Poptimists Review of 2006: Genre Of The Year

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

What was the sound of 2006? That's what we're asking in the second of our end of year polls, discussing the genre of the year. Contenders - drawn from your nominations - include...

Teenpop: Teen confessional and pop narrative (a la High School Musical) drove the genre on in '06 - more teen than ever.
R&B: From Bouncy's hi-gloss dramas through Ciara and Justin's takes on the Prince legacy to Cassie's minimal precision.
Electro: Still the sound of the clubs in 06 (like I'd know) and with big high street traction too.
Emo: The comment box's friend and the parent's foe - whatever it is, it's selling.
Nu Rave: A shot in the arm for indie or a lame NME concoction? 2006's most enigmatic genre.

(A special note: I didn't put "POP" in cos it's all pop, innit. I went for Teenpop as a more specific option, and one picked by as many people.)

[Poll #891678]

You can still vote in yesterday's poll - and still nominate in the remaining 8 categories. Final results collated in the new year!

Tomorrow I'm at home, with YouTube access, which means it's a good day to do the Video Of the Year poll.

Comments

Boys on one side, girls on the other

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

A qn for 2007 - what can mainstream emo and confessional teenpop learn from one another?

Re: Boys on one side, girls on the other

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

I really hope NOTHING.

Re: Boys on one side, girls on the other

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

They're so similar though! Teenpop is currently better at doing the things emo claims to be good at (directness, confusion) and it remembers to mix joy in with its pain - so that's what E could learn from T maybe. As for T, maybe E could teach it how to reconstitute itself as a subculture again, or something.

Re: Boys on one side, girls on the other

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Anyway I picked emo because I find it oddly fascinating. I liked R&B more in terms of listening, but R&B is always good, though this was a very good year as opposed to a pretty good one. (I liked teenpop more too, probably I'd have liked electro if I ever danced to it. Nu Rave I only put in to larff at it, only one person actually mentioned it.)

Re: Boys on one side, girls on the other

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

That essentially, the teenage record buying market just wants someone to understand their angst. I am a teenager and so can say this with authority.

Re: Boys on one side, girls on the other

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

What about the teenagers who buy 50 Cent and Pussycat Dolls and Sean Paul records though?

[blue-russian.livejournal.com]

I think it has to be emo.

Although HSM was certainly a sensation, I personally had very little sense of this being an unusually big year in teen pop. The same goes for R&B, although I have to admit that I generally don't listen to R&B BECAUSE IT SAYS NOTHING TO ME ABOUT MY LIFE (although our of a sense of obligation I try to check out whatever Lex says I should).

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

and emo does?!

if emo ever spoke to me about my life I would have to take immediate steps to CHANGE MY LIFE.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

If I was nominating on this criteria I would be picking lullabies!

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

have i been away and missed ANY impact that HSM has had in the UK. it's massive in the US – or so i gather from Popstar! magazine

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

HSM was sold almost exclusively to Disney kids, and its impact was felt there the most. To the extent that Disney has monopolized a major teenpop demographic (6-14), it was a huge deal. But I'm almost certain not a single song has gotten any significant airplay (or ANY airplay, for that matter) on any station outside of Radio Disney.

[awesomewells.livejournal.com]

I only voted for electro under duress because I've listened to and enjoyed more of it in 2006 than any of the other genres but its not as prevalent as every other year since 2002.

RnB - as usual, liked a few tracks, liked the Big Tunes less than Big Tunes from other year, still can't see myself progressing beyond the dilettante stage sometime soon

Teenpop - there's not been enough of the good stuff in the UK charts for me to pay attention

Emo - Rubbish

Nu-Rave - Doesn't exist

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

Nu-Rave doesn't exist yet. I reckon it will be a fully functioning genre by this time next year. Seriously. It only needs a few kids with GarageBand/Reason to realise they could do a whole lot better than the Klaxxons et al at actually making actual rave and Bob's your considerably monged out uncle.

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

how come we're not discussing the death of rap?

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

because it's not dead? both pop and rock sectors of the music press may have decided to ignore it but it's been responsible for just as much brilliance as ever this year - TI, Chamillionaire, Lupe Fiasco, Rasheeda, the whole hyphy thing, Kanye and Fiddy permanently up to something or other...

Teen confessional tanked this year

[koganbot]

Unless you see Aly & A.J. as teen confessional - I think their music is very personal, but they're not playing the role of singer-songwriter taking you on their emotional and intellectual journey through relationships and poetry and stuff - teen confessional tanked this year. The mediocre Cheyenne Kimball had mediocre numbers on Radio Disney, though she did get a little play on Top 40. There's the promising Jordan Pruitt, but she's only had a couple singles and they didn't put up good numbers either, and it's not clear what direction she'll go. In the teenpop market, Ashlee's fading and Lindsay's nowhere. The new Avril got 12 Disney plays in its first week, and I don't see it rising far ('cause it's not very good). Right now Disney movie and TV tie-ins are the big thing: Hannah Montana and High School Musical stars, w/ Aly & A.J. maintaining their presence and a really interesting story - that I've failed to get any of you to pay attention to - being the non-Disney-contracted boy-rock-band Jonas Bros., whose cover of Busted's "Year 3000" has been the song that's most consistently challenged Hannah Montana at the top of the Disney charts over the last half of the year. And meanwhile, their album got perpetually delayed by Columbia, who then dropped the band shortly after the album was released.

Re: Teen confessional tanked this year

[justfanoe.livejournal.com]

I dunno. I voted for teen pop in the above poll, of course, and I do prefer the confessional sound. But, I'd steer clear of the "tanked" talk. "L.O.V.E." did fairly well this year, and "Invisible" had a really high peak, though no support. Maybe it's more that it was just a BAD SONG than tanking, per se (same with with Cheyenne methinks). "Boyfriend" still gets some Radio Diz plays. Lohan didn't release anything this year. Aly & AJ did fairly well with the confessional sound though, as you noted. I do see them as confessional, unlike the Jonas Bros. New Avril single doing well (not on RD, but it's inexplicably getting a good number of plays on the local top 40 stations), tho it's the least "teen confessional" song of her career. But Jojo doing well, and she's fairly confessional! "Because of You" a huge smash hit in late 05/early 06 as well. Rihanna's "Unfaithful" is arguably also teen confessional.

I'd wait until next year when we get new Avril, new Aly & AJ, Jordan Pruitt, as you noted, new Ashlee or Lindsay?, it's about time for that. New Kelly Clarkson as well, we'll see if she continues the confessional trend. If they all tank, then we're in trouble.

bim bom bim bom bim bom bi-i-m, bim diddle diddle diddle diddle bom bim bom

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

for year to be nicked from i shd have sed = 1320!

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

I was tempted to tick emo but I think 2006, despite most electro releases I've been listening to having come out in 2005, was when electro really got thought about- it's even been the rise of emotronica with Panic! At The Disco and other scamps with keyboards running around all over the place. R'n'b's current electronic angle is also interesting and a lot of the minimalist leanings in other genres this year are, I think, borrowed from electro. (Cassie springs instantly to mind here but there's also the rise of Gym Class Heroes, who are quite stripped back in a lot of places and with Bloc Party cropping up again, minimalist indie is flitting around a bit)

Emotronica may actually be the sound of 2006, to be honest. I feel like I should have ticked emo still, because nearly everything I've said also applies to emo and it's hard to conceive of being able to look back on 2006 without thinking of Gerard Way and his Chemical Romances (or lack thereof- get back on the drugs, boy!) who can, by no stretch of the imagination, be called 'minimal.' They are a bit electronic occasionally.

Maybe 2006 was actually something of a restoration of glam, now I think about it. Well, this was inconclusive.

[koganbot]

R'n'b's current electronic angle is also interesting

Indeed! But I'd say that this derives from the Dirty South and Miami bass and dancehall. Of course, Southern hip-hop has always had way more interplay with club music than Northern hip-hop has, so the South's current commercial dominance just means that more people are aware of the electronics, not that it's new. But its use in a big way in r&b may be relatively new. Or maybe not. I'll have to think.

But where confessional might be breaking big...

[koganbot]

But where confessional might be breaking big is in country, where women influenced by Jewel and Sheryl are making their mark. My attention to country being sporadic and relatively recent, I don't know how long this has been going on (need to track down the first two Deana Carter albums, from the '90s). Stay tuned for the Wreckers and Taylor Swift (hitting big) and Ashley Monroe (struggling for airplay; "Satisfied" is by far the best of her two singles).

The Wreckers, if you don't know, are the duo Jessica Harp and Michelle Branch, both ex-teenpoppers; Michelle Branch's "Everywhere" from 2001 was the first big teenpop singer-songwriter hit and set the template for much of what was to follow from Avril and Ashlee and the like. The Wreckers' two hit singles are only so-so, but the album has some really nice personal-angst slush in the middle, with instrumentation and sound that's only nominally country, if even that. The Wreckers' sound is more interesting than their words, but Taylor's got great words, and she's a much smarter singer, has a smart sense of when to hold back. Also, her big hit is about looking back with bittersweet memories at an early love, a fairly common theme in country since Deana's "Strawberry Wine," but usually done by someone in her twenties or thirties, not by a sixteen-year-old. And there's an aggressive subtext: "When you think Tim McGraw, I hope you think my favorite song," can mean "I hope you have warm memories of me," but also can mean "I hope I haunt you, fucker, the way you haunted me. Sincerely, your discarded girlfiend, Taylor."

I'm curious...

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

...about people's reasons for picking the years they did in answer to Tom's question, unless they were mostly just joshing. I seem to have mindmelded with Frank, but I suspect we might have different reasons for giving our answers. Mine was partly perversity, partly a feeling that people don't actually spend much time going 'which bit of the past to plunder' since this seems like a bog-standard rock-crit approach rather than a way anyone actually makes music (although the two can mix), and partly a sense that whatever is happening this year in music, it's happening away from the spotlight, and there's maybe a whole load of things in incubation, ready to blow up bigger: also we're about due for some hybridity which isn't 'crossover'.

Re: I'm curious...

[koganbot]

You're on the money. For instance, the fact that the Ciara album samples "It Takes Two" and references "S.U.P.E.R.S.O.N.I.C" doesn't mean that she's going '80s but rather that r&b has fully absorbed the hip-hop strategy, which is that you pilfer everything. Back in my Drunken Tiger review I'd said that the basic hip-hop aesthetic is that "Less is more, and more is more too," which means that you can build a track around a real simple element, and then pile everything in atop this element. But that goes back to disco, too. One thing I'm noticing is that over the last decade hip-hop, especially through crunk, has been using sonics from the Euroromantic orchestral palette. But his doesn't mean that hip-hop is going back to the 19th century, but rather that Lil Jon et al. listened to the music on suspense-film soundtracks. (Which isn't necessarily to say that he doesn't listen to Euroromantic composers. But even if he studies them assiduously, that doesn't make his music a throwback to late 19th and early 20th century Europe. I mean, I study Macaulay's sentence forms, but my writing style belongs to the present. At least I think it does. Maybe people are just too polite to go up to me and say, "Oh, Frank, you're so 1840s!")

Re: I'm curious...

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

i picked 1992 having seen the YOUTH frugging wildly to songs of their school disco years at that young person's rave i went to.

[jel-bugle.livejournal.com]

Power Metal was robbed :(

The Internet is killing music!