Hilary Duff: Joy for pre-teens, not just Humbert Humbert

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which one?

― 696, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 18:48 (sixteen years ago) link

oh they're all good

― strongohulkington, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 18:48 (sixteen years ago) link

my secret shame is that the real reason i don't like hilary duff because my ex-girlfriend did

― strongohulkington, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 18:49 (sixteen years ago) link

DINGDINGDING part two

― 696, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 18:51 (sixteen years ago) link

way to play the sympathy card about 500 posts too late!

― David R., Tuesday, 15 May 2007 18:51 (sixteen years ago) link

That Poptimists discussion sounds interesting, Tom. I haven't really looked at that group before. And I admit that I'm being somewhat unfair to Frank, who I do see (having read his book) as someone who's constantly probing all kinds of music in search of something that captures his interest. I just don't always understand why he's moved by what he's moved by.

― jaymc, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 18:51 (sixteen years ago) link

she was a total "poptimist" actually.

― strongohulkington, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 18:52 (sixteen years ago) link

jess, did she look like...this?

http://www.contramano.net/press/images/fluxblog.jpg

― Alex in Baltimore, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 18:55 (sixteen years ago) link

u_u

― strongohulkington, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 18:56 (sixteen years ago) link

SASSY

― David R., Tuesday, 15 May 2007 18:56 (sixteen years ago) link

r.i.p. mathweena perpetua, our loved died too soon

― strongohulkington, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 18:56 (sixteen years ago) link

what did people do before message boards at work, guys?

― strongohulkington, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 18:59 (sixteen years ago) link

He's being cremated next Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and the rest of him they're just going to bury.

xp

― Dom Passantino, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 19:00 (sixteen years ago) link

"I wish they had never invented fried cheese."

― strongohulkington, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 19:01 (sixteen years ago) link

Write War & Peace?

I'm trying to GIS for a machine gun floral arrangement (like from The Wire), but I'm coming up blank.

― David R., Tuesday, 15 May 2007 19:01 (sixteen years ago) link

i can run up the street and buy one and take a picture of it, if you like

― strongohulkington, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 19:01 (sixteen years ago) link

If you're not doing anything, sure!

― David R., Tuesday, 15 May 2007 19:03 (sixteen years ago) link

i'm giving a lecture to my community college students on tropicalia and krautrock today.

― Tim Ellison, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 19:04 (sixteen years ago) link

DUDE STAY ON TOPIC

― David R., Tuesday, 15 May 2007 19:05 (sixteen years ago) link

dont be too frothy!

― 696, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 19:05 (sixteen years ago) link

hilberto duff

― strongohulkington, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 19:08 (sixteen years ago) link

humberto humbertington

― Alex in Baltimore, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 19:14 (sixteen years ago) link

(Ah, I can peacefully fade back into semi-anonymity. It's been fun, though, see ya on the teenpop thread.)

― dabug, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 19:27 (sixteen years ago) link

"see, this is kind of what I've been talking about, these kinds of enthusiastic attempts to pin down the logic in a boring heart/start/apart rhyme scheme, painting the lack of narrative or any sense at all as an asset. I guess this is a good example of how the teenpop thread tends to exert a lot of evergy asking questions with very simple or at least not particularly interesting answers"

Coming to this late but it probably makes more sense to pretend that a lot of the teenpop thread posters are gay (and quite a few are) rather than paedophiles - the combination of ambition and incoherence in something like "Beat of my Heart" is ripe for gay fanboyism. The earnestness is a bit of a pose: it's almost a game being played with the music where the listener takes seriously/literally the musical choices that the creator probably doesn't care about. So Jess is kinda OTM about Hillary wanting to do her nails instead - hyperbolic, but the point is true that there is an over-investment by certain listeners above and beyond what the creator could really have envisioned or perhaps even wants.

Gay people have been doing this for years of course! I used to really resent it when I was younger - not the act itself but the way it was applied to musical choices I thought were creatively bankrupt. I remember being appalled that every gay guy I knew loved Kylie's "Spinning Around". Coming to accept and enjoy this critical reaction over the course of seven years or so (story of my life 18-25) was part of my reconciliation with the notion of being "gay" in the strong, cutural sense.

But I accept it might still annoy the hell out of a lot of people.

Note that this doesn't explain everyone on the teenpop thread - for example I don't think Frank is like this at all.

― Tim F, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 21:54 (sixteen years ago) link

The earnestness is a bit of a pose: it's almost a game being played with the music where the listener takes seriously/literally the musical choices that the creator probably doesn't care about. So Jess is kinda OTM about Hillary wanting to do her nails instead - hyperbolic, but the point is true that there is an over-investment by certain listeners above and beyond what the creator could really have envisioned or perhaps even wants.

Is this "over-identification" a gay phenomenon? I thought most critics (esp those who've been in bands) understood that serendipity is responsible for most moments of genius anyway.

― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 22:04 (sixteen years ago) link

What I'm saying is slightly different I think - there's a self-awareness to gay men's appreciation of stuff that other people would dismiss as being lightweight, hopeless kitsch etc. It's not just an accidental inspiration thing.

Having said that, this is just a really overt and noticeable version of a process that happens with all music - it's not just about gays and teenpop. When I respond to emotionally to, say, Daft Punk's "Digital Love", I can't honestly say "this song has articulately captured something essential and true about my life man!" There is a partial choice involved whereby I'm deciding to let certain things affect me (the whine of the vocoder, the cheesy lyrics, the enormous groove, the Supertramp keyboard breakdown) which someone else might find hopelessly tenuous or meaningless in terms of conveying much of anything.

I think a standard manoeuvre in rock crit is to set up a standard for justification of emotional responses - e.g the literary expressiveness of the lyrics - and I can sympathise with this, but it's clearly not what most listeners actually want or need. Hence people getting choked up over James Blunt's "You're Beautiful". I hate Blunt, but I can't pretend that his inability to make a coherent point is what stops me from liking him - it annoys me because I already hate him, and his whole "style" is not one I'm inclined to make exceptions for, whereas with "Beat of my Heart", because I'm sympathetic to a lot of the stylistic choices in Hillary's song, i'm more inclined to invest anyway.

― Tim F, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 22:17 (sixteen years ago) link

Umm...since this thread still has a last breath or two, I just want to try to save face for totally missing the point re: obtuseness up there by not reading most of the words. Don't think Lex was being obtuse, though.

Hilary wants to do her nails (maybe) and winds up "accidentally" good, Avril puts her blood sweat and tears into having fun (maybe) and sounds like she's trying too hard. So whatever. I bet the latter is closer to the truth in the recording studio than the former, but it's not really relevant whether or not the creator "cared," is it? I mean, how would you even judge this?

― dabug, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 22:20 (sixteen years ago) link

What I'm saying is slightly different I think - there's a self-awareness to gay men's appreciation of stuff that other people would dismiss as being lightweight, hopeless kitsch etc. It's not just an accidental inspiration thing.

As a gay man, I agree, but I'm saying that this sensibility is no longer endemic to homosexuals, as this thread's existence attests. In its bowdlerized form it's the smirking awareness of VH-1 countdowns (e.g. "Ooh! Vicki Lawrence!").

― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 22:24 (sixteen years ago) link

i don't know if i've heard "beat of my heart". none of the hilary songs i have heard make me swoon. not like xtina's "beautiful" does. or even debbie gibson's "lost in your eyes". (old teenybopper example of a song that kinda chokes me up)

― scott seward, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 22:27 (sixteen years ago) link

tim, you should go to the pop conference in seattle next year. both mark s. and simon r. agreed with me that you and frank (and chuck) need to be there next year. you would have a great time.

― scott seward, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 22:29 (sixteen years ago) link

x-post to da bug:
Yeah you can't - I mean more an assessment of the music as it is heard. Perhaps Hillary's lyrics aren't written while she's doing her nails, maybe she spent ages poring over them - lord knows Blunt sounds like he means what he sings and his are worse.

But it would be disingenuous not to acknowledge that as a listener we can pass judgment on these sorts of things. It goes without saying that not all (or even most) judgments are "correct"!

But even pro-teenpop listeners aren't listening in some vaccuum uaware of the general public perception that this music is "manufactured", that the lyrics are just put in there to fill out the song and placate sheep-like listeners rather than to express something true. So that public perception affects us even if only in reverse.

Of course the duff vs blunt comparison reveals the meaningless of this public perception (although I fear the point of my comparison will be lost on ILM who as a whole already hate blunt) - the performance of personal investment can be quite divorced from the "quality" of the lyrics (however you wish to judge this), and people will accept incoherence from someone they've decided is an authentic voice of emotional truths where they won't from someone about whom they feel otherwise.

A more ILM-friendly example might be lyrics in indie/R&B/hip hop - it doesn't really matter, you see the same tendency of people to make differing judgments about the success of the lyrics in conveying something based on whether they've chosen to invest in the music as a form already. I mean, this is a truism surely, I hope I'm boring people with this point!

― Tim F, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 22:32 (sixteen years ago) link

Alfred, I'm not talking so much about smirking appreciation though - unless you think this is a derivation from the gay man's appreciation of kitsch - most of my gay friends (myself to a lesser extent) really do honest to goodness love even the worst kylie singles, there's not really anything ironic about their appreciation, even thought there's a level of deliberation and self-awareness. They've chosen to invest wholeheartedly in something they know that the rest of society thinks is creatively bankrupt.

You could read all sorts of things into this.

― Tim F, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 22:34 (sixteen years ago) link

Late to the party but…
Teenpop is the only ILM thread I actually read because of it's assorted earnestness/frothiness/focus etc. 696 has it nailed I think about legitimacy, in that the teenpop thread - by virtue of the pool of posters - has created a 'safe' environment where the songs can be explored without having to fight the first battle of 'why do you think this is worth discussing?'. And since such critical space, (esp in an ILM context) is rare, there is a certain amount of defensiveness when the activities of that 'safe space' get questioned/attacked outside the thread. After all, without the teenpop thread, where will any of us get to talk about these things? (aside from dabug's blog comments, etc). Is there even anywhere else?

And as for the marketing/consumption elements, I love having a place to read about the corporate context of the product, but maybe that's just because I come at this from a position where 1. I see nothing wrong with music output = product, 2. This carries no value judgement in my assessment of the music, and 3. I find it all incredibly interesting!

For example, Aly & AJ’s new ‘potential break-up song’ is vocoder-heavy and relatively guitar-free (plus is has a bridge straight from ‘Spice Up Your Life’). With Hilary long since having abandoned her pop-rock style, Ashlee lined up to more in more a synth direction (plus emo if Pete has anything to do with it) and Lindsay out of the game, is the 2005-2006 heyday of Max Martin’s chord refrain over? What does Avril's brat-pop sound 'mean' in terms of the teenpop trend - both in terms of commercial success, the core audience that I would have expected to have graduated from her sound by now, radio airplay or lack thereof. Does it 'mean' anything?

Etc, etc. Indie-ists may not appreciate that I genuinely want to debate these shifts in sound, marketing and cultural context just because of the artists involved, but I do. Hence teenpop thread.

― Poptext, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 22:35 (sixteen years ago) link

BTW thank you scott, would love to come, work/study/finances permitting (that's the rub). It's a long way from melbourne to seattle.

― Tim F, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 22:37 (sixteen years ago) link

I'm not talking so much about smirking appreciation though - unless you think this is a derivation from the gay man's appreciation of kitsch - most of my gay friends (myself to a lesser extent) really do honest to goodness love even the worst kylie singles, there's not really anything ironic about their appreciation, even thought there's a level of deliberation and self-awareness

Oh, I know: I was imprecise. I meant that as these ideas disseminate into culture at large they become debased, and at their most debased they assume the oh-so-hip distance I described. I would never suggest that you (or I, for that matter) love Kylie "ironically," whatever that means.

(My moment of pop transfiguration occurred over "Careless Whisper" and Debbie Gibson's "Out of the Blue)

― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 22:41 (sixteen years ago) link

i was lucky enough to have gay best friends in high school. no need to hide my bananarama love.

― scott seward, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 22:44 (sixteen years ago) link

my best friend lance was the only person on earth i could talk to about various forms of pop until i met chuck! it was hard to find wide boy awake fans before the internet.

― scott seward, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 22:46 (sixteen years ago) link

'you're beautiful' is a good tune man

why hate

― r|t|c, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 23:02 (sixteen years ago) link

― deej, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 23:15 (sixteen years ago) link

"WHICH might have a degree of RESTRAINED faux-surprise," i should say

― deej, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 23:16 (sixteen years ago) link

deej what on earth do you think the last 300 posts have been about if not whether teenpop is worth discussing or not? if that's not the issue and we've all been there and done that w/ the rockism argument (which is patently not true, you and i may have but ilm 2007 seems more behind than ever on it, some of the evidence being on this very thread) then why are people so bothered by the teenpop thread's existence?

― lex pretend, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 23:23 (sixteen years ago) link

also i am going to go to sleep now.

― lex pretend, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 23:23 (sixteen years ago) link

there were problematic parts of a couple people's arguments but i don't think myself, or Al, or jess, or Dom, or whoever else were being rockist when we were explaining why we aren't engaged by the teenpop thread. Of course the music is 'legitimate' to enjoy - in fact, most of us said that we enjoy a fair amount of it. our issues were with the tone of the thread, the tone of the criticism, the amount of focus and the style of writing that seemed over the top.

― deej, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 23:25 (sixteen years ago) link

Now there is earnestness in the teenpop thread that you don't get elsewhere, that i agree about. but ilm is largely open to people saying shit like 'this paris hilton song is pretty good,' or they were until paris hilton became a running joke for lexbot

― deej, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 23:27 (sixteen years ago) link

no offense

― deej, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 23:33 (sixteen years ago) link

xpost

Pleasant dreams, Lex.

Teenpop is very much worth discussing, and I (partially) said way, way upthread that my handful of occasions wading through the 2006/2007 teenpop threads have been, on the whole, more enjoyable than actually wading through the music.

I just turned 44 recently; I've been aware of listening to music for 41 years; I've been passionately listening since around the time of the first Ramones LP. Anything new that I hear in the pop/rock space has to compete with my personal elephant-in-the-room: that last 30+ years of passionate, omnivorous listening; my own subjective canon. (The young target-audience doesn't have to deal with such an elephant, I'd imagine.) The artists discussed in the teenpop thread fail my tests, so far. But please keep discussing.

(And, yes, Mingus wipes the floor with everybody discussed in this thread.)

― mark 0, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 23:37 (sixteen years ago) link

Of course the music is 'legitimate' to enjoy - in fact, most of us said that we enjoy a fair amount of it. our issues were with the tone of the thread, the tone of the criticism, the amount of focus and the style of writing that seemed over the top.

So you're saying that teenpop music is legitimate, but the teenpop thread discussion is illegitimate, ie, not what you consider to be 'proper' in tone, focus and style?

― Poptext, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 23:52 (sixteen years ago) link

i dont think folks consider it 'illegitimate,' more 'corny,' 'creepy,' 'humorless,' etc etc etc

― deej, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 00:06 (sixteen years ago) link

I dunno Deej, I don't mean to single out Alex but even a fairly innocuous and tossed off statement like:

"every time I start to see someone's point, they rep for something like "Beat Of My Heart," which is one of the worst songs I've ever heard."

... implies to me that the basis for determining whether what people say in (or in defence of) the teenpop thread is legitimate depends on his decision of the worth of the music involved.

The equivalent would be me saying "you know, I could almost appreciate why people might take hip hop seriously and discuss it in a thread, until I hear someone rep for "Laffy Taffy", which is one of the worst songs I've ever heard."

As if someone liking a particular song could crucially undermine the legitimacy of an entire discourse around a genre.

― Tim F, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 00:19 (sixteen years ago) link

In sum, why do I, as someone who likes some teenpop, have to answer for every sceptic's non-enjoyment of a given example of the genre?

― Tim F, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 00:21 (sixteen years ago) link

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