RIP Leslie Carter, 1986 - 2012

Leslie Carter passed away earlier this month, an event that passed me by completely until Frank told me about it.

I don't like to read much into media exposure, but from watching the Carter family reality show, House of Carters, Leslie seemed extremely unhappy in her participation. There are rumblings of mental illness, and I won't indulge or speculate. That's a private concern.

But I will say that House of Carters might have been one of the more uncomfortable television viewing experiences of recent memory. I was probably one of the few people who watched the show specifically for Leslie. I knew her, and had written about her once, when she started publishing candidly about her family life (particularly the difficult relationship the Carters had with their parents, seen occasionally on the reality show) and defending her brothers against online rumors.

The key pieces to read about Leslie, though, are "companion pieces" of sorts. Metal Mike Saunders wrote a piece -- "Tween-Pop Suppressed!" -- about the entire Leslie Carter album, which was shelved before her only single ("Like Wow!") was released. He sent me a copy of the album on cassette tape, as was the style at the time, and I've listened to it a few times. It's quite good, as early-00s bubblegum goes, at least on par with Triple Image or some of the other Radio Disney B-listers. But I haven't listened to it in a while.

In that piece, Metal Mike also references a more disturbing article, "The Devil in Greg Dark," which describes how porn director Dark turned to the teenpop music video world in the early 00's. The video shoot profiled in that piece was Leslie Carter's "Like Wow!," and anyone who wants to decry shady practices in the music industry would do well to note that it's far more likely that exploitation happens in the videos than in the production of the music. A sample:

Because she is one of the Orlando Carters, there was reason to believe that Leslie would show up for the shoot in a manner befitting the Orlando Carters, which is to say rigorously and even pitilessly prepared.

Instead, she showed up with "issues," which is to say she showed up overweight. Leslie Carter is a big girl, and if there's anything little girls can't abide--if there's anything they fear as a rebuke to the possibilities of their own rapacity--it's the prospect of becoming a big girl, and so, despite their applause and their polite smiles, [DreamWorks executives] Frances and Goldie are uneasy, which is to say panicky. They spend a lot of time in hushed conference, trying to select slimming outfits and to devise flattering camera angles, or else speaking to Craig Fanning, who owns F.M. Rocks, the production company making the "Like, Wow!" video. Craig Fanning is the only person in the studio who did not applaud Leslie Carter's first turn in front of the camera.

Although he wears a white windbreaker and white Stan Smith tennis shoes, and although he has neatly cut red hair and a face full of freckles, he has hard, narrow eyes rigged for unsparing assessments, and his assessment of Leslie Carter's first take was this: It's not enough. She's not selling the song enough. She's not feeling it enough and not having enough fun. Leslie Carter has to do enough in front of the camera to overcome her issues, because the singers she is in competition with--Britney and Christina and Mandy and Jessica--have no issues to overcome. They are perfect. Their hair, their makeup, their clothes, everything is perfect. They are pros. You ask them to do something, they do it. They do not show up unprepared. They are not big girls, and now, because Leslie Carter is a big girl, everybody--from the Orlando Carters to Frances and Goldie to Craig Fanning--is counting on Gregory Dark to transform her more than she was able to transform herself. They are counting on Gregory Dark to make her beautiful, to make her commercially viable, to make her--somehow--perfect.

All I'll say is that "Like Wow!" continues to be one of my favorite bubblegum songs of the immediate post-Britney era, and that it's a real shame that the whole album was shelved. If I ever manage to get a copy of it, I'll share it here.

EDIT: Someone's shared the link on Mediafire.

I also didn't excerpt any of the disturbing stuff about the post-production "squeeze" effect they tried using in the video, which the author of the piece dubbed the "Skinnyizer":

Gregory's sitting in another room at the studio, behind a woman working to skinnyize images of Leslie Carter. There's an image of Leslie Carter on the monitor. She's wearing a pink top, and she has ... issues. Then the woman hits a button, clicks a mouse, and--blip!--she stretches, like an image transferred onto Silly Putty. Blip-bloop: Leslie has issues, and then she doesn't.

No one is safe in the Twittersphere anymore

STUPID SHIT INDEX!

Hey look, first song from Paris (sort of -- she's featured on the track, by Manufactured Superstars, and just recites a monologue over a house track) since the theme song to her BFF show, I think!



Prefer the Pierces' "Boring" for club ennui novelty, and prefer every other Paris Hilton song to this one, but since it doesn't seem to be a "Paris Hilton song," really, I can appreciate it as novelty music.

Stupid Shit

It should come as no surprise to anyone that I like me some stupid shit. But shouldn't there be a way to keep track of all of the stupid shit that I like? Well, reader, you are in luck. I have started the STUPID SHIT INDEX, a very scientific measure of how awesome stupid shit I like actually is to other scientists and such. Most of these tracks have undergone peer review (at the Singles Jukebox).

It looks like 2012 is already going to be a delightful year for stupid shit, as one of my favorite stupid shits (not to be confused with the Stupid Shits) from 2011, Lil Chuckee, who was featured on "Did Ya Mama" on the best and stupidest-shit album of last year, the Collipark mixtape.

Lil' Chuckee - Wop
Short for "'Wobble' w/ bomp," Lil Chuckee reminds us that Little Richard was, indeed, a fool for this one.

Breathe Carolina - Blackout
Slowly but surely the vocodering and Autotuning are getting me to care less about the whiny affectations of singers in sideways trucker hats. (More and more Hellogoodbye look like they staked out key territory here -- they're the Lewis and Clark of my giving a shit about emo dude singers.) Here the boys give themselves over to the DJ, who mixes and futzes with vocals like another instrument -- I don't think I've heard those clipped DJ sound drop-outs used in a pop chorus, but it works.

Key Swag 3000 - Poof


H/t John Seroff on this one -- embedded, commentary unnecessary at this point. Kat Stevens should analyze a few of these outfits.

Brianna Perry - Marilyn Monroe
Not nearly as stupid as Donald Trump. I'm trying to figure out if this lyric is what I suspect it is:

I'm goin' blonde -- I think I'm Marilyn
So I bought more -- Maryland

I'm not sure I've ever heard someone say that they have so much money they could buy a state.


Neon Hitch - Fuck U Betta
I find it impossible to hate this song. Someone brought up the Vengaboys, so I'll just say that this sounds like Girlicious on the Vengabus. If that sounds like a public transit system to hell, you probably shouldn't click through.

And hey, that reminds me that Anjulie's "Brand New Bitch" has been sneaking around the periphery of my consciousness for the better part of six months, and I think it should be belatedly included here. Sounded awesome in Whole Foods the other day! (Wait, really? YES. That happened. DANCE PARTY IN THE BULK GRANOLA AISLE.)

Astute readers will note that I almost immediately abandoned the whole concept of a "Stupid Shit Index." Well, in the time that I began writing this post, my top, second, and third-choice science journals got back to me saying that my data was unpublishable. So consider these merely anecdotal evidence that is in need of more rigorous confirmation. I'll see if I can get a conference presentation out of it at least.

EDIT: Oh, and finally, back by popular demand, a singer called BM who sounds like a horse.

Comments

Echo has finally gone belly up altogether -- is asking me for money in order to continue using the system.

For the time being I've reinstated Blogger, and will switch over to Disqus. All old comments are archived but are currently not searchable from their original posts. I'll try to fix that problem as soon as I can.

EDIT: OK, I'm switched to Disqus.

If anyone can make heads or tails of these instructions and could help me actually use them to repopulate Disqus with my old Haloscan comments (in one XML file containing all comments), I will pay them in monetary units to do so, since the alternative is to pay Echo, which I refuse to do on principle.

SEO

I want to make my point about SEO in the previous post clear. I'm not saying that SEO is not a real problem in the process of turning "writing" and "ideas" into "data." Katherine says:

The part of this I take issue with is the part about complaining about SEO/trollgaze/clickbait/etc. Most of the people making these accusations are people in the online publishing field — people who know exactly what they’re talking about and how prevalent it is. I mean, “trollgaze” was coined by Maura, and I’m fairly sure she knows standards and practices for music blogging.

And yes, it’s usually valid. Recent example: Chris Brown at the Grammys. Any guesses how many media outlets went easy on him out of “objectivity” or “measuredness,” in part or in whole a proxy for not pissing off the Chris Brown stan constituency? It’s not just about tone, either; it’s about what gets written about and how much, which often looks more like a cost-benefit analysis than what people connect with. Yes, that’s how business works. Yes, there are plenty of exceptions. It’s still a valid observation.

This is a misunderstanding of my actual point, which has nothing to do with the realities of SEO optimization as a glorified spam-content creation process (which I will absolutely acknowledge as real and pervasive). But I'm not talking about some vaguely-defined, if probably real, "them." To the extent that SEO leads venues to publish stuff that barely passes the test as "writing," which in my understanding is most of it (see: photo slideshows, listicles, etc.), I don't really care about it much. I can ignore it.

But writers at Village Voice and Popdust and other places sometimes throw the concept of "SEO" around in bad faith of what I see to be things (like songs and artists) far less directly related to literal SEO strategies. This is the problem with the "trollgaze" index -- it basically assumes that every decision in a given song or from a given artist is made with the same cynical eye toward gaming the system that high-functioning spambots (and the people who function as high-functioning spambots) use. Part of my point is that we shouldn't believe that to be true as our default position. And another, probably more important part is that even if that's true it doesn't necessarily tell us much about the thing in question. By assuming "trolling" and calling it a day, the intentions of the creators, however valid, have completely superseded any attempt at meaningful analysis of what's actually going on. It's not that it would be impossible to write something valuable doing that, but that it's a difficult prospect, especially when it's a standard way of writing about certain kinds of music. This was the crux of the "Lana Wars" from my perspective -- very few people, myself included, were actually listening to the music very carefully; rather, they plugged whatever they happened to hear into the framework they'd established before they listened. That this approach usually, but not always, makes for shoddy music criticism isn't too surprising to me. I also happen to think that it makes for shoddy social analysis, shoddy image analysis, shoddy everything -- not on principle, just in practice.

So yes, SEO is a "thing," and it leads to a lot of problematic content online. I'm just saying it's not an excuse for why our writing and ideas are so bad, if and when they're bad. "SEO" isn't in itself the problem -- a more basic and more pervasive problem is that too many writers are creating far more content than they have ideas. This is how I ended up feeling at Tumblr -- I was producing stuff that might as well have been "data" -- I was my own SEO machine, except I wasn't really "optimizing" anything for anyone in particular.

(One specific Tumblr format issue is that, rather than directly respond to someone as in a comment thread, I would often take what they said and republish it for a slightly different but overlapping audience. That allowed me not to engage with specific claims and ideas, but rather take everything as a jumping off point for whatever it is that I wanted to say. And again, this is as much a "me" problem as it is an "environment" problem.)

At least here, or in a comments thread, I can have some semblance of a back and forth in which there's something at stake -- two people either enter and then leave with a new understanding, or at the end at least there can be some understanding of how (if not why) something went wrong. This is exactly what happened during the Rebecca Black comment back-and-forth between Katherine and myself at the Jukebox, which I want to bring up again not to open any old wounds, but as a reminder that this was a genuine conversation, but was never finished.

What's interesting in the context of this post is that what (to me) was the most important divergence point of that back and forth was a point from Katherine that brings me back to the cynicism problem:

It’s my problem with people going and auditioning shittily on purpose just to get them some of that potential finale-show exposure and gag CDs. It’s my problem with producers setting up people who aren’t conventionally attractive, or who aren’t all there, etc., and using them as fodder to mock — and some of them are in on this, some aren’t, but it sucks either way.

My argument, at the time, was that this in no way fairly represented the tactics of Ark Music Factory (from what we can know of their process, which is limited), even if other producers do it (in American Idol auditions, although there we also know that the process of getting an audition is far more understood to be fodder for mockery, which was obviously not true of the extremely-obscure Ark Music Factory prior to "Friday" virality).

And this assumption that AMF must be in any way in conversation with contributing to mockery -- that is, immediately blaming the producers instead of the ones doing the mocking -- is exactly what I'm referring to when I say "operating in bad faith" -- taking the perceived and sometimes real (though not always) immoral behavior of a select group of individuals and assuming comparable behavior from others. That's an incredibly cynical way to view the music world, but in practice such cynicism only holds in specific instances -- that is, it's not a blanket cynicism that would hold for anyone creating music. I don't know how cynical Ark Music Factory may be, but what I can react to is the nasty and seemingly unverifiable claim that a producing duo was knowingly exploiting young women on the off chance that they might be mocked by a mass audience.

That is the attitude I'm referring to, an attitude that, I think, ultimately poisons the well. (At least, that's the poison I'm waving toward in the previous post, re: SEO-blaming.) It exists in the SEO world, sure (if Rebecca Black is being 90% mocked, the spambot assumes it should probably write a mocking post -- why not), but SEO is not responsible for it. It's our fault, us being the ones literally in conversation with one another.

Back to Bedbugs

I've decided to leave Tumblr for a few reasons. Hopefully this will mean that I can split my posts between here and my education blog (which is a Tumblr platform that I don't usually use for reblogs etc.). But I think it's worth reflecting on what was going wrong with me, and with Tumblr, while I was there.

There's something about the visibility of bookmarking -- which is functionally what "liking" posts on Tumblr does -- that is unnerving as a person creating new content. For one thing, it substitutes for a more meaningful response. Imagine if you had to comment on a post by saying, "I liked this post." It would be inane. "Dear Paul Krugman, I liked your column." "Dear Jonathan Bogart, I liked your essay." This is antithetical, to me, to the whole purpose of interacting with posts, which is to promote conversations. Conversing provocatively, and offering feedback that writers can actually use, is hard. I've lost sleep over critiques of my own ideas, and have abandoned ideas on the basis of a good enough counter-argument. That's as it should be. When something's not working, my first impulse should neither be to jettison it immediately, nor should it be to continue to defend it no matter how warped my own logic becomes. Conversations help draw the distinction between things we can keep using and things we would be better off discarding (perhaps to be replaced by new things, perhaps not).

Take "privilege"; the word usually suggests that some people are better off than others in certain contexts, often through no work and/or fault of their own, which is an important thing to recognize in lots of situations, I think. But "privilege" never seems to distinguish between what kinds of "better off" are in the conversation. It can stand in variously for material wealth (or presumed material wealth); general census-style understandings of economic class; a personal sense of entitlement to wealth, comfort, perceived social status, or [insert other good thing that one shouldn't feel entitled to]; presumed or lived experiences as person of a certain race, gender, sexuality, disability, or economic class; or some perception of having power in the world not already mentioned above.

Any one of these things is probably worth talking about in a certain context. But by using the blanket word, we somehow get to invoke all of them without worrying about sorting out which one applies in which situation and why it might matter.

Another one bugging me lately is the frequent blaming irritating writing, music, or other content on things like "search engine optimization" (see also: "trollgaze") -- a general bad-faith assumption about motivations of authors (whether founded or not). This isn't to say that no one operates in bad faith or for selfish or even socially reprehensible reasons, or to deny that there are new industry standards designed to up page counts for websites for click-throughs, etc. (say). But to constantly use this as an excuse for what's going wrong in music or writing or ideas seems to infect our ability to take anything at face value -- or to contribute anything worthwhile ourselves. Instead we cynically assume that any good that something might be contributing to the world is calculated by a cabal of manipulators with purely selfish ends and leave it at that. But things that are calculated by an evil cabal can be good or bad, useful or not useful, interesting or uninteresting. Maybe the premise is true, though I think it's invoked far more often than it could conceivably be true. But in letting ourselves off the hook by invoking a corrupt institution or context, we're just making our jobs easier.

What do I mean by "making our jobs easier?" Well, I explained one of the processes through which I reblogged a quote that I now disagree with here. Tumblr functions too easily as a memory tube, where posts get overwhelmed in new content and no one can reliably return to old content to explore it. Nor is there much incentive to. The reblogging function creates an illusion that a conversation is being moved forward, but there's rarely any direct response -- just a new piece of posturing from a different user, often not engaging at all with the original point -- or picking points specifically to be able to knock down as easily as possible. Tumblr makes every strawman into a real boy, so that the thing that you hate the most is phrased in a perfectly irritating way by someone, somewhere, allowing you to flex muscles that have been developed perhaps at the expense of other more important ones.

When Buzzfeed posted reactions to young women saying that they would "let Chris Brown beat them," I was mostly appalled not at these young women, whom I knew extremely little about (aside from their Twitter profile pictures and one tweet they had ever written), but at peers who could so easily assume that these young women were in need of some kind of a "lesson." If only we could "teach" them how to behave, we wouldn't see these kinds of horrendous displays! What tends to piss me off the most is when people in my general orbit don't seem even to want to think through basic implications (or possible future applications, of which there are usually few, being so ad hoc in nature) of their own claims. As for people not in my orbit -- I usually assume that I don't really know why they say what they say, or why they believe what they seem to believe.

But on Tumblr, there were so many people saying so many "in-orbit things" that nonetheless confused or angered me that I didn't really know where to start. I got tired of the self-righteous contempt for strawmen -- it started to anger me when I heard "straight people" being talked about with the same flippancy and disrespect that seemed to be the motivation for talking in more positive and complicated ways about specific non-straight people and experiences in the first place. I got sick of "power" just sitting there as if it explained itself, as if it was merely an ugly slab of concrete to be bulldozed.

And mainly I got sick of the little mediocrities, the inconsequential stuff, that was piling up, and how dependent on trawling through it regularly I became. I can't imagine how people with iPhones handle it -- I had an iPod Touch that I recently lost and the positive impact on my general well-being was surprising. I realized that, like with the iPod, the investment in Tumblr was more about reassurance and routine than it was about communication. And I also realized (I think) that I don't want to go online primarily to be reassured and to "do my routines," even though I have them (I call it "reading my stories"). Too much reassurance and routine, too many friends, clouds my thinking. It's like being in a room with people you know somewhat well and constantly knowing there are points on which you could put the low-key friendships at risk. I couldn't lose anyone on Tumblr, even though I've lost people in conversation before, and generally this has been good for me -- understanding that not everyone wants to be in the conversations I want to be in, and that I can't expect to be happy and right at the same time. Which is to say I felt wrong a lot on Tumblr, too, in some strange and implacable way. There was some undercurrent of wrongness to nearly everything I wrote there, being satisfied with so little.

And finally I'll note that the comments sucked, and nobody used them. I had a genuine back-and-forth with becoming-wave that is now impossible to track (I may condense the responses into one post here later). I've changed my mind, sometimes radically, in comment conversations with people like Frank Kogan and Erika Villani and Tom Ewing and Mike Barthel. But I rarely changed my mind on Tumblr, and part of it was that I didn't really feel in conversation with anyone -- the stakes were too low. So for the most part, I've decided to leave the Bedbugs Tumblr, which had become too insular for me to trust, and keep the ed blog, since there are so few people in conversation with me at that blog anyway (and I do want to keep some ties to other people's content elsewhere on Tumblr).

It's a personal little paradox I guess -- the more I know who I'm in conversation with -- strengths and limitations alike -- the more I get anxious to go somewhere else. I'd be in a club that would have me for a member, but I probably wouldn't want to live there.