Only a couple of years too early for VIRAL EFFICACY, sigh.
Video for "My Hit Song":
"Behind the Muse" Parody:
Pt. 1
Pt. 2
I think that she must have been making this parody about the same time my friends and I made our first short film, "Penetrating the Music: Joe Daddy," in high school!
Saturday, April 26, 2008
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Valentine's Day ya ya ya ya
Vicky sez: "You can't throw me."
Hmmmmmmmmm.
HMMMMMMMMM.
So Ashlee's on her third album, and I gotta say, I'm giving her a lot of credit just for pulling it off. First listen was impressive, second listen is tempered with opinions of two colleagues I trust -- Frank Kogan and Jimmy Draper -- feeling more ambivalent than I seemed to be. But I'm rarely disappointed by an album that clicks, even a bit, on first listen. Which is to say, I already know I like the album, but maybe a rundown will help articulate why.
Dance stuff: "Outta My Head," "Boys," "Rule Breaker," "Hot Stuff," arguably "Murder."
Nia was spot-on in seeing Ashlee as a 21st century Roxie Hart in this one -- Ashlee says just that in a recent interview, and even if she's not literally doing the Vicky Valentine dual persona thing, some kind of new personality, nu-Ashlee, is here, and mostly old-Ashlee is kept under the surface, both in terms of depth and earnestness.
I really like "Boys," even tough it admittedly sounds like a second-shelf Jessica Simpson material (of course, important to remember here that most of Jessica Simpson's material is THIRD-shelf Jessica Simpson material); "Outta My Head" ingratiated itself pretty easily after some initial resistance, and with that I kind of had some terms on which to judge Vicky, though with time I've found more Ashlee-as-I-know-her in it, unlike "Rule Breaker" which strikes me as 100% Vicky).
(Side note while I'm still re-skimming the three tracks I knew really well: in the time between hearing I Am Me for the first time and now, I've spent an inordinate amount of time with Ashlee's first album, Autobiography, and relatively little with her second album, the one that kind of got me into her to begin with. So it colors my expectations in a weird way -- I forget that retroactively, trying to piece together Ashlee's career to date, I Am Me feels distinctly like a holding pattern with a few lighter tracks, and whatever else this album is, it's not a holding pattern. I think it's to her credit that it's not a failure, since her range as an artist seemed almost impossibly narrow until now.)
"Hot Stuff," a funny, weird little dance number, very similar to the stuff from Katy Rose's Candy Eyed. Alice in Wonderland breakdown, stays bugged-out throughout and might be an under-the-radar favorite. All Vicky. "Murder" sounds better than I remember it sounding, but Frank is right that it suffers from a much more boring rap shat out by Timbaland instead of the batshit "O.J. is my favorite Simpson" verse by Gym Class Hero Travis McCoy.
Rockers: "No Time for Tears," "Ragdoll," "Bittersweet World," "What I've Become"
Hm, not sure how to classify "Tears." Starts with some electro burping, turns into a pretty standard rocker -- barely scratches the surface of dusting herself off and trying again. Has a kind of perpetual low-key energy that, say, "I Am Me" wouldn't have worked with -- just kind of coasts, but doesn't sit there like a glob. But the fact that I could suggest it might sit like a glob suggests that it's skirting glob. Still, she's globbed before -- "In Another Life" comes to mind. (But I guess comparing this to my least favorite of her songs isn't quite fair, and it's still not particularly strong.)
"Ragdoll" is Roxie, "why you gotta throw me around like a ragdoll?" Ummmmmm, because it's what you said ya wanted in "La La"! Er, no. But you definitely get the sense of a persona again here; not the same Ashlee who sang "La La." First of all it's sharp and punchy, guitars pasted in as accents more than providing the meat on the skeleton of the song (the bones are showing here) and she's a little devilish -- Vicky's sort of a demon-pixie, but Ashlee's too everywoman for this kind of prancing around; even when she's being fun she stomps a little. No stomping here, especially on the title track, a weak tossed-off swing, strangely lacking in any semblance of bass -- why not just go flat-out upright on it? Seems like a bit of an awkward compromise between Roxie and Vicky, but it's a nice enough tune. Feels particularly alien, though, a kind of extension of her (swingless) "Why Don't You Do Right" I saw her do live that wants that much depth and isn't getting it. Actually, I bet Amy Diamond could pull this off pretty well, but it begs for a kind of Broadway elbow grease Ashlee probably doesn't have in her.
"What I've Become" is unapologetic power pop that almost lets the Shanks wall-of-guitar seep in at the chorus but ultimately backs off. Don't see as how the Shanks signature would help it any -- this is probably the only rocker that really tries to find the middleground between Vicky and Ashlee, and...I dunno, I guess I don't buy it. One thing I like about this album is that it's not afraid of meticulousness -- the arrangements are precise, relatively spare (despite the thick-spread power-pop synths on this one). To recycle a phrase I once used to describe the Mooney Suzuki's makeover with the Matrix, you can bounce a quarter off these tunes, and I think she handles it pretty well (unlike Mooney Suzuki, say).
Ballads: "Little Miss Obsessive," "Never Dream Alone"
"Obsessive" is probably the closest to old-Ashlee we get on this one, and it's telling that to me she sounds a little out of place -- she brings in Plain White T's dude, "got in a fight with myself," right, so why the hell bring in the actual GUY? This isn't even a particularly guy-centric post-breakup? "Why does it have to be so unfair, tell me that you care" is like something an Ashlee-lite might come up with, but you get none of her ambivalence. She sounds like a baby; what happened to "my feet are on the ground even though I'm stuck?"
"Never Dream Alone," too calculated, too meta-level "this is my closing ballad." Vicki tries her hand at "Say Goodbye" and kind of, like, fails. But it's a pleasant enough outro, I guess...
...So the final verdict, I think, is there's a lot of concept here, but not a whole lot of ideas. Ashlee works best in aggregate -- the way her songs plunge into the middle of a story (even when she's introducing herself) and lets you kind of tread water for yourself if you feel like putting in the time. Which most people don't, but I guess that's neither here nor there. Anyway, there's no treading water here -- neither in the production, which is precisely layered -- from her vocals to the guitar itself, which used to just slather itself over the track and here is leveled to equal everything else just another weapon in the production arsenal -- nor in the concept, which gives you the idea of a character but not much of an idea of a person (unless you already knew her, in which case it's pretty obvious that the real person is playing dress-up).
It works. I like it, too, it does what I think Skye Sweetnam's album didn't quite achieve last year, which is throw a million small ideas into a blender, up the production values (or at least signifier of production values -- something more like "studio tricks" -- since the literal prod. values on her other two albums are quite high) and hope everyone makes it out OK. They do, but I can't help but think, as a sorta representative example here, that I could listen to "Shadow," think about it pretty intently, and not even notice that there was a STRING SECTION weeping behind her the whole time. It just wasn't a big deal (Ashlee yawning in studio); here everything is a big deal except for the album itself. They may have kept "I'm Out" off the thing just because it's so casual, there's nothing particularly remarkable on the face of it. But then, there's nothing remarkable anywhere in it. (And Autobiography is remarkable in part because it's so doggedly unremarkable on a gloss-over; not bad, but not screaming for attention -- even when it is ["La La," maybe "Autobiography" to some extent].)
Vicky likes to shriek and flirt and, uh, contort for attention, but she doesn't really deserve that much thought. She's not really asking for it. But then, I don't find myself thinking about much of I Am Me, either, and that's (almost) all Ashlee -- it's a reiteration of a few of the themes with a little bit more fun ("Boyfriend," "L.O.V.E.," maybe "I Am Me" in its own way) and a few major surprises ("Say Goodbye," maybe "Dancing Alone"). But breaking this one down, I'm giving Vicky about 6 out of 11 tracks, with two-three theatrical indulgences, another two-three simple-pleasure dance tracks. Ashlee/Vicky gets, say, four -- "Outta My Head" (the only dance track that really strikes me as not just goofing around), "What I've Become," and maybe "No Time for Tears" or "Murder." Which basically leaves "Little Miss Obsessive," the only straight-up Ashlee track, and I've got my own problems with it (basically, sounds like Ashlee stuck, with useless schlub partner, in a Vicky approximation of an Ashlee production).
BUT, and this is where I'm a little disappointed (I still think the album itself is generally a hoot) I am getting a pretty strong sense that an awful lot of Ashlee-as-I-know-her is an awful lot of Kara-as-I-like-her-most. And both of them have been frivolous, and sound like they're settling. Which, hell, isn't so bad. But in the whole social distinction/subgenre/whatever, I'm projecting my highest expectations onto them. So when they just want to fuck around, I find myself feeling impatient, if amused. I just hope there's more for them to say, but maybe this is one of the pitfalls of figuring out your way to something two years late and expecting to get a shot at really living the experience again, especially since the terms of that experience are to a large degree determined by investing a lot retroactively into a moment I felt must have just passed me. ***1/2
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Viral Cyrus
Well I'll be damned. The new Ashlee Simpson album is consistently excellent. As good if not better than I Am Me, even! Time will tell, more later.
No further commentary for now, I really just came to post this video of Miley Cyrus doing a choreographed dance to "4 Minutes" that is much less awful than the official video for it. Still don't think the song's very good. "I'm Miley Cyrus and I got fo' minutes..."
(h/t Idolator)
Idolator commented on Miley/Mandy's commitment to the big JC, but I didn't really bat an eyelash. Y'all should really really read this book. More on that later, too.
No further commentary for now, I really just came to post this video of Miley Cyrus doing a choreographed dance to "4 Minutes" that is much less awful than the official video for it. Still don't think the song's very good. "I'm Miley Cyrus and I got fo' minutes..."
(h/t Idolator)
Idolator commented on Miley/Mandy's commitment to the big JC, but I didn't really bat an eyelash. Y'all should really really read this book. More on that later, too.
Monday, April 14, 2008
Bedmux#2
Now featuring selections from my FIRST QUARTER folder. Some of these are older (or a little newer, maybe) than that, but they hopped on my radar sometime between January and the end of March.
1. September - Cry for You
2. Danity Kane f. Missy Eliott - Bad Girl
3. The Knux - Cappuccino
4. Wiley - Wearing My Rolex
5. V.I.C. f. Soulja Boy - Get Silly
6. Teyana Taylor - Google Me
7. Cupid f. B.O.B. - 369
8. Maria Daniela y su Sonido Lasser - Dame Mas
9. Britta Persson - At 7
10. Dolly Parton - Jesus & Gravity
11. Ashlee Simpson - I'm Out
12. Karina Pasian - 16 @ War
September's a lot stronger than some of the discussion of it over at Poptimists suggests it is -- weirdly, my reaction to it is similar to Sharam's PATT, in that it brings out weird latent second-hand nostalgia responses that I'm not sure what to do with...it's as if I've tapped into the "why now?" aspect of Tom Ewing's reluctant endorsement without knowing anything about its past. Which isn't true (it's a slightly simpler/cheesier rendition of straight Euro-club-pop that just about every UK/Euro/Scando poptress does occasionally -- Margaret Berger's "Samantha," say), but there's some sorta Pavlovian shit going on. Plus Emily loves it, so there.
Danity Kane's album is really strong overall, a definite top ten contender (and now I'm wondering why Rihanna never had a shot at my ten with a stronger buffet-style R&B/pop album last year?) and I reluctantly picked "Bad Girl" over my inexplicable favorite, "Lights Out" -- lot to be said for catching a decent song for the first time on the first great day of the year. Cupid is similar -- an obvious pick, not too interesting but I think it gets better the more you listen to it. Verses need a bit of a lift but as the chorus loses its novelty (and I guess it's been done to death elsewhere anyway) the whole thing kind of levels out.
Teyana and V.I.C. both paler shades of '07 teenpop, but I like 'em pretty well anyway -- the former has nothing on Lil' Mama (or Kelis, more obvious reference point) but this song has really wormed its way into my brane. "Googlemebebbe" should be great for about another eight seconds, but whatever what a fun couple of seconds it will be. Anyway, I was wrong about the staying power of "Lip Gloss," which continues to knock me out. V.I.C. is more or less indistinguishable from a Soulja Boy track, except the rapping is more competent [EDIT: in case the last bit there wasn't clear, I don't mean to insult Soulja Boy or give any undue credit to competence]. A couple of great one-liners, and I think it's sum good natured fun, though not much of a contender for the Soulja Boy-related product of the year. YAHHHHHHHH.
The Knux and Wiley are both swiped from Tom and Frank and I don't have much to say about them except that if you haven't heard them yet, try them first. Maria Daniela with questionable single status here, but the song is probably the highlight on her new album. Matthew Fluxblog turned me on to Britta Persson, who does second (or first-and-a-half) shelf occasionally whimsical Scandoangst in Marit Larsen fashion. Doesn't hold a candle to Marit, but a lot of that is because she decided at some point in her career that singing with cotton in her mouth was a good idea. OH WELL. Great great great opening line: "You look a mirror to me / I am not saying that I think you're ugly / Just hard to look at." GOLD GOLD GOLD.
Dolly Parton's "Jesus and Gravity" might (might might might) be my single of the year so far. I KNOW. I don't know. But there's just something about it -- this articulation of the humbling effect of gravity on her faith. I know it's basically cleverer than it is deep, or comes across that way -- but I dunno, I still can't help but project my own ambivalence about that split onto it. Jesus, being all things to all people, gives you kind of a big head, but let's just see how you deal with nature's arbitrary cruelty. Dolly Herzog. Yeah yeah yeah it's a stretch I know, but there's...just...something...that compels me to stretch it anyway. And that's to say nothing of that great moment where Dolly is singing "Jesus!" and the choir behind her is singing "holding me down!" (I mean, Jesus basically is gravity, too, right? LIKE WHAT IF JESUS WAS CANCER AND THE CURE FOR CANCER AT THE SAME TIME MAAAAAN.)
Ends things up with Ashlee's promising bonus track to upcoming Bittersweet World, which, from what I've heard, could use more of its relaxed, wistful vibe -- sort of middle-stretch-of-Autobiography in its easiness (thinly) masking somewhat more conflicted lyrics. The lyrics aren't quite there ("my heart is feelin' jaded" = *BARF*, maybe Kara was, like, her copy editor or something...and she keeps singing "lovah" in a way that really bugs me) and maybe the easiness isn't in stark enough contrast to make it an on-second-thought mind-bender like "Pieces of Me" ended up being. Should really give "Little Miss Obsessive" a few more chances to make a comparable impact (I do forget how long it took me to really click with a few Autobiography tracks, longer than the I Am Me album as a whole). And Karina Pasian's "16 @ War" is an overwrought ghetto lament without the fairytale flourishes of Keke Palmer's "Music Box," but there are a few lines that kind of strike me -- the peer pressure line doesn't come across as too preachy somehow, and I like how she tackles smog and mean girls simultaneously.
1. September - Cry for You
2. Danity Kane f. Missy Eliott - Bad Girl
3. The Knux - Cappuccino
4. Wiley - Wearing My Rolex
5. V.I.C. f. Soulja Boy - Get Silly
6. Teyana Taylor - Google Me
7. Cupid f. B.O.B. - 369
8. Maria Daniela y su Sonido Lasser - Dame Mas
9. Britta Persson - At 7
10. Dolly Parton - Jesus & Gravity
11. Ashlee Simpson - I'm Out
12. Karina Pasian - 16 @ War
September's a lot stronger than some of the discussion of it over at Poptimists suggests it is -- weirdly, my reaction to it is similar to Sharam's PATT, in that it brings out weird latent second-hand nostalgia responses that I'm not sure what to do with...it's as if I've tapped into the "why now?" aspect of Tom Ewing's reluctant endorsement without knowing anything about its past. Which isn't true (it's a slightly simpler/cheesier rendition of straight Euro-club-pop that just about every UK/Euro/Scando poptress does occasionally -- Margaret Berger's "Samantha," say), but there's some sorta Pavlovian shit going on. Plus Emily loves it, so there.
Danity Kane's album is really strong overall, a definite top ten contender (and now I'm wondering why Rihanna never had a shot at my ten with a stronger buffet-style R&B/pop album last year?) and I reluctantly picked "Bad Girl" over my inexplicable favorite, "Lights Out" -- lot to be said for catching a decent song for the first time on the first great day of the year. Cupid is similar -- an obvious pick, not too interesting but I think it gets better the more you listen to it. Verses need a bit of a lift but as the chorus loses its novelty (and I guess it's been done to death elsewhere anyway) the whole thing kind of levels out.
Teyana and V.I.C. both paler shades of '07 teenpop, but I like 'em pretty well anyway -- the former has nothing on Lil' Mama (or Kelis, more obvious reference point) but this song has really wormed its way into my brane. "Googlemebebbe" should be great for about another eight seconds, but whatever what a fun couple of seconds it will be. Anyway, I was wrong about the staying power of "Lip Gloss," which continues to knock me out. V.I.C. is more or less indistinguishable from a Soulja Boy track, except the rapping is more competent [EDIT: in case the last bit there wasn't clear, I don't mean to insult Soulja Boy or give any undue credit to competence]. A couple of great one-liners, and I think it's sum good natured fun, though not much of a contender for the Soulja Boy-related product of the year. YAHHHHHHHH.
The Knux and Wiley are both swiped from Tom and Frank and I don't have much to say about them except that if you haven't heard them yet, try them first. Maria Daniela with questionable single status here, but the song is probably the highlight on her new album. Matthew Fluxblog turned me on to Britta Persson, who does second (or first-and-a-half) shelf occasionally whimsical Scandoangst in Marit Larsen fashion. Doesn't hold a candle to Marit, but a lot of that is because she decided at some point in her career that singing with cotton in her mouth was a good idea. OH WELL. Great great great opening line: "You look a mirror to me / I am not saying that I think you're ugly / Just hard to look at." GOLD GOLD GOLD.
Dolly Parton's "Jesus and Gravity" might (might might might) be my single of the year so far. I KNOW. I don't know. But there's just something about it -- this articulation of the humbling effect of gravity on her faith. I know it's basically cleverer than it is deep, or comes across that way -- but I dunno, I still can't help but project my own ambivalence about that split onto it. Jesus, being all things to all people, gives you kind of a big head, but let's just see how you deal with nature's arbitrary cruelty. Dolly Herzog. Yeah yeah yeah it's a stretch I know, but there's...just...something...that compels me to stretch it anyway. And that's to say nothing of that great moment where Dolly is singing "Jesus!" and the choir behind her is singing "holding me down!" (I mean, Jesus basically is gravity, too, right? LIKE WHAT IF JESUS WAS CANCER AND THE CURE FOR CANCER AT THE SAME TIME MAAAAAN.)
Ends things up with Ashlee's promising bonus track to upcoming Bittersweet World, which, from what I've heard, could use more of its relaxed, wistful vibe -- sort of middle-stretch-of-Autobiography in its easiness (thinly) masking somewhat more conflicted lyrics. The lyrics aren't quite there ("my heart is feelin' jaded" = *BARF*, maybe Kara was, like, her copy editor or something...and she keeps singing "lovah" in a way that really bugs me) and maybe the easiness isn't in stark enough contrast to make it an on-second-thought mind-bender like "Pieces of Me" ended up being. Should really give "Little Miss Obsessive" a few more chances to make a comparable impact (I do forget how long it took me to really click with a few Autobiography tracks, longer than the I Am Me album as a whole). And Karina Pasian's "16 @ War" is an overwrought ghetto lament without the fairytale flourishes of Keke Palmer's "Music Box," but there are a few lines that kind of strike me -- the peer pressure line doesn't come across as too preachy somehow, and I like how she tackles smog and mean girls simultaneously.
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Isn't Miranda Cosgrove a character on "Sex and the City"?
The next Jeannie Ortega?
Factoids from this sorta-interesting Forbes article on the next up from the Disney cross-platform assembly line, Demi Lovato.
"Move over, Miley Cyrus. Demi Lovato is the next big thing. The reason why is simple: The Walt Disney Co. says so."
Um, no. Walt Disney Co. can't seem to make a star worth a damn without a TV show and an even more insane level of promotion than Demi is already getting (supporting role on the Jonas Brothers tour). I'm guessing that "Rock Camp," the movie she's starring in with the Jonas Brothers, will do OK, but with any luck it'll also show signs of the Jonases finally starting to fade out, what with all of their music being terrible, especially in comparison to a lot of the non-Disney pop that's starting to sneak back on the Radio Disney charts. (My prognostication skillz tell me that Miley will do pretty well for herself when she finally goes solo, and she'll be the last major cross-platform success of the Disney brand, followed by lots of much smaller successes.)
"And, oh yeah, she just signed with Hollywood Records (a Disney record label, of course) and hopes to release a debut album this fall."
So is Jordan Pruitt's career basically over already?
"For those deemed worthy, Disney and Nickelodeon rev up the star machine, starting with their much-watched television projects. Nickelodeon's popular Miranda Cosgrove-star vehicle iCarly averaged 7.4 million viewers in the 6- to 11-year-old demographic in recent months, while the Disney Channel still rides high from its High School Musical 2 premiere, which nabbed a record 18.6 million viewers."
I thought these stats were interesting compared to these:
"It adds up fast. According to SNL Kagan, Nickelodeon raked in $342.8 million from DVDs and related gear in 2007, up from $306 million in 2006. And while the Disney Channel brought in only $35.6 million in 2007, down from the $72 million it yielded largely off the success of the High School Musical brand in 2006, it's expected to garner $77.8 million in 2008."
A good reminder that Nickelodeon is major competition outside the music bubble. Disney makes a ton of its money from theme parks and other (non-Disney-identified) TV and film distribution companies. Which, as I don't think a whole lot of people have mentioned, means that their risk for music projects is (comparatively) pretty low, and would likely be the FIRST place to decrease marketing dollars, promotion effort, etc. Which is another reason I think the current hyper-amped Disney megasuccess model is more or less a fluke -- in the scheme of things, even the powerhouses can't compete with ESPN (or, in the case of Viacom/Nickelodeon, MTV, which -- as I was told last week -- handily makes more money than any kid-geared media outlet).
Which is all to say, I guess, that it's important to remember the social organizing strands of Disney music, maybe moreso than its corporate origins; the interesting thing about HSM/Hannah Montana isn't just the money it rakes in, but the insulation of its audience. I watched a clip of the most recent Nickelodeon's Kids' Choice Awards the other day and the interaction of Nickelodeon with the wider pop culture world (MTV-with-training-wheels) is starkly in contrast to the isolated niche bubble of Disney media. Whether or not that gives Nickelodeon an edge over time is unclear, though: if the Disney bubble were to collapse somehow, the company doesn't have as many avenues to reach out to for support -- hence the paradox that it's both healthy and threatening for Disney to allow outside artists onto their radio station in fuller force at this point -- but it also isn't in any great danger of collapsing yet.
Hey, maybe I should actually listen to Demi Lovato.
Shadow: Ummmm why am I identifying this as like the Disney Dismemberment Plan? Musically a bit indier than usual Hollywood Recs fare, lyrics pretty bad, voice good but unremarkable.
Stronger: I'm glad that I made the observation in the Bluffer's Guide that kids can probably graduate from Disney to the Shins directly now -- so maybe Demi will push things in that direction. Might continue in the singer-songwriting pseudo-"pulled-from-MySpace" vein of Marie Digby (I never followed the story about her phony grassroots support, and so never learned that, surprise, it was likely masterminded by Hollywood Records) from the sound of these (I'm assuming) demos.
An update (sort of) from the last post: I've been a litle outta the loop lately, and good teenpop can be found mostly in hip-hop and R&B this year, from Teyana Taylor, Soulja Boy-connected VIC, and Karina Pasian.
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Notes on the Death of Rolling Teenpop
I didn't hesitate to have the 2008 version of the Rolling Teenpop thread locked, not just because it was being trolled a bit more regularly than usual (only once in a way that merited any kind of moderation) but because I thought, and I think the main posters agreed, that it may not be worth the effort of keeping up. (The thread itself would have never died given the more passive posting on it in the past several months, so it's a relief to know that nothing else can be posted there.)
Anyway, I think it's for the best, but it got me thinking about my own relationship to ILM, and the relationship of the thread to ILM, as a way of thinking through some ideas on TROLLS I've had recently.
I should start out by saying that my thoughts here are PRO-TROLL, with reservations, and the reservations are serious, but not serious enough to turn me anti-troll. I consider myself to be a troll in a lot of online places, sometimes productively and sometimes less so, and I've certainly trolled more than one person on my blogroll. Which still needs updating, and will probably then reflect MORE trolling on my part.
Difference between a troll and a bully, to expand on a few ideas that I think Frank is dealing with in his Poptimists post on this subject, is kind of subtle. It's basically the difference between provocation and harassment, but provocation involves some element of harassment and harassment -- maybe "badgering" in a less loaded word -- itself is sometimes the only way to engage an oppositional viewpoint, or feels that way. The basic premise here is that rational conversation, especially online, can only go so far, and it can go sour for a million reasons -- acquiescence to shared, but often simply received or unexplored, ideas, dwindling general interest, formatting issues -- and trolling incites people to positions, figuring out their own and disputing another one. Trolling doesn't have to be dialectic in nature -- just about anything can incite a response. Maybe the best troll/thoughtful moment in teenpop history was this exchange, never really taken up by anyone but Frank (it was directed to him), which resonates with some of the unspoken unease with (not necessarily direct critique of, but probably a factor in its eventual hermetic vibe) the thread among what I might call "bystanders," people who genuinely weren't interested in the music but might have chatted about it if there had been NO baggage in the thread (if they liked a particular song, which happened all the time in 2006 and the beginning of 2007).
The question could have just as easily been asked without the first qualifier, and it might have seemed more negative. But it was a legitimate question that the thread, for a lot of reasons, was dancing around, in part because I (for instance) don't tend to think about this music with my dick (I'd rather fight about not being funny than being a lech, will probably get more upset by the former accusation in part because I'm a lot more concerned with it!), but also because there are certain questions that, for whatever reason, just don't come up. So they need to be brought up -- what I think happened was that a lot of eyebrow-narrowing built up for a long period of time, some justifiably, some coming from possibly justifiable places that betrayed a deep ignorance of what was actually going on. E.g., Zach Baron's lazy and transparent paraphrase of the 2006 thread and at least one early Sugar Shock column in his Meg and Dia review for Pitchfork does make me, incidentally the only person who has publicly admitted to commenting on Brie Larson's MySpace page [you can read the article I subsequently wrote about it here, and a later interview I did with her via MySpace comment is on my sidebar], sound like a creep. But what he says about me is also completely inaccurate -- one possibly valid critique of what I was doing is that there's a contrarian impulse behind trotting out Brie Larson's precocious intellect all the time as if there aren't other bright teenagers out there. But what made (and still makes) Brie interesting is the negotiation between fairly indie- and bohemian-centric intellectual development and the role that she plays (not sure where her career stands right this second, but I'm talking about 2006 here) in the wider culture. In contrast to common children in media tropes -- manipulation, sexualization, prompt disposal past a distressingly young "sell-by" date, all of which can and often do happen -- here was a girl who was vocally, adamantly, funny and smart. Skye Sweetnam affected me in the same way -- I may go overboard occasionally in praise, but it's compensatory, and I genuinely do not think that Skye and Brie are exceptions to the rule, that teens in media -- ones with a platform to reach the widest audience -- must at least be smarter than they're frequently given credit for, and beyond that, I'm honestly attracted to a lot of their music, for a lot of different reasons.
So dick's not it. Or at least not all there is -- though it seems to me that what I've argued most insistently about sex in teenpop is that it tends to be explicit in content and strange (and powerful) in overall message and effect, often in pretty stark contrast to sex elsewhere in pop music. This has nothing to do with my attraction to the performers, and it definitely doesn't lead me to comfortably endorse hyper-sexualized marketing (though it's another extremely complex issue that deserved to be teased out by an outsider or troll and was never effectively done in two+ of the thread's existence). It really has to do with how I think about a song like "Better Off," a song like "Blush," a song like "Touch of My Hand," even, eventually, rethinking a song like Aaliyah's "Try Again," the lyrics of which I'd always taken for granted as fairly superficial (I take most lyrics for granted; I tend to put a lot, sometimes too much, emphasis on words-on-the-page rather than words-as-performed, but usually I enjoy a song without feeling compelled to write a 10th grade English paper on it).
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I started lurking at ILM in 2003, when a friend of mine told me it was where a bunch of rock critics hung out during their day jobs. I lurked for a while, was too intimidated to post anything substantial. When I started writing for Pitchfork in 2004, I posted there a little bit more frequently without having much impact. Then I went back to lurking, figuring out where identities matched up writers I read or had heard of, learning a lot. When I stumbled onto Skye Sweetnam's Noise in the Basement (I'm pretty sure on first listen I wrote a message to my friend Ross saying "she's like Avril Lavigne, but she seems to have a sense of irony about it") through Pitchfork (which might make that the weirdest and most significant thing that happened to me writing there, contrary opinions notwithstanding) I read about her through a pretty batshit thread on ILM, then read a lot (read: all) of what Metal Mike had written for the Village Voice, etc. etc. etc.
I didn't really know who Frank Kogan was, except as an occasional and memorable ILM pontificator and occasional Voice contributor, until 2005 when I was unthinkably allowed to vote again in Pazz and Jop and decided to troll.
It wasn't dishonest trolling -- aside from picking a Bratz track at #10, I stand behind every selection I made...Lindsay, Ashlee, Skye, Mountain Goats, Sharon Jones, Busdriver, whatever -- but it was also clearly eliciting a specific response from a specific audience. I was basically trolling the Ashlee Simpson: Emo or Oh No! Thread, which was another one getting me interested in writing more conversationally about the stuff I'd been immersing myself in, partly arbitrarily (it was cheap music and I was broke but liked buying albums) and partly in contrarian response to where the music conversations were happening. But I did invest myself in the music in the same all-consuming way I Got Into Music (which surprises me now to remember was 2001) and the excitement toward it was real, as was the glee of throwing monkey wrenches in conversations with friends (most of whom, being pretty good friends and generally open-minded people, didn't really bat an eyelash, so the "pleasures" of this sort of confrontation were fleeting from the start). I was figuring out modes of authorship that didn't correspond to my understanding of how the biz worked (and, it turns out, it was fairly unique authorship, possibly waning again after a relatively short run) and I was finding stuff like M2M, a good Ashlee Simpson gateway drug if you need one (or was it the other way around?). M2M often demanded I consider them seriously. Irony, except for the internal dramatic ironies of their stories, was not a luxury I could have as comfortably with M2M as I could with Britney or Skye or Lindsay Lohan or the boybands or the Veronicas' nu-teenpop (even when any of them were being serious). I'm pretty sure Breakaway and Autobiography and M!sundaztood came after I'd really started to click with Shades of Purple. And it was this strain, which was in the first sentence of the first post of the teenpop thread (and was ostensibly one of its main purposes for existing), that ultimately sparked conversation and sealed a lot of the thread off. One thing I think a lot of casual fans don't understand is that a ton of the music by Ashlee and M2M and Kelly is not supposed to be fun. It wants to be taken seriously, and it often deserves to be taken seriously -- and often when it doesn't quite deserve to be taken seriously (P!nk is a good example here) there are a lot of interesting contradictions bubbling under the surface. My dad constantly uses the phrase, "deep on the surface but superficial underneath," and I can't help but want to reverse it, make it totally redundant, to describe a lot of confessional teenpop -- which kind of, like, kills the joke. That ultimately might have been the message -- beyond any suspicions I have of the extent to which people by and large just don't want to talk about children's media in a wider cultural context -- that led to the thread sealing itself off: THIS IS NOT A JOKE.
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But I think it would be unfair to say that the discussion was humorless, and I think the blend of voices in 2006 in particular helped it from becoming too tedious or too heavy -- not all analysis has to SOUND heavy, and a lot of it didn't. This was part of the function of tabloid gossip flung up on occasion, a reminder that there is a lot that's funny and strange (and sad, but no less funny) stuff going on around the music. But the fact that there wasn't much funny going on IN a lot of the music just doesn't gibe with the epic black comedy that is tabloid culture, which most of the artists we were discussing were either thrown into (not unwillingly) or maybe even came from.
And to get back onto the subject of trolling, trolls can be really funny. It's the Lester Bangs pie-in-the-face theory about Alice Cooper, which has a lot to do with his humor (in contrast to Richie Havens' humorlessness). Rolling Teenpop had a lot of Alice Cooper in it (some literally, like the Hilary-with-flu gag) but it didn't get a lot of very good pies. One reason, and one that was somewhat lost as the thread went on, is that the thread itself was for trolling -- provoking ideas, pushing buttons -- and the object of trolling was the rest of the board. But it became a side-thread in the same manner of the other genre categories, which might be like having a "Rolling 2008 Music by Assholes" thread that was seen primarily as a genre overview. Rolling Teenpop was a centralized space for people who were sometimes attacked but more frequently just ignored on their own threads (Skye Sweetnam is a good example), but more than that, and beyond that, it was noticing a strong but impressionistic network within a whole morass of sensibilities and aesthetics and personalities -- orbiting around the social interaction between outside-audiences (teenpop threaders included, at least in the beginning) and the music that seemed to be "for" others but speaking to "us." (The music might have been easier to deal with when it was flirting or providing a dance beat or a hook, but there was a conversation happening through a lot of the music that, like M2M, demanded a certain matching earnestness.)
Rolling Teenpop was noticing, to try this idea on for size, a hermeneutics of a critical blind spot. I don't think that teenpop's casual but significant overlap with contemporary Christian music is at all a coincidence, and that similar resistant impulses to "keep it niche" (i.e. not attempt to understand with any depth or honesty or critical investment OR distance) come from a fundamentally similar place: most people are more comfortable not engaging with it. And that's their prerogative. The question I've now been asking with a greater sense of purpose in the past two years (and will hopefully ask directly in the context of Christian music itself when I write about Daniel Radosh's new Christian pop culture book, Rapture Ready!, soon) is what we gain by engaging. In Christian pop culture, the gains are general and evident; Radosh is essentially advocating CULTURE LUBE, which is an appropriate after-image after the sections on abstinence education and "sex after marriage." And I think it also has something to do with Frank's notion of PBS, the organization of media and ideas in a community that, while preserving them (possibly by preserving them) "renders them lame in our appreciation." A little bit of PBS, like a little bit of lube, is necessary to reduce friction -- counter/sub-mainstream versus mainstream, Christian versus secular -- and I think Frank is, in part, identifying the tricky aspect of PLEASURE we take in having cultural frictions to begin with. In the case of Christian culture, cultural friction has almost no pleasurable element -- it's not abstract enough. It segregates and isolates communities, encourages cultural ignorance on both sides, and leads to a "parallel universe" -- a sub-mainstream of its own -- that is getting big enough to lose its "sub-" status and become something more like "para-mainstream."
Here's the thing, though, and yes it will require me to stretch a few mixed metaphors to mind-boggling proportions so bear with me and we can sort it out in the comments: CULTURAL LUBE IS REALLY LAME. PBS is lame, despite the communities it can open up and the knowledge it can share; culture-lube is lame because it's based on compromise over passion, understanding over fighting, withholding judgment over...well, judging the SHIT out of people, who tend to be harder to judge when you know them a little better.
But being lame isn't the worst thing in the world, almost by definition. Lameness, in this context, is the middle of the road, a stasis point. The Christian/secular split needs healing, and it needs stasis in a healed middleground position -- it's a community thing, a shared interest in the betterment of human kind thing. Teenpop, the way Rolling Teenpop wanted it, was a lame-world exit clause, and of course it required some lube to get airing at all. I don't think the thread itself made much of an impact, but I do know that Skye Sweetnam made it into Da Capo Best Music Writing and some way and somehow a few young music-lovers are going to grow up thinking that Ashlee Simpson's Autobiography is ACTUALLY, NO FOOLING in the top tier of someone's critical canon. (She probably won't come after Sgt. Pepper's, but she'll come sooner than never.)
Another idea here, which I may not even totally agree with, is that "cool" has lost much of its cachet since it had any, as a concept, as a sustainable cultural way of life (maybe as the result of cultural pluralization but I guess I can stay offa that armchair for the moment) -- but that "lame" hasn't, because lame is for "other people" and cool is for YOU; it requires an effort that lameness doesn't, and can lose incentives if it goes out of style culturally -- for one thing, the bar is lower for lameness than coolness because you can just MAKE SHIT UP.
We can question taste in one direction (cooler-than-thou -- and I think I should positively invoke Carl Wilson's Celine Dion book here, because, despite my trolling, he is effectively questioning remnants of elitism that are more pervasive than my internet thought-bubble indicates on any given Thursday) but there's something appealing about it in the other direction. Sometimes it sits there as an escape to the boredom that sets in when there's been a new cultural paradigm shift and no one's rocking the boat. Importantly, though, I don't think that there has been a significant cultural paradigm shift, armchair digital utopias notwithstanding, in how music is really discussed -- and in very basic ways. We're not past debates about responsibilities (and/or just tendencies) as critical listeners to be democratic in our listening -- and by "not past," I mean it's not yet just part of the territory (even more downloading armchair blah blah notwithstanding); it's not yet widely recognized as a condition rather than a position. And in even more obvious ways, we're not past the Christian "them," and we're not past the children "them" -- often hypothetical in the latter case (most of the music we discussed on Rolling Teenpop was created for and marketed to teens-and-older, Radio Disney being a bizarre and atypical, but fascinating, barometer of less comfy demographic waters) usually overblown and narrowminded, if not quite flat-out hypothetical, in both cases.
So Rolling Teenpop was trolling certain widespread attitudes (not universal ones), not in what music we listen to, but how and why. How can you write about unironic music that moves you without the internet mask of knowing sarcasm that seems to permeate all musical conversation, even about music that we return to for our deepest emotional experiences? How can you write about funny or silly music in a way that doesn't deflate it (that's a huge problem generally, and not just for Rolling Teenpop, which could deflate silliness with the best of 'em). What happens when no one else (at least not critically) seems to be having these experiences with the music that's moving you most at all? When I posted Fefe Dobson's "Unforgiven" to a blogroll peer, making my case for its emotional resonance and its complicated analysis of a daughter-father relationship, we finally had to agree to disagree -- he just didn't hear it. It felt like a major loss (in this sense I occasionally empathized with the failure of some evangelicals in Rapture Ready! of getting their message across, even when the goal wasn't conversion -- anyway I maintain that Rolling Teenpop, for all its occasional overheated talk, wasn't in the conversion business) because on paper those lyrics remain to just plain LOOK like some really challenging, really great lyrics, even without the music (which I think adds to their power):
There's falling down and skinning my knee and other clunkers, but the heart of that lyric just seriously knocks me out every single time I listen to it, or even read it.
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I'm wandering a little. Anyway, I don't mean to write this as a "look at how a message board can fall apart" observation, because (1) I don't necessarily think it's true, (2) if I DID, saying so would be hugely presumptuous, and I've gotten in hot enough water for jabbing my elbows out without developing a more visible, less specialized relationship with the board. Board culture is still a culture, and there are a lot of casual get-to-know-you conventions that I was aware of but didn't do enough work to follow -- I don't think I had much of a presence lately anyway, even just via the teenpop thread (which I assume most people didn't read).
These are just thoughts I'm having now that the teenpop board isn't a potential avenue for my thoughts -- I'm interested in trolling, f'rinstance, based on a few ideas that have been floating around the ether lately, and in trying to understand why I can't bring myself to condemn the behavior. I've been a little down about my actual thought output lately -- I've lost a lot of avenues, and there are more that I don't use but should. But not having Rolling Teenpop is frankly more of a relief than anything else. Some of its criticisms, in troll or bully or friend form, were accurate -- it had clearly become a kind of sectarian fringe group of stubborn but content-enough devotees, and it had lost the spirit that kept other people coming to the board. But I'm having trouble figuring out where I want to see the conversation go, where I'd want to follow it even if I didn't feel some responsibility to keep throwing ideas out. It's not the kind of friction that leads to a fight, or even to the introduction of some PBS salve, it's more like perpetual, cyclical exhaustion, like what I'm doing, though immensely gratifying personally, is a not-yet-articulated cause (I'm not even sure I've gotten to a main point in however many words I've typed so far) that's teetering too close to LOST all of the time.
I can't give up on this stuff, obviously, because it's not in me. But I also need some time to figure out what it is exactly I'm doing -- who I'm reaching out to or lashing out at or looking for, and the only way to do it is to continue to write and wait. And this doesn't even begin to address the fact that I don't think I can name a single teenpop album that has COME OUT this year, let alone been any good (Ashlee is closest and I'm wary but hopeful). So maybe this stagnant vibe, to a large degree, is being motivated as much by the outside as the inside, by a need to reach farther out of an "uncomfortable" bubble that's become TOO comfortable, as much as by the insiders' need to push things along. It's very frustrating.
Anyway, I think it's for the best, but it got me thinking about my own relationship to ILM, and the relationship of the thread to ILM, as a way of thinking through some ideas on TROLLS I've had recently.
I should start out by saying that my thoughts here are PRO-TROLL, with reservations, and the reservations are serious, but not serious enough to turn me anti-troll. I consider myself to be a troll in a lot of online places, sometimes productively and sometimes less so, and I've certainly trolled more than one person on my blogroll. Which still needs updating, and will probably then reflect MORE trolling on my part.
Difference between a troll and a bully, to expand on a few ideas that I think Frank is dealing with in his Poptimists post on this subject, is kind of subtle. It's basically the difference between provocation and harassment, but provocation involves some element of harassment and harassment -- maybe "badgering" in a less loaded word -- itself is sometimes the only way to engage an oppositional viewpoint, or feels that way. The basic premise here is that rational conversation, especially online, can only go so far, and it can go sour for a million reasons -- acquiescence to shared, but often simply received or unexplored, ideas, dwindling general interest, formatting issues -- and trolling incites people to positions, figuring out their own and disputing another one. Trolling doesn't have to be dialectic in nature -- just about anything can incite a response. Maybe the best troll/thoughtful moment in teenpop history was this exchange, never really taken up by anyone but Frank (it was directed to him), which resonates with some of the unspoken unease with (not necessarily direct critique of, but probably a factor in its eventual hermetic vibe) the thread among what I might call "bystanders," people who genuinely weren't interested in the music but might have chatted about it if there had been NO baggage in the thread (if they liked a particular song, which happened all the time in 2006 and the beginning of 2007).
i dont know how to ask this without being offensive, and i mean it with real and genuine respect, and while actually liking ashlee--how much of yr love of teen pop is connected to yr dick frank?
-- anthony easton (anthony), Tuesday, 9 May 2006 10:59 (1 year ago) Link
Not a dumb question, Anthony, though not all love is genital, and I'd say that current teenpop is far from being the most sexualized music out there (compared to Europop and dance and r&b or even the teenpop of seven years ago). And also remember that I don't have a lot of access to the visuals - which isn't to say that the aurals can't be enticing. (Strangely enough, Ashlee's videos tend to fall flat for me.) But then, I definitely feel an emotional warmth towards the personas/bodies/human beings I hear in Ashlee's and Lindsay's and Kelly's sound - and from the words and the minds that those words reveal (or invent or construct or whatever). But my favorite Ashlee song is "La La," which isn't as sexy as it's trying to be, even if it's all about sexual role playing; and another favorite is "I Am Me," which hits me in the way that Courtney Love singing "Violet" and Grace Slick singing "White Rabbit" hit me, neither of which particularly convey "warm, wet, inviting pussy." In fact, the person who's singing really feels sexy to me is Lily Allen (whom I wouldn't call teenpop, though I'm glad to write about her on this thread, and she's in the teengirl's age group): the way her tone is almost deadpan but falls lazily from her lips. But I don't yet have the warm feeling towards her that I have towards Ashlee, Kelly, and Lindsay, which is certainly a feeling of love towards a feminized something. (Well, it's three distinct feelings: the Ashlee feeling towards Ashlee, the Kelly feeling towards Kelly, the Lindsay feeling towards Lindsay.) But then, I rate the Veronicas "4ever" as the song of the year so far, and though it has a very sexualized sound, it's not pulling that response from me. The feeling is more like being doused in sugar.
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.
-- Frank Kogan (Frank Kogan), Tuesday, 9 May 2006 19:48 (1 year ago) Link
The question could have just as easily been asked without the first qualifier, and it might have seemed more negative. But it was a legitimate question that the thread, for a lot of reasons, was dancing around, in part because I (for instance) don't tend to think about this music with my dick (I'd rather fight about not being funny than being a lech, will probably get more upset by the former accusation in part because I'm a lot more concerned with it!), but also because there are certain questions that, for whatever reason, just don't come up. So they need to be brought up -- what I think happened was that a lot of eyebrow-narrowing built up for a long period of time, some justifiably, some coming from possibly justifiable places that betrayed a deep ignorance of what was actually going on. E.g., Zach Baron's lazy and transparent paraphrase of the 2006 thread and at least one early Sugar Shock column in his Meg and Dia review for Pitchfork does make me, incidentally the only person who has publicly admitted to commenting on Brie Larson's MySpace page [you can read the article I subsequently wrote about it here, and a later interview I did with her via MySpace comment is on my sidebar], sound like a creep. But what he says about me is also completely inaccurate -- one possibly valid critique of what I was doing is that there's a contrarian impulse behind trotting out Brie Larson's precocious intellect all the time as if there aren't other bright teenagers out there. But what made (and still makes) Brie interesting is the negotiation between fairly indie- and bohemian-centric intellectual development and the role that she plays (not sure where her career stands right this second, but I'm talking about 2006 here) in the wider culture. In contrast to common children in media tropes -- manipulation, sexualization, prompt disposal past a distressingly young "sell-by" date, all of which can and often do happen -- here was a girl who was vocally, adamantly, funny and smart. Skye Sweetnam affected me in the same way -- I may go overboard occasionally in praise, but it's compensatory, and I genuinely do not think that Skye and Brie are exceptions to the rule, that teens in media -- ones with a platform to reach the widest audience -- must at least be smarter than they're frequently given credit for, and beyond that, I'm honestly attracted to a lot of their music, for a lot of different reasons.
So dick's not it. Or at least not all there is -- though it seems to me that what I've argued most insistently about sex in teenpop is that it tends to be explicit in content and strange (and powerful) in overall message and effect, often in pretty stark contrast to sex elsewhere in pop music. This has nothing to do with my attraction to the performers, and it definitely doesn't lead me to comfortably endorse hyper-sexualized marketing (though it's another extremely complex issue that deserved to be teased out by an outsider or troll and was never effectively done in two+ of the thread's existence). It really has to do with how I think about a song like "Better Off," a song like "Blush," a song like "Touch of My Hand," even, eventually, rethinking a song like Aaliyah's "Try Again," the lyrics of which I'd always taken for granted as fairly superficial (I take most lyrics for granted; I tend to put a lot, sometimes too much, emphasis on words-on-the-page rather than words-as-performed, but usually I enjoy a song without feeling compelled to write a 10th grade English paper on it).
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I started lurking at ILM in 2003, when a friend of mine told me it was where a bunch of rock critics hung out during their day jobs. I lurked for a while, was too intimidated to post anything substantial. When I started writing for Pitchfork in 2004, I posted there a little bit more frequently without having much impact. Then I went back to lurking, figuring out where identities matched up writers I read or had heard of, learning a lot. When I stumbled onto Skye Sweetnam's Noise in the Basement (I'm pretty sure on first listen I wrote a message to my friend Ross saying "she's like Avril Lavigne, but she seems to have a sense of irony about it") through Pitchfork (which might make that the weirdest and most significant thing that happened to me writing there, contrary opinions notwithstanding) I read about her through a pretty batshit thread on ILM, then read a lot (read: all) of what Metal Mike had written for the Village Voice, etc. etc. etc.
I didn't really know who Frank Kogan was, except as an occasional and memorable ILM pontificator and occasional Voice contributor, until 2005 when I was unthinkably allowed to vote again in Pazz and Jop and decided to troll.
It wasn't dishonest trolling -- aside from picking a Bratz track at #10, I stand behind every selection I made...Lindsay, Ashlee, Skye, Mountain Goats, Sharon Jones, Busdriver, whatever -- but it was also clearly eliciting a specific response from a specific audience. I was basically trolling the Ashlee Simpson: Emo or Oh No! Thread, which was another one getting me interested in writing more conversationally about the stuff I'd been immersing myself in, partly arbitrarily (it was cheap music and I was broke but liked buying albums) and partly in contrarian response to where the music conversations were happening. But I did invest myself in the music in the same all-consuming way I Got Into Music (which surprises me now to remember was 2001) and the excitement toward it was real, as was the glee of throwing monkey wrenches in conversations with friends (most of whom, being pretty good friends and generally open-minded people, didn't really bat an eyelash, so the "pleasures" of this sort of confrontation were fleeting from the start). I was figuring out modes of authorship that didn't correspond to my understanding of how the biz worked (and, it turns out, it was fairly unique authorship, possibly waning again after a relatively short run) and I was finding stuff like M2M, a good Ashlee Simpson gateway drug if you need one (or was it the other way around?). M2M often demanded I consider them seriously. Irony, except for the internal dramatic ironies of their stories, was not a luxury I could have as comfortably with M2M as I could with Britney or Skye or Lindsay Lohan or the boybands or the Veronicas' nu-teenpop (even when any of them were being serious). I'm pretty sure Breakaway and Autobiography and M!sundaztood came after I'd really started to click with Shades of Purple. And it was this strain, which was in the first sentence of the first post of the teenpop thread (and was ostensibly one of its main purposes for existing), that ultimately sparked conversation and sealed a lot of the thread off. One thing I think a lot of casual fans don't understand is that a ton of the music by Ashlee and M2M and Kelly is not supposed to be fun. It wants to be taken seriously, and it often deserves to be taken seriously -- and often when it doesn't quite deserve to be taken seriously (P!nk is a good example here) there are a lot of interesting contradictions bubbling under the surface. My dad constantly uses the phrase, "deep on the surface but superficial underneath," and I can't help but want to reverse it, make it totally redundant, to describe a lot of confessional teenpop -- which kind of, like, kills the joke. That ultimately might have been the message -- beyond any suspicions I have of the extent to which people by and large just don't want to talk about children's media in a wider cultural context -- that led to the thread sealing itself off: THIS IS NOT A JOKE.
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But I think it would be unfair to say that the discussion was humorless, and I think the blend of voices in 2006 in particular helped it from becoming too tedious or too heavy -- not all analysis has to SOUND heavy, and a lot of it didn't. This was part of the function of tabloid gossip flung up on occasion, a reminder that there is a lot that's funny and strange (and sad, but no less funny) stuff going on around the music. But the fact that there wasn't much funny going on IN a lot of the music just doesn't gibe with the epic black comedy that is tabloid culture, which most of the artists we were discussing were either thrown into (not unwillingly) or maybe even came from.
And to get back onto the subject of trolling, trolls can be really funny. It's the Lester Bangs pie-in-the-face theory about Alice Cooper, which has a lot to do with his humor (in contrast to Richie Havens' humorlessness). Rolling Teenpop had a lot of Alice Cooper in it (some literally, like the Hilary-with-flu gag) but it didn't get a lot of very good pies. One reason, and one that was somewhat lost as the thread went on, is that the thread itself was for trolling -- provoking ideas, pushing buttons -- and the object of trolling was the rest of the board. But it became a side-thread in the same manner of the other genre categories, which might be like having a "Rolling 2008 Music by Assholes" thread that was seen primarily as a genre overview. Rolling Teenpop was a centralized space for people who were sometimes attacked but more frequently just ignored on their own threads (Skye Sweetnam is a good example), but more than that, and beyond that, it was noticing a strong but impressionistic network within a whole morass of sensibilities and aesthetics and personalities -- orbiting around the social interaction between outside-audiences (teenpop threaders included, at least in the beginning) and the music that seemed to be "for" others but speaking to "us." (The music might have been easier to deal with when it was flirting or providing a dance beat or a hook, but there was a conversation happening through a lot of the music that, like M2M, demanded a certain matching earnestness.)
Rolling Teenpop was noticing, to try this idea on for size, a hermeneutics of a critical blind spot. I don't think that teenpop's casual but significant overlap with contemporary Christian music is at all a coincidence, and that similar resistant impulses to "keep it niche" (i.e. not attempt to understand with any depth or honesty or critical investment OR distance) come from a fundamentally similar place: most people are more comfortable not engaging with it. And that's their prerogative. The question I've now been asking with a greater sense of purpose in the past two years (and will hopefully ask directly in the context of Christian music itself when I write about Daniel Radosh's new Christian pop culture book, Rapture Ready!, soon) is what we gain by engaging. In Christian pop culture, the gains are general and evident; Radosh is essentially advocating CULTURE LUBE, which is an appropriate after-image after the sections on abstinence education and "sex after marriage." And I think it also has something to do with Frank's notion of PBS, the organization of media and ideas in a community that, while preserving them (possibly by preserving them) "renders them lame in our appreciation." A little bit of PBS, like a little bit of lube, is necessary to reduce friction -- counter/sub-mainstream versus mainstream, Christian versus secular -- and I think Frank is, in part, identifying the tricky aspect of PLEASURE we take in having cultural frictions to begin with. In the case of Christian culture, cultural friction has almost no pleasurable element -- it's not abstract enough. It segregates and isolates communities, encourages cultural ignorance on both sides, and leads to a "parallel universe" -- a sub-mainstream of its own -- that is getting big enough to lose its "sub-" status and become something more like "para-mainstream."
Here's the thing, though, and yes it will require me to stretch a few mixed metaphors to mind-boggling proportions so bear with me and we can sort it out in the comments: CULTURAL LUBE IS REALLY LAME. PBS is lame, despite the communities it can open up and the knowledge it can share; culture-lube is lame because it's based on compromise over passion, understanding over fighting, withholding judgment over...well, judging the SHIT out of people, who tend to be harder to judge when you know them a little better.
But being lame isn't the worst thing in the world, almost by definition. Lameness, in this context, is the middle of the road, a stasis point. The Christian/secular split needs healing, and it needs stasis in a healed middleground position -- it's a community thing, a shared interest in the betterment of human kind thing. Teenpop, the way Rolling Teenpop wanted it, was a lame-world exit clause, and of course it required some lube to get airing at all. I don't think the thread itself made much of an impact, but I do know that Skye Sweetnam made it into Da Capo Best Music Writing and some way and somehow a few young music-lovers are going to grow up thinking that Ashlee Simpson's Autobiography is ACTUALLY, NO FOOLING in the top tier of someone's critical canon. (She probably won't come after Sgt. Pepper's, but she'll come sooner than never.)
Another idea here, which I may not even totally agree with, is that "cool" has lost much of its cachet since it had any, as a concept, as a sustainable cultural way of life (maybe as the result of cultural pluralization but I guess I can stay offa that armchair for the moment) -- but that "lame" hasn't, because lame is for "other people" and cool is for YOU; it requires an effort that lameness doesn't, and can lose incentives if it goes out of style culturally -- for one thing, the bar is lower for lameness than coolness because you can just MAKE SHIT UP.
We can question taste in one direction (cooler-than-thou -- and I think I should positively invoke Carl Wilson's Celine Dion book here, because, despite my trolling, he is effectively questioning remnants of elitism that are more pervasive than my internet thought-bubble indicates on any given Thursday) but there's something appealing about it in the other direction. Sometimes it sits there as an escape to the boredom that sets in when there's been a new cultural paradigm shift and no one's rocking the boat. Importantly, though, I don't think that there has been a significant cultural paradigm shift, armchair digital utopias notwithstanding, in how music is really discussed -- and in very basic ways. We're not past debates about responsibilities (and/or just tendencies) as critical listeners to be democratic in our listening -- and by "not past," I mean it's not yet just part of the territory (even more downloading armchair blah blah notwithstanding); it's not yet widely recognized as a condition rather than a position. And in even more obvious ways, we're not past the Christian "them," and we're not past the children "them" -- often hypothetical in the latter case (most of the music we discussed on Rolling Teenpop was created for and marketed to teens-and-older, Radio Disney being a bizarre and atypical, but fascinating, barometer of less comfy demographic waters) usually overblown and narrowminded, if not quite flat-out hypothetical, in both cases.
So Rolling Teenpop was trolling certain widespread attitudes (not universal ones), not in what music we listen to, but how and why. How can you write about unironic music that moves you without the internet mask of knowing sarcasm that seems to permeate all musical conversation, even about music that we return to for our deepest emotional experiences? How can you write about funny or silly music in a way that doesn't deflate it (that's a huge problem generally, and not just for Rolling Teenpop, which could deflate silliness with the best of 'em). What happens when no one else (at least not critically) seems to be having these experiences with the music that's moving you most at all? When I posted Fefe Dobson's "Unforgiven" to a blogroll peer, making my case for its emotional resonance and its complicated analysis of a daughter-father relationship, we finally had to agree to disagree -- he just didn't hear it. It felt like a major loss (in this sense I occasionally empathized with the failure of some evangelicals in Rapture Ready! of getting their message across, even when the goal wasn't conversion -- anyway I maintain that Rolling Teenpop, for all its occasional overheated talk, wasn't in the conversion business) because on paper those lyrics remain to just plain LOOK like some really challenging, really great lyrics, even without the music (which I think adds to their power):
And I want you to know that I didn’t need you anyway
And this rope that we walk on is swaying
And the ties that bind us they will never ever fray
But I want for you to know
You are, You are, Unforgiven
There's falling down and skinning my knee and other clunkers, but the heart of that lyric just seriously knocks me out every single time I listen to it, or even read it.
------
I'm wandering a little. Anyway, I don't mean to write this as a "look at how a message board can fall apart" observation, because (1) I don't necessarily think it's true, (2) if I DID, saying so would be hugely presumptuous, and I've gotten in hot enough water for jabbing my elbows out without developing a more visible, less specialized relationship with the board. Board culture is still a culture, and there are a lot of casual get-to-know-you conventions that I was aware of but didn't do enough work to follow -- I don't think I had much of a presence lately anyway, even just via the teenpop thread (which I assume most people didn't read).
These are just thoughts I'm having now that the teenpop board isn't a potential avenue for my thoughts -- I'm interested in trolling, f'rinstance, based on a few ideas that have been floating around the ether lately, and in trying to understand why I can't bring myself to condemn the behavior. I've been a little down about my actual thought output lately -- I've lost a lot of avenues, and there are more that I don't use but should. But not having Rolling Teenpop is frankly more of a relief than anything else. Some of its criticisms, in troll or bully or friend form, were accurate -- it had clearly become a kind of sectarian fringe group of stubborn but content-enough devotees, and it had lost the spirit that kept other people coming to the board. But I'm having trouble figuring out where I want to see the conversation go, where I'd want to follow it even if I didn't feel some responsibility to keep throwing ideas out. It's not the kind of friction that leads to a fight, or even to the introduction of some PBS salve, it's more like perpetual, cyclical exhaustion, like what I'm doing, though immensely gratifying personally, is a not-yet-articulated cause (I'm not even sure I've gotten to a main point in however many words I've typed so far) that's teetering too close to LOST all of the time.
I can't give up on this stuff, obviously, because it's not in me. But I also need some time to figure out what it is exactly I'm doing -- who I'm reaching out to or lashing out at or looking for, and the only way to do it is to continue to write and wait. And this doesn't even begin to address the fact that I don't think I can name a single teenpop album that has COME OUT this year, let alone been any good (Ashlee is closest and I'm wary but hopeful). So maybe this stagnant vibe, to a large degree, is being motivated as much by the outside as the inside, by a need to reach farther out of an "uncomfortable" bubble that's become TOO comfortable, as much as by the insiders' need to push things along. It's very frustrating.
Monday, April 07, 2008
I Also Enjoy Reading.
Wow, haven't updated my book sidebar in forever, so will to the best of my ability tell y'all what I have read in like the past couple months. Because you were DYING TO KNOW. In no particular order:
Confessions by Augustine - Great premise for a confessional album! Specifically by "Tina Sugar," to be played and co-written (eventually, haven't worked out the logistics yet o'course) by Brie Larson portraying ST. AUGUSTINE'S PROMISED BRIDE, who was promised to him at like age ten (olden days are fucked up) and may or may not have actually married the guy a couple years later. Anyway, he goes off looking for his spiritual enlightenment and actually finds it, the faker, and meanwhile Tina Sugar stays back and goes on her OWN search for enlightenment and (duh) doesn't actually find it. Key track: "You Call It Ascetic, I Call It Pathetic."
The Plot Against America by Philip Roth - Very different animal from the Roth I'm familiar with, and engrossing in a different way -- I'm still reconciling myself to the deus ex machina ending (which I won't reveal) EXCEPT to say that there's something -- to my X-philic brain anyway -- kind of harmonious about the absolute need to get history back on its track no matter the cost or stretch of plausibility. The fact that we can even talk about "plausibility" at the point of said derailment is kind of a testament to the power of most of the narrative.
The Throwback by Tom Sharpe - Y'know, I haven't been able to parse Tom Sharpe's politics in his fiction outside of a South African setting, where the critique is a little more obvious -- but when he keeps killing off armies of taxmen I can't help but think some dirty libertarian is trying to put his arm around me for a good yuk. Except all of the characters are so despicable I might just be able to chalk it up to basic misanthropy, which I feel more comfortable yukking with.
Grown Up All Wrong by Robert Christgau - Still haven't even put a dent in it, except reading it I get the sense that Xgau puts about the same amount of thought into his essays as he does into his blurbs, and that the main difference is breathing room (which I appreciate in the bathroom).
Philosophical Occasions by Wittgenstein - a pretty random assortment of essays, many of which are brilliant and just as many of which are totally impenetrable -- interesting to track his thoughts between major works. I still haven't been able to read Tractatus without my eyes crossing almost immediately, meanwhile Philosophical Investigations is a (comparative) breeze except I never sit down and actually READ the stupid thing, so I've re-read the first couple dozen pages over and over. I think my favorite book of Wittgensteinian thought is also the "lightest" (oh, hey, I'm kind of lazy whaddaya know), Conversations with Wittgenstein by O.K. Bouwsma. It's kind of like My Dinner with Andre except Wallace Shawn propositions get PWNED more (Wittgenstein likes to throw out really devastating -- and probably a little dangerous for philosophy-lite-types like myself -- sound bites) (and anyway I like my electric blanket too -- SO WHAT).
Rapture Ready by Daniel Radosh - It's as great as expected (better, actually), but I'll endorse it in its own post.
Cheating Destiny by James Hirsch - A great diabetes book with an unfortunately hokey title, really more of a medical, social, and historical overview of (primarily Type 1) diabetes that's an easy read full of surprising information for people who know nothing about it and people who know a lot about it, an intense personal history from Hirsch (a Type 1 diabetic himself whose son was recently diagnosed at age 3) and at least a dozen bizarre little essays on eccentrics and institutions in the field.
The Collective Unconscience of Odd Bodkins by Dan O'Neill - Almost as hard to believe this was published (popularly) in major newspapers as it is to look at old Little Nemo comics and realize that people drank their coffee over 'em. Presages the early caffeine-addled "Bloom County" (and probably "Doonsebury," the back-issues of which I've never really spent any time with) style but very little between or since, except maybe "Zippy the Pinhead" or something. Found this through a book on O'Neill's battles with Disney over copyright, which I haven't finished yet (The Pirates and the Mouse...fun fact: Disney actively sues anyone who tries to use the word "Disney" in a book title without their permission! Neat!).
That's all I can remember -- oh yeah, Umberto Eco's How to Travel with Salmon collection was really disappointing lightweight column chaff with vaguely Euro/chauvinist undertones that I don't care as much about in his fiction. But seriously, like, mother-in-law jokes.
On the shelf but basically unread or half-read: a Cahiers du Cinema collection that is just MEGABORE from what I've read so far, but that's probably unfair, The American Cinema by Andrew Sarris, which I flip through occasionally (great opening essay on "tree criticism," scattered bright spots in the filmography itself), Canyon Cinema by Scott MacDonald, which is dauntingly thick but probably worth the energy someday, and lots of reading on children's media production/distribution/reception that I'm hoping to synthesize into real actual content at some point.
If you can remember anything else I have read lately, please let me know.
Confessions by Augustine - Great premise for a confessional album! Specifically by "Tina Sugar," to be played and co-written (eventually, haven't worked out the logistics yet o'course) by Brie Larson portraying ST. AUGUSTINE'S PROMISED BRIDE, who was promised to him at like age ten (olden days are fucked up) and may or may not have actually married the guy a couple years later. Anyway, he goes off looking for his spiritual enlightenment and actually finds it, the faker, and meanwhile Tina Sugar stays back and goes on her OWN search for enlightenment and (duh) doesn't actually find it. Key track: "You Call It Ascetic, I Call It Pathetic."
The Plot Against America by Philip Roth - Very different animal from the Roth I'm familiar with, and engrossing in a different way -- I'm still reconciling myself to the deus ex machina ending (which I won't reveal) EXCEPT to say that there's something -- to my X-philic brain anyway -- kind of harmonious about the absolute need to get history back on its track no matter the cost or stretch of plausibility. The fact that we can even talk about "plausibility" at the point of said derailment is kind of a testament to the power of most of the narrative.
The Throwback by Tom Sharpe - Y'know, I haven't been able to parse Tom Sharpe's politics in his fiction outside of a South African setting, where the critique is a little more obvious -- but when he keeps killing off armies of taxmen I can't help but think some dirty libertarian is trying to put his arm around me for a good yuk. Except all of the characters are so despicable I might just be able to chalk it up to basic misanthropy, which I feel more comfortable yukking with.
Grown Up All Wrong by Robert Christgau - Still haven't even put a dent in it, except reading it I get the sense that Xgau puts about the same amount of thought into his essays as he does into his blurbs, and that the main difference is breathing room (which I appreciate in the bathroom).
Philosophical Occasions by Wittgenstein - a pretty random assortment of essays, many of which are brilliant and just as many of which are totally impenetrable -- interesting to track his thoughts between major works. I still haven't been able to read Tractatus without my eyes crossing almost immediately, meanwhile Philosophical Investigations is a (comparative) breeze except I never sit down and actually READ the stupid thing, so I've re-read the first couple dozen pages over and over. I think my favorite book of Wittgensteinian thought is also the "lightest" (oh, hey, I'm kind of lazy whaddaya know), Conversations with Wittgenstein by O.K. Bouwsma. It's kind of like My Dinner with Andre except Wallace Shawn propositions get PWNED more (Wittgenstein likes to throw out really devastating -- and probably a little dangerous for philosophy-lite-types like myself -- sound bites) (and anyway I like my electric blanket too -- SO WHAT).
Rapture Ready by Daniel Radosh - It's as great as expected (better, actually), but I'll endorse it in its own post.
Cheating Destiny by James Hirsch - A great diabetes book with an unfortunately hokey title, really more of a medical, social, and historical overview of (primarily Type 1) diabetes that's an easy read full of surprising information for people who know nothing about it and people who know a lot about it, an intense personal history from Hirsch (a Type 1 diabetic himself whose son was recently diagnosed at age 3) and at least a dozen bizarre little essays on eccentrics and institutions in the field.
The Collective Unconscience of Odd Bodkins by Dan O'Neill - Almost as hard to believe this was published (popularly) in major newspapers as it is to look at old Little Nemo comics and realize that people drank their coffee over 'em. Presages the early caffeine-addled "Bloom County" (and probably "Doonsebury," the back-issues of which I've never really spent any time with) style but very little between or since, except maybe "Zippy the Pinhead" or something. Found this through a book on O'Neill's battles with Disney over copyright, which I haven't finished yet (The Pirates and the Mouse...fun fact: Disney actively sues anyone who tries to use the word "Disney" in a book title without their permission! Neat!).
That's all I can remember -- oh yeah, Umberto Eco's How to Travel with Salmon collection was really disappointing lightweight column chaff with vaguely Euro/chauvinist undertones that I don't care as much about in his fiction. But seriously, like, mother-in-law jokes.
On the shelf but basically unread or half-read: a Cahiers du Cinema collection that is just MEGABORE from what I've read so far, but that's probably unfair, The American Cinema by Andrew Sarris, which I flip through occasionally (great opening essay on "tree criticism," scattered bright spots in the filmography itself), Canyon Cinema by Scott MacDonald, which is dauntingly thick but probably worth the energy someday, and lots of reading on children's media production/distribution/reception that I'm hoping to synthesize into real actual content at some point.
If you can remember anything else I have read lately, please let me know.
Thursday, April 03, 2008
WHY NOT I LIKE RANKING THINGS.
1st Quahtah Ahlbahms:
1. Erykah Badu - New Amerykah Part One (4th World War)
2. Dolly Parton - Backwoods Barbie
3. Danity Kane - Welcome to the Dollhouse
4. September - September [US]
5. Britta Persson - Kill Hollywood Me
6. V/A - Step Up 2 OST
7. Black Mountain - In the Future
8. Taio Cruz - Departure
9. Maria Daniela y su Sonido Lasser - Jeventud En Extasis
10. Efdemin - Efdemin
Special mention: Taylor Swift - Live from SoHo EP
Bubblin' undah: Silver Jews - Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea (ummmm this is probably way, er, advanced?), Destroyer - Trouble in Dreams, Van Hunt - Popular, YMCK - Family Genesis
THAT IS ALL. Please to tell me what else to listen to.
1. Erykah Badu - New Amerykah Part One (4th World War)
2. Dolly Parton - Backwoods Barbie
3. Danity Kane - Welcome to the Dollhouse
4. September - September [US]
5. Britta Persson - Kill Hollywood Me
6. V/A - Step Up 2 OST
7. Black Mountain - In the Future
8. Taio Cruz - Departure
9. Maria Daniela y su Sonido Lasser - Jeventud En Extasis
10. Efdemin - Efdemin
Special mention: Taylor Swift - Live from SoHo EP
Bubblin' undah: Silver Jews - Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea (ummmm this is probably way, er, advanced?), Destroyer - Trouble in Dreams, Van Hunt - Popular, YMCK - Family Genesis
THAT IS ALL. Please to tell me what else to listen to.
Wednesday, April 02, 2008
The Cure for Bedmux
Yes yes yes late bandwagon-hopper am I.
HERE IS THE BEDBUGS MUXTAPE. W/: selections from Down on the Dancefloor, the 2007 in Confessional Dance mix. W/O: that commentary I promised. (Sorry.)
HERE IS THE BEDBUGS MUXTAPE. W/: selections from Down on the Dancefloor, the 2007 in Confessional Dance mix. W/O: that commentary I promised. (Sorry.)
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