Little Boots — Xmas Fun Times Video
Her singing is too straight for me. She does it just like you would on a union gig at a Holiday Inn. But that’s ok because she has her own aesthetic and she’s authentic on her own terms. It’s not *supposed to be* rough and raw in the punk rock way. The straightness and cheesiness of this might be coming from a smooth Philadelphia soul place, with hip-hop bling connotations. Or maybe it’s just the unpretentious way to approach the song and Little Boots has the gonads to ignore punk orthodoxy.
Oh, wait, is this illegal? How is the songwriter getting their cut on the play? How *should* they be getting paid, given that there’s no ad?
Her singing is a piece with her piano playing and that default “realistic piano” synth sound. They all sound like chorus and piano lessons and all the other hallmarks of the conventionally talented youngster. It’s a bit characterless, but it’s also completely guileless and unpretentious which is part of the charm (and a great match for the medium).
I read it as guileful, for what it’s worth. It seems to me that her audience is young enough that it mainly knows about music from television and youtube, and she’s riffing with the toolkit of the conventional popular tv/youtube musicians. All those shredders and soul divas…
I don’t know. I think she’s totally part of that audience, not separate enough from it to consciously approach it with any kind of intentional pose. Do you really think that all of her home-scene recording videos with PJs, her brother playing drums, all that is purposeful “riffing”? Maybe I’m not giving her enough credit, but it read as authentic to me…
By the way, did you see that one of her songs made the Pitchfork Top 100 Songs of 2008: http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/feature/147998-the-100-best-tracks-of-2008 That’s the clearest mark of indie/blog acceptance you can find. Although, Pitchfork’s list is extremely strange this year, way more dance-focused than the site’s general aesthetic and extremely anemic quality-wise. I guess what I’m saying is that their inclusion of her might, to some degree, be a token move as part of their ‘dance is cool. rock sucks’ pose from this year.
More generally, I’m curious as to what portion of this list has come across your radar. It’s a forcibly obscurantist list relative to Pitchfork’s own position in the ecosystem, but I wonder how it looks to you.