{"id":2820,"date":"2009-12-30T09:18:21","date_gmt":"2009-12-30T14:18:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/?p=2820"},"modified":"2015-01-07T13:54:09","modified_gmt":"2015-01-07T17:54:09","slug":"down-like-the-economy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/?p=2820","title":{"rendered":"Down Like the Economy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/djearworm.com\/united-state-of-pop-2009-blame-it-on-the-pop.htm\">DJ Earworm offers up<\/a> his latest year-end mashup retrospective, putting together the top 25 songs of 2009. For me, despite how remarkably well it all hangs together, this doesn&#8217;t quite have the magic of <a href=\"http:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/?p=1096\">last year&#8217;s collage<\/a>, but it&#8217;s still a great way &#8212; much as I would prefer to never hear those BEP songs again &#8212; to relive the year in pop. Most of these songs were drilled into my head, and probably yours too, though I have to note that I missed a few of these given that my pop fix comes from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jamn945.com\/main.html\">Jamn94.5<\/a> here in Boston, rather than say <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kiss108.com\/main.html\">Kiss108<\/a>, so I (gratefully) skipped some of the non-hip-hoppy anthems making the rounds this year.<\/p>\n<p><object width=\"560\" height=\"340\"><param name=\"movie\" value=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/v\/iNzrwh2Z2hQ&#038;hl=en_US&#038;fs=1&#038;\"><\/param><param name=\"allowFullScreen\" value=\"true\"><\/param><param name=\"allowscriptaccess\" value=\"always\"><\/param><embed src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/v\/iNzrwh2Z2hQ&#038;hl=en_US&#038;fs=1&#038;\" type=\"application\/x-shockwave-flash\" allowscriptaccess=\"always\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" width=\"560\" height=\"340\"><\/embed><\/object><\/p>\n<p>The most striking bit to me is the part we first hear&#038;see at 0:22 to 0:32 (and gotta love the video mashing to accompany the audio &#8212; I mean, these tracks exist and circulate as much videos as they do as songs). It&#8217;s a string of people singing &#8220;DOWN,&#8221; and it made me realize how frequent that word was in underpinning and running through so much pop\/rap\/dance this past year. There&#8217;s something appropriate and deeply zeitgeisty about that, and not just because of the so-called Great Recession we&#8217;ve been in. Obviously, &#8220;down&#8221; is a multivalent term &#8212; something that Lil Wayne exploits in the simile I borrowed for the title of this post &#8212; but there&#8217;s a way that downness really nails not just the mood of the year (which was manic-depressive, if anything) but, for me anyway, the mood of the decade. I blame a lot of that on eight friggin years of George W. Bush, and as much as Obama <a href=\"http:\/\/gukira.wordpress.com\/2009\/12\/30\/afterlife-of-exuberance\/\">has disappointed<\/a> with his pragmatic centrism, I can only HOPE that the next year and the next decade will offer an UPswing of sorts. As <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ucpress.edu\/books\/pages\/10935.php\">usual<\/a>, pop will be a barometer. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>DJ Earworm offers up his latest year-end mashup retrospective, putting together the top 25 songs of 2009. For me, despite how remarkably well it all hangs together, this doesn&#8217;t quite have the magic of last year&#8217;s collage, but it&#8217;s still a great way &#8212; much as I would prefer to never hear those BEP songs [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[403,23,409,143,421,407],"class_list":["post-2820","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-lifey","tag-mashup","tag-politricks","tag-pop","tag-remix","tag-video"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2820","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2820"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2820\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8313,"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2820\/revisions\/8313"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2820"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2820"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2820"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}