A couple of examples - just off the top of my head, from the last few months of UK number ones - of current party-pop's obsession with the immediacy of the moment. And here's Pixie Lott with a song called 'All About Tonight'. The song actually scans as an appropriation of current pop tropes in the service of a much more traditional pop milieu – the club song is transmuted here into an ‘I Will Survive’-style break-up song. The partying is thus framed in terms of leaving behind, and moving past, the emotional wreckage of a failed relationship – “I’m so over you”, “I threw all your drama away”, and so on.
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One of the striking things about most recent club-pop is the complete excision of love and relationships, at least in any form that might exist beyond the one night stand. That’s what “it’s all about tonight” tends to mean in these songs. So it’s interesting to see this record letting the rest of life in through the back door. The reason why it’s necessary to say that tonight is all that counts is because there is something outside of the immediate moment that the singer is trying to shut out. The chorus even sees fit to remind its audience that “we’ve been working all week” and explain that “tomorrow doesn’t matter when you’re moving your feet” – which is a significantly more modest claim than “we might not get tomorrow”. We even get an echo of Lady Gaga’s definitive club-versus-world anthem in Lott’s throwaway “they got the music so loud, so I won’t hear the phone if you call!” That line, and the Gaga comparison, are telling. Where ‘Telephone’ reacts with visceral horror to the external world unexpectedly invading the night out, Pixie Lott is casually confident that it can’t – but this is because her stakes are lower. ‘All About Tonight’ is not a futile attempt to obliterate the rest of the world by sinking into the immediacy of the hedonistic moment; it’s just an attempt to take a temporary break. Pixie Lott knows all too well that the working week, and those missed calls on her phone, will be waiting for her just outside the edges of this record.
So, ultimately, the song fails, because it’s not all about tonight – the presence of the week of work that preceded the weekend, and the phone calls from the outside world, are allowed to define Pixie’s party. But the song itself seeks to steamroller all of this, to make the titular phrase true – in the world of ‘All About Tonight’, from its cheery synthetic buzz to Lott’s permanently-grinning vocal performance, all of that external stuff might as well not even be there, and she might as well not even be singing about it. Which I suppose is just to say that this is an emotionally shallow record, and not in an interesting way, either. It is also, like its predecessor in the number one slot, a very sober-sounding song. The song tells us what a lot of fun it is having, and contrasts its fun with some non-fun things which are not allowed to impinge upon its fun. What it doesn’t do is make any of it sound, or feel, like much fun, which is the curse of the unsuccessful party song – when you aim so low, you really need to at least hit the target.Source URL: http://modernlovewalksonby.blogspot.com/2011/10/pixie-lott-04.html
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One of the striking things about most recent club-pop is the complete excision of love and relationships, at least in any form that might exist beyond the one night stand. That’s what “it’s all about tonight” tends to mean in these songs. So it’s interesting to see this record letting the rest of life in through the back door. The reason why it’s necessary to say that tonight is all that counts is because there is something outside of the immediate moment that the singer is trying to shut out. The chorus even sees fit to remind its audience that “we’ve been working all week” and explain that “tomorrow doesn’t matter when you’re moving your feet” – which is a significantly more modest claim than “we might not get tomorrow”. We even get an echo of Lady Gaga’s definitive club-versus-world anthem in Lott’s throwaway “they got the music so loud, so I won’t hear the phone if you call!” That line, and the Gaga comparison, are telling. Where ‘Telephone’ reacts with visceral horror to the external world unexpectedly invading the night out, Pixie Lott is casually confident that it can’t – but this is because her stakes are lower. ‘All About Tonight’ is not a futile attempt to obliterate the rest of the world by sinking into the immediacy of the hedonistic moment; it’s just an attempt to take a temporary break. Pixie Lott knows all too well that the working week, and those missed calls on her phone, will be waiting for her just outside the edges of this record.
So, ultimately, the song fails, because it’s not all about tonight – the presence of the week of work that preceded the weekend, and the phone calls from the outside world, are allowed to define Pixie’s party. But the song itself seeks to steamroller all of this, to make the titular phrase true – in the world of ‘All About Tonight’, from its cheery synthetic buzz to Lott’s permanently-grinning vocal performance, all of that external stuff might as well not even be there, and she might as well not even be singing about it. Which I suppose is just to say that this is an emotionally shallow record, and not in an interesting way, either. It is also, like its predecessor in the number one slot, a very sober-sounding song. The song tells us what a lot of fun it is having, and contrasts its fun with some non-fun things which are not allowed to impinge upon its fun. What it doesn’t do is make any of it sound, or feel, like much fun, which is the curse of the unsuccessful party song – when you aim so low, you really need to at least hit the target.Source URL: http://modernlovewalksonby.blogspot.com/2011/10/pixie-lott-04.html
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