Pop idols spoiling our fun

is the problem that gates/young do not write their own songs? or that you dont like the songs? what if you liked the songs? would there be a problem then?

what of great songwriters, of tin pan alley? should they not have sold their songs for perfomers? should they have done the songs themselves? all the bacharach/david songs? are they diminished by being done by 'puppets' like dionne warwick?

"i used to rely utterly and completely on the music industry to entertain me but now it puts out things i don't like so much what should i do?"

If you're not creative, but aim to be a Pop Idol, getting someone else to take care of writing the music would seem like a pretty sensible idea. Even "credible" acts need lots of outside help in the making of a record (production, engineering, mixing, whatever), so it seems silly to attack a pop idol for also knowing his limitations, and getting someone in to help. It would be silly to hamper the chances of your record being great, because you want to do it all yourself, maaaan. This reminds me of NME's Justin Timberlake review, where Alex Needham basically said: "The music's cool, but it's not Justin's music." Well, duh. Who cares? If the end result is a great record, who cares if the performer didn't write it?

Note: I'm not necessarily saying that Will and Gareth's records are great, either. I'm just saying I don't care if they write their own music or not.

I think that reigns true for pretty much most of the great performers of the last century.

Watch these pop idols on stage (and apart from the fact that they frequently sing out of tune) and tell me that their performance isn't weak. No crowd interaction, no real stage presence. You could never put them in the same category as Sinatra. The real difference is clearly the difference between back then - the artists/performers had a love for the music. Now it just seems to be about a quest for fame and money.

Also note that most of their songs are re-runs of previously succesfuls tunes and the publishing on many of these tunes are owned by the artist mangement.

Nobody has gone out on a limb to try something groundbreaking - and with a captive audience like that - don't you think the execs could have made the decision to try something a little more imaginative?

In answer to Mark's point - fuck off you prick - I think you've missed the point... dude

This is fair enough. If your complaint is that they are soulless, lacking in passion, poor singers, whatever, that's completely cool. But your initial point seemed to be that they should be writing their own songs, and I can only ask "why?" Songwriting probably isn't their thing. You initially said:

"They don't even have the creative whit to write their own material"

Who cares?

i'm not. BUT, you seem to be saying they are bad because they're not good enough NOT because they are singing other peoples material. i can agree with the former (they are bad because they're mediocre singers) but not the latter (they are bad because of the format of interpreting others material)

Okay, not strictly Pop Idol but the same sort of thing.

it's television reality junk food. that is all.

i mean, yes, he won a talent show, which is obviously nervewracking and requires all sorts of specific skills, but still only means you wowed a small number of people: i imagine the winners for some while will be plagued by uncertainties about whether they're actually "good" or not in the real world

(cf myleen klass's legendary outburst on the bbc uk top 40 when "pure and simple" got to number one, compared to her response to a memory of being heckled in the street, when she burst into tears on the frank skinner show... that insecurity will shut some performers, and drive others into chanceless mediocrity, but it will flame some, especially those who are actually somewhat aware of what they're capable of, to Show Everyone... )

This reminds me of NME's Justin Timberlake review, where Alex Needham basically said: "The music's cool, but it's not Justin's music." Well, duh. Who cares? If the end result is a great record, who cares if the performer didn't write it?

I think I know the reasons people around here say stuff like this, and I assume that it's largely a reaction against its use as a lazy dismissal, but that still doesn't make it right. I care. I mean, I object to fact that it's considered to be (outright) bad form by people like you, to give credit where a reviewer believes that it's due, rather than to whatever name or face is on an album cover. Not everyone only cares about the end result. Taking things only at face value as a rule, is (even in the general sense) a nearly guaranteed method of being misinformed. In fact, I would consider my own lack of extensive knowledge going beyond face value, to be my biggest barrier to understanding things and communicating effectively about them. So sorry, but I just don't see it as a good policy when approaching music either. (suprise, surprise)

Just because some folx are great performers, why does that invalidate the idea of not giving them all the credit? It doesn't. It's just that people should be smarter about how they say these things and stop giving us the same old knee-jerk, performer=fake, musician=genuine line. If I can unlearn this, anyone can.

Also they will need to go through their Mitch Miller phase of doing crummy novelty tunes ("Mama Will Bark" anyone?) and then get "the Mob" to put them back on top by landing them roles in Richard Curtis' Oscar-winning adaptation of "Beevor's Stalingrad."

Though I would like to hear all the "Justified" outtakes a la Parker on Dial/Savoy.

= satori.

If, however, you're at the Osmond/Rollers level (and it's way too early to say which category Will or Gareth would fit into, or indeed Justin; in most ways it's up to them to decide what to do with the tools they've been given) then, because there's nothing really "there," the audience will then feel free to gobble up the idol, take what they want from him/her, and then consign him/her to the out-tray of under-recorded history.

Justin T might well go the same way as George Michael; i.e. cross over but, like, Bowie, be "respected" rather than be screamed at. We can only wait and see.

I'm not objecting to the notion that the performer needn't deserve all the credit, I'm objecting to the notion that it's a less satisfying piece of art if the performer doesn't have a certain level of input (which certainly seemed to be the implication in the Alex Needham review.) I wouldn't object to him saying:

"This is a good record by Justin, but Timbaland deserves the credit."

I don't understand him saying:

"I'm put off this record by the fact that Timbaland is responsible for any of its musical excellence, but its Justin's name on the cover."

Objecting to Justin reaping the plaudits understandable, but how does it detract from the overall quality of the music?

Reply to Kim: I don't know - it's a combination of basic human nature and bottom-line marketing. Perhaps by refusing to acknowledge the artists as "individuals" we do the industry's work on their behalf. Problem is that, because the only "truth" we recognise is our own, we can only assimilate music/art/literature/whatever in terms of what we draw from it, rather than what the artist intended. It may be more or less interesting than the original conception, but if we go deeper then we have to venture into the realms of "objective" opinions, which although useful have the side-effect of dampening down our passion. So really you can't win. It's back to the old Baudrillard catchphrase - fascination over meaning.

it's surely not true that these non-authorial figures bring NOTHING to the picnic: even the pop-idol ppl drag in the entire world of the TV talent show and the Fame School of Perf.Arts, which has a specific ambience, and set of values and limitations and assumptions scraping along behind it

it's true that they are more symbolic clusters of energies than artists-as-individuals, but i'm not really sure where i wd go to find the latter, if it exists outside ideology

pop is a collective activity, same as almost everything else

Pop Idol is more about the expression on the faces of the losers and winners than the actual songs they are singing. You're given a load of autopilot cover versions so you can concentrate on Sally from Enfield's tears of joy/disappointment rather than her voice.

This "watch the pleb make it" TV is what the "public" want to see at the moment. We've grown tired of seeing them get a million for answering multiple guess questions, so seeing them become popstars, however fleetingly, is another spin on the same coin. The reality soap element is key, not the songs.

Personally I blame it all on peoples lack of connection to democracy these days. People are far more likely to vote for which nice boy or lovely girl they want piped into their workplace on Rock FM 24/7 than on a single currency. It's more relevant to their actual lives.

The problem vis a vis the music industry goes is that Pop Idol acts will always be a safe financial bet what with their hours and hours of free primetime publicity. Why take a chance on a 20 year old songwriter who might turn shit when you can pump out an endless string of fools who will sign anything you put in front of them. The people on these shows just want to be stars, and as such they are just asking to be exploited. You ask Danny, Noel, Kym etc. how their bank balances are after the whole thing. They were all royally tied down and ripped off, and yes they deserved it.

Comparing these people to Bowie and such is ludicrous. It's a different age. The writing talent stays a step back, sometimes because it's fat, ugly or Swedish (usually all three), most of the time because it can now latch itself on to any flavour of the month singer and maintain a longer career. People don't get bored of you (Mr. Catchy Tune), they get bored of the disposable singer. Let them go and then pick up another young nubile starlet/starboy and off you go again.

In a better world this would be a much more preferable way to do things, but at the moment the whole thing is bathed in that horribly overlit and garish ITV Saturday Night cheesiness. The Sugababes are you prime example of how to do it well in this day and age, McCluskey did alright for a bit with Atomic Kitten - he seems a bit dried up at the moment, but hey, AK will fall out of favour and he can find another bunch of cheap tarts to write for when he's penned another winner. The band members will pass into obscurity and the harsh realisation of how little they got financially out of the whole deal and the wheel turns round again.

My disclaimer at the end will be that no - I do not allways have to connect personally in order to love something. I can take other approaches. It's just that in the case of pop culture, I often can't take the path that's laid out for me as it only leads to a man behind a curtain.

I like the misspelling! "Following the collapse of Elastica..."

My sole objection to the album is that Timberlake's voice eats. This tends to spoil the effect.

goes and sits in dad corner

It's the much over-used Wizard of Oz reference Julio. It felt appropriate (hence why I used it in the first place) but that one is getting pretty tired isn't it?

I would pay good money to see Will Young and Gareth Gates trying to do a Sinatra mob role though.

careful what you wish for...

as for myself I have manged to avoid it all. and I think I only heard will young (or was it gareth's?) version of light my fire once.

I think it matters. At its worst it can come over as if voiceover 'artistes' are getting the credit for the words they're reading out as well as for the way they read them. It is a collective activity, and there's a phalanx of skilled specialists involved in the production of successful music/film, but that's not how it's presented to us, is it? Instead, a load of sex-frontage craft-merchants are presented as 'personalities' or 'artists', by another set of crafty curtain-hidees, because most ppl seem to need a process of 'identification' either of a FACE or an ARSE to allow them to feel 'connected' to the product-brand. The probability that these figureheads could just as easily be replaced as any one else in the chain of production isn't a popular thought.
(I had listened to a Bowie singles collection on Saturday, so when I was seeing some MTV awards thing the other night, and monkey-boy Williams came on, gurning his way through yet another vaudevillian number, I found myself wondering 'who is the present-day equivalent of David Bowie? (obv its not Bowie haha) Is *this* all we have now?' Where is the male individual composer/performer capable of being a cultural icon/star but also producing such works? (I'm not even a big fan of Bowie, either) AND ANOTHER THING - 'Get The Party Started' won some 'best song' award, and *Pink* came up to collect it, even though her acceptance speech commented on how she knew it was going to be huge when she 'first heard it' - WTF? Why weren't the songwriters up there instead?)

mark s is right - maybe all this TV-explicit building up of skilled artisans with the right 'personality' (hahaha ref: 'do looks matter?') into figureheads & 'idols' makes it all the more obvious just what is going on alot of the time anyway. But does it work because ppl either don't care about the process ('I only pay for the end result so that's all I care about') - or else they take interest in the process as a cultural phenomenon in itself ('one of the things that intrigues me abt the pop idol phenom specifically is that (some of) the men behind the curtain are actually on-camera') - or else they feel that they can buy into it as a real-life (drama) whose script they can exercise some degree of control over, unlike most of the rest of their lives?

(oh f**k being so s-l-o-w.... all covered already by some of above....)

mark - ref you're point 'secret acknowledgment that rest of the musicworld had nothing much to offer anyway' -
'Jazz Idols': whaddya reckon?

(I don't think this has ever happened before)

(Is no one going to comment on "Mark"'s use of caps when discussing Sinatra?)

a couple of other questions:

why do i get the same feeling watching those old navy ads with the 'american idol' contestants (and i'm sorry, but that sub-whitney single, featuring ms clarkson belting out the chorus in an 'i gotta go baaaad' sort of way, is absolutely wretched) that i do when i see anything featuring carmen electra or yasmine bleeth?

how do all the behind-the-scenes shows about non-contestant pop idols fit into all this?

I WOULD BE FUCKING RIPSHIT IF I HAD TO SING THAT SONG. It's horrifyingly bad. There's no relationship at all between the verse and the chorus, it's too high for Kelly to sing it comfortably because she belts EVERYTHING, and it's FUCKING AWFUL. I would have been sorely tempted to give my contract back after getting the music to that song.

ok actually carmen looks not bad in that 'come on, baby, skank for the camera' kinda way

Yasmine looks a little haggard in that "I just got sexed by an elephant" way, but what can you expect when catch a cokehead off-guard?

I haven't liked any of Will's and Gareth's singles so far, but they don't bother me half as much as, say, the Stereophonics or Coldplay (haha Craig David on Later: "I listen to a lot of alternative music, like Coldplay"). There are at least two singers in the male half of The Rivals who I really like - Danny in particular has to be a star.

True, but Simon Cowell and Pete Waterman are consumer friendly patsies for Prefuse 73 and Chistian Fennesz to work their dark arts on Will and Gareth. (Darius is busy trying to find LLoyd Cole).

But as you say, that might be the problem with the present. Forget Pop Idol, can we have Pop Producer instead? Ten contestants try and work with a pool of singers, each one gets one to work with and the contest isn't over the performer but if the producer can create something for the performer that brings out both of their strengths. Now that would rock.

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B00005QEBN.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

Isn't being seen to be 'separated' from the listener an intrinsic part of the pop deal - 'There's a guy works down the chip shop thinks he's Elvis'.....oh hold on, it actually is Elvis.... :(

Maybe I prefer the idea that a pop performer’s reln to a song they make a living from *should* be very separate from that of the punters who just buy it - we're all bludgeoned with the idea that they're the important end of the pantomime horse, that the fancy-pants icing is really the entire cake, that they're getting enough fame and £ and shagging and pharmaceutically fuelled 8-D from it to make their lives all shiny and glamorous and larger-than-ours, so maybe the last thing I want is for them to be getting all this without having to even be involved at the initial awkward stages of basic creation. We pay them money to avoid the responsibility of having to make our own entertainment - I want those fuXors to shoulder that responsibility, and to EARN EVERY PENNY.

(Nah, I don’t believe it’s that simple either.
Issues. I got issues. I need to see a Pop Psychologist.)