The top floor isn't too different than your typical club, with extended bar, video screen circling the dancefloor, and tech-house pumping along to keep the crowd moving. But it's the cellar which made me feel like I was in a legendary establishment. The walls were lined with thin, rusty, dingy shelves -- remnants of safety deposit boxes left over from the buildings' tenure as a bank. Further in this vein are the metal gates which divide the cellar into three section. Obviously they used to be for security purposes, now it gives the place a feel of a dark dungeon. The dancefloor is dark, and the flashing lights and regular dousings of dry ice smoke render it difficult to see eight feet in front of your face most of the time. And the music ... hard, pounding, minimal techno (I'd be proud to spin any of it) and a dense, sweaty crowd going 10 times more mental than in the upstairs room. In Toronto (and in most other cities) the situation would be the exact opposite. And somehow, these reactions transcended the sexes, as there were hotter girls downstairs than upstairs. All hail Berlin, the city where the cover for a mythical club on a holiday sets you back a mere three Euros (!) and techno stirs the emotions in such passionate fashion.
After all night at the Tresor, I woke up in the middle of the afternoon and set to the task of packing up and drinking the remainder of the beer in my fridge. And I watched MTV Germany's top videos of 2003. Somehow, I followed pop music more closely on this trip than I have in many years, including listening to pop radio regularly for the first time since 1988. In retrospect, it makes sense. MTV Germany was the only non-news station which broadcast shows in English. My increasing disenchantment with the Brit music papers gives me a craving for trash and gossip that I just don't get from the music I normally listen to. Plus, I'd become thoroughly bored of the 50 CD's I'd brought with me by the fourth week, hadn't had time to shop for anything new and therefore was desperately in need of something new to hear.
I watched the final 30 videos uninterrupted:
30. JT -- Cry Me a River. What more can be said? I was surprised it wasn't higher.
29. Blu Cantrell f. Sean Paul -- Breathe. Putting SP in
your video seems to guarantee a hit with an underwhelming song these days.
28. Nena -- Leicht Turm (Light Tower). Yes, it's THAT Nena. And she looks all right twenty years on, having apparently settled into a niche that Dido fills for the English-speaking world.
27. Snoop + Pharrell -- Beautiful. The song took months to hook me, but it did eventually. At the start of his career, I hated Snoop for his pompousness and arrogance. Now I love the guy to death. He's one of the ten coolest people in the world.
26. Linkin Park -- Somewhere I Belong. Whatever.
25. Xtina -- Fighter. Does this remind anyone else of an "Adore"-era Smashing Pumpkins video? That's not a compliment, by the way.
24. Busta f. Mariah Carey -- I Know What You Want. Busta was virtually unrecognizable the first time I heard this (with his singing). Mariah's career resurgence hasn't happened yet, but it's unevitable. Trust me.
23. Jay-Z f. Beyonce -- '03 Bonnie and Clyde. Beyonce's only purpose here is as the eye-candy sidekick, but that IS the subject of the song and I'm certainly not complaining.
22. Dido -- White Flag. Is Dido the new Jewel, except with better lyrics?
21. Ja Rule -- The Reign. It hasn't been a great year for JR, but he should have known better. Everybody knows that you can't have a hit by casting Patrick Swayze in a tough guy role, he has to play the sensitive tough guy role.
20. Puffy + B2K -- Bump Bump Bump. Yeah, we all know who the real star power is here. As if these little kids know anything about bumping.
19. Wolfsheim -- Kein Zuruck (~No Way Back). It was new to me, and it wasn't offensive or anything.
18. DJ Tomekk f. Kurupt, Tatwaffe, and G-Style -- Ganxtaville Part 3. This rates through the roof on the unintentional comedy scale. It's like they went out of their way to copy every rap cliche, but only from the years 1992-1994. The closing cry of "Fo Shizzle ma nizzle" had me rolling on the floor.
17. Seeed -- Music Monks, 16. Outlandish -- Aicha. These must have been German hits from the first half of the year. Respect for the way they respresent the homeland as well as the Brit/American megastars.
15. Xtina -- Beautiful. The song that made me regain some respect for her.
14. Black Eyed Peas -- Where is the Love. BEP are nothing more than the 21st Century Fugees. They make hip hop that it's OK for soccer moms to like. It takes such a simple-minded band
to distill a complicated issue of world politics down to such basic language.
13. Robbie Williams -- Come Undone. This must be the sickest video to ever accompany a pop song. The only competition
is the similarly styled "Owner of a Lonely Heart" by Yes, but that was far less of a "pop" song, and it certainly wasn't by a "pop idol". Lord knows what British ten-year olds thought of this.
12. Avril Lavigne -- I'm With You. It's the only Canadian entry in the Top 30. In case you were wondering, yes, Avril is indeed played on the radio in Germany every bit as much as she is over here. This song contains a truly amazing Great Pop Moment, it's the chorus that comes about 2:50 into the song, when the longing and admiration in her voice has risen to a boiling point and the song's title flows from her not-such-a-bad-girl mouth with one of pop's most emotional outbursts of the last few years. 11. Eminem -- Sing for the Moment. This is his weakest single to date. I'm just not moved by anything associated with Aerosmith.
10. The Rasmus -- In The Shadows. Decent to good Catchy Pop-Rock from a band I know absolutely nothing about. It's just not rock's year, but you already knew that.
9. Beyonce f. Jay-Z -- Crazy in Love. It's amazing to see how this track and Outkast's "Hey Ya" have united just about every writer in every genre in every major publication in picking the top singles of the year. Now THAT'S perfect pop music.
8. Sean Paul -- Get Busy. Again, not much to say about his amazing success, except that I was somehow unaware of his Toronto connections until recently (he partly grew up here and still has family living in T.O.) and I thought that last year's "Gimme the
Light" was a Neptunes-aided fluke, only to be proved wrong
in startling fashion.
7. Lumidee f. Busta + Fabolous -- Never Leave You (Uh-Oh). The most danceable song of the year that didn't have a backbeat. Not as if there was much competition. A song I rather like as long as I don't hear it three times a day. Therefore, flipping radio stations or listening to CD's once in a while was neccessary. 6. Robbie Williams -- Feel. The video isn't much cop, but the song is wonderful. I never get bored of it.
5. TATU -- All the Things She Said. You'd be forgiven for
thinking that everything had been tried in pop music, every gimmick
extended beyond it's worth, every good idea previously taken or explored by somebody else. But there's always that small subset of music intelligensia who find an opening and drive a Mack truck
of determination and ambition straight through it. This is but one way that great music gets made. In this case, somebody had the foresight to say "You know what we need in pop music? We need RUSSIAN LESBIANS. And they don't even have to be real lesbians, they just have to be really hot young girls who make out at every available oppurtunity so that people think that they're lesbians. Then we paste them to a dance-rock song about love and jealousy and we sell it to the world".
When the song came out, and every struggling music entrepreneur realized they'd been beaten to the punch, they must have simply hung their heads in despair. Russian lesbians? How could that NOT sell records? It makes you marvel at the simplicity of the concept and wonder why you didn't think of it yourself. And the reason you didn't is precisely the genius behind the concept, naturally. Add it all up and you've got the best pure pop single of the year. The
best pop choruses leave you wishing they'd go on and on, but then the song ends so you have no choice but to play it again. Just tremendous stuff.
4. 50 Cent -- In Da Club. Huge, although I could probably rap on a record with Dre and Eminem pulling the strings and it would be a hit.
Let's talk about something else. I was innocently
watching MTV Germany one night, and "P.I.M.P." comes on, a video I've seen many times. I'm not really paying attention, and then suddenly, all the girls aren't wearing any clothes! And 50's on the couch feeling them up! Whoa! Snoop and 50 spend the rest of the video cavorting and enjoying the booty of naked women. What's with this X-rated version? I'd never heard anything about it before. I guess you gotta love European non-censorship.
3. Evanescence f. Paul McCoy -- Bring Me To Life. This song was everywhere in Germany during my trip there in the summer. I certainly can't argue with its placing here, but when half-decent songs become megahits they eventually become suspended in some opinionless netherzone. Great songs (i.e. most of the rest of this top 10) can be heard over and over while losing little of their impact. Half-decent songs get boring after half a dozen listens but remain good enough to not be despised, but bad enough to not care if you never hear it again for as long as you live and breathe.
2. RZA f. Xavier Naidoo -- Ich kenne nichts (das
so schön ist wie du). I'd translate the title as "I Don't Know (What's as Beautiful as You). I suppose this song hasn't been pushed in North America due to the language thing, but I see no reason why it couldn't be as massive here as it was in Germany. It's got a summery hook, a laid back feel, and music is supposed to transcend language barriers.
1. Eminem -- Lose Yourself. The best and most
surprising Oscar-winning song ever, this track probably has done more to motivate young people than an entire year of after-school specials.
