Rolling Teenpop 2007 Thread

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I dunno what Pick It or Kick It is (a US thang, I assume), but the song appears to have been upped to youtube already:

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=aly+aj+potential+break+up&search=Search

I won't be able to listen until tonight.

much more electro than any of their previous songs. No acoustic guitars, backed mostly by synths, etc
I'm sure A&A said at the beginning of the year that the next album would be 'a lot more rock'. But I for one will be happy if that isn't true.

― Jeff W, Monday, 14 May 2007 13:18 (nineteen years ago)

Uh-oh..."Yahoo! Answers - Is Aly and Aj's new song about fornication?"

Song's pretty great! Love the castanets + music box on the chorus. And they are officially funny without nudging me too hard about it: "Now all I want is just my stuff back/ Did you get that?/ Let me repeat that: I WANT MY STUFF BACK/ You can leave it in a box/ I don't care just drop it off."

― dabug, Monday, 14 May 2007 13:40 (nineteen years ago)

This isn't on their next album IIRC, it's a one-off for a Disney soundtrack. (Jeff, Pick It or Kick It is a weekly feature on Radio Disney where kids choose whether or not a new song should go into rotation. This one will probably show up on the Top 30 in a week or so, airplay to follow.)

― dabug, Monday, 14 May 2007 13:41 (nineteen years ago)

Upon further reflection/listening I DO like the song, I was just a bit thrown off by the sound of it.

― Greg Fanoe, Monday, 14 May 2007 14:43 (nineteen years ago)

PS - interesting that they're swiping from Ben Folds and the Spice Girls in the same song (whether they meant to or not).

― dabug, Monday, 14 May 2007 14:49 (nineteen years ago)

This isn't on their next album IIRC, it's a one-off for a Disney soundtrack.

Do you mean their upcoming MTV made for TV movie?

― Greg Fanoe, Monday, 14 May 2007 16:48 (nineteen years ago)

OK, call me utterly predictable, but "Potential..." is my single of the year so far. It sounds really European to me - there's a bit of ABBA in there, a bit of Madness... Wonderful.

― Jeff W, Monday, 14 May 2007 18:29 (nineteen years ago)

Maybe it is on their next album:

This is the potential breakup song
Our album needs just one
Oh baby, please -- please tell me

― dabug, Monday, 14 May 2007 19:22 (nineteen years ago)

Their previous soundtrack songs made it onto their album proper.

― Frank Kogan, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 13:11 (nineteen years ago)

And Aly & A.J.'s MySpace says that "Potential Break Up Song" is on Insomniatic. (They stream about a minute and a half of it.)

― Frank Kogan, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 13:30 (nineteen years ago)

Jeff: I don't hear any ABBA in it (judging from the MySpace) but definitely some Madness, Squeeze (!), Stiff Records filtered through electropop. I liked it a lot until the "potential break-up song" bit when the extra percussion came in and everything suddenly got a bit overloaded and rickety: the "you're not winning" part is a strong enough hook in itself, for me.

― Groke, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 13:39 (nineteen years ago)

Has anyone heard Bianca Ryan, of America's Got Talent fame?

Whoa, someone just showed me that clip the other day. Weird. I showed her an Amy Diamond performance and she wasn't as impressed. Even though Amy Diamond is America's most talented person. The person who showed me the clip was bummed that Bianca didn't seem to have a pop career forthcoming and seemed to be doing prestige benefit gigs etc.; problem is no one's in the market for another recorded version of "And I Am Telling You," unless it's on the Dream Girls soundtrack, which was a cheap shot anyway. (Singing "And I Am Telling You" is cheap, the talent show equivalent of "snowflake" babies. Does anyone remember the In Living Color skit with tips about how to win over the Apollo audience on amateur night, and singing "And I Am Telling You" was the punchline? Never heard the song the same way after that. Also never saw Dream Girls, but that's just because the video store doesn't believe us that they lost a movie we already returned.)

― dabug, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 13:40 (nineteen years ago)

What I like about "Potential Break Up Song" (aside from getting "Spice Up Your Life" stuck in my head after I hear it) is that they can still deliver a line like "obviously my armor was cracked," one of those lines that sticks out like a sore thumb, the sort of overwrought, earnest anger/sadness they do in their other songs. So not only is this funny, but it has it both ways, which might have been (lyrically) what I wanted out of "Chemicals React" (I still probably underrate that one).

― dabug, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 13:46 (nineteen years ago)

anyone heard the sophie ellis bextor album?

― groovemaaan, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 13:48 (nineteen years ago)

"Potential Breakup Song"

They use vocoder! But they do it subtly, so that the vocoder just adds an extra glint to the vocals, as if you're hearing them from a couple different angles at once, the sound flashing from one angle to the other. And the vocals are reminding me of someone but I'm not sure who: there's an Alanis sharpness to their glints, as if their voice boxes were producing these brief sparkles of feedback, though fortunately they don't sound nearly as grating as Alanis. I'm also hearing a suggestion of the Andrews Sisters in the melody, something going back to swingpop. But again, not so blatant as to jab you in the ribs and say "1940s." Lucy Woodward (a singer who in 2003 was working with John Shanks, would do this, go a bit swing and put refraction into her voice, but by way of soul burrs rather than vocoder). And then when they sing "This is a potential breakup song" they're doing something else, also familiar and also something I can't put my finger on. Melissa Lefton? Not just in the self-consciousness but in the phrasing, a sharp-eyed precision, but with great joy in the way they're holding the guy and the situation at arm's length and giving him/it the eagle eye.

― Frank Kogan, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 14:21 (nineteen years ago)

the sort of overwrought, earnest anger/sadness they do in their other songs

The narrator doesn't really want him to go, necessarily. She still wants him, but different. But then she wants him to pick up his stuff. When she's not there.

― Frank Kogan, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 14:28 (nineteen years ago)

(Tom - possibly I was using "ABBA" as convenient shorthand for belted-out 70s europop in general)

Rather amusingly, I noticed last night that, in the latest "New Music" leaflet that HMV produces, Into The Rush is finally getting a UK release on 28 May. Keep up already, Brits!

Oh well, at least I've got an excuse now to include the LP in my year-end favourites list AGANE ;)

― Jeff W, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 14:28 (nineteen years ago)

xpost

Speaking of which, does anyone remember 2ge+her's "The Hardest Part of Breaking Up (Is Getting Back Your Stuff)"? That song actually made the Hot 100. 2ge+ther were a turn of the millennium MTV boyband parody that had several fairly good songs, my favorite being "U + Me = Us (Calculus)," which was deliberately vapid in its lyrics but quite winning in its melody.

― Frank Kogan, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 14:33 (nineteen years ago)

Frank, here's what I wrote about 2ge+her on my blog a couple months ago:

2gether - "The Hardest Part of Breaking Up"; 2gether - "U + Me = Us (Calculus)"

Review: 2-gether was the "fake" boy band produced by MTV. They starred in a TV movie that was all the rage when I was in high school. It was funny, or at least it seemed so at the time. In any event, they released two songs that were hits on MTV, in an example of blatant and shameless cross-promotion that far precedes the Disney Channel's exploitation of the same. Anyways, since they were in a movie that's a parody of boy bands, I guess that makes them a fake or parody boy band, but these both sound like pretty awesome boy band songs to me. The lyrics are just a bit sillier, but these would both fit pretty well in the Backstreet Boys catalogue, for example. Anyways, "U + Me = Us" is their ballad and "The Hardest Part of Breaking Up" is their uptempo tune, and both are good songs with funny lyrics! In any event, I can't think of another song about an ex-girlfriend stealing all of your stuff when she leaves, and it's a pretty good conceit that's handled in a funny way. They've got the boy band look and dance moves and looks down so pat, and they play it so straight faced that it begs the question of where the line between reality and parody is crossed. I guess they are a parody, but they had substantially the same audience as the actual boy bands, and it was pretty genius of MTV. Boybands dominated MTV to an almost nauseating degree at this time, and they capitalized on it. They made their own boy band, but they couched it in "parodying" or "making fun of" boybands, like they were too good for that whole boy band thing. That's a gesture I find inherently distateful, but when it works it works. [8] and [7] respectively

― Greg Fanoe, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 14:45 (nineteen years ago)

Is Miranda Lambert relevant to this thread? Well, her new album is great. Rocks harder than just about any country I've heard in a while, and has really great tunes and lyrics too! I'll be pleasantly surprised if it doesn't end up my album of the year. But the first two singles are only like the 7th and 8th best songs on the album though.

Similar situation with Avril too. I didn't think I'd be too into the album after hearing "Keep Holding On" and "Girlfriend" but neither of those are in my top 5 tracks on the album, and "Keep Holding On" is prolly my least fave of them all. Hilary Duff too! Bad year for teenpop singles, I think, because the teenpop artists are not releasing their best songs as singles. And Jordan Pruitt's next single is gonna be "Teenager" or "Miss Popularity"??? Come on!

― Greg Fanoe, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 14:50 (nineteen years ago)

Jeff W is utterly predictable.

― Greg Fanoe, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 14:51 (nineteen years ago)

Bianca Ryan: Got an impressive speedball but the batters know just where she's going to throw it, so she needs to move the ball around more and maybe add a changeup.

― Frank Kogan, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 14:53 (nineteen years ago)

2ge+her's "The Hardest Part of Breaking Up (Is Getting Back Your Stuff)"?

Whoa (again), this very song just came on Pandora the other day and I remembered how GREAT it was. They were really good!

The problem with finding em on Pandora is that they are actually 2ge+her, but Pandora lists them as "Together," so I think I either had to go song by song (or maybe they added them to their playlist late in the game).

― dabug, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 14:59 (nineteen years ago)

(And yes, 2ge+her is closer...when I said "Ben Folds" I was actually thinking of a ballad I wrote called "Give Me My Stuff Back," which all my friends compared to a dumb song by Ben Folds.)

― dabug, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 15:01 (nineteen years ago)

I think "Miss Popularity" and "Teenager" would be pretty good singles choices, esp. the former (the lyrics are old hat but the tune and singing are ace). And "Stranger" may be my favorite on the Hilary alb (though I'm not in love with either it or the album). And I don't agree that the two Miranda singles are 7th and 8th best. They're 6th and 7th best. Or 6th and 8th.

― Frank Kogan, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 15:02 (nineteen years ago)

So, inspired by that other thread discussing this thread, I decided to check out Aly & A.J. on youtube (my 13-year-old son does not listen to them and I had not so far). I watched the videos for their covers of "Walking on Sunshine" and "Do You Believe in Magic." Not bad, but they just seemed merely competent. I gather from some of the posts on the other thread and what I've read here, that I must not have picked out the finest examples of their work.

― curmudgeon, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 15:10 (nineteen years ago)

Correct.

― Frank Kogan, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 15:16 (nineteen years ago)

xpost

curmudgeon - You picked their two covers, which are not representative of their overall best work. I'd recommend "Rush" or "Not This Year" or "Speak for Myself" or "Chemicals React", etc., etc.

Frank - "Miss Popularity" and "Teenager" are ace, but in my opinion there are about 5 acer songs among the non-singles. ("Later", "Waiting for You", "No Ordinary Girl", "When I Pretend"...rats! that's only 4 that are better than "Miss Popularity"! Though "My Reality" is also better than "Teenager")

― Greg Fanoe, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 15:17 (nineteen years ago)

Ha, you totally picked the wrong singles!!!

Try "Rush," "I Am One of Them" (about child kidnapping, a total 180 from Walking on Sunshine!), and "Not This Year" on YouTube. Also check out their (great) new single "Potential Breakup Song," which is also quite different. "Shine" is pretty good, too.

― dabug, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 15:18 (nineteen years ago)

curmudgeon - What is "that other thread"?

― Greg Fanoe, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 15:18 (nineteen years ago)

(That ha isn't directed at you btw, I'm glad that thread actually led to something productive. It's just that when Aly and AJ first came out, those were the only two singles that got major airplay on Radio Disney, so discovering their other stuff was a very strange experience for me! That is to say, your reaction takes me back to 2005, when I had that exact reaction to them!)

― dabug, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 15:19 (nineteen years ago)

What is "that other thread"?

You have been warned.

― Ned Raggett, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 15:21 (nineteen years ago)

OK, now we've mentioned the "thread that must not be mentioned" here (joke), I hope Abby Poptext won't mind me copying and pasting something she said there that might otherwise get lost:

...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?

Questions worth further teasing out here, I think.

As to Avril, my own view is that she just wanted to make an album that sounded like Sum 41. The fact that it has been as successful as it has (or at least that "Girlfriend" has been so successful, haven't seen any LP sales figures) is no doubt exercising minds in music industry boardrooms even as I type.

― Jeff W, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 15:25 (nineteen years ago)

i reviewed both hilarity and avril albums and gave both 4 stars at the time - enthusiastically so for avril, hesitantly for hilarity. time (a month) has shown though that i got those the wrong way round - now my ears have gotten used to nu-hilary, i love dignity to bits, start to finish. whereas i haven't gone back to avril, not even 'girlfriend', after the first rush. she does seem a bit...shrill.

opinion obv liable to switch when i actually do go back to avril.

― lex pretend, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 15:33 (nineteen years ago)

Lex, I'd love it if you'd say more about the Hilary, since I'm just having a lot of trouble feeling it. ("Danger," my second favorite song on it, is a Paris sound-alike that isn't as good as Paris would do it, and even so it would only be the 10th best thing on the Paris album.) There's certainly stuff I'm liking, and maybe if you told me the process of how it grew on you it would grow on me two. Hilary doesn't have a high-impact voice, and John Shanks back on "Come Clean" and "Fly" knew how to use her slightness for enormous feeling (as if the feeling were in the melody and the voice just let it come through in a beautiful sketch - I still can't figure out how he made it work), while Kara DioGuardi on Dignity seems to be working a middle ground that doesn't always work. (Strangely, I prefer DioGuardi's Tisdale tune; strange, given that Tisdale's voice gives even less to a song than Duff's does.)

― Frank Kogan, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 16:14 (nineteen years ago)

Might as well paste what I said on there too, since maybe it'll be interesting:

I like teenpop in large part because of the reasons people were bashing it for upthread--because it's insistently mainstream, because it has a specific target demographic, because it's primarily commercial. It eliminates a lot of the bullshit you have to deal with when you talk about music, and I think that surrounding context makes the music itself much richer and more interesting. I also like that it's working the kind of pop-rock sound I love, which doesn't really seem to exist much anymore outside of teenpop and (increasingly, weirdly) emo.

I also think it's not accidental that the subject provokes such good discussions. It's the music itself, not just something about the people involved or the format or anything. I think it's genuinely one of the richest, most meaningful kinds of music being made right now. Not necessarily the best, but certainly one of the most unpackable. Ditto hip-hop and R&B, fwiw.

(Incidentally, I have accidentally listened to the FoB a lot and now a) totally love it, and b) am behind the FOB-as-teenpop theory advanced upthread, although I would love to discuss it a bit more.)

(Also, Abby mentioned The Blow, who are interesting in that they're accidentally working a teenpop sound, i.e. they jacked pop beats and then had a twee girl sing over them, often about very teenagery things--see "Hey Boy," which is a bit too delicate for modern teenpop but seems to fit anyway.)

― Eppy, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 16:29 (nineteen years ago)

Just xposted it to the Other Thread (which somehow has gotten really good in the past 24 hrs! Good conversation!), but Lucky Soul fits in with the 60s teenpop throwback stuff that we never really talk about much here. I like it! Immediately like them more than the Pippettes, not sure if I like them more than other stuff I've heard this year yet.

― dabug, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 16:33 (nineteen years ago)

The not-always-accurate Wikipedia lists Aly Michalka and A.J. Michalka as the writers of "Potential Breakup Song." No one else. No producer listed. From Mediabase it seems as if so far Radio Disney hasn't played it outside of Pick It or Kick It. No plays on Top 40, either. ("U + Ur Hand" at number one on Top 40, "Girlfriend" at number two, Timbo number three, Kelly C. number twenty-one and not likely to get much higher.)

― Frank Kogan, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 16:35 (nineteen years ago)

Frank, you've gotta give Pick It Kick It a week or two to, er, kick in. I'm sure this will place in the Top 30, though since it's in-house airplay and ranking might be more simultaneous than, e.g., Jojo's last single, which needed some warm-up time.

― dabug, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 16:37 (nineteen years ago)

Oh, OK, xthread posting going on!

As for Avril/Sum 41, it just goes to show how important the celebrity real-life dynamics are music-wise, because my first thought on hearing the Duff/Madden break-up was 'Oh no, now we won't get any more restrained synth Killer-esque tracks from Hilary' because 'Wake Up' and 'Beat of my Heart' were both Madden productions, I think. And hence my interest in what Ashlee and Pete Wentz will come up with since I can't see Ashlee making a new record without there being some FoB influence. Which would be a good thing, because 'Infinity..' has some of the best hooks and lines I've heard (barring, of course 'His fists are big/ My gun's bigger' a la Miranda), and was basically the convergence of my love for 80s hair rock with my taste for teenpop songwriting structure and precision.

― Poptext, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 16:48 (nineteen years ago)

I guess to be more specific, I'd be interested in talking about Fall Out Boy as a boy band.

― Eppy, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 16:53 (nineteen years ago)

Y'know, one thing I didn't notice about MCR's new one until last time I listened was that they're essentially the TEENPOP MR. BUNGLE. Crazy.

― dabug, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 16:55 (nineteen years ago)

And now McFly are the teenpop MCR!

― dabug, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 16:55 (nineteen years ago)

Well I think if you look at MCR and FOB as having made a stylistic shift into pop-qua-pop with their most recent albums, rather than making poppy emo albums, you can see them picking up some batons that were dropped a few years back. Like maybe "The Black Parade" is the rock version of the album *Nsync would've made if Justin didn't want to be Michael Jackson.

― Eppy, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 16:58 (nineteen years ago)

No, he'd need to want to be Mike Patton!

― dabug, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 17:04 (nineteen years ago)

Surely at least some of how we're able to see FOB and MCR as 'pop qua pop' has something to do with the shift of the emo aesthetic to mainstream amongst 'the kids'. If, contextually, the style and cultural cues of the genre were very much a marginal/underground phenomenon, then would we draw the N*sync comparison/ would we even think of doing so, regardless of what the music actually sounded like?

― Poptext, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 17:26 (nineteen years ago)

i still don't see FOB and MCR as pop at all, i am holding out here. it's the voices. i didn't see blink 182 or sum 41 as pop either!

Lex, I'd love it if you'd say more about the Hilary, since I'm just having a lot of trouble feeling it. ("Danger," my second favorite song on it, is a Paris sound-alike that isn't as good as Paris would do it, and even so it would only be the 10th best thing on the Paris album.)

probably easiest if i explain what i didn't like so much first - on the first few listens i thought it was expertly executed electropop but clumsy (lyrically and production-wise) in comparison to its nearest relative (rachel stevens' come and get it) and, most of all, i missed the transcendentally gorgeous hilary of 'wake up' and 'come clean'. a lot of how i came to love dignity is just the process of adjusting my ears to who hilary is now - and also, separating the songs from each other. it's a really consistent album, in quality and in sound, which means that you don't get the songs which stand out from the pack and it can be...a mass of 14 solid tracks.

the production is definitely better with time though - there are some great touches, that little guitar phrase on 'happy', the crunkish beats on 'burned', the stutter beats and really, really treated guitar on 'with love'. the variety's coming out - it's a sonically coherent electro-rock crunch throughout, but by turns melodramatic and light and vengeful and caught up in itself. sometimes inappropriately so: 'happy' is a quintessential "trying to convince myself of an emotion i don't feel" song, while 'dreamer' is a super-breezy, super-casual, super-generous kiss-off which is all about being stalked and sent death threats (which actually happened to hilary!).

i've also reached the stage where...this is hard to explain, but it's like, i've got over every obstacle i may have had with the album, i like each of the songs as songs, any one of them could now become a song i couldn't imagine living without.

two further things - 1) you know 'gypsy woman' is actually about hilary's parents' divorce, right? and the titular femme fatale is the woman her dad ran off with. which explains its nastiness - contra the usual femme fatale narrative in pop, hilary's not romanticising her (eg 'maneater' and 'gold digger' which are as much celebrations of the subject as warnings; and in the case of the former the obvious subtext is "i, nelly, am the maneater"). 2) will.i.am is apparently one of the producers - i could look this up but can't be bothered, i can't even begin to imagine which song he did though

― lex pretend, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 18:36 (nineteen years ago)

OK, explanation of "Gypsy Woman" officially makes it my song of the year. PROFOUND WTF.

This is something from Maura's abstract for her EMP paper about freestyle, relevant here because of Frank's connection btw "Happy" and freestyle (been listening to a bunch of freestyle lately through these CD comps plus some old cheap vinyl):

I listen to "Too Turned On" and "Spring Love" in the privacy of my own home, and when you're alone, it's hard not to notice the deep longing of lyrics like "I had to leave you / And that's where my heartache began." Alisha and Stevie B were hardly the only freestyle artists who, instead of describing the hedonism of the dance floor, sang about the emotions that propelled people there; the genre's minor-key trappings only serve as a further reminder that the world beyond the club was never far away. In my paper, I'm going to discuss why freestyle, despite its continued presence at parties around the New York area, is at its core a genre defined by loneliness, and why—as a wise man once told me—Stevie B could be considered one of the more unlikely godfathers of emo.

Anyway, this is more interesting in re: freestyle than "Happy" (which is a great song, but probably doesn't stand up to anything Maura's interested in in the paper) but it offered me a way of looking at the obvious music/lyrical split ("trying to convince myself of an emotion i don't feel") -- well, the "feel" comes partially from that minor freestyle-ish melancholy. And the relative lack of such affectation/referencing of this genre makes it stand out that much more (and makes it that much more powerful, IMO).

― dabug, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 18:49 (nineteen years ago)

That is to say, the music, not Hilary, sells the melancholy. Hilary's performance is fairly perfunctory -- but if one thing is clear, at least, it's that she's not happy. (She's not really much of anything, which can be a problem or an appropriate style -- here I think it's appropriate, in "Fly" its seeming inappropriateness makes the song more interesting, in "Beat of My Heart" and "Wake Up," it's totally perfect.)

― dabug, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 18:52 (nineteen years ago)

as if the feeling were in the melody and the voice just let it come through in a beautiful sketch

I dunno, this is a lovely metaphor but I'm not sure it's how/why Hilary's voice works for me. I like androids, tho (and identify, e.g., with Haley Joel Osment in AI) so LACK of human feeling or the awkward approximation of it can often be weirdly endearing to me, and I might hear it in places that Frank doesn't (like "Fly," though not really "Come Clean," where the emotion and song don't seem so much at odds with one another).

― dabug, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 19:02 (nineteen years ago)

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