Another Song I Wish I’d Written: Teen-Pop for Art’s Sake
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 9th, 2008 2 Comments »
It’s time for Another Song I Wish I’d Written.
I don’t think anyone can truly say that their taste in music, or in anything else, is entirely unbiased and uneffected by cultural and social influence. But that’s what I strive for nonetheless. If I like a song, I don’t care what demographic it’s marketed to, or how ridiculous some people may find my admiration for it.
That being said, I have noticed something: Some music is made for Art’s sake, but afterward, packaged by business-people in such a way that it will appeal to the specific audience who they suspect will buy it. The album cover may scream “buy me!” to a certain demographic, but the music within was just made out of a desire to make good music.
Other times, this process happens backwards. The music is made for the sake of Business. Business people, seeing a demand from a certain audience, hire musicians to supply them with music tailor-made for those people. This often has a negative effect on the music, because during it’s conception, the producers are focussing on pleasing that portion of the population, and not doing anything to turn them off. Sometimes talented producers, songwriters, musicians and singers manage to do great work, even for an album that was born out of business. But it’s rare.
My music doesn’t really have such an enormous range, although reviews and fan feedback has suggested otherwise. I guess it could appear varied in style when compared with today’s increasingly compartmentalized popular music. When I make a recording, I give almost no thought to who will enjoy it.
….No, that’s not true.
But I prevent my anxiety about who’s going to like it and who won’t from effecting the music.
….I think.
This brings me to “teen-pop”, a genre with it’s damn demographic right there in it’s name.
I believe teen pop can be traced as far back as Frank Sinatra’s early work, which inspired such lust and lunacy from the “bobby-soxers” that one journalist claimed the Paramount theater janitors had to clean the urine of over-excited teenaged girls off the floor after Sinatra’s shows.
In the 50’s though, the entertainment biz really started recognizing the lucrative potential of the teenaged market. -Think “Why Must I Be A Teenager in Love”… that sort of music became big.
The trouble with teen-pop is, it only lasts as long as teenagers last. That’s why each phase of teen-pop is so shortlived; there’s only a small window of time, before most of the fans “grow out of it”.
In the 80’s, a weird fellow named Lou Pearlman managed a group named “the New Kids on the Block”, and that started another little teen-pop craze. Then “Grunge” hit America and killed teen-pop for a while. Then Grunge killed itself, and the Spice Girls crossed the Atlantic and took the USA by storm with a disturbing but profitable idea: They combined all the tricks that attract child consumers, with an almost subliminal sex-appeal, which kept the hormonal audiences from feeling that this music was strictly condescending kid’s stuff.
That fellow Lou Pearlman showed up again with his boy bands, and enlisted the help of a Swedish musical genius named Max Martin, who had also produced and written Britney Spears’ breakthrough record.
As the fans of this Mickey-Mouse-Club generation went through puberty, the “almost sublimnal sexuality” I alluded to became less and less subliminal, and then not at all subliminal, and then downright pornographic, over the course of the last few years of the 1990’s.
In the 21st century, the Max Martin / Lou Pearlman teenpop ship began to sink. All the artists had to choose between two lifeboats: the punk-pop lifeboat, and the “urban” R&B/dance/hiphop lifeboat. The Boy Bands drowned, except for one kid named Timberlake, who jumped into the R&B boat at the last minute. Lou Pearlman was convicted of fraud and money laundering, and Max Martin went back to Sweden, where teenpop never seems to go out of style.
During that late 90’s wave of teen-pop, there were two albums that to me, appear to have been created for the sake of Art, not the sake of business. Both of these albums are of teenaged sibling singing groups, and both were produced and co-written by two men I can never praise enough: Steve Lironi and Mark Hudson (Hudson is also responsible for Aerosmith’s drug-free comeback, but he’s most famous for having dyed his moustache blue).
One of these albums was Hanson’s “Middle of Nowhere” and the other was the Beu Sister’s “Decisions”.
“If there are mistakes, as long as they’re not glaringly obvious, I leave them as part of the performance. I hate things that are too perfect. Things became way too perfect in the mid-to-late-’80s and that took the soul out of a lot of stuff. In fact, I love the imperfections on a lot of my favourite records because they give character. I mean, listen to a singer like Billie Holliday. There’s no way that she ever sang a note in tune, she was always under the pitch, but that was the soul of it as well.”
Another thing I was pleased to learn Lironi and Hudson had in common, was a collaboration with one of my heroes, the Beach Boys’ troubled genius Brian Wilson, on his daughters’ album. The sibling harmonies of both the Beu Sisters and Hanson definitely bring the Beach Boys to mind.
This week’s song I wish I’d written is a gem from the Beu Sister’s album “Decisions”, called “Catch Me If You Can”. Go get it on itunes, or from their myspace.
One summer day in 2002, when I lived in Boston, I was strolling around the Commons when I noticed a free concert being given. The Beu Sisters were on stage belting this heavenly funky tune out. I was so blown away that I waited in a long line of little girls to get their autograph after the show.
Was I embarrassed? Sure.
But God Damn it, I know what I like.
