Representing the USA: Savannah Outen – Goodbyes
From the looks of the video, she’s setting out to be a Jojo for the post-Busted generation: Jojo plus guitars. She also made her her name on YouTube, so if she doesn’t succeed (or turns out to be a fake) we can all just switch tactics and term her the American Sandi Thom, although in this case the lyrics are offensive only in their insipidity and not in their puzzling confusion of punks and hippies. For the first half of the song I considered it to be the typical US teenpop thing, an oddly half-hearted attempt at emulating European pop music, but I’ll admit it does get going and improve a lot as it continues. The chorus is stuck in my head after two video viewings, but having heard it before without the visual accompaniment, I don’t recall thinking about Savannah even one time between that first listen and now. Still, blandness is the key to reasonable success in this day and age – the only problem for her is that you have to be either extraordinary or extraordinarily bland to really take off, and she’s not either one.
Representing Finland: Mariko – Unstoppable
Considering how much I adore their Scandinavian neighbours’ musical output, you’d think I would have delved into the Finnish music industry before now, but I hardly know a thing about it. The reason is that every time I’ve tried, I’ve had to sit through so much indistinguishable metal music to get to anything with a beat. However, one advantage of countries where pop music doesn’t exactly thrive in the charts, is that when they do create some it can often be very interesting and different to what other countries are producing. Unstoppable is a fine example of this – it’s unusual, yet catchy, with a nice video and a singer who looks like she has at least something resembling an individual personality. Mariko used to be in a rap-metal band called Kwan, and this song was actually written by someone from The Rasmus, but neither of these things could at all be guessed, so if they both would put you off normally, then this is the song for you!
Representing Jamaica: Brick & Lace – Love Is Wicked
As all my Scandinavian readers will know, this song’s already been around a while, and been very successful, but it seems to be only just making itself known in the USA. This is quite surprising since Brick & Lace are a female duo from Jamaica, signed to Akon’s label – how they ended up gaining success in cold and far away Scandinavia first can only be put down to the Scandis’ good taste. I can’t see how such a great song, which is also so fitting with current trends, could not be popular, so I will predict now that Love Is Wicked could easily be a huge summer hit for the USA and UK. It’s like Pon De Replay, but much poppier and much much better. It’s just great to dance to, so I can’t wait til it starts getting played over here. Along with Just Dance by Lady GaGa and No Air by Jordin Sparks and Chris Brown, this is the single I most definitely predict to be the biggest summer smash in the UK this year. Let’s see if I’m right, or whether something rubbish will steal the crown, as is inevitably probable.