(This post was originally written for my arts and culture blog on Salon, Buzzkiller. All postings from that blog will also be reposted here.)

Today, the NYTimes, my go-to source for rant-inspiring material, ran an article entitled “Country’s New Face: It’s Young and Blonde”. Hearkening back to sometime in the early 18^th century, the piece expresses surprise that a female country musician might have gotten her start on the mysterious new interweb. Ignoring the fact that country’s new face sounds a lot like its old face (were not Tammy Wynette, Dolly Parton, and Tanya Tucker once every bit as young and blonde as Taylor Swift, Carrie Underwood, and LeAnn Rimes)?), the article found another way to piss me off. Allow me to quote at length:

“In a video posted to YouTube in January 2008, Veronica Ballestrini — then 16, blond, precocious — sits on a wrinkled couch wearing a pink Abercrombie & Fitch zip-up hoodie and clutching a guitar…

…A year and a half later, all the screen time has begun to pay off. Last spring [Ballestrini] recorded a proper video for “Amazing,” a single of her own, and uploaded it. After a couple of weeks it was picked up by CMT.com, the digital arm of Country Music Television, and shown on CMT Pure Country, the network’s all-video digital channel.

A young female country singer savvily using online media to construct a career built on largely self-written songs about teenage experiences? The Taylor Swift Playbook is making the rounds.”

Why does this piss me off so much? Because this article, like so many describing the amazing promotional power of the internet, ignores the fact that the vast majority of musicians who have managed to transmute online fame into tangible success in the real world have been attractive young females. In other words, it is the male tendency to click on every image of a sexy teenager, whether the underlying link is hawking emoticons or offering the opportunity to reconnect with that slutty redhead from high school, that has made these women famous. How revolutionary.

The evidence is overwhelming. There’s Julia Nunes, the babyish blonde ukelele sensation who parlayed her YouTube videos into an opening slot on Ben Folds’ 2008 tour. Or what about Lily Allen, the multi-platinum singer/songwriter who become a poster child for MySpace (even though she was already signed to a record label when she started posting videos there). Then there’s Lily Allen redux, Kate Nash, the more talented (and less born into fame) of the two, who also credits MySpace with her success. Most egregious are YouTube’s five breakout musicians of 2008— Marié Digby (currently signed to Disney’s Hollywood Records), Mia Rose (Cherry Entertainment), Dondria Nicole (Jermaine Dupri’s So So Def/Island Urban), Esmée Denters (Justin Timberlake’s label, Tenman Records), and Lisa Lavie (who has chosen to release her albums independently).

Each of these five women, as well as another few dozen I’m too demoralised to list, started out singing covers of pop songs on YouTube, either while accompanying herself on a guitar strummed with a coma-inducing rhythmic regularity, or else a capella, utilizing her free hand as a baton with which to conduct her Fantasy-era-Mariah-Carey-style coloratura. Then some record exec found himself carrying underwood (file under: jokes that never get old) while watching her video, and made a call. Consider Mia Rose, who is an absolutely gorgeous Portuguese girl and shares her name with a prominent porn star. Both of these facts go further to explain her YouTube channel’s 204,000 subscribers than her voice, which is seldom even in key. Esmée Denters’ medley of Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” and Aretha Franklin’s “Respect”, performed during her opening for Timberlake in London, is truly painful. Try not to cringe when the back-up singers arrive and pretend to rock out to this skinny white girl’s half-assed attempts to dance.

I realize this may sound like over the top rage, but there is so much talent out there on the web, it hurts to see all the attention go to cute eighteen year-old girls singing covers. Just to prove I know how to be positive, here’s an example of a musician I love, Jack Conte. He’s using the medium of YouTube not just to put himself out there, but to produce interesting original music and creative videos. He has 1/200^th the fanbase that Esmée has, and 500 times the talent. But that’s how the web goes. My advice to Jack? I think it’s time to consider a dye job. And a sex change.

Though I wrote “Room In Your Heart” especially to sing with Ema (whom you can hear on the EP), there was never any target for the sentiment of the song. It’s one of very few love songs I’ve written without anyone in mind. It makes me wonder how many songs that we assume are written from this really personal, emotional place, are actually just bits of theater—characters that the singer is taking on for the duration of the song.

Then again, I think all love songs are about the people we’ve loved, even if we’re not singing about them directly. When I sing along to my personal favorite love songs by other musicians, I’m always picturing someone in my mind, even though I know the song was written for someone I’ve never met. Here are ten love songs (in no particular order) that have gotten me through rough times:

1) “Dinner at Eight” by Rufus Wainwright (actually about his father, but still counts)

2) “The Light in the Piazza by Adam Guettel (from The Light in the Piazza, the musical)

3) “Love Ridden” by Fiona Apple

4) “Red Right Ankle” by The Decemberists

5) “Waltz #2″ by Elliott Smith

6) “Sea of Love” by Tom Waits/Cat Power

7) “Love Is Like A Bottle Of Gin” by The Magnetic Fields

8)”In The Aeroplane Over The Sea” by Neutral Milk Hotel

9) “The I Love You Song” by William Finn (From The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee)

10) “There, There” by Radiohead

Anyone else have what it takes to create a top ten best love songs? I’ll make it easier: Top five. One person who gives me a list will win a free copy of my EP. Try listening to it while in love!

-tommy

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“A W H O L E
N E W W O R L D ”
F R O M A L A D D I N .

BY TOMMY WALLACH

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The day the Aladdin soundtrack came out I was one of the first kids on line. Beyond the fact that Jasmine is the hottest cartoon character short of Jessica Rabbit, my favorite part of the movie was the music. When I watched it, I was forced to silence two well-meaning but over-exuberant twelve years old who had somehow already managed to have memorized all of the music by the three o’ clock show on opening day; displaying my most withering glare and all the authority I was capable of mustering, being twelve myself, I shut them down.

These were the days when Disney still let the music ride over the plot and character. When, like in the Fosse musicals of yore, the only real point of the plot was to facilitate the transition from one fantastic showstopper to another. Ironic then that Aladdin is one of only two of the quadrumvirate of modern Disney movies (The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King) that has not been placed on the big stage. Maybe it was the technical nightmare of the magic carpet, or fitting Robin William’s ego into a giant blue hot-air balloon.

Read on…

I’m putting this welcome, best-of-tommywallach.com post up here at the top of the page, where it will live forever, so that I can keep all the other posts beneath it live. Here are links to some of the more interesting posts on this page, to get you started in the magical world of me:

The announcement for my Decca Records/Gather.com contest win, which got me signed to Decca

A review of my Decca EP in Newsday

My piece for The Huffington Post

The first piece I had published in McSweeney’s

One of my weekly webcasts, which have been featured on the front page of YouTube

One of the book reviews I write for Public Radio International’s World Books blog, in this case, of John Ajvide Lindqvist’s “Let The Right One In”

A Feature Article I wrote for ReadyMade Magazine about a little island off the coast of Alaska dealing with climate change

My first byline in Wired, and my first byline in Salon

An article about my awesome mom