WHAT'S GOING ON

Hi, hello. How are you We've had a week off, like Desperate Housewives (though unlike that program, we sadly could not be bothered to cobble together any kind of summary of the Fop action "to date" in order to "stretch out the season". If blogs had ratings, ours would be probably insalvageable. You'd almost be forgiven for thinking we'd migrated permanently over to the Lizjournals, as per the latest fashion). We also haven't been to any Pop Festivals or anything even slightly good (apart from a wonderful restaurant called Zum Zum in North Carlton). We did go to the Triple R Community Cup which was just as tedious and earnest as you would think, but more crowded (and with more Dallas Crane involvement). In summary, we have no real excuses for our absence. We ARE sort of trying to book a trip to Iceland with our chum, but that's really about it why is Iceland so bloody expensive

But never mind, as they say, all that! Let's just talk about nothing at all except CASSY "Casey" DONOVAN, for a few minutes, can we! Some time ago, we were fairly astonished to learn that she's busting out a third single from her album. Look:

"Flow", she's releasing. And even though we're probably the only pop blog that:
* truly wants this song to do well; and
* thinks that this song could be anything other than the final nail in the Cassy coffin,
we must say that surely the only reason Cassy hasn't been summarily dropped by SBME is that season three of Australian Idol is about to start, and it wouldn't really do to have Andrew G banging on about the great chance of a fantastic record deal for the winner, if the most recent winner didn't actually have hers anymore. So, lucky Cassy! (sort of)

Now, this song. It's very good, really (for something Australian). It's been written by the same person who wrote "Put Yourself In My Place", which everyone knows is Kylie's best proper ballad, and though "Flow" isn't as good as that, it's certainly far better than some of the other Australian-made pop polluting the charts presently. And by "Australian-made pop", we mean the horrible Random single and the "beautiful" Jimmy Barnes/Dallas Crane duet, which would almost certainly constitute an "unnecessary cultural product" for the purposes of subsection 29AA(1)(f)(i) of the Shithouse Ideas Act (Cth), if that act, eg, existed.

Do you like the sound of "Flow" so far? Do you really wanna feel her flow? Oh oh oh?

It's also good that the record company have clearly spent about $20 on the video for "Flow", but made it still look sort of acceptable. Hopefully this signals a shift in the way Australian record companies market pop music (ie, letting a pop act develop gradually, rather than throwing pots and pots of money at it from the start, then dumping it immediately once it inevitably doesn't quite make very much money back). We've been reading a very intelligent thread over at the Popjustice boards about how proper pop is now more of a minority musical interest than indie ever was in the early 90s, and its marketing and production needs to reflect this. (We, of course, had this idea back in 2001 when we noisomely considered that Bardot should make a video "in the style of" Magic Dirt's cheap, sexy and clever "Pace It" clip, but no one was remotely interested in the brilliant notion of a shamelessly pop act appropriating gritty indie imagery, stupidly.)

EDIT: Speaking of Kylie, a lovely person over at the Sayhey just hooked us up with Jose Gonzalez's cover of Kylie's "Hand On Your Heart". This is one of our favourite EVER Kylie songs, and a cover version of it is BIG news. Expect more on this breaking development shortly.