My Jackin' Pop Ballot
Dec. 28th, 2006 07:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
koganbotHere's my Jackin' Pop ballot as I submitted it for the Idolator poll, with a couple of typos corrected and the Lex quote inserted in full, otherwise as it was. My own anger makes me uneasy sometimes - see the first paragraph - but when I wrote it I felt I had to blast through a wall before I could write the rest of my commentary. Next time maybe I'll notice a doorway. But I'm glad for the point I'm making - would rather say it the way I did than not at all. Sterling Clover tells me - correctly, I think - that I overlooked the self-mocking irony of the Idolator masthead statement. That is, the Idolators are sending up some Web people's pretensions to having created a haven safe from marketers and pop idols etc. The Idolators don't seriously believe that such a haven ever existed, or could exist. But the irony doesn't change the fact that they're taking a dig at "manufactured pop idols," in the same way they accompanied their announcement of the poll with a jab at the Voice for putting "a seventh-rate American Idol nitwit" on the cover. (Please please please do not say, "But Frank, the Voice article was terrible." Idolator didn't chide the Voice for printing a bad piece, they chided the Voice for putting American Idol on the cover.) Idolator's way of presenting the poll still feels like someone throwing his arm across my shoulders in camaraderie and inviting me to join him in his social prejudices.
(This doesn't mean the poll itself isn't potentially A Good Thing. With the right support, both Matos at Jackin' Pop and Harvilla at P&J are capable of doing a good job, and the competition from Jackin' Pop might actually strengthen Harvilla's hand in keeping the anti-intellectual boobfaces he works for from meddling in the P&J supplement.)
My Pazz & Jop ballot is due Sunday. My lists will be similar but possibly not identical. I'm still searching.
I'll post my Country Critics ballot in the next couple of days.
Frank Kogan's Jackin' Pop ballot, 2006
SINGLES:
1. Veronicas "4ever" (Warner Bros.)
2. Aly & AJ "Rush" (Hollywood)
3. Lily Allen "LDN" (Regal import)
4. The Pack "Vans" (Jive)
5. Marit Larsen "Only A Fool" (EMI)
6. High School Musical (Zac Efron, Andrew Seeley, Vanessa Hudgens) "Breaking Free" (Hollywood)
7. Hi_Tack "Say Say Say (Waiting For You)" (Gut import)
8. Britney Spears "And Then We Kiss" (Jive)
9. Blog 27 "Hey Boy" (Magic import)
10. Yung Joc "It's Goin' Down" (Bad Boy)
ALBUMS:
1. Marit Larsen - Under the Surface (EMI)
2. Paris Hilton - Paris (Warner Bros.)
3. Robyn - The Rakamonie EP (Konichiwa import)
4. Brooke Hogan - Undiscovered (SoBe Entertainment)
5. Lily Allen - Alright, Still (Regal import)
6. Ciara - The Evolution (LaFace)
7. JoJo - The High Road (Blackground)
8. Taylor Swift - Taylor Swift (Big Machine)
9. Cham - Ghetto Story (Mad House/Atlantic)
10. Eric Church - Sinners Like Me (Capitol)
ARTISTS:
1. Aly & AJ
2. Scott Storch
3. Gang Oscypa
4. Marit Larsen
5. Tim Finney
It's not Matos's fault, and Maura seems personable enough on her livejournal, but I feel even more alienated participating in an Idolator poll than I will in a couple of weeks when I submit a ballot to that magazine on Cooper Square that I used to write for. Whatever's wrong with the nü-Voice, it's not emblazoning its ignorance and bigotry on its masthead, like you do. Taking swipes at "manufactured teen idols" is bigotry, and it makes you come across as trying to suck your readers off: "When the internet came, we overthrew the pasty white tastemakers, the duplicitous music marketers and the manufactured pop idols. And then they all came back." Putting aside that what you're saying is utterly retarded (what, were Mariah and Left Eye and Courtney home-grown in the backyard, and hand-watered and fed on tofu, in comparison to the new shiny industrialized Kellys and Carries and Ashlees?), that word "we" is simple bad manners. You have no right to it. In any event, I'm not a part of it.
I have no objection in principle to your displaying your sensibilities -- such display is a crucial part of thinking -- but true critical thinkers take it further, ask where their sensibilities come from, and what the alternatives are. (And to be honest, I haven't read enough of Idolator to know whether you do so or not.)
If you're for real, you judge music on the basis of what the music does, not just on whether you approve of how it's made. All music -- even John Cage's -- is a product of choices, whether the music's made by marketing teams or by junkies in basements.
I read two people this year -- Edward Okulicz and Mordy Shinefield -- who gave interesting reasons for disliking the Paris Hilton album. Maybe there's a third somewhere whom I haven't read. Edward and Mordy actually talked about the music. Lots of other people may have interesting reasons as well, but they don't know what their own reasons are, so they dip their hands into the culture and come up with commonplaces and clichés that momentarily sound good and play to their own and other people's feelings, even though the result is incoherence. OK, I'll admit, their reasons were fascinating too, but as symptoms. You had people trying to say two contradictory things at once: the record is bad because Paris made it and it represents everything bad about her; AND the record is bad because Paris hired people to make it and she didn't really have anything creative to do with it. Or another version of the same contradiction: the record is bad because Paris is a dilettante and it's a vanity project; AND it's bad 'cause she got a bunch of music-biz producer professionals to make it sound good. And they must have used Auto-Tune! All these reasons are specious, if you think about them for 20 seconds, and they're not real reasons anyway, just stand-ins. Underlying them is the assumption that Paris Hilton and Scott Storch and Kara DioGuardi and Dr. Luke -- as a class -- aren't quite as real as other musicians and therefore their musical choices don't count as choices in the way that real people's choices count. But I doubt that many of the critics would really want to make this assumption, or to say "I only like music made by people whose social commitments I share," since that would cut out most of the world's music. But it's at this point the Paris haters can start to explore what the real sources of their unease might be. If they want to be genuine critics.
The thing about the Paris album is that it's basically an unassuming set of club tracks (though drawing on a variety of clubs, with some interesting nonclub input; see below). The beats and timbres can hit you as wonderful if you care about clubs and beats and timbres, but still the album's not coming on as any big deal. Mordy finds Paris's voice to be a dead dry husk. This is one of the things I like about it, that given the husk-ness, she and her producers stick with the basic character of her voice and find a way to make the husk glide. She/they layer the voice on in overdubs, and this turns out beautiful; I like how on "Nothing In This World" they run the voice layers into the guitar layers. Several different producers came up with pretty much the same technique (or perhaps Paris instructed them to): this layered-on beauty and this gliding insouciance. Lex points out that "Nothing In This World" combines the rock confessional mode with the club r&b mode.* So there's innovation here (but not so as to declare, "Look, we are so innovative").
[*Might as well quote Lex directly: "this album is the first I've heard which ties both strands of current teenpop - guitar-based confessional Lohan/Lavigne/Clarkson/Simpson Jr teenrock, and hott beatz'n'braggadocio r&b - together again - a really important accomplishment."]
None of which explains how the album got nine great tracks (out of eleven), rather than the usual three or four. Maybe the woman on the cover made a bunch of decisions, accepting material only when it was strong.
This year's Aly & AJ album is mostly Christmas standards, and as such is hit or miss: their piercing pinched voices get something interesting out of "Silent Night" and "I'll Be Home For Christmas" and a couple of others; most of the rest of the carols are blah. And that barely matters, since the real story is the two originals, one opening and the other closing the album. In the opener, they rev up their drones and power chords into something genuinely joyous; in the closer they go to alienation and anguish, taking aim at themselves, at the surrounding Christmas cheer; screaming for the right to be unhappy.
Aly & AJ are a couple of Darwin-shunning home-schooled evangelical Christian teenagers who act and record for Disney and sing songs urging us to throw ourselves into life, into the unknown, as the crucial condition of our expressing ourselves; and they sing other songs about their terror of life, their difficulty in growing up while being racked with fear, afraid of strangers, helpless in the face of bullies. It's as if every Aly & AJ song has an equal and opposite Aly & AJ song. Minds in motion. Into your head, into your mind, out of your soul, race through your veins, you can't escape, you can't escape. Accidentally like Iggy Stooge. Desperately wanting to be touched, afraid to be touched. Raw power got a healing hand; raw power can destroy a man. Can you feel it, can you feel it, rushin' through your head, rushin' through your head, can you feel it, can you feel it? (Raw power is a guaranteed O.D. Raw power is a laughin' at you and me. Can you feel it? Can you feel it?) It took me two seconds, after seeing that there was an Artist Of The Year category, to know that Aly & AJ were it. Both of us broken, caught in a moment, we lived and we loved, and we hurt and we jumped, yeah.
(If you think all of this was manufactured in a Disney boardroom, then it's the Disney boardroom that's the top artist, with the brain, the mind, the guts of the year.)
Tim Finney's on my Artists list for writing the best and most moving commentary on Ashlee Simpson (his analysis of "Say Goodbye" over on the rolling teenpop thread).
Gang Oscypa is a Polish 15-year-old (assume she's the one in the Metallica shirt) with a digital cam who calls in her friends and makes videos, some these baffling quasi-narrative joke movie takeoffs shot in the middle distance, others these Warholesque (maybe I'm projecting that onto her) interviews with her friends, and then several astonishingly great lip-synch vids, including THE MOST WONDERFUL VIDEO IN THE HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSE, to Blog 27's "Hey Boy." I love everything here, the initial look of love and complicity between her and her friend in the Korn shirt, as if to say "Here we go," the fact that the Metallica girl nails the lip synching, the fact that the Korn girl muffs it gleefully, the kid sister in back who jumps up and down and whom Metallica Girl takes by the hand and leads to the front, the way Metallica Girl sidles out of the picture, then peers in, the System Of A Down kid who fights for the (turned-off) mic at the end. A lot of thought went into this glee.
It doesn't hurt that Metallica Girl looks just like my ex-wife Leslie -- Leslie as she would have looked thirty years ago, that is.
(This doesn't mean the poll itself isn't potentially A Good Thing. With the right support, both Matos at Jackin' Pop and Harvilla at P&J are capable of doing a good job, and the competition from Jackin' Pop might actually strengthen Harvilla's hand in keeping the anti-intellectual boobfaces he works for from meddling in the P&J supplement.)
My Pazz & Jop ballot is due Sunday. My lists will be similar but possibly not identical. I'm still searching.
I'll post my Country Critics ballot in the next couple of days.
Frank Kogan's Jackin' Pop ballot, 2006
SINGLES:
1. Veronicas "4ever" (Warner Bros.)
2. Aly & AJ "Rush" (Hollywood)
3. Lily Allen "LDN" (Regal import)
4. The Pack "Vans" (Jive)
5. Marit Larsen "Only A Fool" (EMI)
6. High School Musical (Zac Efron, Andrew Seeley, Vanessa Hudgens) "Breaking Free" (Hollywood)
7. Hi_Tack "Say Say Say (Waiting For You)" (Gut import)
8. Britney Spears "And Then We Kiss" (Jive)
9. Blog 27 "Hey Boy" (Magic import)
10. Yung Joc "It's Goin' Down" (Bad Boy)
ALBUMS:
1. Marit Larsen - Under the Surface (EMI)
2. Paris Hilton - Paris (Warner Bros.)
3. Robyn - The Rakamonie EP (Konichiwa import)
4. Brooke Hogan - Undiscovered (SoBe Entertainment)
5. Lily Allen - Alright, Still (Regal import)
6. Ciara - The Evolution (LaFace)
7. JoJo - The High Road (Blackground)
8. Taylor Swift - Taylor Swift (Big Machine)
9. Cham - Ghetto Story (Mad House/Atlantic)
10. Eric Church - Sinners Like Me (Capitol)
ARTISTS:
1. Aly & AJ
2. Scott Storch
3. Gang Oscypa
4. Marit Larsen
5. Tim Finney
It's not Matos's fault, and Maura seems personable enough on her livejournal, but I feel even more alienated participating in an Idolator poll than I will in a couple of weeks when I submit a ballot to that magazine on Cooper Square that I used to write for. Whatever's wrong with the nü-Voice, it's not emblazoning its ignorance and bigotry on its masthead, like you do. Taking swipes at "manufactured teen idols" is bigotry, and it makes you come across as trying to suck your readers off: "When the internet came, we overthrew the pasty white tastemakers, the duplicitous music marketers and the manufactured pop idols. And then they all came back." Putting aside that what you're saying is utterly retarded (what, were Mariah and Left Eye and Courtney home-grown in the backyard, and hand-watered and fed on tofu, in comparison to the new shiny industrialized Kellys and Carries and Ashlees?), that word "we" is simple bad manners. You have no right to it. In any event, I'm not a part of it.
I have no objection in principle to your displaying your sensibilities -- such display is a crucial part of thinking -- but true critical thinkers take it further, ask where their sensibilities come from, and what the alternatives are. (And to be honest, I haven't read enough of Idolator to know whether you do so or not.)
If you're for real, you judge music on the basis of what the music does, not just on whether you approve of how it's made. All music -- even John Cage's -- is a product of choices, whether the music's made by marketing teams or by junkies in basements.
I read two people this year -- Edward Okulicz and Mordy Shinefield -- who gave interesting reasons for disliking the Paris Hilton album. Maybe there's a third somewhere whom I haven't read. Edward and Mordy actually talked about the music. Lots of other people may have interesting reasons as well, but they don't know what their own reasons are, so they dip their hands into the culture and come up with commonplaces and clichés that momentarily sound good and play to their own and other people's feelings, even though the result is incoherence. OK, I'll admit, their reasons were fascinating too, but as symptoms. You had people trying to say two contradictory things at once: the record is bad because Paris made it and it represents everything bad about her; AND the record is bad because Paris hired people to make it and she didn't really have anything creative to do with it. Or another version of the same contradiction: the record is bad because Paris is a dilettante and it's a vanity project; AND it's bad 'cause she got a bunch of music-biz producer professionals to make it sound good. And they must have used Auto-Tune! All these reasons are specious, if you think about them for 20 seconds, and they're not real reasons anyway, just stand-ins. Underlying them is the assumption that Paris Hilton and Scott Storch and Kara DioGuardi and Dr. Luke -- as a class -- aren't quite as real as other musicians and therefore their musical choices don't count as choices in the way that real people's choices count. But I doubt that many of the critics would really want to make this assumption, or to say "I only like music made by people whose social commitments I share," since that would cut out most of the world's music. But it's at this point the Paris haters can start to explore what the real sources of their unease might be. If they want to be genuine critics.
The thing about the Paris album is that it's basically an unassuming set of club tracks (though drawing on a variety of clubs, with some interesting nonclub input; see below). The beats and timbres can hit you as wonderful if you care about clubs and beats and timbres, but still the album's not coming on as any big deal. Mordy finds Paris's voice to be a dead dry husk. This is one of the things I like about it, that given the husk-ness, she and her producers stick with the basic character of her voice and find a way to make the husk glide. She/they layer the voice on in overdubs, and this turns out beautiful; I like how on "Nothing In This World" they run the voice layers into the guitar layers. Several different producers came up with pretty much the same technique (or perhaps Paris instructed them to): this layered-on beauty and this gliding insouciance. Lex points out that "Nothing In This World" combines the rock confessional mode with the club r&b mode.* So there's innovation here (but not so as to declare, "Look, we are so innovative").
[*Might as well quote Lex directly: "this album is the first I've heard which ties both strands of current teenpop - guitar-based confessional Lohan/Lavigne/Clarkson/Simpson Jr teenrock, and hott beatz'n'braggadocio r&b - together again - a really important accomplishment."]
None of which explains how the album got nine great tracks (out of eleven), rather than the usual three or four. Maybe the woman on the cover made a bunch of decisions, accepting material only when it was strong.
This year's Aly & AJ album is mostly Christmas standards, and as such is hit or miss: their piercing pinched voices get something interesting out of "Silent Night" and "I'll Be Home For Christmas" and a couple of others; most of the rest of the carols are blah. And that barely matters, since the real story is the two originals, one opening and the other closing the album. In the opener, they rev up their drones and power chords into something genuinely joyous; in the closer they go to alienation and anguish, taking aim at themselves, at the surrounding Christmas cheer; screaming for the right to be unhappy.
Aly & AJ are a couple of Darwin-shunning home-schooled evangelical Christian teenagers who act and record for Disney and sing songs urging us to throw ourselves into life, into the unknown, as the crucial condition of our expressing ourselves; and they sing other songs about their terror of life, their difficulty in growing up while being racked with fear, afraid of strangers, helpless in the face of bullies. It's as if every Aly & AJ song has an equal and opposite Aly & AJ song. Minds in motion. Into your head, into your mind, out of your soul, race through your veins, you can't escape, you can't escape. Accidentally like Iggy Stooge. Desperately wanting to be touched, afraid to be touched. Raw power got a healing hand; raw power can destroy a man. Can you feel it, can you feel it, rushin' through your head, rushin' through your head, can you feel it, can you feel it? (Raw power is a guaranteed O.D. Raw power is a laughin' at you and me. Can you feel it? Can you feel it?) It took me two seconds, after seeing that there was an Artist Of The Year category, to know that Aly & AJ were it. Both of us broken, caught in a moment, we lived and we loved, and we hurt and we jumped, yeah.
(If you think all of this was manufactured in a Disney boardroom, then it's the Disney boardroom that's the top artist, with the brain, the mind, the guts of the year.)
Tim Finney's on my Artists list for writing the best and most moving commentary on Ashlee Simpson (his analysis of "Say Goodbye" over on the rolling teenpop thread).
Gang Oscypa is a Polish 15-year-old (assume she's the one in the Metallica shirt) with a digital cam who calls in her friends and makes videos, some these baffling quasi-narrative joke movie takeoffs shot in the middle distance, others these Warholesque (maybe I'm projecting that onto her) interviews with her friends, and then several astonishingly great lip-synch vids, including THE MOST WONDERFUL VIDEO IN THE HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSE, to Blog 27's "Hey Boy." I love everything here, the initial look of love and complicity between her and her friend in the Korn shirt, as if to say "Here we go," the fact that the Metallica girl nails the lip synching, the fact that the Korn girl muffs it gleefully, the kid sister in back who jumps up and down and whom Metallica Girl takes by the hand and leads to the front, the way Metallica Girl sidles out of the picture, then peers in, the System Of A Down kid who fights for the (turned-off) mic at the end. A lot of thought went into this glee.
It doesn't hurt that Metallica Girl looks just like my ex-wife Leslie -- Leslie as she would have looked thirty years ago, that is.
