[Dixielandjazz] Music Kids love is not all Rap

[Steve Barbone]

Maybe off topic, but a look at the kid music scene in NYC. The garden was
packed with pre-teens to see/hear this show. (20,000 +). So take heart, all
is not rap out there among the young.

Maybe OKOM will figure out how to get to these kids someday?

Cheers,
Steve Barbone


Wages of Pop (the Little Girls Understand)

Fans at Madison Square Garden for the Jingle Ball on Friday tended to be
young. 

NY TIMES - By KELEFA SANNEH - December 18, 2006

It was Friday night, and it was time for the 2006 Jingle Ball, the annual
pop variety show presented by Z100 (100.3 FM), the Clear Channel property
that calls itself New York¹s No. 1 Hit Music Station. Madison Square Garden
was filled with screaming kids, stone-face parents and ‹ almost unnecessary,
but not quite ‹ performers whose excitement level was somewhere in between.

The good news about playing Jingle Ball: It means you¹re a pop star. The bad
news about playing Jingle Ball: This is what it means to be a pop star.

Or a midlevel pop star anyway. On Friday night many of the year¹s biggest
names ‹ Beyoncé, Justin Timberlake, Gwen Stefani, Nickelback ‹ were nowhere
to be seen. Instead the line-up included Rihanna, Evanescence, the Pussycat
Dolls, the Killers and Nelly Furtado. In this room Nick Lachey (a former
member both of the boy band 98 Degrees and, more important, of the Jessica
Simpson household) seemed like a big deal.

To some parents the whole affair must have seemed laughably rinky-dink, with
its breathless radio personalities and celebrities in training. (Like JoJo,
who will be 16 on Wednesday, doing a tame imitation of a fierce diva.) Have
pop stars really shrunk, along with their sales figures? Or do they just
seem smaller once you graduate from fan to chaperone?

In any case Mr. Lachey¹s five-song set earned louder screams than any other,
partly because he seemed truly happy to be there. He didn¹t pretend he had
somewhere better to be. (Perhaps because he didn¹t.) So he raised his
eyebrows and sank to his knees, singing power ballads about lost love to a
largely preteenage audience. Maybe young listeners take to relationship
songs in reverse order: first the break-up songs (because there¹s not too
much gushy stuff), then the love songs (because there¹s not too much icky
sex stuff), then the getting-together songs (because there¹s plenty of
both). Evanescence went to the other extreme. Amy Lee, the lead singer,
announced, ³We¹re going to do something completely different from everyone
else tonight ‹ and rock as hard as we can.² She did her part, bending over
and pumping her fist, and sometimes twirling while her band bashed out
pleasingly purple goth-rock hits like ³Going Under² and ³Call Me When You¹re
Sober.² (Sadly, during the Killer¹s uneven set, Brandon Flowers, the
famously combative lead singer, declined to interpret Ms. Lee¹s announcement
as a provocation.) 

Ms. Furtado brought out the producer Timbaland, which made sense; he helped
her reinvent herself as an eccentric electro-pop hitmaker. Near the end of
the summer smash ³Promiscuous² he conducted the band onstage, turning the
musicians on and off like a D.J. fiddling with a record.

Ms. Furtado¹s set felt like a headline performance (she sang three songs
then gave herself an encore, the only one of the night), but it wasn¹t. That
honor went to the co-ed Mexican sextet RBD, whose members quickly learned a
lesson about headlining the Jingle Ball: It means many more people hear your
first song than your last one.

Despite the success of ³Promiscuous,² Ms. Furtado wasn¹t the night¹s
top-selling act; her excellent 2006 album, ³Loose² (Geffen), is only now
working its way toward one million sold. Surely it means something that the
two Jingle Ball acts whose most recent albums have sold the most (so far)
were also the two most faceless.

The Fray, a purposefully inoffensive band from Denver, has moved more than
1.3 million copies of ³How to Save a Life² (Sony BMG), though band members
probably could have walked the Garden¹s aisles unmobbed. Then again the fans
on Friday night didn¹t spend much time looking at the guys onstage; they
were too busy singing along.

The Pussycat Dolls, on the other hand, are somehow famous without actually
being famous: everyone knows the brand, but who can identify the members?
(Exhaustive research shed a little light on the matter: one of them seems to
be named Nicole.) No matter: the debut Pussycat Dolls album has sold more
than 2.3 million copies. And if, during Friday¹s sometimes messy set, the
six Dolls ‹ or is it seven? five? ‹ seemed as if they were merely putting in
time at work, maybe it was because they already knew a lesson that some of
their counterparts were still learning: In 2006 this is what it means to be
a (not quite A list) pop star.