Reference sites

[koganbot]

Does anyone know if there's a U.S. equivalent for everyhit.com? Allmusic gives the year for chart singles but not the month they peaked (and it's hard interpreting what their year designation means anyway: year it enters or year it peaks?). The reason I'm interested is that the quartet of singles that altered U.S. teenpop - "Everywhere," "Don't Let Me Get Me," "A Thousand Miles," and "Complicated" - in 2001 and 2002 seem to have hit later in Britain than in the U.S., but I'm not sure how much later. "Everywhere" doesn't peak in Britain until April 2002 (at a relatively low 18), whereas its U.S. peak is sometime in late summer or fall of '01 (Wiki gives release date of July 24 but no peak date); "Don't Let Me Get Me" hits number 6 in the UK in May 2002, probably only a couple of months after its U.S. date; "A Thousand Miles" gets to number 6 in August 2002 (my memory says February or March for the U.S. [Wiki says Feb for the release date], but of course that's not at all trustworthy), "Complicated" is number 3 in October 2002 (memory says May or June for U.S., same caveat).

I'm curious because Tom just linked this old NYLPM post from June 2002 (Is Pop Cool?), so I was looking at dates and seeing that what he was hearing as teenpop was already being superseded in the U.S., but in Britain he wasn't likely to be hearing the supersession yet - and anyway I don't know if the supersession ever really happened in Britain (unless you want to call the later retro-quirky singer-songwriter and/or quasi-soul crop of Tashbed-Amy-Duffy "teenpop" and say its ascendance marks a British equivalent to the American shift)(Bedingfield's "Unwritten" did very well on Radio Disney, by the way, but I still don't think she registers as teenpop; Nelly Furtado's "I'm Like A Bird" got on Disney at the same time or earlier than "Everywhere," for that matter, so could make my quartet a quintet except I don't think Furtado was registering as teenpop either, though maybe she was influencing it).

Comments

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Think you're giving me too much credit actually - what now looks like transformation was parsed by me as clumsy attempts to grow the form up. Tho I really liked A Thousand Miles at the time.

[koganbot]

Don't fret, I wasn't getting it as a teenpop transformation either, in that I thought of the Pink track more as a transformation in Pink (that nine-year-olds happened to be listening to) than as a transformation in teenpop (and my favorite on Missundaztood is "Dear Diary" which didn't get nearly enough votes in the poptimists poll). And I underrated the Avril and barely noticed the Carlton and I first heard "Everywhere" on the adult contemporary station and had no idea Branch was a teen so my reaction when I first heard "Everywhere" on Disney was, "Huh, Disney's playing an adult contemporary singer-songwriter; well, they do tend to have breadth in what they play." Then I heard Branch interviewed on Disney and even though she sounded like a young woman I still didn't realize she was a teen and thought "Hmmmm, an AC singer-songwriter thinks its useful to market herself through Disney too." When Naomi told me that Lia was paying attention to Michelle's lyrics and of course to Pink's anti-Britney song (which isn't anti-Britney but that's how a lot of people took "Don't Let Me Get Me") maybe I figured out that something was happening but I thought of it as happening with Lia not necessarily with teenpop in general.

Still think "Everywhere" holds up amazingly well in melody and style, and I never did think the lyrics quite meant anything.