Rolling Teenpop 2007 Thread

Actually, now that you've said that, there is a sort of oblique connection btw teenpop and indie as "gateway" (or something like that) with soundtrack albums, in that now the trend is for OSTs to be sort of indie-sympathetic (Garden State, Veronica Mars, etc.) whereas back in 2000, or even in the early 00s when Lindsay started to get big, you'd have teenpop (the only place to find Melissa Lefton is on OSTs) or, a little later, a "gateway" band covering, e.g. "Baby One More Time" in a slightly indier fashion (like on the Freaky Friday OST, also LiLo's musical debut). And now, kid soundtracks are pretty much the best place to find a range of current teenpop. (Very different musical climate recorded over on that Crow OST thread!)

Also pertinent to this whole discussion: Megan McCauley might have "pulled a Mandy" (h/t Eppy again) faster than any teenpop personality in history. Maura (does she post here?) @ idolator tipped me to this:

OK, now that our latest comunication gap has been breeched... I feel safe to say, that I am a bit proud of myself today. I took my own advise and stood up for what I believe in. I have consulted with the forces that be, and in a more civil and professional vocabulary, I politely expressed my current feels, which are as follows:



I CAN'T TAKE IT ANYMORE!

I AM A BLUES SINGER

I WOULD RATHER NEVER SING ANOTHER NOTE IN MY LIFE THAN REALEASE THESE POP SONGS!



And I am proud to inform you, that they agreed! TAP THAT IS G-O-N-E! That booty shakin music isn't me! I've decided that when I'm not myself...I SUCK! I have to be ME. Not a fuckin Pussy Cat Doll...although that "Buttons" song is off the heezy!


I hate myself for contributing to this new fad, where everyone sings the same song with different lyrics and we happily smile, as we knowingly deface music!

The whole reason I wanted to sing was to change the world...

xpost to Tim
This is probably something I should've pursued with my paper more, but I'm curious when exactly shows started using "real" songs as their soundtrack. The TV usages of "Hallelujah" really started to crop up in 2002, but maybe it comes from the "killer soundtrack" phenomenon of the 90s--The Crow, Trainspotting, Pulp Fiction, etc. Once music is discovered through its wedding to visual images it becomes natural to think of music in terms of visual images rather than the music itself etc. etc. I should look that up.

xpost to Dave
The analogy I'm trying to make would be easier if I was a bigger rock nerd. Maybe I'm trying to say that teenpop right now is like Lauren Canyon? No, apparently that's too self-consciously arty, according to the internet. I guess I maybe mean like Motown. The performers differ but the same background players crop up on different recordings, it's aiming for commercial viability but some people don't make it, etc. And nowadays it seems like there's a sort of implied hierarchy of Motown artists that doesn't necessarily have to do with their commercial success, and there's an appreciation for some of the "minor" artists who might have slipped through the cracks at the time.

Actually that second xpost was more to Lex. Or everyone. Whatever.

(Notice the Freudian slip in "REALEASE"...ya got some issues, Meg.) xpost

I agree with you, and I think if history's kind to teenpop since the late 90s, we might get a killer Back to Mono-style retrospective of, e.g., Max Martin (and later Max/Luke) or Kara or John Shanks. But there are also artists that didn't just fall through the cracks of the not-even-close variety (maybe this isn't so much like the crooners, though). (And again I should point out that people on this thread could be the very ones to create something like a Back to Max, or foster an environment in which there's a collector's or appreciator's or whatever desire for this kind of thing. (But I hesitate to say any of this, really, since right now I'm much more interested in recognizing the music where it exists -- I mean, almost every artist I've named as a never-was is still trying to get their career going.)

http://hotstufffiles.com/imagegallery/data/media/2/shakira_2.jpg

Shakira stealing her new look from Gemz.

also shakira hit number 1 last year - she's not R&B or balladeer or AI?

As often as I feel bad focusing almost solely on widely-known music, I really do think there's something important about making that jump into a place where the mainstream can be conscious of you. It changes the art and it changes the artists. So like teenpop is just not analogous to a local scene or whatever, even if it shares some of its qualities (insular, self-referential, internicine rivalries and jealousies and backbiting and mate-swapping). Even if people didn't know about Gemz, the fact that they're working in the same context as H-Duff means you can't treat them like any of the things they would normally be (kiddie music, dance music, rock music). I don't entirely know how this applies to the current discussion but it seems to. I think the term Eric of Marathonpacks used was "affective potency." Which sounds SUPER DIRTY.

Everyone should read/respond to Koganbot's latest blog post, btw, but maybe he'll xpost here himself.

Been thinking about this comment from Eppy:

I think there are times when we can all agree that someone's making a stab at it, when they're trying not to be successful or make what they want to make but to be taken seriously. (These times include maybe pianos, string sections, or Diane Warren.)

Funny, because the three things listed are things I think you don't do if you're trying to be taken seriously. (They're things you do if you're Aerosmith and you want to not matter anymore.)

But what's more interesting to me is those three categories: successful, serious, and making what you want to make. Whereas where I come from, "serious" and "making what you want to make" are the exact same thing. I mean, you can have illegitimate pop--like when Jewel did "Intuition" and everyone hated it even more than Britney, because Britney was "at least" "really" a pop artist, and then the only way Jewel could do damage control was to say she did a pop album because she wanted to do a pop album. Britney was okay because she was serious about pop--you could dismiss her by dismissing pop, but you couldn't dismiss her. And Jewel's still suspect, even now, everybody's like, "Oh, so you're a country artist today? Sure."

Which is why I think indie teens are direct descendants of Michelle Branch fans. Looking at people, say, five years younger than me, they were first forming their ideas about music when singer-songwriter pop was hitting it big, everyone was being branded as "the anti-Britney," and the idea being ingrained was that you shouldn't let record companies feed you pre-fab pop. Because that was uncool! (Plus suddenly you were able to download music for free, and the dominant justification for doing so was that the artist or the record company "didn't deserve my money." So you didn't buy music you wanted to hear, you bought music you wanted to support.) And so we got singer-songwriters, but then singer-songwriters seemed like pre-fab pop, so we got rebellious singer-songwriters, but then rebellious singer-songwriters seemed like pre-fab pop--so now we're off in the indie world, where we know these artists aren't label creations because they aren't on labels. And/or we want pop that is really seriously pop, like Gwen and Fergie.

...But then we realized that the indie artists are on the same labels as the pre-fab ones, so now we're _____.

Also, Avril was never close to non-pre-fab (i.e. there was no movement from "legit" to "illegit," like the legitimacy drug was losing its effect and people demanded harder stuff), despite the attempt to position her as such in articles, etc. -- in fact, IIRC, she was worse than Britney for the reasons you're getting into above. Other reasons, (1) she was in line with pop-punk (which was also more of "the enemy" to an indie-minded person at that time than straight-up pop artists -- Sum 41, Blink 182, etc.), (2) she wanted legitimacy as a songwriter, which Britney et al didn't (and this was pretty significant, I suppose: "I write a song every day," etc.), (3) she was still working with the pre-fab people and living in the pre-fab world. So whereas someone like me at the time could choose to ignore BSB/Britney, Avril was especially annoying (and she still is to me, but for different reasons...it doesn't help that Avril might be the dumbest pop star of the teenpop era and comes across as totally clueless about herself and her music, which hasn't stopped her from making good music).

And when I started downloading it was more OH MY GOD FREE MUSIC NOW NOW NOW NOW than anything else. I think most "political positions" were formulated after the fact.

Exactly.

I agree with you on Avril, and I think most people currently in their 20s would, but I'm thinking about the kids I know--now, at 17, they're solidly indie, but at 14 they were major Avril fans. Back then, they told me to stop hating her because she was "real" and "not stupid like pop," but now they think she's fake and they hate her more aggressively than I ever did. And that's basically what I was saying, that initially indie kids were like, "Yeah, singer-songwriter, so genuine!" because they (a) didn't hate pop-punk yet (it had singer-songwriters and looked kind of dirty), and (b) believed that if an artist wanted legitimacy and was being positioned as non pre-fab, that was the same having legitimacy and being non pre-fab. And then when they discovered your third point, they were like, "Oh, fuck this," and moved on.

Don't know if this relates to "legitimacy" and "retrospective genres" - and bear in mind that when at age 13 I read (think it was in Life magazine) some musician or indie person denouncing the Monkees as totally manufactured pop that would have no lasting musical value, this in comparison to the real rock of the Airplane, Doors, et al., I was shocked, having thought several months earlier that in a head-to-head competition ("Steppin' Stone" vs. "Penny Lane") that the Monkees were whipping the Beatles' butt, but also was assuming that Monkees and Beatles were comparable artists, not different in kind; also thought that since Peter was from my home town and that the home town had a road called "Pleasant Valley Road," that "Pleasant Valley Sunday" must be a critique of parts of my town, not realizing that Peter had nothing to do with the song - I'm under the impression that the '60s songs that were retrospectively dubbed "punk rock" or "garage rock" ("96 Tears," "Wild Thing," "Psychotic Reaction," etc.) were considered somewhat teenybopper in their time in comparison to the Brit Invasion bands they were trying to catch up with and the psychedelic bands that were (or seemed to be) outflanking them on the left. And also that the critics and bands in the early '70s who were embracing these old songs knew this - knew the bubblegum element - and were including this in their sense of what was in the mix of this anti-Established Respectable Rock they were championing (glitter, glam, punk, Dolls, Bowie, Slade, Stooges, Sabbath etc.). I had a convo with a DJ in 1974 who was deriding the Dolls and Slade for being "punk rock" and therefore "teenybopper music." I think most of the CBGB bands got this too, even if Television was molto serious. It was only when punk was brought to Britain that it lost some of this bubblegum sense, though even there I think Television Personalities and Generation X knew their own bubble tendencies. And so punk/garage rock in its second attempt at being made retrospective was seen as illegitimate in its own time but legitimate in ours for having been crude and rebellious. (Maybe this is too unfair to Brit punk, which I'm sure was populated by all different types.) And then I think Go-Gos and Bangles were somehow seen as intelligently pop in comparison to, I don't know, a whole bunch of other stuff that was just plain pop. (Not sure what I'm saying, actually.)

Obv. there are differing and contrary modes of legitimacy running at the same time and sometimes within the same person. W/ Paris, it isn't so much that people have an idea of what's legit and she violates it, as that they've decided she's illegit and safe to be sneered at and make up reasons for hating her as they go along, the reasons coming after the decision to hate, basically.

Relevant to above discussion, Fred Bronson, in his Chart Beat Chat column, flat out states that "Girlfriend" is not a rock song because it is not being played on rock radio.

Re: Dave's what I think is happening with Avril, i.e. she's simultaneously pandering to and insulting her intended audience. Like, here's your teenpop, but we all know this is really stupid *wink*. It's aggressive, way too self-conscious (which is strange because when Skye did what might be the most self-conscious version of a "Girlfriend"-like song with "Hypocrite," it was endearing, mostly because she's really saying she LIKES this kinda music, this is really her; whereas with Avril, it's implied that this isn't really her, it's this little pop starlet character she's constructed for everyone).

A friend very kindly bought me the Avril album for my birthday (earlier in the week) - the deluxe edition no less, with the bonus DVD of "the making of" tha record, which I'll talk about in a follow-up post.

On first listen I was a bit aghast at the number of songs that strike the bratty pop princess pose or otherwise repeat the formula of "Girlfriend". But less because of what that might or might not be saying about Avril's intentions and more cos I was hoping for more variety, musically. The ballads providing the only contrast - and these felt a bit samey on listen #1 too.

But what I didn't get from it at all was any sense that Avril wasn't less than 100% serious about her new direction. No sly winks here. That was borne out by watching the DVD, which shows a commitment to the material and the complete absence of any self-consciousness on Avril's part. Now, it may be that this is a one-off statement, a set of clothes that will be ditched when she does her next record. But then that's what artists often do.

Maybe this isn't all that different to what Dave is saying in the quote above, but I think the 'insulting the audience' thing is off-beam.

Key track on the album might be "I Don't Need To Try", which reads like a pre-emptive fuck off to anyone who doesn't like the direction taken on The Best Damn Thing. Such persons may include the friend who bought me the album, actually - a big fan of Avril's first two LPs (which I've not heard yet, only the singles) who hates "Girlfriend" - although I gather this is largely based on his dislike of the video. I haven't seen said video, and now plan never to.

Anyway, after a couple more listens, I rate the album highly - especially the first half. Its strengths are: the melodies, the singing and the ideas, in roughly that order - all of which I'll give Avril full credit for. Dr Luke and the other producers act as facilitators for the most part.

The weak link if any is the lyrics. There are a couple of good lines, e.g. the one in "Everything Back But You" about the unfaithful boy who wrote "I wish you were her/ You left out the e" and the verse on "I Can Do Better" about drinking as much Limoncello as she can (inserted at the last minute in the studio, it turns out, since Avril was swigging the stuff from the bottle in between recording the vocals). Several good lines in "When You're Gone" as well. But on the whole, it doesn't seem as if she spent very much time on them, having decided the basic theme. (I played the Skye Sweetnam album immediately afterwards and Skye comes across as a poet laureate by comparison.)

But this is a minor gripe. You might even argue that the lyrics suit the regressiveness implicit in the 'motherfucking princess' persona.

LOL - I just wrote a review of this album, and I used "I wish you were her/ You left out the e" as an example of bad lyrics.

(I think it's a good line, but it's then milked to death because Avril doesn't back it up with anything else of interest in the song, which makes it stand out too much.)

So the "making of" DVD then. It concentrates on four songs - "I Can Do Better", the title track, "Girlfriend" and "Innocence". (I think there's a bit of footage of Travis Barker recording the drum parts for "I Don't Have To Try" as well, but otherwise just those 4.)

Footage of Avril in the studio recording the above songs is linked by a 'talking head' interview, in which Avril says almost nothing of interest - it's the most 'corporate' element of the film. The footage shot in the studio is really good, however - capturing some nice moments of creativity (or possible re-staging them for the camera, but it mostly looked spontaneous to me).

Two new things to listen out for next time you spin "Girlfriend":
- in the handclaps section (the middle 8?), listen out for Dr Luke's high-pitched giggling in the RH speaker
- Avril blowing across the mouth of a beer bottle in the last two choruses (it's a mid-range note in the same key as the song).

Interesting insight into Avril's process, and maybe I'm being harsh with "we all know this is stupid." I guess I mean that I distrust any fun that sounds like it took so much WORK (and to that extent, I don't care how much work it actually took).

I'm not sure I can clarify it any more than that, but (1) surely Avril has to be "serious" about the music to make it (it's pretty painstakingly put together, including the giggles and beer bottles) but (2) I think that it sounds like someone who's trying really hard to be "stupid." (Except I also can't shake the feeling that she really is stupid...maybe I'll revise this when I see some of this xtra footage provided it makes it to Youtube. Not that it really matters if she's dumb, unless she's trying and failing to be clever, which is particularly annoying to me.)

By comparison (funny, I was listening to Noise from the Basement this weekend), Skye sounds funny and smart in a more effortless sort of way; maybe it's that her voice is naturally less agonized than Avril's, and makes the default atmosphere something more like "light and precise" to Avril's "heavy and smeared." I hope that's even a LITTLE coherent (to put it another way: neither preciseness nor effortlessness fun suits Avril, who needs to disguise herself radically to accomodate these things, whereas Skye's voice accomodates preciseness and humor naturally but doesn't do so hot with, e.g., conveying agony -- luckily Skye's a natural comedian who doesn't "dress up in agony," whereas Avril is naturally DENSE and trying to dress up like a cheerleader, which doesn't make any SENSE, which is why I make jokes at her EXPENSE).

One issue I have is who I think this music ("Girlfriend") is for; it's for people who "get fun" but by someone who (sounds like she) doesn't. Just as most post-teenpop is for people who "get teenpop" but is made by people who obviously don't totally get it themselves, or they might not be making the music they make or saying the things they say in the first place.

*"effortless fun"

in the handclaps section (the middle 8?), listen out for Dr Luke's high-pitched giggling in the RH speaker

Well crap, I thought that was Avril.

*haha, also "precision" not "preciseness."

dabug,
By what criteria are you judging whether she's having fun or not? I'd like to think that there's a wide range of ways people have fun - and a wide range of ways people express having fun. And either way, that seems an odd critique. I'm having fun while I listen, so why do I care if she had fun? Or rather: If she is SINCERELY having fun as opposed to having CALCULATED fun?

So. 5 months into 2007 and the top 5 played songs on my iPod this year?

1. Taylor Swift - Tim McGraw.
2. Taylor Swift- Teardrops On My Guitar
3. Jordan Sparks - I Who Have Nothing
4. The Used - Bird and the Worm
5. Avril Lavigne - Girlfriend
6. Travis - Closer

Explain Me!

Well, I called it "Skye Heavy" when that first came up; I'm trying to judge by my own reaction to how it sounds more than whether or not she was actually having fun, say, in the studio. As I said, it's hard for me to explain, and I always fall back on the old Calvin and Hobbes strip where they need to cram as much fun as possible into the last few days of summer, Hobbes says "I didn't know having fun was so much work," and Calvin says, "well sure, when you're trying to have fun, it's not much fun at all!"

The difference here is that I need to translate this into the context of listening to the song, not thinking about how it was produced (Skye recounts the recording process of "Hypocrite" as the most difficult before she had to rerecord her singles; I think she said "Recording 'Hypocrite' was a breeze compared to 'Tangled Up in Me,'" which suggests it wasn't a breeze).

To me it's like the difference between someone making you get out of your chair and someone PULLING you out of your chair. Now, if you're having fun already (and I don't doubt you and many other people -- "Girlfriend" being #1 in the country -- are really having fun) you might not mind getting pulled outta your chair. You might even enjoy it. But if you're a little skeptical and your arms are crossed (and I think sometimes it's ok to cross your arms, just shouldn't be a given) getting pulled from your chair takes on a sense of unpleasantness -- even if ultimately it gets you to uncross your arms. What pulling people from chairs says to me is that they NEED to be pulled from their chairs, which I don't think is true in this case (My wild claim: if people'd give Skye more of a chance, they'd leap out of their chairs without Avril coming along and forcing 'em to -- this is what happened when my girlfriend started listening to Skye...she crossed her arms but it grew on her, now she listens to it all the time.) So my job writing about this stuff isn't to pull people out of their chairs and rub their noses in it, it's to direct them to places where they'll want to hop out and dance, given there is an "arms crossing problem." I don't think there is necessarily within the intended audience for Avril, but there might be in a more general audience. But even if there's an arms-crossing problem, I wouldn't look to Avril for the solution, even though she's providing it whether we like it or not (or sort of like it, which is how I feel about it).

And when I say "intended audience for Avril," I really mean "intended audience for teenpop." Avril's intended audience is the general one (and maybe an anti-teenpop one to the extent that teenpop means Disneypop and music for kids) and her assumption is that "these people" need to be forcefully led to (her style of) fun and won't go there otherwise. Which might be true, might not, but consequently the song turns me, someone who goes out and looks for (this kind of) fun on a regular basis anyway and can compare it to, e.g. Skye or Fefe Dobson or maybe Lillix, off a little.

(And what's funny is that Avril also CUTS OFF the pro-teenpop audience -- kids -- with lyrics that'll ensure no one plays her on Radio Disney, and can divorce her from "kids' stuff" -- you don't actually have to say "fuck" in kids' music! Late 60s bubblegum -- and early Beatles, etc. etc. -- had about a thousand ways to say "fuck" in all its many varieties with euphemisms that were much more interesting anyway)

More questions answered by Avril Lavigne. (No c'gar.)

have we discussed the bizarreness that the "standard" edition of the best damn thing has the profanities muted out (only relevant on four tracks, i believe) - you can only get the "explicit" version on the deluxe edition. i almost bought a used copy of the single cd this weekend, but balked at it being "clean". what does this tell us about who she's being targeted at? is there any precedent for this?

kids who spend their own money on music = clean version
music nerds who NEED to hear profanities on an avril lavigne album = deluxe edition

i've missed a lot here recently - was in new york over the weekend, looking at subway ads of an unrecognizably bland ashlee hawking shoes, jojo hawking something-or-other, and a storage company ad with a tiara'd tinkerbell impersonator (imdogator) and the quip "your closet's so shallow it makes paris look deep."

the avril #1 (whatever it is [rock], clearly not r&b) is fascinating in light of sf-j's emp paper, which mused on the hegomony of r&b as "our music." as you can read in his rather lengthy précis, he proposes blunt, powter, and hicks as r&b variants rather than deviations. but avril's a different matter. is it significant that she's #1 without r&b (or, presumably, rock) radio support?

"with love" is currently #1 on the dance chart, btw.

the deluxe edition is aimed at music nerds?

Not to deny that I'm a music nerd - but I think the deduction of "motherfucking princess" on Girlfriend is a detriment to the song.

Late to the game (as per custom), but my 2 cents on Avril's "Girlfriend" video: The stupidest part of the whole thing is the dance routine. Avril, don't do dance routines. Please. Poor girl looks like she's in pain,

"oh yeah and I'm the motherfucking princess" is most likely the lyric of the year, whatever the motivation behind it may be.

Mordy, dude, the idea of a song that can be played in the car in front of mom but everybody knows the real lyrics but everyone gets to whisper them in the backseat and giggle...THAT'S TEENPOP GOLD BABY.

When I was younger, and we'd listen to profanity-laden singles with my father in the car, we used to all cough really loudly when the artist swore. One time, we did this during an Eminem song. My father become concerned about our health.

DONT NORMALLY POST IN THIS THREAD BUT
http://www.cwtv.com/shows/pussycat-dolls/cast/asia

DID U KNOW? the winner of that Pussycat Dolls reality show is Asia Nitollano, aka daughter of Bataan Nitollano, aka Joe Bataan.

Yeah, we used to turn down the volume knob on our backseat boom box, but for us it was the Clash and the Pretenders and the Stooges and stuff like that.

uh xpost. i forgot to type that because deej just blew my mind, and because damn, asia is kinda heartbreakingly pretty in that picture.

i rave about that Mims/Toto mash-up last week and now i only just hear JoJo's 'Anything'. you can't fuck up that hook I guess!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gqf-TXDt6Dc

Never Again video. Freaky eyes! And too bad she sacked her old bass player.

And is the Britney comeback THE anticlimax of the year? (Just a guess)

A new link for the "Never Again" video.

And "Never Again" has withstood scores of listenings and still sounds great. But I think I like this one more.

Woohoo! Goodbye Chris! Yay, Blake!

Or maybe I do prefer "Never Again." I think the video has too much shoulder-shaking, however; think the song itself tells a stronger story.

By the way, is "Never Again" available for sale at all? My guess is that running on airplay alone it won't have a shot at the top ten; with sudden download sales it could get into the top ten but its stay will be brief - unless the video itself is some kind of monster hit, which I doubt. It's rising solidly but not spectacularly on Top 40, but is getting no support anywhere else, and its rise in airplay isn't nearly as big as Daughtry's "Home," Justin Timberlake's "Summer Love," or Rihanna's "Umbrella," the latter two also getting significant r&b play. In fact, "Never Again" isn't getting as many new spins as Pink's "U + Ur Hand," which was released seven months ago and is now up to number three in Top 40 airplay. ("Never Again" is number twenty-two.)

I would like "Never Again" to do really well, by the way.

Oh, I've lost all touch with American Idol. Got too many other things to do. How's Jordin been the last couple of weeks? Anyone giving particularly interesting performances?

Oh, according to the not-always-reliable Wikipedia, "Never Again" got its digital release on April 23. So if this has an impact on its Billboard ranking, we'll find out tomorrow.

Oh, I've got to stop beginning sentences with "Oh."