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

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xp: I mean, would you say "Jump" by Kris Kross wasn't bubblegum music? Or "Pass the Dutchie" or "ABC"? (But yeah, it's not like that stuff, or "Chicken Noodle Soup," figures that much on the teenpop thread anyway.)

― xhuxk, Monday, 14 May 2007 23:21 (nineteen years ago)

xxp to xhuxk
it isn't! Those songs are all very similar. i think there's probably connections between those songs and ones that aren't considered 'hip-hop' that you could discuss like, i don't know, 'hollaback girl' or something. But still you're talking about a much larger spectrum of music than that - isn't this 'genre' just a catchall for a wide range of genre & emotional & stylistic & perspective & concerns etc. that happen to appeal to younger people? Its the equivalent of having a genre called 'adultpop' that talks about rap, R&B, country and rock

― deej, Monday, 14 May 2007 23:22 (nineteen years ago)

Well actually deej don't the terms "MOR" or "AOR" cover a similarly wide and eclectic area of music?

― Tim F, Monday, 14 May 2007 23:26 (nineteen years ago)

No, Deej is right, we should really stop talking about Stockhausen and Merzbow on the teenpop thread, its totally creepy. That one ten-year-old Dave supposedly knows who listens to nothing but noize and avant-classical is probably made up anyway.

― Eppy, Monday, 14 May 2007 23:34 (nineteen years ago)

what unites this 'genre' in the first place

This is a major part of why it's so interesting in the first place. Important to note that "teenpop" was a genre before it was an ILM thread, so it's not like the posters created it from thin air; one point of the thread is to try to figure out what makes something "teenpop" in the first place (sometimes it's an aesthetic, sometimes it's an audience, sometimes it's...harder to say). If it is about the audience, it's not creepy unless we were, like, creepy about it. I'm really interested in how children and young teens actually listen to, use, purchase the music they do -- largely because no one else is paying attention to it. But I'm also interested in more ambiguous audiences of artists like Ashlee and Lindsay and P!nk, who don't really have much of a clear-cut shared audience...and if they did, it wouldn't be all (or maybe even primarily) kids.

Doesn't it make more sense to talk about 'teenpop' that sounds like rock in the context of rock, and teenpop that sounds like r&b in the context of r&b?

Short answer is no. Long answer is no, but...there are lots of reasons to talk about contexts, to classify this as this etc. etc. etc., and one thing the teenpop thread exists for is to catch a lot of music that falls through the cracks -- the stuff "aimed at kids" that isn't really aimed at kids, hence there's not a huge audience for it, or stuff that is presumed to be aimed at kids but is potentially deeper and more meaningful than more widely held to be "sophisticated" or "mature" genres. Ashlee vs. mainstream rock, Ashlee vs. indie rock, Skye Sweetnam or Hilary vs. Good Charlotte or the Killers, Fefe Dobson vs. the rest of the world. Not to say one wins and one loses, but to say, nobody ever talks (intelligently) about this stuff, and it's where some of the most interesting conversations could be happening.

― dabug, Monday, 14 May 2007 23:38 (nineteen years ago)

xp Tim - they do, i suppose; not that i'm interested in starting anything like this, but i haven't seen many interesting critical discussions revolving around this concept, though, and probably for the same reason that teenpop as a central context for discussion seems kind of uninteresting to me.

― deej, Monday, 14 May 2007 23:38 (nineteen years ago)

There's also the more practical issue that any non-rolling teenpop thread discussion of this stuff always goes back to "you can't really like this stuff as much as you say you do!" or some similar argument - see this thread! The actual teenpop thread is almost entirely free of this.

x-post Deej Tom wrote a great review once about Dexys Midnight Runners' "Come On Eileen". If I recall he was discussing how the usual critical impulse of music writers is to try to rescue DMR from all the drunk office workers dancing on tables to "Come On Eileen" at Christmas parties, and Tom was saying "no, their relationship with this music is interesting and worth thinking about as well."

I'm not volunteering to write about MOR though because I don't tend to like James Blunt or "Bad Day" or etc. etc. but I'm not a priori opposed to the idea that interesting writing on this topic is possible!

― Tim F, Monday, 14 May 2007 23:44 (nineteen years ago)

i'm not dismissing discussion of it out of hand though, just saying why as a long-running thread i have minimal interest in it as a platform for discussion

― deej, Monday, 14 May 2007 23:50 (nineteen years ago)

deej, ignoring the central context (since we can call it arbitrary for the sake of discussion), does something about the thread fundamentally bother you, or do you just not understand all the fuss or what? (I'm guessing it bothers you, since you're singling it out when there are probably thousands of threads I could care less about -- no general swipe at ILM, I just don't pay attention to or post on many of the threads.)

What does it matter how the music is grouped if the conversation's a good one about artists the people in the conversation want to talk about, and it's a conversation worth having? Or, why isn't it a conversation worth having, esp. to someone not engaging in it? (These aren't rhetorical questions.)

― dabug, Monday, 14 May 2007 23:52 (nineteen years ago)

i don't find it to be a conversation worth having and i was trying to ascertain why, and my conclusion was because of how the music was grouped it didn't lead me to be open minded about it; a large portion of the music discussed i dislike because it isn't what i enjoy, so any discussion i would have in that context would be coming from that place, even if i was discussing music i did like (I like some Fergie songs for example) in the context of 'teenpop' as a whole.

i wouldn't say i'm 'bothered' by the thread but i do see a lot of intellectual energy being expended in an area in which i like some tracks yet which is organized so as to minimize my interest.

― deej, Monday, 14 May 2007 23:55 (nineteen years ago)

Deej I think it's pretty clear that in a lot of ways Hillary Duff and Avril Lavigne are more similar to each other than Hillary Duff is to "adult" synth pop or Avril to "adult" rock - and it's not just the audience.

That's a false dichotomy, Duff's latest album is synth pop-ish but I don't think anyone would categorize her so unless she did several more albums like it, and her first hit was a carbon copy of "Complicated."

Important to note that "teenpop" was a genre before it was an ILM thread, so it's not like the posters created it from thin air;

This is only kinda sorta true: Google "teenpop" (as one word) and the first 10 results include both ILM threads, and stuff you wrote about the stuff on Pitchfork and Stylus. In the larger sense, yes "teen pop" (two words) is a genre or at least a market that people are aware of, but I think mostly non-music people think of it in terms of the "teen pop era" of early Britney and boy bands, or maybe going back to 80's mall pop like Tiffany, all really bright synthetic stuff, not a broad continuum of teen-oriented rock and teen-oriented rap like it's being treated here. Maybe no one person here made the decision to use "teenpop" as one word and sort of reinvent its parameters, but it definitely has turned out that way.

― Alex in Baltimore, Monday, 14 May 2007 23:56 (nineteen years ago)

I'll also admit that the whole teenpop-as-one-word thing has always irritated the hell out of me and probably figures heavily into my criticism of these threads.

― Alex in Baltimore, Monday, 14 May 2007 23:58 (nineteen years ago)

Fair enough. I still haven't really figured out why that thread in particular seems to draw such vocal skepticism and "creepy vibe" comments, except for the relationship to the audience. But I really don't think this is it exactly (despite the constant pedophile jokes)...I think it's something harder to define having more to do with what Tim F was talking about above, the "broader context w/r/t how pop and non-pop define themselves (including against eachother)."

I think more people are finding it harder and harder to distinguish btw pop and non-pop the way they conceive(d) of it (at some point, anyway), and there's a lot of latent hostility, or at least confusion, in this sort of incipient anarchy that seems to be hiding just under the surface -- an idea that there's no (one) meaningful way to think about or talk about music socially, institutionally, maybe economically. People read the teenpop thread and they see what amounts to them to be a kind of anarchy (from their structures of respectable rock-crit) and they write it off as irrelevant, or misguided, or reactionary, or (easiest pot shot) creepy. Which is bizarre to me because it's a very welcoming thread, ready to try to meet whoever posts there on his/her own terms. (And, importantly, this doesn't go hand in hand with "conscientious generalism" as Simon Reynolds put it, or "post-modern pop soup" (which is totally perplexing...what does this mean?), or with a "you can like whatever you want to and it's all great yaaay" vibe.)

― dabug, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 00:07 (nineteen years ago)

(that was an xpost to deej)

― dabug, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 00:07 (nineteen years ago)

Well if you're going to literally split hairs about it. "Teen pop" has been widely in use since at LEAST BSB/Britney, or further back to Hanson/Spice, and "teenybopper" has been around forever (in terms of pop music). The one-word thing maybe signals that "teenpop" as definable genre (c. 2000) has sort of come and gone, and now we're doing something of a salvaging act, trying to save the Hopes and Fefes and Skyes from oblivion, since no one else will pay attention to them.

This is a part of what the thread is doing. It's also asking harder questions of the audience that's listening to it and, maybe more commonly, of the audience that isn't listening to it. It's also figuring out what the artists' terms are; usually the artists aren't sure themselves (and plenty of them essentially disown whatever part of their body of work could be classified as "teenpop" on the teenpop thread -- but joke's on them because we'll still talk about them there anyway).

This relates to about a million different assumptions, issues, problems in rock-crit writ large, and it's convenient to have these issues resurface over the course of a long ongoing conversation, instead of playing leap-frog across a million different threads, esp. when it's so hard to find those threads around here in the first place. (And not because they don't exist, but because they're hard to find. Xhuxk can't keep up with the teenpop thread, but I can't keep up with anything other than the teenpop thread.)

― dabug, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 00:14 (nineteen years ago)

"That's a false dichotomy, Duff's latest album is synth pop-ish but I don't think anyone would categorize her so unless she did several more albums like it, and her first hit was a carbon copy of "Complicated." "

Um, my point Alex was that it is a false dichotomy - the artists on the teenpop thread mostly sound a lot like eachother, regardless of the specific instruments/production styles used at any particular point.

― Tim F, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 00:17 (nineteen years ago)

I'm pretty surprised that people can't see this as a fairly obvious sub-genre or style of music! It seems as self-evident to me as "britpop", say.

― Tim F, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 00:18 (nineteen years ago)

(Ignore the first part of the first parag, you touched on this in yr post.) xpost to AiB

― dabug, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 00:18 (nineteen years ago)

I know that was your point, I'm just saying it was a poor example.

― Alex in Baltimore, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 00:20 (nineteen years ago)

I'll also admit that the whole teenpop-as-one-word thing has always irritated the hell out of me and probably figures heavily into my criticism of these threads

to be perfectly honest i'm not keen on the moniker either, probably because i care less than the others on the thread about how actual teenagers consume the music (this partly because the various sales stats which periodically get quoted show that mostly, they don't). but i'm not keen on terms like "crunk'n'b" or "blog house" or "freak-folk" or any number of silly genre names which float around but i use them b/c it's what gets used and my linguistic quibbles don't really matter compared to enabling people to understand what i'm talking about.

I'm just stating that the idea that teenpop championing might involve some sort of reactionary relationship with other musics has crossed my mind more than once.

this could be aimed at me? i'm the first to admit i have a totally reactionary relationship to ONE genre, indie rock (caveat for the gossip, yeah yeah yeahs, css, any number of indie rock bands i actually like); but given that the teenpop thread is my third most followed after the r&b and minimal house ones, it's not an accusation which really holds water. and there's no one else on the teenpop thread it could possibly apply to!

re: other types of music being discussed - as far as i can tell, given that frank sets the tone, it's often his playground to discuss anything he likes. you say it's creepy* if we talk about lil' mama - what about when we talk about USDA and young jeezy?

*i did a vague headcount a while back and fyi the teenpop thread probably has the most balanced gender ratio on ilm, plus some of the dudes on there are gay, so it's probably the only thread on ilm where straight men are in the minority.

― lex pretend, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 00:22 (nineteen years ago)

i think the lil mama song rules fwiw

― deej, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 00:23 (nineteen years ago)

well hopefully there's a point we can all agree on

― lex pretend, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 00:26 (nineteen years ago)

"I'm pretty surprised that people can't see this as a fairly obvious sub-genre or style of music!"

might have just called it the rolling radio disney thread. i definitely consider radio disney to be a sub-genre! it's the only place you can even hear half that stuff.

― scott seward, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 00:30 (nineteen years ago)

that would confuse the brits though!

also HANG ON, TIM, YOU LIKE PANDA BEAR????

:(

― lex pretend, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 00:30 (nineteen years ago)

Well, there's a subthread of the mainthread of subgenre (er...) called "Rolling Radio Disney," updated whenever I feel like it. If that helps.

― dabug, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 00:31 (nineteen years ago)

i guess if you guys find the teenpop genre useful as a jumpoff point for discussion, go for it. But seriously dude

I think more people are finding it harder and harder to distinguish btw pop and non-pop the way they conceive(d) of it (at some point, anyway), and there's a lot of latent hostility, or at least confusion, in this sort of incipient anarchy that seems to be hiding just under the surface -- an idea that there's no (one) meaningful way to think about or talk about music socially, institutionally, maybe economically. People read the teenpop thread and they see what amounts to them to be a kind of anarchy (from their structures of respectable rock-crit) and they write it off as irrelevant, or misguided, or reactionary, or (easiest pot shot) creepy

this is not it at all. i do not find this 'revolutionary' thinking; i have no problem with people upending the canon, or whatever. i've been through the thinking on anti-rockism and popism and all that, and now would like to look at music i like and discuss music i like in ways that i find interesting.

I don't fear anarchy; i think the reason a lot of people object to the Lex's tone in many threads is because he seems to see himself as consistently stepping across THE LINE of what is acceptable, but it isn't him crossing 'the line' that bothers people; its the idea that he sees this transgression AS a transgression any more, in 2007.

― deej, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 00:35 (nineteen years ago)

x-posts - It's a great album Lex! Ned is right in that it's a lot like The Avalanches.

And, um, actually deej is on the money here.

― Tim F, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 00:38 (nineteen years ago)

deej i don't see anything i post as crossing any line or transgressing anything - this is entirely what people who read it project on to it!

i didn't like the avalanches either...oh well.

― lex pretend, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 00:40 (nineteen years ago)

i don't know your intentions, i'm just explaining how i see people perceive your posts

― deej, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 00:40 (nineteen years ago)

also, lex surely you like the avalanches 'ray of zdarlight' thing right?

― deej, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 00:41 (nineteen years ago)

if it had come out in '03 it would have been ilx canon material, i think

― deej, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 00:41 (nineteen years ago)

the avalanches are ilx canon though aren't they? haven't heard 'ray of zdarlight', i like 'frontier sychiatrist' but their album irritated me

― lex pretend, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 00:43 (nineteen years ago)

same here. and i'll listen to anything.

― scott seward, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 00:44 (nineteen years ago)

if you google ray of zdarlight an mp3 is the first result

― deej, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 00:46 (nineteen years ago)

Ned is right in that it's a lot like The Avalanches.

:-) (I mean, I stand by my 'it's middling' judgment, but even so!)

― Ned Raggett, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 00:47 (nineteen years ago)

Yeah, I'm gonna go ahead and strike that parag quoted from the record, but hey why not try it and see if it flies (uh, it doesn't...come to think of it, this is the second time in a week I've failed to make a concept involving "anarchy" stick, maybe I've got anarchy issues).

(I don't really know why people get so bothered about the Lex in the first place, his Ciara interview was great.)

― dabug, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 00:48 (nineteen years ago)

(Although come to think of it again, my point wasn't that we're anarchists, or upending a canon, but that we're perceived to be trying to do this for some reason. But usually Frank is trying to re-establish the regular ol' canon (Stones, Dylan, punk) on his own terms, using teenpop as a way to get people to think about it differently.)

― dabug, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 00:50 (nineteen years ago)

No image bomb intended, just a quick promo spot for the teenpop thread:

http://a856.ac-images.myspacecdn.com/images01/6/l_0d40b3d7bceccb91624916624164b3d7.jpg

― dabug, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 00:55 (nineteen years ago)

x-post: Yes, everyone's regular and persistent misinterpretation of Frank on this score is pretty key i reckon.

― Tim F, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 00:56 (nineteen years ago)

[i]this could be aimed at me?[/i[

No, not specifically, though I will admit to having Kogan's of Montreal review on paper thin walls in mind (which, for some reason, doesn't seem to be in their archive).

― Tim Ellison, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 00:56 (nineteen years ago)

And Frank would probably say, "But I gave it a good review." But it's the lack of enthusiasm for what seems to me to be great accomplishments, again, in the same postmodern pop-rock stew that teenpop is involved with that puzzles me.

― Tim Ellison, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 01:08 (nineteen years ago)

You're puzzled that Frank didn't like an album as much as you did?

― Tim F, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 01:23 (nineteen years ago)

A track. It's not just "didn't like the track as much as I did" - I've found Frank to be puzzling for twenty years!

― Tim Ellison, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 01:46 (nineteen years ago)

Well, I missed waayyyyy too much of this thread, but regarding the 'teenpop' label, I will say that most (and by 'most,' I'm pretty sure I mean 'all' (except myself)) teenagers don't listen to the music discussed on teenpop. Is that the point? I mean, I'm pretty sure I understand what's considered 'teenpop,' but is it considered that because people think teenagers listen to it, or is it because it's marketed to teens?

Maybe I'm just surrounded by weird teenagers, but they all seem to fit into one of several categories: metal-heads, 'mature' acoustic pop fans (e.g. Guster, O.A.R.), hip hop addicts and other (e.g. Indian music, no music). I'm not aware of a single Aly & AJ fan at my school (maybe a 13-year-old junior high kid?)

― Tape Store, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 04:29 (nineteen years ago)

Definitely a predominate ethos on the Teenpop forum is: If you can make an argument for inclusion, it's worth discussing (which is probably in relationship to Chuck's Stairway to Heaven, if I were guessing the source). And part of it is definitely about figuring out how teenagers consume music - and part of that is trying to figure out how we consume music now, and consumed music when we were teenagers.

Personally, though, I'd like to think that discussing such a loosely-defined genre, that enjoys so little current mainstream interest, gives a lot of space for interesting discussion. You're held back by less assumptions, etc.

Not to mention the relationship between teenagers and dilettantes, and the question of whether the teenpop thread actually has anything to do with honest-to-god teenagers.

― Mordechai Shinefield, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 08:10 (nineteen years ago)

But usually Frank is trying to re-establish the regular ol' canon (Stones, Dylan, punk) on his own terms, using teenpop as a way to get people to think about it differently.

Are you sure?

The problem here is that a) the "teenpop" (ugh!) thread is way more interesting than the "teenpop" music, unlike the hoary canon, which contains a lot of great music (even though I may be tired of hearing it -- and hearing about it -- any more after decades and decades of it); b) the dominance of Disney radio/TV synergy is distasteful as hell to me -- it's not far removed from payola, except it's perfectly legal for Disney's right hand to pass money to its left hand.

While this may be one way to "think about it differently", I only see it as tarnishing the canon and canonization to use teenpop product (emaciated music, bland similacrum of canonical memes) as the vehicle. The canon is the canon because it transcended its status as product; teenpop hasn't done this for me.

There's a difference between and 1) music purchased by teens; 2) old-school teenpop (i.e. Frankie Lyman, "ABC", "Candy Girl", Musical Youth, etc.; and 3) music (aggressively) marketed to teens/tweens. Capitalism has brought us the third in recent years, and as long as it works for Disney and its partners and emulators, we're stuck with it.

― mark 0, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 08:20 (nineteen years ago)

...i.e. while old-school teenpop was part of a whole, and consumed by a wider demo than just teens/tweens, now we have, in a sense, a full-blown teenpop industry.

― mark 0, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 08:24 (nineteen years ago)

I don't get that the industry is being analyzed so much as the content that the industry is producing.

― Mordechai Shinefield, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 08:26 (nineteen years ago)

...which smacks more of greed/desperation than art.

xpost to myself

― mark 0, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 08:28 (nineteen years ago)

Or not.

― mark 0, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 08:30 (nineteen years ago)

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