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

Tom, here's some from the teenpop 2006 thread:


If you want my auto, want my autobiography
Baby, just ask me.

Except the lyrics on the page don't convey how sexy it is when she says it. It's a come-on. The song is like the world's most brilliant personal ad.

And I never in my life wrote a line as great as "I walked a thousand miles while everyone was asleep." I don't know if Jay-Z or Eminem ever did either. Or Dylan. It's like she's saying, "Here I am, stealth genius, and you didn't know." Of course, she's making promises in that song that she probably won't be able to keep, just as Dylan and Jagger and Iggy and Lennon and Johnny and Johansen never lived up to their promise.

-- Frank Kogan (edcasua...), January 23rd, 2006. (Frank Kogan)

And then:

(and then later)

A couple more things about Ashlee and Dylan: Her second album was released a couple weeks after her 21st birthday. Dylan's first album was released a few days before his 21st birthday. Dylan only puts a couple of his own songs on that album, and their lyrics aren't all that interesting (nothing close to "Autobiography," which came out when Ashlee was 19); and nothing in those lyrics foretells what he's going to unleash a year later in "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," going out into that storm he'd called forth on us. But actually, the first Dylan album is my favorite of his four early acoustic records; on that one you can hear him twisting and stretching and distorting the musical forms to make them do what he wants them to. He finds all sorts of different ways to sound intense. In "House of the Rising Sun" and "In My Time of Dying" his voice calls down the storm even though the words don't. Nothing on Ashlee's albums has her imposing her musical will like that, and I'm not sure if there is a way for anyone to drastically twist and distort and reshape her style of music. Which isn't to say that there's nothing special going on in her music or that of people like her. The various reshapings/recombinings are slow and not as ear catching. (And maybe they need to be the subject of another post.) Basically in today's teenpop you're getting admixtures of goth, '80s arena rock, singer-songwriter confessional, various retro dancepop styles, funny novelties, sugar-sweet melodies, hard dark melodies, and blissful r&b, and what's most interesting is the tendency to do them all at once. What's immediately striking about Ashlee is her voice, which sits somewhere between Pink's and Courtney's except that she doesn't sit with it but lets it play around, especially on I Am Me. I Am Me is lighter on its feet than Autobiography; she's found a way to ease up on her bruised intensity without losing it, so she keeps its power while not burying the music under it, which sometimes happens on Autobiography. On the first album she's declaring her identity, on the second she's romping from style to style saying "Look what I can do," so she's the disco slut, then she's the ingenue, then she's the wrathful woman scorned.
But you know what? My heart's with the first album. That's the one where more feels at stake, in words and in sound. Stephen Thomas Erlewine at allmusic.com complains about the second album (he liked the first much more): "The problem is this album is presented with utter seriousness, as if her garden-variety changes in emotions and fashion were great revelations instead of being just what happens in adolescence." That's obviously not how I hear it. Is it possible to listen to "L.O.V.E." and "Burning Up," for example, and not get into the goofing around? I guess it is for Erlewine, who's always worth reading anyway. He's right that her changes in emotions and fashion are garden variety. That doesn't mean they can't be revelations. The situations and emotions in Dylan's "Outlaw Blues" and "Visions of Johanna" and "Sooner Or Later" are just as garden variety. What is amazing is what he makes of them. Any 23 year old can say that even though he sometimes looks and acts like a weasel, he still feels like there's a hero somewhere in him (you hope that a 23 year old hasn't yet lost a sense of his heroic potential). But most won't then come up with anything like "Well, I might look like Robert Ford, but I feel just like Jesse James" to call forth the legends of weasels and heroes past, not to mention calling forth the fear that he'll get shot in the back for it (and the subtext that says, "Look, I can make my little blues song go anywhere, try and stop me"). The risk with Ashlee is that she'll put everything into perspective - that she already has - that she'll decide that a weasel is just a weasel and a breakup is just a breakup and they have no resonance with any larger perfidy or heroism. Maybe "Autobiography" and "Shadow" and "I Am Me" and "La La" are just the pop machine making a couple of lucky shots, and maybe this garden-variety celeb (Dylan: "I know there're some people terrified of the bomb. But there are other people terrified to be seen carrying a Modern Screen magazine") won't make much more that's extraordinary out of her ordinariness. If a Sophie or Alanis or Lucinda had come up with a clumsy line like "Does the weight of consequence drag you down until it pulls you under?" (in the title song of I Am Me), I'd mutter, "Go take a walk in the park, or a nap, or something," but in Ashlee it gives me hope. If she's still got pretensions, maybe she'll push herself to make her mind worthy of those pretensions. You know, like she's got a million miles to go before she sleeps. Or not. In the meantime, at least she gets to speak to my inner 19 year old. Important not to lose that guy.

-- Frank Kogan (edcasua...), January 24th, 2006. (Frank Kogan)

This is great writing, BTW. If people think this is creepy it's totally their loss.

Isn't this the same point raised in that P&J poll though? By deliberate rating and valuing all of this stuff against the canon all you're saying is "Hey, this music is as good as that dead white guy music". All you're doing is reinforcing a hierarchy by building new idols in its style.

Well in FK's case destroying the hierarchy of dead white guy music has never been part of his project as far as I can tell, and he's the only person who's pushing a Dylan comparison.

I know, but it kinda follows that anyone writing in that style, or even following in that style, is forcing a renewal of a status quo, yes?

Or, to put it another way, traditionally pop writing was more "subversive" than any other genre-crit, which is why it irks to see pop writing about in some 73 Cream style.

i don't think frank compares ashlee to dylan because dylan is canon - it's because he loves dylan (regardless of canon status) and also hears actual specific points of comparison in the music (honestly just READ WHAT HE HAS WRITTEN ffs). it's not as if dylan's the sole comparator for ashlee either, pink's in there too and she's hardly canon.

Those aren't really "specific points of comparison" though, unless you think there's a massive dearth of musicians under the age of 23 who don't write all their songs and sometimes write lyrics that take place in banal situations.

I mean, we may as well compare Ashlee to The View if we do that.

most traditional pop writing is the least "subversive" (what do you mean by this overused word anyway) thing ever, anyway

xp well engage with frank about it, i'm not the one making the comparison, though frank's detailed and cogently explained argument is way more convincing than your superficial soundbite reading of it

There was this thing called Smash Hits Lex. It was popular in the 80s.

ok learn some conversational skills before addressing me again, i don't have the time to parse yr trite and rude non sequiturs

How can something be traditionally subversive? (and still be any good?) And what pop writing are we talking about anyway?

(This is a bit of a tangent but it's an interesting point - this idea that there's a way of writing about pop that works (and is still subverting something) and by moving away from it the Teenpop people are putting it at risk...?)

xpost I wuv Smash Hits too but that approach took us straight to Q!

i think we should move away from focusing on "ways of writing" - all of which can be good if done well - and more on to "what is actually written". content not form.

[/writingrockist]

Tom, any revolution eventually leads to evil, it's just enjoying the moment at the start of it before it all goes wrong. Surely that's true with pretty much all junctures of music/the arts?

Yes, but then can you/should you go back again?

Difference between the dilettante and the obsessive.

I don't think so - is it even possible still to 'do' Smash Hits, whether you're a dilettante or obsessive or both? Doesn't it just become a pastiche?

Well, surely that ties into the canon, the idea that you should return back to these "great" ideas and reference points over and over again, as if they're the base camp for music, rather than finding new areas to operate within.

I mean, when you get older do you become less inclined to tear down the cathedrals, as it were?

I don't think that's quite what FK's doing though - he's talking more about effects than techniques. "We need something to have the effects Smash Hits had" rather than "We need something that's like Smash Hits".

(I don't think the teenpop thread writing could have the effect SH had, by the way!)

Do you think earnestness, on the whole, is a good thing?

It's a good option to have!

It always ends up a bit "we mean it, maaaaan" when put into practice, though.

(Is the Teenpop thread the ILM equivalent of the TITTWIS threads I wonder?)

i don't think the teenpop thread is particularly earnest. it can get earnest (like the music) and it's often very...precise and involved, but it's no more earnest than any other rolling thread which takes its particular genre seriously.

it IS earnest about the process of thinking about the music though, whereas some of the other genre threads are more "list songs you've been feeling recently" and little more

does anyone on ilx *make* teenpop?

if not, why not?

Is there any point whatsoever in me bothing to read any of the 600+ posts over the last three days?

There's a picture of Talk Talk about 370 posts in.

i tried, i failed.

Nick: no. Read the last 50 and if there's anything that engages you join in with that.

whatever happened to post busted british teenpop? is mcfly the only survivor? cos the lovebites and the faders where great!

not so much the noise next door.

Post Busted British teenpop is alive and well and called The View and The Fratellis, etcetera. It's grubbed up and pretended not to care about Kids TV, is all.

hmmm. not sure i buy that. different business model, different marketing or a slightly differnt audience?

666 NEW ANSWERS

Slightly different on all fronts; if we're getting picky it really is politics of small differences. It's about choice of stylist. The Kooks have more in common with McFly then with... Led Zeppelin...

"Earnestness" and "Humorlessness" and "corniness" on the teenpop thread (in relation to much of the rest of ilx), until somebody explains otherwise, seem to mean (1) People consistently write about music in actual full sentences and sometimes even paragraphs and try to spell words right and (2) No stupid overloading with photographic non-sequiturs in an inept attempt to be "funny." I don't buy it. There's as much humor there as anywhere else here.

Anyway, here is Metal Mike Saunders, certainly one teenpop-crit's patron saints for his 4000-word Voice examinations of Britney, Radio Disney, etc, a few years back, last week on (now relevant!)Dylan. "Humorless" my ass (and neither were Vom):

there's a loooong Dylan piece up on rocksbackpages that's pretty new and it must be by Ian MacDonald. if i pull it up to read it (meaing, whenever i have time since i dig through the weekly additions in sequence formthe e-mail lists, don't skip around) i'll try to remember to cut/paste it. he has some pretty new/interesting theories spanning "entire career" about mr Bob's modum operandi.

i have a theory no one else is insane enoguh to even imagine.

The Turtles rocked the fuck out of "It Ain't Me Babe" and bobby never got over it. the fuckin' Turtles man! stupid former surf band (the Crossfires) from the terminally unhip South
Bay! trumped johnny cash, trumped the Byrds' covers, jeeesus. to this day Bob goes meltdown if anyone even intimates they're goiong to say the forbidden "T" word -- Turtles. yeah, and their version really IS that good.

history eventually revealed that they had another Dylan song on the table to cover for the followup, but they decided to do P.F. Sloan (two straight two, ie Let It Be and You Baby) instead. oooh.

my theory is at least consistent with my preferences re recorded Bob-output. by a mile i'd rather hear the 1962-63-64 recordings (pre electric) than the 1965-66 crap (no band is >>> to horrible nashville rednecks dozing zzzzzz along cluelessly), and the 1964 band (Bringing It All Back Home), well, huh, that's not even really a band is it? just a ragtag bunch of pickup mooks. dylan's best electric vocals/tunes might be on that one, but that band is a real tough listen.

not to be confused with the most boring band ever, the BAND. man that bob knew how to pick his backing musicians. seriously, if the guy'd had any balls after the fake motorbike accident ( = a metaphor for his dopey marriage i guess) left him clueless and shoeless --

he'd have bought full on Marshall amps/stacks, worked up some old Stanley Brothers brothers songs for the "new sound, man" and played the Fillmore East doing same. power trio, bob and maybe the Vanilla Fudge rhythm section. hell yeah, i'd pay to hear the 18 minute version of "Man Of Constant Sorrow" with fuzz guitar sorrows. fuck this Visions of Johanna shit and songs about joan baez. stomp some fuzzbox onto some old Bill Monroe jams!

does anyone on ilx *make* teenpop?

if not, why not?

The answer is likely "not". Because this is I Love (Rumination That's Been Triggered By Pop) Music; glorified couchpotatoland. Kogan pulled out a plum by coming up with parallels between a boomer icon and a contemporary youth-market celebrity; it's not far removed from those spooooky parallels between Abe Lincoln and JFK. (Well, maybe it is.) It's potentially commercial gold (relatively speaking) in rock-crit land, since both Dylan and Ashlee are recognizable to the lay audience.

Even rock-crits have to worry about commercial viability. Right?

Mark why do you come here?

To watch shuffleboard on the Titanic?

when you knowww it makes things harrrd for meee

I mean, if your basic position is "music criticism is worthless", which it seems to reduce to, then hanging out on a board full of people who like to do it seems an odd choice.

That's not my basic position. I started posting around the time of Xgau's axing from the Voice, for instance; part of what makes something like the teenpop thread interesting is the issue of commercial viability for this class of writer that sprang up When Rock Was Fresh And New in a time when we've saturated the culture with pop music and "rock" represents a set of memes that are no longer fresh and new.

y know what bugs me. i'm jealous of the teenpop thread. i occasionally look at it, like i do the rolling dance and hip hop thread and it's very interesting but i have little interest in the actual music so i can't exactly get "excited". yet everytime a thread is going on about something i have some knowledge / interest in it gets derailed in snark or geir; see that stone roses / 60s cannon thing that was just running. i think there is room for another rolling thread where one can talk about well european rock, indie and pop without it getting constantly derailed, also it would hopefully cut down all the two answers threads about aerogramme or whoever. in some ways it would be a very postive thing, just admit indie/rock whatever is just a genre amongst others and has no priviledge.

it might be interesting to try make a teenpop style record

im not that comfortable with blanket criticism of a genre, by someone who hasnt tried it out for themselves

its not really a direction id thought about, but it might be interesting to try it out