Pretense and music for preteens.

I said it a while ago, and I’ll say it again here to preface. Of the Billboard stars, few artists make great videos (this is discounting jailbait girls) anymore, and if they do make a great video, they almost always follow it up with a thunker, then another crap vid, and then one of those videos that is so bad, you only could see it once on MTV or VH1, because that’s as much as the music label was willing to pay space on Viacom for a weirdo video for a single that they never believed in the first place. They’d rather beat the new single with Paula Denada into your head until you just give up, turn 23, and start watching CNN because of terror plots.

You know what? Let’s use that song, and video as a pallete cleanser.

Things I hate about music production and videos today, in no particular order:

Just a link for this one

1. She’s way too young. A. There has only ever been one artist in history who deserved to have the main vocal on major single in history. That band was the Spencer Davis Group, the song was “Gimme Some Lovin” and the lead vocalist was Steve Winwood. No one ever deserves to have a voice like this at 17. John, Paul, George, Thom, Bob, Van, Joe Cocker, and even Marvin didn’t sound this good at 17 as Winwood. Once in a lifetime do you get a kid who can actually sing, who has resonance to sell the lyrics, and goddamnit, the fucking voice. Listen to the song again, he’s actually 17. He sounds like he is 35 and been doing the tour scene for half his life. To boot, he is the one playing the organ. That’s male, and that’s deserved. He wasn’t just some guy off the street who could do the singing, he actually made the song better.

2. Rhetorical Questions as a chorus. While this goes back to the theme of immaturity, it’s part of a larger point. Some say weak art answers questions, great art makes the viewer ask questions about themselves. When a piece of art merely poses struggles as a throughline, all that is left is the semblance of stupidity – not in the baseness, but in the end quotient of nothing even attempted to be resolved. This is the same problem with BEP’s “Where’s the Love?” or Jadakiss’s “Why.” Brilliance in art is about the struggling and finding ones point in life due to it. I don’t need someone who isn’t a philosophy major asking me “why” for 4 minutes.

3. The featuring special. First, we are subjected to two artists that may wind up being big if this single takes off. For them it’s a win-win, they may get the exposure, they also get the paycheck. As far as I know, the only one to receive bad feedback from this was Ja Rule, and that was well after he became a millionaire. Second: While the song is nothing more than a love song where the girl wants to know what she is doing wrong, Baby Bash comes in and supplies answers, “I’m your man, I got the plan, I’m the shit, yo, we’ll hit.” This is part of the reason I think we should just get rid of the duet outside of adult standards. If all we get are 40 second verses of personality or harmony, we either deserve to get this on the whole album as if it were cohesion of the whole. The fact that the music industry is now a distribution business for the music art is not the worst thing in the world, but when one interferes with the other as a matter of marketing, when has that ever not felt cheap and manipulative.

4. The Princess Ideal: “If you wanna be happy for the rest of your life/ never make a pretty girl your wife.” Outside of age or shit music, maybe one of the reasons I stand fast to dismiss an artist like this is because we are sold mostly on their beauty, the other facet being her screaming about her self esteem (hey, we like bulimic and/or dysfunctional girls who possibly do anal here at INLY) I really don’t care if she is attractive or not, and I may side with her more if she wasn’t a Britney or J-Lo replicant, but to sell this girl, in short skirts, flashes of cleavage, touches of mature but naughty sexuality, really, we don’t need this, nor do we want it. Sure it’s eye candy, but there’s got to be something more. The side would be that she has such an ego without doing too much, but I have no doubt that every Comm major in the room told her that sex sells, and that she naively went with it.

5. The vocal overlay: If American Idol has done anything tremendously malicious, it’s that vocal bravado equals great singing. Part of this belongs to the huge success of Mariah, but just because her 3 octave crescendo’s work, doesn’t mean that any flip off the street is a good singer because they have the ability to vibrate on a note. In the history of pop music, the voice has rarely been the selling point. Mel Torme, Tony Bennet and Bobby Darin all had better voices than Old Blue Eyes, but Frank could sell the song on charisma. Bono has the best voice in rock and roll, but Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen are his idols. The Temptations or Marvin Gaye? Otis Redding or R. Kelly? Usher or D’Angelo?

Did David Bowie have a good voice?

Did Robert Plant or Animal have one that wasn’t merely unique in its perfect setting?

Great songs don’t need great voices. They need singers who match the song. Can you imagine “Imagine” with 35 Beyonce vocal tracks. It’s the singular tone, no same singer backups that sells the song, the vacancy instead of the vast.

She’s a first single artist, sell us on the song, not the skill of your “vocals” if Garth Brooks can outsell the Beatles, Elvis, and Zep with a voice that fits the bill, maybe the industry is completely idiotic, or just trying to play to the niche for the quick buck and hoping for crossmarketing.

The video (if you have watched) and the song (if you bothered to listen) is a blip in the music scene for the summer of 06 and will be gone, and likely to the artist. But from the ashes will rise another artist, and another one-shot wonder will wonder where her parents spent the money.

I am not putting this in the bitter pile, but in the, “god what a shame” lot, the fallout of a song this mediocre yet highly hyped is the small scale of winning an election. Unless Paula Denada comes out with a 2000’s version of “Borderline” or “Opposites Attract” she’s going to be gone in 6 months, and she’s going to be convinced by others she is over. She’s likely done, but for the girl’s and not the music’s sake, lets hope she actually gets a real shot.