Rolling Teenpop 2006 Thread

Amy Diamond's new single has hit the Swedish charts at #4, realplayer link on http://sr.se/p3/topplistor/hitlistan/ - it's not especially dis-similar to her other stuff...

Also, Magnus Carlsson and Andreas Lundstedt - the two blokes from Alcazar - have solo singles in the top five. Neither is especially stunning.

Throughout dinner -- where we're joined by the girls' dad, Mark, who owns a successful contracting company -- kidnapping comes up in coversation. Carrie says that hen the girls were invited to a party Elton John was giving, she sent a body guard with them, because "if they got in someone else's care, I could never see them again." Hollywood, mom and daughters agree, is "full of freaks." Later on, Aly pets her big black dog Saint vigorously (they're about to get two puggle pups, too), and says he's there to protect them from "perverts."

You're home-schooled girls in a gated suburb -- why are you so afraid of kidnapping?

"It's not a fear of ours, Aly says."We just want people to be aware. You could live in a nice neighborhood and there could be some perv there. You never know."

Later, re: home-schooling:

Given the pronounced Christian overtones in the home-schooling movement, we can't help but ask the girls for their thoughts on that cultural hot potato, intellgient design.

Do you believe in evolution?

"No," AJ says, shaking her head and frowning.

"Wait, Aly says," bolting forward. "Are they teaching that in schools now?"

They've ben teaching it for the beter part of a century.

"I think that's kind of disrespeectful," Aly says. "Anything that has to do with anybody's beliefs on religions, that should stay out of the classroom. I mean, I think people should be able to pray in schol, if people were into that. Everybody should just do their own gig."

"Evolution is silly," AJ adds. "Monkeys? Um, no."

Clarkson uses them more as texture/orchestration. "Beautiful Disaster" is a great example of an implied higher third harmony that just begs to be properly sung tight with the main melody, but instead, and very cleverly, as it adds an element of teasing frustration of sound desire, is sung by a whole mess of Kellys, panned hard left and right like a keyboard.

The Veronicas tend to go for that tight harmony thing straight-out, which might explain why people seem to react to them being more 'real' or something. Whatever, the combination of the crazy-perfect production and the very human two part singing is terrific.

But that leads to some Dead Ringers weirdness: They're identical twins. So do they have identically toned voices? Who's singing what? Are they two identities or a human doubling machine?

"sos" on vh1 (#3 on top 20) right now. seriously, that song keeps getting
better. which is amazng since i got a leaked mp3 back in late Jan...4
montgs later it's still fave song of 06. too bad the album sux. current
single (ballad) is just ok. the sean paul song is good tho. butr it's
basically just a choruis sung like 18x in a row.

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METAL MIKE SUNDERS VIA EMAIL:
i've never liked a single tune i've heard by A&A, so i know absolutely nothing them except that they suck. honest, i don't even know which Disney cable TV show they come from...since i did notice/see part of the lame TV movie.

on the other hand i LOVE love love Mylie Cyrus's voice...man, does she have a whopper of an accent. y'all.

A&A can kiss Mylie's ass.

Jimmy Draper CD-R'd me all the Max Martin-related cuts of the Bo Bice, Pink, and Marion Raven albums. i totally dug the Pink and Bo tunes and productions. only one of the Marion tunes made much an impression. the CD-R also had five of the Marie (Sernekolt of the A*Teens) album cuts and i REALLY liked them...they sounded just like a tamer more Adult AC version of the A*Teens style. the Veronicas, marit Larsen, West End Kids, and Amy Diamond cuts on the back half of the CD-R made no impression.

there's a small truckload of Girls Aloud CD-singles/UK over at Dublin tower (marked down to) $2.99 or $3.99 and i'm trying to remember if they ever had a good song. I brought home "Love Machine" because it had the best sleeve but haven't opened it yet. Best find in that rack (CD-singles) was Rachel Stevens' best single "I Said never Again" for $2.99 sealed.

i brought home a sealed SLEEPOVER soundtrack CD from the 15/$10 bin (of about 15,000 cds...or 14,925 after i was finished) and would like to point out -- Brie Larson was one of the MEAN girls in that movie, i'm pretty sure. i liked it a lot and wanted to see it again but it vanished even quicker than Mean Girls itself buried New York Minute. which i liked (in the movie theatre) and i'm about to run a sealed $1 VHS tape of same any night now as the featured home movie attraction. one of the hated Olsens as surly "chick rocker" (w/guitar)...too much.

METAL MIKE SAUNDERS VIA EMAIL:

oh god i haate fuckin Rooney.
> i'm a very picky old man you gotta realize.
> i'd like to shave their dopey heads with a Marine buzzsaw
> induction barbershop blade, for sure.

> pop puppet = a grand tradition. Fabian actually had about a
> dozen sides during 1959-1961 that rocked like hell and he sang like
> a howling punk rock future with none whatsoever (future). all
> over, within 18 months. that's how i prefer my "artistic
> credibility." set it to zero and i'm a happy man. people thinking
> they're as talented as the Beatles...that's what gets my blood
> boiling.

> haven't heard any Ashley Parker A except what excerpts were on
> the TV show, and the live TRL slot of the single.

i grew up in the era of 1965-66 garage bands, and saw firsthand (in highschool) the hippie mentality take over by the end of the 60's (and beyond till this day) of "we only play original material, man" which i think ruined rock and roll forever. (as compared to its high point in the mid-60's, for rock bands anyway). even bands that don't have this "i'm a muuusian, man" fuckhead attitude (from the punk/new wave days) still suffered from hippie-fallout in their basic orientation re material.

for every talented writing team like Holder-Lea (Slade), there's idiots like the Sweet who had NO BUSINESS thinking they could write anything but B-sides (ok, and the revised version of "Fox On The Run" that became the 45 side).

instead, since the start of the 70's you have writers becoming singers-songwriters in order to get their tunes heard (when they'd be better off spending 100% of their time writing), and strong performers/bands whose writing output usually goes bad pretty quickly. even an all time great band like Black Sabbath only had 2 good albums of material in them! (their 2nd and 3rd lps). bands like AC/DC or Kiss that had 6 whole albums of material (before they started to suck) are by far the rarity.

i'm a big fan of the Motown division of labor -- producer / writer / performer -- and always will be. no one expects acts to produce or engineer their own recordings in order to have "credibility," so why should songwriting be any different?

Elvis (through the early 60's) and Frank Sinatra functioned brilliantly as their own A&R men (choosing their own material) (in Elvis' case from stacks of acetates of song-demos, ha many of the early 60's west coast ones sung by PJ Proby)....sure didn't seem to hurt them re putting their personal stamp on their sound/recordings. (if there's a better 2-sided #1 hit than "Marie's The Name / Little Sister," i sure never heard it. .

if i were in a big national rock band, the very first thing i would do is put out a cattle call for MATERIAL WANTED. you never know what great tune in your genre might be stuck out in Nebraska somewhere without a connection to ever get it heard anywhere except in demo form on its myspace page.

bands with their own in-house "lyricist" (ie ALL lyrics, by a non-band member re performance or recordings) like Procol Harum or the Grateful Dead (altho their music sure sucked) were a curious phenomenon of the late 60's.

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JIMMY DRAPER VIA EMAIL:

not-so-good girls aloud = anything on 1st album

great girls aloud= everytrhing else (when Xenomania took control!).
particularly the girl-power song "no good advice" and "models", which
is
like a manic muppets theme song. but the BEST GA song EVER is the
recent
b-side "i dont really hate you" ("...i just dont want to date you"),
which i
once worked out at the Y for 8 days straight listening to only that
song on
repeat. which is excessive even for me,..

GA's "love machine" sux, as does the arctic monkey's cover of it.
sugababes'
cover of AM's "...dance floor" is brilliant, tho. sugas' cover of that
metal/rock/classic rock band (i don't ev en know what counts as WHAT
anymroe) about "living 4 the weekend" something or other is trash tho!
(hard
lesson? hard-fi? i forget which band...probs hard-fi cuz U.K.)

Has anybody else heard Meg and Dia? Teen-emo sisters (twins maybe?) from Utah, album out later this summer. Also they have two boys in their band, which makes them look like the A*Teens, and I was hoping they'd at least sound like the Veronicas, but sadly they do not. More like the Cranberries, I guess, yuck. (If you're gonna be a pop-hating teenager, better to go the route of this 17-year-old guitar prodigy girl from Long Island, who prefers Nektar and Gentle Giant):

http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=4182039

http://www.myspace.com/megdia

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/omm/story/0,,1776732,00.html

Elsewhere in the mag. they're big up a forthcoming best music books ever feature and say: "A surprise early contender? Chuck Eddy's Stairway to Hell"

Just yesterday pulled Meg & Dia from my PO box, will report back later, though temporarily I've been trying to immerse myself in country to pretend to convince myself I care about anything other than teenpop (which isn't really a genre, we decided on a Bedbugs comments thread; more a catchall like "Young Adult" says Abby).

In the meantime, for some reason I can't figure out I've been using the term "Hawaiian music" almost at random these days to refer not to real quasi-Hawaiian music like Sol Hoopii but rather to any sound that seems kinda '40s-'50s loungey or like "sophisticated" '50s jazz-pop but I only apply the term when the sound is on a teenpop record. So, another of the many reasons for Ashlee's superiority to everyone else is that her music is much more Hawaiian. I credit Shanks, since the Hawaiian style seems absent when DioGuardi goes Shanks-free, e.g. on A Little More Personal (Raw), though perhaps Ashlee herself is responsibe for some of the Hawaiian input (and to confuse matters more, the chorus to "Unreachable" seems at least as Polynesian as any other Ashlee, and the songwriters are Simpson-Frazier-Fox-Nevil-Mann, not Shanks, though Shanks is responsible for all instruments but drums and Ashlee for all the vocals, so those two might nonetheless be the ones responsible for the Hawaiian-slidin' feeling).

So when I first heard "Burnin Up" I thought to myself, "a not-so-dubby dub track, hmmmm," and my mind wandered a bit until the hilarious Deborah Allen–stylee disco-sex-slut break. In later listens, however, I found my way to the more subtle but just as sexy vocals in the verse, and it dawned on me that despite the reggae rhythm, neither melody nor singing was remotely reggae, in fact was this fake-Spanish vocal descent not unlike "Habañera" from Bizet's Carmen, which Ashlee sings in a warm breathy Brazilian-Manhattan coo, which I immediately designated - both melody and coo - as "Hawaiian."

(Also, by the way, Ashlee is incredibly effective in inserting more of her basic throaty burr into her coo as the verses go on.)

There are scary and dangerous things in my life and in this world and so music like that made by The Veronicas and Lindsay offers the abstracted balm of melody and a sort of cottony femininity that has nothing to do with my sexual interests but which I find reassuring.

And really, that's about it for me. Plus, Cheap Trick isn't making amazingly great/transcendant pop right bnow, so this'll do.

Anthony, the videos for a lot of these songs are streamed on launch.yahoo.com; the sound is high quality even for people like me who are on dialup. You'll have to register, but unless your being in Canada is a barrier (I doubt it), you can find "Rush" there, all five Ashlee singles (though not album tracks such as "Burnin Up," unfortunately), ten Clarkson singles, five Lohans, three Rihanna (incl. "SOS"), two Veronicas ("Everything I'm Not," and "4ever"), one Ashley Parker Angel ("Let U Go"), a whole bunch by Shakira. They don't have everything, however (don't yet have "So What" by Field Mob, for instance, or "Sweet Temptation" by Lillix).

Hint, there aren't nearly as many commercial interruptions if you click "Yahoo! Music in Spanish" at the bottom and then go searching from there.

(Hope this isn't a double post; I've been getting poxy fuled all over the place.)

But still - all those reading this thread not in possession of Stiff, Stiffer, Stiffest ought very much to check it out. 'Swords Of A Thousand Men' and 'Lucky Number' are worth the entrance fee on their own.

We regret that Yahoo! Music videos are not currently supported for Macintosh. We are exploring ways to offer video on additional platforms, and hope you’ll check back as we make enhancements to the service.
For more information on Yahoo! Music Video system requirements, visit to the Music Video section of Yahoo! Music Help.

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Yes a Rachel Sweet video, "Sweet Dreams of My LA Ex," but they won't let me watch it, owing to my uncouthness. But right now I'm at de.launch.yahoo.com listening to (and occasionally glancing at stopframes of) Lafee's "Virus," which will be worth at least another listen. It's got enough candles to be Mexican. A kinda guitar-chorded dance-pop track, voice not as extravagant as a Spanish speaker would give it, but emotive in that emotive way anyhow. Before that I'd programmed "That's the Way My Heart Goes," the best by far of the two Marie Serneholt singles I've heard. OK, and I just tried to see if I could sneak into Rachel Sweet by the backdoor through the German site, but was still told, "This video is not available in your area. Please choose another video or visit your local Yahoo! Music US music service at http://music.yahoo.com to find all videos available within your region. Thank you."

Sob.

(Anthony, I guess that youtube is your next hope.)

Best track in the WTF category (not necessarily in the "actually rewards repeat listens" category, though one category isn't automatically more important than the other) is one called "Unfaithful" I think, which sounds like Deltra Goodrem in the backing music, but has these awesomely over the top lyrics that Deltra would blanch at. The extended metaphor is infidelity = murder, with Rihanna as assassin. At one point she suddenly blurts out something like "Why don't I just put a gun to his head and get it over with!"

Also, The Dollyrots are similar, Morningwood with less make-up and more sk8r tendencies, and the album closes with a fantastically tuneless run through of "Be My Baby".

Of course, 'twould probably be way better if Shanks & DioGuardi had written it, and way more evocative, emotional, ALIVE with Lindsay's pipes.

These are all good, 'cept Eminem is obviously capable of way better than "Cleanin."

"Janie's Got a Gun" was disqualified for being in the third person, and 2Pac's "Dear Mama" for being too much a mother's-day card. Sophie B. Hawkins' "Carry Me" and Naughty By Nature's "Ghetto Bastard" also don't meet my criteria (not that I've quite figured out what those criteria are). Not does "Luka." There's a famous Bikini Kill ("Suck My Left One") I never heard, and I don't know if Tracy Bonham's "Mother Mother" belongs (I've not heard her version, only the Veronicas'), and I haven't heard either the Lennon or the Lynne "Mother" in a long time (latter is a cover of the former, but with a whole lot of subtext), nor "House of Pain" (had the album on cassette but I can't find it anywhere), so rankings are just sort of how I feel at the moment. I probably overlooked several thousand more.

The Wreckers way under-impressed, sadly.

(x-post)

supposedly this dude landed a recording & publishing deal with virgin/EMI...?

John Shanks is producer on the whole thing and co-writes half, Shelly Peiken** also on as co-writer on four of those (she later was co-writer on Ashlee's great "Love Me For Me"): Shanks is going for full melody as he did with Michelle on "Everywhere" but also for strong rock, which Woodward augments with a P!nk burr, i.e., a basic soul-blues growl, w/ a slight tendency towards jazz scat in the melisma. Her voice is bigger than Michelle's, Ashlee's, or P!nk's, though bigger doesn't necessarily mean better, and in fact Woodward doesn't nearly convey as much personality as those three (and nothing in her lyrics come within miles of the thought or emotion you get in P!nk much less Ashlee). But there seems to be one lost classic - "Is This Hollywood" - and at least several more good ones.

(*There still is Lucy Woodward as you can find on her MySpace pages (two of 'em) but the direction seems more "legitimate")

(**Peiken a subject for further research; co-wrote a forgettable track on the first Lohan and the latest Backstreet Boys, but "Love Me For Me" and her four Woodward tracks leave me wanting to find out more.)