meddle" and "Remedy" by Little Boots, two great electropop songs with catchy hooks, perfect for summer. But I didn't really take her seriously as an artist until I heard "Stuck on Repeat." It's pop music on acid, like Kylie Minogue produced by Captain Beefheart, and the unlikeliest hit song of the year. Even its lyrics can be interpreted as a deconstruction of pop music. Whether it's listenable as a song depends on your taste, but I think it's a work that demands attention.
Two Replies to Something Comes Along to Intervene
Scott Hardie | March 12, 2017
I was thinking about this song again recently (it came to mind when the similarly meta-textual "Hook" came on), and two more thoughts occur to me:
1) I neglected to mention that Little Boots writes, records, and mixes her own music, usually on her own laptop (with occasional remixes by guest producers). She's the Real Deal that most pop artists aren't. That's impressive, and so is the fact that she was 23 when she made the above songs.
2) This mix of "Stuck on Repeat" deliberately breaks the rules of music, pitch-shifting the melody and making other "mistakes" to sound wrong to the ear. And that's the point, really: The self-aware lyrics are about trying in vain to escape from a loop of the rising-and-falling chord progression of traditional pop music. This song is more clever than I gave it credit for.
Logical Operator
The creator of Funeratic, Scott Hardie, blogs about running this site, losing weight, and other passions including his wife Kelly, his friends, movies, gaming, and Florida. Read more »
Fur and Feathers
Yesterday was a good day: To celebrate my mother's 75th birthday, we took her out for a day around Sarasota doing things that appealed to her love of animals. After starting with a big breakfast, we went to a local attraction that we've all been meaning to see for years, the Big Cat Habitat that takes care of exotic animals that were born in captivity but abandoned by their owners. The lions and tigers and liger were the prime attraction, but they also had bears, monkeys, a chimpanzee, parrots, emu, turkeys, goats, koi, and even stranger animals like a kangaroo, kinkajou, and coati. Go »Meow Mix
Thanks Evgeni: Cat Music. Go »Bad for Business
CNN Money published an interesting look at the 101 Dumbest Moments in Business in the year 2006. Go »Twit
Have you heard of Twitter? It's this great new web site where you report to your friends exactly what you're doing at that moment in time. Neat stuff! Go »Eschew Obfuscation
For any FIN players wondering where in the hell the game is: I used my little free time over last weekend writing a mini-post – three whopping paragraphs – and at the end of the weekend I just couldn't bear to publish it so short. (The title of this post was the planned title of that post.) I have now rearranged my social so that weekends are more free, and one thing I plan to do with the time is resume writing FIN, starting this weekend by expanding my three paragraphs into more like three pages. Go »
Jackie Mason | May 30, 2010
[hidden by author request]