Girls just wanna...

[blue-russian.livejournal.com]

I've been trying to figure out why I have suddenly taken such a strong dislike to Miley Cyrus aka Hannah Montana. After all, it wouldn't be very poptimist of me to dislike her just because she's a manufactured pop princess, right? I should judge her on the basis of her songs/performances.
Yeah, she's a precocious 15-year-old, but I can't blame her for that - let her have her fun. And I may cringe a bit at the nepotism inherent in the daughter of a country-pop crossover star "proving" to the best of a thousand little girls eager for a starring role in a Disney project, but I don't really care about her so much to let that bother me.

To be honest, I think it's actually Disney that unnverves me. (Here, to be honest, I must note that I have never watched Hannan Montana on small or large screen, so I am mostly speaking on the basis on what filters through pop culture media. On one hand it's ignorance, on the other hand there are some things it's impossible to remain ignorant of.) There are lots of "machines" out there that generate stars. Not so many that create them across the whole media spectrum - usually it's the ambitious star theirself who parlays their album sales into a movie role (Madonna) or their movie roles into music careers (JLo). More power to them, I guess, if they've got the combination of talent and marketing moxy to pull it off. Something about Disney seems sinister, though: their own network, their own movies, their own record company, their own radio station.

Sure, it's all about money - Miley's aspirations to be famous are convenient to be exploited - so targeting a specific family-friendly, tween-teen audience makes sense. Maybe I've spent too long immersed in US politics, and so a market strategy aimed at keeping the conservative/religious right happy through wholesomeness while not alienating the left through keeping overt religion out of things just seems like a fifth column move to me. There's a kind of denial of reality in the Disney universe, as if we still don't know what will become of Michael J. or Britney S. when they grow up, not to speak of Kurt C. or the millions of people stuck in dead-end office jobs. So really, folks, of everything out there, was she really among the ten best things you heard this year? No better voices? No more interesting sounds? Can this fifteen-year-old really tell you things about life you didn't know? How can that be?

By general convention - and the spirit of poptimists, I think - we try to post questions and generate discussion. So my intention here is not to attack those that like Miley/Hannah - each of us appreciates different things, or sometimes the same things for different reasons. And for the same reason, I guess I'm not asking why you might like Miley. Maybe what I'm asking is to what extent... let's call them "political" considerations figure into your enjoyment of music. A lot of times we sniff at artistic pretensions by singers because we don't see any art in what they're doing, or because we're jaded from seeing art/authenticity rolled out as a marketing ploy. But sometimes these things are important, no?

Comments

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

It's a good question - a lot of the time I'm lucky in that I know absolutely 0 about the musician before I hear a song and have an unbiased view. 'See You Again' has yet to grab me at all, but aaaaages ago 'East Northumberland High' got sent in for the poptimist podcast and I really liked it. I'd never heard of Miley or twigged that she was the spawn of BRC or the same person as Hannah Montana (whom I *had* heard of, but only through the name of the tv programme at work). Now I know Miley's background, but I don't think that was the factor in me being underwhelmed re: 'See You Again' - at least not consciously!

HOWEVER knowing the 'politics' of a popstar can definitely work in their favour for me! Especially in terms of 'bothering to give it a listen in the first place' - would the Lex love Paris Hilton's music so much if she was a nameless producer? Maybe, but I probably wouldn't as her bonkers personality isn't really present in her music (unlike say, Avril).

[blue-russian.livejournal.com]

Whereas Paris was the perfect example of "poptimism" for me - I hate her as a person but the four songs of her album were definitely among the highlights of that year for me. Probably if the Miley stuff were as good, it would overcome my discomfort, although Paris definitely falls more into the individual-driven category (like Madonna and JLo). Her personality may work in her favor for me on some subsconcious level but for the most part it's not relevant for me.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

This is a good question and no need to apologise for it!

I am not a huge Miley Cyrus fan either, though she doesn't disturb me on any level really - my idea of pop is a very broad church, with room for the wholesome as well as the realistic. I think I'm less interested than Frank and Dave et al in emotional truth and the communication of it via song, which seems to be a lot of what they get out of Ashley, Miley & co.

Some other thoughts:

- Britney is an odd example to use as lack-of-innocence was a huge selling point right from the start: surely the Disney Channel is a step away from Britney/Xtina style pop.

- The Disneyverse seems to me a symptom of a wider trend of creating teen or teen-friendly spaces ('walled gardens' to use the online terminology) in a culture that's painted as predatory: I think this is at the root of the "adults who dig teenpop are creepy" slur. Obviously creating cultural niches also delivers readymade marketing niches.

- I'd be really intrigued to see if Cis or Sarah see any similarities between the Disneyverse and the kind of cross-platform promotions J-Pop boybands and stars have. I wonder if Disney is an attempt to create a kind of western J-Pop, though obviously the things the star-personae get up to are very different.

[blue-russian.livejournal.com]

I mentioned Britney because inside the Disney universe - which is where Britney started, of course, and yes, that was part of her selling point - the Britney of 'Boys' let alone of 'I Has a Plan' never appears. No one matures (or only does so relatively) in the Disney universe, they simply disappear to be replaced by a new idol.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I think that the Miley generation of teenpop stars are a fairly deliberate attempt to introduce level-headed role-model style pop stars to the core audience - people they'd have on their friendslist rather than people they'd gawk at or aspire to be like.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

This is true, and it amuses me that it's just not gonna happen. I don't know much about Miley Cyrus but you can virtually see impending DRINK AND DRUGZ SCANDALS!!!!111 hoving into view for Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens. And despite no evidence at all my brain has decided on its own that H-Duff is a coke whore.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

I'm wary of machine-driven wholesomeness as well, in a way, but whatever its faults it does have a track record of producing great pop songs (eg early Britney) - which is why I pay attention to it. Pretty much all the culture we consume is driven by some sort of machine, so it's easy to ignore - I don't see the Disney machine as any more sinister than, I dunno, the indie machine which drives popularity of Cat Power and the Arcade Fire and fucking Spoon (the Disney machine is at least better because it's so transparent, whereas the indie one seems to exist in order to reinforce listeners' smug complacency in their own superiority).

'See You Again' is definitely one of the best tracks of last year. Beats pretty much everything in eg the Pitchfork top 10 to a pulp. Who knows whether Miley will make any more great songs? Who cares?

[blue-russian.livejournal.com]

The difference is the Disney machine is a monolith - it's one huge corporate machine. Despite your hate for indie, I hope you would admit there ISN'T an indie machine in the same way. Sure there may be hivemind out there, but it's hardly as if you see the Spoon movie, the Spoon TV show, the Spoon magazine, and the Spoon clothing line.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I would imagine Spoon (who I like a lot!) have band T shirts and appear frequently in magazines! And TV shows have been one of the huge reasons behind the rise of the new indie - look at the soundtracks to the OC, for instance. Spoon don't need a dedicated TV show, as they're hip enough to get TV show appearances and ad money should they want it: the younger end of teenpop has no such option.

I agree though that Disney's cross-promotion is much more co-ordinated: I don't personally see that as sinister and CERTAINLY not as new - are Elvis films or the Monkees TV show sinister?

I could definitely see it as off-putting though. If I didn't find the performer or character interesting in the first place then the cross-marketing would feel like overkill.

[blue-russian.livejournal.com]

The Monkees is a good counterargument. Elvis is not, because he falls into that same Madonna/JLo model: it wasn't as if there was a faceless machine that started out with the intention to build Elvis Presley block-by-block. Elvis was a success as a singer, and then a huge success, and then Elvis' people (Colonel Tom, I guess) started to build out other opportunities. Do you see the difference?

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Well obviously I see the difference but I don't see one approach as being worse than the other! Why is it?

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

the indie "machine" is the market in which all the indies compete as equals: which does -- empirically if not "by an iron law" -- seem to deliver a certain hozrizon of interchangeability

meanwhile, the disney machine is no more internally transparent than other large social cluster -- probably less so than some (because neither internally competitive, nor internally robustly democratic) -- and it doesn't, simply by being a corporation, have a better grasp of how can art be manipulated to bring about the ends it believes it has: the monolith-machine aspect of it is as irrelevant as regards contents and effects (and indeed affects) as it is to self-understanding; like all hierarchies it's highly opaque and clogged with rotten information-flow -- it's more like a randomiser than anything else

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

short-term ends = opportunistic stab at profit <--- lots flung at wall to see if sticks (much falls off)

long-term ends = profitable cohesion of "disney brand" <--- but the gulf between this as a goal and the micro-managing of any element of (eg) hannah montana's career -- and value ass sales-platform -- is HUGE: literally layers and layers of content-related guesswork, second-guessing, sucking up, bad maganement instruction implemented reluctantly; amitious feuds within management leading to contradictory implementation; fashions in this month's marketing buzzword, effective (or incompetent) imitation of apparent successes elsewhere; panics; meltdowns; art-people foolishly over-wowed by business acumen and caving accordingly; business people over-wowed by art aceumen and going along with all kinds of half-baked nonsense

the irrational complexity of the stratified layers makes for a much richer and less biddable internal ecosystem -- outlay of this much less consistent of course (does a richer ecosystem has a higher rate of fatality?)

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

ASS-SALES PLATFORM!

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

What Tom said - also I find that I don't really feel the monolith to be too, well, monolithic or overwhelming: I find it very easy to cherrypick what appeals to me out of the Disney empire, and discard the rest (ie take some of the music, ignore the rest). I don't find it sinister if eg an 8-yr-old girl wants to buy into all of it, though.

SPEAKING AS A PARENT

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I *would* find it annoying if MY hypothetical 8-year-old girl were to buy into all of it cos it wouldn't be her money doing the buying. As the madness around H Montana tiXoR in the US suggests, though, pester power is pretty heavy.

So I would condemn from that POV the marketing tactics which say "If you're a *real* fan you'd see HM live AND buy the record AND buy the DVD AND buy the clothes AND etc etc." - those are certainly not exclusive to teenpop, though! And I dunno even if the HM brand does push that.

Re: SPEAKING AS A PARENT

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Yeah I guess that's my argument really - the marketing tactics Disney uses are not really any different to the marketing tactics used by the brands us adults are 'supposed' to like. I'm not a huge fan of any of them but it shouldn't be used as a stick to beat one with and not others. I do always try to be conscious of marketing when I actually spend money, and to not be seduced into it. I mean, I wouldn't buy Paris Hilton's perfume or anything.

[martinskidmore.livejournal.com]

I really like the handful of tracks I heard from her. Based on the first couple, I gave the TV show a go but thought it was dreary and witless. I couldn't care less whether she came from a manufactured route through Disney or was an indie performer or whatever - I just like her records a lot.

Actually, my views of Disney tend to swing around rather. I love the old Donald and Mickey comics of Barks and Gottfredson, and I love some of the old movies (King Louis in the Jungle Book is among my favourite film scenes ever) - but I think their vision of the perfect America was horribly right wing, and their normative tendencies are very powerful. I enjoy quite a lot of the music they are generating these days.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

As one of the biggest supporters of Disney-originating music 'round here, I should say that I devote a LOT of my time into figuring out how Death Star Disney (the transnational conglom bit) works, too, since one of my arguments is that, as pernicious and awful as Disney is as a company (sweat shop labor, intellectual property insanity, etc.) there is a divide between what they ARE and what they DO. In fact, this divide has actually been closing up a bit the more heavy-handed they've gotten about keeping their music in-house (compare, e.g., to the bonkers nature of early Radio Disney, which was an improvised novelty/pop channel that helped break Toy-Box and A*Teens and Steps and etc. in the States in some fashion) .

I've written a lot about how all this stuff happened -- the best summary I've done was leading up to HSM (before the solo stars and at the beginning of Hannah Montana) here (http://cureforbedbugs.blogspot.com/2006/04/first-ever-lovemarks-photo-shoot-in.html). And I recently wrote a bit about the seemingly grassroots support of "See You Again" on the US (and now Canadian) charts without a marketing push from Disney here (http://www.cave17.com/?p=29). The key point is that "See You Again" has (at least, to the best of my understanding) removed Disney from the equation, so that we can try to watch this network of kids/teens make musical choices without the looming impact of the Disney marketing machine. (The machine itself is remarkably transparent, but that doesn't make it any less evil, I suppose. Though my issues aren't with its pandering to conservative values -- I argue in my first piece that it's actually moved AWAY from "innocence," though HM and HSM are good examples of a potential "swing back" -- but with how it throws around its institutional weight in the realm of IP, distribution, etc.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Not between what they ARE and DO, rather, what they ARE/DO and "the music that results from the universe," either through production or promotion.

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

I have really big political problems with Disney. I found it quite hard reviewing 'Potential Breakup Song' for Chartblog because I knew I was going to say it was amazing, it is amazing but at the same time, I didn't actually want to say 'go out and buy it and support Disney.' Which is why I still don't own Insomniatic, despite the fact I really want it because I just can't face breaking over a decade of Disney boycott even to support music I really love.

I have similar problems with Miley. She seems like an absolutely charming human being from the time I saw her on... Jay Leno maybe or something that was on NBC Europe when I was on holiday with my parents and very levelheaded for a fourteen year old; I can't actually see her going down the 'off-the-rails mentalism' route purely because this isn't her first foray into the trippy world of music stardom, presumably she's seen it in one way or another since she was tiny but at the same time, she is as you say just a bubbly fourteen year old girl having a huge amount of fun being a popstar. Which is great, I suppose, I mean, everyone has that 'oooh wow wouldn't it be great to be a popstar' daydream at some point in their lives and Miley appears to be good at it and has made at least one song that I really, really like but (without deliberately wanting to roll out the controversy rug here) I can't help thinking there are degrees of similarity between my objections to Paris Hilton and things I really *ought* to object to about Miley. Except I like Miley and intensely dislike Paris. (and their markets are the same, after all, it's just the Disney store instead of Stupid Spoiled Whore* and Walt Corp instead of Hilton Industries but I suppose at the end of that particular day it comes down to whose music I prefer.

Since I'm indulging in my usual habit of flicking between writing this and doing work, this is probably not making any sense whatsoever.

Disney *is* creepy. The way Disney is marketed at girls in particular is ultra-creepy -nearly every female I know goes ga ga over Disney stuff because it's CUTE and GIRLY and YAY (which is where the P.Hilton reference comes in, insofar as it's very much the 'that's hot' mode of discourse) with absolutely zero shame whatsoever. Which is lovely if that's really what gets them off but I can't help thinking there's some hideous Cosmo dumb-down of the 'whee, I mustn't bother my fluffy little head with corporate misdemeanour' lurking about somewhere in there. I mean, a lot of these girls are International Politics and the Third World students who would auto-condemn Nike and, eh, I dunno, Microsoft for being evil conglommerates because that's BOY STUFF so who cares but I have derailed from my train of thought here and just gone off on one. The thing I believe I intended to say was that aside from all my traditional objections to Disney (sweatshop labour, white supremacy) they appear to have grown a newer and perhaps even more sinister face in the last ten years that these pop girls are in some way heavily linked to.

I have the feeling there are dynamics involved in the whole thing which I cannot possibly understand properly because I am a middle class British university student and not a hick beauty pageant contestant. And since I am a middle class British university student I have to go and cram some Hegel now and stop staring at this comment box as I have been for the last 45 minutes but eh, I agree with a lot of what you say. I obviously deviate on whether Miley's music is any good because I really do think 'See You Again' is a masterpiece in a similar vein to the way 'Baby One More Time' is a masterpiece but there are some very uncomfortable tensions involved and certainly I do think that it's possible to have a political (hrmm, ideological) gut-reflex dislike of music (or indeed all arts) or inability to identify with it in any way.

I think possibly the thing that bothers me most about the Disney lasses is their hegemony on the genre of teenpop. If such a thing exists.

*Which is a South Park reference, if anyone doesn't know.