Rolling Teenpop 2006 Thread

Anyway, Je4nn3, now that I've got you here, I've been meaning to post this quote from Ashlee's Elle interview (and I'm desperate for more insights into her various photo transformations as well):

Elle: Growing up in the Dallas suburbs with Jessica, was there ever any sibling rivalry; times when you hated her?

Ashlee: We never, ever really fought. I used to wear her clothes, and they would stink and have holes. Little things. There were times when I was insecure, but not because of my sister. I was a weird-looking little kid for a while. And her world of high school and stuff I did not want to be part of. I was a ballerina with ballerina friends, and we thought cheerleaders were stupid. I was Miss Artsy Fartsy.

(And maybe it's time for me to finally post about "Shadow," but probably not today.)

Lily's "LDN" is definitely in competition with "Rush" and "4ever" as my single of the year so far.

(And yes, Matt, I realize that if I'd been 11 and with it, "Rush" would have made my ballot last year; but it's video only came out this year, so it counts this year on my P&J ballot, yes it does.)

It's really you but no one ever discovers

Those of so foolish as not to haunt the teenpop thread may be unaware that Miley and her dad Billy Ray have a TV show, in which - I gather from the theme song, which is all TV-less me knows of it - by day she's a regular middle-schooler, but at night she twirls around like Sailor Moon and takes on a SECRET IDENTITY as a... as a... well, you'll just have to look for yourself.

The theme song's OK, likable enough, not grebt.

-- Frank Kogan, April 9th, 2006.

Agreed, I like one of the other ones ("Who Said") better. I tried watching one of the episodes on YouTube with limited success (surprise, it's cute), but what IS significant about this is that "Hannah Montana" is the highest rated show in Disney Channel history (I'd be interested to see how it compares to High School Musical; Hannah got something like 5.4 mil viewers last week, though.)

They seem to show clips of songs, but not full songs, at the beginning or end of each show, previewing one new track per show with the goal of putting out an "official soundtrack" by the summer.

Last thing: Brie Larson just wrote what I'm pretty sure is her first indie rock song. Available for download at her Myspace page.

"Don't Go" - Bratcutepunk sort of halfway between Gwen and Jo Jo(maybe even some Lene Lovich), though with a tough cuteness, or a cute toughness. A toughness that'll punch you pink.

"Unforgiven" - Hey, here we are, splits the difference between Lindsay Lohan and Stacey Mosley - neither of whom had made a record when this came out. So let's say it's Evanescence (or whatever ur-pop-teengoth Rosetta Stone I've yet to find) backing and arranging Avril, adding gangshouts. Also, occasionally, a real pretty plinky-dink that could come from disco or from Lee Van Cleef's sister's locket in For a Few Dollars More. Kicks butt.

Also got B.G. Tha Heart of tha Streetz Vol. 1. As with the other two CDs, I'll report on whether the vocalist on this one most resembles Lacey or Marit.

Or it might be that your judgement is better than mine, which is hardly unlikely. (Have I mentioned recently that I love these threads? They're almost all I read on ILM.)

"Asked how she would describe herself, Aliana rolled her eyes and replied, 'Funny.'

"'People laugh at me -- like my jokes, not personally at me,' she said.

"Her sister is known for her on-screen wit, Aliana said. But watch out. 'Lindsay's not as funny as me,' Aliana added with a smirk."

. . .

"Diana Lohan, who studied with the American Ballet Theater under Mikhail Baryshnikov, has apparently mastered the art of stage mother. She said she had been positioning Aliana to follow Lindsay's 'it' girl trajectory.

"'She's on the track, basically,' Ms. Lohan said, discounting the pitfalls of fame that have dogged Lindsay. . ."

. . .

"Recently Aliana was at Tainted Blue studios in Manhattan finishing up her debut solo album with Chris Christian, chief executive of World Digital Media Group and a producer, singer and songwriter who has worked with Elvis Presley, Olivia Newton-John and Sheena Easton."

from the rolling metal (!?) thread:

This new Bananarama album is weirdly joyless. Their old stuff always sounded like they were having fun, on the brink of cracking each other up. This new one is all cyborg-y, like Kylie Minogue's last one (but not nearly as good as that).
-- pdf (newyorkisno...), March 9th, 2006.
i hate to say it, phil, but the last really good bananarama album was pop life. the disco album after that with the cover of more, more, more wasn't that hot, and the album with every shade of blue wasn't that great either.
-- scott seward (skotro...), March 9th, 2006.
pop life even had some metallic moments and was produced by youth of killing joke. and of course it had that ace doobie brothers cover of long train runnin'.
-- scott seward (skotro...), March 9th, 2006.
Well, I haven't paid attention to them in years - I never even heard them after Siobhan Fahey left. So this direction (which appears, after a quick visit to AMG, to be one they've been pursuing for some years now) is new to me, and thus more disappointing than it probably should be.
-- pdf (newyorkisno...), March 9th, 2006.

(1) I love "My Humps," which perhaps says more about me than about the song. (Well, actually, I love "My Humps" when teenagers play the ringtone in order to annoy nearby adults, even or especially when I'm one of the adults.)

(2) I have played Fefe Dobson's "Unforgiven" 30 times in the last 36 hours. (I think I was asleep the other six.)

(3) Je4nn3 (and the rest of you), I posted Ashlee's Elle quote not so much because it pertains to Ashlee and Jess but because it pertains to Pink's "Stupid Girls." That is, it's Pink who's the arsy-fartsy still trying to differentiate herself from Ashlee's sister and types like that, and doing it by calling them stupid. (Of course, Pink's being a little more complex than that, but still...) Also posted the Ashlee quote because it pertains to social categories, and because it's smart.

(4) Sang Freud, nice to see you back.

(5) I don't have the interview in front of me, but Dina Lohan told Seventeen that when Aliana, who's naturally thin, goes to school, kids will come up to her and say, "You're anorexic like your sister." Not fun. Also said that when Lindsay tries for a part she finds she has to spend several hours with the producer and director convincing them that she's not a drug addict and doesn't have eating disorders.

(6) The Björk soundtrack for Drawing Restraint 9 probably is out of judging range for me, since my guess is that the music makes more sense accompanied by visuals. Slow moving sounds, repeated with slight variations. I think to listen to it most profitably I'd have to do it like meditating, concentrating on sounds, returning to the sound. Rather than daydreaming, which of course is what I did. Anyway, the parts that had her voice didn't remind me much of either Marit or Lacey, but the voice is a lot closer to Marit's than to Lacey's. Oh yeah, and unlike Marit or Lacey, the soundtrack bored me silly, but as I said, maybe there's a way to use it well.

Back in my New York days I had a good friend who'd grown up in horrific family circumstances. She told me that when she was a little girl, age five or so, and would complain about something, her mother would turn to her and say, "What if you had no legs?"

So, this is from Pink's Seventeen interview:

17: Have you ever been a stupid girl?

Pink: I've always been. I'm a stupid girl every other day. I'm still a stupid girl. I made that song because I don't want to be in that struggle anymore. I gotta break the chain.

17: How do you do that?

Pink I visit children's hospitals and see 6-year-olds with cancer. I see girls who say "I wish I had legs at all." Let alone [worry about] fat legs...

Covais, from the one or two times I saw him on the show, is utterly loathesome, one of those "old songs are better than new songs!" kinda guys. His contrariness comes off less punk-rock and more conservative, and his fans have a similar creepiness to Clay Aiken's "Vanilla Revolution" partisans. If he acheives stardom I can only assume it will involve Branson, MO prominently.

KARA DIGUARDIO WRITES A COUPLE OF THEIR SONGS OMG

(Interestingly Launch Yahoo just played "I Don't Care" by ex-boyband idol Ricky Martin; it was a Latin hit last year that deserved to have crossed over big in U.S. pop but didn't; strong Latin wail 'n' moan with some late '80s r&b girlsex interspersed as percussion and condiment.)

im not sure if this counts as teenpop really, but i have no idea where to place it. 30 something woman who cant get over high school?

Q: why are you so spectacular? A: i took classes from lindsay lohan. but they involved drugs and drinking, so I failed.

Q: Are you excited about turning 17 this year? A: i'm more excited about not turning 16.

Q: Where do you get the inspiration to be a song-writer and by being an artist (design)? A: i dont get inspiration. I dont really know why I write about certain things, or why I dont write about certain things. I dont really "write" about anything. its all pish posh.

The tracklist goes 1. Gwen Stefani "Hollaback Girl" 2. Kelly Clarkson "Because of You" 3. Ciara f. Missy Elliott "1,2 Step" 4. Mario "Let Me Love You" 5. Natasha Bedingfield "These Words (I Love You, I Love You)" 6. Weezer "Perfect Situation" 7. Simple Plan "Shut Up" (live) 8. Relient K "Be My Escape" 9. Saving Jane "Girl Next Door" 10. Emma Roberts "I Wanna Be" 11. Howie Day "Collide" 12. Gavin DeGraw "Follow Through" 13. Backstreet Boys "Incomplete" 14. Carrie Underwood "Inside Your Heaven" 15. Frankie J "Don't Wanna Try" 16. Ryan Cabrera "Shine On" 17. Switchfoot "Stars" 18. Franz Ferdinand "Do You Want To."

Anyway, one-third of the way in, we run suddenly into a batch of songs that I'd previously heard rarely or not at all. These are my thoughts:

Simple Plan "Shut Up" (live) - Good hard-rocking adenoidal bratboy bubblepunk. The harmonies thrill me to my teeth, the adenoid voices make me grit my teeth. Nice roar, and when they're sensitive they're better than when they're adenoidal. They've got a nice lift, may be nicer than Green Day's, but Green Day doesn't irritate me nearly as much.

Relient K "Be My Escape" - Good strong rock riff at the start, which the track then flees, clearing out the space for sensitive boy vocals and nice harmonies. Likable, I suppose, but still, I'm trying to figure out what is it with boys these days, why they don't sing nearly as well as girls. Why are boys either defensively whiny or stupidly sappy?

Saving Jane "Girl Next Door" - See above.

Emma Roberts "I Wanna Be" - Nice bubblepunk start, 8 fast beats per measure on the guitar. The voice is really young, which seems to be its main characteristic. "I want my life to be more than a journey into nowhere." Needs a better song. And a more interesting voice. Maybe she'll grow one.

Howie Day "Collide" - This is terrible. Boy sensitive. The voice... Is he a Ryan Cabrera imitator? But Ryan has a beautiful voice, whereas... wait, this guy just sang "I somehow found you and I." Aagh! Make it stop. (Oh, yeah, this is a CD so I can make it stop.)

Gavin DeGraw "Follow Through" - I think I've heard this before. The melody is not so bad; the voice is inflexible, but its inflexibility may give this a bit of dignity. And maybe ths melody is so bad. It's not fair that this stuff corners the market on sensitivity. Not horrible, I suppose.

Switchfoot "Stars" - The name Switchfoot seems so familiar, as if they're a majorly popular band that I've just never managed to hear. (However, if I were novelist needing to invent a name for a fictional Majorly Popular Mainstream Rock Band, "Switchfoot" would be the sort of name I'd choose.) The singer manages to be strained yet blah. The harmony is not altogether terrible. "Everyone feels so lonely, everyone feels so empty, but when I look at the stars I feel like myself." Um. The melody has its pleasing moments, but the lyrics achieve a sublimity of badness that I, were I to be a novelist, would be proud to place in any fictional bands' mouth. How come nobody ever told me about this? "Stars looking at a planet/Watchin' entropy and pain/And maybe start to wonder how the chaos in our lives/Can pass as sane/I've been thinking of the meaning of resistance/Of a world beyond my own/And suddenly the infinite and the penitent/Begin to look like home."

It has an inexplicable tendency to get them laid.

Keith Harris REALLY likes "Stars." I've seen him sing it in his car on the way to a Beck concert.

"Oh your promised land doesn't stand/Can't hold back the avalanche."

And the Ashlee line (from "Say Goodbye"):

"Maybe you don't/Love me/Like I love you baby/'Cause the broken in you doesn't make me run."

The Platinum Weird line is just far too vague, whereas the Ashlee line is utterly wonderful. Yet when I look at them, I realize that the Ashlee line is at least as abstract as the Platinum Weird. So why does the Ashlee line work so much better?

(Btw, for those of you just tuning in, Platinum Weird is Dave Stewart and Kara DioGuardi, and the forthcoming album is produced by John Shanks; and Shanks and DioGuardi are listed as co-writers (along w/ Ashlee Simpson) of "Say Goodbye" and everything else on Ashlee's I Am Me, and many of the songs on Ashlee's Autobiography.)

I do like "Your promised land doesn't stand/Can't hold back the avalanche," the idea of a fantasy or a promise or a dream being knocked down and swept away by an avalanche (the avalanche being reality I suppose, life, or Kara's anger, or something). It's an ambitious image. But it needs something else in the song, some story for the metaphor to hook onto - promise of what? which dreamland? for the metaphor to sum up. Whereas "Maybe you don't/Love me/Like I love you/'Cause the broken in you doesn't make me run" is a story in itself. It feels archetypal, like "The King died, the Queen died of grief." For all its abstractness, "the broken in you" is an image that I can immediately attach my experience to. Or maybe not my experience, just the image of Ashlee willing to wrap her arms around a man in his brokenness. As for promises and dreams not holding back the avalanche of events - my mind gets it but doesn't bring any feelings or experience to add to it.

I realize that my explanation here doesn't explain...

But I love every song on the album. If I'd heard it last year it probably would have been my third favourite of the year (I like it much more than Autobiography actually, though maybe that's because I heard it first so it hit me harder). I even love the powerballad "Say Goodbye", which has some awesome lyrics:

"Maybe/you don't/love me/like I/love you/baby/'cos the broken in you doesn't make me run"

Something about that line is so ace, maybe it's that it drags out the simple first part so much, then all the meaning is actually so tightly compressed in the second half.

Tim, interestingly enough, a couple of days before you posted that I was listening to "Say Goodbye," a song I'd tended to pass over, and the "broken in you" line hit me hard; and what I said to myself was, "Here's a line from the second album that feels like a lot of the first album."

I'd heard the second album first too, didn't buy Autobiography until I was basically done with my review of I Am Me. I'd heard the three singles from the first, only really concentrated on "La La." When I finally did hear Autobiography, my jaw dropped at the title song, the two singles I'd ignored ("Pieces of Me" and "Shadow") suddenly hit me as really powerful - in fact tracks one through four were a knockout, "Autobiography" followed by the three singles - and a few tracks farther I found another song to adore, "Love Me For Me." But I did feel that, overall, I Am Me had a stronger sound, despite Autobiography having a rougher, rawer guitar. In fact, I decided that on "La La" - which I still think is her best song - both she and Shanks are pushing too hard, trying to be too rough and tough. Whereas on I Am Me - e.g., rockers such as the title track and "Coming Back For More" - the sound was a lot cleaner and the singing more at ease without losing an iota of force. And back on Autobiography the rawer guitar sound was also applied to the ballads at the backend. And the combo - guitar roar and ballads - seemed wearying.

Anyhow, at some point something shifted in the way I heard it. And this isn't because my analysis above is wrong; maybe just my ears remixed the songs in my head. I'd played my five favorites from Autobiography into the ground and was now going on to the others, and I was hearing through the roar to the melodies and the words, or the roar now had rearranged itself and didn't seem like a roar. Hard to say why you like one thing more than another, but Autobiography ends up - at least for now - having more tunes that grab me and more words that make me feel.

This is relative. I love both albums. The difference is really this: Listening to I Am Me, I fell in love with the music. Listening to Autobiography, I fell in love with her.

Thinking of that line in "Say Goodbye", I think one of the things that makes it work so well is that, yeah, at first glance it sounds pretty straightforward, but actually it's almost encoded. A straightforward line would be something like: "You can't handle me 'cos I'm complicated" or "You only like me when I make you look good." But instead she says:

"Maybe you don't love me like I love you, baby, cos the broken in you doesn't make me run. There is beauty in the darkness. I'm not frightened - without it I could never feel the sun."

It's a lot less judgmental and, I guess, more reflective, this way: like she's just coming to understand the difference in the way that she and her (soon to be?) ex approach questions of love and relationships. And she's not sure which is right or wrong (if right and wrong there is) but she's not sorry for being the way she is. And then on another level she's telling him that it's okay to be damaged.