Saturday, January 03, 2009

#82 Jordin Sparks & Chris Brown, "No Air"



Got me out here in the water so deep
Tell me how you gon be without me
If you ain't here, I just can't breathe
It's no air, no air

Overdone epic pop-R&B balladry becomes the greatest thing in the world for the length of the second single from American Idol winner Jordin Sparks's debut album. I've gone on the record with liking Chris Brown many times before, so it made me all the happier that he was half of this fantastic song and I very much wanted Idol to prove that it can still produce winners relevant to the modern commercial music scene, but even beyond that they match the song well vocally and even just with their youth. They lend their voices to a song that avoids the typical power ballad route and instead steps lightly and gorgeously from cloud to cloud. "No Air" acknowledged and worked with the sound of contemporary charts, but it was an incredible breath of, well, fresh air for American music.

Find it on: Jordin Sparks

3 comments:

Yuяi said...

Such a great song! I thought fer shure it would have ranked higher on your chart. :)

Anonymous said...

I am SHOCKED this song is rank so low????

Poster Girl said...

You all might be even more shocked to find out that originally, in an early version of the list, it wasn't in the top 100 at all! I think the best I can say is to take a page from Adem and say it's a case where all the songs in, say, the top 50 could be in the top 10, all the songs in the list could be in the top 30, and so on. Making it onto the final countdown was incredibly difficult for songs this year, so everything on this list is something I love. "No Air" is a song that sometimes I end up admiring, respecting, and wanting other songs to feel inspired by (not in the sense of copying, but rather seeking to make music that sounds as fresh as this) more than personally connecting at times (though not all times!), and I think that's what caused the lower placing.

These rankings are so ridiculously arbitrary for me, though--I flip back and forth on where songs should be every day. I think "No Air" will be a song to go the distance and hold up for years to come.