Teen Choice Awards were last night...I don't know if I've ever actually watched these, or part of these, before, but it was a trip. Greeted by the Cheetah Girls and sent off to bed by Kevin Federline, and all other sorts of ridiculousness in between. I won't do the blow by blow, but I think it's worth noting that I didn't get a sense of any real musical personalities, even at an awards show that got Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom together, both looking confused and maybe a little intoxicated.
I can only assume that the lack of Ashlee or Lindsay or P!nk was the decision of the teen tastemakers (which isn't to say there weren't schedule conflicts with touring or filming, but I doubt they were invited to start with), but it makes me wonder whether or not the Teen Choice audiences have rejected some of their most important stars. They had Jessica (co-host with Dane Cook), they had Rihanna, they had Nelly, they had the cast of High School Musical at one point. But something was missing, some gap between the old-school Disney types -- a last-minute appearance by Britney, obviously looking very pregnant but having some fun announcing K-Fed, more on that in a sec -- and Miley Cyrus and HSM, that I could mentally fill with several artists that audiences seem to have largely abandoned.
The show might be the closest television equivalent of what happens when Calvin eats a bowl of Chocolate-Frosted Sugar Bombs, completely schizo and disorganized, plus there's a jacuzzi on the stage, plus they give out surfboards instead of statuettes. But even with the show bouncing off the walls, there was no clear culture that the show was drawing from, there didn't seem to be any acts that really brought the crowd over the top. Nelly and Timbaland looked awkward and uncomfortable; it gave me the impression of Nelly being washed up, even though she's probably never been more successful -- maybe not washed up, but she doesn't seem to fit in her new persona at all, maybe the reason why there are only about three songs worth of it on the album. Rihanna was lip-syncing poorly (nobody minded), but didn't really compensate with a big production number, the whole thing seemed tossed-off. Kevin Federline was a jaw-dropping joke, lame in Vanilla Ice proportions. I'm not even sure how to describe it, but K-Fed might have less charisma and talent than anyone currently working in music. He can't rap...he can't even walk across the stage convincingly. He's got one hype man DJ who completed his lines (occasionally because he seemed to forget them) and two kids who seemed to just be hanging around (at one point a third kid came out and started breakdancing right in front of him, but was sucked into the black hole of lameness because he stood too close to K-Fed).
Anyway, a disappointment, and it got me thinking about where the Choice culture is headed at the moment -- as far as I can tell, Ashlee and Lindsay in particular have been blacklisted for a number of strange reasons. Tabloid culture is huge, and a lot of the night's more (forced) memorable moments engaged with it directly, including Nick Lachey winning Best Love Song and saying "Um, awkward!" or preggers Britney launching K-fed's doomed solo career or even Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn appearing together in a video clip. And yet even though Ashlee and Lindsay (Ashlee moreso recently) have been absorbed by tabloid culture, there seems to be a rejection of them by those standards, for Ashlee still reamining from the SNL/Orange Bowl fiascos (which was another type of rejection uncharacteristic of her audience) and for Lindsay from her partying and other tabloid stories. But the key is that both are in the tabloids, both are part of the culture -- if they're perceived as the tabloid's "bad guys" (which may be true of Lindsay, probably not Ashlee), fine, that's a valid role to play. Paris will undoubtedly get all the mileage she can from her "bad" image, which is to say her image, when her new album is released. And maybe we'll see if she's on the awards show next year.
But what can Ashlee or Lindsay, or P!nk, who never needed the tabloids to aid her career but whose audience seems to be dwindling, do to regain their places toward the top of the Teen Choice food chain (if they were ever anywhere near the top -- Lindsay more than the rest, I suppose)? The hardest road is probably for P!nk, whose public tabloid image isn't as fundamentally linked with her popularity. Ashlee has been getting herself more immersed in tabloids recently, but it hasn't helped her ticket sales. I can only imagine Lindsay "cleaning up," doing a few prestige movies (starting with Altman probably doesn't hurt, even if she didn't actually do very much), but I don't think it will transfer to her pop career.
I wouldn't mind so much if the available options weren't such lightweights. Wherever teenpop is going right now, it doesn't seem to have many pillars in place for the transition; it seems like the star system of a year or two ago has been effectively dismantled, but nothing replaced it. Disney further privatized and expanded its own little corner of the world, older stars like Nelly and Jessica have tried to come back, and there are exceptions like Rihanna, but the love for the new guard -- Ashlee and Lindsay and even Hilary (who was also nowhere to be found) -- seems diminished. I guess there's always Kelly Clarkson, who bypassed the tabloids early.
And maybe Skye Sweetnam -- new track "Girl Like Me" produced by Dr. Luke/Max Martin confirmed! -- is poised for her inexorable rise to power.
Did anyone else even watch this?
[EDIT: Apparently Hilary was scheduled, which would have been all the Disney people except Aly and AJ in one place... "Tonight Hilary Duff is scheduled to appear on Jimmy Kimmel Live, however there’s a bit of skepticism that she’ll be a no show just like she did at the Teen Choice Awards due to the box office bomb of Material Girls."]
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