Brief sketch of what I mean by Superword: A Superword is a word like "punk," which is, among other things, a battleground, a weapon, a red cape, a prize, a flag in a bloody game of Capture the Flag. To put this in the abstract, a Superword is a word or phrase that not only is used in fights but that is itself fought over. The fight is over who gets to wear the word proudly, who gets the word affixed to himself against his will, etc. So the use is fought over, and this - the fight over usage - is a big part of the word's use. That is, we use the term in order to engage in arguments over how to use the term.
Meta use is use!
A Superword is a controversy word, but not all controversy words are Superwords; for what makes a Superword really super is that some people use the word so that it will jettison adherents and go skipping on ahead of any possible embodiment. Like, no one and nothing is good enough to bear the word "punk," and I wouldn't join a band that would have someone like me as a member anyway. (Supposedly, in the late ’80s I once claimed that Michael Jackson and Axl Rose were the only two punks going at the time.) “Rock,” “pop,” “punk,” and many other genre names sometimes act as Superwords. So "punk" (for instance) can be an ideal, and every single song that aspires to be punk can fall short in someone's ears. But for the word to be super, not only must people disagree on the ideal, but some people must consciously or unconsciously keep changing what the word or ideal is supposed to designate so that the music is always inadequate to the ideal, even if the music would have been adequate to yesterday's version of the ideal. And the music then chases after this ever-changing ideal. Words bounce on ahead, and the music comes tumbling after.
This one is coming up on the ILM board, a Kogan idea (applied to punk, although Tom Breihan makes interesting observations about hip-hop as superword) that makes me want to read his book. Commence summer reading. Anyway, I'm thinking about a lot of this stuff now and felt like I should respond to a few things in a way that lets me obsess/expound a little.
This thread evolved into a discussion of genre and social categorization, and I think a lot of it relates to teen pop in ways that have been discussed (for one) in the Voice Ashlee review. Which I still haven't totally unpacked yet.
The first idea here relates to the (seeming) breakdown of social category that has a lot to do with how production, distribution, and marketing of entertainment media in the context of American (and I guess global, but I'm speaking in a primarily American context here) capitalism has developed in the past 20 years. I'm using the Time Warner merger in 1989 as the marker of a distinct phase in entertainment media creation/consumption...see the incredible Global Hollywood 2 for an extensive overview of these developments.
The idea of the "counter-culture" and of any culture stemming from a consumer model -- this includes rock, punk, hip-hop, most codified or wannabe-codified genres of music -- has been undermined by niche marketing capitalism, which doesn't attempt to market to the individual within a wider group, but rather emphasizes individuality to, paradoxically, ensure mass homogeneity. Examples are maybe most apparent in global Hollywood marketing schemes that strategically isolate culture, racial, gender, even class groups in order to market to the individual, in what's called "positioning" films for a specifically defined audience (semi-related fun fact: "domestically...films about black themes are given a mere six weeks of opportunity each year, in the period between Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday and the end of Black History Month"). Arguably most pertinent to a discussion of music in this structural context is the "indie film" as a niche genre, which utilizes the same distribution and marketing practices of a witheld-from-critics action movie while somehow being perceived as having greater substance and/or value than those films, despite being indistinguishable in terms of the structural aspects of its distribution and marketing (and usually production, although that can very occasionally be subverted).
That point can be translated pretty well to an argument about "indie" as music genre, which I think has been discussed enough, and I don't really have much to add to the discussion -- read a few Myspace posts to find a few "mainstream pop" indies. And remember Skye's new slogan: "INDIER THAN THE DECEMBERISTS!"
But the niche marketing aspect can also relate to changing perceptions of musical genre as part of a culture or subculture. Though "punk" (for example) isn't a purely historical superword, perhaps it will become more difficult to introduce and canonize new superwords as young audiences are individually targeted using group assumptions that intentionally and systematically don't translate to a unified, identifiable cultural group defined by music genre.
Current teen pop's relationship to the superword is interesting, because to some extent it defies social categorization, despite the fact that much of it (from Britney to Ashlee) is widely believed to be part of the mass homogenization of popular music. Again, I'm torn when it comes to the music world vs. film world, where homogenization seems so apparent -- I think this has to do with the relative ease in which new music can be created as compared to the resources required for production, distribution, and marketing of a Hollywood-standard film. The Myspacers can record in their basement and hold their own with Britney (Skye did just that and toured with her), whereas aspiring film students, or anyone else for that matter, have pretty much zero chance of infiltrating the Hollywood system with their own independently produced work. Granted, Skye needed the distribution and marketing backing of Capitol, but she initially produced the music on her own aesthetic terms.
The actual musical content of teen pop of the last ten years has not effectively established a regular or definable group fanbase. Even using just three signifiers of popular support -- Billboard, Radio Disney, and TRL -- it's impossible to adequately track most artists in teen pop, which itself encompasses many superwords, along definable group lines. Ashlee Simpson is a model here, as she might be for many other aspects of this discussion, because as has been previously stated, she has not found a unified audience outside of TRL. Other audiences who might be unified under a blanket superword for whatever music Ashlee makes have, if not rejected, been hesitant to embrace Ashlee's music.
This opens up a lot of questions. Is teen pop subject to the parameters of already formed superwords, or is it truly a unique new musical experiment, a superword in itself? If it is truly unique, can any subsequent superwords emerge from the artists who now push the boundaries of how the music is understood by its audience (whoever they are)?
Kogan examines I Am Me using punk as a "red cape," if the punk/Ashlee thread is any indication. But he also asserts on his blog that Ashlee has no clear precedent, and actually (re-reading this) makes a few points I've tried to make above:
Obviously, I'm identifying hard with teenpop in that just as I don't see a path for them into the future, I don't see a path for myself either - which isn't to say that there's no future for me, but just that like for the teenpoppers, my path isn't given, my way isn't clear, so we're going to have to invent one.
Current "teenpop" - or the strain within it that most currently is capturing my attention, the part I'll call "rock confessional" - is actually without precedent, kids in their teens and early twenties working with a handful of music pros in their mid thirties, but the kids all included in the songwriting credits and creating (with the aid of those veteran pros) songs that are smarter and more emotionally complex than most of what you're getting from real grownup pop and rock performers (including the grownup pop and rock performers that the veteran pros also work with). But what this means is that these girls have no good models for how to expand and deepen their music as they grow into their twenties, and no preset market or genre to inhabit once they do, unless they create it for themselves. Well, no good models is my opinion. The girls probably all want to be Alanis, not realizing that they're already better. Kelly Clarkson's commercial success is heartening, as she's managed to do her agony and angst without shedding the sugar pop. But Ashlee, who's the best of the lot, is now only getting middling sales and poor airplay and is probably reliant on the tweeny-market that she'll shortly be losing. Maybe there's a way for Ashlee and the others to carry on with their pop craftsmanship and exuberance yet do Alanis and Fiona and KT Tunstall and Tash Bedingfield and Courtney Love and Craig Finn and Conor Oberst, but without Alanis et al.'s bullshit and obfuscation.
Hmmm, don't know why I didn't tell John the truth, which is that I'm hearing in Ashlee the potential to do Jagger or Dylan 1965 but take it somewhere else, since she's basically a "nice girl," which means for better or worse she won't be tied to the alienation of a counterculture, so maybe she'll grow where Dylan and Jagger stopped dead. These are sketchy thoughts on my part, and I don't know how much to credit to Ashlee as opposed to Shanks and DioGuardi et al., except none of what S & D et al. have done with anyone else shows this promise, so I might as well credit Ashlee. "Ashlee" is an amazing creation anyway, no matter how many hands are involved.
Not to say that existing superwords are mutually exclusive from whatever category it is in which we can define, or attempt to define, Ashlee's music. But if I'm interpreting this correctly (which I may not be) this idea of being a Dylan or a Jagger is imperfect because of its reliance on an older conception of superwords -- to go back to the idea of capitalism underlying and maybe informing this entire discussion, as changes capitalism so changes how superwords are formed and used, or perhaps in the case of musical identification, if they're formed and used. In 10 years, there has been no one genre to describe nearly any of the artists widely recognized (and in some cases vilified) as teen pop (to do a quick top of the head list, Backstreet Boys, Britney, *NSync, M2M, Avril Lavigne, Michelle Branch, Skye Sweetnam, Kelly Clarkson, Ashlee Simpson, Lindsay Lohan...how are any or all of these artists actually musically related?). I don't see teen pop itself as the genre, but as more of a catch-all (or is this the definition of a superword? Maybe I'm just confused here) for an incredibly diverse range of musical artists and maybe sub- or emerging genres (like confessional rock in the teen pop context) with no clear single aesthetic or audience. Instead, teen pop is largely organized by critical assumptions, in this case assumptions about audience demographics, which may be, if not totally unfounded, harmful to valid analysis of musical content ("teenybopper music" is not the codified genre/cultural term for whatever it was the Beatles were doing).
I guess part of this is the question of how music and/or superwords are canonized, and whether or not recognizable artists and audiences within a superword "really happened like that" -- maybe there's as much diversity in "punk" as there is in teen pop. But I have a suspicion that the aforementioned artists will not be critically or institutionally canonized in the way that, say, Sex Pistols, Clash, Ramones (to name three very different but prominent artists informing the discussion of punk as superword) have been. Current niche marketing practices, which infiltrate both how audiences consume music (define a "punk," then define an "indie kid," then define a "teen popper"...)and how writers write about music, might preclude the possibility of Ashlee Simpson or Skye Sweetnam or even Britney Spears from being widely critically discussed in a manner that might lead their catchall "genre" (teenpop) to the same superword status as rock or punk or hip-hop. It's been (at least) ten years already and I see little progress toward a superword -- teen pop is dogged by many of the same assumptions and exclusion from "validity" as it was in 1996.
Part of my frustration and confusion here comes from an almost complete lack of critical discourse on teen pop. I'm not sure how one would combat this, aside from writing about it on a blog or a message board or a Myspace comment box somewhere, because music magazines have all become integral components of niche market capitalism. Ashlee Simpson won't be taken seriously in established music magazines so long as her audience doesn't require that sort of discussion or validation to sell records. And yet she doesn't really have an audience -- a unified one, anyway -- if the charts are to be trusted. She's existing in an interstitial teenpop universe, a liminal zone of pop (academia here I come!)...along with Lindsay Lohan, who certainly isn't getting any favors from the New York Times. Oh no, it's OK, as long as she "matures" (and conforms to the "valid" indie film niche, where you can actually get written about SERIOUSLY in publications that smart people like to buy) she'll be just fine.
I'm not sure how many interesting or valid or original ideas I have here, just thought I'd kind of expel it and see what happens. That's all for now, but I'll probably return to this after thinking about it more.
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