Rolling Teenpop 2006 Thread

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).

anticipating feels the opposite like it's about one specific person trying to be another specific person who's really a universal archetype.

I really don't want to overdraw my point. Teens can write adult-like pop songs, and I'll bet if someone asked me to write a teen-angst song I could do it convincingly. And also, individual personalities can be playing a role here: there aren't actually that many people involved in writing and producing the teenpop hits, and it might be a peculiarity of Martin and Rami that they weren't writing adolescent family drama songs back in 1999; whereas maybe Shanks and DioGuardi were saying to themselves five years ago, "We've got to find us some teenagers, since we've got all these great ideas for family-drama and identity-angst songs, but Keith Urban and Sheryl Crow and Celine Dion just aren't the right people to sing them."

Eppy, it's both: sounds like something being confessed in part because it starts off whispery and acoustic.

also my fav. k. osbourne song is the one she didn't write, which is papa don't preach, but then that's a great song so i don't know what it says.

madonna could have written it but does that mean kelly could have?

who meant it more when they were singing it?

A quick run-through at Wikipedia gives these dates of birth:

Current producers/songwriters: Ben Moody 1981, Kara DioGuardi 1970, Greg Wells 1968, Max Martin 1971, Dallas Austin 1972, Raine Maida 1970, Chantal Kraviazuk 1974.

(Of course Moody and Maida and Kraviazuk are better known as performers, and Avril can get on this list for co-writing "Breakaway"; there were a number I couldn't find, but I'm guessing late '60s for John Shanks. I have no idea how old Clif Magness is - well, I surmise he's over 20 and under 60 - and he's interesting to me because he can be at least as metal as Moody is. Also, he's real good.)

Current performers: Hilary Duff 1987, Lindsay Lohan 1986, Marion Raven 1984, Marit Larsen 1983, Ashlee Simpson 1984, Britney Spears 1981, Pink 1979, Kelly Clarkson 1982, Avril Lavigne 1984.

So, Ben Moody is basically a contemporary of those he's writing with and producing (well he's five years older than Lindsay), and so is David Hodges I'm sure though I couldn't find his date of birth. But most of the rest are 15 to 25 years older, whereas...

Early and mid '60s producers/songwriters: Gerry Goffin 1939, Carole King 1942, Phil Spector 1940, Jeff Barry 1938, Ellie Greenwich 1940, Cynthia Weil 1940, Barry Mann 1939.

Early and mid '60s performers: Ronnie Spector 1943, Darlene Love 1938, Mary Weiss 1949. Wikipedia didn't have dates of birth for the Dixie Cups. For perspective here, Eric Burdon is 1941. (I'm choosing Burdon because the Animals had hits with Mann and Weil's "We Gotta Get Outta This Place" and Goffin and King's "Don't Bring Me Down." He's their age, but he still represents a new era that cut into these people's business until King reinvented herself as a singer-songwriter.)

So basically, the people who were writing and producing the Ronettes and the Crystals were the same age as the performers themselves; whereas the Shangri-Las were significantly younger. Mary Weiss would have been 15-16 when she sang their hits, while Barry and Greenwich were in their mid 20s by then. In any event, the producers and writers were all in their early and mid twenties when they were creating this music (I think Carole King was 18 when she wrote "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?").

Greg Wells, by the way, is Gerry Goffin and Carole King's son-in-law.

I found a Japanese site that has a 1957 birthdate for Clif Magness. A quick glance at his credits doesn't seem to find any heavy metal, but that might be owing to the ignorance of my glance, not an actual lack of metal.

Proof that I can't do elementary arithmetic: 10 to 20 years older is more like it, not counting Magness (and I don't necessarily trust the date I got on him). Of course from my point of view they're all wet behind the ears.

But the point is that there's a significant age gap now whereas there hadn't been between the Brillers and their performers.

I liked the Destiny's Child hits from 1999, but I never really felt them. The one Destiny's Child song I love is "Survivor," from 2001, and in that one Beyoncé's a passionate, immature bitch, and I feel I'm hearing the person not the persona. I don't mean to imply a general rule that persons are better than personas, or that persons can't be part of personas and vice versa; but in this case the person was warmer and more alive for me than was the persona.

It was "Survivor" that jumped to mind when Je4nn3 wrote upthread about pop sounding younger than it once did. (This makes sense for me if you compare the 1999 of TLC–Destiny's Child–Pink to current teenpop, but not if you compare the 1999 of Backstreet Boys–*NSync–Britney. I'm still not sure how much I agree with Je4nn3's point, but I good one to think about).

The original Pink sound was modeled after the Destiny Child, even if Pink's persona was edgier. On another thread I told Tom that I didn't consider Pink's subsequent shift to confessional rock an attempt to move from teenpop to adult (rock) cred, since she already had adult r&b cred. She had cred with everybody but herself. The shift allowed her to be as messed-up on CD as she was in life.

My favorite song of that 1999 r&b style is Blaque's "808," which is a lot sweeter and warmer than "Bills Bills Bills" and "No Scrubs," though maybe not as interesting.

Not to say that this can't be seen in countless pop stars to some degree, but in Ashlee's case, real public trauma is a kind of shortcut to perceivable confessional honesty. (Strange that so many use those same embarrassments/experiences that have informed many of the songs to essentially dismiss the album, when that's the lens through which it should be engaged.)

Re: the "know confessional when I hear it" idea, it's also interesting that many artists like the Veronicas (and maybe Hilary or Aly and AJ to a lesser extent) have found ways to use the "sound" of confessional rock to create straight-up bubblegum music, no "legit" backing persona necessary -- although if more Veronicas sounded like the one DioGuardi track, they may sound less like bubblegum. Is confessional bubblegum an oxymoron?

Saw yesterday that Radio Disney is now streaming to the internet, meaning you can get yer B5 fix in the middle of nowhere, too.

both feel horribly precocious.

also we should talk about the holdouts, ppl like ashlee's older sis who haven't gone the confessional mode, and if now confessional is the opposite -- something you grow out of intsead of grow into.

I Am Me really is great though. Not only is Ashlee looking a lot like Courtney Love, this album reminds me a lot of Celebrity Skin. Although in a funny way it almost doesn't quite work as well as a pop album - one of the great things about Celebrity Skin is how burnished and perfected so many of the songs sound; I Am Me sounds a lot looser and less fussy.

Janis Ian says NO!

It's also interesting that what you guys are calling confessional rock other people hear as a gloss on metal.

Nothing here on how the top three albums in the country this week (or last week*? I can never keep weeks straight; I always get Billboard a week behind I think) were all for little kiddies? (i.e. High School Musical, Kidz Bop, Curious George soundtrack.) Well, now there is.

* - 'cuz now Ne-Yo passed them all on the right, right?

The Singles Jukebox

Good analysis too, from Eppy, Martin, Edward, and others. (I love the song but I'm still basically inarticulate about what it's doing.)

OK. Let's invent a retrospective subgenre called Confessional Metal that can serve as a precedent for current teenpop. Songs in this subgenre would be...

Well, there's Nazareth's great cover of Joni Mitchell's "This Flight Tonight." And I'd say a lot of Guns N' Roses tracks share a family resemblance to "confessional." (I count GN'R as metal when I feel like it.)

From the sound of it, Clif Magness listened to a lot of Zeppelin and Sabbath; and I think John Shanks listened to Def Leppard. (Has anyone seen the credits on the recent Bon Jovi? Does Shanks play on it, or is he just there as a producer and sometimes songwriter?)

But I've been using the term "confessional" as a fairly loose catchall. In fact, I think that what Ashlee's doing with her personal lyrics is a bit different from what Pink and Lindsay are doing with theirs. But for the reason I gave upthread in capital letters, I'm going to hold off a few days before saying more about that aspect of her work and about her probing of her use of her own celebrity.

But here's a question I posted back on the Ashlee Emo or Oh No thread that no one responded to:

What would you people (if you've seen it) say about the album photos? She entitles the record I Am Me and then gives us a whole bunch of very different looks: the Nico Ashlee, the Marlene Ashlee, the Debutante Ashlee, the Forlorn Runner-Up Prom Queen Ashlee, the Burlesque Ashlee, and - I don't know, the one in the brown two-piece, and her hair a dishmop - Frazzled Riverboat Harlot Ashlee. Pieces of her. Or pieces of her playing dressup.

Also, the "I feel safe with you" part comes in the break, which has a sound - a slow and serious climbing up the notes - very different from the rest of the song. It's brief, but suggests something at stake (sex being about acceptance, self-acceptance), then the song goes back to the exuberant lala fuckaraound.

And then on I Am Me she's trying on a bunch of musical roles.

But anyway, that's not what we're here to talk about, really, because "Don't Save Me" is awesome and I'd put it all on Marit's shoulders. The way she sings it, phrases it - I'm willing to contemplate the possibility that "Don't turn the truth around/It reads the same way upside down" isn't the greatest lyric ever, but the way she sort of... there's not a word for it, but if there was it'd be in between snarl and smirk and snigger and sneer - the way she does that anyway, her voice gets redoubled for the punchline - fuckin' awesome. "House! Of! Cards!" And the way she lets "Don't you dare" out of her mouth, the last little "r" sound, I swear that when I sing along to that it makes the taste buds on the tongue ripple apart like velcro hooks gently unlacing themselves... it's rather bloody remarkable, really.

So, the words might belong to the category "Young Woman's Relationships Singer-Songwriter Pop" - I'll call it Tashpop for short, though I've actually so far paid no attention to the Tashbed's lyrics - but the sound isn't Tashpop at all. Anyway, I have no idea if her sound is new or if people in the know would be able to say, "Oh, her arranger is Blibbidy Blibsen, and this is what he always does." Or, "Yeah, that's the gatticky-glip-glip genre that's so popular in Denmark and Iceland these days." The Jukebox crew noticed all sorts of ABBA touches in "Don't Save Me" that passed me by (I've actually only heard a smattering of ABBA's biggest songs). To my ears, her musical elements aren't new, but she's fashioned them into something unique. So she's neither teenpop nor Tashpop, and on two songs at least she's found a way to sidestep a problem (a problem for me, anyway, if not for the performers) that Natasha and Alanis and KT Tunstall and Dido etc. have, which is that they do the "bright young woman with something to say" thing by flaunting a pseudosmart hard edge and vocal mastery and control, all of which tends to subdue the music. (Doesn't subdue it altogether, by a long shot, and I realize that these people sing this way because they like the way it sounds. But...)

Autobiography has variety too, in fact the song on it that I'm going to talk about later is a tour de force, drastically different styles of melody in the verse and chorus, Ashlee using two or three different types of vocal attack but holding the song so well together with her timbre that you hear it as a unity (I didn't notice its variety until I sat down and analyzed the thing). I'd say the difference on I Am Me - not on all the tracks, just a few of them - is that she's shifting timbre. I'll have to give this more thought. It isn't the variety per se but that she makes a few things feel like dressup: The hot disco-slut break in "Burnin' Up" is what I'm thinking of most, but also the sugar-pop chorus of "L.O.V.E." "Eyes Wide Open" feels like a mood piece - albeit hard rock. Being dark rather than a hoot, it doesn't have the feel of dressup, but it's still a change, her slow singing.

I agree that Missundaztood has a lot of variety, but once again the mood isn't dressup. Not that I'd call the overall mood of I Am Me dressup, either, but it has that element. I think. Autobiography probably has as much melodic variety - Shanks & DioGuardi are versatile - but the guitar sound and vocal timbre are more consistent.

(I've only heard a couple of tracks from Celebrity Skin. The styles on America's Sweetheart are all over the place.)

On the other hand, maybe it is. It's damn good. I hadn't even noticed it, as I was so amused, bemused, and fascinated by the sound.

No, never heard it.