new/nu/neo-pop

isn't "Old Pop" (Brill Building, Motown, Phil Spector) a more apt comparison for this nu-pop?...seems like pretty much the same formula (headstrong producer, interchangable performers, zero personality - how many people can really tell a Ronette from a Shirelle, tunes equally disposable and vital)...I suspect this is why the Rhino Girl Group box resonated so strongly with people last year...

she's from 'da shot'

i'm in love with girls aloud (except the ginger - which is where mc pitman and i differ)

dallas austin is involved in ad agency saatchi and saatchi's 'branded entertainment' wing...

owen said:

not even a debate about the new one in the sugababes...?

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Indeed... I thought their cover of the Arctic Monkeys would have been a hot topic here at Dissensus.

For a touch of sonic novelty some of this stuff is quite fun, but I reckon in general the songs just aren't there. If you're just arguing about your favourite flavour of Muzak, then I guess it's pretty cool in that respect, but that pretty much fits with Simon blissblogger's summary...

I really tried to get into the Sugababes, and more recently Rachel Stevens, cos I thought some of the beats and the sounds were really cool but mostly I just don't like the songs at all. I don't listen to much radio or watch much TV, so it's not anything about their media image either, it's about feeling any kind of connection or respect for the songs. Maybe drunkenness and a pub dancefloor would aid appreciation?

Equally producer-led, chart storming tunes like Kelly Clarkson's 'Since U Been Gone' or Amerie's '1 Thing' just grab me much more. Maybe more relevant, if a few year's older, is Kylie's stuff off 'Fever'?

Also, is there a touch of that life-draining "we know what true Pop is and we will not deviate from the path" vibe in there?

I remember reading somewhere (gah, think it was Simon again) this as a criticism of St Etienne - that they seem to be after some kind of mythological, pure strain of pop that is anaethema to what actually charts / functions as pop. No friction, no sex, etc. I think that is applicable here, at least wrt the music - I'm assuming most of these female artists are marketed for all they're worth on the sex angle visually?

I'm not sure if you can talk about one Saint Etienne approach to pop in that sense though, as they've changed their minds on how they conceive of 'pop' several times - there's a world of difference between, say, the notion of pop expressed in "He's On The Phone" and that in the music on <i>Good Humor</i> - which is, I believe, the stuff Simon R didn't like, and, really, is closer to The High Llamas or The Aluminum Group than it is to Xenomania et. al.

I think what distinguishes Xenomania in particular is the reverse of a "we know what true Pop is and we will not deviate from the path" ethos: I'm tempted to suggest that the entire point of Xenomania's work is to foreground the fact that Pop, even "pure" Pop, is always <i>embodied</i> in a particular genre, is always <i>electro</i>-pop or <i>brit</i>-pop or <i>punk</i>-pop or <i>house</i>-pop or etc etc. If you listen to <i>What Will The Neighbours Say</i> or <i>Chemistry</i>, it's pretty clear that the makers of the music are delighting in being able to revel so shamelessly in particular sonic and stylistic affectations, whether it's skiffle or new wave or hip-house or big beat....

This indeed in the same way that Saint Etienne were always foregrounding particular stylistic choices - from dub to handbag house to English folk to techno... I think the difference is that throughout Saint Etienne's <i>songs themselves</i> retained that very refined retro vibe (Sarah Cracknell's singing if nothing else) such that there was a sort of internal distance between the song and the sound, a tension or conflict which people either really like or find kinda suspicious, perhaps on the grounds that this conflict threatens to place either the song or the production or both inside quotation marks, everything becomes a rhetorical gesture.

Whereas with Girls Aloud, perhaps because the girls haven't carved out these hyper-obvious personalities which their vocals are then tied to forever expressing, they're usually going for a much more straightforward mediation between contemporary pop typicality and whatever stylistic manoeuvre their producers have foisted upon them, such that it actually feels like they're pushing at the edges of contemporary pop from the inside, rather than trying to import this carefully cultivated vision of pop (see Saint Etienne) from elsewhere. That's not a value judgment - the long version of Saint Etienne's <i>Tiger Bay</i> is often my favourite album ever - but I think it's important to note that there are differences as well as similarities between the two groups' "magpie pop" approach.

I think Tim (Wrong Side of Capitalism)'s more recent post which touches on GA is also highly relevant - especially this bit:

Girls Aloud, whose latest album possibly marks pop’s complete emancipation from rock and roll. Hence the confusion of so many over the structure of GA’s songs; “there’s no chorus”: well, these aren’t verse-chorus-verse rock songs, they’re dance tracks with builds and breaks and repeats (the other complaint about the new tracks is that they fade out in arbitrary places; but of course one of the significant features of dance records is that they are plateaus, they don’t come to a climax or conclusion, there’s never any reason for them to stop). I’d like to try and make an argument that this carries over into GA’s lyrical and affective content, which rejects the interiority characteristic of rock music (Girls Aloud don’t do love songs).

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What is interesting about this is that something like 'Biology' is full of rock and roll references - that whole 'wicked game' section is driven by r and r-style guitar. But this is to underscore rather than undermine both Tims' points. Xenomania have dispensed with r and r form, so that r and r can now return as style. Xenomania/GA kind of do that same thing which Tim Finney writes of above (house pop, electro pop, rock pop), but within the space of one song. The plateau-architecture of dance is the meta-structure in which all of those elements are contained.

What Simon complains about in respect of GA - their lack of personality, their functional interchangeability - IS what makes them New New rather than New Pop. I don't necessarily share Simon's Adorno-melancholy about GAs' part-interchangeability. What is fascinating about GA is the complete lack of interiority, romantic creativity or scamster 'personality' - EVERYTHING about them is mass-produced (in fact, ren't GA the point at which two motor-city trajectories - techno and motown - converge?), from the way in which they were formed (through a reality TV show) to the way that their songs are constructed in the Xenomania lab.

That rock & roll style not rock & roll form thesis is spot on Mark, I hadn't really thought of it in quite that way before.

The track that I think most openly demonstrates the Xenomania game plan is actually "Graffiti My Soul" from <i>What Will The Neighbours Say</i>, perhaps because it's so reminiscent of big beat (specifically, rocky big beat like Hardknox or the first Lo-Fidelity All-Stars album in places, or parts of <I>You've Come A Long Way, Baby</i>) - there's that same reverence towards rock as an enormously effective bundle of signifiers, coupled with a total disregard for conventional notions of the <i>rock song</i>.

Is it relevant to note here the current spate of mersh dance tracks sampling big rock riffs? Mostly in the wake of Bodyrockers' "I Like The Way You Move", although arguably the trend really started with Par-T-One's INXS cut-up, "I'm So Crazy" (itself a natural extension of harder Armand Van Helden, Basement Jaxx, Green Velvet... Funny how these ideas filter down to the absolute mainstream over the course of almost a decade). Australia's Rogue Traders have a new single called I think "Watching You Watching Me" which is based around the "My Sharona" riff, but it's a) much more conventionally structured than current Girls Aloud stuff, and b) not nearly as good as Girls Aloud's own classic "My Sharona" rip, "No Good Advice".

Re the "part-interchangability" issue, I wouldn't pretend that I've learnt anything salient about the members' personalities (though to be fair the second GA album wasn't even released in Australia, "Biology" has only just been released here and it's the first thing we've had since "Jump"). But I do feel like the better GA songs convey a very distinct and almost perverse personality (singular) - it might be a Xenomania decision to write a song called "Wild Horses" and make the hook "Wild horses couldn't drag me back to you", but the girls as performers benefit from that decision.

I try to imagine what it would have been like digesting the Spice Girls at their peak without the benefit of music video clips or the media blitz, and I suspect it would be quite similar. You don't need to know that it's Baby Spice singing "Be a little bit wiser baby, put it on, put it on" in "2 Becomes 1" to enjoy it as a total what-the-fuck moment.

k-punk said:

(in fact, ren't GA the point at which two motor-city trajectories - techno and motown - converge?), from the way in which they were formed (through a reality TV show) to the way that their songs are constructed in the Xenomania lab.

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Motown, maybe but how so with Techno?

Martin Dust said:

Motown, maybe but how so with Techno?

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ha ha, I guess I was pushing it there for reasons of poetic symmetry. Was also thinking about the oft-quoted and oft-repudiated remark attributed to Derek May re: the relationship between techno and motown. Wanted to make the connection between Simon's Adorno-observations on 'part interchangeability'.

Tim:

on the GA r n r relation --- seems to me that GA have moved from 'Sound of the Underground' where a rock and roll structure of verse-chorus (complete with rockabilly tremolo guitar) was decorated with jungloid sounds (reverse bass etc) to the reverse: dance structure decorated with r and r touches.

Very busy atm, but just wanted to note that I think the issue with GA is not lack of personality. It has more to do with lack of persona, which relates to the issue of myth/fiction deficit we were talking about on the other thread. Will try and substantiate this later.

k-punk said:

ha ha, I guess I was pushing it there for reasons of poetic symmetry. Was also thinking about the oft-quoted and oft-repudiated remark attributed to Derek May re: the relationship between techno and motown. Wanted to make the connection between Simon's Adorno-observations on 'part interchangeability'.

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That's just the myth tho isn't it? Something the 4th and 5th wave of producers are now stuck with...

"Very busy atm, but just wanted to note that I think the issue with GA is not lack of personality. It has more to do with lack of persona, which relates to the issue of myth/fiction deficit we were talking about on the other thread. Will try and substantiate this later."

Yeah I do know what you mean I think. But again I wonder where the deficit is, is it in GA or in us? They seem to push quite hard with a certain persona, but it doesn't seem to come through, to be popularly accepted or discussed in the same way that it was with the Spice Girls. Maybe that's because GA haven't been quite as crushingly dominant? Or are they also actually less convincing/alluring/etc. than the Spice Girls? (I dunno whether they are or not, as I said above they have zero media presence in Oz).

I think one of the big problems is not an abundance of manufactured pop, but rather almost the opposite, the surplus of pop music which attempts to claim that it is something more than manufactured pop, either through the music or the personality of the performer or whatever - this is something that Tom Ewing talked about a long time ago in his "Death of Pop" article. I think one of the problems with this is that the surplus of people <i>making the claim</i> erodes the potential for the claim to be meaningful in terms of its impact, but also makes it harder for pop stars to feel comfortable in <i>not</i> making the claim. People react to the sight/sound of e.g. Will Young experimenting and displaying some musical chops and historical knowledge with shrugged shoulders - a "so what? everyone seems to do that nowadays" kinda attitude. And of course the end result is that audiences eventually gravitate towards music that is more classically positioned to be making these sorts of claims - James Blunt, the Arctic Monkeys, whatever.

Perhaps another big problem is that precisely because a lot of this pop music is like a "best-of-all-worlds" compromise between actual straightforward manufactured pop and some sort of musical experiementation or sense of personality, the myth that's promoted by the performer is almost inevitably that of the integrated individual, who likes to go out dancing to R&B but also thinks Radiohead are really deep, and hopes to have a few jazz touches on his/her next album - the sort of thing Simon R skewered so effectively in <i>Blissed Out</i>.

I think artists in this position are still capable of making great songs at times (see Daniel Bedingfield's first album, or the second half of Sophie Ellis-Bextor's <I>Shoot From The Hip</i>), but the overall cultural attitude which they are engaged with is ultimately anti-pop, or at least apologetic about being pop. Perhaps one of the big reasons for the net-popist gravitation towards figures like Annie and Robyn is that the cultural and geographic dislocation provides a certain exoticism, and more specifically a sense that these artists are not part of some general impulse in the UK pop world to make Perfect Britons of its performers.

The US suffers from this problem less perhaps; one of the nice things about artists like Hillary Duff, Ashlee Simpson and Lindsay Lohan dabbling in rock, and at times highly confessional rock, is precisely the fact that on the terms of their chosen genre they're <i>automatically</i> dismissed, and kinda objectionable too for even daring to make the claim. There's a lot more <i>tension</i> at work because the reaction of so many people is active hatred rather than mere indifference.

Tim F said:

Yeah I do know what you mean I think. But again I wonder where the deficit is, is it in GA or in us? They seem to push quite hard with a certain persona, but it doesn't seem to come through, to be popularly accepted or discussed in the same way that it was with the Spice Girls. Maybe that's because GA haven't been quite as crushingly dominant? Or are they also actually less convincing/alluring/etc. than the Spice Girls?

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Yeh, I think the Spice Girls comparison might have highlighted part of GA's problem, actually - that people see them as the Spice Girls mark II, and there's a sense - I would say an unwarranted one of course - that GA are just a second-rate, secondhand version of the Spice Girls.

But the problem is much wider than GA. It's even worse with Rachel Stevens, for instance. I really disagree with Michael upthread - I think most of the songs on the Rachel Stevens' album are superb, really a match for most of New Pop. But where I agree with Simon, and I think Marcello, who tried to account for the comparative commercial failure of the RStevens LP in his piece on Church of Me, is that there is something
missing from the Rachel Stevens package that was there in spades with Adam Ant or ABC... I think this is connected with the creativity of New Pop being bound up with the manufacture of a persona and a sonic fiction. There just isn't a convincing or interesting Rachel Stevens persona. As Marcello said, and as I think you're saying Tim, Rachel Stevens is far too busy looking snootily superior to/ bored of the Pop she fronts. She wants us to believe that there is a creative subject behind the Pop facade. With Adam Ant, the creativity consisted in the production of the Pop facade itself.

Yeah that's probably right, although again it's hard for me to comment b/c Rachel Stevens has even less media presence in Oz than Girls Aloud do (to some extent I'm forced to appreciate this stuff in the atomised consumer mould you dislike because there literally is no-one I know in real life who is even aware of the existence of this stuff - &Catherine would be the only person!).

Rachel Stevens does seem to be less and less present in each consecutive record. I thought "Sweet Dreams My L.A. Ex" had quite a zesty performance actually, and then with each single after that she becomes glassier, kind of like Debbie Harry on "Heart of Glass" except she just seems passive rather than fucked-up. That absentness worked well for some of Kylie's stuff on <i>Fever</i> ("Can't Get You Out Of My Head" obviously, "Fragile", "Love Affair" etc.) but she balanced it out with more enthused material like "Love @ First Sight", plus I think Kylie has the weight of history behind her, people are going to read more into her less fulsome performances, whereas Rachel maybe hasn't given people a reason to care. Minna from Gel & Weave reckons that a lot of the Rachel Stevens songs would sound better if they were Kylie songs. I'm not so sure - "Made of Glass" actually <i>is</i> a Rachel Stevens song stolen by Kylie (written/produced by Xenomania) and I felt it was Kylie herself who let it done a bit.

"With Adam Ant, the creativity consisted in the production of the Pop facade itself."

This is key, yeah, and part of the problem is maybe Pop Idol, which has encouraged us to focus even more closely on the the pop-star-as-human than we did before - this works well for people like Fantasia Burrino or Kelly Clarkson who can position themselves via genre-affiliation within a more familiar pop-as-self-expression narrative. But, more generally, it has the pernicious effect of underminining the notion of pop-as-spectacle... somewhat ironically when one considers the fact that the <i>everyone</i> agrees that the most thrilling moments of the various Pop Idol shows are when the performers pull out all the stops and just go for big pop-as-spectacle moments.

So people are confused by Girls Aloud ("I don't know what these girls are really like --> I don't like them"), while someone like Rachel Stevens is placed in the invidious position of trying to play to both camps and, in the process, severing the connection between herself and her songs. And, of course, someone like Annie sinks like a stone commercially.

There seems to be an ambivalence here between the necessities of myth-making and the interesting absence of interiority. Is the problem beginning at public indifference or at the mode of manufacturing the pop itself? Or is the problem that all our enjoyment vs. public indifference is just sympomatic of broader dearths?

There is a sense for me that the appeal of GA/RS is precisely their degree of inadequacy under New Pop / Idol human criteria, re: Mark on interchangeability. On the Ashlee Simpson botch-up my friend said "It's like her skin shredded off and we caught a glimpse of the terminator skeleton" but I think this is wrong - it actually provided her w/ this interior/human tension that Tim mentions. If it was Rachel Stevens maybe everybody would just roll their eyes or something (reminds me of the pop justice RS joke w/ accompanying pic of bjork/cunningham android).

GA remind me much of this:
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/KRAMAS.html

and what better way to describe them than "the ostentatious display of surface" (in both sonic / personification terms). But they are a pop act not a Busby Berkeley spectacle. I really like that they have their own set of dolls (woebot posted this) but then again i can't imagine what a young girl would do w/ them... maybe build some kind of headless Voltron thing?? ?

If Rachel Stevens is 'even worse', infamously nebulous, I feel that all talk of restoring the semblance of presence to her (T. Ewing on 'nothing good about this goodbye', the Kylie wishes, etc) actually run counterpoint to what I like about her. I know, Mark, you have derided Kylie in the past for being a blank slate upon which any male fantasy can be projected, but isn't RS in some ways the distillation of this very blankness? So much so, that maybe indifference or even repulsion is the only "sensible" widespread response? I wonder if the problem is this very paradox of ineffectualness being the effect.

Tim F said:

"With Adam Ant, the creativity consisted in the production of the Pop facade itself."

This is key, yeah, and part of the problem is maybe Pop Idol, which has encouraged us to focus even more closely on the the pop-star-as-human than we did before - this works well for people like Fantasia Burrino or Kelly Clarkson who can position themselves via genre-affiliation within a more familiar pop-as-self-expression narrative.

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Yeh, I think that's the problem for RS - she's started from the patently manufactured context of S-Club (where she wasn't even the nominated 'proper' singer - stand up Jo O'Meara, just now plying her trade on rubbish reality TV show Just the Two of Us on BBC1). Now the next step from there is standardly towards a pop-as-expression solo career - but RS hasn't, perhaps couldn't, take that route - which is good news for the records, but bad news for her career. (I definitely think that the RS songs are too good for Kylie, but I would say that. But they seem like they were written for someone colder, more imperious than either RS or Kylie.)

Perhaps part of the problem with GA is that there was always a sublimation-deficit because of their Pop Idol origins. The Spice Girls arrived as a worked-out Concept, i.e. they were Sporty, Ginger, etc FIRST then Melanie Chisholm, Geri Halliwell etc SECOND (Geri of course far less convinving as herself than she was as Ginger). Seeing GA constructed before-our-eyes meant that it was always going to be much harder for them to adequately fictionalize themselves. Think Tim Wrong and Marcello have got closest to spelling out a GA fiction, but there's a sense in which they're doing as much work as GA/ their team to develop that fiction.