Rolling Teenpop 2006 Thread

Just finished listening to the HM soundtrack. Of the songs I never heard the full versions of, thumbs up to "This Is the Life" and "Just Like You", and thumbs down to "The Other Side of Me". The more dance-y HM tries to get, the worse the song ends up being. Still don't really know why "This Is the Life" never really picked up any RD play as it sounds at least as good as, say, "If We Were a Movie" to me. Extra tracks + duet add nothing to the album. I really wish they had included at least one new HM track on this.

PS) The Chow Nasty "Ungawa" guy reminds me as much of James Chance as Jon Spencer; did I ever say that before? Which is not say not as good as James but not as irritating as Jon. If the whole song was as good as chorus chant, it would maybe have shot at my top ten, but as of this moment the James/Jon parts just make me wince way too much.

"Eleven Seven Music was created to help artists release albums that would later potentially be picked up by Warner Music Group subsidiaries."

Whatever that means. I guess "being developed in associaton" with WB doesn't necessarily mean being distributed by whoever distributes WB. Or something.

Dirtie Blonde are more interesting, and more fun, than I thought. Who they sometimes remind me of Artificial Joy Club, this Canuck band that I liked in the early '90s (they're in the second version of Stairway to Hell) and nobody else noticed, though I doubt Dirtie Blonde are that good. But Amie Moriello's sandpaper vibrato seems to take stop-offs not only at Alanis and Sheryl and Morningwood (and the song where she does that somehow turns out to gain something in this context by the way), but also Shakira ("Officially in Love" is kind of blatant in that regard) and Taylor Dayne and PJ Harvey. Hmmm.

Also I don't *hate* the Red Jumpsuit Apparatus song on *Employee of the Month.* It's just your usual dime a dozen emo twerpola, but it does at least appear to be a comprehensible (and comprehensibly hooky, in its lame way) song, where the singer is chiding some other guy for being physically abusive to a woman, or something like that.
Also, *Employee* version of Exile's "Kiss You All Over", by somebody named Santino, is in another language. Wonder if it was a Euro hit.

Also "Ungawa" seems more fun despite itself every time I hear it.

Tom Ewing said that the Mad Cobra "Cobrastyle" is his song of the year or decade or something.

Link is here

I have some more thoughts on Emma Roberts and acting/singing but they will have to wait until I get home from work.

Watching some behind-the-scenes footage of "Unfabulous" from an Emma Roberts fansite, there were several portions I thought were relevant:

1) Asked if she prefers music or acting, she replies: "I like acting better than singing, just because I've been doing it longer, and it's really what I wanted to do. The singing thing just happened from the show and it wasn't really anything I ever wanted to do"

2) Asked what job she would have if she couldn't be an actress, she replies...something, I can't remember, but the important thing is that her answer wasn't "singer"

3) They made it a point to mention, several times, that Malese Jow (Emma's co-star on the show) is also a really good singer and that her and Emma like to sing around the set.

Could Nick be really trying to get into this teen pop thing that Diz dominates? They'd be idiots not to, given all the success Disney has had with it. As of right now, the only Nick product that has any recorded output is Emma Roberts and Drake Bell, as far as I know, and neither is anything good (some of Emma's songs, especially "Dummy", are OK). Maybe if they stopped forcing people who don't like to sing to record songs for them (see Emma R.) and got people who were actually good singers, or at least enjoyed singing, it would work better. Disney has been ultra successful at it by getting people who are great singers but mediocre actors (e.g. Miley) or people who even if they aren't great singers are lively and have personality as singers (e.g. Ashley Tisdale). Emma just sounds lifeless.

Lalena just asked me why I was listening to Edie Brickell (who she likes) while Dirtie Blonde's most country/Sheryl Crow song ("Change The Water") was playing. She's probably right. I never listened to Edie beyond the hit about throwing her into deep water or whatever it was. Mostly with Dirtie Blonde I just hear potential, I guess. But I'll give it a little more time and see if any songs kick in.)

Finally got around to playing Justin's album this week. Has anybody pointed out that his singing sounds really, really consticted this time out? Maybe it did last time too, and I didn't notice, but this album is nowhere near as great as his first one. Maybe that's what comes from trying to imitate Prince instead of Michael Jackson? I dunno. I guess "Summer Love" is pretty good. Am I alone in this? (I haven't really been paying attention to the discussion about that album, at all, so it's not really clear to me what people think about it. Ditto the Paris Hilton album, which sounds better to me, especially "Stars Are Blind" and "Jealousy," though it's weird I like her doing slow songs better than doing dance songs. Though I don't mind the Rod Stewart cover or the Bee Gees imitation. Brooke Hogan's CD sounds to me like the Paris Hilton's only less good, and her version of "Low Rider," which is about low riding jeans, reminds me of L'Trimm's version only nowhere near as good. At least so far.)

Uh, that was pretty incoherent of me, wasn't it? I meant am I alone in thinking the first Justin album was lively and effevescent and fun and funky pretty much from beginnning to end, and the new one sounds totally reigned-in, Timbaland or no Timbaland? Are people interpreting this as a "maturity" move, or what? Am I just confused?

But yes, the singing is perhaps even more constricted. But I'm not really into Justin for his pipes per se.

Brooke Hogan's album, on the other hand, is growing on me a little.

I think that this album is mostly too dark/intense to recreate that situation, but it's too soon to tell really - I could imagine people singing along to "Damn Girl" perhaps. I don't think "mature" quite captures this album. It's more serious and intense and caught up in perfecting signifiers from other genres (hip hop, funk, Prince), and certainly pop albums have gone wrong before by focusing on these things rather than on simply great songs, but there's no reason why they can't also go right by doing this as well. In fact this is precisely what Justified did relative to Justin's N'Sync days, so it makes perfect sense that Justin would seek to go further down that path.

I agree that Justin is perhaps drawing as much or more from 90s Prince than 80s Prince, but for me this is actually a point in its favour (although I'd say it's more "Get Off"/"Sexy MF" Prince than, say, The Rainbow Children) - the dubiousness of this proposition relative to the safer option of emulating 80s Prince/MJ makes the album's success even more interesting. Though I recognise my argument rests on the premise that the album is a success.

And "Sexy MF" would be on my short list of least sexy songs of all time.

Which isn't to say that I might not wind up liking Future Love/Sex Sounds a lot, someday -- right, like maybe when a few tracks hit me as singles. (Confession: I originally liked Nick Carter's solo album more than Justified!!) Though I gotta say, most of what Tim's saying really does not make me optimistic.

Different kind of intensity, I'd argue: closer to how I'd use the word when talking about rap or dancehall, and it's not necessarily adverse to chart success either - I'd call "Get Busy" "intense" (nothing on FutureSex/LoveSounds is as good as "Get Busy" but "Get Busy" is one of the best songs ever - I must say though that I was surprised that it was as big as it was, I'd previously thought it was too relentless to be so successful).

Of course FutureSex/LoveSouinds will necessarily be a disappointment if you specifically want Justin to be "lively and effevescent and fun", this is pretty clear from even a superficial sampling of both records.

Whether that makes it a failure as a pop album is a different question of course, as a lot of pop music becomes better pop to the exact extent that it seeks to run away from those attributes - e.g. Kelly Clarkson is a better pop star when she's singing "Since You've Been Gone" or "Behind These Velvet Eyes" or even "Because Of You" than when she's singing "Walk Away" (not a bad song, mind). Which is not to say that these songs don't often end up also being lively and effervescent and fun in a different kind of way, but whatever that way is it's mediated through the music's statement that it is or does not want to be any of those things.

Quite a few people decried "Like I Love You" and "Cry Me A River" as being try-hard, pretentious, enslaved to standards of musicality or style which took them away from being good pop songs. And, as much as I disagreed with those people, I felt there was a kernel of truth there: esp. with "Like I Love You", at first I found all of the carefully underscored and highlighted stylistic decisions (the deliberately naturalist drums etc.) to be almost obnoxious in their desire to be noticed and valued. A couple of months of radio play totally normalised the song though and now it sounds basically like good pop (it helps that several people subsequently attempted to make their own equivalents of this song). And, more than that, it's not good pop in spite of all the affectations, but because of them.

PS. I would at least agree that "Sexy MF" isn't as sexy as it holds itself out to be. The same applies to all the songs with "Sex/Sexy" in their titles on Justin's album. Somehow though the allusion to/desire for/aspiration to/simulcrum of "sexiness" is totally endearing in both cases, and perhaps more loveable than actual sexiness would be (I tend to think it's a core component of Justin's success that he in fact falls so short of his intentions on so many levels).

For me a better pop album comparison point might be Madonna's Erotica (perhaps not-coincidentally my favourite Madonna album, followed by her debut).

actually, it's her duh-dunt-duh-duh (you know, the sound you hear before people yell "charge!"), not her la-la-la-la. and the song ends with a christopher walken imitator requesting more cowbell!

yeah that's a perfectly sensible position even if I disagree with it.. (...except... Ray of Light? JUSTIN's Ray of Light? Really?)

i don't really think of it as dark and would agree that 'cry me a river' is darker than anything here, though i know what tim means by intense - there's something in the loving attention to texture throughout which is very overwhelming, the way each sliver of sound seems completely perfect. i disagree that it forfeits energy and fun, too, but it's a different kind of fun: slicker, more poised, less bouncy and innocent. i actually think 'rock your body' is the worst justin single to date though i do like it, but to my ears 'lovestoned', 'sexyback' and 'chop me up' are more than its equal in terms of dancefloor fun.

i could see an argument in saying the justified singles are superior to the fs/ls ones, though bear in mind we've only had two of the latter (and i think 'my love' is the best yet, but then i would). and i'm not usually one to rate consistent albums over albums with great singles - but fs/ls is just such a coherent statement that it makes justified seem even more singles-and-filler than it did at the time.

bearing in mind that i also think erotica is, like, madonna's PINNACLE (and by extension pop music in general's pinnacle), we may have to put this down to never-the-twain-shall-meet differing tastes.

Do you really not like "Rock Your Body" so much?

both erotica and fs/ls are cumulatively dark rather than song-by-song dark (though erotica much much more so, in that 'in this life' and 'bad girl' are much more staring-into-the-void than anything justin tries to do, and erotica explicitly deals with death as well as sex - justin's crack song, as good as it is, is not quite so bleak). but yeah, the darker moments somehow infect the less overt songs and make them dark by proxy.

the most successful dark moment on fs/ls is the '...comes around' coda! i'm not so keen on 'what goes around' because i feel it does absolutely nothing to build on the template already perfected by 'cry me a river' and 'nowhere', but the coda just sounds so...vitriolic and vengeful, and totally makes the song.

Tim's comparison's good, but I heart Erotica and _hate_ FS/LS.