On Elyar Fox, popjeopardy and out-of-control lyric videos

Any new break­through (or about-to-break­through) artist is inter­est­ing to a certain degree, but despite his obvious talent — and a huge fanbase that he pretty much built himself — Elyar Fox is the sort of waiting-in-the-wings pop sensation whose imminent hugeness is seen to be so guar­an­teed that when people talk about him they do so with a certain sense of sadness. Maybe, from some quarters, it's resent­ment from managers and artists whose own exper­i­ences with artist launches have been frus­trat­ing and unsuccessful.

But it's also the case, as a lot of us dis­covered with Rita Ora (even if we didn't realise it while it was happening), that there are times when you really miss the part of a popstar's rise to fame when it feels like anything could (or couldn't) happen. This sort of talk might be com­pletely lost on anyone who works at a label. If you work at a label, or have any involve­ment with trying to break an artist, you'll take any glimmer of success and cling onto it for dear life.

But for pop fans, with Rita Ora and a few other artists in recent years — Conor Maynard's another — there was no real sense of jeopardy. Gameshows don't work without jeopardy, nor does sport, and nor does pop. With Rita the label, the feature on a dance track, the guest rapper, the producers and song­writers, the PR campaign, the man­age­ment, the whole package was so smoothly con­struc­ted that there was almost no narrative when Rita did, as planned, become very famous. When 'How We Do (Party)' hit Number One, it should have seemed impress­ive. Instead, it just felt like someone could tick another box.

Some of our favourite music comes to life in a manner that is more sci­entific than it is artistic, but when the launch of a new act is reduced to an equation it means we miss out on the best bit of falling in love with a new popstar: the excitement.

Anyway we are not here to talk about Rita Ora, and we're not really here to talk about Elyar Fox's equation for pop supremacy (in this case the brute force pop launch combines Polydor with Global Talent's guar­an­teed airplay and Fox's own impress­ive following on YouTube, Twitter etc), and we also don't want it to seem like we're down on Elyar Fox, because there's lots of potential here for a bright and likeable new star in the pop cosmos. At the very least, his logo is good.

Anyway, what we're really here to discuss is the lyric video Elyar has made for his rather good new song 'Colourblind' (which you can get as a download on his site), and the fact that the lyric video is com­pletely ridicu­lous. It's ridicu­lous because it's not a lyric video at all, it's just a video which happens to have some words in it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65YbEYuwySM

We've loved lyric videos since they first started popping up a few years ago, and this one takes the 'genre' to absurd extremes. In a way we feel slightly upset that the purity of songwords flying around on a screen is lost with lyric videos like this. On the other hand, we always like seeing lyrics brought to life in different ways. This 'lyric video' chat isn't as inter­est­ing as the popjeop­ardy thing, is it? Sorry about that.

Elyar Fox: further reading

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