I kind of like this year’s female pop sound, but, for some reason, all the top-selling pop artists this years seem to sound oddly similar. Moreso than usual for such things, which is saying something. I don’t think that normally Britney Spears, Pink, Christina Aguilera, Rhianna, etc. all have nearly identical voices. I think this is one of those occasions where, if I knew more about how the female pop sausage is made, it probably boils down to just a few writing teams and just a couple of producers.
This year, barring visual cues, I can’t tell any of these chicks apart from their singing. The new Britney Spears single “Womanizer” is predictably stylish and expensive-looking. It is in the format of one of those videos where the girl wears a whole passel of different outfits to appeal to a larger variety of demographics. Britney Spears has always been marketed somewhat like this, but this vid kicks it up a notch.
There is even a sequence where Brit is all done up with a reddish pinkish bob for hair and fake tattoo sleeves. Basically, the scenario has her done up as a waitress who would have a lot of “friends” on MySpace. The temporary tattoos are what feel like they put it over the top, although certainly, as the meaning of having ink has changed, tattooed hotties like Masuimi Max and Kellie LaPlegua are getting their ink lasered off. So maybe there is no true permanence in counterculture beyond what is in your heart. The look can always be co-opted, often in ways which are glossier than the original.
They will gobble up fashion as fast as the underground can produce it, although genuinely individual and independent spirit is the part mainstream wants to leave behind. But, like, America’s favorite trainwreck Britney Spears is, like, sorta naked in the “Womanizer” video.
Edit: So apparently, although this video has been uploaded about a billion and a half times to YouTube, it is not embeddable the way most vids from there are. Blue Blood has a policy against linking pirated content, but Antiquiet has the Britney Spears Director’s Cut video and I’m linking that, despite Kevin Skwerl’s FBI arrest and indictment because him once again having special materials means that either (1) it’s all effing astroturf and thus the copyright holders want it approached this way or (2) Kevin Skwerl takes stuff from work.
I love music, or at least I used to, but the music industry sure makes me sick.
I have a confession to make. You probably know I’m opposed to piracy. I’m especially opposed to the kind of modern large scale digital piracy which makes it pretty much impossible to make a living as a midlist band. The internet is great for giving nowhere bands a shot and it rules for creating record-breaking manufactured pop and blanketing the world with it. But it is a polarizing medium and, in the faint spotlight of the computer monitor glow, midlist bands have either rocketed to wild success or more frequently withered on the vine.
But nobody is perfect and I have committed piracy on two occasions. Ironically, the first was when The West Wing had a special episode with a fictional candidate political debate and I missed it. It was going to be at least a year before the debate came out on DVD or Instant Play on Netflix, there was no download option either on the official site or Amazon Unbox, and I wanted to watch the following episode. Technically, I was not the one who downloaded it off a torrent site, but I did knowingly receive stolen property.
The second time was when the Axl Rose project Chinese Democracy was leaked. I missed it the first time Antiquiet posted it, but I listened to it one of the times it was repeatedly re-posted in the Antiquiet comments. I could say that maybe there was some kind of justification in my head because I liked the writing style on Antiquiet. But really I took it for the same reason most people steal — I wanted it and there was not another way to get it.
I was terribly disappointed in what I heard. Appetite for Destruction changed my life and I sure didn’t hear anything life-changingly good on there. In fact, it seemed like averagely professional hard rock with a little self-indulgent wanking which might impress some musicians with its difficulty, but not with its quality. Possibly fine for a titty bar, but nothing to write home about. Of course, the fact that GNR super-fans almost couldn’t help but be disappointed with everything after Appetite, it is easy to understand why Axl Rose took 572 years to complete the album.
The FBI arrest and ensuing indictment of Kevin Skwerl is most likely being downgraded to a misdemeanor. Hopefully, if they don’t let him cop a plea, they will at least put the trial on Court TV or whatever it is called these days. I want to watch jurors rock out to a variety of different versions of the same series of hard rock ditties over and over. The various authorities who got involved in the Chinese Democracy leak i.e. lawyers, FBI, etc. asserted, among other things, that the leak was damaging because none of these songs were the final mixes. There seem to be other sites with live versions and other nonfinal versions of some of the songs still live, but the one with the best SERPS is in Vienna, so maybe nobody feels like taking it up cross-Atlantic. Whether the whole thing about nonfinal mixes was said to make sales or because it was true will be revealed. Now that the title track single “Chinese Democracy” has been released for radio airplay, I’d have to say that this song, at least, sounds like a different mix.
So, if you were a real big Scorpions fan back in the day (or are a ironic big scene Scorpions fan now), you may keep thinking you are about to hear “Rock You Like a Hurricane” on the radio, a lot in the near future. The song “Chinese Democracy” sounds a lot like a sorta modern “Rock You Like a Hurricane” meets “Mr. Brownstone”. Well, sorta modern. It sounds pretty retro, but in a likable way. On November 24, whether or not there is a Court TV broadcast, everyone will be able to decide if they’d like to check out the actually final final mixes on the long-incubated songs on Axl Rose’s debut solo project. I think Axl Rose is brilliant and I love love love his voice, but, let’s face it, GNR with just him is as much Guns N’ Roses as the current Led Zeppelin reunion where the shows will be performed by a bunch of Futurama-style preserved heads.
When the feminist publications like Feministe and the rock publications like AntiQuiet, and the news overlords like MSNBC all agree on something, it is safe to assume the topic is something as definite as the sky is generally blue. In this instance, pretty much everyone agrees that famous homophobe Katy Perry’s “I Kissed A Girl” video is a lot like a tremendously sucky version of a Girls Gone Wild set up.
More than a decade ago, Jill Sobule sang a bouncy tune, of the same name, about a woman who is titillated and unsure and excited about the new experience of having kissed another woman. Neither video shows a lot of lip-locking because both were intended for MTV airplay and, as a society, we tend to still view same sex kisses as potentially unsuitable material for kids. I think there will come a time when the idea of two women kissing being scandalous is as quaint as the idea of two people with different ethnic or racial backgrounds kissing is now. Massachusetts, where gay marriage is legal, recently had to work on their legislation because they had some old laws on the books to prevent black/white couples from other states from using Massachusetts to legitimize their otherwise illegal unions.
Because progress really can and does happen on so many fronts, the lameness of third wave feminism never ceases to disappoint me. If Katy Perry thinks it will turn guys on to tell them that she had a dream about kissing a girl, but, like, ew, not that she’d ever really do that . . . well, it probably will turn guys on.
Most guys I know, who would freak if their girl made out with another guy, think they will be just fine with it if she makes out with another girl. In real life, guys often beg to see this and then get really upset when the opportunity actually arises. Like it never crossed their minds that the chicks might actually be into each other, so then they get belatedly jealous. Personally, I think the swinger relationship model is at least internally consistent, but it is just silly to have the notion that it is totally cool for your girlfriend to kiss other girls, so long as she doesn’t like it. The idea of chicks kissing chicks because they really want to kiss a guy and need to get his attention . . . well, I guess I just think it is better to be more goal-directed towards what you really want.
Gentlemen, before your girlfriend starts kissing girls, decide whether or not you are cool with swinging. In most cases, the other party having a vagina doesn’t really mean it does not count, unless you are making your darling do something she hates. Of course, there is also the possibility that your girl is indifferent one way or the other to whomever she fools around with. To her, getting down with anyone may not be worthy of a musical anthem because it is a matter of some indifference and just really no big deal. This may include doing it with you.
Ladies, do not ever plant your beautiful sexy lips on anyone who would sing a song which manages to be sexist, male-bashing, and homophobic like “Ur So Gay”. Katy Perry does not deserve your kisses.
I first came across Guns n’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction when I was a teenage metal DJ on the radio in Connecticut.
A little background explanation: I got into doing this gig partly because I’d gone to high school overseas and the American overseas high schools I attended were woefully behind the times when it came to music. Like really behind. I used AC/DC and Rush lyrics in my campaign posters when I ran for class president. (I won. I mean, of course I did; there were AC/DC and Rush lyrics in my campaign posters.) I was shocked when I found out that Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven”, the big slow dance number where I went to ninth grade, came out more than a decade earlier than I would have guessed on a multiple choice test. So I arrived at college with more of an Aerosmith taste in music than the average student at a competitive, left-wing, East Coast school normally would have. Although I loved bands like Janes Addiction and The Dead Milkmen and The Cure and The Violent Femmes as soon as I was exposed to them, I held onto the hard rock thing because you never forget your first musical loves. Oddly, although my classmates identified as free-thinking liberal individuals, they seemed to hold the view that bands like Motley Crue and Dokken were for lower class stupid people. My annoyance at this classist hypocritical bigotry is probably the reason I became a metal DJ. I was frustrated that my classmates could be so close-minded about something like music. I enjoyed hard rock in my personal musical mix and I wasn’t about to fake like I didn’t just to impress people I went to school with. To bring home the part where I was not hiding it, I ended up playing it on the radio. Never let it be said that I do things by halves.
Before Appetite for Destruction came out in the stores, it was naturally released to radio stations. One of my listeners called up to request the track “Paradise City” and I took a look and we had this album with an appalling Robert Williams painting of a girl up against a wall with her panties down. Only the requested track had lyrics about wanting to go down to Paradise City where the girls were pretty. Ooh, artistic emotional conflict! I was intrigued and had to listen to the whole thing. Appetite for Destruction changed my life. There was plenty of music which had moved me before this. I was a DJ, after all, but this was something new and different and deeper. If not for Guns n’ Roses and William Gibson and Jay McInerney, I would probably be an attorney or a management consultant for McKinsey or some place like that right now.
Last week, something happened which might have made me break my self-imposed rule never to download music. A blog called Antiquiet leaked nine tracks from the long-awaited Guns n’ Roses Chinese Democracy album. On June 6, Antiquiet editor and media expert Kevin Skwerl wrote an article Crying Chinese Democracy where he said he thought Geffen should just release the freaking album already. He said that he stole Appetite for Destruction from his mom’s record collection when he was eleven-years-old and has been waiting literally half his life for Chinese Democracy to come out. His definition of terms is hilarious:
The phrase is now more universally defined as the new Guns N’ Roses album than as the actual political movement in China that inspired the titling. And over the years, the phrase has developed a second meaning: It can also be used as an adjective, to describe something eternally “in the works,” promised countless times, yet never, ever, ever delivered. As in, “that raise I need is fucking chinese democracy,” or “that big break your boyfriend’s shitty band swears is going to happen is totally chinese democracy, tell him to get a fucking job.”
The gist of the rest of the article was that he’d personally worked at Universal and knew a fair number of music industry folks and that everyone he knows, who Axl Rose has allowed to hear Chinese Democracy, thinks the music is beyond excellent. In a very well-written feature he posited that the only way Geffen could ever make back their ridiculously huge investment in the new Guns n’ Roses record was if it turns out to be really good. Kevin Skwerl then brilliantly breaks down the sales aspect of GNR:
In an attempt to recoup some of their eight-figure investment after closing out Axl’s tab in 2004, Geffen put together a greatest hits compilation, with not a single new or previously unreleased track, or any promotional efforts by the band. It sold more than 1.8 million copies. It was the world’s ninth-highest selling album that year. But of course that album had one thing that Chinese Democracy probably won’t have: Welcome To The Jungle . . . Appetite For Destruction still sells 5,000 or 6,000 copies each week.
On June 18, Rolling Stone reported that the Antiquiet blog had posted an article We’ve Got Chinese Democracy, And It’s Worth The Wait. Antiquiet immediately had a bunch of comments from people saying how much they loved the Chinese Democracy tracks. Other sites which linked the downloads also got a bunch of positive comments about the music. Oddly, there was an undercurrent of Motley Crue vs GNR commenting, but the majority of the comments were people saying the music was great and they wanted the CD or legal downloads to come out. Apparently, someone from GNR management then phoned and asked Antiquiet editor Kevin Skwerl to remove the tracks, which he did. On June 24, Rolling Stone reported that FBI agents had come to Kevin Skwerl’s place of employment to chat with him about the situation, and he explained his actions saying that he thought posting the tracks was a legal gray area as the songs were potentially not the final mixes (WTF?) and that he had received the files from an anonymous source which he had since deleted at the request of GNR management.
Cynics question whether the brief leak was a deliberate publicity ploy to “get people talking.” Very few commenters who post about liking the music are people who are signing real names or known online nicks. It is possible that no tracks were ever posted and the whole thing is smoke and mirrors and fake sock puppet comments.
On the other hand, I just discovered Kevin Skwerl’s Antiquiet site and I’ve been really enjoying his writing and Johnny Firecloud’s all morning. They seem to disclose their biases and work backgrounds and it may be unfair to wonder about secret plots. I know it annoys me when people read something journalistic that I wrote and discount it as possibly having an agenda.
The problem is that all the astroturfing of recent years has left people very cynical. A lot of consumers thought they were being forward-thinking by using ad-blockers and claiming total resistance to traditional marketing. So the marketers adapted with fake grass-roots support and forced viral marketing. The record labels shunned rock journalism and attempted to replace it with articles written by publicists, who are bought and paid for out of artists’ future royalties. Add to all that that the record labels decided that the internet age meant they could and should stop servicing journalists and radio. Supposedly they just got sooooooooooo frightened that journalists and DJs would pirate the music and post it to torrents and file-sharing networks, but I think a lot of it was that they did not want to deal with an independent writer’s genuine opinion and they preferred corporate radio’s complete control where the DJ never gets to choose the song. So now we never know whether to trust what a journalist says. And we definitely know (or should know) never to trust what a supposedly random man on the street says. And the radio rarely offers up anything new that we want.
So people are still pining for a new effort from a band like GNR where at least they know they liked it for real the first time around. I know music industry people in LA who tell me lots of bands sounded like GNR in the late 80’s and the label just signed them all and buried them in order to prop up Axl Rose and co. Maybe I just have more visibility to how the sausage is made now than I did then. They say nobody wants to eat sausage, once they see how it is made. It seems to me that, if lots of groups of talented rockers could have been thrown together to make a Guns n’ Roses, then the record labels would already have done so and that manufactured rock just is not the same.
Maybe it is all a sham, but it moved me at the time it first came out. If not for Guns n’ Roses and William Gibson and Jay McInerney, I would probably be an attorney or a management consultant for McKinsey or some place like that right now. I should totally sue those guys.
Note to music industry: Seriously, guys, I don’t want to read a well-written blog and wonder if it is real, so can you please stop ruining all the cool pop culture which inspired me to take the road less traveled. Thanks.
