Rolling Teenpop 2006 Thread

Incubated over at Radio Disney a while ago and kept a strange blog.

Infrastructural inspiration, as -remarkable- as hearing 20,000 people applied for Nashville Star or the thousands that line up for various casting calls reported on by Entertainment Tonight from 7 to 7:30, everyday. Giver a Nobel or a Pulitzer or a Booker or a Mcarthur, but how many people are so blown away by the talent, that as session hacks, they'll work for free for a chance to be on the recording?

Entertainment and talent as spectroscopically combed during observation of populations of ideal gas cloud volumes of molecules. Statistically, there's always one to fit every requirement of wonder in every cloud.

Yet somehow, nothing like as bad as Karmah's version of 'Just Be Good To Me'. I'm not describing that, though... quiversome. Brrr.

My response: "Combining Rage Against the Machine with stupid girl vocals is way better than combining Rage Against the Machine with Rage Against the Machine vocal. Sexless, juiceless dork, the guy was.

"Are there any sexy male rock singers under the age of forty?

"Flyleaf sound like Rage Against the Machine with Evanescence-type girl vocals except that Lacey the girl is a live wire on the order of Avril Lavigne rather than poor Amy Lee being stretched on the rack. (But I like Evanescence when they've got hooks; Amy's agony can be quite fetching when it's melodic.)

"I just listened to a band called Stutterfly who are like Flyleaf but even more harmonized and poppified, which would be fine with me if the guy singing hadn't removed all the sex and liquid from his vocals, sounding like another sun-deprived indie boy, basically."

So, anyway, back to Flyleaf: you get sexy female vocals, lotso high female harmonies. Now, where else in Officially Gets Played On "Rock" Stations rock do you get those sexy live wire high female harmonies? I've barely listened to the "rock" stations in the last five years, though I'm now wishing I had. You do get boy harmonies, usually sexless and dorky (in my unlearned opinion).

Xhuxk: Maybe what you're trying to say is that you wish some of the Lindsays, Avrils, Ashlees (and Shankses and Martins) hadn't thrown over the DISCO during the transition to "confessional rock" (or whatever you want to call it). And by "DISCO" of course you can really mean "freestyle w/ girlgroup leanings." Although freestyle is pretty much a dead genre, some of its DNA has wormed into Europop. Ive been telling Edward O. that some of the pretty Swedish pop needs the sort of personality-oomph that a Lindsay would give it; but I can turn this around and wish that the Ameriteens would incorporate some Eurofizz.

(By the way, "r&b" is strong on the Radio Disney palette, B5 and Jo Jo not to mention Black-Eyed Peas, Chris Brown, Pussycat Dolls, Usher, Ne-Yo, and Rihanna. Akon's finally fallen out of the Top 30, but I'll bet that "Lonely" will be a Disney perennial, like "Blue Da Bee" and "The Rockefeller Skank" and "Get Ready for This.")

Wouldn't "L.O.V.E." count as r&b, albeit more Gwen than Teena?

come back, shifty shellshock, all is forgiven.

Come my lady
Come come my lady
you're my stutterfly
Sugar.baby

Such a sexy,sexy pretty little thing
Fierce nipple pierce you got me sprung with your tongue ring
and I ain't gonna lie cause your loving gets me high
So to keep you by my side there's nothing that I won't try
Stutterflies in her eyes and looks to kill
Time is passing I'm asking could this be real
Cause I can't sleep I can't hold still
The only thing I really know is she got sex appeal

Lindsay Lohan gives you something that singers with stronger voices often don't. I want to say "personality," even though that's a cliché and even though many of the world's songs are fine or even better with anonymous singers: those thousands upon thousands of freestyle and Europop songs I've loved. But even in those, the virtue may not be the anonymity of the singer so much as that the wrong singer isn't getting in the way of the song. Whereas when the singer is right, the personality can add something. (This is all abstract. Which personality, added to which song?)

One thing I noticed this time around when watching the video for "Confessions of a Broken Heart" is that, halfway through, the camera pulls back and you see that the house is all picture windows, as if it were storefront on all sides, the family dysfunction on display and onlookers crowding outside, to gawk.

Herbie: Fully Loaded: How come I was so moved by this film? The Herbie concept (a car with a personality, can intuit moods and intentions, takes rudimentary action on its own but still needs symbiosis with the right driver) is dutifully brought up every now and then, since it's the official reason for the picture, but basically the movie sidesteps it. The story is about the driver, not the car. Any (nonpsychic) stock car would do. The Herbie concept's only usefulness is that it gives Matt Dillon the opportunity to be hilarious as the conceited, handsome creep of a driver who's continually blowing his gasket whenever the VW bug beats him. Dillon and the bug relate on one level, the rest of the movie is on another. This strategy - one set of characters operating in different zones from other sets - can work in a story. Dickens did it all the time. I would just say that in watching Herbie: Fully Loaded you just bracket the boring "Herbie" ideas and forget them when they're not needed.

Lohan was 17 or 18, playing a woman in her early twenties. She plays her as someone forthright, energetic, but watchful. I could imagine Lindsay doing the Jodie Foster role in Silence of the Lambs, a fundamental directness but with the need to keep a formal reserve in the bureaucratic FBI environment and, when dealing with mindfucking madman Hannibal, a care in weighing just how much of her vulnerability to dole out to him in exchange for the information she needs.

Screenwriters provide words and a lot of social subtext, which is also provided by costumes and sets. The actors provide bodies, postures, movement, tones of voice, expressions that make lines plausible, ways of standing in this particular kitchen or that particular porch or in a particular garage, next to a particular guy. Herbie: Fully Loaded has a between-the-lines subtext about the dad's class anxiety and his wanting his daughter to surpass him and enter a world he would never feel right in. Michael Keaton playing the dad moves as if he's no longer comfortable in himself, whereas Lohan walks in a direct line, except then she'll waver, not quite allowing herself to claim her true calling, which is actually back among the stock cars with her dad.

When Lindsay's "First" plays under the closing credits, the effect is totally jarring, since the posturing, demanding, voluptuous adolescent voice of the song has nothing to do with the clear sleek line of the character I'd been seeing for the last two hours.

("First" sounds better and better every time I hear it.)

Some of Have a Nice Day's lyrics convey what would be an interesting dissatisfaction if they weren't so evasively abstract, though here's one that's kind of engaging (and intrigued rather than dissatisfied): "She wakes up when I sleep to talk to ghosts like in the movies/If you don't follow what I mean, I sure don't mean to be confusing/They say when she laughs she wants to cry/She'll draw a crowd then try to hide."

For what it's worth, one of the tracks, "Who Says You Can't Go Home," is Top Twenty on the country charts: a Cougar-wannabe number that's neither terrible nor good.

(I wonder why that happened.)

http://cdbaby.com/cd/kingwell

http://cdbaby.com/cd/kingwell2

>"I saw The Angels gig at the Palace in 2000 and it absolutely knocked me out. I was one of a dozen girls in a room of about 1500 guys who just went off and knew the words to every song. That gig got me thinking about how to create some kick arse rock n' roll that girls would dig as much as guys."<

>A four track EP featuring a cover of Fischer Z's 1980 smash "So Long" plus 2 originals.<

and yeah (as reviews on those pages say) i definitely hear the easybeats and suzi quatro in there, too.

(paraphrased from a long rant:) I think the "personality" is related more to the teen pop star system, connected to film/TV cross-platforming. There's nothing actually "new" about it except for the genre of music it's being applied to. Stephen Thomas Erlewine discussed this in his AMG review of I Am Me (but as a weakness of the album). Confessional rock creates a kind of personal narrative that a lot of other pop formats don't, and in this sense the star -- Lindsay, Ashlee, occasionally Hilary maybe -- lets audiences into a seemingly personal story in a way an anonymous (Veronicas) or unknown (maybe Avril or Michelle Branch when they first became popular?) can't necessarily. Maybe whatever qualities make Lindsay compelling as a movie star also make her compelling as a singer, even if its not the singing that stands out.

I guess my problem with Erlewine's criticism is that it relates to celebrity gossip culture, which I Am Me is certainly in conversation with, but not dependent on for resonance. It's Ashlee that sells the songs, not just the idea or celebrity of Ashlee (one reason why Lindsay's confessional album doesn't hit as hard...despite a few good songs, I just don't get the feeling that she's in control of the material she's singing, particularly the covers, maybe because so much of the material itself is weak).

Anyway, Lindsay's musical personality in "First" was strong enough to jar me in its difference from the character she played in Herbie: Fully Loaded. Not that personality is everything. I don't think Kelly Clarkson's musical personality is anywhere near as strong as Lindsay's, but I think she made an (even) better album. (Didn't think so at first, by the way.)

Not that a cross between Shooter and Lindsay wouldn't be worth something...

"1.) superstition is not a religion.

"2.) one time I saw a guy getting a BJ in the car next to me on the freeway. and I was with my parents.

"3.) my electric blanket is on.

"4.) In This Hole by Cat Power makes me cry everytime.

"5.) I took 7 tylenols once. it was a really bad headache.

"6.) a boy needs to come home"

Btw, I wish that someone here with better fashion sense than I (and that would be almost anyone who posts here) would say something about Ashlee's various magazine-cover appearances over the last few months: Cosmopolitan, Seventeen, Elle, and Jane. She's endeavored not to look remotely similar on any of them.

Also would like to know what you make of the various photos in the I Am Me CD booklet.

Ashlee seems to have a pretty sharp sense of humor about her music (the "LIKE YOU" bit in "I Am Me" is gold!), I imagine she gets a kick out of those ultra-posed pics. Skye is maybe more transparent about which songs she's "in" on.

Can't comment on fashion, as I have none.

Whereas I think it's a bit of a truism about adolescence that we don't necessarily feel like there is some stable concept of ourselves that we can point to and say "that is what I am". "I am me" in this sense doesn't necessarily mean "I am this singular thing". Rather, it can mean "I am not prepared to a conform to a singular thing outside of myself; I refuse to play by other people's rules". The "me" in "I Am Me" stands in for the inadequacy of any other word to "cover the field" in describing what "i am..."

The incongruent (as in, compared to one another) setpiece shots in the CD booklet might in this sense be a tongue-in-cheek elucidation of the album title rather than an attempt to undermine it; their incommensurability bearing witness to Ashlee's sense of internal fracturedness.

That seems more reasonable. I wonder how the cover (and maybe album) might be received simply as I Am... "I am me" is definitely a statement worthy of further analysis...the "to be or not to be" of teen pop?

1. lily allan (u.k. i guess?) "LDN"
2. wir sind helden (germany) "von hier an blind"
3. aly & aj (u.s.a. i guess?) "rush" (this reminds of joshua clover i think it was calling beth orton's song with the chemical brothers i think it was a cross between fairport convention and silver convention, except this blows anything by beth orton out of the water)
4. mahsar (iran) "vase chi"
5. tinchy stryder f. wiley (u.k.?) "uptown girl"
6. cansei de ser sexy (brazil) "let's make love and listen death from above" (a reference to how skye likes death from above 1979 these days?)
7. light beat (tunisia) "nhary liel"
8. amy diamond (sweden) "what's in it for me"
9. saian supa crew (france) "la patte"
10. dx7 (spain) "el plan semanal"

(and even that #10 one is pretty good, i admit)

Yeah, this is part of it. Though what was that Hilary Duff song I mentioned way upthread? "Wake Up"? Is that more disco in my memory (or my memory of its video, anyway) than in its actual sound? I forget.

>wouldn't "L.O.V.E." count as r&b, albeit more Gwen than Teena?<

Yeah, I'll buy that. And also more Led Zeppelin than Teena, right?

http://cdbaby.com/cd/mckee

http://cdbaby.com/cd/hollistunes

Well, if the story's true, Kelly C. told Max Martin to redo "Since U Been Gone" with more drums and more guitars, which in the abstract could easily equate to "afraid to be too catchy," even if it actually amounted to an insanely catchy song, and that could very well have been why Kelly did it. But it's more likely that catchy didn't enter into it. I see what chuck's saying, but my suspicion is that the textures they're going with are just more appealing to their ears--they're not as dense, not as showy. Certainly in the case of Robyn the road to indie leads not away from pop but through Neptunes-y / Prince-y (hip-hop-y?) minimalism. But someone should probably interview Ashlee or someone and ask, if they haven't already (I don't keep up enough).

The songs are solid, and more significantly there are three of them even though the show's only aired once. The show's theme is already climbing up the RD Top 30.

Soon she'll probably be credited under her real name. I'm pretty sure that Miley Cyrus has a deal with Hollywood Records in addition to "Hannah's" soundtrack on Disney.

From YouTube: Best of Both Worlds, Who Said, and This Is the Life

I guess part of what I'm saying is that I wish teen-pop now had a little more "Pour Some Sugar on Me" or "Talk Dirty to Me," a little less "Love Bites" and "Every Rose Has Its Thorn." Does that make sense to anybody? Is it my imagination, or are most teen-pop hits *power ballads*?

I think that using new wave as the mediation point can make even the sillier material (like "Wake Up") seem oddly serious or earnest, in the sense of "this could be on one of the The O.C. soundtracks." It's that implied "soundtrack to adolescent life" vibe that comes off this stuff in waves. Something about "Wake Up", for example, announces, "Yes, I am a silly, fluffy, inconsequential song, but in the right time and place I could change your life."

Whereas with freestyle-pop, for example, it certainly can change your life, but it does so without necessarily announcing that possibility in advance.

The Ataris.

Humorful: Lindsay Lohan, Ashlee Simpson, Skye Sweetnam, Brie Larson, Marit Larsen, Robyn

I can't tell if she's being funny or not: Hilary Duff, Hope Partlow

Funny in her remake of "These Boots Are Made for Walkin": Jessica Simpson

I forget if they're funny: Aly & AJ

They probably think they're funnier than I do: Veronicas, Bon Jovi, Morningwood, Crazy Frog, Pink

Person who would do an amazingly great version of "Pour Some Sugar On Me": Ashlee Simpson (remember Xhuxk, I'm the one who says that there is a lot of Mutt Lange in John Shanks); "La La" seems very Joan Jett (but better); Ashlee's Deborah Allan disco-slut imitation during the "You make me feel like fire/Is this love, or just desire" break in "Burnin Up" is (1) an approach to disco by way of disco, (2) an extravagant bit of scenery chewing, (3) brilliant, (4) hilarious. It's exhibit 1 in my case for Ashlee playing dressup on I Am Me (of course every dance* song that contains a line such as "You make me feel like fire" is scenery chewing).

Although "Burnin Up" has a dub reggae arrangement, its main vocal melody is a sexy itchy vocal descent that sounds not at all like reggae but rather like "Habañera" from Carmen. It too is fun(ny).

*Not to mention nondance songs like Courtney Love's Robert Plant imitation on her (great) "Life Despite God": "Run away, your head's on fire/Can't tell the difference between hate and desire"; this too is a great bit of scenery chewing, even if it isn't disco.

I once gave a teacher the lyrics to "I Am a Rock" as an example of great song lyrics. But I was only 14 or 15. Since girls mature faster than boys, you'd think Brie's "I Am a Rock" phase would have ended a couple of years ago.

NOT FUNNY. "I Am One of Them" to thread!

Brie's "I Am a Rock" phase would have ended a couple of years ago.

True, but I still haven't read any Henry Miller. Something to be said for a girl who claims to spend $60 on books in one go (w/ no mention of CDs, DVDs, etc). Also, is any of the new Lindsay humorous at all? Dahv has been mentioned before...

However....

>there is a lot of Mutt Lange in John Shanks<

...reminds me that Mutt produced Def Lep's power ballads, as well. So I still stand by my claim that too much teenpop is just way too slow (and also too "emotional," which is often not better than being fun.)

What a DORK! That guy in the church band -- the drummer to be exact. He is way into me. I know it!! But all he does is look. Well I got sick of waiting for him to say something.

So right before the Youth Group tonight, I just walked up to him. I said -- Hey. We should hang out. You're in a band -- I need a band. (Plus I heard that some guys like girls that can approach them...guess he didn't.) He said, "I have to go pray now." ...all I could say was Amen!

I'll just take that one as a compliment. TOO BAD!!! Nobody can figure that guy out!

'LDN' is getting its official release as a 7"-only single on April 24th. Also, for excitable New Yorkers, Lily will be DJ'ing on
http://www.eastvillageradio.com between 8-10 tonight, your time.

Popjustice has been getting in a lather this week about the respective returns of Siobhan Wot Used To Be In Sugababes and Alesha Wot Used To Be In Mis-Teeq. In both cases, they have a point.