Fear and Paranoia on Radio Disney
Those are the words of Rob Gordon, Nick Hornby’s protagonist in his modern classic tale of arrested adolescence, High Fidelity. Rob continues,
“Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?”
If pop music is measured by its ability to tap into a prepubescent’s inner anguish, then Radio Disney has quietly snuck up on the culture to become the clear frontrunner for Voice of a Generation. Gone are the days when John Lennon or Kurt Cobain could utter a few hyperbolic Zen ramblings and the kids would listen. In the musical landscape of the 2000’s, one not only saturated by would-be Eddie Vedders, but also cowed by conservative watchdogs that would make Tipper Gore look like a Phish-following hippie, rebellion must be dished in small, easy-to-digest doses – dare I say subliminally.
This is where Radio Disney comes in.
Protected by a steely, unassailable curtain of white, blond, good-girl warblers no Senator would ever accuse of being a sex kitten, and whom would never wear Daisy Duke jeans, Radio Disney boasts a constant rotation of up to twenty breakaway pop hits, and the occasional faux-electronica, vaguely German, “hamster” funk. The money and teenage ears, however, are pointed directly at the glossed lips of about three girls: Hilary Duff, Kelly Clarkson, and Ashlee Simpson.
Ashlee Simpson, little sister to the constant runner-up who became a Juggernaut, Jessica, is arguably the wild card of the bunch. She possesses a flawed vulnerability that her Avril-style punk faÃ?¯Ã?¿Ã?½ade can never quite mask, and which the middle school brunette hanging out in the back of the blond pack at the movie theater can relate to on a level not understood by the hordes. The “loser” vote is a powerful one, and it has so far kept her within clawing distance of the other two powerhouses.
Her outcast status can sometimes catch up with her, though. After her Saturday Night Live fracas, in which her digitally programmed, pre-recorded performance upstaged her lip movement, forcing her into an awkward-yet-adorable panic hoedown, the popular majority seemed to have won an I-told-you-so victory. Or has it strengthened her rabid fan base of band geeks, lending a new, earned power to lyrics like “Tuesday I am fading/and the darkness is a clear view” off her hit single, “Pieces of You?” Time will tell shortly, as she releases a new album this month in hopes of persuading the musical youth that she is merely a misunderstood and persecuted dork in a sea of bullies, the same game plan that made Rivers Cuomo of Weezer an unexpected hero in the midst of the muscular grunge scene of the early 90’s.
No one ever expected American Idol to yield anything resembling a superstar, and yet here comes Kelly Clarkson, bursting onto the scene like the country girl that gets a modern makeover in the John Hughes films of the 80’s. Not only is Clarkson fanatically admired amongst the Radio Disney crowd, she is widely accepted as the current pop queen on the mainstream Top 40 scene, knocking Avril Lavigne and Michelle Branch back to 2001. Yet despite her waitress-done-good story, and squeaky-clean rep, Clarkson suspiciously belts some of the most angst-ridden darkness this side of Audioslave. Consider her current unstoppable force of nature, “Behind These Hazel Eyes.” Backed by heavily layered guitars and a spooky choir of background singers, she roars a scorned-woman lament over being left by the man she thought was her soul mate. Clarkson gets raw and emotionally naked, employing dramatic, Milton-esque descriptions of her self-loathing:
Here I am, once again
I’m torn into pieces
Swallow me, then spit me out
For hating you, I blame myself.
There was another hitmaker, around twelve years ago, who spoke to his young, shoe-gazing fans in similar metaphor:
She eyes me like a Pisces when I am weak
I’ve been locked inside your heart-shaped box
for weeks.
Think I’m exaggerating? Clarkson, at press time, has three singles in the Top 40, one of which has been hanging around for nearly a year. There is simply no young star that can approach the apparent staying power of Kelly Clarkson.
Except at Radio Disney, where a princess named Hilary refuses to relinquish her crown.
Hilary Duff is so protective of her place, such a dominating force in the teen pop world, she has squeezed out more competition than her smiling parents at MickeyTown.
First came poor Lindsey Lohan. Lohan, following the exact footsteps of Duff, transitioning from Nickelodeon to film to Girl Pop, traded blows with Duff for nearly two years, often at absurd levels. When the aforementioned Simpson sister experienced an outing of her own, Lohan saw the opportunity to move ahead of Duff by performing completely live (!) on the Ellen Degeneres Show. Lohan crashed and burned, and Duff figured she would be safely hosting Main Street parades until her first child. She couldn’t rest on her laurels for long, because along came Clarkson, the Beyonce of sanitized pop.
Since Clarkson, Duff has seemingly gone off the deep end, hooking up with the much-older lead singer of “punk” band Good Charlotte, picking fights in magazines with Clarkson, and now attempting to top Clarkson in the Twisted Anthem category, trading in her twinkling tunes of puppy love for torturous arena-rock Grrrl Pop/Punk.
The thing is, it has worked. Like gangbusters.
When she started releasing albums, the formula was simple. Take an Avril Lavigne song and make it better. Well, sweeter at the very least. Turn that cynicism upside-down and watch the money pour in. As the Lohan pressure increased, Duff went ever so slightly in a darker direction with her 2003 album Metamorphosis. In tunes like “So Yesterday,” Duff flirted with a phrase commonly used to insult a teen girl’s wardrobe and turned it on its ear, suggesting the girl being picked on wake up the next morning and brush it off. It’s “So Yesterday.” Not exactly Alanis, but it inspired the kids.
By last year, Duff released a self-titled album, a gimmick usually reserved for a debut, and started reaching for the Kelly vote:
Fly
Open up the part of you that wants to
Hide Away
The wordplay was coying, but direct. Duff was sending out feelers to see if any of her Nick Kids were feeling this emptiness as well. When Clarkson answered the question for her, and loudly, Duff seemed to turn her barely-there anxiety inside herself, allowing it to fester and morph into a dangerous, yet admittedly fascinating, paranoia.
In her 2005 new addition to her greatest hits (!!) release, Most Wanted, “Wake Up” exposed an entirely new Duff: jealous, shifty, and outraged to the point of inexplicabilityâÂ?¦
The city’s restless, it’s all around me
People in motion, sick of all the same routines
People all around you, they don’t really know you.
Witnessing the rise of Clarkson and the descent into madness of Hilary Duff has not damaged the stranglehold of Radio Disney a bit. In fact, the station has never been more popular, currently in podcast as well as satellite FM, displaying the kind of sales boom not seen since the East Coast/West Coast rap wars of the mid-90’s. Dysfunction sells no matter the genre or time period, as neu-metal proved in the late 90’s, as grunge proved before it, and hair metal proved even before that. There is simply no stopping the tidal wave of disaffected youth. As hard as government pushes to cleanse the consumer market of anything controversial, the skeletons slip into the closet somehow. They must, or else we see the kind of burnout that brought us disco in the 70’s or the Gin Blossoms in the 90’s.
In short, Radio Disney is broadcasting the voice of the modern-day unhappy teen to keep the music scene from imploding, but the Mouse House’s greatest trick is making everyone believe it already has.
