NOW That's What I Call Music! 25 is the number one album in the country this week, with 223,000 copies sold. The NOW! album held off Hannah Montana and T.I. to claim the top spot.
What's interesting about this installment of the NOW! series is the surprising lack of rock. Sure, the NOW! discs have always been about pop music, but they've always thrown in the two or three token rock songs at the end; you know, when kids' attentions spans had already run out and they wouldn't notice a Papa Roach song was playing.
Check out this tracklisting for NOW! 25:
1. Fall Out Boy - Thnks Fr Th Mmrs
2. Avril Lavigne - Girlfriend
3. Gwen Stefani w/Akon - The Sweet Escape
4. Pink - U & UR Hand
5. Fergie - Glamorous
6. Beyonce/Shakira - Beautiful Liar
7. Justin Timberlake - Summer Love
8. Ne-Yo - Because Of You
9. T-Pain w/Yung Joc - Buy You A Drank
10. Lloyd - Get It Shawty
11. Huey - Pop, Lock & Drop It
12. Mims - Like This
13. Bone Thugs N-Harmony w/Akon - I Tried
14. Bow Wow - Outta My System
15. Kelly Clarkson - Never Again
16. Boys Like Girls - The Great Escape
17. Keith Urban - I Told You So
18. Carrie Underwood - Before He Cheats
19. Elliot Yamin - Wait For You
20. Daughtry - Home
The only songs resembling rock at all are Fall Out Boy and Daughtry, and those are definitely on the pop end of the rock spectrum. Where are the token rock hits? Are they cutting rock bands out of the equation, or are there simply not any big enough rock hits out there right now? I mean, I can't even think of a rock song from this summer that has permeated pop culture. It's kinda sad.
If you go back in history, the NOW! 20 disc had songs from Coldplay and Weezer. NOW! 15 had tracks from Fuel and Three Days Grace. I could go on, but the format is the same for most older NOW! CDs: about 15 pop songs, a couple pop/rock songs, and a couple real, solid rock tracks. Now, it's all pop.
Furthermore, if you listen to pop radio, there are no more rock songs anymore. There used to be a couple that snuck in there, but the last rock song I can remember really crossing over was Red Jumpsuit Apparatus, and that's almost a year old. What happened to the crossover rock song?
These days, a lot of people rely on sources like the Internet and satellite radio for music. This was supposed to make music less segmented and break down genre barriers, with people listening to rap one minute, then rock the next, and pop the next. But has it actually made segmentation worse? It's starting to seem that way.
