Culture

The Rules of the Game No. 9: The teens are cool, but they burn out

The kids were all right in the ‘60s; how’re they doing now?

Frank Kogan

At the start of his very funny pan of Michelle Branch’s first album, The Spirit Room, in 2001, Robert Christgau wrote “Only in a biz discombobulated by teen pop could an 18-year-old with an acoustic guitar be plausibly promoted as ‘the anti-Britney.’ Don’t you remember? Writing Your Own Songs means zip, zilch, nada.”

Well, yes and no. In these columns I’ve been calling the issue of whether or not a performer writes her own material a red herring. What matters is the content of the song, not that, instead of being written by the singer, it was written by the singer’s sister or mother or best friend or producer or by some professional songwriter who faxed it in from three cities away. That is, it doesn’t matter unless there’s a social difference between the singer and the people who would have written the song if she hadn’t. Because if there’s a social difference, then this will change the character of the song. It won’t necessarily make her songs better, that she wrote them—might well make them worse—but it will make them different songs.

In his autobiography Andrew Loog Oldham talks about how, when he was producing the Rolling Stones in the mid-’60s, he ordered them to start writing their own songs. The band had mostly been recording covers of American R&B and soul, and Oldham thought these would only have limited appeal to the young white people the Stones were gathering as their audience.

In style and delivery the Stones had already transformed the songs they covered; the Valentinos in the original version of “It’s All Over Now” were doing a matter-of-fact typical breakup song, you fooled me but you won’t fool me any longer, whereas in Jagger’s mouth “tables turn, now her turn to cry” gets extra venom, as if it’s not just regular old anger but the discovery of anger; and “Hurt my eyes open, that’s no lie” sees through a lot more than the fact that some girl was two-timing him; the idea in the Stones’ own “Heart of Stone” is old—guy pretends to hardness when he’s really smitten—but in sound and feel and in its mind as well as its guts, “Heart of Stone” is the song of an alienated young man. So it’s not just about someone faking his feelings, pretending he’s indifferent. It’s about Pretense, about Fakery, about False Identity and Who the Hell Am I? And eerie background “ooo-ooos” express a grief the posturing narrator doesn’t know enough even to feel.

Take The Who’s “Substitute” (“You think we look pretty good together/You think my shoes are made of leather/But I’m a substitute for another guy ...”) and compare it to something like Smokey & the Miracles’ “Tears Of A Clown”; in “Substitute,” it’s not just the narrator and his girl who are putting up a front; everything around them is implicated, too—it’s all a front, life is a front, the Universe is a fake.

One could say that the original R&B musicians were more mature than the young Brits, understood that deceit just happens to people, it’s human, it’s life. But the Brits were young in a time of opportunity, new affluence, where they could crash into their own personalities and not accept themselves, demand a transformation. And so The Who singing “Things they do look awful cold/Hope I die before I get old” wasn’t an embrace of perpetual immaturity but rather a gesture in which they simply ripped up the map of adulthood and left the territory marked “Unknown,” expecting something better.

The British Invasion bands had to write their own songs, since they weren’t going to find music biz professionals who knew how to write them. (Exception that proves the rule would be The Animals’ “We Gotta Get Out Of This Place,” written by Brill Building pros Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. Weil’s lyrics have the protagonist desperate to break out of poverty; Eric Burdon sings them as if he’s desperate to break out of the world.)

Jump forward almost 40 years to Michelle Branch, a girl with an acoustic guitar and the look and the feel of a singer-songwriter. Her great hit “Everywhere” gives you verses that sound confessional and then a wailing chorus that’s sweeter and more beautiful than the confessional genre ever gives you. And—as Christgau noted in his review—the song was co-written by her producer. Interestingly, Christgau had the story at his fingertips but managed to miss it—which isn’t surprising, since the story hadn’t happened yet. But “Everywhere” was something of a template for a whole subset of pop and teen pop that began to flourish on the pop charts and on Radio Disney. And the template wasn’t just the sound: In the song’s wake you had girls in their teens and early 20s writing songs in collaboration with men and women—professional songwriters—in their 30s and 40s. About the time “Everywhere” hit, a young R&B singer who called herself Pink had talked her record company into allowing her to bring in her own producer and to jettison her sophisticated R&B and her alluring authoritative persona in favor of messy confessional rock that let her be the vulnerable mixed-up woman she actually was. And Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated” and “Sk8er Boi” hit several months after, along the same lines.

Though this sort of collaboration—professional songwriters in their 30s and 40s co-writing with girls in their teens and early 20s—was hardly unprecedented, for a while it became a teen pop standard, and it produced songs that were smarter and more emotionally complex than most of what you’d get from real grown-up pop and rock performers (including the grown-up pop and rock performers that the veteran pros also worked with). Some of this might have just been good luck, talented people accidentally getting thrown together. Who knew that John Shanks—the producer and co-writer of “Everywhere” who went on to co-write Hilary Duff’s and Lindsay Lohan’s best songs and was Ashlee Simpson’s key collaborator on both of her albums—would turn out to be the best melodist of the decade, or that, when you added Kelly Clarkson’s name atop the lyric sheet, blood would pour from the ceiling and guts would slop all over the floor, or that Jessica Simpson’s ambitious little sister would turn out to be a Courtney Love fan and would write or co-write probing and restless lyrics that were eight times more complex than anyone else’s?

But I also think the age differences might have been beneficial to everybody. The young ’uns would bring the gall and uncertainty of youth; the adults would help make it articulate and rich. And conversely, the teens would bring actual teen content that an adult given the assignment “write a teen song” would never think of, or if he thought of it, wouldn’t allow himself. E.g., Aly & A.J., a couple of home-schooled evangelical Christian teenagers who are by far the best musical act under contract to Disney, do a song about child kidnapping; and do a Christmas album on which the first track sincerely celebrates Christmas as a time for cheer, while the final track walks away from the cheer and screams for the right to be unhappy (“the lights are cool but they burn out”); and do a song where Aly laboriously sets up rules under which her boyfriend can come on to her, and then, at the end, makes it clear she’s really setting the conditions under which she herself can say she wants to be desired.

I think that this collaboration—teen and adult, youngster and pro—worked in the ’00s in a way that it wouldn’t have in the mid-’60s because a certain confidence of the ’60s is gone. Pete Townshend, creating new territory, wouldn’t have needed someone older to help him to his sensibility, whereas today’s pop girls want reconciliation—they still have an urge to break free, but feel their alienation as a disaster more than an opportunity. But notice that I’ve written most of this column in the past tense, even when I’m talking about current teen pop. This is because the teen confessional subgenre is struggling. Disney’s rise to dominance in the last couple of years is skewing the market too young for the teen confessional, while pop radio isn’t welcoming these young women beyond the Avrils and Kellys and Pinks who’ve already established themselves; and anyway as the young performers grow up, they have no good adult models for how to further expand and deepen their music, and no preset market or genre awaiting them. So their future, if they have one, is as uncharted as it was for Townshend, but not half so inviting.

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