Rules Of The Game #21: When The Wrong Song Loves You Right
I talk about Celine and the White Stripes. I quote Nia (and once again rely on her brain).
The Rules Of The Game #21: When The Wrong Song Loves You RightThis time I'm doing something of a free association, stitched together at the last minute - I'd envisioned writing a different piece and then abandoned that other piece and did this - and the ( Read more... )
The Rules Of The Game #21: When The Wrong Song Loves You RightThis time I'm doing something of a free association, stitched together at the last minute - I'd envisioned writing a different piece and then abandoned that other piece and did this - and the ( Read more... )
In one of my rough drafts to Intro number one in Real Punks I said that humor was the rock critic's substitute for personality. My idea was that the standard record review went "Identify the genre, compare to previous groups, say whether it's good or not, and throw in a joke to show that you're real and not just a hack." Of course, throwing in a joke makes one a hack, too. But also, high-flying invective in Meltzer and Bangs glory days was one thing that made their writing rock, and too many subsequent writers didn't get the other things that made M & B's writing rock, which was their ideas. But anyone, "humor" came to represent the wild beat of the music, rumbling up in your own prose. And then became a shtick and then became a bore.
Jessica was commenting in response to my first Ashlee column, ("Embracing The Ashlee Whirlpool",which was hardly humorless. I interpreted her as meaning that all this analysis missed the point, was taking the fun out of chemistry, though she could have just meant that she doesn't feel she needs to analyze pop for her own purposes (but of course she does analyze pop).
What Jessica actually wrote was: "I still think Ashlee's European counterparts are far, far superior to her and others like Paris and Hilary. The songs are just better, and for me all this analysis is unnecessary when it comes to pop music. Although I must add that Ashlee's general persona doesn't appeal to me at all - she doesn't seem like the kind of girl I'd want to be friends with or would admire if I met her, whereas Robyn or Margaret Berger for example would be the complete opposite." Of course, the final sentence contains an incipient analysis that she ought to have pushed further.
But it's strange her lumping Ashlee and Paris and Hilary like that - I just don't think that Jessica knows their music very well - and her setting those three off against Robyn and Margaret Berger; sure, DioGuardi has worked with all three of them, but then Robyn (don't know about Berger) has worked with Maratone people and so has Paris (Robyn with Max and Paris with Luke)*. But in personality, and I mean the personality of the music as well as the personality that comes across through the music, Ashlee reminds me way more of Robyn than of Paris or Hilary.
(*I think there's this interplay between Max Martin and John Shanks: Max is someone Shanks heard before he himself went into teenpo, and then the new Max sound that appeared with "Since U Been Gone" drew on the teen rock confessional that Shanks had helped invent; as far as I know the closest there's ever been to an actual Shanks and Max collab is Bon Jovi's "Complicated," co-written by Max and Jon Bon Jovi (and I think Billy Falcon) but produced by Shanks and sounding very much like a Shanks song.)
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Anyone = Anyway (in the post above that)
Parentheses, I order you to close. Close, I tell you. Close.
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