web analytics

Pop Rock Nation

Blog

  • The American Idol Tour Is Getting Cut Short. Is This Bad News?

    In what might be further proof of the faltering of the American Idol franchise, Billboard.com reported in a brief post yesterday that the American Idol summer tour, which features Season 9’s top 10 contestants including this year’s winner Lee DeWyze and shoulda-been winner Crystal Bowersox, will be coming to an early close at the end of August. But while I certainly sympathize with the show’s performers, I have to think this is a good thing – for the performers as well as their audiences. Although by its very definition, the American Idol concert tour should feel current, it has always struck me as a weirdly anachronistic concept, an ugly ghost of the recording industry’s past haunting the summer tour schedules each year. Like the travelling road shows of the 50s and 60s (famously sent up via the “Play-Tone Galaxy of Stars” tour in Tom Hanks’ wonderful 1996 movie That Thing You Do!), it always seemed more about advancing the Idol brand then promoting any of the individual artists.

    Especially as the franchise has maneuvered away from the by-the-numbers big-vocals pop performance template it began with, gradually culminating in this last, much-unloved season’s full-on embrace of “artist” values – varied and often idiosyncratic vocal styles, varied and often idiosyncratic stage personae, singers as both songwriters and (multi-)instrumentalists – the American Idol summer tour has begun to seem out of touch with its own brand. Moreover, as the show has started to find more and more artists who’ve already had their foot in (and slammed by) the music industry’s door, there’s an even greater disparity among its finalists’ in terms of level of experience and/or naivete. Even despite the relative compatibilities of their styles (compared to previous seasons’ first and second finishers), why, but for their common appearance on a hit TV show, should someone like Crystal Bowersox ever have to share a bill with a singer like Lee DeWyze? Or vice versa? (I don’t mean that as a diss to either.) In the real world, there’s no way David Cook would ever co-headline a tour with David Archuleta. I mean, c’mon. The sheer diversity of the show’s contestants has turned what used to be a pretty straightforward pop showcase into an increasingly hodge-podgy (in terms of both stage prowess and style) travelling version of a talent show for which the winner has already been declared, thereby limiting and cheapening what each of the performers can do, reducing their act to a least-common-denominator-ready instant replay of the season’s greatest hits and misses.

    That said, a far more palatable (and possibly far more profitable) alternative to the annual Idol tour is already presenting itself. This summer, last year’s runner up Adam Lambert is currently on tour with fellow Season 8 finalist Allison Iraheta. Not only does it offer Lambert, clearly the more seasoned and exciting performer, the showcase he clearly deserves while giving Iraheta a platform (and a sympathetic audience – surely more of Iraheta’s AI constituents gravitated toward Lambert than Season 8 winner Kris Allen in the final tallies) on which to grow as both an artist and a live performer. Maybe the venues they’re playing are smaller than the Idol tours, but I imagine that after spending nearly half a year watching these singers from the comforts of their living rooms, audiences would both crave and appreciate the intimacy that smaller venues might afford. Seriously, how many people really come to see all 10 artists?

    So. Note to American Idol producers. Ditch the “Top 10” road show. Instead of one big tour, why not criss-cross the country with three or four smaller tours with two or three artists on each bill. For every Adam, an Allison; for every Kris Allen, a Danny Gokey. It will better serve the artist. It could very well better serve the brand as well. The Idol tour might only hit any given concert market once or twice in the summer. With multiple tours, they could hit the same market half a dozen times. And there really may be folks who want to see all 10 artists bad enough to buy tickets every time one of the many AI tours comes to town. Just sayin’.

  • Boys Will Be Boys, and Men… Will Be Boys in Three Awesome New Videos

    Three terrific new videos by just-barely-under-the-radar artists center around men doing what men do best: being boys. Approaching the similar subject matter from three distinct points of view, from the simply fun and nostalgic, to the tragic-comic-pathetic, to the reflective and hopeful, they’re all individually great in their own right. But taken together, it seems that Philadelphia alt-hip-hop duo Chiddy Bang, indie blues duo The Black Keys, and slam poet Sage Francis have inadvertently created a coming of age suite that John Hughes would have loved.

    Already an international Top 10 hit, Chiddy Bang‘s debut single “The Opposite of Adults” (built around a sample of MGMT’s “Kids”) celebrates the carefree life of a kid – basketball, skateboarding, ogling girls at the playground – with rapper Chiddy (Chidera Anamege) promising (with apologies to Mommy) never to grow up. The video attaches cardboard cut-out looking adult faces to live action adolescent bodies as the duo relives all the various awesomenesses of their childhoods. Such as opening a box of cereal to find the prize (A Chiddy Bang 7″? Swwwweeet!).

    Chiddy Bang “The Opposite of Adults”

    The song may not be explicitly about childhood, but the video to the Black Keys‘s latest single, the Danger Mouse produced “Tighten Up” from their latest album Brothers, has to be one of the greatest videos about a lust triangle among the monkey bars. Singer Dan Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney sit on a park bench watching as their sons (who, we learn in a hilarious exchange of dialogue before the song starts, may not be the best of pals anyway) compete for the attentions of an elementary school hottie. But their efforts to be the responsible, intervening grown-ups go horribly, horribly wrong.

    The Black Keys “Tighten Up”

    “It was the best of times. It was the end of times.” In this incredible new video from his latest album Li(f)e, Sage Francis sits among an array of chairs suggestive of a school classroom – only with a wooden coffin where the teacher’s desk might be. Taking a look inside, Francis finds a trove of snapshots and artifacts, and reflects variously on religion, media, and technology before drifting back to memories of his adolescence. His first crush. Discovering his passion for words. Discovering hip-hop. Contemplating suicide, and contemplating the things he wants from life. Contemplating the apocalyptic paranoia that is being a teenager, and contemplating the wisdom he’ll pass down to his children’s children if he’s lucky enough to live long enough to meet them.

    As the classroom chairs around him fill up, he’s both teacher and student in what Prince once called “this thing called life”. His verses are loaded with richly specific details – like the love note written in code and wrapped up in ten layers of Scotch tape, but deposited in the wrong locker – and poignantly self-deprecating punchlines. The video has a familial intimacy to it that culminates in a sweet little moment between Sage Francis and the kid who plays the young Sage Francis. It’s the kind of song and video that makes me want to write a deeply personal thank you note to the artist. (Thank you, Sage Francis.)

    Sage Francis “The Best of Times”

  • “Say No To Love” by The Pains of Being Pure at Heart: More Adorable Than Surprised Kitty?

    With their self-titled debut last year, New York’s The Pains of Being Pure at Heart established themselves not only as one of the cleverest American indie pop bands to come around since Velocity Girl in the 1990s, but also, unquestionably, the cutest – in both sound and appearance. It was a noisy record, but the noise wasn’t abrasive so much as warm and fuzzy, and when you could hear the lyrics, they were full of puns (“Young Adult Friction”), alt-pop-cultural references, and coy tales of teenage ribaldry. Now, after releasing a more studio-polished EP (Higher Than the Stars) last fall, the band has returned with a new 7″ single (on “sea foam green” vinyl, even!) called “Say No To Love” b/w “Lost Saint”, both sides of which sport a jangly, retro-flavored melancholy that recalls 90s alterna-faves like the Lightning Seeds, the Cranberries, and Ivy. The band’s also put out a video for “Say No To Love” that delivers a 10,000 kiloton bomb of adorable on the viewer. Nibble on this, Suprised Kitty!