Aly & AJ, Samsung Experience Store, NYC, 4/11/07

I was taking a break from work this afternoon when I realized that, at that very moment, Aly & AJ were scheduled to play at the Samsung Experience store. The Samsung Experience store, for those of you unfamiliar, is this weird thing in the TimeWarner Center, i.e. the weird mall at Columbus Circle, where you don't buy anything, you just sort of wander around and try Samsung stuff. Very conceptual. But, more importantly, very close to my job, and so since I was taking a break anyway, I figured I'd head over. Let's get the fanboy stuff out of the way first: they said they were just in NYC for a day, as they had a new album coming out July 10 (my birthday, also Jessica Simpson's, hey) and were spending all their time in LA, "playing around in the studio" and finishing it up. There was the suggestion that they were going to play new songs, but they didn't. They played "Something More," "Rush," "Into the Blue," and "Chemicals React," which got the biggest welcome from the almost entirely tween (and almost entirely white and asian) audience. It was recently one of their birthdays, and said recent birthday girl also just got her driver's license, having turned 16. There was a hand drum solo on "Into the Blue." They mentioned it was a strange show for them, and it was. I've no idea how attendence was handled (I just wandered in), but the store is fairly small, and while there was a seating section, there wasn't much overflow. There can't have been more than a couple hundred people in there, and they usually play to large crowds. Also, it was an acoustic performance--just Aly, AJ, and some other dude with a fedora, all playing acoustic guitar. This is notable because, if you were not aware, Aly & AJ are pure Disneypop, packaged and marketed and all those horrible things. So, by conventional wisdom, they should've had a hard time playing an acoustic set to a small crowd, being used to studio trickery and whizz-bang light shows etc. etc. Suffice to say they did not. Allow me to put it plainly: holy shit, they could sing. And I don't mean "sing at all," I mean "sing really fucking well." I even checked the soundboard, and nope, no Autotune, no magic gremlins or whatever the fuck it is people think pop singers have. Even if there was, there's no way it could've reproduced this sound, which was just two female voices singing like hell, really powerful and controlled. They were so strong that it made me realize how much the power of those songs, which I thought were working a Pixies/Nirvana quiet-loud-quiet thing in the arrangements, stem solely from the vocals. They hold back and sing single lines in the verses, go a little stronger in the prechoruses and bridges, and when the chorus hits they bust out with these belted harmonies that hit like hell. You can tell they're good singers from their recorded output and all, but live, they show that they're great singers, better than almost anyone else I've heard in terms of pure power and technique. More than that, though, they took that small crowd and actually worked it. They talked with the crowd, made self-depricating jokes, bantered with the crowd, complimented people on their homemade banners, the whole thing. It was a Samsung show, sure, but they could've done the same thing just as effectively (maybe more so) at a coffeeshop or a small club. They were professionals, but not in a Krusty-taping-voiceover-lines kinda way. They had the ability to hold a crowd's attention and put it at ease, letting their personalities come through and showing that their personalities were pretty damn affable. All of which put me in mind of an article in this week's New York Times Magazine about tween shows on Nickelodeon. It's a fantastic piece, and well worth a read, but here's the particular part the Aly & AJ show reminded me of:
I watched in vain for any hint of cynicism on the...set, any trace of the corporate imperative to get these kids to simulate innocence no matter how miserable they were. Schneider’s prime directive — “Kids win” — is an element not just of the fictional Nick universe but of the real one as well. Not once in three days of taping did I encounter a pushy stage mom; nowhere did anyone break out in tears for any reason at all. Even the extras exhibited none of the restlessness or aspirational smart-mouthing you might expect. The crew didn’t grumble about the kids (they were busy passing around a Super Bowl betting sheet), and the kids were undemanding pros. A live goat was present in a house-party scene, and when, inevitably, it had an accident on the set, the kids cringed and screamed, but they did not leave their marks.We forget that professionalism exists for a lot of reasons, and one of them--probably the biggest one, in practice--is to make everyone's jobs easier. Certainly there are people up there at the top slicing demographics and plotting large-scale strategy, but at the end of the day that strategy has to be executed by a number of actual human beings, the vast majority of whom share the common goal of wanting to get to the end of the day feeling OK. Professionalism exists so that, when a goat poops--and, as anyone who's worked a job can tell you, a goat always poops--everything doesn't break down. It may, arguably, function as a system of control for those under its sway, a nefarious influence that stifles creativity and encourages artificiality, but it mainly works to allow things to run smoothly. That's what I saw at the Aly & AJ show. If they weren't good singers and decent guitar players and great performers--and if they hadn't practiced a hell of a lot to become those things--the whole event would have been far less pleasant, for everyone. It doesn't really make much sense for pop stars not to be good at all aspects of what they do, because, let's be honest, there are lots of pretty people out there, but very few pretty people who can sing well. That's one of the reason Disney has been so successful with music and TV: whether you like their style or not, they insist on quality.

It also put me in mind of something I wrote a while back that I think I neglected to menion here: an article about the professionalization of indie. At the time I wrote it, I think I meant that to be an indictment (I was pretty grumpy around the new year), but: consider this. It's band camp, but for pop stars! You audition and you go and they give you "fitness training" and then maybe you can become a national recording audience! It's really amazingly fantastic, and the sort of thing you don't think could actually exist until it actually does. And far from ruining the music it's training you for, it would seem to enhance it, giving kids the technical training to do what they do, better.

So maybe a better way of thinking about it is that the professionalization of indie just makes it the same as everything else. They're all controlled industries, local economies spread out on a global scale. And if you're OK with indie, then you might as well be OK with the methods and machinery of pop. It's all the same shit; it's just that Aly & AJ are, well, better. Or they were today, at any rate.

Labels: disney, flagpole, pop, teenpop

posted by Mike B. @ 11:09 PM