Vancouver-raised crooner Michael Bublé. Beloved by “the olds.”

Scurrilous Ephemera for Oct. 27 2009 – Michael Bublé tops the charts. Plus: New Moon soundtrack.

– by Stephanie MacDonald

The hotly anticipated and long awaited soundtrack to New Moon, the second movie in the Twilight trilogy (yep, production on a THIRD one of these things just wrapped in Vancouver), appeared last week. The much-hyped CD (record? digital download?) features original music by some of the world’s most excellent and successful artists including Thom Yorke, Death Cab for Cutie, Muse and The Killers, along with not-mainstream-yet critical darlings like Sea Wolf, Grizzly Bear and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, to name a few.

With this lineup fronting an album with, like, a zillion built-in fans you would expect a landslide into the number one spot on the charts. But who, pray tell, topped the Billboard list in the week of this tidal wave of coolness? Suburban Vancouver’s own Michael Bublé.

After cruelly denying KISS’s comeback the pole position last week, Bublé licked it up again, this time against much harder competition: authentically good music. Should this ignite our brand of chilly Canadian patriotism? Not really. Defamer’s Richard Rushfield makes some very good points about this, including the fact that there is a huge market out there that Rolling Stone and MTV pretty much ignore: uncool people.

Not often considered by hip people like Guttersnipe readers (give yourselves a collective pat on the back), uncool people are often (but not always!) old, and the olds have a hard time with a couple of things: those Internets and, well, morality, resulting in an inability or a unwillingness to perform simple tasks like downloading free music. (Hey, we’re not advocating downloading music for free – Marilyn Manson needs to subsidize his absinthe distillery somehow.) Since the charts generally only count music that’s actually bought, this is where our crazy numbers come from, making the charts themselves look almost as archaic as the people who like jazzy standards sung by David Foster disciples.

Ironically, though the soundtrack to New Moon may actually be quite great, anyone over the age of 14 who is really obsessed by the Twilight series of books or movies, or vampires sparkly-or-not in general, is treading a dark path right into lameness themselves, so beware.