Rolling Teenpop 2006 Thread

Sound Soldier, Music Is My Boyfriend, I'm in My Pink Bulldozer, and Gonna Knock You Over. Jeez, and they're selecting from 70 songs.

now all of you can get to hear my ongoing breakdown critical analysis of Mylie Cyrus aka Hanna Montana. ha hahaah just kidding.

actually the single sounds GREAT on the radio disney, altho on TV i thought it was lame...funny. boombox spkr radio > TV speaker

what're the BEST old 70's - 80's silver-face intergrated power amps? (at the flea markets or thrift stores).

i used to love my old PIONEER 100-watt, which eventually got stolen i guess. have made do with a dumb Kenwood and a Akai (?) for my two stereo amps. i need to upgrade.

i just bought (used) the Kelly Clarkson album, and the 100 watts of Kenwood power aren't getting it done. I need to make actual dents in the wall facing the 4 speakers (two bookcase Sonys as mega-tweeters, on top of two name brand thrift store floor speakers...total cost maybe $29) in order to do justice to Max Martin - Dr. Luke's productoin values and PLAYING VALUES.

"all instruments (excepting drums) played by = Max Martin and Dr. Luke (aka whatever his swedish name is"

let's just nickname them "DrMx" (as in Doctor Max")

they are the gods of modern rock

and Max is still my #1 musical hero of all time

does he shoot heroin like John Lennon?
burn his brain out like Brian Wilson, John Lennon?
fake dumb motorbike wrecks like Bob Dylan?
is a asshole who's mean to his younger brother like Ray Davies?

no!

Dr-Max shits on all of them.

c'mon, let's hear johnboy, surfer brian, bob or ray try to write, produce, AND PLAY ALL THE INSTUMENTS on "Behind These Hazel Eyes" / "Since U Been Gone."

man now i'm only 18+ months behind the "New Pop Generation" curve!

skye sweetnam needs to hook up with Dr/Max next time out (3rd album) d'you think? no duh.

oh and here is the link to Dave's very swell and huge long "underground radio 2006" article. yeah man kick the f'n jams for the kids! kick em out! kicked em out!

i'm stunned at how great hannah montana's voice sounds on the radio ( = pure country accent like her daddy Billy Ray). and how dorkwad she looks on TV. lose the Hilary Duff wig, girl! get a Mohawk or a mullet! anything but that stupid blondie wig!

great "underground radio 2006" cover feature article from the Ithaca Times. a must read for anyone who still thinks that (pick just one) Phil Spector, the Ohio Express, ABBA, Max Martin,

http://72.14.207.104/search?q=cache:T2KEnzr7jcMJ:cureforbedbugs.blogspot.com/2006/04/first-ever-lovemarks-photo-shoot-in.html+cure+for+bedbugs+%2B+%22thursday,+april+20%22+%2B+%22radio+disney%22+%2B+%22mike+saunders%22&hl=en

A week ago yesterday Brie Larson said, "

http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=10483041&blogID=114808099&Mytoken=D0EAAABB-CF1A-4A30-BA5E42037A8D30E056552375

I would like everyone to tell me what they did last night, and incorporate the words "rhythm nation" in their brief synopsis.

That would have been a week ago last Wednesday, and I do not remember what I did, so I will tell you what I did last night: I did the laundry. The clothes were rolling, they were rotating, they were rhythmnating. But they must have been rolling and rhythmnating too hard, because when I pulled them out of the dryer I saw that my grey shirt had a rip up its sleeve. This must have been owing to all the rhythmnation, because I doubt that the shirt ripped itself. It's been depressed lately, but it's never resorted to cutting itself in the past, and I don't believe that it did so this time, either. It's just not the sort to do something like that. I blame the washer and the dryer.

Thank you for letting me share.

1.) Cheers Darlin' by Damien Rice
2.) One by Amiee Man
3.) Hang On To Your Ego by The Beach Boys
4.) Wondering Where The Lions Are by Jimmy Buffett
5.) Funny Little Frog by Belle and Sebastian
6.) I'll Feel A Whole Lot Better by The Byrds
7.) The Way I Walk by The Cramps
8.) See Emily Play by David Bowie
9.) Lose My Breath by Destinys Child
10.) No Radicals by the Flamming Lips
11.) I got Rythm by George Gershwin
12.) Spaceship by Kanye West
13.) The Painter by Neil Young
14.) Mrs.Mcgrath by Bruce Springstein
15.) Pleasures of The Harbor by Phil Ochs

(Frank, you should post to Brie's blog, chances are decent that she'll respond!)

And a good suggestion for Skye's next title from Metal Mike: THEY LET ME MAKE ANOTHER ALBUM!

First post contains this paragraph, originally from a letter I wrote John Wójtowicz:

Current "teenpop" - or the strain within it that most currently is capturing my attention, the part I'll call "rock confessional" - is actually without precedent, kids in their teens and early twenties working with a handful of music pros in their mid thirties, but the kids all included in the songwriting credits and creating (with the aid of those veteran pros) songs that are smarter and more emotionally complex than most of what you're getting from real grownup pop and rock performers (including the grownup pop and rock performers that the veteran pros also work with). But what this means is that these girls have no good models for how to expand and deepen their music as they grow into their twenties, and no preset market or genre to inhabit once they do, unless they create it for themselves. Well, no good models is my opinion. The girls probably all want to be Alanis, not realizing that they're already better. Kelly Clarkson's commercial success is heartening, as she's managed to do her agony and angst without shedding the sugar pop. But Ashlee, who's the best of the lot, is now only getting middling sales and poor airplay and is probably reliant on the tweeny-market that she'll shortly be losing. Maybe there's a way for Ashlee and the others to carry on with their pop craftsmanship and exuberance yet do Alanis and Fiona and KT Tunstall and Tash Bedingfield and Courtney Love and Craig Finn and Conor Oberst, but without Alanis et al.'s bullshit and obfuscation.

(And then I added that I'm hearing in Ashlee the potential to do Jagger or Dylan 1965 but to take it somewhere else, since she's basically a "nice girl," which means for better or worse she won't be tied to the alienation of a counterculture, so maybe she'll grow where Dylan and Jagger stopped dead.)

http://deathjam.blogspot.com/2006/05/lily-allen-live-at-notting-hill-arts.html

(Frank, the text on yr blog is tiny!)

Blog 27 have now covered Teddybears STHLM's 'Hey Boy'.

I apologise unreservedly.

Anthony, I couldn't list anything - hmmm, I forgot the Teddy Bears - but I did list the Shangri-Las!

But I will anyway.

Lillix "Sweet Temptation," first listen: Buzzing beats, even some sped-up Moroder. "Get back in touch with their rock 'n' roll roots." That's what they all say. Well, this is loud. Loud bubblegum (perhaps not unlike early glam, though the tune is '00s). Some breathiness in the singing; the singer finds feeling in the air puffs. This doesn't take me as far above the moon as "Rush" and "4ever" do, but it can at least inhabit the same sentence. Far better than I would have expected from Lillix. I'll have to revisit their first album.

Marie Serneholt "Calling All Detectives," first listen: This is breathy too, but a different kind of breathiness. Breaths from the lounge, breaths that waft. But a punchy kind of talk-singing eventually moves to the foreground. I like the push in the talk-singing, creating substance within the airy environs. But this track doesn't have nearly the immediate catchiness of her previous single, "That's the Way My Heart Goes." I'm not sure about this track. Given its style, it might take a number of listens to reveal itself. Stacey Q took a while to kick in; so did Annie. Maybe this will too, but I'm not expecting it to, obviously.

Serneholt seems more "Europop" than "teenpop" - not that music like this isn't 100% discussable on this thread. And Serneholt does have teenpop credentials from her days in the A*Teens. Has Metal Mike expressed an opinion on her yet?

(1) Lily Allen "LDN," (2) Dizzee Rascal "Fix Up, Look Sharp," (3) Beats International "Dub Be Good To Me," (4) Lily Allen "Smile," (5) Ludacris "The Potion," (6) ODB (f. Clinton Sparks?) "Pop Shots," (7) some dancehall guy, (8) Selectah "Wede Man," (9) Peter Barry "She Taught Me to Yodel," (10) Creedence Clearwater Revival "Born on the Bayou," (11) Lee Dorsey "Get Out My Life Woman," (12) Rod Stewart/Faces "Stay With Me," (13) Squeeze "Up the Junction," (14) Lily Allen "Knock 'Em Out," (15) Jammin' "Go DJ" mashed up with some other grimish thing, I think, (16) Specials "Friday Night, Saturday Morning," (17) some funky dubby thing, (18) Vanessa Paradis "Joe Le Taxi," (19) Janet Kay "Silly Games," (20) Lily Allen "Cheryl Tweedy" mashed-up with Origin Unknown "Valley of the Shadows (31 Seconds)," (21) General Levy "Incredible."

Listening to Alexandra Slate's MySpace clips, which is difficult (and unfair to the artist), given that since I'm on dialup I only get 7 seconds of continuous play, which is then followed by 12 seconds of rebuffering, then 7 more of play, 12 more of rebuffering, etc. Seen any writer's credits? Are they Cavallo and Slate? I ask this because the two tracks I've listened to so far sound like Sheryl Crow filtered through Kara DioGuardi with thicker rock vamps than Sheryl'd use: which is to say that these songs sound a lot like "Avalanche" by Platinum Weird. So (1) the tracks are good, w/ strong melodies and a strong voice but (2) the voice is missing the zing of personality. Which is to say that thin-voiced Lindsay and medium-sized voice Ashlee deliver their songs or deliver themselves along with their songs, whereas Alexandra just seems like a solid singer. Good strong mainstream pop-rock tracks, but...

"So I wrote this song and then I go and sell out," Sweetnam says abruptly.

She's talking, of course, jokingly, about working with The Matrix, a.k.a. Scott Spock, Lauren Christy and Graham Edwards, who produced a series of hits for Britney Spears, Hilary Duff, and Avril Lavigne, among others.

"I go to The Matrix and everybody's going, 'Skye, what are you doing?' I'm thinking, 'I have an anti-Matrix sign on my guitar and I'm going to The Matrix,' who obviously wrote tons of hits, wrote Avril's record, who I've heard about, her name, everyday for the last three years of my life. So I'm like, 'What am I doing? I'm committing artistic suicide right now.'

"But they were actually thinking the exact same thing as I was thinking," Sweetnam continues with refreshing honesty.

"They were thinking, 'We don't have a credible name in this business because all we do is take young girls and write hit songs for them,' and they just worked with Korn on their record so they were like, 'We're trying to do something different.' So I'm like, 'Oh my God, finally somebody who understands.'

"So I brought my art books and I'm like, 'Can you turn this picture of a wolf eating a girl into a guitar riff?' and they're like, 'Okay, let's try it.'

"So a lot of it is high concept; a lot of it rocks, like Nine Inch Nails meets Britney Spears. I can dance to it. I'm very very proud of this record."

Why is it unhappy and wounded, Frank? I've skimmed it a couple times, and notice a couple cranky posts, just like any other ILM thread, but nothing out of the ordinary. What am I missing there?

But then also, a lot of great music that I'd call "sexual" - Amber's "Sexual," for instance, and a lot of stuff by t.A.T.u., and "Don't Say Goodbye" by Paulina Rubio - might as well be performed by someone called Anonymous. I'm not feeling love (or much of anything one way or another) for the people who perform them. And it's great sexual music anyway. But then, it's wrong to think of musical sexiness necessarily pertaining to the relation between the hearer and the performer. Really, what we do with sexy music in our lives may be more crucial, even if it's easier to talk about the relationship to the performer.

Don't know if I'm answering your question. Over the years, most of my hero-frontman-performers have been guys: Jagger and Dylan and Iggy and David and Johnny and Eminem. This isn't to say there can't be anything sensuous in my feeling towards them, but since I'm not gay, it's not warm in the way that it is towards a feminized someone like Ashlee. But Ashlee is definitely in a Jagger and Dylan rock category for me - as opposed to being in the Cover Girls sexy dance-pop category, though those categories need not be mutually exclusive and in fact there's something in all my heroes' music that pulls in a Cover Girls sensuality at least somewhere. Or something.

So I've just written a lot of words without quite figuring out my answer to your question. I tend not to have sex fantasies about people I don't actually know in real life, which is why girlie mags don't do anything for me. But that doesn't mean sex isn't a part of my feelings towards a singer.

I feel that if we assembled the people who've contributed to this thread and found an investor and some hotshot photographers, we could put together a great magazine on teenpop that would be like no other. Wouldn't say it would make money, but it'd be great.

I don't know what anyone discussed on this thread actually looks like bcz I only ever hear this stuff via MP3.

I'm inclined to assume that Frank's attitude to Ashlee et. al. isn't predominantly sexual b/c I identify with a lot of what he writes about Ashlee in particular and, being gay, there's zero sexual attraction there (which doesn't rule out visual aesthetic appreciation of course).

I think that because of the use of visuals in marketing teen-pop - video clips, magazine covers etc. - there's a general assumption that a listener's relationship to the performer and their songs is going to be more intensely visually-based than it would be for other types of music. And certainly the heightened prominance of visuals plays a huge role in shaping our understanding of and connection with the music and the performer.

But, for myself I've never been consciously aware of there being a meaningful link between me finding a male pop singer hot and feeling a connection or identification with his music. I had a totally sexual crush on one of the guys from Blue, was largely indifferent to the guys in the Backstreet Boys, and found Daniel Bedingfield to be kinda weird looking (not in a good way), and yet "If You Come Back", "Shape Of My Heart" and "If You're Not The One" all hit me in a substantially similar fashion (and in ascending order of power and greatness as well).

Whereas sexual attraction plays a much more substantial role in my enjoyment of tv and film, perhaps for obvious reasons.

Of course anthony saying "how much of enjoying ashlee is to do with yr cock" isn't limited to how much we get off on ashlee visually...

I felt a pull and attraction to Miss Lonely in "Like A Rolling Stone" and to the girls in the Dolls' "Babylon" and "Frankenstein," and I never even saw their pictures!

Ashlee Simpson Ghostwrites Dylan's Autobiography

I had a wonderfully impossible assignment from Paste magazine to write 625 words on Dylan as a songwriter. I did my best to present the guy's mid '60s achievement as a potent, problematic, living thing to be grappled with rather than revered, but I sure could have used an extra five thousand words. If I'd had 'em, I would have started by quoting "Tell Me Momma," in which Dylan sings "Everybody sees you on your window ledge/How long's it going to take for you to get off the edge" but doesn't say whether getting off the edge means pulling back or whether it means jumping. Now, the music he helped invent - "rock" - is supposed to have an edge, to be sharp, to cut; and it's supposed to take you over the edge. Of course the idea of an "edge" long proceeded Dylan, but he's one of the ones who brought it from bohemia to the center of the culture. So when Ashlee Simpson spits out her anguish in the chorus of "Shadow" ("living in the shadow of someone else's dream"), and when Eminem in the role of mad, sick Stan goes "I hope your conscience eats at you and you can't breathe without me," they're each using anger cadences that entered popular music in the '60s with Dylan and Jagger.

My idea of "The Autobiography of Bob Dylan" is that the true autobiography of Bob Dylan wouldn't be his story but our story, not just how he got to be that way but how we got to be that way, how the edge got to be the edge, what in our context and our culture takes him and us up to that ledge. Dylan dropped out of his autobiography in 1966, but the autobiography continues without him; thousands of other people carry it forward on from there (I'd originally written "carried it forward," but I don't know if we do carry it forward or just keep running into the same old wall and then eventually retreat; that's why Dylan '65 has a living presence but a problematic one).

I think Ashlee is discovering that it was a cinch getting out from under her sister compared to getting out from under all the other stuff the world saddles her with, not to mention what she lays on herself. But she's got a strong urge to reconcile with what she's trying to surmount, which is one reason she might take the story somewhere new. She's more a Johansen than a Johnny, wanting to embrace more than to shatter. The danger is that she'll settle for too easy a reconciliation. Tim Finney has talked beautifully over on the teenpop thread about the lyric in "Say Goodbye":

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

Tim says: "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."

And then:

"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."

I agree with Tim wholeheartedly, but I do think that "without it I could never feel the sun" is something of a platitude, too easy a resolution. The question as Ashlee's career goes on is whether she's going to do right by the darkness, the damage, whether she'll find the words and sounds to make us feel it, think it, comprehend it, analyze it. Interesting that the abstractions in "Say Goodbye" - "love," "broken in you," "run" - tell a powerful story in one sentence. Astonishing, actually, and she's done it before, not as compactly but just as powerfully, in songs that sound even better: "Love Makes the World Go 'Round" and "Undiscovered." But on "Beautifully Broken," the track on I Am Me that's supposed to be the crucial, self-revealing one, where she deals with the SNL and Orange Bowl debacles, she just vagues out. "I'm beautifully broken/And I don't care if I show it." Well, show what? This is where we need details, need the scene, need to feel the breaking. "Every moment I'm filled with hope 'cause I get another chance/But I will try/I will try/Got nothing left to hide" - I'm truly grateful that she'll try, but this feels too much like Norman Vincent Peale. "Without the highs and the lows/Where would we go/Where would we go..." is a nice "ending" in being irresolute, and she is admirable in her determination to make positive use of her setbacks, but still, this is reassurance not revelation (compare to "Love Makes the World Go 'Round," where she questions the sentiment in the song title, wants to believe it but won't believe it from you). For actual darkness you need to go to lines like "What's she got that I don't have" in "I Am Me" or even to her undercover bitchiness in "Boyfriend," and of course "Shadow," which deserves its own 25 posts. And to Dylan: "You say you never compromise/With the mystery tramp but now you realize/He's not selling any alibis/As you stare into the vacuum of his eyes/And say do you want to make a deal." Like, you've really got no secrets to conceal, out on that ledge, and damn, we all know this Ashlee girl has lived it, but she's got to put it into words.

(To honor the people in the trenches, I'll point out that Ashlee's got two co-writers, John Shanks and Kara DioGuardi. But since most of the world wants to acknowledge the trenches only so it can sneer at Ashlee, I'll also point out that Shanks and DioGuardi have a co-writer too, and her name is Simpson, and if they've written lyrics this good with or for anyone else, I haven't seen it. And on "Love Makes the World Go 'Round" and "Undiscovered," John and Ashlee do without Kara. I suppose it's possible that Ashlee's role could be primarily as muse and inspiration and that her name is on the writing credits mainly as a courtesy. If that's the case, we all should have such a muse.)

(Another observation regarding the trenches: Shanks plays signature Dylan-style riffage at the start of "Shadow," a style that Dylan would use incessantly, playing the full chord with the mi note, then playing it with fa, then going back to mi.)

And there are what look like more up-to-date photos here, but it's some flash stuff that I'm not going to try and link.

(I'm feeling the Kara photo more.)

Ashlee Simpson coy on rumors of a new nose
From Associated Press
May 10, 2006 5:38 PM EDT
NEW YORK - Ashlee Simpson is laughing off rumors that she had a nose job - but she's not denying it either.

Recent photos splashed across the Internet and in tabloids suggest the multiplatinum singer has made an alteration to her profile, removing the bump that made her nose distinctive.

When asked about the speculation during a phone interview with The Associated Press on Wednesday, Simpson giggled and said: "Everybody's already saying it, so I just don't talk about it. I'm like, OK, whatever. It doesn't bother me."

But when asked whether the rumor was true, the 21-year-old singer didn't confirm or deny it, but just giggled more.

"Maybe - who knows!"

Simpson - the younger sister of Jessica - is about to launch a summer tour in June. Her latest album is "I Am Me"; her first album, "Autobiography," was released in 2004 and sold 3 million copies.

"But I wouldn't be surprised if Tim F. has warm feelings towards attractively vulnerable young woman too, even if those feelings don't come from the loins."

Probably true!

I guess I haven't paid enough attention to the lyrics, though.

So, these are a few of my favorite things about Lily.

It's Danni Minogue syndrome!