Jop Tournament Round 2.2

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

The second half of round 2!

I think for round 3 rather than trot through more one-on-one matches there might well be some kind of second group stage. We will see on Thursday!


[Poll #926319]


And now over to Lex for the spluttering with horror viewpoint.

Comments

[koganbot]

I voted Breeders because they indirectly led to Ashlee and Lindsay

This is an intriguing statement. I'd heard Ashlee and Lindsay as Alanis-Sheryl rock-leaning singer-songwriter types - for Ashlee add Courtney - embracing power-pop and dance-pop melodies, with Melissa Etheridge's former guitar player melding it all together for them and tossing in a bit of hair metal. Or, if you want to trace it back further, think Dylan and Joni embracing garage rock and girl groups.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Isn't Alanis a descendant of the Breeders herself though? And Courtney clearly seems to be, to me. I wouldn't call either Ashlee or Lindsay descendants of Sheryl, they're not inoffensively MOR enough, Sheryl has never been about the Punk Rock.

(Ashlee and Lindsay seem to take their most immediate cues from Avril, whose Breeders-style punk influences seem more obvious.)

[koganbot]

I'm still not following. It's Courtney's singing that Ashlee's taking off on, which has nothing to do with Kim's on "Cannonball," which is mostly this girly dreaminess, w/ punky squeaks thrown in. Courtney precedes the Breeders and is coming from Sex Pistols and hardcore and - ultimately - the Stones (Grace Slick a key predecessor but don't know if she was an influence; if you're looking for punk-as-such female-vocal influences on Courtney they're probably Patti Smith and Poly Styrene and Joan Jett). I don't know. Are there interviews where Courtney is citing Kim? I'm not hearing an iota of "Cannonball" in "You Oughta Know," either. Alanis's marbles-in-the-mouth-harshness was there in her early '90s dancepop tracks, believe it or not. She precedes the Breeders too, and I don't think she got the singing style from Black Francis. Maybe from Dory Previn and Marianne Faithfull and k8. She reminds me of Dolores O'Riordan a lot more than of Kim Deal, actually. I don't own any Breeders albums, so maybe haven't heard the right Kim Deal vocals, but from what I have heard Kim's deliberately low on affect, not going for the riot grrrrl squawl or the cutting angry-singer-songwriter bitchout. And I don't hear anything remotely like Kim in Avril's singing, either. Why would you think Kim rather than, I don't know, Heart or Stevie Nicks?

I tie Ashlee to Alanis more through lyrics - Ashlee says that "You Learn" was one of her favorite songs when she was ten: the woman on a self-critical adventure through life and boyfriends, Ashlee (or Ashlee-Kara-John) being Alanis with a brain.

[koganbot]

I wouldn't call either Ashlee or Lindsay descendants of Sheryl, they're not inoffensively MOR enough, Sheryl has never been about the Punk Rock.

You're looking too much at the signifiers. Look at album credits, and start with the name John Shanks.

This is a whole other story, but the Punk Rock Movement and the punk rock I love are pretty much at odds with another, the former doing great damage to the latter. I mean, Stevie Nicks is MOR rock (forget the adjective "inoffensive"; it's a red herring; like, inoffensive to whom?), and she once called herself the anti-punk, which just means she's got no self-knowledge, because she can virulent in both word and groove and she's way more punk rock to me than the Clash are. (Doesn't mean the Clash are worse than she is. Just that they're doing something different.)

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

OK you win! Or at least I probably didn't have much of an argument beyond "when I was growing up, people like Tori and Alanis and Courtney were aligned with each other, and even though this was blatantly untrue sonically I'd always assumed they must have shared a pool of influences, which I'd thrown the Breeders into on the basis that they did the whole fierce-emotional-grrrl-with-guitar thing a few years before the people I cited" - of the female singers you cited as Courtney predecessors I'm only really familiar with Patti Smith.

[dickmalone.livejournal.com]

And Courtney clearly seems to be

You just made my head explode, Lex.