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Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

that song (dunno who it's by) with the lyrics "We found love in a hopeless place"

It's by Rihanna, and I can't even understand how it got released. It's like something that got rejected from how-to-make-techno.tumblr.com for being too basic.

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It's got a strong hook- something I have come to believe is nine-tenths of a pop single's success.

don't forget a lot of money and promotion. I think that's at least half

Its incredibly repetitive pop drivel. I wonder if teens have a higher tolerance for repetition than adults. They seem the only demographic with any affinity for this type of stuff.

When you're young, you've heard less music. Which means that things that seem derivative and samey to older people don't to teens.

There is also, in general, more tolerance for repetition in dance music than in other genres.

My impression is that older people stop listening to new music, so at some point that's not true anymore..

I listen to a lot of trance/techno music and other similarly repetitive genres (eg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrAxmOvjSYw&feature=relat...). But I like it to have a few different elements to cycle between, and when there's a big musical build I expect it to climax with something other than the exact same thing that came immediately before the build. I have literally made more interesting things than this over morning coffee, and I don't consider myself any great shakes as a musician.

The only explanation I can come up with for the release of this tune is that the quite-talented Rihanna was either incapable or unwilling to go back to the studio to record anything and there was a looming contract deadline imposed by her record publishers, so her management team took some abandoned recording material from a previous session and farmed it out to a momentarily-popular DJ.

Calvin Harris (producer of the song) is hands down the worst DJ I have ever seen in action. No feeling for the audience and horrible noise.

That's surprising, given that the only other Rihanna song I know ("Umbrella") is... well, it's a bit annoying, but it's got significantly more going on musically.

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