Frank Kogan

Preliminary thoughts, after only a few listens, ASHLEE + EVAN EP, Ashlee Simpson & Evan Ross.

GOOD (maybe even GREAT):

"Paris"

HEY, THIS IS KINDA NICE:

"Home"
"Tonic"

COULDA BEEN A CONTENDER:

"Safe Zone"

OKAY:

"I Want You"

MEH:

"I Do"

Evan's voice seems anonymously Michaelesque, missing Jackson's tension but with potential to glide and swoop. In "Safe Zone," it's his voice that feels ready to move, while Ashlee is the one who sounds stuck. The other songs, you're relying on Ashlee to provide the personality. "Home" might grow with more listens; I'm wondering what could have been added or rearranged to make it as wonderfully sweet and poignant as, say, Miley Cyrus's "Malibu." "Paris": Ashlee's voice has the same great burr as in the past, and she adds high tones* that are effectively searching and probing, already the sense of a lot happening even though I'm not yet taking in the lyrics. Evan is a sweet steady presence accompanying the search. I think if the other songs had gotten more work they'd all have moved one level up, though I'm not sure what the work should have been (made more stark? given more obstacles? more lift? better tunes?). I've always loved Ashlee's voice: it's not capable of transforming all that it touches, but it contains automatic pain and hope no matter what.



Anyway, if this were a popular music review site, and if people actually visited it, I wouldn't be the one I'd assign to review this EP.** I have such insane love for Ashlee Simpson's Autobiography I have too many unreasonable hopes and expectations and fears around her. Right now I'd give this a B-MINUS overall, but there's one solid A song, and two or three potential growers.

Regarding "Now I'm free, yeah, and the world keeps spinnin round" in "Paris," unfortunately or fortunately, or rather irrelevantly, I keep thinking of the Elaine Stritch line in The Perfect Furlough:

Assistant: We discovered he was gone.
Les Tremayne: He's loose in Paris?
Keenan Wynn: ...Well?
Elaine Stritch: Well... everybody's loose in Paris.

*Actually, I'm assuming it's her on the high tones, but I'm so unused to hearing her sing an upper register I'm not sure it's not some third singer. It does have the same bumps as her usual deep voice, even while high and gentle. In a brief Google search I didn't locate musician credits for the EP.

**[EDIT: "Christgau once warned against assigning a follow-up review to someone who loved the previous record" (link). And yes, there are a couple intervening Ashlee albums after Autobiography: I only got to really know Autobiography after reviewing I Am Me, and I am half-and-half on Bittersweet World (as Xgau'd predict, and I'd probably still be that way now, but I never did review it or rate it), but the hangover from Autobiography is still hanging. New York Dolls and Highway 61 Revisited may be my only other albums that are "sacred" in the way Autobiography is; there are definitely albums I think are better than those three, but I still have trouble putting those three and my old intense love for them in any kind of perspective. (Btw, Xgau himself didn't stop reviewing New York Dolls albums, despite loving one after the other.)]

Been saying that these days the voice of adventure in popular music is young and female, though so far my argument is more loose ends than fabric, and I find counterexamples as soon as I find examples (e.g., male EXO is certainly adventurous, I just wish I liked them more).

Watch on YouTube

To put it negatively, pop music doesn't seem to have a viable adulthood, and masculinity (or whatever) stops making sense — or stops making excitement, anyway. (This last is a lot less true in the dancing than the singing, and I'm more and more questioning whether "popular music" is the right term anyway, "music" being too limited a descriptor. "Popular" is limited, too.)

So, on cue, Rock Critic Roundtable is hosting a discussion regarding NOT MEN, inspired by the relative absence of men (and boys, presumably) in Dave's recent year-end best-ofs. (Absence of male performers and frontmen, that is, not producers and execs.) He's asked Sabina, Jonathan, RGR, and Alex to be the convo, and invited us to the peanut gallery.

( Questions from the peanut gallery )

( Feigning clumsiness, he lets himself loose )
( Wonderful but somewhat horrifying )

If the Osmonds can make a metal album, so can Feist — though it turns out she merely made a metals album... Best track on the Lauren Alaina alb is "Growing Her Wings," lyrics something of a prequel to Sara Evans' "Suds In The Bucket," which it also sounds like. Incidentally, "Suds In The Bucket" was written by Billy Montana, Randy's dad... If Feist can make a metals album, Sunny Sweeney can surely make one of concrete... Sunny of SNSD survives tractor mishap to return to Invincible Youth. We at koganbot had a discussion a few posts ago regarding her political prospects... How in the world did little teeny-voiced Selena Gomez make a track that reminds me of Judy Torres?

Albums and EPs I like, some I've not listened to in months, more than several I've not yet listened to twice:

1. SNSD Girls' Generation (1st Japan Album) (Universal Music Japan)
2. Britney Spears Femme Fatale (Jive)
3. Dev The Night The Sun Came Up (Universal Republic/Island)
4. Miranda Lambert Four The Record (RCA Nashville)



5. Rainbow SO 女 [EP] (DSP Media)
6. SOOLj Electro SOOLj [EP] (CNH)
7. Various Artists Mr.Collipark Presents Can I Have The Club Back Please? (colliparkmusic.com)
8. T-ara Temptastic [EP] (Core Contents Media)



9. HyunA Bubble Pop! [EP] (Cube Entertainment)
10. LPG The Special (Windmill Media)
11. Selena Gomez & The Scene When The Sun Goes Down (Hollywood)
12. Sunny Sweeney Concrete (Republic Nashville)
13. 2NE1 2nd Mini Album [EP] (YG Entertainment/KMP Holdings)
14. Lauren Alaina Wildflower (19 Recordings/Mercury Nashville)
15. DJ Bedbugs Teen Pop Lock And Drop Vol. 1 (cureforbedbugs.com)
16. Randy Montana Randy Montana (Mercury Nashville)
17. Feist Metals (Cherrytree/Interscope)

( SNSD name and title synchronization? )

( Thinking about the album format )

This makes me unhappy, though for all I know it's fine or really good for all the people involved. Can't imagine it'll be great for the little one.

Also wanted Ashlee to have to surmount the artistic challenge of generating lyrics while being fundamentally happy.

http://popwatch.ew.com/2010/10/26/kara-dioguardi-jewel-going-platinum-bravo

The series... will follow 12 musicians as they compete in songwriting challenges across a variety of genres — everything from dance tracks to love ballads... — and perform these self-penned tracks for the cameras.

I think that Kara likes to think of herself as a teacher and would like to give substantive advice in a way that American Idol didn't really permit. But I don't know if this sort of reality-show format will permit it either; it does have potential, however, since it might actually take one into the process of how good songs are constructed. But I'm skeptical about how telegenic that process is. What's going to grab the viewer? I would expect it's pretty rare to find an Ashlee-quality person with live-wire self-expression and an obvious connection between life and song, much less a houseful of such Ashlees.

"Here's Frank Kogan, here's Chuck Eddy, and here's this dude!"

Dave Moore has posted a transcript of his rockcritics.com interview - had originally been a podcast (Scott Woods the interviewer):

(When I saw there was a third vote for I Am Me, I said to myself, "Must be the father of a couple of pre-teen girls. What other critics listen to this stuff, outside our circle?")

FK (You make me wanna reblog, in the kitchen on the floor):

My Dylan blurb for Paste. It only makes a passing reference to Ashlee, but she was saturating my mind when I wrote it, so I feel she inhabits every word, including the words I lifted from Mark Sinker.

Not to mention the words I lifted from Greil Marcus.

The ones from Mark were "Dylan pulled together worlds that want to remain separate but mustn't be allowed to," except in Mark's version it wasn't Dylan but the Village Voice music section under Chuck Eddy. I thought Mark had posted them on Tom's lj, but I haven't found it (was it Freaky Trigger?); it was right after the Voice fired Chuck. I used the words with Mark's permission.

The ones from Greil Marcus were the stuff about Elvis not knowing his place, which I lifted without asking, and it wasn't a direct lift, just the basic idea, which I gave my own twist to; it was from Lies About Elvis, Lies About Us, his commentary in the Voice Literary Supplement (December 1981) about Albert Goldman's Elvis. Greil: "[Elvis] wasn't willing to keep his place, and now he is being returned to it."

EDIT: The Mark quote was on poptimists:

it's not the end of the world, but it is the end of a project, and that's sad -- even tho projects do usually end (and final acts are usually bloody)

(no chuck in the voice in the 80s, no "my" wire)

(wire after me is a lesson in the possibilities and problems of a medium circulated among obsessives only: i think this "oddness" is the heart of said project actually -- an interface between two worlds that want to separate and mustn't be allowed to

So it wasn't only about the Voice under Chuck in the '00s, but also about Chuck in the Voice in the '80s, and Mark at The Wire in the early '90s.

http://poptimists.livejournal.com/140139.html
(April 19, 2006)

I coin a new term in this comment thread on Tom's Tumblr: "I was sick and tired of the way soul ballads had been dismissed as romantic escapist drivel."*

*Warning: some might find my comment unintelligible.

If you want to join in there or here, I'm in an interesting convo with someone named Petra over on a comment thread on one of Tom's Tumblrs in regard to how or even whether angry songs by women are perceived (convo inspired by an incompetent and incoherent Jude Rogers trend piece in the Guardian).

Last month I linked the "radio edit" of my decade's end piece, the version that was printed in the Las Vegas Weekly. Here under the cut is the "extended freestyle mix" (a.k.a. director's cut), a full one thousand words longer – that's 60 percent more, for the same price! To put it in brief, I'm suggesting that the musical story of the Web is words, but that this Web word story can be one of distance and isolation.

( Microwaving A Tragedy: The marriage of romance and romanticism in '00s pop )