Rolling Teenpop 2006 Thread

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.

I'll tell you, the other songs on here will have to be complete dogs for this album not to make my Pazz & Jop ballot. (Assuming I get to hear the album. Amazon doesn't yet know of it, at least in the U.S. Not that I could afford an import album.)

The album's title is Under the Surface.

anyway, another countertrend indicator could be (tho again, this was earlier than the current wave and also, sorta flopped maybe?) jewel's 0304.

what you heard as dress-up on the ashlee frank i more cynically heard as "trying lots of styles for singles to see what sticks" but then that's what we all do when we're growing up is see what styles stick with others and then that makes us as much as we made the styles to begin with.

the style question is less look and sound and more in song construction i feel, not that i'm going to listen to the whole album right now again and give a close reading, but the sense was just that the sorts of songs drew from lots of places, not that ashlee herself was going lots of places, or even singing about different identitiees so much as just borrowing lots of constructions along the way.

It may well be, or maybe it's "You said you were just kidding/And I say, this is no joke", though that might just be the incredible frigging popping noise she makes when she sings 'joke' - she does that with almost all those last words, and it never ever sounds forced or meta or whatever, just... wow. I'm trying to think of other modern popular singers who could do this, and struggling. Sophie Ellis-Bextor's the nearest one I could come up with, though it's hard to tell since her lyrics are almost always stunningly awful...

Need this album. Dammit.

Another name to throw out there - Hello Saferide, from Sweden. I am currently very much digging their "If I Don't Write This Song, Someone I Love Will Die" - not quite in Marit's league, but still very chirpy Scandipop with guitars and such.

(also presuming the Eurovision thread is the place to be discussing Kate Ryan's "Je T'Adore"?)

It took me a few weeks to adjust to all the New Pornographers records after the first one. Agreed about the words, but when he uses 'em well in the chorus it really kills, like on "Sing Me Spanish Techno" on the new one. Who knows what that's about, but. And on the second album, Bejar's "Ballad of the Comeback Kid" had one of the pop moments of the year for me when he yells "Like a bat out of hell..."

Obviously they're not particularly teenpop, because of the words and all (which arguably makes 'em not even very pop) but they did cover a power-pop song, here, and it's interesting to see how the style fits with the song.

Bizarre, my neanderthal downloadaphobia is starting to make me feel months behind on TEEN-POP, of all things. (Though it's not really phobia; it's just that I have so many CDs piled up I can hold in my hands that I don't get *around* to downloading, and anyway, I don't trust my judgement when I listen to music that way. It's too sterile, too much like going to a listening session where I'm not allowed to hold the record, too fucking transitory, sorry. Music is meant to be lived with, and that's just not how I live. So who knows, maybe I'll try to BUY the Marit Larsen and Aly & AJ albums someday, just like the last Toby Keith album and the Akon album and Ha-Ash and Reggaeton Ninos other stuff I still haven't gotten around to. Or maybe I won't.)

not from country thread:

Speaking of Reggaeton Ninos, I noticed in Billboard this week that there is one other album (*La Pluma Negra* by El Chichiuilte -- sounds Mexican, right?) that is both on the "Top Kid Audio Albums" chart and the "Top Latin Albums" chart, always a good sign. Anybody know anything about it or them? (Also in Billboard: "Love of My Life," a duet with Reina off the Louis Prata guido-disco album I mention above, is at #16 on the "Dance Airplay" chart. Good for him!)

* -- I DID download the Kidz Bop version of "Axel F," however. If it was a single, it'd have an outside shot at my 2006 singles ballot.

is it because it has the word daddy?

I wouldn't be surprised if some of this stuff ends up drifitng towards the hyper-production approach of the second Garbage album.

First-spin favourite apart from DSM is "This Time Tomorrow", which is a quirky, strangely-structured song that keeps shifting dynamics and has a lovely chorus.

Wonderfuly, the wholet hign sounds expensive and glossy. Hurrah.

Let me guess, "Endless Sleep" on the Nagg album is the one you thought was most Quatro-like. Digital copies don't come with credits or lyrics, so I'm guessing.

-- George 'the Animal' Steele (georg...), March 11th, 2006.

Nope -- Well, maybe, but the one I meant was "She's in Love With You," which is an actual Suzi Quatro cover. (Liner Notes to Suzi's Razor & Tie *The Wild One* comp say she took it #41 in the US and #11 in the UK in 1979 -- I'm assuming as the followup to "Stumblin' In.")
-- xhuxk (xedd...), March 11th, 2006.

Didn't realize that. But the one you mention really has zing, too. "Sleep" is a thumping pop boogie, like you'd find on the first two SQ LPs. Maybe. Anyway, it's a good Nagg song and that album shoulda went further than local.
-- George 'the Animal' Steele (georg...), March 11th, 2006.

They've apparently got no qualms (in the great tradition of Girlschool, Joan Jett, and the Sirens) of doing loud shouting glam rock cover versions. Not sure who if anybody did all of these first, but these songs on the Nagg CD do not get Ward and/or Turner writing credits:
Beauty of the Bitch (Craig/Kinsley/Coates/Cashin)
Endless Sleep (Nance/Reynolds)
She's in Love With You (Chin/Chapman)
So What If I Am? (Murray/Callander)
We're Really Gonna Raise the Roof (Holder/Lea -- so Slade, obviously)
Little Boy Sad (Walker)
All I Need (Herrewig/Paliselli/Cooper/Cox)

And it is now back in my CD changer (replacing Juvenille, who I'll get around to eventually.)

-- xhuxk (xedd...), March 11th, 2006.

(And interestingly, one of my favorite Joan Jett songs has always been the one CALLED "Nag," originally apparently done I believe by a group called the Halos, who judging from her version -- I've never heard theirs -- sure must have sounded an awful lot like the Coasters.)
-- xhuxk (xedd...), March 11th, 2006.

All I Need is Artful Dodger, a Virginia or Maryland glam rock band I saw open for Kiss and others in Pennsy a lot. They had a few albums on Columbia, the two best being the first s/t and Honor Among Thieves. I don't remember this song. Naggs are reminding me of The Sirens.
Endless Sleep was some kind of rockabilly hit in the late Fifties. "So What If I Am" is a song by Paper Lace I never heard, PL being the "Billy Don't Be A Hero" single act.

-- George 'the Animal' Steele (georg...), March 11th, 2006.

Wow. Those guys are record collectors! (Paper Lace actually hit in the States with "The Night Chicago Died," the opening of which -- "daddy was a cop/on the east side of Chicago/back in the USA/back in the bad old days" -- might be the first example of gansta rap ever to top US charts. Bo Donaldson and the Heywoods, who also covered "Teenage Rampage" by the Sweet, had the US hit with their cover of Paper Lace's apparent Brit hit "Billy Don't Be a Hero." Which makes me wonder what connection, if any, Paper Lace and Bo Donaldson may have had to glam rock in England. Though I guess in the early Sweet/Bolan years, "glam rock" and "Top 40 teenybop singles pop" may have been one and the same there? Limeys please explain.)
-- xhuxk (xedd...), March 11th, 2006.