Ain't nothing but a number

MANILA, Philippines - When the number one album only sells 192,000 copies, you begin to wonder what “number one” even means.

Last week, Katy Perry’s sophomore serving “Teenage Dream” was released to deafening buzz and high industry expectations, and promptly debuted with a whimper — on top of the charts but with less than 200,000 copies sold, an underwhelming sales figure for the number one album, even in these sales-challenged times.

All signs pointed to a blockbuster week for Perry. California Gurls, the album’s earworm of a lead single, was already widely considered 2010’s song of the summer. In fact, Gurls’ biggest competition was its own follow-up single — the dance-around-your-room-in-your-underwear blissful Teenage Dream. The singles had set her up for the kind of pop moment that changes careers, the kind of stars-align, one-two punch that propelled Usher’s “Confessions” to become its year’s top-selling album and broke Rihanna into superstardom.

When the dust finally settled on Katy Perry’s bazooka bra’s cream jizz, she was revealed to still be in the Pop Universe Hotel’s purgatory, not a one-hit wonder taking up space in storage, not a has-been reliving her peak in the lobby, but not exactly a superstar occupying the penthouse.

Gold Standardz

On the other side of the music news coin, the indie snobs at Pitchfork released their list of Top 200 Songs of the 1990s earlier this week. Both expectedly and unexpectedly, Pavement, the band Chuck Klosterman calls the “indiest band ever,” topped the list with its ageless Gold Soundz.

With an emotional, rather than figures-based, approach, Pitchfork came up with a list that’s at turns infuriating (Blur’s best song is Boys & Girls? Really?) and comforting (even Nineties artifacts like LEN get their due), but somewhat comprehensive. One of the list’s most pleasant surprises is the inclusion (#8!) of the late great Aaliyah’s Are You That Somebody?, a minor 1998 hit that seamlessly mixed screwball production (babies cooing, for example) and a typically confident, cold-as-ice performance from Aaliyah.

They’re coming to the chorus now. Pavement, possibly the greatest band to almost appear on the original Beverly Hills 90210, tops the Pitchfork list with Gold Soundz.

But, of course, being the ironic hipsters they are, Pitchfork’s own Nate Patrin rains on the nostalgia trip. Patrin says about Aaliyah’s greatest single: “The moment in the chorus where her voice finally wraps itself entirely around that stagger-step beat and rolls out with the same fluidity as the frenetic bassline —“causeIreallyneedsomebody/tellmeareyouthatsomebody”— is everything great about late - ’90s R&B in one burst of inspiration.”

It’s an observation that hits you hard. Are You That Somebody? was released to little fanfare in 1998. This is not Outkast’s Hey Ya! praised from the get-go as a contemporary classic. The inventiveness and genuinely rhythmic and bluesy Are You That Somebody? might be the best example of the late ’90s sound, but it wasn’t exactly an anomaly. There was Missy Elliot, Brandy, Monica, Maxwell, Ginuwine, Usher (again), and a lot of other artists offering quality R&B songs, albeit not as consistently as Aaliyah.

We Can Blame It On Ke$Ha

This realization, of course, leads one to consider our generation’s R&B landscape, and eventually, radio landscape. While ’90s radio was replete with flannel rock, Lilith Fair confessionals, and inventive though sometimes syrup-y R&B songs.

This is not some masturbatory nostalgia trip. While every generation has its shameful Who Let the Dogs Out?, 2010 radio programming seems to be on a quest to one-up the whole pound      — making hits out of novelty offerings that sound more like ringtones than actual songs. Tic Toc, OMG, even California Gurls — is anyone writing songs we’ll be listening to in 10 years?

Of course there’s the indie movement and its prodigies and geniuses. But as Esquire’s Tom Junod already observed in his “Is There Such a Thing as a Perfect Song?” essay, that’s neither here nor there. “A perfect song is a song you first heard on the radio, because besides simplicity and yearning, the elements indispensable to all perfect songs are the elements of commonality, time, and fate. Subtract any of these and not only do you have a song that is suddenly less than perfect, you have the lot of the song aspiring to perfection in the age of MySpace and the iPod.”

This is why Feist’s 1, 2, 3, 4’s chart run was such a miracle — a great songwriter with a great song finally getting the audience it deserves. This is why we cling to Taylor Swift. For all her annoying tics and fairytale allusions, Swift is a sincere but professional pop songwriter churning out hits with actual melody and song structure. In the 1970s, it would’ve been a small feat, but in 2010, we shower her with Grammy’s and album sales.

Perhaps Taylor Momsen is symptomatic of the problem. The Upper East Side reject turned Hole-era Courtney Love impersonation famously told a reporter, “There’s always going to be pop, but it’s not real music, it’s not me.” Perhaps it’s this snobbery that’s killing music, more than piracy, more than Justin Bieber.

Anybody saying they don’t want to write the perfect song is lying. Everybody wants a piece of that infinity-in-a-song, art that transcends.   And perhaps it’s the alchemy between a Pavement and a Perry — the artist and the muse, the king of Cyprus and Pygmalion — that will save everything in the end.

Take the case of Kelly Clarkson’s Herculean Since U Been Gone. It’s easy to dismiss a song like that for what it is — a perfect pop thrasher sharpened to perfection by Swedish pop doctors. But what’s great about the record is that everyone brings their best to the table. A world-class singer letting her bloodhound of a voice loose on an immaculately-crafted pop song — it’s an ingénue-svengali relationship that harkens back to the rich, fertile days of Brill Building songwriting. And if “artificial” and “fake” art like this can trick you into thinking that breaking up sounds like being reborn, I see nothing wrong with that.