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]

Yeah, the way I said it implies that only the young have gall and uncertainty, whereas I know plenty of oldsters - e.g., me - awash in gall and uncertainty.

What I have in mind is that only by Ashlee Simpson putting herself at issue and having a hand in the process are lines (like these from "Shadow") possible:

"Somebody listen please/It used to be so hard being me."

Then, in a parallel spot, later in the song:

"So if you're listening/There's so much more to me you haven't seen."

There's an incredible vulnerability and poignancy in these lyrics, and at the same time an absolute confidence that There. Is. Something. Here. Worth. Hearing. Now, there's no reason a 33-year-old woman couldn't feel such things (Kara DioGuardi's age when she co-wrote the song)(for that matter, no reason that a - [calculates, quickly, how old was I in 2002 when I wrote the letter to managing editor Doug Simmons that became chapter 18 of my book?] - 48-year-old man couldn't feel those things either), but those lines just make more sense in the mouth of a 19-year-old, have a spring and a dance they wouldn't have gotten otherwise. Hypothetically I understand how adult songwriters could come up with such lines and say to themselves, "OK, now let's find a 19-year-old to sing them" (after all, there are adult novelists and screenwriters who create convincing teen characters), but I can't think of an instant in recent pop where this has happened. Which isn't to say that it can't have been Kara who actually wrote most of the words to "Shadow" - though I strongly doubt this - or wrote those lines in particular, but nonetheless she needed Ashlee to provide plot, to provide inspiration, to provide spark. (It'd be ironic if Kara did write most of those words: talk about living in the shadow of someone else's dream.)