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koganbotAlfred Soto claimed over on a Justin Bieber review thread on the Jukebox that "In our many, many teen-pop discussions we rarely discuss the interaction of sexuality and the singers' self-representations" (he also claimed that gay male critics preferred male singers, which certainly didn't accord with my experience, or that of anyone else who commented). Anyhow, I took this as a challenge to engage in familiar riffing about Ashlee, Lindsay, and Taylor. You can click the link for context; here's what I wrote:
In our many, many teen-pop discussions we rarely discuss the interaction of sexuality and the singers' self-representations.
You could say the same about indie-pop and a lot of other stuff too.
But the overriding issue for the teenpop girls is "Who am I?" not "am I hot for you, are you hot for me?" So when the songs are about hotness and sex and romance the underlying question is actually, "Will he love me for me"? Well, for Lindsay, who was the one in recent years with the most blatant sex sell, the question is "Is he and she and everyone else going to pay attention to me?" That's really more of the issue when she's going "I wanna come first" than "Do I get my orgasm?"
Ashlee's two best songs, "La La" and "Love Me For Me," are raucous romance-sex comedies of manners; but the break in "La La" goes, "I feel safe with you/I can be myself tonight/It's all right with you/'Cause you hold my secrets tight," this in a song that is all about SEXUAL PLAY ACTING AND ROLE PLAYING in which she says she likes it better when it hurts and she promises to come back and beat you up. So being accepted for being herself means being accepted for any shit she throws and any role she could conceivably adopt as an experiment, now or in the future. (And the critical thing for Ashlee age 19 was that she didn't really believe that anyone would ever accept her, either her personality or her music.) But, though "La La" is great, it's really not very sexy; at least I don't think so. As far as what it sounds like, it's a Joan Jett leader-of-the-gang-thing, and that's how it's presented in the video, "You make me wanna la-la" being a group shout to the world, not an intimate encounter.
"Love Me For Me" is hilarious and as well-written as any lyrics I've heard ever, sets out the issues in four lines and then starts playing with you, and it is sexy, but the prime moment comes two-thirds through where she lets out a wild "Meow," which is more domineering than kittenish; and she ends up, "And when you're crawling over broken glass to get to me/That's when I'll let you stay."
As for marketing (if we should talk about this in relation to teenpop, we should talk about it in relation to The Knife and everyone else too; just maybe the singers and songwriters and producers in pop are creating material that is meaningful to them and building an audience out of who responds to it, just maybe), the Disney kids-only machine didn't take over until later in the decade. Ashlee and crew wouldn't have known who her audience would be, but she ended up getting the MTV-TRL crowd. That and the teen confessional faded out as Disney siphoned off the younger set, and by putting most of its marbles on HSM/Cheetah Girls/Camp Rock, Disney left the field wide open for non-Disney Taylor Swift to swoop in and nab the teen confessional and, in one motion, get country and kids and adult contemporary in swift succession. I don't really know, but I suspect that Miley broke out of the kids ghetto despite Disney rather than because of it. There wasn't even a video for "See You Again," and Radio Disney didn't start playing the song until it had gone top ten pop, five months after it began getting play on scattered top 40 radio stations.
Bieber's not on Disney either, and if he doesn't have one eye on AC and urban AC right now, he will shortly. Adult contemporary is the major elephant in the room and blind spot when it comes to critical coverage, and AC is a blind spot in the coverage of teenpop as well. I've done zero demographic studies so don't know what I'm talking about, but I assume that the audience for most teenpop is female - but it's not restricted to female teens and preteens. Some of it's crossing to women in their forties or so, whoever it is who turns on adult contemporary radio. The current AC top fifteen is evenly split between men and women (well, 8 men and 6 women and one mixed-gender group whose woman is the singer you care about). But of the songs that have held the top spot in the nine months since the Jason Mraz single stepped down at the start of June 2009, there's been a male singer at number one for only one week (Michael Bublé the week of January 30); in the seven months before that, the number one went to no male at all and no female who could legally go to a bar. And Bublé was succeeded by a female old enough to go clubbing but not to run for congress - who was immediately replaced by an underager, but then grabbed the spot back the next week. (The females in question are Miley Cyrus, Taylor Swift, and Colbie Caillat.) This for a demographic that I assumed would go for men with smooth, deep voices.
So, whoever is responding to "teenpop" girls as models or objects of desire or, well, whatever it is that people respond to when they respond to music, this - teen and younger girls but also the adult woman who follow adult contemporary - is where you get the most response, even if you also, among critics, get me and some other males gay and straight. (Rolling Teenpop was about 50-50 straight male/gay male, with Jessica and Hazel popping in occasionally. And the performers we talked about were predominantly female, though we ranged far beyond teenpop, actually. However, I did use the words "John Shanks" and "Max Martin" a number of times, iirc.) (Also, my taste in American Idol contestants the last two years seemed to line up with gay males', and it was female; i.e. I liked Allison and Brooke. Maybe it's because Allison and Brooke were the best.)
The other women (besides Colbie, Taylor, and Miley) in the AC top 15 this week are Pink, Kelly, Hillary Scott (Lady Antebellum), and Mariah.
Dave says that Autobiography makes most sense as an album for people in their twenties, an audience that as far as I know the record didn't get (outside of Rolling Teenpop, that is; btw, I once lashed out at [Jukebox regular] Al Shipley on Rolling Teenpop, and that was unfair because in my mind I'd conflated what he'd said with some heinous stuff that actually had been from others; so, Al, sorry to have gone after you).
Intriguingly, the teenpop person who has most explicitly brought up her own sexual desire is Aly Michalka of Aly & AJ; she may well believe that it's wrong for her to have premarital intercourse, but she sure wants to be touched. (She's an evangelical Christian, but she doesn't give that as a reason - or give any reason - for wanting the guy to go only so far in "Blush." So we don't know her reasons or convictions on the subject.) Key songs here would be "Chemicals React," "Bullseye," and "Blush," though the former is as much about her desire to make plays on words as her desire to make plays on boys. (I really like what I wrote about "Blush" for the Las Vegas Weekly.)
Back when we first reviewed "You Belong With Me" I said that Taylor Swift's Fearless was awash in femininity, was womanly in a way that reminded me of Stevie Nicks, despite their difference in style.* This isn't in regard to the lyrics particularly. And of course not everyone will hear it. I suppose that people are entitled to say that they don't personally find Taylor sexy. What they have no right to say is that she's sexless and doesn't sing about sex. Not that anyone at the Jukebox has said so, that I know of, but I've read it three times in the last month.** Anyhow it's bullshit: Taylor's very first single, which she wrote when she was fifteen***, is set in lover's lane, and she doesn't stop with that song. The thing is, she's ambivalent about sex and love and desire since she thinks that the girls not the boys are the ones who pay the price, at least she said so in "Tied Together With A Smile," though that's an early song. Anyhow, you might disagree about the girls being the ones to pay a price, or at least think this is not universally true, and she probably now has more nuanced ideas ("Breathe" on Fearless is a song where she finally gives a guy a break), but it may well be very true to her experience, in her particular world.
The critiques of her supposed sexlessness aren't so much about sex as about social class or cultural category (not that sex and class are unrelated). Since her image is deemed to be "wholesome," it's assumed that she must also be sexless, though this is demonstrably untrue - I mean, look at how she's dressed in this video**** - and it is assumed that she doesn't sing about sex, even though she does.
I'm just amazed that people will make stuff up and not even know that they're making it up, just invent things about whole stretches of people that aren't remotely true.
*Though being her lightest song, "You Belong With Me" is actually the one least immersed in a deep sea of female moods.
**And I found another one. Click here if you want to get uselessly, helplessly angry.
***Though it did attain a cowriter between the time she first scribbled the lyrics during math class and later that same day (according to Wiki) when she and Liz Rose finished the thing.
****Also, note how she's playing mindfuck games with her audience. That's her opening her set back in April '07, when her audience was still overwhelmingly country. Don't know if she was headlining there, since in '07 she was mostly a supporting act, for George Strait and Ronnie Milsap early in the year, Brad Paisley later. EDIT: And from the YouTube evidence that's how she started her set all year, whether opening for Strait or Paisley or on her own. Pretty gutsy.
In our many, many teen-pop discussions we rarely discuss the interaction of sexuality and the singers' self-representations.
You could say the same about indie-pop and a lot of other stuff too.
But the overriding issue for the teenpop girls is "Who am I?" not "am I hot for you, are you hot for me?" So when the songs are about hotness and sex and romance the underlying question is actually, "Will he love me for me"? Well, for Lindsay, who was the one in recent years with the most blatant sex sell, the question is "Is he and she and everyone else going to pay attention to me?" That's really more of the issue when she's going "I wanna come first" than "Do I get my orgasm?"
Ashlee's two best songs, "La La" and "Love Me For Me," are raucous romance-sex comedies of manners; but the break in "La La" goes, "I feel safe with you/I can be myself tonight/It's all right with you/'Cause you hold my secrets tight," this in a song that is all about SEXUAL PLAY ACTING AND ROLE PLAYING in which she says she likes it better when it hurts and she promises to come back and beat you up. So being accepted for being herself means being accepted for any shit she throws and any role she could conceivably adopt as an experiment, now or in the future. (And the critical thing for Ashlee age 19 was that she didn't really believe that anyone would ever accept her, either her personality or her music.) But, though "La La" is great, it's really not very sexy; at least I don't think so. As far as what it sounds like, it's a Joan Jett leader-of-the-gang-thing, and that's how it's presented in the video, "You make me wanna la-la" being a group shout to the world, not an intimate encounter.
"Love Me For Me" is hilarious and as well-written as any lyrics I've heard ever, sets out the issues in four lines and then starts playing with you, and it is sexy, but the prime moment comes two-thirds through where she lets out a wild "Meow," which is more domineering than kittenish; and she ends up, "And when you're crawling over broken glass to get to me/That's when I'll let you stay."
As for marketing (if we should talk about this in relation to teenpop, we should talk about it in relation to The Knife and everyone else too; just maybe the singers and songwriters and producers in pop are creating material that is meaningful to them and building an audience out of who responds to it, just maybe), the Disney kids-only machine didn't take over until later in the decade. Ashlee and crew wouldn't have known who her audience would be, but she ended up getting the MTV-TRL crowd. That and the teen confessional faded out as Disney siphoned off the younger set, and by putting most of its marbles on HSM/Cheetah Girls/Camp Rock, Disney left the field wide open for non-Disney Taylor Swift to swoop in and nab the teen confessional and, in one motion, get country and kids and adult contemporary in swift succession. I don't really know, but I suspect that Miley broke out of the kids ghetto despite Disney rather than because of it. There wasn't even a video for "See You Again," and Radio Disney didn't start playing the song until it had gone top ten pop, five months after it began getting play on scattered top 40 radio stations.
Bieber's not on Disney either, and if he doesn't have one eye on AC and urban AC right now, he will shortly. Adult contemporary is the major elephant in the room and blind spot when it comes to critical coverage, and AC is a blind spot in the coverage of teenpop as well. I've done zero demographic studies so don't know what I'm talking about, but I assume that the audience for most teenpop is female - but it's not restricted to female teens and preteens. Some of it's crossing to women in their forties or so, whoever it is who turns on adult contemporary radio. The current AC top fifteen is evenly split between men and women (well, 8 men and 6 women and one mixed-gender group whose woman is the singer you care about). But of the songs that have held the top spot in the nine months since the Jason Mraz single stepped down at the start of June 2009, there's been a male singer at number one for only one week (Michael Bublé the week of January 30); in the seven months before that, the number one went to no male at all and no female who could legally go to a bar. And Bublé was succeeded by a female old enough to go clubbing but not to run for congress - who was immediately replaced by an underager, but then grabbed the spot back the next week. (The females in question are Miley Cyrus, Taylor Swift, and Colbie Caillat.) This for a demographic that I assumed would go for men with smooth, deep voices.
So, whoever is responding to "teenpop" girls as models or objects of desire or, well, whatever it is that people respond to when they respond to music, this - teen and younger girls but also the adult woman who follow adult contemporary - is where you get the most response, even if you also, among critics, get me and some other males gay and straight. (Rolling Teenpop was about 50-50 straight male/gay male, with Jessica and Hazel popping in occasionally. And the performers we talked about were predominantly female, though we ranged far beyond teenpop, actually. However, I did use the words "John Shanks" and "Max Martin" a number of times, iirc.) (Also, my taste in American Idol contestants the last two years seemed to line up with gay males', and it was female; i.e. I liked Allison and Brooke. Maybe it's because Allison and Brooke were the best.)
The other women (besides Colbie, Taylor, and Miley) in the AC top 15 this week are Pink, Kelly, Hillary Scott (Lady Antebellum), and Mariah.
Dave says that Autobiography makes most sense as an album for people in their twenties, an audience that as far as I know the record didn't get (outside of Rolling Teenpop, that is; btw, I once lashed out at [Jukebox regular] Al Shipley on Rolling Teenpop, and that was unfair because in my mind I'd conflated what he'd said with some heinous stuff that actually had been from others; so, Al, sorry to have gone after you).
Intriguingly, the teenpop person who has most explicitly brought up her own sexual desire is Aly Michalka of Aly & AJ; she may well believe that it's wrong for her to have premarital intercourse, but she sure wants to be touched. (She's an evangelical Christian, but she doesn't give that as a reason - or give any reason - for wanting the guy to go only so far in "Blush." So we don't know her reasons or convictions on the subject.) Key songs here would be "Chemicals React," "Bullseye," and "Blush," though the former is as much about her desire to make plays on words as her desire to make plays on boys. (I really like what I wrote about "Blush" for the Las Vegas Weekly.)
Back when we first reviewed "You Belong With Me" I said that Taylor Swift's Fearless was awash in femininity, was womanly in a way that reminded me of Stevie Nicks, despite their difference in style.* This isn't in regard to the lyrics particularly. And of course not everyone will hear it. I suppose that people are entitled to say that they don't personally find Taylor sexy. What they have no right to say is that she's sexless and doesn't sing about sex. Not that anyone at the Jukebox has said so, that I know of, but I've read it three times in the last month.** Anyhow it's bullshit: Taylor's very first single, which she wrote when she was fifteen***, is set in lover's lane, and she doesn't stop with that song. The thing is, she's ambivalent about sex and love and desire since she thinks that the girls not the boys are the ones who pay the price, at least she said so in "Tied Together With A Smile," though that's an early song. Anyhow, you might disagree about the girls being the ones to pay a price, or at least think this is not universally true, and she probably now has more nuanced ideas ("Breathe" on Fearless is a song where she finally gives a guy a break), but it may well be very true to her experience, in her particular world.
The critiques of her supposed sexlessness aren't so much about sex as about social class or cultural category (not that sex and class are unrelated). Since her image is deemed to be "wholesome," it's assumed that she must also be sexless, though this is demonstrably untrue - I mean, look at how she's dressed in this video**** - and it is assumed that she doesn't sing about sex, even though she does.
I'm just amazed that people will make stuff up and not even know that they're making it up, just invent things about whole stretches of people that aren't remotely true.
*Though being her lightest song, "You Belong With Me" is actually the one least immersed in a deep sea of female moods.
**And I found another one. Click here if you want to get uselessly, helplessly angry.
***Though it did attain a cowriter between the time she first scribbled the lyrics during math class and later that same day (according to Wiki) when she and Liz Rose finished the thing.
****Also, note how she's playing mindfuck games with her audience. That's her opening her set back in April '07, when her audience was still overwhelmingly country. Don't know if she was headlining there, since in '07 she was mostly a supporting act, for George Strait and Ronnie Milsap early in the year, Brad Paisley later. EDIT: And from the YouTube evidence that's how she started her set all year, whether opening for Strait or Paisley or on her own. Pretty gutsy.
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Date: 2010-03-04 01:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-04 04:05 pm (UTC)Yes, makes sense ("indivisible" not meaning "identical"). Actually, Timberlake's looks helped me root for him too, for reasons not so distant from yours, and I'm not gay. And the Jonas Brothers, too, who look like nice guys - and actually copied the guitar intro to "Anarchy In The U.K."* on their very first single, "Mandy," and took the song somewhere cuddly, which was a move I liked - but ultimately they don't have the music to back it up.
When I was 15 and 16 my wall was covered with pictures of the stars of music, and among the scores of pictures, there was exactly one female: Grace Slick. While now, if my wall were covered with singers I listen to, it would be overwhelmingly female. But there's a connection, lots of the '00s nice girls being angst girls too, struggling with the same experiences as the nihilist angst boy heroes of my youth but trying to do it without the nihilism.
(I'm sure what I wrote is unclear. My Decade's End piece tries to get at the same thing a little more extensively, though maybe no more comprehensibly, in the part - if you scroll down - where I say "alienation was more an opportunity than a catastrophe" and then talk about how Joni and Stevie moved the romantic alienated hero into mainstream femininity. I think the sonic presentation more than the visual presentation moves my sociosexualemotional viscera towards the '00s girls, the sense of romantic hero(ine) Dylan/Miss Lonely as sweet regular Ashlee and Kelly and Taylor, "nice" girls with their deep bodily moods just trying to get through the day.)
*UPDATE: Don't know why I kept saying "Anarchy In The U.K."; it's much closer to "Holidays In The Sun" (for about ten seconds, and minus the marching feet).