Rolling Teenpop 2006 Thread

"They opened a string of high-profile dates for Ryan Cabrera."

Shouldn't it be "They had a string of high-profile dates WITH Ryan Cabrera"?

BTW for those who might be interested: chart is here, complete with soundclips (5 seconds on mouseover, 30 seconds when clicking og loudspeaker symbol).

Fr Kog - I will give ver Raven a spin a little later on.

Best Marion Raven songs: "Crawl" and "End Of Me".

The Marie Sernholt single is tidy too.

She's got a very different look on the cover of Elle, which I can't describe, not because it's indescribable but because I was never taught how to analyze fashion. Her eyes are made up to look wide-eyed but not quite innocent. Her clothes if I recall correctly are a half-glitz, made to look snazzy but expendable (or at least removable). Not blatant like glam or freestyle, but akin to their spirit. There's a definite restlessness to her various looks.

Cosmo: You and Jessica have such distinct styles. How would you describe yours?

Ashlee: It's a little more feminine now but still has an edge. I love vintage, and I like things to be a little off. I wear things Ashlee-style. I don't care if I'm on the worst dressed [list] because it means I tried something.

xpost

Anthony, what is "ovalour"?

Je4nn3, I wish you would elaborate on this. (I have an idea of why one might think it's younger, though "younger" might not be the right word. But I'd like to hear your ideas.)

Amy Lee, Annette van Giersbergen and Cristina Scabbia will hit those melodramatic high notes--and that girl from Leaves Eyes who duets brilliantly on the new Cradle of Filth song--but systematic emoting negates the required goth, er, deadpan aesthetic, doncha think?

from rolling world music thread:

>Lucas Prata *Let's Get It On* on my probably favorite dance label Ultra is excellent outer borough guido-disco (see also: Razor & Guido a few years ago) from I think Queens since that's what it says on his t-shirt in some photos on the inner sleeve unlike the front cover where he's wearing a superhero costume, plus I bet he weighs 200 pounds easy, probably more. Also he covers "The Ma Ya Hi Song" as he calls it by Romanians (I think) O-Zone which I voted for as one of my top ten singles last year. Plus his ballads split the difference between boy band pop & early '80s power ballad rock. Even more interestingly, tracks like "Never Be Alone" sound quite Italo-disco, which makes me wonder what the connection is between Italo-disco from Italy and guido-disco from Queens and Brooklyn Hmmm....
I doubt HE (or his fans) call(s) his music "guido disco," of course. I'm not sure *what* they would call it -- I'm guessing just the annoyingly all-purpose "club music," maybe? If anybody knows, I'm interested. Also he defintely connects to the tradition of "tough-looking New Yawk Italian American guys singing in angelic falsettos," a tradition that harks back at least to Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. (How often did Dion falsetto? Or Frank Sinatra? Assuming Hoboken counts as an outer borough. Um...Vito and the Salutations??)
-- xhuxk (xedd...), March 5th, 2006.

Aaron Carter!

xp: (Also I guess I'm assuming Prata IS Italian American, which i suppose it's possible he might not be. But most of the evidence does seem to lean in that direction, as far as I can tell.)

Watched *High School Muiscal* last night (I was sent a DVD.) "Stick to the Status Quo" is definitely more fun on the DVD than on the CD. Most likeable charcter is the girl who plays piano, partially since she dresses thrift-store wacky-but-snazzy like my daughter Coco (whose fashion sense was I think influenced *very* early on by the title character of the TV show *Blossom*) , though it annoys me when they make said piano girl "let her hair down" librarian-coming-out-of-her-shell-style at the end. Most hilarious and over-the-top character is Sharpay, which is interesting since at first you expect her to be a *Heathers*-type snob. Dullest characters, naturally, are leading man and lady Troy and Gabrielle, just because they're so goody-goody innocuous. (The Gabrielle character's only previous singing experience, we learn, was, of course, in her church choir: bad omen from a culture war perspective at the start, but the rest of the movie is gay enough to make up for it.)

I mean, I look at the goth label from a traditionalist POV, in the sense that, in order to be 'goth', one also needs to be willfully or intrinsically perverse in some way--whether that manifests as lyric content, artifice or just plain weirdness doesn't much matter. Just the impulse alone is goth.

So in that light, Amy Lee saying her stuff is 'dark' is accurate and maybe even self aware. And Kelly C, no matter how much she may mess up her life, will never be gothic--she'll always be a lively suspect enduring a bad streak. It's a big, crucial difference, sort of like how, in an opposing way, Nick Cave could sincerely sing Bar Mitzvah songs for his glow-cheeked daughter and still be gothic.

I can't get a read on Anneke--I love the heck out of The Gathering, but I--perhaps assuming--her difficulty with English that results in the lyrics I've listened to as sort of pouty, or conventionally melancholic--which would put them, sensibility-wise, in the same camp with Lee (but with way more interesting music.)

The fact that Scabbia is *named* Scabbia and/or didn't change it to something else renders her sensibility goth from the git-go. Plus, she has that deadpan, enjoying-the-wrechedness verse approach and overwrought chorus delivery that pins her to traditional gothic.

Point is, I don't think it has so much to do with technique or even chosen delivery style, as much as a sense of something at the core being fundamentally askew and the artist being either in conversation with that aberration, enjoying or getting lost in it.

My point isn't that "Heart of Stone" is better than "It Won't Take Long" (though it is), but that it's different in kind, even if you could summarize the lyrics in the same way: "lovesick man pretends he's indifferent" (which by the way is a songwriting staple, in country even more than in pop). And the difference is that in sound and feel and in its mind as well as its guts, "Heart of Stone" is a young man's song. So it's not just about a man faking his feelings, pretending he's indifferent. It's about Pretence, about Fakery, about False Identity and Who The Fuck Am I? And on from there through "Under My Thumb" and "Back Street Girl" and "Lady Jane" and "High and Dry" and "My Obsession" and "Street Fighting Man" and "Brown Sugar." (And after that he wasn't a young man anymore, and to my ears didn't find a middle adulthood nearly as interesting as his youth. Which doesn't mean there's nothing new of interest. For instance, "It Won't Take Long" has the lines "Time it passes quickly" and "Life is short," implying that what won't take long is life (and maybe it's life that'll be all over by Christmas, and only then will he be over her; or maybe I'm making that up). I'd say I like about half the tracks on A Bigger Bang, which is more than I'd anticipated liking, and there are two or three I like quite a lot.)

So, my point for this teenpop thread? Well once back in the early '60s Andrew Loog Oldham, manager of the Rolling Stones, a rock band that played mostly covers of American soul, rock 'n' roll, and blues songs but which had burgeoning teen and youth appeal in Britain, basically ordered the lead singer and lead guitarist to start writing songs themselves, his reasoning being that, because of who Jagger and Richards were, they'd be able to write songs that the youngsters would care about way more than those youngsters would care about someone else's soul and blues.

Interesting (and extremely well-written) CG review by Christgau back in 2001 starts like this:

Michelle Branch The Spirit Room [Maverick, 2001]
Only in a biz discombobulated by teenpop could an 18-year-old with an acoustic guitar be plausibly promoted as "the anti-Britney." Don't you remember? Writing Your Own Songs means zip, zilch, nada. By now, literally millions of human beings WTOS, and while Branch may be among the top 5000 (and may not), note that her hit, like most of the front-loaded material, was co-composed by her producer.

Christgau's right, of course, that in itself writing your own songs means zip, zilch, nada. But if you're in a different social category from the people who would be writing them otherwise (e.g., you're youth and they're not), and if this difference affects the character of the songs you write - or co-write - then writing your own songs makes a huge difference. Doesn't necessarily make your songs better, but it means they're different songs.

As of right now, I can't think of any major American teenpop performers except Crazy Frog and B5 who don't co-write at least some of their songs. (JoJo only did three on her album, but Ashlee, Lindsay, Kelly, Avril, Aly & AJ, and Jesse all do, as do Click Five, if they count as major, and of course Pink does, if she still counts as teenpop (not sure how much Kelly does, either, but she gets major teen airplay).)

*A piece of celery, perhaps

Lyrics have seldom meant much to me aside from indicators of intent and essense, which is what everything is about for me. I love The Cardigans, I mean, a LOT, but the it was only after listening to their last two, highly dour CDs that I noted how glum the lyrics were. And sometimes even clever.

But all I need of the lyrics of "I Need Some Fine Wine (and you need to be nicer)" is right there. The intent--that I gotta get fucked up not to notice what a prick you are and even then, I'm gonna domme your ass because of my own self-loathing--it's in that sentence, the music, the delivery, the inter-related associations between all of it. Now that's elegant!

(Unsurprisingly, I love Cocteau Twins because the infinity mood is never ruined by language making sense, and RAMMS+EIN because I don't speak German and so all the terror, ruin, sorrow and sex remain intact.)

I'm not sure what 'teenpop' means at this juncture. I never much bought into authenticity, what with a goodly portion of my life spent making or watching other musicians systemacticcally de-authenticize their work via record production. It seems that what teenpop implies--aside from the age stuff which is either irrelevant to me or a disconnect interest-wise--is the idea of an intended artiface--a perfect form of plastic 'real' punks are too blindered by possibly impossible notions of authenticity to get.

Mainly, I enjoy proudly 'artificial' pop with high voices. Older Sparks, Kelly, Amy Lee or Low (when they're not trying to prove their realness by being noisy), don't much matter to me. Except what's branded 'teenpop' lately seems more in sync with what I like. Like, if ELO had a girl singer, and were ProTooled, I'd be way happy.

OMG!

Ian

Of course then there were the Animals, who managed to connect well to the young'uns in a Stones-y way and whose best material (at least early on) was a cover song and three songs composed by Brill-Colgem types (who probably weren't much older than the Animals themselves, and who also provided music for the Monkees that even younger young-uns liked, but who probably weren't all that in touch with the Animals primary audience; that's a guess).

Got the new Gathering album; supposedly a return to "rock," though I don't think I buy that. I'm hearing a lot of Kate Bush and Cocteau Twins in it myself. BETTER than most Kate Bush or Cocteau Twins, probably, and the guitars do pick up now and then, but this is still more new age than metal in my book. Not sure how much I like it yet.

people always forget with pink that she was punk even when she was in r&b like say with "you make me sick" or "split personality" and she didn't write her songs then at all.

http://www.villagevoice.com/music/0111,eddy,23025,22.html

I finally heard "Stupid Girls" last week, by the way. I give it, I dunno, maybe a 6.5 (on the Radio On scale).

launch.yahoo.com streams the "Shadow" video (and Launch has high-quality sound, unlike some of the other video streamers), though they may block people without North American IP addresses from seeing it. (Nowadays they block me from watching the vids on their Brit-Irish site, though they didn't used to.) You have to register on Yahoo, but that's a cinch.

i miss dream.

Sterling, I'm not sure I can guess what the difference would be if Ronnie Spector and Darlene Love and the Weiss sisters (Shangri-Las) had been co-writing the songs. Young Smokey Robinson was writing and producing his own stuff over at Motown (and writing/producing for the Temptations as well); come to think of it, maybe his stuff has more identity angst than the Holland-Dozier-Holland and Barrett-Whitfield material. (That's a comment off the top of my head without my pondering the matter.)

I don't think Spector, Greenwich, Barry, Goffin, King, Pitney (he wrote "He's A Rebel"), Mann, and Weil were that much older than the performers. There was a social difference between the girl groups and the young Brits, in that the Beatles, Stones, Animals, Kinks, and Who were art-school punks (even the ones who weren't art school per se were of that type and milieu, and there were bohemian music scenes to support them). And so there was an implied social defiance in something like the Who's "Substitute" that you're not going to get in Smokey's "Tears of a Clown." In "Substitute," it's not just the narrator and his girl who are putting up a front; everything around them is implicated too, it's all a front, life is a front, the Universe is a fake. Just as Jagger singing "Hurt my eyes open, that's no lie" has him seeing through a lot more than the fact that some girl was two-timing a guy. And the young Brits, being bohos, didn't necessarily want to reconcile with what they were seeing through - or, to be more accurate, they were ambivalent about how much they wanted to reconcile and how much they wanted to push away. Which I suppose any kid is, but the Brit kids dance of push vs. reconcile was a social drama - a new bohemia under construction - while my bet is that if Ronnie et al. over in America had been in as co-writers, the pushing-away vs. reconciliation would have been a strictly personal or familial drama, as it was in the songs written for them, with some class and gender thrown in but in ways that had already been mapped out: good girls in love with bad boys and all, but not the impetus to create a new Strange or a sense that alienation can be an achievement as well as a disaster.

So, hmmm, I'm claiming a significance in the fact that modern-day teenpoppers are in on the songwriting, and there's an obvious difference between teenpop now and teenpop in the non-self-writing days of 1999, but I'm speculating that in the Brill-building days there wouldn't have been much of a difference. Hmmm. And today's teenpop girls are sticking with the personal and family dramas or push vs. reconcile, yet still they do seem part of the legacy of Stones, Dylan, et al. (and Joni and Alanis), and it's no coincidence that the change in lyrics is accompanied by more and louder guitars.

That was a cover song, of course (the Valentinos' version goes "Hurt my nose open"); but given a different meaning with the Stones delivery in the Stones world.

she couldn't have written "not a girl" on the other hand or "one more time." though she did write "dear diary" (though she didn't have to, and it is bad anyway, but she was younger then).