Month: January 2006

Pop Music Divas

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Pop music is the perenial sewer of bad taste, cliche lyrics, and in today’s music world really bad songs. This editorial might seem a tad offensive, but it is suppose to be, a bit offensive I mean. My tirade of the week, has been Kelly Clarkson’s song: Behind These Hazel Eyes. Take it for what it’s worth, but Clarkson won the American Idol competition and the song that Christinia Aguilera wrote for her on the first album was pretty cool. Miss Independent, really is a good song. It’s not great, but it is everything good pop music is suppose to be, a good beat with some silly lyrics that make you feel good when you are thirteen (or totally depressed at 32). Since U Been Gone hit the same mark for Clarkson, it is a fun song and you might even call it a remake of Miss Independent, but the song that radio is killing (I mean playing) is Behind These Hazel Eyes. There is something which Clarkson seems to lack as an artist and that is depth. It’s hard to really explain, but if you listen to Whitney Houston (before she became all crackish) or even Mariah Carey, who is a talented singer despite her crappy songs, you can hear a lot depth. You believe the stupid lyrics, you breathe in the moment sort of speak when they sing. A good singer does this. Right now Clarkson is still not there and her music lacks depth because of it. She may hit the high notes on her music, but she just does not sound believable to me. Perhaps it’s that I don’t really hear the emotion in her songs and I really can’t believe she’s really hurt by love or whatever, but emotion is what sells pop music and so Clarkson’s music is mostly a bad product.

Which brings me to the rest of the pop music world, which is littered with even less talent and emotional depth, that’s right I’m talking about you Hillary Duff, Lindsay Lohan, Ashlee Simpson! This is what happens when music is forced, overly produced, and mass marketed for no other reason than to sell and make money. But one can’t really blame Hillary, Lindsay, or Ashlee, cause they are not the ones who originated it. Nope, I’m talking about you J-Lo! What made you think you could even sing? And for us latin people, what ever possessed you to sing in Spanish? A far worse crime! Britney Spears and J-Lo have great beats, but the talent is not there. They can’t sing. Britney is better than J-Lo at it, but I have no idea why people compare Britney to Madonna. Madonna has class, she has smarts, and most of all she has good taste and a good read on what people will like. Madonna may overly produce her music, but it is always good and interesting, even if you may not like it, you can still appreciate it.

But even in this mire of bad music and pre-packaged bad taste, you have to give it up to Gwen Stefani as being one of the few pop artists that can not only sing with the likes of Donna Summer, but also do the whole hip-hop thing without sounding too wanna-be (a.k.a. Mariah Carey). Stefani is the cool rock-chick. I don’t even like Hollerback Girl, but I still end up grooving the beat and listening to the lyrics.

White People Are The New Black People

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Think about that for a minute. Now go and watch some cable tv. With the exception of BET, UPN, and a rare freak occurrence of a Black character on one of the network reality shows, television is predominantly white! Go ahead and turn on one of the 24 hours news shows, and here again, pretty much everyone is white. Let’s face the truth white is in. Maybe in the post Eminem era, white people really can do everything!

On closer inspection, you even have super white steretypes now. Paris Hilton being the gold standard of the spoiled-rotten rich white girl, that all the others like Nicole Richtie, Lindsay Lohan, Hillary Duff, Jessica Simpson, etc… must compare themselves to. Then there’s that white comedian, Larry The Cable Guy. Everyone in America knows his signature phrase, “Get’r Dun”. Last year the NBA even promoted its white looking atheletes like Steve Nash on the Phoenix Suns. White is the new black, and it is proving very popular. The news channels just can’t get enough stories of white women missing, either cause they were kidnapped or at least managed to fake it. White is the new New Hip Hop. Fifty-cent you might be white after all!

Speak To Your Audience

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Every now and then I write a post and have my friend over at Coffeebear.net review it. His comments most of the time end up being that I missed something or did not include extra information, and then of course there are the “you are totally freaking wrong!” comments, but by and large I have the same conversation with Manzabar, which is that when you write something, you should not write to impress people who know more than you, but to help your intended audience. I am a big believer in that anyone can do anything they want if they put some effort into it. I’m not saying you can conquer the world with your skills, cause definitely not having skills is going to make your results a tad unsuccessful, but the point is not that you are the greatest, but that you did it. Failure is part of life, and just because you failed at what you tried does not mean your efforts were not worthwhile. In my life time I have tried many things, like playing guitar, learning to play basketball at 32, cooking chicken marsala, etc…, and even though I know what I am good at, I still try different things, cause boredom is after all the greatest of all evils. This leads me to the point of this rant, which is that people make things a lot harder than they really are. At the bookstore you will find hundreds of new books on how to do something, but my personal favorites are all the technical books written about how to use Windows, Linux, how to make a web page, how to do everything. Did not all these things already include documentation? If I remember correctly, every piece of software I have used had some documentation, most have manuals, yet when you open these up and take a look at them, they are not in English! They are written in some weird technical jargon that you need to understand before you even can know what the author is trying to say. This is why I love using Macs, and Apple’s documentation while being short and very uninformative for most technical people, it is exactly what regular people can understand. In other words, Apple really does write their documentation for its customers and not for programmers or computer people. This is the reason why some geeks hated Macs and exactly the reason why I think Apple has such dedicated users.

But this does not apply just to computers, but to everything.  I hear people all the time talking above their knowledge, trying to impress me and convince me of their argument. Sometimes these people are what I call Pseudo Intellectuals, people who are not really intellectual, but just want to appear like they are. These people bore me to the point that I discard automatically 99% of what they say. However the ones that I truly have no patience for are religious advocates, people who quote The Bible to you as if they actually understood it, and all the time, I keep thinking that religion is like water. It can be clear and good for you, or dirty and contaminated, but regardless it is always free, unless someone bottles it and calls it something else. Religion is something you try to sell people, spirituality is something you choose for yourself.

Today I came upon this blog which talked about how business people talk like idiots, which they certainly do at times, but it is exactly what I was thinking about when it comes to writing:

When we’ve seen authors we work with fall into a trap, it’s almost always out of fear or the inability to imagine another way (the just-do-what-everyone-else-does syndrome). The fear is about imagining what reviewers and readers will do if the author doesn’t cover every possible base and be as technically complete as humanly possible. They imagine that if they try to simplify things, someone will think they aren’t expert enough.

You’re worrying about the wrong people! The people most likely to criticize you for lack of completeness aren’t your target audience anyway. The only people who matter are your intended readers. So it gets back to the other points I’ve been making in the bestseller posts — are you writing for how you’ll be perceived or are you writing to enhance the reader’s life? The answer changes the content.
Get you out of the way, and chances are your readability will go WAY up. (Unless you’re already a good writer. But for the rest of us, like me, this doesn’t come naturally.)

Essentially you have to write not for yourself or your critics, but for your audience. This is what makes your writing effective and successful.