What qualities do you look for in a pop star?

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Obviously musical/singing ability is required (well, most of the time) but what else?

- Eccentricity?
- Frivolousness?
- Dancing ability?
- Number of white towels in their rider?
- Appearing on Saturday morning kids' telly/Christmas specials?

Phrasing the question slightly differently: What makes you think an artist is 'pop'?

Comments

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

I think an important factor is not taking yourself too seriously. Or taking yourself SO seriously that it goes right out the other side into mentalism.

[(Anonymous)]

I agree with this.

Also, great tunes (oh wow I'm so full of insight...)

Sparkliness of whatever form.

Less important:
Technical ability
Production values

Of the last two, I'd guess that the production values one is the most controversial, in that it seems to be what divides my idea of great pop music from some people's on here. I think fantastic, sparkly pop tunes can still be thus even if they sound like they were recorded in a shed. Some people disagree, I think. Fair play.

Er...

[martinv.livejournal.com]

Me, that was.

Re: Er...

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

I do get what you mean - a strong tune should be able to hold its own whatever instrument you play it on. Production values are important to me as I like hearing interesting noises.

[spazhammer.livejournal.com]

hahaha. the deftones are shit!

a few years back, long before it was "cool" to like them, i was working on the bar at rock city in nottingham, i went up to Jay the DJ and asked for the bosstones (as in mighty mighty), but he misheard me and played the deftones. which prompty killed the dancefloor dead.

nowadays though, all the kids seem to love them, i dont know why, they are still as shit as they were back before it was cool to like them.

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

I think I ebayed all my old Deftones albums. They weren't that bad! But there are many other dudes out there doing what the Deftones were doing (droney riff-rock etc), but better.

[spazhammer.livejournal.com]

they couldnt have been that *good* if you ebayed them!

me? i hate parting with records, and have only ever sold one cd that i owned (stupidly rare heather nova ep and i was desperate for the cash)

i even have the spin doctors second album, but i wouldnt get rid of it.. it kinda shows who i am/was and how i progressed musically over the years.

or something :)

[spazhammer.livejournal.com]

for me, pop could be loads of different things, but in the traditional sense of pop, i think getting airtime on local commercial radio is a pretty good indicator of what is pop.

unfortunately, deciding what is good pop vs bad pop is a whole kettle of worms, and varies between different people. i thinki this is where the actual band members start to play a part... for example, i LOVE mcfly, but HATE maroon 5. both make similar sort of pop music, but theres just something about m5 that i despise...

and then you also get pop stars who you hate, but think they are releasing great songs... i hated darius, but theres no denying that colourblind was a truly great pop song.

ah god knows. although shaggability of popstars is a bit of a factor. for example, dido is dulldulldull, but i dont turn her off when she is on tv as i could gaze at her all day long, whereas if you bring a cheeky girl or two near the tv, i will instantly turn off...

[koganbot]

Partying like a rockstar!

Hah! But I'll point out that when on the teenpop thread we had a discussion of who made the best rock star, the three names that came up were Lindsay, Paris, and Britney - girlboymusic plumped for Britney this way:

Paris and Lindsay are too apologetic. Rock stars don't play dumb and then insist they're smart, or confess to eating disorders and then take it all back. Britney comes closest to the kind of iconic, defiant rock stardom you're talking about, Dave, in that she seems to really not give a shit.

Nia was subsequently disappointed by Britney's apology for the umbrella incident, whereas the rest of us argued that the apology was merely an "apology" and as such was really quite brilliant (see discussion on livejournal here).

Anyway, this is barely beginning to answer your questions, but I just want to point out that in some instances the template for pop stardom is rock stardom; distressing as this might be for the rock haters among you, Britney and Paris have artists like Elvis and the Stones among their precursors.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

I don't think I look for anything specific: it's about working what you've got. Eccentricity, frivolousness, taking oneself seriously/not - all these things can be tremendous or hideous depending on the artist. A couple of things which seem to apply across the board though:

- Comedy is bad, unless the jokes are funny. (The jokes are rarely funny.) If we must have comedy at all, it should be dark comedy and NEVER pratfall comedy.
- Either be totally invested in yr art, or be a robot. None of this lame halfway-house do-I-mean-it-or-not nonsense.
- A certain amount of fuck-you attitude. Being unapologetic as per Frank above. Being able to say "out of my way, peons!" and meaning it. Being a DIVA. This kind of necessitates taking oneself seriously, and expecting everyone else to.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Oh and yr private/tabloid life should ideally run along the lines perfected by Misses Hilton, Lohan, Richie, Winehouse and Spears.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

In films I like to use the somewhat ambiguous phrase "creating knowledge" (nicked phrase); I think pop is similar in that it can create knowledge about a person (or persona), about itself, or about ME.
Meaning it draws out feelings that I have to constantly reevaluate before I can settle on a general opinion beyond "any good at all." (Ashlee does 1 and 3 more than 2, except now when she's doing 2 at the expense of 1, Britney's new one introduces 1 into the equation across a whole album rather than in fleeting glimpses.

So maybe that's a way of putting it: aspires to be something beyond "any good at all." This is what's disappointed me so much in a lot of the music (pop and semipop and indiepop and whateverpop) I've been listening to to catch up; the stakes are so friggin' LOW that when they hit their marks you kind of want to pat them on the head, but you don't want to invest yourself in them or what they do. They tell me nothing (interesting) about themselves, or about their music or anyone else's music, and they seem to ASPIRE to do this. Yr Panda Bears and Battleses and the list goes on. I'd probably put Girls Aloud and Sugababes and Roisin Murphy in this category, too, to be honest.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Second criterion there should be "about itself as MUSIC," for stuff that's incredible even when the sense of the person isn't what you'd call "pop star" -- Kylie doesn't tell me much about herself, but she's been so strong with the music for so long, she sort of becomes one anyway.

[mackromackro.livejournal.com]

An artist is pop if you can know of or listen to an artist without going out of your way to do so, because the exposure is all around you.

pop = shorthand for "popular"

It would be more fun to talk about all the magic qualities, but "popular" is what it really comes down to, doesn't it?

None of the above qualities really describe say The Shins or Modest Mouse or Snow Patrol, who are all rather plain in many ways, but are nonetheless "pop" in ways not too different than Kanye or Britney or whatnot. (Different markets sure, but we're talkin' numbers here!)

you're missing the point i think

[blue-russian.livejournal.com]

you're focusing on "pop" and not "star." it's fairly easy to make a case for those artists as "pop" (i think, only know Snow Patrol really) but it's much more difficult to call any of them "stars."

Re: you're missing the point i think

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

But are both popularity and star quality equally important? The fact that one is more measurable than the other may make it less exciting, but like mackromackro says, exposure is key to an artist's success and without it there's rarely room to develop a star persona. (This is where you give lots of examples to prove me wrong!)

Re: you're missing the point i think

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

But what is "star quality"? I mean, I think I agree that star quality as I perceive it is impt to me, but so often I see people only take into account zaniness, wackiness, colourful clothes, funny quotes and so on as being "star quality". I think star quality can be subtle, eg I think Cassie has more of it than Mika, though possibly I am the only person who thinks this.

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

This is an interesting point - if you have to actively seek out an artist (crate-digging or interwebs or whatever) rather than passively hearing it by accident does that make them inherently indie (or at least, non-pop)? When does a particular channel move from passive to active? If I turn on Hits!TV and it's that rather sub-par Foals song then there is no-one to blame but myself. Yet I didn't intentionally want to hear it. I resent them more for not being Girls Aloud than I would by investigatively clicking on their Youtube video.

[koganbot]

Well, one of Xgau's ideas when he created the term "semipopular" was that you had people with all the attributes of stardom except fame (Xgau had other ideas about semipopular too, not all of which were consistent with this one; but then, there doesn't have to be a single consistend attribute to "semipopular," or "popular," or "stardom"). He called Iggy Pop "semipopular," and Iggy was the perfect example, because Iggy was acting like a rock star, which means as a performer he was reaching out to and against his listeners, reaching out to unknown audiences, making them take him on as a performer, trying to turn the audience into performers themselves. So he's not just addressing/reflecting people like himself.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

M.I.A.!

Actually I just want all pop stars to be able to pull off photos like this one of Mariah:



CHAMPAGNE. In the SNOW. That is BEYOND FIERCE.

[koganbot]

Interestingly, Mariah's "offstage" behavior has nothing to do with why I think of her as a star. It's really the voice, what it does - in my book I compared it to a horse out for its gallop - that is her crucial star attribute. I'd probably say the same thing about Courtney Love. It's the content of their music that made them stars for me. But that doesn't mean that all good music makes stars of the people it features. Again, JoJo is a good singer who to me is not a star, since I don't feel an adventure in her singing to which I can affix the name "JoJo." This doesn't mean that there's no adventure in her music, just that this adventure doesn't focus itself on a character called "JoJo."

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I look for different things in pop music than I do in pop stars. For "pop stars" I put my marketing hat on and what I look for is basically a Unique Selling Point - I want my pop stars to have an essence, something or some combination of things that makes them uniquely them, even if you couldn't put it into a sentence (though sometimes you can). One of my favourite books about rock and pop is Nik Cohn and Guy Peelaert's Rock Dreams, an attempt to define essences and establish an iconography of pop through vaguely kitsch but very powerful paintings of stars. Cohn was particularly good at zeroing in on a truth about the stars he wrote about.

This means that people I hate musically can be good, effective, talkable-about stars, and people I like musically can be quite bad pop stars.

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Could your point be extended to "good pop stars can be charicaturised"? I mean, if you can draw a cartoon of them that everyone recognises then they have a USP? It doesn't have to rely on looks e.g. In Great Pop Things then they capture Sting (String) perfectly despite him having a very ordinary visual presence.

[genie22.livejournal.com]

Pop should be digestible - e.g. easy to sing/dance/relate to.

It should also come in a pretty/presentable/fun package and, as you say, not take itself too seriously.

[koganbot]

To me Brie Larson is a pop star, even though you haven't heard of her and she sold only 5,000 copies of her album, and her next music is likely to sound much less like current chart pop, if she even gets to make the album. This is because she acts like a character you have to take on. Also, a lot of her "stardom" for me is that she's a really good writer, so for me she became a star on her blog and with her lit mag. But then again, this year was when Britney finally became a personality for me, and she did it first with a headshave, then with gags on her website, which foreshadowed her album.

Chuck Eddy is a pop star. I'm not, though not for lack of trying.

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

Popstars= people you want to hang out with (in some capacity, be it driving them to rehab or going on a night out) for one reason or another, even if they are nothing at all like you.

[koganbot]

I don't look for particular qualities in stars (whether "pop" or some other type of star); rather, their qualities find me. JoJo is not a "star" in this sense since the qualities of her music that find me don't seem to attach to "JoJo," even though the music is usually very good, as is her singing. Paula DeAnda is not a star in my constellation, despite making one of my favorite songs of the year. Whereas Robyn is, despite never making a song as good as "Easy." (Or maybe one song as good as "Easy": "Be Mine!") Robyn puts Robyn at issue in her music.

I think writers and producers and instrumentalists can be stars, even ones you've never heard of. But I'm having trouble thinking of current examples. Keith Richards was a star not just because I recognized him by his craggly face and because he was in the Stones but because I heard a personality in his playing. James Williamson of the Stooges is a star. The Stooges collectively were a star. But now that they're famous they're not a star, at least not in their new stuff. Maybe you can go back and discover a now-dead person and that person can function as a star.

The Thomas Magnum theory. Sometimes a fictional character can be a star (Homer Simpson, for instance) and can be an auteur. Maybe it isn't Ashlee Simpson the human being who's the star and the auteur of Autobiography, but Ashlee Simpson the restless character. It's this character that became the guiding force for the three crucial artists on the record: Ashlee herself, John Shanks, Kara DioGuardi (plus Shelly and Steve and Stan and maybe even Jeff). I call this The Thomas Magnum Theory, my idea being that it's not Tom Selleck (the actor) but Thomas Magnum (the character) who was the star of the show, and not Donald Bellisario (the man who created the show) or Selleck who were the auteurs but the character Magnum who was the auteur. Obviously I'm overstating this, and not meaning to deny deny Donald Bellisario or Tom Selleck or John Shanks or Ashlee Simpson "authorship." (I haven't read much on the subject of the Death Of The Author, and not everyone who uses that phrase means it in the same way, but the phrase was really really really ill-chosen, because - no matter Barthes' or Derrida's or Foucault's intentions - it implies the bad idea that there's an either/or relationship between author and (con)text, that either one is determinate or the other so that noticing the importance of text - which is basically what I'm doing here - somehow pits you against the idea of an author.) I'm more trying to make sense of the fact that Magnum P.I. was drastically better than the other similar shows on TV at the time, even while drawing on a similar pool of writers and directors - just as Autobiography is way better than anything else that Shanks and DioGuardi have had a hand in (which isn't to say that they haven't created great music elsewhere - I like Hilary's "Come Clean" more than any Ashlee song, for instance - just not with the consistent greatness and consistent character that they got with Ashlee). So my idea with Magnum is that the character - or, more accurately, the relations among that character and the other main ones in the show (Higgins, T.C., and Rick) and the character's way of relating to the guest star (who would play a Sympathetic But Screwed-Up Client who sucks Magnum in and runs him in circles, Magnum having to work through the circles to really be able to help the client) - is so rich that lots of pretty good nongenius writers could create greatness with it.

You could think of poptimists being the auteur, and even though Tom and Lex and Kat are stars, it is the role that each takes poptimists that is the condition of the stardom. So the roles can be considered stars too. "Star" critics aren't necessarily better than nonstar critics, but they often are. And contexts such as ilX and poptimists that allow writers to take starring roles are usually better than those - most of the press - that don't.

In any event, one quality of pop stars that sometimes finds me is ideas. Jagger had ideas. Ashlee has ideas, even if she's not likely ever to become an intellectual. Britney has ideas. I wouldn't bet on her thinking them through, but she's got 'em.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

"Star" is an interesting generic category, because there's an assumption of "naturalness" in the star that's necessarily socially and/or personally constructed; and yet, to each person identifying the star, the effect IS natural. I don't think I could be argued into thinking that Girls Aloud, say, are stars when I don't think they are, and yet I couldn't tell you some rule that they broke that kept them from being stars. It's a totally ad hoc rationalization for appeal (or lack thereof).

What I like about stardom is that there's no way of trying to wiggle yer way out of making a pretty serious, possibly irrevocable value judgment (regardless of popularity) about the power of the star...I dunno, presence, or auteur status, or whatever you want to call it. It's a super-something, an exemplar, head-and-shoulders above the mass of artists, and there's no particularly clear way of deciding what distinguishes a given artist's star-power/presence/whatever, despite the intensity and singularity of the classification.

Anyway, one question: can anyone, once becoming a star, actually become de-starred? The new Stooges certainly doesn't exhibit any particular star quality, but as you said, the Stooges are a star; so they haven't exactly given up their star status, they just haven't contributed anything to it. It's stuck in the past, but it's not like it disappeared.

[koganbot]

Andy Warhol to thread.

[koganbot]

Can fans create stars out of people who wouldn't have had a star personality if their fans hadn't forced a starring role on them? I'm thinking that the constant talk about Kara from me and skyecaptain and girlboymusic makes her into a star, at least for the three of us, even if Kara herself prefers to work behind the scenes. But also, Kara is good-looking enough that she's a natural magnet for writers and entertainment television reporters who want to do a segment on a Pop Songwriter.

[koganbot]

Seems to me that John Shanks and Max Martin are more crucial songwriters/producers than Kara DioGuardi is, but no one is projecting love and hate their way, hence no "stardom." Maybe a good auteurist account of their work would help us to locate the star quality in Shanks and Martin.

[mcarratala.livejournal.com]

I am sorry to admit that as I advance through life, what I appear to want from a Pop Star is that they be young, female and attractive. Which is to say: the bulk of music I listen to on vinyl or CD is by old-ish and often unattractive people of both genders (or people who were young and attractive forty years ago when they were making the music I'm listening to now), but contemporary pop I consume via TV. This could account for why I haven't been convinced by Robyn, who looks like the killer dwarf from Don't Look Now, or Fergie (except for the one song I really like) or Madonna since 1990. There are plenty of exceptions, probably, but my most truthful answer to the question of what qualities do you look for in a pop star is: resemblance to Christina Milian.
(Side argument: on some other thread, someone asked why the NME was pro-KNash. I think the answer is that she is girl-from-your-class pretty (rather than internationally glamorous) - the 2000s answer to, say, Andrea Darling Bud (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X17MHr5oFvI&feature=related)).