Skye Friday: Luke/Max Edition

Point/counterpoint: Skye versus Amy and the Four Seasons [note: due to budget limitations, Amy was only able to book two of the Seasons]

Well, "Girl Like Me" is out there in the world, thanks to the Japanese edition of Sound Soldier.

It's kind of a trip. A flashback, actually -- I'm not sure exactly how to place this, except to backtrack through Max Martin's career, with the lessons he learned in his Luke collabs, to 2002 and, um...setting him up with Avril Lavigne.

I've never been on board with Avril comparisons, unless they go in the other direction: I'm glad that Skye basically came out and said straight out that her conversations with Dr. Luke had a direct influence on "Girlfriend," which is something that I suspected even when I first heard that song. But there are a lot of retro flourishes in "Girl Like Me," the Matrix-like lilt, the rhythmic vocal breakdown in the bridge (second bridge?), the canned "record scratching" at the beginning.

So it's early Avril in its sensibility, which is to say it's mid-period post-Britney teenpop in its sensibility. Which is weird, because that mid-period had a sort of LATE mid-period with Kelly C. and Ashlee relatively recently (about 2004-2006?), so it feels more like an aberrant lag rather than a sorta post-teenpop (e.g. Shut Up Stella, who's basically ripping on early Radio Disney/UK teenpop perennials, B*Witched etc. now w/ curse words) formal experiment.

And I know I'm giving this all waaay too precise descriptions, but I guess this is actually starting to help me figure out what doesn't quite sit right with Skye's new stuff -- I think she was walking sort of a fine line of referentiality that still allowed her to sound earnest even when she was being tongue-in-cheek. And what's gone is that underlying earnestness, that sense of a precocious girl who took her music seriously and was aware of its frivoloties without feeling WEIRD about it (like the new Be Your Own Pet, which is so terrified of being "in" on frivolity that it sort of drags all of its songs through mud first -- it sounds like an album of self-sabotage).

Skye's not like BYOP, because her mixed results this year aren't the result of self-conscious shooting in the foot (hm, I'm trying to figure out why the Dollyrots, just as self-conscious as BYOP, don't succumb to this i.e. are consistently delightful instead of seeming smug or lame?). They seem to be results of just...the damnedest things. So many of them. And a different damnedest thing for a different song -- there's nothing else on her album that feels late-bandwagon-like (and for the record, I like most of the confessional late-bandwagon stuff better than Avril's early stuff, but to hear it in 2008 is just giving me a sense of cognitive dissonance for some reason, because I can hear the influences of Marion Raven or the Veronicas on "Girl Like Me" along with it being "older"), just as there's nothing else on the album that's peculiar in the ways that a lot of the tracks are. So if these songs are failures (and I'm not ready to make that strong a claim), they're each a different species of failure; and actually there's something a little exciting about that conceptually. Because when I think "each is a different species of success," my mind goes immediately to relatively under-the-radar successes, many of them coming from Euro- and Scando- dancepop -- Margaret Berger, Rachel Stevens. And for half-and-half success/failure, maybe Marie Serneholt (more than half, but that's only out of a total ~ten tracks). And maybe that places Skye somewhere close in sensibility to the newish teenpop stuff -- Jordan Pruitt, Aly and AJ. They go all over the place with a lot of confidence, and a lot of good songs between them. Skye suggested as much on her first album, and in particular on the B-Sides/one-off tracks that followed it: she's a pop omnivore. But she's just missing something...some sense of grounding. She's aimless, and weirdly her aimlessness results in songs that lose some spark of spontaneity. So you get something like the best song that sounded strangely dated in 2005.

Maybe Amy Diamond's "Stay My Baby" is a good counterpoint -- Max Martin again, working in a mode that's about half Amy and half Max, and the half that's Max goes all the way back to early Britney. So there is a veil of nostalgia over it, or would be if anyone but Amy Diamond was singing it. Amy has a weird way of appropriating just about anything and infusing it with some sorta talent show/child performer prodigy bombast that's usually frowned upon in recent pop stuff (see: all of the fairly timid HSM alum vocals, a timidness not on display in the movies themselves...possible exception in like 10% of Ashley Tisdale songs?). Skye's got a streak of that bombast, too, but it's not as incongruous in the kind of music she does -- it's just a little cleaner and a little sharper than her peers, where there's something outside-the-genre about Amy Diamond's child star voice (a bit like Celine Dion, maybe?).