Rules Of The Game #9: The Teens Are Cool But They Burn Out

[koganbot]

The Rules Of The Game #9: The teens are cool, but they burn out

I make a bunch of bald statements many of which I barely even try to explain much less support. Which means I've got lots of bones I can put flesh on in the future, if I can find the right skin for 'em.

But here's a bone that's especially worth getting some flesh, fat, and muscle from you guys: If you were to form a band, what would it sound like? An implication of what I've written here is that, though I love hearing scads of modern music, I can't imagine myself making any of it. To paraphrase Pink, it's so pretty (or icy or funny or brutal) but it just ain't me.

This isn't necessarily so different from how I felt 27 years ago when I was looking for fellow musicians by placing ads along the lines of "Teena Marie meets Johnny Rotten On The Corner" or was calling for the great James Brown-Stooges fusion. (Ironically, when the JB-Stooges fusion actually came along - Public Enemy, say, or Phuture - I was a lot less interested than I'd expected to be. By then I wanted Public Enemy to meet L'Trimm in Judy Torres' bodega.) I wasn't calling for such an amalgam out of any commitment to eclecticism, but because I couldn't imagine myself doing any of the available musics straight up.

(Meet Brie Larson and Lisette Melendez in your own kitchen.)

EDIT: Here are links to all but three of my other Rules Of The Game columns (LVW's search results for "Rules of the Game"). Links for the other three (which for some reason didn't get "Rules Of The Game" in their titles), are here: #4, #5, and #8.

UPDATE: I've got all the links here now:

http://koganbot.livejournal.com/179531.html

Comments

[koganbot]

Outtake that I left on the cutting room floor ('cause it was too much of a speedbump):

Of course, there also could be personality differences between the singer and the people who would have written the song if she hadn't, and these differences matter too. This last point may be kind of obvious, but it has implications that haven't necessarily been thought through. I mean, if you ask me, "How does music come to sound the way it does?" I'm not sure I have an answer. (And so far I haven't even mentioned the character of the audience and how this affects music.)

What I had in mind in regard to "implications that haven't been necessarily thought through" is that a performer is defined to a big extent by her early hits, and since there's some chance involved in what hits and what doesn't, there's also some chance involved in which part of her or her songwriters' (!) and producers' (!) and bandmates' (!) musical personality becomes her public personality, her musical identity. Whereas the songwriter - not being the public face of the music - can change his musical personality any old time he wants, provided he can sell the results.