Rolling Teenpop 2006 Thread

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.

That sing-songy brainless piano plinking and sing-songy brainless melody coupled with YOU YOU YOU YOU YOU chorus is irritating beyond words.

I dunno Don, I think Ashlee is saying "we're both broken (damaged, not heartbroken), but you want someone unbroken (maybe because you can't handle your own brokenness). Whereas because I know that I'm broken I'm willing to accept that dealing with your brokenness is the only way I could make this arrangement work. You disagree, so this relationship isn't gonna work."

I crashed your pickup track
then I had to drive it back home
I was crying I was so scared
of what you would do
of what you would say
but you just started laughing
so I just started laughing along
saying it looks a little rough
but it runs o.k.
it looks a little rough
but it runs good anyway

we get a little further from perfection
each year on the road
I think it's called character
I think that's just the way it goes
but it's better to be dusty than polished
like some store window mannequin
won't you touch me where I'm rusty
let me stain your hands
touch me where I'm rusty, let me...

Not for long...enter The Lovemarks!

Saatchi & Saatchi is touting a manufactured girl band, created by the agency, as its latest ad weapon in the battle to reach young consumers.

Marketers will be able to hire the as-yet-unnamed group to promote their brands in their songs, their clothing and what they eat and drink.

(More at Poptimists). (xpost)

It's also the message threaded through I Am Me, is it not?

(2) I got Tori Amos's Scarlet's Walk (2002) from the library last Saturday; haven't had time to listen to it enough, but so far I like it far more than I'd expected. It seems far more pop than I remember her being (I used to cringe when people played her for me); is this because she's moved closer to pop, or because pop moved closer to her? I've not been taking in the lyrics, not because I've been avoiding them, just because she's been in the background and they haven't broken through. In any event, there are songs on here that aren't so different from the opening to "Rush," though unlike Aly & AJ she doesn't take them through to the teenrush of a wailing chorus.

So are the girlpoppers effecting a change in my taste?

I mean, Tori Amos???

I imagine it's both...a friend of mine made this same observation a week or so ago. She doesn't listen to the radio and dislikes most teen pop, and she thought that Tori Amos was going more "mainstream" in her some of her later albums (I wouldn't know, never really listened to Tori Amos all that much). I forget which album we were listening to. But then how many teen poppers cite Tori Amos as a major influence? Is the ratio the same as a high school drama dept's worth of aspiring singers?

Ashlee et. al. certainly still sound closer her first album Little Earthquakes, which I actually really could imagine sounding quite different after a heavy dose of current confessional teenpop. Some young aspiring girlpopper should definitely cover "Girl" from that album. But more generally I think we might see girlpoppers move toward that territory when they get to the third album stage and wanna "prove themselves creatively". Relevant factoid: Alanis Morrissette claimed in an interview that when she first heard Little Earthquakes she lay on her floor and cried all day.

"Take it back, take it all back now/The things I gave, like the taste of my kiss on your lips/I miss that now."

So by the third line she's taking back the taking back. She misses him. She wants him back. Once again, she's telling a story in abstractions, and once again it feels like a fullbodied story anyway. The chorus goes:

"All the things left undiscovered/Leave me waiting and left to wonder/I need you/Yeah I need you/Don't walk away."

What a profound way to lament a relationship: "All the things left undiscovered."

And then there's the ending, which is a whole new melody, sung in the same slow steps Tim described in "Say Goodbye," but many more - I wish I could convey her singing, the slow emphasis she gives everything, first a steady tread on her husky register:

"'Cause I can't fake/And I can't hate/But it's my heart/That's 'bout to break/You're all I need/I'm on my knees/Watch me bleed/Would you listen please"

Then repetitive little cries as her voice lifts.

"I give in/I breathe out/I want you/There's no doubt/I freak out/I'm left out/Without you/I'm without/I cross out/I can't doubt/I cry out/I reach out/Don't walk away, don't walk away, don't walk away, don't walk away"

A couple of interesting facts about this song: (1) Background vocals are credited to Ashlee Simpson alone; unlike the other tracks, no Kara or John augmenting her. (2) Songwriters are Ashlee Simpson and John Shanks. No Kara.

So, a question I'm kind of posing myself - who or what am I loving when I love Ashlee? - well, this doesn't necessarily eliminate Kara (who's at least as good-looking as Ashlee, and she's only 17 years younger than I rather than 31, and she says on her Myspace page she's single and straight)... This is an artistic creation here, this Ashlee, no matter how few or how many hands are in on it. But still, try and find an equal creation from Kara or John when Ashlee's not in the room.

I love it to death. It's like the Matrix guys doing Judas Preist with a refreshingly non-breathy girl voice on top.

Back to "Undiscovered": Good guitar playing from John, too. A gentle drone, a note shifts while the others stay put, but it's insistent, like the song itself.