koganbot | Dressing up the cheeseballs

As I type, Jessica Mauboy, Demi Lovato, and t.A.T.u. are in a three-way battle to see who made the eighteenth-best album of 2008, and I'm busy coming up with further reasons why I might not write any Pazz & Jop comments this year and why I won't respond to Geoff Himes' desperate plea for us to submit more country critic comments for the Nashville Scene poll.

For Geoff the only thing I can think of saying is that I don't see why people make a point of calling Ashton Shepherd a "classicist" or a "traditionalist" given that she's actually a TOTAL CHEESEBALL. Not that being a cheeseball and being a classicist/traditionalist are mutually exclusive, by any means. She could be a classic cheeseball, after all. Except that she's not. The Village People were classic cheeseballs. Ashton is just a garden variety cheeseball. Her song where the terminally ill little girl worries about being too small to fit into angel wings is a craven attempt at blatant emotionalism, which I'm not against, even if its basic aim is to lubricate the listener, but it merely made me curl my lip (compare to Jason Michael Carroll's "Alyssa Lies" a couple of years ago, which has me blubbering like a little girl whenever Carroll sings "I told her that Alyssa wouldn't be at school today/'Cause she doesn't lie in the classroom/She doesn't lie anymore at school/Alyssa lies with Jesus/Because there's nothin' anyone would do").

Ashton is good anyway, maybe the cheeseball energy helps, or maybe she'll be better if she outgrows it, or maybe she'll be worse, I don't know, but admiring her supposed traditionalism seems evasive, or obsolete, or just plain missing the point of music. (This last idea needs further work, esp. since the guy who called Shepherd a classicist, Jody Rosen, hardly is averse to cheesiness - is a huge fan of that stupid T-Pain in-luv-with-the-stripper song. Anyway, the way my comment would play in print when excerpted would be Someone Provocatively Calling Ashton Shepherd A Cheeseball. Controversial.)(See what I mean about alienation being my instinct, my habit, my heroin?)

As for Pazz & Jop, what's popping in my head is that Danity Kane's slut sensibility is a total nothing to me, that the Danitys' concept of discovering their true selves by whoring themselves up isn't even interesting, at least not in the way the lyrics portray it; so they've got nothing to say about playing that particular form of dress-up; fortunately, though dull in itself, what it does for them is gives them an excuse to dress up their MUSIC, which they do hilariously and deliriously well, harmony and counterpoint as mock high drama. And I'd compare to Ashlee, who does have smart insights on the subject of discovering oneself; on Autobiography she spends the first three tracks crawling and clawing her way to an identity, testing herself against her listeners and her boyfriend and her family. Then on Track Four she unleashes herself, is the wild la la role-playing sex girl - having found herself, she gleefully finds herself anew through playacting. OK, so now, four years later, she's doing a whole album full of playacting, turning her struggle into a lark, which works fine for four or five songs and is pleasant enough on the rest, has great beats and motion but not nearly as much at stake as back on albums one and two, when sadness was always shadowing her no matter the send-ups and the comedy. [Again, the idea needs more work, and I don't know if that's what I want to be working on when I wake up tomorrow.]