Rolling Teenpop 2007 Thread

I think I'd have given it a 7, so 6.7 or whatever seems fair. I've listened to it quite a lot this week and I think it's a bit too fast, brisk, kind of yapping at me almost. On the one hand I like this - like they're hustling Mr Bad Boyfriend out the door, no time for ifs or buts or answering back. On the other hand I feel like they're hustling ME out the door with him and onto whatever the next track on my MP3 player is.

Also discussed over on Jukebox:

Lady Tigra

Jordin Sparks

The Reba version of "Because Of You."

Greg, is Jordin's studio version of "I Who Have Nothing" as good as her March AI performance? (I thought the March beat the May, 'cause in May the accompaniment got too ambitious with the strings.)

(And I'm meh on the Lady Tigra, which sounds strangely unemphatic. There are a couple of better tracks on her MySpace. And a couple of worse.)

And for those who don't know, here's The Rules Of The Game No. 1: Joining In, the first installment of what will be an ongoing twice-a-week column I'm writing for the Las Vegas Weekly. You're all encouraged to send me your thoughts on it (or post them there).

I'm all over the Lady Tigra one, I got a little over excited last week and listened to it about a million times!

FK, you can hear the recorded version of "I Who Have Nothing" here. I still prefer the March version, mostly because of the strings and that looooong note near the end...

Oh, and here's a song from some old Jordin demo with a slideshow of family pics.

Yeah, the "Stranger" vid makes no sense as a video for that song. The song goes "You treat me like a queen when we go out," and the whole point is the difference between the public warmth and the private callousness. Yet in the video he's not treating her like a queen in public, he's flirting with other girls or ignoring her, or acting pissy. The lyrics provided a great plot for a video; I don't see why they didn't follow it.

The video for LeAnn Rimes' "And It Feels Like" was a much better piece of breakup cinema.

Like It Or Leave It

Whoa whoa whoa. What's that about? I kinda hope it's not a relationship...

In their in-store performance they mentioned that they were doing a lot of playing around in the studio.

Maybe they're talking about THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

Er...actually, I just came here to post about a nice power-teenpop OST for the upcoming Nancy Drew Soundtrack. Kinda digging the Joanna tune on there, "Pretty Much." Don't know if the Liz Phair song was on one of her post-Matrix albums.

Uh...who is Katie Melua? Voice sounds familiar...

Whoa! "She is, as of 2006, the United Kingdom's biggest-selling female artist and Europe's highest selling European female artist."

Frank, what do you think about the announcement that Pete Wentz is helping Ashley pen new songs for the new album?

*gasp*

The star was up for the role in "Mama Mia," an adaptation of the ABBA musical, but was unavailable because of prior commitments.

Simpson’s rep told In Touch magazine, "She was interested in the role, but unfortunately, it didn’t work out because she’s putting out an album."

So what, would she have been Agnetha or something? Or is that not what Mama Mia is? (It should be!)

Mamma Mia is a musical that uses ABBA songs to tell a story.

I find Katie Melua unbearably winsome.

(No idea why I thought it was a story about ABBA. It was huge on Broadway...I think all of my roommates but me have seen it!)

I have been anticipating the Nancy Drew movie for a long time, as it stars Emma Roberts and Kay Panabaker, who are two of my favorite current actresses, or at least two of my current favorite young female actresses.

I know one thing about Katie Melua, and that's that she does a cover of "Just Like Heaven" which is featured at the beginning of the (very underrated!) Reese Witherspoon movie of the same name. It's "not bad".

I absolutely cannot believe that this soundtrack features a cover of "Kids In America". That's at least the third teenpop cover of the song I can think of, and this is just off the top of my head. So Emma Roberts doesn't have any songs on the soundtrack, or they just aren't being streamed? I kind of like this "Hey Nancy Drew" song!

i'll raise tom's "unbearably winsome" with a "really fucking appalling and dull" re: melua. you can all have her.

i don't think 'stranger' is a very good choice of single at all :(

WHOOOOOAAA. I'm so going to the Missouri State Fair this year...American Idol tour/Corbin Bleu, Drake Bell & Jordan Pruitt/Counting Crows/Big & Rich, Cowboy Troy/plus two more big acts to be announced!

Omg, http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=esmeedenters.

Justin is right. Esmee does sing his songs better than he does. I'm smitten!

I have been listening recently to Kim Wilde songs that are not "Kids In America" - I hope some teenpopper rediscovers "Chequered Love"! Or "Cambodia" though it might need a title change ("Afghanistan" scans, come to think of it). Probably not any of the other ones ("Chaos At The Airport" is quite topical mind you).

OK, the new Kelly Clarkson single was released today, called "Sober", and can be heard on Kelly's Myspace: http://myspace.com/kellyclarkson

I haven't had a chance to listen to it properly yet; I'm at work. But it appears to be some kind of emotional ballad. I'm a bit surprised that they're just blatantly giving up on "Never Again" so quickly, but that's the biz I suppose.

My initial impression of "Sober" is that it is fantastic. I like it better than "Never Again", and I really liked "Never Again"

Forget the Karas of the future--the Kara of now is good enough. (1) She is working with Ashlee again, per her official site and this article in Billboard, which (2) makes me feel a lot better about her whole "This song is giving too much of the power to the man and it does not make me wanna la la," because apparently what she meant by that was (direct quote): "Dude, you are not writing that. You're a fucking hot bitch, and you are not begging for anything. These guys are begging for you." (Dave: I believe this means Kara is in favor of "My Humps.")

http://tommy2.net/2007/alyandajinsomniatic.jpg

I'm just going to quickly pencil this into my year-end ballot real quick...

er, LIGHTLY pencil it in real quick. Or quickly real light.

Reminder:

AMNIOTIC SIN, ANIMISTIC? NO!, INACTIONISM, MOSAIC INNIT?, I SIN INTO M*A*C, and SIMIAN TONIC are but a few of the alternate titles to this abum.

Come on use a pen DABUG, this is clearly going to be one of the ten best albums of the year.

<i>I believe this means Kara is in favor of "My Humps."</i>

Maybe. She's right that "men begging for it" can be sexy, but she's wrong that "begging for it from a man" CAN'T be sexy. Tricky conflation of personal kinks w/ systematic/institutional sexism and power relationships there, because to me Ashlee's song is empowering precisely because she knows exactly what she wants, and what she wants is very different from what most people want. The "Papi" idea was mostly bad because it was <i>boring</i>.

Anyway, I think it's hard to have pop music both ways -- as something that represents an individual viewpoint expressing incontestable personal emotions/kinks/whatever (as the writing process in that piece makes clear) but also something that can be said to influence a "culture," so that when Ashlee wants to get thrown like a boomerang (N.B., she also wants to come back and beat you up!), she's "giving men power"...well, sure she is, because sometimes giving men power gets her off! Having power over men gets her off, too. It's called a sexual identity -- it's complicated. If we wanna take power away from men, let's write some laws that do it and not just tell people how to (say they like to) fuck!

Er, Kara's got issues is what I mean to say, but that article was great.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: STUPID TAGS

"from what most people want" should be "from what most people say they want in pop music, as opposed to real life, where lots of people like to beat up/get beat up, sometimes both at the same time." Usually it's all about fidelity and I'll be with you forever and our love is so friggin' huge and boring crap like that.

I was listening to "Better Off" on my way to work and it's quickly becoming one of my favorite Ashlee songs. For one thing, it's completely NOT about what I've always thought it was about -- the recent end of a relationship. Actually it's about that strange, low-key beginning of a relationship, when you're still trying to "lay low" and you're not sure if it's going anywhere. She is so specific in this song, she just NAILS that early relationship ambivalence. Art Brut sorta nails the excitement in a song like "Good Weekend," but "I've seen her naked...twice!" isn't the only way to see a new relationship, and from my own experience (well, vicarious, since I tend to fall in love instantly, as does, er, can Ashlee, except really she has to feel things out little by little like "the rest of us"), the "Better Off" scenario is way more common that Love At First Sight. (Worth noting: "Love at First Sight" is really "Love at First Listen," not really about SEEING anyone at all, but falling in love through music!)

"Better Off" has about a million little arguments and observations running through it, none definitive, none particularly cliched and all related to a real individual person...all delivered with ambivalence and slight disinterest in which way the relationship might go. But it's about the amivalence and disinterest and the little things that help you gauge those first steps...wearing his clothes, telling your friends you're trying to keep it on the DL, etc. etc.

This in TWO unique verses, the rest being the chorus and bridge. That's about a dozen lines worth of lyrics, maybe a handful more.

*than, not that Love At First Sight

Plus there are plenty of thrown-in-there-for-the-hell-of-it lines that just kind of color the song, "hair's a mess when it's straight," whatever, "feet are on the ground even though I'm stuck" is self-conscious like Elvis Costello, using a great line that either has very little to do with anything in the song, or sums the song up in too pat a way (as it does in "Better Off"...I mean, it's true and captures her ambivalence, but "spilled my coffee etc." is better at painting the picture than using two cliched metaphors to make one not-cliched metaphor that's still obvious).

Did no one post this yet?

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/07/fashion/07skin.html

Lil Mama on lipgloss! Album's out in September, and her dad's True, which I was unaware of.

Article about emo posted by Idolator yesterday includes this choice quote:

"It's not edgy," says songwriter Butch Walker (he's also written and produced for Pink, Avril Lavigne and Bowling for Soup). "It's no different than the hair metal movement that Bon Jovi pioneered," he says. "When those girls outgrew New Kids on the Block and Debbie Gibson and started smoking cigarettes and hanging out with boys who drive Camaros, they started listening to Bon Jovi. And that music was not good either."

Walker, whose tastes run more toward the Arcade Fire, concedes that a lot of the Crush bands sound "so same-y - they all have the same look, play the same guitar songs, all the songs are about the same s - - -. I think that's why the critics don't like it." He pauses. "Jonathan may not be the poster boy for what is indie-cred cool, but if he was, he wouldn't be successful. Let's not have our head up our ass and shoot ourselves in the head with the hipster gun. And I think that's why the company is equally loved and loathed."

To Wentz, it's all just white noise. He sees himself as one in a long line of great artists who, in their prime, were profoundly misunderstood: "You know, Bob Dylan plugged in and everyone started booing," he says. "Thirty years later, he's hailed as one of the greatest artists of all time. There are plenty of ways to get rich. It's very easy. But if you want to be involved in this, you want to be involved for the legacy of your art."

Wentz aside, Walker's engaging in some real pot-kettle shit here.

Which Jonathan is Walker referring to? (Sorry didn't click through...)

Jonathan Daniel, head of Crush Management (who work with Fall Out Boy, PATD, etc.)

Those Walker quotes are silly. In particular, I know Walker co-wrote "Everything Back But You" on Lavigne's album and I don't see at all how that is substantively different than the music he is dissing.

Better Off has perhaps Ashlee's greatest lyrical achievement:

i spilled my coffee
it went
all over your clothes
I gotta wear
mine now

Jukebox contributor/screw junkie Jonathan Bradley had this to say about "Better Off" a couple weeks ago:

Apart from "La La" she hasn't to my knowledge really sung about anything explicitly adult, but her lyrics do basically seem to be written from the POV of a woman her age. "I spilt my coffee, it went all over your clothes/I've got to wear mine now" could be sung by a 14 year old, I guess, but I have in mind someone Ashlee's age when I listen to it.

...I really do like that particular Ashlee lyric, and I've been thinking about it, and I think in some way it reminds me of the Hold Steady's "You Can Make Him Like You," when Craig Finn (another artist who consistently sings about being much younger than he really is, and his work is all the better for it) sings "You can hang in the kitchen/ talk about the stars in the upcoming sequel." It's such an easy, tossed off line, one not even detailed or clever enough to really be described as observational, but it paints such a vivid picture of not only the scene, but of all the characters in it, and where they are in their lives.

And that's the thing with "Better Off": in that first verse, I can picture exactly the kind of morning Ashlee is having from the clothes to the emotions she's experiencing. I'm even getting a sense of what her boyfriend is like, what their relationship is like - and this is before she hits the chorus where this sort of thing is made more explicit.

I never really have thought of it in terms of an Ashlee coming into her own metaphor, but I think if there is that metaphor there, it's inherent in the entire 20-ish feel of the passage. The early 20s is for many people the time in their lives when they're first becoming properly independent, and the passage has a very enduring the trials of everyday life feel about it, but also a sense of newness suggesting that these trials aren't things the singer has experienced thousands of times before. If the track were a country song by a mid 30s singer, it would have a very different feel, I think.

Kara's in her mid-30s, isn't she? (I was somewhat wrong about the "coming into your own" metaphor, btw, unless you take it literally -- figuring out who you are, with all of the false starts, dead ends, dead air, etc. that this entails.)

Also, Autobiography was made for a vigorous summer walk. I highly recommend it, esp. if you've never listened to it before!

Those Walker quotes are silly. In particular, I know Walker co-wrote "Everything Back But You" on Lavigne's album and I don't see at all how that is substantively different than the music he is dissing.

He's not dissing them--according to the article, he's their in-house songwriter, so he's saying his own music is "not good." Which is why I keep thinking that I must be misreading that quote somehow. Does he mean not good as in "not good"? Or did he really just hate on his own music?

Nia, I have no idea what the guy is saying at all. But it just rubs me the wrong way. I wonder if the quotes were taken out of context or something.

Point being, songwriters can be crazy misguided what-have-you's sometimes, so best to leave the personality-frontin' to the professionals like Ashlee (but not Mandy, who does the same thing this idiot does). Loved the bit in the Kara article where Ashlee calls the Kara Hotline with "hey, I wrote a pretty good song and now it needs to be better. Help, plz thx --Ash."

This is like the cutest thing ever:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nqpW7VjIpQ

It makes sense that Avril's more girly now than when she was a girl (probably lots of earnest teens become girly in their twenties) (I became girly in my thirties) (at least, Leslie kept telling me I was the girl in the relationship), but still I think Avril's first album - the good stuff on it, that is - crushes "Girlfriend." (Which doesn't mean I don't like "Girlfriend.")

Which brings me to, in regard to Kara DioGuardi:

Where's John Shanks? Where's Clif Magness? Two of the three best songwriters Kara's ever worked with (the third being Ashlee). (Two of the four; I forgot that Scott Storch co-wrote Paris Hilton's "Jealousy.") Also think that the Magness songs on the first Avril alb are as good as the two Matrix hits on there (and a lot better than the other Matrix tracks).

So, does anyone know what Shanks and Magness are up to these days? I'm afraid that Shanks has abandoned teenpop altogether; his country stuff isn't as good or inventive as the teenpop stuff, and neither is his adult pop.

Question to self, in regard to Ashlee and Aly & A.J.: have I ever not been disappointed by a favorite artist's followup album? I can't think of any instance where I haven't been. (This is partly due to various accidental factors, e.g., not buying Dylan's mid '60s albs until the early '70s, not hearing the Stooges until all three albs were released, not buying any Stones albs until 1969, first Beatles alb being Sgt. Pepper's.) I'd be surprised if Insomniatic weren't better than Into The Rush, but even if it's quite a bit better I can see myself being disappointed, given the promise of their best stuff.

Song titles, by the way, remind me of Joy Division.

Avril's best stuff on her first couple albums crushes "Girlfriend" but it does not, in my opinion, crush "The Best Damn Thing" or "Hot" or "Innocence" or "Runaway". I think this is my favorite overall Avril album, even if there's nothing with the angsty, weighty crush of a "My Happy Ending" or "Complicated"

Hmmm. Don't think Miranda Lambert was - or quite is - in Favorite Artist category, but "Kerosene" was in Favorite Song category, and her new album is not a disappointment, even if it has no "Kerosene." (There is something missing, however; something that doesn't infuse the roles she's playing with... er, not sure what; she's got personality galore, but the personality itself seems to be a role... or I want something to shine through the roles, in the way that role players like Jagger or Astaire had a Jaggerness or Astaireness that was simply there... I don't think I know what I'm saying, actually. Maybe the Miranda-ness <i>is</i> there and it excites me but doesn't warm me. Still the best album I've heard this year.)

Frank - My initial instinct after I heard the Miranda album was that it was a good album but that it lacked real standout, great tracks. Then I realized that ALL of the tracks are so good that NONE stand out and particularly great. It's a good problem to have. Agreed that nothing on there is as good as "Kerosene", but there's like 4 or 5 9/10 tracks on there, to me.

i spilled my coffee
it went
all over your clothes
I gotta wear
mine now

i don't think i've heard this song but minus that stray I, it makes a perfect haiku

i spilled my coffee
it went all over your clothes
gotta wear mine now