Paris Hilton enjoys a chunk of traditional holiday tofurky and diet soy gravy1. It being T-day and all, I'm compiling a bunch of drafts I saved up this week and expelling them into the interweb at once. I'm not editing or deleting any of it, because if there's anything further to be said, amended, contradicted, it'll happen in the comments. I just reread some of the Paris posts the other night and the back and forth was really interesting to watch develop all in one go, my thinking on that album and Paris and a bunch of other things changed very quickly, several times over. I think it's probably my #2 or #3 of the year at this point.
I bring it up 'cuz at
this time last year I was seriously considering giving up the blog and moving on -- I always tend to feel a little bummed/burned out at the end of the year (side note: "Not This Year" is the only non-single in my top ten at this point, since "Only a Fool" HAS BEEN OFFICIALLY RELEASED AS A SINGLE!!!), and abandoning a blog is a wonderful way to feel as though you've made a significant change (and sometimes it's a significant change, but last year it was just year-end angst...it did lead eventually to the current layout, which is much better than the boring old Blogger template). But I really like this blog and made the right decision to pick things back up, and I would encourage other unsure or sporadic bloggers to try to write it out instead of waiting it out.
Anyway, I think a great conversation has been developing here throughout 2006, and I've discovered lots of great(er) conversations happening elsewhere, but the main point is that anyone reading this (anyone? anyone?) should comment more often, because it's the only way to move conversations forward. For me, it's the only way to start to understand the nebulous ideas that emerge in intial posts, which I basically view as thought dumps most of the time. And I should be commenting more elsewhere, too -- in the past two or three years (as long as I've been paying much attention, basically) I've noticed a major movement away from back-and-forth conversation even in some of the highest profile and most popular MP3 blogs, and if my impression is correct, this is a truly poisonous development. Onward to holiday chaff...
2. P&J in the year 2000 (and 1999, which I didn't get around to). I'm going to sidestep my Summer of Stan (listened to a dubbed cassette of
Marshall Mathers LP pretty much non-stop, so that's what I was into at the time) and instead suggest that c. 2000 was a bad time to create/feed teenage myths about the illegitimacy of current pop music. I'm about a year away from full-on music obsession, which meant effectively tuning out the radio and what was going on for Musical History and Cool Music That You Should Be Paying Attention To. This wasn't until early 2001, and 99-00 was sort of the last gasp of what I'd call my adolescent tastes, which were pretty casual and open.
In 2000 I started "getting into" movies, which is to say I rented seven to nine of them in a given week and started building a film geek resume. And I basically did the same thing with music a year later. There's a lot to be written about this, but I'm only touching on a few ideas. I just wonder what happened when I constructed a basic timeline of rock history through All Music Guide, for instance. (Of course All Music is huge and diverse enough to construct different rock histories depending on how you navigate it -- but what happens when you use "You might also like..." click-throughs to build a library of 300, 400 albums in the course of a single summer? What kind of history are you creating, and what went into constructing it?)
So a lot of the stuff I'm ticking now I knew pretty well then, too, but not in the way I would know it a year or two later, when it had its place in a History that wasn't necessarily
my history with it, leading me to think and say things like "I never really listened to music before high school," which as you can see from these posts isn't true at all. I think that with so many avenues to find new music, one thing that tends to go overlooked is the extent to which we do construct personal narratives, but that perhaps the promise of practically limitless information suggests to someone just recently "getting into" music -- as a serious intellectual commitment (and I'm not saying that everyone, or even most people, do this, but I did) -- that the path they're choosing is the "correct" path.
3.
Jukebox ran Tuesday. Paris's middling score is a bigger travesty than Nadiya's (Paris is about 20 times better), but one thing I thought was odd about the
Nadiya blurbs is that no one mentioned that THE CHORUS IS CHOPIN. Note for note. She actually says "CHOPIN PLAY THE SONG," like it's a guest spot. That was neat enough for me to give it an 8, along with it being a great single. As for Paris, y'all got issues, fine, GOOD even, but don't take it out on one of the top five to seven singles of the year which I am currently compiling (I gave it a 9). It should also be noted that I really like the phrase "experimental hamburger."
Speaking of Paris, the
Paris thread's been heating up again. [I know I just said I should post other places more, but I've said so much about this already I don't think I have much to argue in the middle of jpeg sabotages.] But I do want to whine about the story that revived the thread, that Paris vomited in the middle of singing one of her songs on stage at a Jay-Z concert. The headline I read uses the phrase "While Attempting to Sing Own Song," which is silly since they put the CD versions on and didn't expect her to sing either of the two songs (whether this was planned or impromptu is unclear, but it doesn't seem like she was a separately billed act or something). Point being that this has ZERO to do with her talent or ability, which are still documented on the album. Still perplexed by the argument against talent, as if her recorded performance is no indicator of her singing ability (still seeing arguments like "well, it's really about her writers/producers' talent" -- (1)
she is a co-writer and (2) even if you want to discount that, her role is to perform! So in that sense you can discuss her talent, but you can't assume that what you're hearing has nothing to do with her "actual" ability. I don't understand what's unclear about this). So what I'm basically saying is, the WAR ON LINDSAY (Lindsay just got into a car crash, which I don't buy at all since everyone knows she's rich enough to buy a car with an internal computer that will drive FOR her, so obviously it's a conspiracy) should probably be extended to the WAR ON PARIS and the WAR ON ASHLEE and the WAR ON FERGIE for good measure.
4. A friend of mine just suggested a fascinating economic model for Disney label pop, which she compared to a market system following, for example, the deregulation of the airlines in the 1970s. It's a "perfectly contestable market," which occurs within a larger, possibly monopolistic (or at least monolithic) industry. Roughly -- airline industry: big media/music distro industry :: individual flight "market":boutique labels/album production. So the Disney market is a subdivision of sorts of a larger market model -- the Disney media monopoly -- in which Disney has no inherent control over the product, e.g. they don't control the market (CD prices, dictated by the "primary" market, the music industry standard, or ~15-18 bucks a pop) and they don't necessarily control the content (the music on their albums, though this isn't always the case, and in some specific instances Disney controls for content. But judging from Aly and AJ or any of the Hollywood Records artists who don't get major airplay on Disney, this isn't always the case).
The requirements for a perfectly contestable market include operation at marginal costs (e.g. music production in the subdivision model, as opposed to astronomical costs of marketing and distribution in the overarching monopoly model), the ability of "firms" to enter and exit the market instantaneously (e.g. the ability to throw a bunch of artists at the wall and see who sticks), and the parent corporation acting as an overshadowing force that doesn't actively control the market within the subdivision. In the case of the airlines, a diverse market for flights -- say from Boston to New York or Philly to Phoenix, any time of day or night -- develops under the umbrella of a monolithic airline industry. This follows government deregulation, which in effect allows more flights to more locations more regularly with less regulatory hassle (but no one outside the existing monopolistic industry could possibly afford to offer these flights). In the Disney model, the diverse market is for musical artists, and deregulation is more complicated -- in part it has to do with internet access (in terms of mobilizing a pre-existing market, Disney kids) and technological advances that make high-end music production very cheap.
ANYWAY. The interesting idea here is that the monopoly model acts as an umbrella for another model, which -- contrary to a general perception of stifling diversity (which, distribution-wise, the overarching monopoly model does, but only meaning there are a select few primary sources of mass distribution, which is kind of a no-brainer) -- actually encourages it. Not that I needed any convincing of that in economic terms, I just found this discussion interesting.
How this relates to recent discussion: Aly and AJ seem to be creating their audience in a similar way to Ashlee, there's no clear artistic or audience path for them, though not to the extent that there's no path for Ashlee. BUT, the Disney monopoly ensures that the artists have the audience as a given, but it has no influence on what they do, how it sounds, provided they play by the rules just long enough to keep their name out there ("Greatest Time of Year" on Disney Channel commercial breaks, "Not This Year" most likely not gonna be on Disney Channel anytime soon, both from the same album) or sometimes push some boundaries (success of "Rush" on RD), but for the most part retain artistic freedom. If Ashlee was on Hollywood Records, working with the same producers...she's still in the Top 50 over on RD.
OK, that's all for a while, but I won't be taking a three-month hiatus. Not this year.
