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

meant to use archetype rather than stereotype and tradition there, these are hardly set in stone

It's all in the ear of the behearer, and on a case-by-case basis. Gospel isn't uniformly about stock emoting -- you're supposed to be "in the spirit" and spontaneous to the point that there's no definite, decided-upon end to the performance. (xpost)

But my, uh, tangent was a roundabout way of saying there are ways of making and experiencing music that may be perceived as alien to someone who's a hardcore defender of teenpop.

I've cured my insomnia now, I hope. Thank you, and good night.

it might be, yes!

but your taking it as a given that it is. and not accepting that there is no reason teenpop songs cant be made and experienced in that way.

if you were talking about minimal techno, then yes we're not going to play and sing it sat on the stoop!

we'll just take the laptop and the midi controller out onto the stoop like everyone else

^ lol. expertly executed. well done team

high fives all round.

freedom fries

xpost

I endorse MIDI controllers as well, though mine are gathering dust in favor of acoustic instruments these days. I'm in favor of more music-making and less music-consuming.

but here you are talking about performativity, or more specifically overt emoting (or overemoting). i didnt really bring that up at all.

I know, but I count emoting (almost always stock) as a given in a pop song nowadays, in terms of the aforementioned severe/austere definition of music.

(Logged back in because I missed this post earlier. Take it from here, draw a moustache and Groucho-glasses on my visage, and I want to see 1000 posts by nightfall. Thank you.)

i really dont have a problem with the idea of more music making, and less consuming at all. i think thats a good thing

but that means less dylan consuming too!

ie to consume dylan is no more worthy than to consume duff

*opportunity for bedalia to make amusing post*

"i don't know if that equivalency holds up, because i don't think al was questioning people taking teen pop seriously or discussing it in a thread - it wasn't the concept that bothers people, its the execution."

Can we separate concept from execution though (and this goes to Al's response to me too, I'm not ignoring him)?

I mean, can we meaningfully describe a critical reaction as "earnest" without a consideration of the worth of what is being reacted to? How do we know that earnestness is bad unless what it is in response to makes that reaction seem unwarranted or distasteful?

So even if Al's saying that he doesn't mean anything by raising his dislike for "Beat of my Heart", he kind of does anyway: I don't know how to read such a comment except as code for "earnest appreciation is okay, but earnest appreciation about this????"

Again, not to focus on Al, who has been pretty reasonable, and in fact that reaction is itself reasonable, but it's very reasonabilty undercuts it a bit, b/c it implies that at root the only thing that makes the teenpop thread creepy/corny/whatever is that sceptics don't like some/most/all of the songs being discussed.

Which is fine, but a less controversial and more accurate statement of this beef would simply be:

"I simply can't hear in [x song] the value and worth which is being ascribed to it; it astonishes me that these posters can, especially when they appear to be so earnest about it."

Earnestness is everywhere on ILM and in music-crit-land. And it can be very annoying. A lot of the times that I see someone earnestly praising something which I don't see much value in, I feel a bit annoyed. But this doesn't make that earnestness creepy.

If anything, what makes that earnestness annoying is not its earnestness per se, but the fact that it typically goes hand in hand with a certain blitheness and naivety w/r/t the critical manoeuvres being performed. The strawman extreme of this is "[x artist] really means it...." - which irritates precisely because it performs as heartfelt and novel a critical reaction which is in fact such a culturally embedded, long-sedimented layer in the rock-crit landscape that it cannot be said without tumbling headlong into vacuous cliche.

So the criticism which i could imagine someone half-persuasively making w/r/t the teenpop thread is that its contributors repeat some of these manoeuvres, either unaware of or oblivious to (or perhaps even gleefully but shallowly cognizant of) the fact that they are using such cliches, despite or perhaps because of the fact that these cliched criticial manouevres are being applied to material that they would normally never be applied to - the paradigmatic example being Frank's Dylanesque reading of Ashlee Simpson. Thus the earnestness of the discussions annoy precisely because they are hyper-extreme examples of a certain (bear with me) rockism-about-pop.

But the proof is in the pudding here surely: if Frank's take on Ashlee really were as shallow and naive as that it wouldn't stand up to even the most cursory critical examination. I'd like to think i'd not find it interesting and worth thinking about (i'll stop short of saying "convincing" - it doesn't convince me, but only because I don't know enough about Dylan to judge).

But if people are prepared to go to the thread and actually find examples of the naive superficiality that would make any apparent earnest truly objectionable, and then come back and post them to this thread as examples of why they are right and I am wrong, I'd be most interested.

I guess I should ask this question to Frank, but others might know: is there anywhere the Ashlee/Dylan thing is explored or expanded on more - a particular stretch of conversation, or a review or article or anything?

Tom, here's some from the teenpop 2006 thread:


If you want my auto, want my autobiography
Baby, just ask me.

Except the lyrics on the page don't convey how sexy it is when she says it. It's a come-on. The song is like the world's most brilliant personal ad.

And I never in my life wrote a line as great as "I walked a thousand miles while everyone was asleep." I don't know if Jay-Z or Eminem ever did either. Or Dylan. It's like she's saying, "Here I am, stealth genius, and you didn't know." Of course, she's making promises in that song that she probably won't be able to keep, just as Dylan and Jagger and Iggy and Lennon and Johnny and Johansen never lived up to their promise.

-- Frank Kogan (edcasua...), January 23rd, 2006. (Frank Kogan)

And then:

(and then later)

A couple more things about Ashlee and Dylan: Her second album was released a couple weeks after her 21st birthday. Dylan's first album was released a few days before his 21st birthday. Dylan only puts a couple of his own songs on that album, and their lyrics aren't all that interesting (nothing close to "Autobiography," which came out when Ashlee was 19); and nothing in those lyrics foretells what he's going to unleash a year later in "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," going out into that storm he'd called forth on us. But actually, the first Dylan album is my favorite of his four early acoustic records; on that one you can hear him twisting and stretching and distorting the musical forms to make them do what he wants them to. He finds all sorts of different ways to sound intense. In "House of the Rising Sun" and "In My Time of Dying" his voice calls down the storm even though the words don't. Nothing on Ashlee's albums has her imposing her musical will like that, and I'm not sure if there is a way for anyone to drastically twist and distort and reshape her style of music. Which isn't to say that there's nothing special going on in her music or that of people like her. The various reshapings/recombinings are slow and not as ear catching. (And maybe they need to be the subject of another post.) Basically in today's teenpop you're getting admixtures of goth, '80s arena rock, singer-songwriter confessional, various retro dancepop styles, funny novelties, sugar-sweet melodies, hard dark melodies, and blissful r&b, and what's most interesting is the tendency to do them all at once. What's immediately striking about Ashlee is her voice, which sits somewhere between Pink's and Courtney's except that she doesn't sit with it but lets it play around, especially on I Am Me. I Am Me is lighter on its feet than Autobiography; she's found a way to ease up on her bruised intensity without losing it, so she keeps its power while not burying the music under it, which sometimes happens on Autobiography. On the first album she's declaring her identity, on the second she's romping from style to style saying "Look what I can do," so she's the disco slut, then she's the ingenue, then she's the wrathful woman scorned.
But you know what? My heart's with the first album. That's the one where more feels at stake, in words and in sound. Stephen Thomas Erlewine at allmusic.com complains about the second album (he liked the first much more): "The problem is this album is presented with utter seriousness, as if her garden-variety changes in emotions and fashion were great revelations instead of being just what happens in adolescence." That's obviously not how I hear it. Is it possible to listen to "L.O.V.E." and "Burning Up," for example, and not get into the goofing around? I guess it is for Erlewine, who's always worth reading anyway. He's right that her changes in emotions and fashion are garden variety. That doesn't mean they can't be revelations. The situations and emotions in Dylan's "Outlaw Blues" and "Visions of Johanna" and "Sooner Or Later" are just as garden variety. What is amazing is what he makes of them. Any 23 year old can say that even though he sometimes looks and acts like a weasel, he still feels like there's a hero somewhere in him (you hope that a 23 year old hasn't yet lost a sense of his heroic potential). But most won't then come up with anything like "Well, I might look like Robert Ford, but I feel just like Jesse James" to call forth the legends of weasels and heroes past, not to mention calling forth the fear that he'll get shot in the back for it (and the subtext that says, "Look, I can make my little blues song go anywhere, try and stop me"). The risk with Ashlee is that she'll put everything into perspective - that she already has - that she'll decide that a weasel is just a weasel and a breakup is just a breakup and they have no resonance with any larger perfidy or heroism. Maybe "Autobiography" and "Shadow" and "I Am Me" and "La La" are just the pop machine making a couple of lucky shots, and maybe this garden-variety celeb (Dylan: "I know there're some people terrified of the bomb. But there are other people terrified to be seen carrying a Modern Screen magazine") won't make much more that's extraordinary out of her ordinariness. If a Sophie or Alanis or Lucinda had come up with a clumsy line like "Does the weight of consequence drag you down until it pulls you under?" (in the title song of I Am Me), I'd mutter, "Go take a walk in the park, or a nap, or something," but in Ashlee it gives me hope. If she's still got pretensions, maybe she'll push herself to make her mind worthy of those pretensions. You know, like she's got a million miles to go before she sleeps. Or not. In the meantime, at least she gets to speak to my inner 19 year old. Important not to lose that guy.

-- Frank Kogan (edcasua...), January 24th, 2006. (Frank Kogan)

This is great writing, BTW. If people think this is creepy it's totally their loss.

Isn't this the same point raised in that P&J poll though? By deliberate rating and valuing all of this stuff against the canon all you're saying is "Hey, this music is as good as that dead white guy music". All you're doing is reinforcing a hierarchy by building new idols in its style.

Well in FK's case destroying the hierarchy of dead white guy music has never been part of his project as far as I can tell, and he's the only person who's pushing a Dylan comparison.

I know, but it kinda follows that anyone writing in that style, or even following in that style, is forcing a renewal of a status quo, yes?

Or, to put it another way, traditionally pop writing was more "subversive" than any other genre-crit, which is why it irks to see pop writing about in some 73 Cream style.

i don't think frank compares ashlee to dylan because dylan is canon - it's because he loves dylan (regardless of canon status) and also hears actual specific points of comparison in the music (honestly just READ WHAT HE HAS WRITTEN ffs). it's not as if dylan's the sole comparator for ashlee either, pink's in there too and she's hardly canon.

Those aren't really "specific points of comparison" though, unless you think there's a massive dearth of musicians under the age of 23 who don't write all their songs and sometimes write lyrics that take place in banal situations.

I mean, we may as well compare Ashlee to The View if we do that.

most traditional pop writing is the least "subversive" (what do you mean by this overused word anyway) thing ever, anyway

xp well engage with frank about it, i'm not the one making the comparison, though frank's detailed and cogently explained argument is way more convincing than your superficial soundbite reading of it

There was this thing called Smash Hits Lex. It was popular in the 80s.

ok learn some conversational skills before addressing me again, i don't have the time to parse yr trite and rude non sequiturs

How can something be traditionally subversive? (and still be any good?) And what pop writing are we talking about anyway?

(This is a bit of a tangent but it's an interesting point - this idea that there's a way of writing about pop that works (and is still subverting something) and by moving away from it the Teenpop people are putting it at risk...?)

xpost I wuv Smash Hits too but that approach took us straight to Q!

i think we should move away from focusing on "ways of writing" - all of which can be good if done well - and more on to "what is actually written". content not form.

[/writingrockist]

Tom, any revolution eventually leads to evil, it's just enjoying the moment at the start of it before it all goes wrong. Surely that's true with pretty much all junctures of music/the arts?

Yes, but then can you/should you go back again?

Difference between the dilettante and the obsessive.

I don't think so - is it even possible still to 'do' Smash Hits, whether you're a dilettante or obsessive or both? Doesn't it just become a pastiche?

Well, surely that ties into the canon, the idea that you should return back to these "great" ideas and reference points over and over again, as if they're the base camp for music, rather than finding new areas to operate within.

I mean, when you get older do you become less inclined to tear down the cathedrals, as it were?

I don't think that's quite what FK's doing though - he's talking more about effects than techniques. "We need something to have the effects Smash Hits had" rather than "We need something that's like Smash Hits".

(I don't think the teenpop thread writing could have the effect SH had, by the way!)

Do you think earnestness, on the whole, is a good thing?

It's a good option to have!

It always ends up a bit "we mean it, maaaaan" when put into practice, though.

(Is the Teenpop thread the ILM equivalent of the TITTWIS threads I wonder?)

i don't think the teenpop thread is particularly earnest. it can get earnest (like the music) and it's often very...precise and involved, but it's no more earnest than any other rolling thread which takes its particular genre seriously.

it IS earnest about the process of thinking about the music though, whereas some of the other genre threads are more "list songs you've been feeling recently" and little more

does anyone on ilx *make* teenpop?

if not, why not?

Is there any point whatsoever in me bothing to read any of the 600+ posts over the last three days?

There's a picture of Talk Talk about 370 posts in.

i tried, i failed.

Nick: no. Read the last 50 and if there's anything that engages you join in with that.

whatever happened to post busted british teenpop? is mcfly the only survivor? cos the lovebites and the faders where great!

not so much the noise next door.

Post Busted British teenpop is alive and well and called The View and The Fratellis, etcetera. It's grubbed up and pretended not to care about Kids TV, is all.