Oh I do agree to an extent - sometimes it isn't needed. I hate when she does it in 'Big White Room' the most, which could be 10x better if she didn't oversing it so much :(.

I love that she over sings, especially in 'Big White Room'. :kink: I don't like it when she goes too far, but I love her riffs. :wub:

I like the oversinging in Big White Room because the song is so simple and her vocals are what makes it for me. I only dislike it when the melody of the song can't be heard sometimes like the final chorus of Rainbow. The mixing has her adlibs too high and so the chorus is drowned out a bit. I Need This also has too many at the end. The instrumental is nice and doesn't need her to adlib every single second.

I found a poll of peoples favourite songs on the album, so I thought i'd post the results:

 

Who You Are - 37%

Price Tag - 34%

Do It Like A Dude - 26%

Nobodys Perfect - 22%

Whos Laughing Now - 14%

Mamma Knows Best - 11%

Abracababra - 10%

L.O.V.E - 10%

Big White Room - 8%

Rainbow - 8%

Casualty Of Love - 6%

Stand Up - 5%

I Need This - 5%

 

I am suprised that Mamma Know Best is so high and I expected Stand Up, Rainbow & Abracadabra to be a couple of places higher each too :o

I'm surprised by those results too! :o :o A lot of the songs have grown on me even more, I'm in complete love with this album. :wub:

I found a poll of peoples favourite songs on the album, so I thought i'd post the results:

 

Who You Are - 37%

Price Tag - 34%

Do It Like A Dude - 26%

Nobodys Perfect - 22%

Whos Laughing Now - 14%

Mamma Knows Best - 11%

Abracababra - 10%

L.O.V.E - 10%

Big White Room - 8%

Rainbow - 8%

Casualty Of Love - 6%

Stand Up - 5%

I Need This - 5%

 

I am suprised that Mamma Know Best is so high and I expected Stand Up, Rainbow & Abracadabra to be a couple of places higher each too :o

I'm not. Jessie is plugging her Vevo Lifts session quite a bit on her facebook page (in which she performs the top 4 and 'Mama Knows Best') 'Who's Laughing Now' would be the song that gives her another big hit on the fact that she hasn't given it a high profiled performance yet (well, that I know of anyway :lol:). 'Stand Up' and 'I Need This' are too low though! :(

Up to #37 on US iTunes :wub:!

 

 

B.o.B. was thereeeeeee! :wub: - The instruments were too loud though through the last chorus :drama:

 

 

With these live performances 'Mama Knows Best' is GROWING! :wub:

She smashed Mamma Knows Best. I wasn't as keen on the performance of Price Tag, the band just drowned it out too much. Hope she can at least go top 40 on the Billboard officially after the performance though.

Hopefully the album can miraculously climb to no. 1 in the coming weeks, or when NP is released! This album is fantastic, it and 21 are my two fave albums of the year! I hope Whose Laughing Now and Abracabdra get released, although Who You Are is my fave on the album because I'd prefer it to remain a totally epic album track rather than a single!

Hmm if Jessie gets her way, Who you are will be a single. It's her fav off the album apparently.

Hmm if Jessie gets her way, Who you are will be a single. It's her fav off the album apparently.

 

Hmmmm so it was the labels choice to release the inferior Nobodys Perfect then? You would think they would go with the one that already went top 40....but apparently not :lol: :lol:

Mamma Knows Best is amazing live! So fun and so much energy. :)

Up to #37 on US iTunes :wub:!

to #27. ^_^ ^_^

Now #21! :o

Jessie J

Who You Are

[Lava / Universal Republic; 2011]

 

 

2.0

 

At least in the United States, it seems as though Jessie J has been thrust into the spotlight without any warning. There's an uncomfortable inevitability about her sudden stardom, as though superproducer Dr. Luke and the people at Universal Music Group decreed that she would be huge whether we wanted her or not. So far she's done okay-- her single "Price Tag" is performing well at pop radio and digital retail-- but it's hard to say whether she's going to have much traction in the U.S. market.

 

Mainly, Jessie J seems to be surplus to demand. The contemporary pop landscape is already crowded with well-defined female pop stars-- postmodern disco artiste Lady Gaga, fierce soul goddess Beyoncé, slovenly party girl Ke$ha, cheesecake goofball Katy Perry, cyborg sexpot Britney Spears, troubled ice queen Rihanna, and perennial underdog Robyn. Jessie J is much more of a cipher; she is set apart mainly by the fact that she is British, though her accent only occasionally comes through in her performances. She comes across like a severely dumbed-down Lily Allen at best, and at worst she seems like someone you would want to root against in a televised singing competition. Her approach to song selection on her debut album reinforces the singing-competition vibe-- the music is scattered, covering all the bases in an over-eager attempt to prove vocal chops. It's very ironic, then, that she titled the record Who You Are, because she does pretty much everything but assert a coherent identity over the course of 13 tracks.

 

Jessie J, otherwise known as Jessica Cornish, already had a successful career as a songwriter going before becoming a pop star in her own right. Most notably, she co-wrote Miley Cyrus' hit "Party in the U.S.A." with Dr. Luke and Claude Kelly. Clearly she has some chemistry with these two, as the most tolerable cuts on Who You Are happen to be collaborations with them. Very faint praise, though: "Price Tag" sounds like Nelly Furtado fronting Sugar Ray, and "Abracadabra" could pass for a reasonably decent Natasha Bedingfield deep cut. Cornish co-wrote the rest of the tracks with various writers, and the results are competent but generic.

 

In some cases, it is all too obvious that the writers are trying to write a "type" of song. "Casualty of Love", for example, sounds like Alicia Keys' wonderful "If I Ain't Got You" stripped of melodic complexity, ambiance, soul, and sentimental resonance. The single "Do It Like a Dude" is dancehall pastiche that isn't too far off from Robyn's "Dancehall Queen", but trades that singer's warmth and humanity for spiteful hectoring. The acoustic ballad "Big White Room" aims for beautiful simplicity, but its delicacy is drowned out by a clumsy and overwrought vocal performance.

 

Jessie J's persona seems most defined when she is being totally obnoxious. Though she mostly sticks to the predictable un-nuanced phrasing of many young singers desperate to prove that they possess a "good voice," she sometimes employs a snarky singsong that is very shrill, but at least somewhat distinct. She goes over the top with this affectation on the bratty rocker "Who's Laughing Now", a song that could very well be the nadir of modern pop's fixation with attacking "haters." The track has her lashing out against acquaintances who she claims bullied her and dissed her early music, but now show an interest in her since she has attained some degree of success. While it is fair to distrust people who transparently want a piece of you, the details in the lyrics seem a bit too minor to merit her intense vitriol. The song is a humorless expression of galling entitlement; the sound of a person who will conflate any form of criticism or disapproval with an attempt to crush her soul. "Who's Laughing Now" seems to be pitched as a motivational song, but it's so narcissistic and myopic that it's hard to imagine anyone connecting with the singer's petty grudges and desperate need for constant affirmation.

 

Cornish is an alum of London's prestigious BRIT School, the arts academy that has launched the careers of several notable young British singers including Amy Winehouse, Adele, Katy B, Jamie Woon, and Kate Nash. Weirdly, of this crop of singers, only Cornish very obviously seems like a person who went to a school for pop stars, with all the tackiness that would imply. She shares their polish and poise, but none of her peers' individual style. Whereas Adele and Winehouse also have powerhouse voices, they fit into clear aesthetic niches and invest their songs with depth and humanity. Jessie J doesn't have even a fraction of their restraint; her idea of showcasing her gift is to shoot for a blaring melisma on "Mamma Knows Best" that makes Christina Aguilera seem as subtle as Joni Mitchell by comparison.

 

On the same weekend Jessie J was getting her first big push in America as the musical guest on "Saturday Night Live", the music video for Rebecca Black's "Friday" was just beginning to spread around the Internet as a viral sensation. "Friday" took off because people were calling it the worst song ever and mocking its dopey lyrics and awkward approximation of standard modern pop tropes. The biggest difference between Black's song and the contents of Who You Are is that while Jessie J gets the expected formula of pop "right," the hapless Black gets it "wrong." But in that "wrongness" lies a humanity that J cannot approach. Even through bad vocal processing, Black sounds like a specific person. Also, the lyrics of "Friday" may be undeniably clunky, but there is a magic to them that makes the song funny and immensely quotable, like a lot of great pop songs throughout history. Jessie J's lyrics are no less banal and artless, but they lack charm entirely. When she's not going off on bitter rants against those who doubt her, she mainly sings forgettable boilerplate or spouts vapid utopian nonsense, as on the utterly nauseating "Rainbow". Black gets attacked for representing the worst of modern pop, but she's a gawky 13-year-old amateur backed up by a Z-grade production company. If you need to rail against dumb, soulless music, Jessie J is a far better target.

 

The post above is completely ridiculous. I don't know where that was posted but how they can call someone as down to earth as her 'obnoixious' and say that possibly the worst song ever written is better than Jessie is pathetic.

The post above is completely ridiculous. I don't know where that was posted but how they can call someone as down to earth as her 'obnoixious' and say that possibly the worst song ever written is better than Jessie is pathetic.

 

It is quite comical though...

Jessie has confirmed on her Twitter that she has shot the music video for 'Nobody's Perfect' this week. :)

The post above is completely ridiculous. I don't know where that was posted but how they can call someone as down to earth as her 'obnoixious' and say that possibly the worst song ever written is better than Jessie is pathetic.

 

That Pitchfork review is out of order on a grand scale just mean spirited.Jessie has real authentic talent but her record company got greedy and rush released her album when it really needed stronger songs.Truly to compare her to talentless spoilt brat Rebecca and the worse rubbish ever written is beyond a joke.

God what a needlessly nasty review :( I feel the album is a very strong debut, not a track I dislike! I love Friday, but comparing it to Jessie J isn't really fair. Rebecca is very likely having one big joke, it's not as if Friday is actually a serious song! But Jessie has been trying for so long to make it big and now she's even cracking the US!

I still standby that 'Nobody's Perfect' is a pretty $h!t choice and it should be 'Rainbow' or 'Who You Are' instead.