Rolling Teenpop 2006 Thread

On some of the other songs there is a dominately featured piano, but the playing has a very modern feel to it - the piano's purpose being to introduce the condition of empty modernity that Ell is singing about, as opposed to jaunty tunes. (Glass instead of Mozart - to be slightly facetious).

What do people think?

Looking right back at the top of the thread, at Mr Kogan's KDIS playlist, it strikes me that all the artists there have at the very least been nodded at on this thread, with one exception:

8. CHEETAH GIRLS - Shake Your Tailfeather

Given that I presume the song was a cover, I can kind of see why they never popped up again, but what were they to start with?

(WBS, sorry I never replied to your email; I'll be back at my home digs in early Aug., will try to catch up then.)

I still think it's interesting that Ashley Tisdale and Lucas Gabreel display the least character development...duality (bogus or not) is the main theme, but in Ryan/Sharpay's case the duality is externalized to actually limit the possibility of us being moved by any transformation resulting from them acknowledging inner conflict. Apparently there's a subplot in the works for HSM 2 to explore Ryan/Sharpay by making brother stab sister in the back, not sure how exactly. I don't think that Ashley Tisdale's desire to be her opposite is especially apparent; she only goes after baking basketball guy after the credits have rolled, as a sort of, um, credit cookie. And anyway, I think that it's probably in line with her character's one-note behavior, manipulative, dominant, etc. (How hard would it be for the Wicked Witch to get someone to cook for her? Did she cook for herself? Not being able to touch water would be a severe culinary handicap.) Using the film's binaries, it follows that Sharpay should secretly be an excellent field hockey player or something.

He also seems to be forgetting the golden rule of capitalism: The corporation's goal is to make money. Disney would have nothing to gain by attempting some sort of bizzare brainwashing, they just put out what they think will sell, it's that simple.

They can do both, you know. Wink

*sigh* Also, they're singing about the horrors of life. Many many MANY artists do that, but you don't see other people anylizing THEM. Rolling Eyes

Eek, violent? Who gets that out of Aly & AJ?

Their fans, apparently! I get all kinds of violent hate mail from these people.

More female fronted emo over at clap clap, the band is Paramore. Maybe this should be called shemo, since emo has been tainted by a culture war and the girl groups do it better anyway.

In 1998, Britney Spears released “Baby One More Time,” and created the template for teen pop for the next four years. In 2002, Avril Lavigne released “Complicated,” and her bratty pop rock became the new standard for girls on the radio. Another four years later, having been through Avril, Kelly Clarkson, the Veronicas, Ashlee Simpson, Hilary Duff, and a whole bunch of non-starters like Skye Sweetnam, Cheyenne Kimball wheezes the genre’s last breaths. We’re due for a brand new take on teen pop right about now and “Hanging On” suggests the reinvention cannot come soon enough.

I disagree (even though I do think that Cheyenne Kimball's album and new single are pretty awful), but I'm wondering if or when teenpop has ever been proclaimed "dead." This example could just be referring to the Kelly/Ashlee style (in which case I still disagree), but all of teenpop is implicated.

Quick Google search shows that teenpop has been kinda sorta pronounced dead in Time magazine (obliquely, as a question to Xtina), and a few sarcastic results. But here the premise is "teenpop is dying but it was once very much alive!" as opposed to "teenpop is dead, finally."

but right now there is none of that. sure, xtina and justin are still massively successful icons, but they appeal as much to an adult audience as a teenage one. i find i have to do crate-digging to get to the teenpop which still clings on, which is disappointing - i don't like having to crate-dig for pop! crate-digging is indie! pop should be IN MY FACE ALL THE TIME.

yet we have ashlee simpson always missing the top 10 in the uk, lindsay lohan's music barely has a profile here at all, no one ever ever talks about either duff sister apart from ilx people...this stuff is not selling. and no one involved is going to go stratospheric like britney.

(thx to mindtaker_cro for pointing out the vid on poptimists)

http://www.myspace.com/youngbscrillahill

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyOAYxHQFL4

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=chicken+noodle+soup&search=Search

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=search_videos&search_sort=relevance&search_query=toe+wop&search=Search

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=search_videos&search_sort=relevance&search_query=tone+wop&search=Search

Except for People, what the tabs print is basically made up. You read them not for info on the celebs themselves but for the stories they project onto the celebs. So what are they saying about Ashlee? In Touch proclaims on the cover that Ashlee's friends are worried that she's obsessed with plastic surgery. The article irself doesn't back this up. The mag talks to a plastic surgeon and show him before and after pictures of Ashlee and ask if she's gotten anything done on her chin, her eyebrows, and so forth. He looks at the pictures and says no. They talk to a psychiatrist who says that getting plastic surgery often fails to build one's esteem. If people suddenly like you, you wonder why they didn't like you before. You don't believe in it. But the article is counterposing two attitudes. (1) Ashlee is insecure, in trouble. (2) Ashlee's now a knockout, a dazzler.

I haven't read the Life and Style piece, but the theme on the cover was dangerous diets, and she was shot in a revealing dress, all open on the side.

Seems to me that what the tabloids want are for the girls to be in distress, to suffer by their own hands, to be torn up inside; and the girls need to have excruciatingly normal concerns about their looks and their appeal and whether they can get dates and whether their boyfriends/hubbies are cheating and so on; and but still there has to be something special, some celeb dazzle or something.

Not sure why the tabs are seizing on Ashlee now. She'd provided damsel-in-distress material from the get-go. Something about the nose job brings her into the tabs' comprehension but also makes her one of the glamour people.

One thing I'm liking about Ashlee, beyond the music, is that she's embracing the glamour puss role, that she won't put her beauty-shaping, beauty-testing self in opposition to her moral-intellectual questing; just as when she announced the quest back in song one, she coupled it with the information that she's got stains on her T-shirt and that she's the biggest flirt.

(They sound like bored teenagers because they are - Be Your Own Pet just graduated high school, and the core of the band grew up together in Nashville and have known one another since sixth grade. RS 8/10/06)

So are BYOP a teen version of the Yeah Yeah Yeah's, or is their age coincidental to the music (which appeals to older listeners more)? I was struck by their posturing about emo music, where they basically mocked all emo bands. They aren't that different from those emo bands, and so instead of elitism, it sounded more catty. Like they wanted to start a fight - rather than actually believing in what they're saying. Which I'd say is a hallmark of teen-pop.

p.s: I can't believe everbody is ignoring my chicken noodle soup and toe-wop links.

Lily Allen "Smile": I like the light Caribbean lilt (reminds me of "Uptown Top Ranking," at least at the beginning), like the vocal (do the British people who complain about her "mockney" thing think she'd better if she didn't use pronunciations like that? I totally don't get that, but I'm not British so what do I know), love the totally mean-spirited revenge video even more. Yet there doesn't seem to be anywhere near as much to grab ahold of in the song itself as "LDN" (it's not half as funny, for one thing), but maybe I just need to hear it more. Still haven't heard her album; I can wait, though if a copy does come my way, I'll put it on first chance I get.

Chuck I could have told you this, her vocals are totally anti-Chuck!

it's that she's monied & middle-class but using working-class phrasing & accent, ostensibly as a gimmick to appear more street/urban/whatever - which may be artistic choice but the fakery sticks in the craw of many

(I'm trying to think of any Americans from the North who've used Southern accents that sounded hokey to me; it must have happened, in some hee-hawing cowpunk parody novelty act sometime. So maybe that's an equivalent. Or maybe the minstrel crap that the asswipe in the Red Hot Chili Peppers has always done? If Lily hits people how Anthony Keidis hits me, I suppose I can relate. Though with her, it seems you'd really have to bend over backwards to let it bug you.)

Anyway, yes, for me the the accent sounds affected, in the same way that a white "comedian's" rap pastiche might - it's not only appropriating the accent: it appears to be mocking it (like the girl in Common People). And that's where it bugs ...

i'm not saying there aren't remote, isolated instances here and there (which is why i said "tend not to," and "most" rather than "all") -- i mean, yeah, "not ready to make nice" takes on a different meaning if you hear it in the context of what's happened to the dixie chicks in the past couple years. but even in an extreme case like that, i have to make a point of thinking of the song that way; it doesn't come naturally. there's something willful about it. and honestly, i can't think of a case offhand, even when i do know the biography of the artist in question, where knowing said biography makes me like a record more or less than i would otherwise. maybe i'm just weird that way, i dunno. and no, obviously that doesn't mean i think "an artist's work exists in a vacuum" -- it exists in the world, which includes my life, among others.

no, of course. I meant "... work is created in a vacuum..."

And then there are songs that obviously refer to real events - possibly "Easy Silence" on the same album - that don't force the listener to contextualize the song. So I feel like the natural listening of "Not Ready to Make Nice" is a contextual listening, and the natural listening of "Easy Silence" is not.

As per the contention: "i can't think of a case offhand, even when i do know the biography of the artist in question, where knowing said biography makes me like a record more or less than i would otherwise."

For me, Cloud Room's "Hey Now Now" was like that. When I understood the biographical context of the song, I had more appreciation of it. Though that doesn't tend to be my experience - I didn't like Wilco more because of their story, or the new M. Night movie because he ditched his studio to make it. Though both those stories might be compelling reasons to reevaluate the source materials -- spend more time with it -- it didn't actually retroactively change my appreciation. (Vis-a-vis, I might relisten to an album after hearing the context to listen for the subtlties I missed the first time, but I wouldn't go: "Oh yeah! I didn't understand. In that case, it's awesome.")

They aren't ambiguous if you notice them, true. But I still find I have to listen for these lines; they don't naturally jump out of the song and tackle me. So yeah, for me, the context is still willful; then again, maybe if I heard the song every day, on the radio or on the record, or maybe if I used headphones instead of a stereo across the room, the lines would jump out. (I suppose contextualizing Eminem's songs about Kim and Haile is less willful, though. I'm sure there are other examples. But I don't think knowing who Kim and Haile are makes me like those songs more, or less.) (I still think "Easy Silence" is the dullest track on the Dixie Chicks album, for what it's worth, but this is the wrong thread for that.)

Looks up at the thread heading.

Wait a sec. How did we get from the Country thread over to the Teenpop thread?

But anyway - about the accent thing - does that mean that if as an American I completely miss the subtext of Lily Allen's participation in class warfare I'm misunderstanding Alright Still?

But if I really want to let go with *reading* Monster, I need to go to Isaac Bashavis Singer - who is the best example of someone writing about Monsters and meaning people. He writes about Dybbiks (demons) as though they were people and then turns around in the next story and writes about people as though they were demons. He was challenging the way we've come to accept humanity and the supernatural unknown - he's engaging with Jung's Shadow indirectly.

M&D are doing something similiar with Monster. Because if you can take a song about wanting love and twist it so that it comes out dark instead of poppy-happy, then you've done something with the genre. When kids on M&D's myspace page are saying that Monster is really pretty, even if they don't understand what it's about - they are challenging the notion of pretty, or of which themes translate to the listeners. If the Monster can really be a human being, than in the next song you're listening for something new - maybe the human being is a monster (maybe he isn't, but at least the listening is now there).

Then the album (at least on my first few listens) devolves into pretty standard fare. It doesn't take advantage on that reversed expectation - which I find disappointing.

The one thing I can't come to grips with in the song is how dark it actually is. "I'm a glass child. I am Hannah's Regrets." "Bathe in Kerosene. Their words tattooed in his veins" Am I just not familiar with other examples of this in teen-pop? It doesn't seem like standard fare to me.

(The story that Dia wrote as a child that inspired the single is here: http://www.meganddia.com/board/viewtopic.php?t=72, though the same questions apply to the story as to the single.)

*I've not paid enough attention to M&D's lyrics to really decide what is standard and what is not. But Meg's lyrics tend to depict scenes and situations (taken from novels), which isn't that prevalent in teenpop. (Not that it's absent. "Sk8er Boi" has phone calls and concert scenes, after all.)