And Another Thing!
So if, as Ned says in the comments box to my blog post, yr online self is necessarily dissipated these days, why not use blogging as a way of bringing it together? If I feel this ‘works’ I’ll try to do it regularly – this is a hotchpotch of opinions I’ve spouted elsewhere online in the last day or so on Radiohead, teenpop, non-teen pop, fillums and suchlike which don’t really feel workable into full blog posts (also some of them are unformed to say the least).
- Lots of people have been talking about how amazing it is that everyone can hear the radiohead album together. But almost every great ILM album thread from the last 5 years is “so many people listening to an album together for the first time”! (And new people joining in as the leak spreads). Rhead’s masterstroke has been working out how to combine that excitement, which is totally a download-age thing, with the pre-download excitement of a fixed release date so you can anticipate the excitement too.
- I agree with Dave Moore that the niche marketing of teenpop is (beyond the actual music) the most interesting thing about it in 07. I’d make a direct parallel between that and the way fiction for teenagers got its own niche – if yr an adult you might read kids books but I don’t see many adults into whatever the Sweet Valley High equivalents are nowadays (or the 12yr-old boy gore-lit – maybe teenpop needs a new Alice Cooper equivalent to Darren Shan!). And generally there’s a will within the culture to give teenagers their own space – under-18s discos, teen social networks etc. – which is sort of responding to actual teen demand but also makes them much more marketable to. With pop though it’s a slightly different trend because ‘respond to inchoate adolescent desires’ has always been so much a part of the mainstream remit, so section teens off and what happens to the rest of pop - is it going to be like the horrible ‘adultisation’ of comics, where thrill-power has been banished in favour of pseudo-sophistication?
- In fact it is happening already :(:(:( the list of favourite Facebook music linked on Poptimists the other day was miserable but the qn is WHY do I dislike it so much? I think it’s the way this stuff is so unembarrassing, even potentally, it’s like the formula for “acceptable music” has been found and it turns out to be mid-paced rock by an endless turnover of vaguely trendy young men. I don’t want cool or even tepid, I want vulgarity! Mind you I thought the same about clothes and hairstyles in the mid-90s, that a Fukuyama style end of hist. had been reached (and they WERE rly boring) but people snapped out of it and look much hotter and funnier and stupider now (I remain as rub a dresser as always of course). I’m tempted to blame this on Radio 1, the inevitable consequence of their giving up on Smashie and Nicey et al. But I hated the Smashie/Nicey R1 quite a lot too, they’ve just replaced phoney enthusiasm for life with phoney enthusiasm for music.
- On a totally unrelated matter, I rly like the new Kylie single and I have not as much sympathy as I should have with people disappointed in it because it sounds exactly like the demo (or ‘original’) – this is what comes of crate-digging for pop on the net dudes! Let thy demos be demos! Of course they’d say “it’s just a bad song” and fair enough (but it’s not – it’s like a pop PJ Harvey!) (/lexbaiting). Love the skull-faced mic in the video.
- Finally fillum corner: The Dark Is Rising – the whole sequence really – seems like it wd be much better suited to an old school BBC kids teatime production than a “modern fantasy” film, the kind of lavish one they (admittedly) don’t actually make any more. (Yes I was thinking of the Box Of Delights, what of it). It’s not an especially ‘big budget’ book is it? Maybe the last one is but that’s rub anyway. But all the first four are totally designed to be acted by proper old British character actors and precocious middle class kids. I agree with assorted complainers that it makes no literary sense to have Will Stanton be an alium (ok not a real alium but you never know) – doesn’t make any marketing sense either since the films it is trying to piggyback to success have proved that there is a huge worldwide audience for Brit kids as stars. (If you want to know what people are complaining about there is a point-by-point comparison here, but this kind of obsessive detailing always makes me want to betray my fannishness: I end up thinking “The director is completely right and actually it would have been better if Will was a ninja who befriends a robot triceratops.”)
So many parentheses!!
I was thinking this the other day, re blogging. I use to just spout half-arsed ideas (gags), now I write longer half-arsed “pieces”. I think going back to the former and seeing if the comments massive want to run with it is a good idea.
On yr Dark Is Rising point we are currently wading through no end of kid fantasy bobbins post LotR. Narnia did alright, Eragon BOMBED, Terabitha doesn’t really count, Lemony Snicket didn’t do well enough… Stardust faltered at the BO and all signs are that TDIR has done much the same. Having seen the full length Golden Compass trailer I’m impressed, but kid heroes do little for me as an adult (is having a child shaped adult in The Hobbit Tolkein’s greatest invention?) The mid noughties could be seen as the trilogies graveyard.
It’s America in the eighties all over again – the really interesting music isn’t selling and the music people are buying/downloading/liking is (ironically for Facebook) largely made by faceless people; I’ve been reading Robert Draper’s The Rolling Stone Story recently and this was exactly the problem the magazine had in the mid-eighties, i.e. cool people on the cover wouldn’t shift copies but they couldn’t exactly stick the likes of Foreigner or REO Speedwagon on the cover either even though they were selling gazillions. A sort of make do and mend mentality going on at the moment, I think, with an undercurrent of glamour? outrage? don’t you know there’s a war on and the planet is dying? etc. The Bill Pertwee perspective.
In Rainbows and “2 Hearts” are both very fine indeed but they’re hardly exceeding themselves.
re child-shaped adult: the psammead? child-sized if not child-shaped (and hangs around w.kids)
Pete if you look at those (and include Harry P), the ones that do good are the ones with Brit kids as leads – Narnia and Hazza (and I expect Golden Compass will do OK too). I guess because they’re more exotic and olde-worlde. I agree that the trilogies bubble will burst (and also what remains to be filmed anyway?).
Psaammead hangs round with kids, no need for a child substitute there (though is a fine thing).
Other things about LotR & Hazza is a lot of money thrown at, and real sense of anticipation by rabid fans. Indeed the existence of rabid fans who cared if it was done right (which potentially includes the film-makers*) built in a degree of quality control. (Though I still think the first two Harry Potter films stink).
I believe the kid in TDIR is been Americanised.
We must be near a new stab at OZ at this rate.
1. Re: Facebook charts and the magic formula for acceptance, I wouldn’t rule out Snow Patrol or whoever becoming a future generation’s Guilty Pleasure. Who knows what pop revolutions may be around the corner. (NB: I am an optimist.)
2. Landmark event that should not go by unremarked: I think this is the first time you and I have ever agreed about any Kylie record.
Well, Sir Rowley has “rehabilitated” ELO and Supertramp to much revolutionary excitement so who knows indeed? (nb: the former didn’t need rehabilitating, the latter didn’t merit it, Scooter excepted)
The first two Potter films are presumably “This is an even bigger pot of money than the hobbit films, don’t screw it up or you’ll never work again”, leading to movies whose main concern is that everything is exactly as people might have imagined it. Of course, those are the two shortest books as well, so there wasn’t the freedom to drop the duller subplots as in the later films. Plus they coasted a lot on perfect casting.
And so Chris Columbus sailed effortless through the shoals of the first two films, and has gone on to make… Rent.
i think i’ve argued elsewhere that the psammead is the protoype for gollum, so i guess i can’t have it all ways!
i would actually be ASTONISHED if there hadn’t been a wee-people hero for small-human readers to identify with prior to the hobbit — the big shove for faerie as a kidlit territory came 1890-1910, on the back of the arts-and-crafts movement, and the die-down into semi-tweeness of the pre-raph school
tolk’s innovation was taking fantasy toughly back into the adult realm
We already have a pop version of PJ Harvey this year and her name is Kelly Clarkson! (The opening three songs on My December are still incredible.) I don’t hear anything that PJH does in ’2 Hearts’, is the pop version of…I dunno, one of those interchangeable chugga chugga haircut indie idiots hanging around the Radio 1 playlist.
I don’t really see the PJH input in “2 Hearts” either. I see where Lex is coming from but I think there’s still enough of Kylie in the record to save it from Hard-Fi (Once Removed) Hell.
I have to say though that GA might be going down that route if they’re not careful. Maybe that’s why the Sugababes pulled back from overusing Xenomania etc. on their current album but replacing them with bland “Holler”/”Too Much”-type fodder isn’t the answer.
The PJH was almost pure lexbaiting but something of the glammy vampiness reminded me of Polly circa mid 90s?
I’m waiting for the new GA to click with me – didn’t much like “Sexy No No No” for a while (admittedly – sorry Robin C – rural France isn’t the best place to bed this stuff in) and then suddenly it hit and became completely essential.