Wow, might be experiencing my first excellent Pandora set in a while.
Veronicas – “Did Ya Think”: I didn’t even know this existed! The B-side to “4ever” -- or maybe that was released as an extended single with a few extra tracks. Anyway, this is nice, simple rock song, tending toward the Tracy Bonham influence (I think).
Haley James – “Halo”: Might be on a roll, never even heard of this—this is from the “One Tree Hill” OST, more straight alt-rock with strong Kelly C-indebted teenpop vocals. Soundtrack is all over the place, Audioslave, Hot Hot Heat, Fall Out Boy, Tyler Hilton.
Janie Chu – Tears of the Nation: “Can’t distinguish from the foe/ Civil war brewing/ No end in sight/ …When will healing begin?” Uh oh. That’s the build to the chorus, which doesn’t boil over at all. There’s some Wurlitzer noodling throughout and now there’s a weak drumline beat. Like dippy Aimee Mann, just heard something about the “condition of the human heart.” Just added Paris Hilton to my artists (before now the only available “Paris Hilton” was the Mu song), maybe that’ll make up for the detour.
Lilys – “With Candy”: INDIE AFFIRMATIVE ACTION. This is NOT Paris Hilton! THUMBS DOWN.
Ryan Cabrera – “Illusions”: Jeez, this isn’t going well at all. Not the worst Cabrera song I’ve ever heard. But skipped.
Def Leppard – “Hysteria”: Not even Max Martin Def Leppard! Not in the mood for this at all. Skipped.
3 Doors Down – “My World”: Blarg. Thumbs down.
Aaliyah – “Try Again”: Nice palate cleanser. Classic.
Robyn Hitchcock – “Egyptian Cream (demo)”: I was in the other room, but this sounds inappropriate, sort of Elliott Smith-ish. Pretty but thumbs down.
Beu Sisters – “Anytime You Need a Friend”: They play this one all the time and it’s fairly bland.
Emma Roberts – “I Wanna Be”: Seriously, this girl’s got nothing on just about any other children’s media crossover star…she’s probably closest to Brie Larson, but without brains or a sense of humor. So not close to Brie at all, really. That reminds me, Brie is reading Khalil Gibran (that makes one of us). From
this post.
No Doubt –“Running”: From
Rock Steady. Plinky 8-bit ballad, like Gwen singing the death music in Legend of Zelda. Nice.
Mandy Moore – “Cry”: Decent Mandy Moore ballad, makes me wish I could find my copy of her greatest hits CD! Did someone take it? (Also Britney –
Britney, just re-alphabetized my CD collection after like two years, took me 4ever.) Anyway I still have the DVD extra if I get desperate. But I don’t think there’s a video version of “Senses Working Overtime” on there.
Cherie – “I Believe in You”: Definitely back on track now, I usually like Cherie when I hear her. Sheryl Crow verses into flimsy disco-rock in the chorus, doesn’t completely hold together and Cherie doesn’t really stand out as a performer. I like the lyrics, “I don’t believe in miracles/ I underestimate the spiritual/ I don’t believe in anything,” maybe this is that atheist rock that Aly and AJ fans have been directing me to -- except then there’s “I believe in you,” not atheist enough.
Cyndi Lauper – “Shine”: I don’t know Cyndi Lauper very well, but this sounds no different from the little I know of her. Something about the past two songs reminds me of “Take a Walk” by Sara Paxton. Adding it (again?) in the hopes that they play it next.
Hefner – “Christian Girls”: The anti-Aly and AJ set, I guess. More IAA but I like the little Hefner I’ve heard…someone back in the Extreme Pop discussion suggested they’re “extreme indie” which I claimed isn’t possible since whatever social mechanism includes Hefner as indie also categorically excludes them from extreme pop.
Kay Hanley – “Satellite”: One of the (relatively) underappreciated bedrock influences of, and major contributors to, current teenpop, the influence more felt c. 2003 when she was heading Josie and the Pussycats. I think she’s working with Fan_3 project Shut Up Stella now, as both her personal page and Letters to Cleo are Top 8 Friends. I contacted them through Myspace but they didn’t return my call -- still need to figure out how to hear their album if it exists.
[TEA INTERLUDE: WHERE’S PARIS AND/OR SARA PAXTON]
Avril Lavigne – “Complicated”: I’ve written enough about this already. Thumbs up I guess…strangely, this is the first time I’ve ever heard this song on my station in like eight months.
Better Than Ezra – “A Life Time”: Weird accent on the phrase “three and a half minutes,” like “min-OOTZ,” where are they from again? [Checks] New Orleans…just a weird emphasis on the second syllable I guess. Nothing else of note in this song far as I can tell. Skipped. (Retroactive thumbs down.)
The Corrs – “Give Me a Reason”: I think I included this group in the master list, might change that. Low-key Eurodance, I don’t remember them sounding like this?
Lisa Marie Presley feat. Pink – “Shine”: What the hell? Waiting for Pink…woop, stopped paying attention and missed it.
The Bangles – “Something to Believe In”: Bah, so much for the atheist set. Not bad, skipped.
Fleetwood Mac – “Say You Will”: Wow I know so little about Fleetwood Mac it’s kind of embarrassing. I kinda like this song, the kid chorus overdub that takes over during the fade-out is a little annoying though.
Dream Street – “I Say Yeah”: Me too! BOYS WHO SING LIKE GIRLS! Dreamy, thumbs up.
ELO – “Secret Messages”: Uh, OK. I won’t split hairs here.
The Lordz feat. Everlast – “The Brooklyn Way”: Wow, haven’t heard Lordz of Brooklyn in a long time. I thought Pandora might have mislabeled this but no, apparently they reformed as The Lordz last year and this came out pretty recently.
Backstreet Boys – “Drowning”: Not one of their best by a longshot but not bad. Somewhere toward the tail end of their greatest hits CD, usually I’ve turned it off by that point.
Bratz – “Never Gonna Give Up”: How many albums does this group even have? I just checked out
Forever Diamondz but this from an album called
Genie Magic, which if I remember correctly is like a straight-to-video movie featuring the Bratz. This is closer to
Forever Diamondz, faceless R&B, sub-sub-Destiny’s Child.
Cassie – “Long Way 2 Go”: Ooh, I like this. I should check out the rest of the album. She has real presence, a nice low-key voice to go with the embellished snap backing, closest thing to a Hilary/Paris cipher I’ve heard in recent R&B…not anonymous, just completely inaccessible, like an android you could fall in love with.
Cheetah Girls – “The Party’s Just Begun”: Ug, their new movie’s gonna get even more of this stuff on Radio Disney. My problem with it is that none of it is
bad, it’s just music that actively disengages you from just about any reasonable response you might have—you can’t really sing along, you can’t really dance, you can barely nod your head to it. It’s pure competence.
Amel Larrieux – “Earn My Affection”: Minimal production, nice harmonies, but the song doesn’t really go anywhere.
OK, that’s enough. Appropriate closer (sort of); part of the reason I did this feature today was because most of my mental energies have been going toward my next column on Paris and “earned pop,” the concept of “hard work” in current pop emerging from a post-rockism music press that’s kept many of the same values that (some people) challenged with “rockism.” Of course, rockism itself is such an inadequate term that it doesn’t concretely mean anything; it’s a fairly projective term that in practice has come to signify a binary divide between rock and pop, a matter of preference (which is ridiculous since rock and pop aren’t directly opposed). But the resulting pro-pop climate in a way is even worse than when the conversation openly drew a line in the sand, so to speak. Writers like Kalefa Sanneh and Stephen Thomas Erlewine bring a complex set of dubious values to their writing without being “rockist” per se; pop is OK on their terms -- but it’s precisely
their terms that are the problem, the terms have always been the problem and they haven’t really changed since rockism became an in-joke. Ideas to explore in this piece:
(1) The idea that music is work, that music can be earned, and that there are ways to differentiate "hard work" from "easy work" among different music. This seems to be a much more prevalent idea today than, say, “some music is manufactured,” which is a more transparent value judgment, and one that’s easier to refute than the former assertion. So one can enjoy or dislike Paris’ album and, regardless of one’s taste, claim that she hasn’t
earned it. I had a conversation this weekend with a friend who refused to acknowledge that Paris even sang on her own album -- what’s more, she refused to believe that anyone even played any instruments. That’s an extreme argument, but there are shades of it happening in almost every discussion of
Paris I’ve read, pro or con -- the overriding idea is that Paris didn’t
work for the album, and therefore doesn’t
deserve it, regardless of whether or not it’s any good.
(2) The extent to which the Paris persona on record is intentionally indecipherable. I think the multi-tracking literally fragments any possible singular persona, but beyond that I think that, generally, putting a unified Paris forward is the opposite of the album’s goal. Paris is diffuse, there’s something inscrutable and elusive about Paris-of-
Paris.
(3) The extent to which Paris’ obfuscation of self on record leads listeners to “fill in the gaps” with her tabloid persona. No, "gaps" is the wrong metaphor, it’s more like a swap or a superimposition. Atop Paris-of-
Paris many have pasted Paris-of-tabloids and have tried to make both coexist, or they’ve ignored the album’s Paris in favor of tabloid Paris.
(4) How the need to combine the two Parises into one entity facilitates transferring the idea (1) from the non-pop world to the pop world. Not to say those two worlds are mutually exclusive (in fact, they’re inextricable), but the values that fuel tabloid-Paris hatred (“hard work” as signifier of a Protestant work ethic and Paris’s implicit aristocratic refusal of it) are awkwardly being carried into a discussion of the production of her pop music. These values may in part underlie some of the assumptions that have always gone into the denigration of “pop” in (some versions of) rockism, but now they’re being used in the
promotion of pop as well. Both pop and rock (as [falsely] mutually exclusive categories in the context of “rockism”) can be enjoyed openly, but in either category, work must be demonstrated. The work doesn’t have to be playing your own instruments or writing your own songs, but it must be
manifest in production. This leads to uninformed value judgments of a production's “legitimacy.” In the case of Paris, a pre-rockism argument might sound like my friend’s: everything on the record is fake, illegitimate. She wasn’t responsible for any of it; it was all, on the contrary, “manufactured.” Whereas the post-rockism arguments are more along the lines of: this music that was once considered manufactured is
not manufactured, but Paris Hilton’s brand of it is illegitimate (even if personally I enjoy it), because she didn’t
do anything, or, because she did only the bare minimum work; she didn't work hard enough.
Still working on it, hopefully this will transform into something coherent.
