Lady Gaga, Pussycat Dolls and a Taxonomy of Vacuous Pop

not that we should give much, if any, credit to the labels imo. t-pain and ne-yo have been two of the most bankable r&b minds of the past two or three years and t-pain was signed by akon after t-pain parodied "locked up" and i'm willing to bet ne-yo got a deal out of courtesy for writing hits but the label mad minimal expectations for his solo career

because it just became to inexpensive and not profitable enough to employ 3 or 4 guys who are singing songs written by people who have to be paid and dancing in choreography devised by someone who had to be paid etc

good point when taking into account the market decline (piracy + saturation)...altho the number of guitar-based quartets seems the same if not greater

um that should say too expensive btw

I don't want this to get into a pop vs rock rockist bands should write their own songs "debate". But when did pop groups stop writing their own songs? Cathy Dennis writes loads of songs as does betty boo, but their chart careers didn't last long really. Are labels too scared about their investments to allow pop stars to write like say Madonna did? Gary Barlow is the last one I can think of. (Does Ronan Keating write his songs?) I can't believe there aren't some talented people out there in the pop world that could write or produce their own stuff. (if any do exist please point them out as it's not a genre I'm an expert in obviously)

I can't believe there aren't some talented people out there in the pop world that could write or produce their own stuff. (if any do exist please point them out as it's not a genre I'm an expert in obviously)

― Pfunkboy Formerly Known As... (Herman G. Neuname), Thursday, October 23, 2008 6:00 PM (27 seconds ago) Bookmark

i mentioned these a few posts ago, but t-pain has basically written and produced every song that he's sung for himself or been featured on in the past 3 years. ne-yo and the-dream write a ton of songs for themselves and others, and though they don't produce most of them they have each have a reliable team to do the production. akon is the same as t-pain but he doesn't work at the same clip.

yeah i think the trend is actually towards pop stars writing more of their own material! and to let a lot of the songwriters out from behind the curtain as viable pop stars in their own right, like ne-yo.

Any British equivalents?

basshunter

Sugababes write many of their own iirc. All Saints did too.

All Saints is going back a bit!

from a rock perspective, there are no boyish guitar bands that are successful anymore on a massive scale like blink-182 was. panic at the disco fell the fuck off and fall out boy are in the process of doing the same on a huger stage, so right now majors have nickelback and american idol rockers or one offs like hinder and finger eleven. i'd say, contrary to what herman has proposed, pop/r&b are far far outpacing popular rock in terms of "writing their own hits"

only 2 years! xp

there aren't that many british commercial pop acts left any more. girls aloud don't write their material, generally, but they're a holdover from a different time. the saturdays are the only other act in this vein having any sort of success, i have no idea whether they write their songs but given how pointless they are it prob doesn't matter.

jonas brothers, jordan

i wonder how the game will change as and when all these insanely popular disney stars grow up and forge their own artistic paths outside the disney umbrella

oh true i forgot about them

but that's still not the same as a perspective a rockist would take cuz jonas bros and the disney-arm are like a parallel universe version of the music business. traditional majors are still flailing

Are many of the fall out boy type bands having hits written for them? I know that Bon Jovi (in the mid 80s when they got mega) used to have Desmond Child write songs for them until Jon Bon Jovi wrote a no1 single for them and took over. (i wouldn't be surprised if they get someone in to write for their hits now though) Kiss had others write for them too, didn't they?

i think when it comes to the success of pop we're really going to start seeing two distinct strains:

-megastars who are promoted traditionally, like britney who had no promo budget because she was always in the tabloids, or chris brown scoring a huge hit out of a commercial jingle. i guess rihanna is the outlier here, but usher and pcd were both promoted really traditionally here and didn't live up to sales expectations. i'm not sure how many huge vacouous pop stars are going to appear in the ways we are used to.

-more artists in the t-pain/akon/ne-yo/dream writer/singer etc. mode, though even this may be dying out as neither t-pain or akon are really taking over this year and someone like sean garret flopped earlier last year

or i guess we have seen these strains i suspect that they will continue

megastars who are promoed untraditionally, jeez

Jim Steinman is probably looking for a younger band to take on the Bat Out Of Hell franchise haha

jazmine sullivan wrote her own huge r&b hit this year, whereas ciara, keri hilson and cassie have all had huge megawriters behind their singles which have all been relative flops

dunno if this means anything though

xp to myself

hang on keri hilson had a megawriter behind her single? b-b-but she IS a megawriter! she's part of the clutch, the only reason she has a career is because she's doing a ne-yo-style move out from behind the curtain. wtf is the point if you're just going to hire someone else?

maybe she's trying to groom a new her

wtf yeah i totally blanked about hilson breaking in as a writer

she didn't write energy though

but she did hire the producers of "no air"

i think energy is great though so :/

kind of back to the original topic of the thread...listening to a few of the scherzinger's finest moments over the years, i'm struck by how incredibly versatile she is, and this is because she commits so fully herself to whatever style she's working in at whatever moment. she's so subservient to aesthetic - particularly formalist within an ultra-formalist genre - everything's in the correct place and done in the correct way. 'i hate this part' is their epic groove/ballad, so we got those opulent extended syllables and flowing half-rhymes culminating in heartbroken semi-whispers. 'bottle pop' is their blackout-style banger so all vocal pyrotechnics are abandoned in favour of robotic intonation. 'stickwitu' is all tender candyfloss, the breathlessness of 'whatever you like' makes it overwhelmingly visceral, &c &c.

'whatever you like' is such a great lost banger, the video was amazing too and t.i.'s verse is so raw and sexy. "somethin' 'bout that cock, you think you got me wanna see what's goin' on"

T.I. said that?!

Always the romantic.

I would imagine breaking a manufactured pop band in this day and age is a very expensive and highly risky activity unless you have a ready-made marketing tool like a popular TV show there in advance. In today's market, its not really surprising that British record companies don't really bother.

no it's nicole singing about t.i.'s cock obv

i'm also v fond of this lost scherzinger track, a duet with rihanna called 'winning women' which exhorts women to represent their culture, keep their last names and buy homes in geneva

"where the word DIVA DIVA means VIVA VIVA, we run las vegas"

great thread.

I think as far as the US and where-did-all-the-boy-bands go, the rise of the Jonas Brothers/Miley Cyrus/High School Musical Disney seems to me to have created a cut-off point as far as market demographics. Whereas in '98, the Backstreet Boys and *Nsync would appeal to the tweeners, it still had appeal for high schoolers and even college girls. The Disney thing seems to have a cut-off at around 13 or 14 (pulling ages out of a hat, here, admittedly), and they've got the young'ens sewn up. Past that, you're going to get slightly "edgier" Katy Perry stuff, so the market doesn't exist for that kind of across-the-board boy band. Plus American Idol neatly manufactures groups for the other demographics already, without having to spend the money (Daughtry, etc...). A fascinating look at how the US sees (or the industry tries to sell) "pop" these days is MTV's Friday night show (can't recall the name), where they have a few live performances and premiere videos (IN THEIR ENTIRETY is the hook they give) and interviews, and the way that Rihanna, the Jonas Brothers, PCD, Ting Tings, Maroon Five, Slipknot, and No Age all (uncomfortably) occupy the same space. Not to mention it's hosted by Pete from Fall Out Boy.

The gay aspect of the taxonomy leaves the US a bit wanting for pop stars that can fit into the molds described. Britney holdover, PCD seems more of an abberation, and...anyone else? Not wanting to go back to the old argument of "America doesn't understand camp", but...

wow lady gaga really is the absolute pits isn't she?

this whole thread: tl;dr

i hear this stuff all day at work. lady gaga is 10000x better than 'i hate this part', which makes me want to kill everyone

http://www.funnycatpix.com/_pics/no_wai.jpg

lady gaga is 10000x better than 'i hate this part', which makes me want to kill everyone

there is no statement more wrong than this!

Conversely, Lady GaGa's "i'm interesting and arty" angle relies totally on her post-facto justification of it, there's nothing in her music or performances that would point to it. What's the opposite of the the Trojan Horse? The Emperor With No Clothes.

^^this was a very prescient criticism (though as the UK's been spared gaga until now, i've only had to start thinking about her in the past couple of weeks) - people like fergie and the scherzinger are really instructive points of comparison. fergie is the genuinely unpredictable, zany, out-there artist than gaga says she is (how much more inventive and ridiculous is the dutchess than the fame?), and as tim says scherzinger is so permanently ON as a vocalist that gaga just pales in comparison. but fergie and nicole have these extremely vacuous public images, and afaik have never said anything interesting about their artistry in interviews, or gone on about warhol as if by invoking his name they can grasp something of his essence.

apart from the performative/sonic side of it all the other unpackable aspect of gaga is the way she harps on about money fame boys shallow shallow money fame boys in her songs, which i should love, but really the way she acts as though it's some giant art project is so extremely tiresome. you can just hear her trying to layer on the irony ("do i mean it? yes! no!" I DON'T CARE) with heavy hands and fists of ham, much like calvin harris. and then think about genuinely great paeans to shallowness like lil' kim's 'the jump off' and again gaga just doesn't match up.

I think 'Just Dance' is a very good record and its success doesn't surprise me. I like the way it has both an r&b and rock element to it (eg the neanderthal, cymbal-laden beat on the chorus). The fusion works very well on that particular song (and the chorus is massive). I listened to a couple of her other songs ('Beautiful Dirty Rich' and 'Poker Face') but found them to be feeble by comparison.

I think she is trying to be the new Madonna. That's the closest comparison I can see. When Madonna first appeared on the scene there was a similar sense of her early songs being very closely related to the funk/club music of the day, but also that she was trying (too) hard to be 'more' than just that. I've never been a big Madonna fan and that 'trying too hard' thing is one of the things that's always annoyed me about her (along with a lot of her songs being just short of very good - as actual songs).

Unlike Madonna, Lady GaGa seems to be quite a good singer technically, but, when you listen closely, rather too conventional for my taste.

--

I missed the earlier discussion about changing artist formats (groups vs solo artists) and I think there is a big, and very obvious, point being missed. Things change primarily because they have to change, to stop being boring. The boyband format, and also the three or four man (or woman) r&b group, died out (or receded) because it became boring, through overkill.

Every format runs its course, be it musical style, or the format of line-ups. When something begins to lose popularity, the labels notice that sales are down. The aspiring artists find they are not getting signed doing whatever it is so they have to shift to something else, or not get signed. Obviously it's more complicated than that (influences bouncing around), but the audience's liking for, or boredom with, whatever it is is what, to a large degree, drives change (in the form of rising or falling sales).

i think "just dance" is an all time banger but i dont know if i care much about gaga herself. i think the song is extremely well-written in terms of getting across the feeling of being really fucked up and not caring about anything but dancing. you don't really hear lyrics as straightforward as "I love this record baby but I can't see straight anymore/ Keep it cool, what's the name of this club?/ I can't remember but it's alright, a-alright" on pop radio and i think that's the song's biggest strength, esp. compared to awfully generic shit like "hot n cold" and "womanizer"

it's the same reason why that veronicas song sticks out to me besides being sonically bonkers. "i feel so untouched right now" is arresting in the same manner to me as "i love this record baby but i can't see straight anymore"

this is an interesting point from tim's OP

"Just Dance" reminds of "Piece of Me" but sounds so rote and bored-with-itself in comparison.

i think this is otm but (not to jump through too many backwards logic hoops here) it's kind of what makes the song attractive to me (lyrically at least). gaga seems bored with everything BUT dancing i.e. "what's the name of this club?/i can't remember but it's alright" - which i read as "this club kinda sucks but let's dance" which i like along with "i lost my phone but let's dance" and "what's the name of this record idk let's dance" etc etc

as it being sonically boring - yeah idk i could feel that. the keyboard bit at the beginning sounds exactly like lollipop/low

also the radio down here has been playing the remix with kardinal offishal subs out the o donnis verse and the bridge iirc and is way better imo

I really like the theme of "Just Dance" and (unusually for a pop song) I think the lyrics look a lot better written down than when they're sung.

At work, I have started a very successful rumour about Lady Gaga having a penis.

http://www.newnownext.com/images/2008/08/12/ladygagatrl_1.jpg

"I don't know what you're talking about"

think some of the paint is coming off that action figure's legs

hey Tim I don't know if you've spoken about it elsewhere but what do you think of natalie basingthwaite's "alive"? it's probably my favourite non-indie thing of '08 next to the presets..