A Star System Is Born

Before/After


Before/After

Major late night revelation ensues from an idea that's been really nagging me lately: why is Ashlee Simpson so goddamn GREAT?

I don't mean this in the ingrained prejudice anti-pop whatever sense, but more honestly...what is it about I Am Me that feels so different than comparable pop-rock in the confessional mode?

First I needed to clarify my terms a bit...I've been throwing around "confessional bubblegum" and it felt not-quite-right. I realized what I've been feeling averse to is not bubblegum per se, but what could be better described as ANONYMOUS CONFESSIONAL.

Bubblegum is an aesthetic. It can be applied to anything, even if the definition of bubblegum is ambiguous and can shift constantly according to the general social/musical climate. Anonymous is a method of production; it may be an ideology (maybe bubblegum is an ideology, too...). My hypothesis is that what we're seeing in teen pop now is not so much the bubblegumification of the confessional post-Alanis (to use a somewhat arbitrary 90s sign post) aesthetic (hell, plenty of Alanis is bubblegum) -- rather, what we're seeing is the movement away from singer persona identification and toward consensus of confessional music indexes, that is, shortcuts to "confessionality" that have nothing to do with direct identification with a performer.

In the case of Aly and AJ, what anonymous-confessional potentially means is that the "I" in most songs is supplanted by "you," the audience. There is no "I" in Aly and AJ, there are only the projections of young audience members. This is the general idea anyway. The teen pop star system functions in a similar way to the Hollywood star system -- you identify with a protagonist not only through celebrity, but through a certain structural means, through recognition of cinematic language (or, if you want to be "indie" about it, through identification with the figure in a trance narrative).

However, one does not identify with the star directly -- I'm no Brad Pitt, nor am I supposed to be. (I am ME!) (And you're not Maya Deren, indie rocker girl.)

This principle (sort of) holds up in the confessional teen pop realm, where identification with a "protagonist" or singer persona is equally dependent on listeners' knowledge of the language of the music (the confessional index) and extra-textual understanding of the star. As the language becomes crystal clear (even to the 6-14 Radio Disney set) the star system may not be necessary...perhaps the "stars" of High School Musical, still "Troy and Gabriella" etc. on the RD playlist, are like B-movie actors. If the B-Movie does well (and it is doing well, both as music and as an ACTUAL B-movie), maybe these temporary protagonist placeholders can become stars in their own right. Which, again predicting here, they very well might in the case of HSM.

Things get interesting with a veil of celebrity. Maybe that's what intrigues me about Ashlee...in the star system, she's the underappreciated sibling, always in the shadow of her sister but somehow more compelling for it...like if Emilio Estevez and Eric Roberts were actually more talented than their siblings, but held lower in esteem anyway. Aesthetically, Ashlee seems to be working in a realm of songwriting very much removed from traditional indexes to confession -- her sound has been described as monotonous on I Am Me, but I find it to be unified. My tentative term for this trend or genre is "celebrity rock diary," which encompasses three important features of Ashlee's album:

1) Ashlee is acutely conscious of her role in a celebrity/star-driven system, and this informs many of her songs.

2) This is not traditional pop, and even given the move away from Britney Euro techno whatever and toward straight guitar/bass/drums rock (and Max Martin masterminded both of them, so don't revive rockism just yet...) there is something intangibly different and compelling about I Am Me. It doesn't begin and end with "pop" (though there's a bit of pop on it, which I L.O.V.E. [third usage of pun = retired]); in fact there's an oppressive wall-of-guitar thing happening that makes some of it weirdly inaccessible, and more striking for it.

3) Again, Ashlee is working from direct personal experience, filtered through complicit audience understanding of her celebrity. Not just anyone can be a star, meaning the number of artists who can even ATTEMPT this mode of songwriting is very low, and some of the ones who have tried it (Lindsay, I love ya but your album is really not good this time around!) have failed.

Hitchcock understood this third point perhaps better than any director with full access to the elite Hollywood star system. And when I really thought about all this, I came up with a bunch of imperfect but hopefully provocative metaphors to link today's teen pop stars with Hitchcock films.

♥ Skye Sweetnam/Noise from the Basement is Psycho: Audiences assume a big budget production, but it turns out it was produced as an indie! Hitchcock used his television crew and few regulars from his production team; Skye recorded in the basement with a totally green youngun producer who nailed it. Referential irony is a crucial strength, but subtle and may go over the heads of audiences who aren't viewing or listening esoterically. Yes, both Hitchcock and Skye know it's all kind of silly -- that's the whole point, nerds and nerdettes!

♥ Ashlee Simpson/I Am Me is Vertigo: A master work that could be categorized as "neither a hit nor a failure" (Truffaut), receiving moderate critical praise upon release (ignoring baseless character attacks posing as critical evaluation) and undoubtedly earning more recognition over time. Like when Kara DioGuardi gets inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Aside from the obvious hair dye parallels, the stories intersect: Ashlee, like Kim Novak, will seemingly do anything for the man of her dreams (the ambiguous "you" invoked in songs like "Dancing Alone" and "In Another Life") but, like James Stewart, is bitter and somewhat aimless after a series of major traumas. In terms of production, the masterful crafting of both album and film are to some extent concealed by a mesmerizing aesthetic and narrative.

♥ The Veronicas/Secret Life Of... are North by Northwest: Big, bold, epic, hard to follow in a linear fashion. Both feel like eating a whole cheesecake in one sitting when tackled from start to finish in one go. Secret Life Of... will be quoted primarily for "scenes" that have little relation to the bulk of the album...perhaps "4Ever" is the crop duster and "Everything I'm Not" is the Mount Rushmore chase?

♥ Courtney Love is The 39 Steps: I'm becoming increasingly convinced that Courtney Love is pretty much the archetype of mid-00s confessional teen pop. She served as a template before anyone had any idea there even was a template. How to divvy this connection between Celebrity Skin and America's Sweetheart eludes me at the moment, but there is more to come on this one.

♥ Liz Phair is The Man Who Knew Too Much: Liz Phair's early work in the 1990s is comparable with the 1930s version. Her "remake" as an unapologetic pop star functions as the 1950s update -- bigger, flashier, and critically derided in a knee-jerk fashion by elitists for daring to fuck with the original. (This is kind of a stretch, I'm not sure there's a significant 1955 Man Who Knew Too Much "backlash.")

♥ Lindsay Lohan/RAW is Rope: The audacious conceit (filmed in "one shot"/putting Dad in the role of pop-traditional unidentified male...also a competent cover of "Edge of Seventeen") doesn't redeem the fact that the individual ideas are all pretty lame. Good performances, mediocre material.

♥ Aly and AJ/Into the Rush are The Birds. Both contain semi-anonymous stars who got bigger after release, both are generally really friggin' creepy but kind of fake, and both demonstrate a definite underlying streak of straight-up misanthropy. Also, the Aly and AJ cover reminds me of the final scene of The Birds...those eyes follow you out of the room!!!! I'll never look at bombshell blonde tweens/seagulls the same again.

AND MIRANDA! IS KIND OF LIKE BERNARD HERRMANN!

Miranda! - Quiero