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]

There are some snippets on The Ashlee Simpson Show about the making of the album; I've only seen a couple of episodes, but those who've seen the whole series say that what it shows of the creative process is frustratingly incomplete. (Commercially it makes sense that the show would concentrate on boyfriends and girly goof-ups rather than songwriters, though I have a feeling I'll find it just as fundamentally unrevealing when it comes to boyfriends and the girly psyche; Ashlee's got such an appealing surface that maybe no one including Ashlee thought of any value in exploring the depth; I suppose some people could argue that the "depth" on the album was John's and Kara's doing, but the people likely to discredit Ashlee probably never noticed any depth in the album anyway.)

There's a Boston Globe profile of Kara DioGuardi that tries to paint Kara as the brains of the process (Kara describes working off of emails from Lindsay to come up with "Confessions Of A Broken Heart"), the article giving the impression that, while the girls provided spark and themes that Kara tried to stay true to, it was who Kara did the actual dogwork. But I don't trust the author of that article (and the Ashlee songs on Autobiography where Kara's not on the credits are just as smart and complex as the others). There's a Day In The Life Of Kara DioGuardi piece in a recent Billboard that has a great moment where Kara is working with r&b singer Cassie, Cassie trying to come up with lyrics about a romance that doesn't get beyond emails. Cassie: "It keeps coming around, but it never turns into anything." Kara: "Like a revolving door, maybe?... [sings, while instrumental track plays in background]... 'My heart's not an open door... even if it was before.'" But that's something of a different situation, Kara coaxing Cassie to express herself, whereas with Ashlee and Lindsay there's no question that these girls are going to express themselves. Lucy Woodward, a young singer who worked with John Shanks and Shelly Peiken, describes John bringing out his guitar and the three of them just sitting down and creating songs. skyecaptain told me that you see Shanks and Ashlee doing something similar on her show but that the snippets don't give you enough to know what really happened. In any event, nothing I've read tries to address the question of who brought what to the table in the way of psychology and experience.