Rolling Teenpop 2007 Thread

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(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)

― 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)

"Silly robot, feelings are for [real] kids!"

― dabug, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 19:03 (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?

Well who knows, but even if we didn't, that doesn't mean the comparison doesn't exist. They seem to be a boyband in the same way that the Beatles were. Nevertheless, now that they're here in pop, it's fun to think of them that way, which maybe involves removing some of their context (they write their own songs, have clear frontmen, etc.) and highlighting instead the theatricality, willful embrace of fashion and artificiality, their high-level place within a gossip discourse, separate personalities for each member, and existance as a unit with certain members being more prominent. I like thinking that the turn-of-the-century boybands could have fulfilled the artistic goals they seemed to be rising toward, but only by breaking the modern boyband format and reclaiming an old one, i.e. the Beatles.

My contention (and I'm going to write about this next week I think) is that emo, by accruing a large fanbase, engaged in a move toward the mainstream, embracing its values and so becoming viable as pop. MCR and FOB completed this process with their last albums, which were only emo in the way that my non-observant atheist girlfriend is Jewish. Most of their songs sound nothing like emo did as recently as five years ago. We can argue about whether or not they are making pop music (although I think they are if you think Blondie and Poison were making pop music) but they're most definitely pop acts, given their place in the culture and the way their albums are presented to us. I think I really like emo now, but I only like its new version, the one that seems related to great pop-rock bands in a way Hinder (say) can only dream of. And pop-rock bands wer teenpop in the 80s, right?

― Eppy, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 19:06 (nineteen years ago)

i don't hear hilary (or rachel, or kylie) as a robot though. lack of forceful personality != mechanical. pussycat dolls are robots (in a GREAT way), not hilary. they're...just girls. everygirls. they sing the notes so you can feel the song.

xp

― lex pretend, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 19:08 (nineteen years ago)

Yeah, like there's this band now that plays pop-metal songs but there's no lead singer, just occasional chanting. Pussycat Dolls are like the backup singers trying to take over for the absent lead singer and it's occasionally awesome, even if "Beep" makes me want to stick forks in my ears.

― Eppy, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 19:10 (nineteen years ago)

not to sidetrack, but Kelly Clarkson confirmed that the label indeed wanted to junk the new album:

[Removed Illegal Link]

― Matt Armstrong, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 19:12 (nineteen years ago)

arrrgh my first link disaster.

― Matt Armstrong, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 19:12 (nineteen years ago)

I agree with you on Rachel (especially...I think Edward O wrote a good defense of her voice once that wasn't in robot-terms) and Kylie, but Hilary really does strike me as androidish (android's not exactly the same as robot, I suppose -- it's SUPPOSED to be human, there's just something...you know, a little strange).

― dabug, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 19:13 (nineteen years ago)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_vN9wYIuCc

― Matt Armstrong, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 19:14 (nineteen years ago)

I LOVE 'BEEP' (but not as much as 'buttonz') xps

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

[/i]closed tag.

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

Trying again.

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

Hm, my sense of both FOB and MCR was that they never sounded particularly emo; it just took a while for rock-crit types to catch up with the unwashed teenage masses on the pop brilliance. (I have absolutely no idea if this is true since I've only heard both their most recent albums.)

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

(This happened on another thread once. Just code indigestion or something. It'll pass.)

― dabug, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 19:17 (nineteen years ago)

Well they both exist very much in the context of emo I think. Both they and their audience think of themselves that way, no? And so in that case people's definition of emo changed at least. (The members of FOB used to be in a much more traditionally emo-sounding band, also.)

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

just girls. everygirls

^uh, italicized.

My girlfriend pointed out the other day that Lindsay's charm until recently was as a girl-next-door type. Then I remembered that I wouldn't have been able to pick her out of a crowd till I started listening to her music (I saw her in Mean Girls and I still couldn't really distinguish her from other actresses in a general sorta way afterwards). I think Lindsay has this everygirl charm, which is why it's also a little strange what a tabloid black hole she's become (well, duh, it's her behavior, fine), but I don't think this applies to Hilary so much. Everything about her is a little too canned, planned, safe. None of which has much bearing on her music, but tell a story about Hilary that isn't like that of, say, Kelly (everygirl w/ diva chops) or Ashlee (everygirl but you don't REALLY know her, she's actually totally unique) or Lindsay (everygirl with prrrrrrrrooooooobblleemmmmms)

― dabug, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 19:20 (nineteen years ago)

I don't know about Fall Out Boy, but "Helena" sounds way more emo than "Welcome to the Black Parade," and I liked them better in that incarnation: they were a little more nervous and jagged.

― jaymc, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 19:20 (nineteen years ago)

Dave, you should read the Lohan thread on ILE if you want to see how other people think about her. Also, to be a little yigged out. Speaking of creepy...

― Eppy, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 19:22 (nineteen years ago)

xpost Yeah, Helena was totally an emo song in that at least 50% of it consisted of unlistenable thrashing. But omg that chorus. Maybe you heard it differently.

― Eppy, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 19:23 (nineteen years ago)

Kelly (everygirl w/ diva chops) or Ashlee (everygirl but you don't REALLY know her, she's actually totally unique) or Lindsay (everygirl with prrrrrrrrooooooobblleemmmmms)

ie they're not really everygirls, ultimately! whereas hilary and rachel really are.

everygirl with DIGNITY?

― lex pretend, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 19:23 (nineteen years ago)

And so in that case people's definition of emo changed at least. <in italics>

Well this is sort of my point re: your idea here...what does mainstream success have to do with how they sound? And if they sound no different (again, I don't know this, maybe they do), how can they be "embracing" the values of pop, if their values (in how they sound, anyway) haven't changed that much? Is it about their values or ours? And who's included in "ours," their burgeoning-to-huge fanbase or the critic-types who've hopped on the bandwagon a little late?

― dabug, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 19:23 (nineteen years ago)

I have italicized the thread, it appears. I'm really sorry.

I think the Kylie comparisons are excellent vis a vis the new Hilary. Kylie indeed does sound robotic at times (most of Fever, for example), and it is, in my opinion, a conscious decision to create a sort of futuristic, cold-beauty aesthetic. But on Dignity, Hilary sounds less robotic than simply fragile. And I think it doesn't quite work like it did on previous faves from the first two albums. Perhaps her vocals are best on Danger, the Paris-imitation track!

― Matt Armstrong, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 19:24 (nineteen years ago)

the ile lohan thread is funny! i dunno i love tabloid-friendly hot messes. i want to party with lindsay, frankly.

― lex pretend, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 19:24 (nineteen years ago)

Well yeah.

― Eppy, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 19:25 (nineteen years ago)

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