NewYearsDayProject | a song a day blog

Back in 2010, we learned that yes, a pickle can get more likes than  Nickelback , a band that had become the most hated  "butt rock"  band in the mid-'00s. In fact, the conclusions of the social media study found that a pickle had more likes than Oprah Winfrey or other beloved figures. It turns out that internet users' hate outweighs Internet love, or the terrible outweighs the good. In 2014, the most hated rock band would become  U2  after their release of  Songs of Innocence   was forced into every  iTunes user's library. People tried everything to scrub the songs from their shuffle. Today, people have mostly forgotten about Nickelback, and Apple Music no longer comes standard with that U2 album, so people have other musical axes to grind. Justin Bieber has grown up and is no longer blaring in our cultural continuousness. So who is the most hated band these days? After the 2019 Super Bowl,   Maroon 5 , for taking to the stage when the NFL was in the middle of ra

MUNA ’s first two albums weren’t exactly uplifting, at least as a whole. Sure there are moments of empowerment, but the glass appears half-empty more times than not with songs about breakups and lost loves. On 2019’s Saves the World , two songs act as companions to a terrible breakup. “ Stayaway ” is an if/then song, explaining why the speaker won’t go out. She might see her old friends or the friends of her ex and might be dragged back into a bad romantic situation. “ Who ” is a song that speculates about the person who replaced the speaker. “Who are you singing about now?” Katie Gavin pleads on the chorus.   W HEN I GO OUT AGAIN… In the fall of 2021, MUNA returned with the bright duet with Phoebe Bridgers , the lead single “ Silk Chiffon ” from their third and self-titled album . While the other pre-release singles were not as hopeful as the lead single, all of them were more optimistic than the last album’s twin break-up tracks. There was, however, the album’s final single, release

  Last year, I ranked The Weeknd ’s Dawn FM as my fourth-best album of the year, right behind Underoath ’s Voyeurist . While I’d probably re-rank the list and add a few albums I missed like Lizzy McAlpine ’s five seconds flat , I still admire my fifth and fourth-placed records. Although I ranked The Weeknd and Underoath highly last year, I didn’t listen to either artist’s album very much for similar reasons. Voyeurist was a dark album dealing with drug addiction, suicide, and hopelessness. Unlike Underoath’s Christian albums, the darkness had the reprieve of light somewhere within a song or the album. However, the post-Christian Underoath offered an album so dark that I couldn’t listen to it, especially with some of the stuff that I was going through last year. Similarly, The Weeknd's Dawn FM was a beautifully crafted album, but it was too dark for me to enjoy for my mental state last year. I REMEMBER WHEN I HELD YOU. On paper, Dawn FM should have been my album of the year last ye

Yesterday, we took a deep dive into where Kesha is as a musical artist by looking at a mature work in her discography. When Wikipedia introduces Kesha Rose Serbert, she is said to be an American Singer-Songwriter, a term that signals to significant factors: 1) the singer writes songs and thus has a greater opportunity to monetize the song and 2) the singer is actually an artist, which is more important for music snob conversations. It grafts the wheat from the tares, the Lady Gaga s from the Britney Spears . But recently, I’ve been rethinking this argument, mainly because it doesn’t account for the sexism in the industry. Moreover, I’ve really started to think about how unfair my opinion has been formed about Britney Spears, particularly after watching the documentary Britney vs. Spears .  A TASTE OF YOUR POISON PARADISE. I happened to go through puberty around the time of Max Martin ’s first era of teen pop. MTV was filled with the late ‘90s sounds of boy bands, pop rock, a few Spani

We haven't heard a rock song from English Alternative-turned-pop act Coldplay since...ever, come to think of it. Even when the band was considered cool in the early '00s, they weren't exactly known for distorted guitars or thundering bass. And years of refining their sound in a time when rock music's cultural impact retracted into the underground solidified Coldplay as the 21st century's definition of pop-rock. But in 2019, the band decided to break with their established sound and put out something a little more experimental, a two-disc record titled Everyday Life .  The album was released with only three sparsely promoted singles and no planned tour to support the record, which didn't really matter since all tour plans would be canceled early the next year, anyway. THERE'S A MAN WHO SWEARS HE'S GOD.  Coldplay's most recent album, Music of the Spheres , doesn't hold to a set genre. Lead singer Chris Martin has called the invention of genre as

I've written a bit about how I'm a  Coldplay  apologist. I believe that the London-based band is very good at what they do. Though so many artists accomplish their sound, both musically and lyrically, better, there's something uplifting about a new Coldplay album. Two years ago, I talked about the band's first single from their ninth studio record,   Music of the Spheres , " Higher Power ." The album was released on October 15, 2021 . Before the release of the record and after releasing "Higher Power," the band released the promotional single, the 10:17 track " Coloratura ," which was praised by critics for its composition and production. Then they released the second radio single " My Universe ," featuring the South Korean boy band,  BTS . The song shot straight to number 1 on the  Billboard Hot 100 , becoming the second Coldplay single to top the Hot 100, the first being " Viva la Vida ." I JUST WANT TO PUT YOU FIRST .

The '90s certainly wasn't the first the world saw of teen pop, but today bubblegum pop is synonymous with several '90s acts, whether it were Backstreet Boys , Britney Spears , *NSYNC , or demigods in the pantheon like  98 Degrees or Spice Girls . Being a middle school student in the era of boy bands and subtly sexualized teen girls, peer pressure dictated a lot of what I thought was cool. It's about how in one year, the boys at school thought that Backstreet Boys was good music because it was for boys to a sudden wave of realization that Backstreet Boys were actually for girls and Britney Spears' music sucked, but not like her music videos meant you were gay. MAYBE THAT'S WHY. In that rather toxic dichotomy that pushed us boys into listening to Nickelback for about a year, *NSYNC was of course grouped with Backstreet Boys. Still, somehow my peer group missed the three major albums the Justin Timberlake -fronted boyband released between 1997 and 2002. Of course

  Back in 2010, we learned that yes, a pickle can get more likes than  Nickelback , a band that had become the most hated  "butt rock"  band in the mid-'00s. In fact, the conclusions of the social media study found that a pickle had more likes than Oprah Winfrey or other beloved figures. It turns out that internet users' hate outweighs Internet love, or the terrible outweighs the good. In 2014, the most hated rock band would become  U2  after their release of  Songs of Innocence   was forced into every  iTunes user's library. People tried everything to scrub the songs from their shuffle. Today, people have mostly forgotten about Nickelback, and Apple Music no longer comes standard with that U2 album, so people have other musical axes to grind. Justin Bieber has grown up and is no longer blaring in our cultural continuousness. So who is the most hated band these days? After the 2019 Super Bowl,   Maroon 5 , for taking to the stage when the NFL was in the middle of