Good year

Sorta. Here are things that make me smile a little in DOUBLE OH SEVEN.

1. Not feeling the need to write some general "best of" thing. Which isn't to say that you shouldn't read other people's lists:

2. OH SIX! You haven't listened to this yet?? You really need to download it and give it a listen at your "Hey Remember '06?" party this weekend.

3. Enthusiastic but Mediocre run-down of the year's singles (still working my way through the ones I haven't heard/heard of), which has so far reminded me how much I like "Tornero," "Strangelove," and that Croatian song. Also haven't given enough love to that Wigwam single. The one called "Wigwam." Didn't even know this t.A.T.u. song was a single (wouldn't make a top whatever, though). Hey, never seen t.A.T.u. live...she looks like Tank Girl or something. See also: Beach Party Cosmos (sounds like crap), random fan video (highly recommended).

Biggest revelation: I LIKE THE FRAY!!!! I'd never heard this song because of my intensely negative reaction to that other one.

4. Tom Breihan had a decent, almost creepo-free post on High School Musical, nice at least as a corrective to the other Voice piece I linked the other day. But he's still got issues! So I will now talk about them.

It's a powerful reminder about the spending power of children who haven't yet discovered illegal downloading; these kids are basically running the music industry these days. They're also making me feel like a total creepshow. I might not be the only unaccompanied grown-up at the show tonight, but I sure feel like it. I forgot my notepad, so I'm hunched over in my chair scribbling notes on the wax-paper wrapper of the Auntie Anne's pretzel I bought at Port Authority before jumping on the bus to East Rutherford. I can feel these kids' parents' eyes boring into me all night.

Tom! Calm down! I bet no one batted an eyelash. (I bet most of the girls, if they noticed you, thought you were a DORK, not a creep. Who takes notes at HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL???) No need to turn this into an anthropological experiment (ah, I've been spotted outside of my natural habitat!). Besides which, who says you weren't there with your little sister, who just HAD to get as close to Zac as possible (and joke's on her cuz Zac doesn't even sing and they brought in Drew Seeley for the tour -- yo, also, factchecker alert, Drew isn't a stand-in, he's the voice of Troy! I bet just about everyone in the audience knew that. Why hasn't Zac launched his RAP CAREER yet?).

And then there's this manufakshured-cheezo hand-wringing dressed up like some kinda "contrarian" capitalism rah rah:

The whole show couldn't possibly be more planned-out or test-marketed, but every kid I see leaving the arena after the show is smiling. And it makes sense: they've all just been treated to their own pop-music spectacle, a thoroughly professional circus of beats and riffs and smiles and lights that's all been staged just for them. The mad scientists behind High School Musical and its accompanying Disney empire understand something about pop-music that pop musicians sometimes forget: when it's done with energy and hooks and eager professionalism, it can reduce arenas full of kids to screaming ecstasy. High School Musical is making a few people rich, and it's making millions more extremely happy. When everything goes according to plan, that's what pop music does.

Professional circuses, eager professionalism...this may be true of the live show, or the general vibe of the live show, I guess. Hey, I remember an A.C. Newman show that reeked of eager professionalism, too (that show was pretty good too). I don't think professionalism is what's bringing anyone to ecstasy. (Can you be "reduced" to ecstasy?) What I like about Breihan's writing is that when he struggles with something, he doesn't pretend he already solved the problem -- and what, you didn't? But there are still shades of condescension here, subtle invocations of the SUITS (and I do not doubt suits are involved; I would wager the Disney conglom has about a 10,000:1 suit to performer ratio) that's trying to cover up things that are making him uneasy about all of this. Some of the hang-ups he admits straight up (but relax, yer not a petta-file for liking "Breaking Free"). But there are issues about who's producing it, how they're producing it, who they're producing it for, which get dodged a little. "Planned-out and test-marketed" clearly isn't a good thing (since it's positioned in opposition to the kids' smiles) and yet supposedly "this is what pop does," i.e., it goes for as many jugulars possible and sucks all the money from them. Or something.

I have similar problems with some of what I'm reading (mostly re: the more current artists) in the bubblegum book, which lets a pretty lazy conception of "manufactured pop" remain intact while the writers essentially switch sides. "It's fake! But I like fake!" Which is one thing where "fakeness" (or maybe just anonymity would be more accurate) is the expressed goal (e.g. Archies), but another when we're talking about, oh, I dunno, BRITNEY. Britney's not great because she's fake! She's great because she's great.

Maybe we should be creating our own parallel universes here by treating this stuff like we're listening to it and moving forward from there. Tommy over at Tommy2 doesn't get "creeped out" at all by Disney pop, unequivocally loves it in fact, and as far as I can tell he's married and has a kid (and runs marathons!!). Unfortunately the site basically reads like a giant Disney/tie-in commercial, which I don't reject on principle, but it doesn't make the writing very interesting. Aly and AJ fans have constructed their own universe (and their writing is better). I wish they'd let my universe cross with theirs more often but they've stopped posting comments.

One bit I have sort of sketched out in this next essay is: imagine a review that read, "I think this about the new White Stripes, but the people who actually listen to the band will think this." Which isn't necessarily invalid, I guess (even though more often than not whatever you follow that up with is gonna make you sound like a presumptuous jerk), but it's not all that common (except maybe in indie rock writing, where the presumed audience is even more explicit -- a group of backlashers and uberfans and music geeks...I guess you WOULD see "I think this about Franz Ferdinand, but the backlashers are going to think this," for instance. The key difference in that case being that the writer is very much "in," i.e. "actually" listens to the band). And yet High School Musical is always about this totally unknown wildnerness of CHILDREN who are strange and darn it, I just don't understand 'em, but hey maybe more pop stars should be pandering to them! C'mon, we were kids once! Breihan wasn't a kid THAT long ago; neither was I -- y'know, the girls I knew who really like(d) Spice/Britney/Backstreet had complex relationships with it. Most of them still have the CDs hanging out somewhere in their collection and they'll tell you exactly what the circumstances of buying/listening to it were, more often than not free of "guilty pleasure" second-guessing, too. And five to ten years from now, the HSM audience will still probably know every word by heart, and some might not even be brainwashed enough to go live in CELEBRATION, FLORIDA (which according to Carl Hiaasen's great quick read Team Rodent was deannexed from the Disney "community"/state-within-a-state strategically/innocuously named Reedy Creek Improvement District [they have the right to LEVY TAXES there], a.k.a. the area surrounding the 40 sq. miles of Disney world, so they could keep the RCID population low, consisting of 100% Disney employees + their families to keep everything "in the family"...now THAT'S a parallel universe!). This is only tangentially related to the post, but I guess what I'm driving at here is...as fascinating as Disney is as a marketing phenomenon right now (Haikunym calls Disney Channel artist of the year, several others place HSM in that category, etc., over at Jackin' Pop poll), there's a certain Big Brotherish language being used to describe the music itself that doesn't quite fit. Like in the case of Paris, this state of society conglom hand-wringing is bleeding into discussion of the music, and into the "this is what pop is" statements...does pop music really benefit most from eager professionalism and energy? Which isn't to say that lots of great pop acts aren't eager energetic professionals (although I still don't think the P-word can be used very effectively without providing a definition of what distinguishes a professional pop act from an unprofessional one), but rather, that professionalism's not a quality that can make anyone's pop music great or not so great, or make millions of people fall for it.

But wait, lemme get the quote right at least -- "High School Musical is making a few people rich, and it's making millions more extremely happy. When everything goes according to plan, that's what pop music does." Well, OK, sometimes pop music makes people happy and makes people money, and that was the plan. But sometimes it makes people happy and makes very little money (Paris Hilton), sometimes it makes people ANGRY and makes very little money (Paris Hilton) (and I imagine only the "very little money" part wasn't part of the plan -- what do you imagine market testing on PARIS might look like?), sometimes it makes people sad and makes lots of money ("Candle in the Wind Redux"), sometimes it makes people hungry and makes lots of money (aborted Ween jingle for Pizza Hut...well, it COULDA made someone lots of money). Pop music does lots of things, and High School Musical probably means something different to everyone who listens to it, including the creeps.

5. Lindsay Lohan as a gay icon over at Lil' Bobby.