Bunch of random odds and ends this week that accidentally have a lot to do with each other.
American Idol judge Simon Cowell: “I need to know everything which is interesting about you.” Contestant Brooke White: “About me that’s interesting?” “Yeah.” “Um, I’ve never seen a rated R movie.”
This could be potentially interesting, that Brooke has never seen an R-rated movie. It’s telling—or maybe not—that her first impulse is to focus on what she won’t do, to describe herself by a restriction. If I’d been interviewing Brooke I might have asked her why she chose to restrict herself in that particular way. For example, it makes sense for me to want my knowledge of, say, heroin and murder to be merely secondhand—neither is what I want to do with my life, thank you, and forgoing heroin and murder allows me to do other things. And I’m probably never going to get around to learning the sousaphone or teaching myself to knit, either, but that’s because I have other priorities, not because I want to shun knowledge. So I’d ask Brooke what she gains by turning her eye away from this hunk of her culture, and why she’s willing to let a ratings board do her thinking for her. (In the back of my mind I’d be wondering if she and I might have a lot in common, not in what we turn from, but in the fact that we turn. More to the point than knitting and sousaphones is that I stay away from canasta and that I turn away from singles bars—not for reasons of principle but rather because I don’t think I belong there.)
Brooke is by far my favorite singer in this year’s competition: nice, heartfelt, sexy. If it came down to the last two between her and young David Archuleta, I might get an attack of conscience and vote Archuleta instead because his singing really is extraordinarily sweet and he’s even more at ease as a singer than Brooke is—despite botching “We Can Work It Out” last week. But still, I’m rooting for Brooke. She has more in her voice, including nonniceness when the song demands it. I wouldn’t bet on her surviving to the final two, however, my guess being that voters are going to want someone who appears less goody-goody and more exciting. As for the rest of them, it seemed for a while that Ramiele Malubay was going to be this year’s Designated Bore Who Gets Highly Praised, like Melinda Doolittle last year, except Melinda was genuinely creative and intriguing in what she tried to do in her R&B and jazz mixtures, even if she never quite brought the feeling. Whereas Ramiele just seems well practiced.
Maybe Archuleta is this year’s Bore, actually, but he has such a beautiful voice that I think he’s the performer to beat, and I hope he ignores the standard advice to “take risks” and that instead he sings within himself, doing what he’s comfortable with. (Ditto for Brooke.) Someone’s going to have to really show great artistry week after week to overcome the advantage David’s voice gives him. Carly Smithson is liked by the judges, but they’ve no longer got a vote, and to beat David with her relatively inflexible voice she’s going to have to really deliver the emotion and meaning of her material in a way she hasn’t so far. I thought the judges ridiculously overpraised her “Come Together” (Simon actually compared her to Kelly Clarkson). It was an audacious choice, and she did well to sing powerfully and not ape the original, but she didn’t come close to conveying the shock and loathing of Lennon’s words. Not that great performances have to convey the words, necessarily, but if she’s to win she’s got to take advantage of everything she’s given.
Chikezie is an affable bear of a fellow, big in voice, likable and smart, but I’m not hearing much beyond affability in his singing. He floored everybody with his arrangement of “She’s A Woman,” taking the song from old-time country plinking to loud soul-rocking. If he can consistently come up with arrangements like that, he’ll keep things interesting, but he’s still not got the emotional juice to go with his volume. Jason Castro does a good job of hippie dippy mush, but he has too narrow an emotional range and his voice tends to recede. Amanda Overmyer is a barroom belter and is fine as that. The rest of them can’t get voted off the show fast enough for me.
* * *
Last Wednesday, the day after Idol, the New York Times located Ashley Alexandra Dupré, the young prostitute “Kristen” who had the assignation in a DC hotel with ex-Governor Eliot Spitzer that brought him down. The story piqued my interest because, it turns out, she’s an aspiring singer. “I am all about my music, and my music is all about me” she says on her MySpace page (http://www.myspace.com/ninavenetta). Times writers Serge F. Kovaleski and Ian Urbina call her track “What We Want” “an amateurish, hip-hop inflected rhythm and blues tune that asks, ‘Can you handle me, boy?’ and uses some dated slang, calling someone her ‘boo.’” I think it’s way better than that: true, it’s done cheap, barely demo quality, but it is effectively spare, a big drum creating a space of mysteriousness, though obviously a topflight producer like Scott Storch would create the space better. (My friend Alex MacPherson and I both immediately pegged this as a takeoff on Paris Hilton’s Storch-produced “Turn It Up.” “Turn It Up” is twice as good, but then something one-half as good as Scott Storch is still pretty good.) Ashley’s other track, “Move Ya Body,” is a lot clumsier but has potential, trying to sound like Rihanna’s “Pon Da Replay” in dark silhouette. Ashley doesn’t do seductiveness nearly as well as Paris, and is totally missing Paris’s wit, but she puts an interesting strain in her singing, has a viable voice.
(And though I’d be the last person to have an informed opinion on whether “boo” is outdated or not, Dave Moore reminds me that the first two lines of Chris Brown’s “With You”—the number two song on this week’s Hot 100—go “And I need you boo/I gotta see you boo.”)
* * *
I’d been spending most of Wednesday on YouTube replaying all of Brooke White’s American Idol performances, trying to figure out how, for instance, she makes me care about dull old Beatles sap like “Let It Be” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I87pxbeyu_s). What Brooke does is to always bring her singing back to quietness so as to sound intimate and conversational even with all the held notes and melisma. Her version of “Love Is A Battlefield” (http://youtube.com/watch?v=fspzPnH9jdM) does this very nicely, doesn’t try to out-ache Pat Benatar but just lays the predicament in front of us.
So then, for comparison purposes I watched Pat Benatar’s omg wtf video of the original “Love Is A Battlefield” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ujEj64CKyQ), which somehow I’d forgotten but suddenly there it is, a glitzed-up version of a prostitute’s life story: teen runaway finds herself employed in the red-light district, a dancer in a garish bordello. I was gaping, having minutes before read Ashley Alexandra Dupré’s MySpace bio, written of course without her being aware that soon the world would know her as a prostitute: “Left my hometown. Left a broken family. Left abuse. Left an older brother who had already split. Left and learned what it was like to have everything, and lose it, again and again. Learned what it was like to wake up one day and have the people you care about most gone. I have been alone. I have abused drugs. I have been broke and homeless. But, I survived, on my own.”
Brooke White wouldn’t watch the Ashley Alexandra Dupré story if it were a movie, but as a singer I think she could do the story justice, find her way to the pain and the anger and the naivité, do it softly in a way that could be annihilating. Whereas Ashley’s own singing is more about her image and her aspirations, inhabiting a nightscape, a sexy dreamland. The lyrics, though, have a tension between sexual promise (“I know what you want, you’ve got what I want/I know what you need, can you handle me?”) and total distrust (“Baby what would you do/If someone tried to take me from you, oh boy/Would you stay right here boo/Would defend your girl do whatever she do/Would you stay true?”). What she says on her MySpace: “What We Want is my latest track. It’s really about trust, something my past has made very difficult for me to feel. This one was inspired by a guy, who taught me not to confuse my dreams with the sounds of the city…”
* * *
Tuesday also saw the release of Randy Jackson’s Music Club, Vol. 1. (For those of you who don’t know, Randy Jackson is a Grammy Award–winning rock bassist, singer, record producer, and Emmy Award–nominated television and radio personality.) It has as an iTunes and Walmart-only track Aly & AJ’s bang-up version of Grand Funk’s “We’re An American Band,” a song which is about partying, about ravin’ and rockin’, and not least of all, about GROUPIES—a fact that evangelical Christian teenage nice girls Aly & AJ half confuse and obscure by changing up a bunch of the lyrics: where a Grand Funk fangirl has the whole show (and that’s a natural fact), the Aly & AJ fanboy merely steals the show, “booze and ladies” are replaced by “rock and roll,” and “let’s get it on” becomes “sing us a song.” Nonetheless, after all these years, the hotel detective still stays obligingly out of sight, the boys are out to meet the girls in the band, and they all proceed to tear that hotel down.
Grand Funk’s “We’re An American Band” is as religious a song as has ever hit the charts, its religion being The Great Party, and the band its great purveyors. Grand Funk are declaring that they bring the prancing, sweating, gasping party with them, unleash the latent party that’s within the rest of us. The word “American” is in the title, to tell us that they speak for the party in every town (so place names are given: Little Rock and Omaha) and that they identify the party as quintessentially our country, the essence of America.
And Aly & AJ, 35 years later? They’ll help us party it down, but which party, how?
Dave Moore says in his “Bluffer’s Guide To Post 2000 Teenpop” (http://stylusmagazine.com/articles/weekly_article/bluffers-guide-to-post-2000
-teenpop.htm), “Teenpop is actually one of the few areas in popular music where sex can be discussed within the music itself, sometimes explicitly, as something other than an assumed inevitability—for the most part, past a certain age it’s just not OK to say ‘no’ to sex in most pop music.”
Aly Michalka is one of the most interestingly conflicted figures in music because she carries a “No” within her (see my review of “Blush”: http://www.lasvegasweekly.com/content/nc/news/single-story/article/the-rules
-of-the-game-no-20-fleshy-women-slimy-men-smart-teens. At her party, sex isn’t the ultimate sacrament. Yet her music is awash in desire. When she sings about entering the rush of life, the lyrics tell us that the rush is in our blood. And so the old Grand Funk party clichés are potent again because they call to her and are potentially dangerous to her. Sure, Aly & AJ bowdlerize the lyrics, but they pick a song that they have to bowdlerize.
Aly seems torn, and when she’s torn she writes a song, or in this case covers one, poking a stick into the embers and then withdrawing it, but the flame not yet extinguished.
[The Rules Of The Game is going on hiatus, possibly to return in a month or two. For updates or just to talk, write koganbot(at)gmail.com.]