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

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have a go tim!

― 696, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 11:26 (sixteen years ago) link

teenpop artists don't need criticism, or they don't receive it anyway -- this isn't even white noise, it simply doesn't exist for them. the profile of hilary duff is not raised by ilm or poptimism. this is just people talking, on a messageboard.

― That one guy that quit, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 11:28 (sixteen years ago) link

i dont really think its talking as such. im at work, my mouth is closed

― 696, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 11:34 (sixteen years ago) link

Honestly, fuck, let me open a big old can of worms here, the other rolling threads could afford to be a lot more like the teenpop thread, in a lot of ways. People on most of them just seem fucking lazy to me: Constant "XXX rekkid is awesome," or "[NAME OF SONG] [NAME OF ARTIST] LOL" and that's it, with almot no attempt to explain why. (Have the snap or punk or drone ones gotten any less boring lately? I haven't checked in a while. Last time I checked out the snap one I was trying to figure out why nobody seemed to like the Rich Boy album, which sounds pretty good to me, and my hands wound up empty. (Last year's hip-hop thread was better because there were actually people arguing about how this is a really shitty time for hip-hop, though some posters thought such arguments should be off limits. Interestingly, when the same questions were raised on last year's teenpop thread -- that this is actually a really shitty time for teenpop, compared with past eras -- the response seemed a lot more reasoned. Those sort of discussions should be part of all the threads, really.) And last year I actually quit the metal thread for a while because it never seemed like a conversation, just a list. It's gotten somewhat better this year I guess, but it's still missing something that the teen-pop one has.) (I still love the country one, though; sue me.)

― xhuxk, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 11:37 (sixteen years ago) link

people find it hard to believe the people on teenpop threads are for real; or, if they are real, what their deal is.

― That one guy that quit, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 11:39 (sixteen years ago) link

ie gershy otm

― That one guy that quit, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 11:39 (sixteen years ago) link

Do you honestly believe that Enrique?

― Groke, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 11:40 (sixteen years ago) link

though um maybe different people approach music in different ways. some will suit you some won't? my favourite rolling thread is the pick of the pops one. that was great for a while.

― acrobat, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 11:41 (sixteen years ago) link

the other two rolling threads i frequent are both great and full of good people, but the minimal house one really is

poster 1: name of record
poster 2: name of diff record
poster 3: name of diff record

sometimes. the r&b one is brill because it's actually dormant most of the time, it works in flurries, there are recommendations but not an overwhelming number of them, there's interesting and funny thought but not as dense or involved as on teenpop, and there's never any sense that you're working overtime just to keep up.

people find it hard to believe the people on teenpop threads are for real; or, if they are real, what their deal is.

1) why 2) surely the problem is with the people who can't grasp a fairly simple fact rather than with the teenpop people?

― lex pretend, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 11:43 (sixteen years ago) link

I think that there have been so many naval gazing debates on minimal that simple record recommendations is about all anyone can manage now.

― Tim F, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 12:40 (sixteen years ago) link

does anyone on ilx *make* teenpop?

FWIW, I have several songs written and ready to go just as soon as I can find some teenage diabetics to do 'em up like Lillix (is anyone in Lillix diabetic? No response yet from Nick Jonas).

― dabug, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 12:53 (sixteen years ago) link

craigslist?

― 696, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 12:57 (sixteen years ago) link

I'm probably going to go through the ADA or something.

― dabug, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 12:59 (sixteen years ago) link

Or a diabetic summer camp (that's where Skye Sweetnam got started...pop star camp, not diabetes camp, obv.), which is where the now-defunct (apparently since their website disappeared) Pump Girls got their start.

― dabug, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 13:00 (sixteen years ago) link

Not to beat a dead horse, but since the conversation's still going and there are some people that feel like I haven't illustrated or backed up any of my points about the teenpop thread, I'll use this as an example:

What teens (and younger) among my MySpace friends have playing on their profile pages:
Kill Hannah "I Love You to Death"
Cartoons (?) "Witch Doctor"
Turtles "Happy Together"
Simple Minds "Don't You Forget About Me"
Cascada "Everytime We Touch"
Melody Club "Baby"
Richard Hell & The Voidoids "Blank Generation"
Paula DeAndra "Walk Away"
One had her song deleted by artist, but has McFly pics as her wallpaper (she's from Denver)
One just posted the lyrics to Evanescence's "Immortal" in a MySpace bulletin
One just posted how unhappy she was to be too young to go to the Fall Out Boys show.

-- Frank Kogan (Frank Kogan), Thursday, 4 January 2007 20:06

I don't honestly think that Frank or anyone else on the thread is a paedophile, but you have to admit that at the very least, something like this is ripe for ridicule. And it's not just creepy because of the age thing, it's this weird quasi-anthropological study of the 'target audience'. If one of us white kids on the rolling rap thread went on MySpace looking to find out what black people are listening to and returned to the thread with our findings, wouldn't that be creepy, too?

This brings me to my other big issue with the "teenpop" thing; Frank and others take pains to point out that a lot of teens don't listen to teenpop at all, but that maybe anything teens listen to belongs under the teenpop umbrella, or that singers who began their careers as teenagers but are now 23 or 27 or whatever may be forever teenpop. If that's the case, then what the hell's the point of calling it that? I like pop writing that acknowledges that pop music is one big messy soup that we're all free to take part in, young and old. And it's kind of a given that most pop stars are pretty young, and that the audience is largely young too. I like the Rolling US Charts thread where we can talk about all the pop on the radio with the implicit agreement that if it's popular it's pop. On the teenpop thread it seems like there's constant questions of "is Akon teenpop?" or whoever when it's kind of an irrelevent distinction. I think I'd respect the thread more if it was more narrowly about the Disney-type stuff that is clearly not being made or listened to by many people over the age of 16.

― Alex in Baltimore, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 13:46 (sixteen years ago) link

yeeesh, sorry i do find that weird.

― That one guy that quit, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 13:49 (sixteen years ago) link

1. I don't want to respond for Frank, but I'm pretty sure (being one of his MySpace friends and all) that the "teens he knows" are basically considers family, or close to that -- he has a personal relationship with them. Your misgivings about "anthropology" (setting aside the fact that I'm very interested in using good anthropological approaches to figure out my own relationship to music, since avoiding any anthropology is impossible; I recently wrote a column on this topic for Stylus) in this specific example are misplaced: in your analogy, it would be like rap thread posters putting info from their cousins that listen to rap, or (shock) people they're friends with on MySpace for whatever reason (uh, maybe the musical interests). This is not off-limits!

2. Your second parag doesn't even remotely get at what's "creepy" or "wrong" with the teenpop thread. The teenpop umbrella is ambiguous because music that is considered "for teens" or "for children" or more simply "teenpop" (in places other than the teenpop thread) is fairly ambiguous. Would you deny Ashlee Simpson is "teenpop"? Would you also deny that it's possible to listen to her as "rock" or "punk" <--not trying to go there, but the arguments have been made or "pop"? Why not use any of those distinctions instead? Who cares (or, who can make a reasonable argument that there's something wrong with picking one over the other)? If it's a quibble, fine, but you're linking this idea to a parag with the qualifier "now I'm not calling anyone a pedophile but..."

― dabug, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 13:55 (sixteen years ago) link

Also, not to be a dick but way to assume that "black kids on MySpace" have like zero in common with "white kids on ILM" and never should the twain meet.

― dabug, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 13:57 (sixteen years ago) link

I.e., I think what you just said was a little problematic (not necessarily "creepy"), but no, it wouldn't necessarily be creepy if I posted what a black person was currently listening to on his or her MySpace page.

― dabug, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 14:00 (sixteen years ago) link

I'm not even sure what you mean by that last part. That wasn't my implication, it was kind of a taking the piss comparison. And no, it wouldn't necessarily be creepy, but if I said it like "What black people (and other nonwhite minorities) among my MySpace friends have playing on their profile pages," yeah I think that would be creepy.

My 2nd paragraph wasn't really meant to be about what's "creepy," it was more of a tangent that I probably should've saved for a seperate post. It was more "while I'm on the subject, that reminds me..." than a supporting argument of the previous paragraph. Sorry if that was unclear.

― Alex in Baltimore, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 14:02 (sixteen years ago) link

Again, this is about good vs. bad anthropology here. Your premise is, we're not the "real" audience for rap. The "real" audience is the black listeners, we white listeners are more distanced from rap, therefore not as "legitimately" engaged. Therefore, I will go find a black person on MySpace, post what he or she thinks about rap, and call it a day.

Frank is interested in figuring out what teenagers listen to (sort of). Really, he has a few friends who happen to be teenagers, and whatever they happen to listen to become "what teenagers listen to." He's not doing a blind survey ("I better go google for some teenagers!"); he's also not using one of his MySpace friends as a representative example of ALL teenagers. In fact, his point is that it's hard to tell what "teenagers" listen to, because their tastes vary. Just as it's hard to tell what "adults" listen to, so "adultpop" would probably be a pretty weird (and interesting) genre to discuss, too. Or hey, "DADROCK," that'd be a fun way to talk about music I usually don't give a shit about!

― dabug, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 14:05 (sixteen years ago) link

Given that the popular media is very fixated on "what teenagers are into", and also on the notion that adolescent taste is so ephemeral/inscrutable, I find random lists of what individual teenagers are actually into pretty much de facto interesting for this reason. I'm always talking to my little sister about what she and her friends are into. I mean, part of the whole point of "teenpop" as a concept being interesting is that the music industry is partly structured around notions of adolescent experience of music, so music that is so explicitly targeted towards teenagers (whether it succeeds or fails, sometimes because it fails) is always at least mildly interesting to me. Also I think a large amount of people, myself included, have mixed emotions about adolescence. I view adolescence in general with a fair amount of romanticism although my own adolescence was relatively non-descript. I connect strongly with a lot of films that try to articulate something about the teenage experience even if they fall wide of the mark of my own.

I don't think that the media fixates on "what black people are into" in the same way - by which I mean that although i don't deny that this happens too, the logic is very different. Probably because it's not a temporal thing: the experience of being black is not something you gain and lose over time, whereas "we" were all teenagers but now we are not. There's a reason that "I don't understand kids today" is a trope whereas "I don't understand black people today" is not.

Does all this make me weird/creepy/paedophilic?

― Tim F, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 14:06 (sixteen years ago) link

Strike that -- it's not your premise (and NOW I'm being a dick). Let's call it a possible premise.

― dabug, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 14:06 (sixteen years ago) link

how old are you dabug?

i find myspace creepy enough already among adults tbh

he's also not using one of his MySpace friends as a representative example of ALL teenagers.

i thought you said he *was* doing that? "he has a few friends who happen to be teenagers, and whatever they happen to listen to become "what teenagers listen to.""

but anyway i don't care what teenagers like; it fascinates the media because teenagers are as ever the primary consumers of recorded music. but why should that interest me? (or frank?)

― That one guy that quit, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 14:11 (sixteen years ago) link

― dabug, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 14:13 (sixteen years ago) link

barry zito is dating hillary duff - crepe or non-crepe?

― Steve Shasta, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 14:14 (sixteen years ago) link

Just as I wonder what the relationship is between Phoenix (#7 of last year) and the Veronicas (#4 of last year) and Paris Hilton (#3 of last year) and Marit Larsen (#1 of last year).

― dabug, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 14:14 (sixteen years ago) link

I think it's hugely interesting Enrique! All that cod-anthropological stuff interests me! Not just "what teenagers think" obviously - what my friends think, what office workers think, my parents' generation, little kids, posh kids, whatever. And collecting primary evidence to help discussion is part of that, or at least it was when I did my creepy history degree and when I go to work in the creepy market research industry. (Actually the MR industry can be quite creepy though not in a paedo way).

When I'm in the queue at the supermarket I *always* peek into other people's baskets and try to work out what they're buying. Surely I can't be alone in that? (ulp).

xpost

― Groke, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 14:17 (sixteen years ago) link

(And, maybe esp., MCR -- listned to by many real genuine teens -- who shoulda been #11 but I think they were on my list)

― dabug, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 14:17 (sixteen years ago) link

I don't think that the media fixates on "what black people are into" in the same way - by which I mean that although i don't deny that this happens too, the logic is very different.

I think they focus on it when it serves a certain angle or goal, like it mattered a lot a few years ago that black people liked Paul Wall, but as soon as white people liked him too, it no longer mattered.

― mulla atari, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 14:19 (sixteen years ago) link

And, just to elaborate once more before I go to work, the problem with the example of "black people" is that it assumes that "black people" are the audience for rap. Whereas Frank (and Tim and people on the thread) assume that "teenagers" are NOT the audience for teenpop, and are interested in what they're actually listening to, see if it has any relationship to the teenpop that's for adults (Kelly Clarkson) and children (Hannah Montana) and British people (Crazy Frog).

Yeah, I wasn't implying some straight line parallel with the comparison, of course the correlation between teenagers and teenpop is completely different from the correlation between black people and hip hop. I just think either scenario is a little loopy. My point was that none of the people on the rap thread would do that because we're all opinionated and knowledgeable, and trust the opinions of other knowledgeable rap fans but wouldn't go off looking for tips from random people on MySpace who are superficially more "in the target demographic" of the music (this was before you pointed out that Frank's MySpace friends are apparently people he knows IRL, which would be very difficult to infer from him calling them "my MySpace friends").

― Alex in Baltimore, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 14:20 (sixteen years ago) link

I view adolescence in general with a fair amount of romanticism although my own adolescence was relatively non-descript

i've often wondered whether the stereotype of the gays loving the teenpop possibly stems from the way in which teenpop approaches things like love, relationships, crushes, finding personal identity, growing up - sometimes clichéd, sometimes romanticised, sometimes confused. i think to a lot of gay people it might not be as...banal, as it's sometimes accused of being, because obv few gay people (of our age and above, certainly) could have actually had a typical adolescence.

― lex pretend, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 14:20 (sixteen years ago) link

i don't think wanting to know in general is creepy, just social networking websites. if frank knows them irl then alright (i hope!).

― That one guy that quit, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 14:23 (sixteen years ago) link

i think to a lot of gay people it might not be as...banal, as it's sometimes accused of being, because obv few gay people (of our age and above, certainly) could have actually had a typical adolescence.

now thats beginning to get somewhere

― 696, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 14:23 (sixteen years ago) link

tom and tim massively otm about finding out what other people like, too! finding out why people like what they like is one of the reasons we're all here, surely? and i'm always really interested in why 'normal' people (ie people who aren't music geeks and not on the internet) like what they link, since they're the silent majority in all of this.

― lex pretend, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 14:24 (sixteen years ago) link

Also, Alex, the whole "what does The Other listen to in the Real World?" question completely animates 1000 ILM threads - all the MIA ones, the Stelfox ones, the equivalent of "what are [x] listening to on their MySpaces?" seems to be the guiding principle of the Dissensus approach to music too.

That doesn't have anything to do with whether caring about teenpop is creepy or not, but I'm just saying it's hardly unknown as a critical method.

xpost OK some of this covered in Alex' reply.

― Groke, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 14:24 (sixteen years ago) link

In Frank's book he has the essay where his girlfriend's daughters are talking about Xtina, and it's interesting to see how much they've either absorbed or rejected the image the media is aiming at them.

― mulla atari, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 14:25 (sixteen years ago) link

"but anyway i don't care what teenagers like; it fascinates the media because teenagers are as ever the primary consumers of recorded music. but why should that interest me? (or frank?)"

I don't think it's just that. I think there's a widespread notion that teenagers care more about such things - held not just among the media or big labels but also a surprisingly large amount of pro-authenticity, anti-pop keepers of the true flame.

I mean, isn't the standard story of music fandom the tracing of the decline and fall from the white-hot stridency and passion of teenage musical obsessions to a sort of complacent 12 cds per year dilettante-conformism?

"i've often wondered whether the stereotype of the gays loving the teenpop possibly stems from the way in which teenpop approaches things like love, relationships, crushes, finding personal identity, growing up - sometimes clichéd, sometimes romanticised, sometimes confused. i think to a lot of gay people it might not be as...banal, as it's sometimes accused of being, because obv few gay people (of our age and above, certainly) could have actually had a typical adolescence."

It's a double pincer movement I think: most pop culture representations of adolescence are obsessed with the difference between essences and appearances, so in a funny way most pop culture representations of adolescence tell the story of gay adolescence at one level of remove.

At the same time, the specific content of those representations is not just something we didn't happen to experience, it's stuff we were structurally unable to experience (or, to get the emotional sense of it more accurately, it's stuff we were denied) even if we were in the right time and place for it.

Massive generalisations though obv.

― Tim F, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 14:27 (sixteen years ago) link

My point was that none of the people on the rap thread would do that because we're all opinionated and knowledgeable, and trust the opinions of other knowledgeable rap fans but wouldn't go off looking for tips from random people on MySpace who are superficially more "in the target demographic"

wanting to know what people i trust are listening to so i can pick up hot new stuff myself, and wanting to know what less "knowledgeable" (ugh, snobbishness, but i know what you mean) people in the target demographic are listening to so that i can think about what aspects of the music have mainstream or widespread appeal, which in turn is helpful with talking about future trends, are both equally valid things to pursue

― lex pretend, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 14:28 (sixteen years ago) link

"It's a double pincer movement I think: most pop culture representations of adolescence are obsessed with the difference between essences and appearances"

By this I mean that adolescent films in particular almost always at least involve one character whose social position and representation is at odds with their "true" self - High School Musical is paradigmatic, as is Buffy, but it's difficult to think of teen romantic comedies, say, where the central relationship isn't made difficult by the constraints of one or both participants having to perform a social role.

Alex i think it's misinterpreting Frank to assume he was genuinely looking for tips! If anything when he does this sort of thing it's a kind of humility-gesture, like, "hey, I'm talking about "teenpop" like I know what I'm talking about, but actually who knows what the hell it is".

― Tim F, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 14:31 (sixteen years ago) link

Yeah, Tim, you're right, it was kind of a willful misinterpretation to compare it to "looking for tips" when he clearly wasn't doing that. Again, for me it mostly comes down to the fact that you're almost never going to be the same age or race or whatever as the artist or the target audience of the music you're listening to, so pointing out those disparities isn't really that interesting to me.

All this stuff about gay culture's embrace of camp and cheesy pop as it relates to the teenpop thread is interesting, although I never thought to bring it up since I have no idea about the sexual orientation of most of the people on that thread.

― Alex in Baltimore, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 14:38 (sixteen years ago) link

It's a double pincer movement I think: most pop culture representations of adolescence are obsessed with the difference between essences and appearances

totally agree: i'd say that the obsession is based on the tension between the absolute certainty adolescents have regarding appearances (ie what they "should" be, what is socially acceptable) and the total uncertainty they have over "essences" (ie who they really are - the process of adolescence is after all trying to find this out, and for gays this is magnified) (this pins down something i was clumsily trying to express right at the top of this thread because it's this fumbling attempt at self-discovery which those hilary duff tracks best express, and with which i identify most easily)

― lex pretend, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 14:39 (sixteen years ago) link

I mean, isn't the standard story of music fandom the tracing of the decline and fall from the white-hot stridency and passion of teenage musical obsessions to a sort of complacent 12 cds per year dilettante-conformism?

well yeah. this is certainly my narrative. still not caring what teenagers like though -- interesting that the poptimists here do. isn't this some kind of displaced authenticity kick, a la stelfox?

― That one guy that quit, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 14:41 (sixteen years ago) link

nrq you don't seem to care about what anyone likes though, or indeed very much about anything at all

― lex pretend, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 14:41 (sixteen years ago) link

i mean, feel free to correct me with examples

― lex pretend, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 14:41 (sixteen years ago) link

Yes, probably! I think in my case it's more likely to be a displacement of authenticity onto the 'mass', the marketplace (cf Popular as a project, the centrality of group opinion to Poptimists), rather than adolescence: a class-related yearning rather than an age-related one, rooted in my ambivalence over my private education. Since you asked.

― Groke, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 14:44 (sixteen years ago) link

Another point, why, not, since I took a breath and will not be a jerk again, is that I would love to see teenage MySpacers post on the teenpop thread (in particular I would REALLY love to see Aly and AJ fans -- all of whom HATE ME -- post on the thread, since they always post on my blog and say really interesting and often intelligent and provocative things!). Googlers and "outsiders" (and "target audience members," as vague as all these categories are) can bring some of the most interesting and unexpected arguments and perspectives to the table, especially when things get insular (simply because there are only six people posting with any regularity. And if you hadn't noticed yet I'm basically just doing a membership drive for the teenpop thread on this one).

― dabug, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 14:47 (sixteen years ago) link

nrq likes loads of stuff! comedy stufff mainly. he loves nathan barley, the big mad man.

― acrobat, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 14:50 (sixteen years ago) link

I like the whole random googler thing in theory but in practise I've never seen them actually integrate into a thread or community.

For instance, it'd be interesting to do a comparison of the rolling hip-hop threads with the Nas/Jay-Z Throwdowns. Someone's point at the time - might even have been Frank's! - was that the hip-hop fans on ILM almost never used to post on those (they're still one of the strangest phenomena I've seen on a message board).

― Groke, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 14:51 (sixteen years ago) link

i love poetry, and a glass of scotch, and, of course, my friend baxter here.

― That one guy that quit, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 14:51 (sixteen years ago) link

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