And, no, it wasn’t complicated
On KROQ yesterday, I heard something that sounded eerily like Avril Lavigne doing metal: a bratty, thin voice that wraps tightly around hard r sounds as if intending to snap their necks, heat-shrinked over distorted power chords. Any ideas?
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13 Responses to “And, no, it wasn’t complicated”
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July 14th, 2009 at 10h05
Do you remember any of the lyrics?
July 14th, 2009 at 14h06
“Decode” by Paramore?
July 14th, 2009 at 15h18
Yeah. Yeah, that would be it. How the hell did you do that?
Decode | Paramore
July 14th, 2009 at 15h43
In further Googling, I guess the song was on the Twilight soundtrack. I avoided everything to do with that phenomenon from “principle” that was probably closer to “bigotry”, but I gathered from cultural osmosis that Kristen Stewart was the lead. I had meant to blog about her before, actually — years ago. Like (I would expect) many movie fans, I first noticed her in a kick-ass performance in David Fincher’s Panic Room.
I saw her a year later in the horrible Figgis scary-house flick Cold Creek Manor, the cast of which leads off with Dennis Quaid, Sharon Stone, Stephen Dorff, and Juliette Lewis as (respectively) the heroic and villainous couples. Kristen Stewart played the first couple’s daughter, who (IIRC) was fancied by Stephen Dorff (?). Dorff, icon of my early-90s-indie-films-saturated college years, at least tried. Juliette Lewis, apparently, they just wound up, pointed at the camera, and said, “Go! Crazy!”, and she gave essentially the same performance she has since her Oscar-winning debut, an award given before the Academy realized she’s not acting, she’s just fucking insane. Quaid and Stone would have been happy phoning their performances in, except the one scene that I really remember has the pair over some sort of Cellar containing Something Malevolent on the property — drenched in rain and mud, and basically shouting their lines back and forth at each other, but every line seemingly “Damn you Mike Figgis for putting me in this fucking rain!!!”, dubbed over.
Anyway — Kristen Stewart. Figgis (presum.) her in one of the early-aughts low-cut bikinis (both pieces low-cut) for a pool scene, and I remember turning to Jenn (we were watching the DVD) and my saying, indignantly, “She is going to be a beautiful woman some day, but that outfit is completely inappropriate for a girl her age.” Call me old.
IMDB shows that the lead singer of Paramore (what is up with that spelling?) and Stewart are 20 and nineteen years old, respectively? If this has an obvious answer, I’m going to plead actual, literal ignorance, but are the two of them and Lavigne, taken together, sex symbols? Just for teens, I would hope? I would think they would kind of have to be, as the women in similar environmental niches when I was a teen (Alanis Morissette? Reese Witherspoon?) were thusly considered, but I’m old enough that it’s a little creepy: the year I went to college, they were presumably in kindergarten. My lowest-bound sex symbol (yes, here’s a link to Passing the Torch again) is Olivia Wilde, b. 1984, but can pass as ten years older than that:
ramble, ramble, …
July 14th, 2009 at 16h58
Wow. Was Alanis actually considered a sex symbol at some point?
Anyway, the lead singer from the band Flyleaf sounds a like Avril too. Listen to the chorus from “I’m So Sick.” Or maybe it’s just me.
July 14th, 2009 at 17h10
Yeah. You were nine, right?
My good friend Nathan, who was a year behind me in college, loved her, and Madonna sure marked her as a sex symbol. The rest of us, IIRC, just liked her angst and her then-edgy lyrics, while we simultaneously yearned for a girl with such a victim mentality that she would fall in love with us and actually blame it on us, yet feared breaking up with her and coming home to find her, naked, crying in our beds.
July 14th, 2009 at 18h04
Actually 12 when JLP was released, but I only started liking her music at around 13 or 14…pretty much the age every teenage girl (especially when raised Catholic haha) feels listening to a song with the word “fuck” is rebellious. Ah, those were the days…
Madonna is the least qualified person to say whether someone’s sexy or not.. And I love Alanis, but she definitely isn’t.
July 14th, 2009 at 20h26
I love Alanis, but she definitely isn’t [sexy]
You know, Karina, you’re absolutely right. I was thinking about this and how I needed to drive back home and respond to my reply to you with further musings when I … um … almost ran over myself with my truck? I’m OK, but, fuck. Not cool.
So, yeah, Nathan (hi, Nathan?) probably was a little out there with huge sex crushes on Alanis — although doesn’t the lead-off video for SFIJ (hmm, that could be arranged into “ISFJ” — probably not intentional, but would be the reading, Typelogic-wise, of my ex-wife, if my ex-wife she were a brooding introvert instead of a bubbly party person. A brooding, introverted Jenn may in fact be Alanis. So, hmmm, I may have just typed Alanis by morphing Jenn. Maybe it’s just the “needy” and “all-or-nothing” things that link them.)
OK, I started a sentence: “doesn’t the lead-off video for SFIJ have a static shot of her standing nude, doing her weird-jaw singing, in soft focus with a brushstrokey backdrop?” Someone thought she was hot. You don’t put John Popper naked on stage to sell records.
But, no, I was never hot for Alanis. Madonna, on the other hand, stirred pathways and muscles I’m not sure I knew I had when I saw her televised concert in Japan at eight years old. She did numerous wardrobe changes behind a diaphanous curtain. There were moments in which this lady could be seen without any clothes on on the television. I’d make a joke about this is not the normal meaning of “k[...]-p[...]“, but, while I don’t really give a shit that K-Mart blocks everything on my site, I really don’t need a Secret Service knock for what is just an amusing pun.
I was thinking of the people who really did fill Hayley-whatever’s eco-niche when I was her age. Sure, we had vixens — Shirley Manson and Tori Amos were the stuff of dreams, and Heather Nova slithering in a miniskirt while panting “I want you to come // I want you to cuuum // I want you to cuuuuuuuuuum walk this world with me” was not precisely subtle — but the women fronting alt-rock and metal were oddly (comment dit?) repulsive? I mean, PJ Harvey? Liz Phair, in her first emergence? L7, 4 Non-Blondes? Courtney Love for crying out loud? Maybe if the grunge guys weren’t supposed to wash their hair or buy expensive clothes, their female counterparts weren’t supposed to touch up their eyeliner when fits of emotion sent tears streaking black courses down their cheeks, or, notoriously, to not wear underwear onstage.
Bob Mike, you’re a contemporary, and (at least was) a Tori fanboy to a ridiculous degree — thoughts? Mike once confided to me that since he discovered that Tori Amos only released great albums after huge catastrophes in her life, he was going to wait for the one year anniversary of her marriage and then shoot her husband in the head. If you know Mike, that’s completely in-character, completely joking, completely hilarious, completely innocent, and completely terrifying.
So, maybe Hayley-whatever and Avril aren’t supposed to be hot? But — they are pretty, aren’t they? Not trailer jail-bait what-the-fuck-are-you-doing-putting-breast-implants-in-a-fourteen-year-old sleazy Britney. Pretty. Prettier than Stewart, at any rate. In high school, you would want to go to their parties (but not get invited) in order to look at them in their swimsuits, not want to go to their parties (but not get invited) because you heard they were going to be injecting antifreeze or something. I really don’t know anything about these girls^H^H^H^H^Hyoung women. I wouldn’t trust the Toobs for facts on them, and I’d be way-surprised if they were straightedge, but our fashion trends were being set by Courtney fucking Love and other pharmaceutical reclamation servicers, not just sk8r-grrl tank-top-plus-necktie brats.
Actually 12 when JLP was released
Really? I was 16. I’m 30 now. Are you actually gaining on me in years, or have you just been a reader so long that I have “23″ fixed at your age (last.fm?) and you’ve been, say, aging? If it’s the former (the more interesting option), I’ll fly you out to the coast for our equinox — I’ll buy you shots all night until the clock ticks, you’re suddenly older than I, and then you have to start paying.
July 14th, 2009 at 20h32
How I did that:
1. I went to KROQ’s site to see if they had a playlist. No dice.
2. I Googled “KROQ playlist”. The first result was from a site called theaudioperv.com with some non-recent playlists.
3. I clicked on the top result, and then searched within the site for KROQ hoping to find a more updated playlist.
4. The most recent playlist (maybe somebody just listening and transcribing? don’t know how they got this.) was from 5/26. I looked at it. One: Kings of Leon. Wasn’t them. Two: Incubus. Wasn’t them. Three: Kings of Leon. Ain’t that just like KROQ? Still wasn’t them. 4: Decode by Paramore. Didn’t know what the hell that was, but something about that misspelling seemed just right for the genre.
5. Googled. Heard a few seconds on YouTube. Some chick over-enunciating her r’s. Nooch.
6. Posted on your site.
In conclusion: I gots that Google-foo, son.
July 14th, 2009 at 21h26
1. You indeed gots that foo. You also gots the patience to listen to clips of shitty music. The wise master haveth infinite foo and infinite serenity.
2. I supposed I would have bothered if you asked on your site. Helping someone is motivation.
3. Kings of Leon, in my casual exposure, are exceedingly good, and playing them every other song is a better solution to our current rock-’n'-roll problem than those many other stations have devised. I may buy my first record since Tally Hall and Dragonforce.
4. What is this “nooch” contraption of which you speak, wise one?
July 15th, 2009 at 03h03
Oh geez..thank you for the insight on men’s psyche. Anyway, even though I respect most of the female artists previously mentioned, I find them all repulsive. Is there rule in the feminist bible that says “Thou shall not use make up”? I hate to admit it, but girls really are ruthless when it comes to judging another girl’s outer beauty. Vicious even.
Wait, do Kings of Leon really get played that much on the radio? Well, they’re not exactly the band out the “neo-garage explosion of the 2000s” that I think deserves recognition (and sadly, it happened with their one disappointing album), but it’s a step up from all the crap out there, I suppose.
Are you actually gaining on me in years, or have you just been a reader so long that I have “23″ fixed at your age and you’ve been, say, aging?
Busted.
July 15th, 2009 at 13h41
Bob Mike, you’re a contemporary, and (at least was) a Tori fanboy to a ridiculous degree — thoughts?
I can’t speak for all of the women listed, but in the cases of Courtney Love and L7, of course you don’t find them attractive. That’s kind of the point, isn’t it? I mean, they were all early grunge, which means that they had just crawled out of the primordial soup of punk. No one ever comments that Darby Crash could have put more work into his appearance, or that The Ramones could have really been big if they’d just cut their hair and bathed with more regularity. 4 Non Blondes was headed by confirmed lesbian Linda Perry, whose performances were probably not influenced by how attractive they would make her seem to a bunch of (semi-)heterosexual dudes like us.
The 1980s were a phenomenally shitty time to be a female rocker for a number of reasons, but one of the largest of them would probably have to be watching significantly less talented musicians get pushed to the top based on their appearance. A lot of the look of the 1990s was designed to be a rejection of that. Sadly, the pendulum seems to have swung back in the other direction in the past decade. I’m hoping that the next ten years will recover from that, and that the status of musicians will focus a little bit more on the quality of their music.
July 21st, 2009 at 17h49
Let’s go ahead and link these related posts for posterity.