SamboraBlog

Critic's Notebook

It's Pop Goes the Rocker Again, This Time a Longhaired Alumnus of 'American Idol'

By KELEFA SANNEH
Published: December 15, 2005
Rock stars and pop stars are always colliding, but this year you could barely even tell them apart.

Kelly Clarkson, the original American Idol, worked with a team of pop super-producers to create a series of chart-smashing rock songs, most notably the sublime "Since U Been Gone." (The songs came from her second album, "Breakway," released late last year.) The twins from the pop-punk band Good Charlotte teamed with a friend to form a production company, Dead Executives, and helped Hilary Duff score one of her biggest hits, an excellent teen-rock song called "Wake Up." Meanwhile, Rob Thomas, from Matchbox Twenty, tried to turn himself into a pop star with his solo debut. The tidy new-wave band the Killers wooed many of the same young fans who love Ms. Clarkson. And some of the year's best teen-pop anthems came from clean-scrubbed emo bands like Fall Out Boy.

In an earlier era, rock stars and their fans might have sneered at all this cross-pollination. But now fresh-faced actresses and fresh-faced punk rock bands are battling for the same slot on MTV's "TRL" - and maybe, while they're at it, battling for the services of the same stylists. So it's hard for either camp to accuse the other of trespassing. That's why the current collision is so much fun to watch, and to hear: everyone's a wannabe.

All of which makes Bo Bice pretty much inevitable. Sooner or later, "American Idol" was bound to give us a long-haired, soul-patched, hippie-shirt-wearing singer, eager to differentiate himself from previous Idols. The rest you can probably guess. He spent years recording with obscure local bands (Purge and, more recently, Sugar Money; you can hear them both on garageband.com). He gives interviews oozing rock 'n' roll sincerity. He has sung "Free Bird" on network television - and a song from "Pippin." He lost (to the country-pop singer Carrie Underwood), but by the time you're in the "Idol" finale, it scarcely matters whether you win.

Mr. Bice's debut album, "The Real Thing" (RCA/Sony BMG), was released on Tuesday, and suffice it to say that Bo Bice is no Kelly Clarkson, at least not yet. This album, short and occasionally unpleasant, consists of 40 minutes of slick but earnest love songs. Rock 'n' roll ringers like Chad Kroeger (the guy from Nickelback) and Jon Bon Jovi appear in the songwriting credits. So, too, do full-time hitmakers like Max Martin, the Swede who helped invent the sound of late-90's teen-pop, and Kara DioGuardi, who has quietly become one of America's leading pop songwriters-for-hire.

You won't be surprised to learn that Mr. Bice has taken pains to portray himself as a breath of fresh air. "I'm not a pop person," he told one interviewer, the same way a senator might claim not to be a Washington insider. What's more surprising is how little anxiety he seems to feel about going pop. In praising Mr. Martin, the ultimate pop person, he has gone beyond the call of duty. "Max and I are kindred spirits," he said. "We got each other right away."

On this CD, which was rushed into stores just in time for the Christmas shopping season, the songwriting is split pretty evenly between pop professionals and rock veterans. (Mr. Bice gets a partial songwriting credit on two tracks, both tucked near the end.) In fact, the album offers yet more proof that the old questions of rock 'n' roll credibility have been inverted. No aspiring rock star - certainly none working with Clive Davis, who produced the album - would dare call Mr. Martin a lightweight, especially after "Since U Been Gone." He excels at making hits. Exactly what does Mr. Kroeger, that Nickelback guy, excel at, again?

For starters, Mr. Kroeger excels at sounding like himself. His contribution to the album, "You're Everything," is instantly recognizable as a Nickelback song, right down to the characteristically inelegant lyrics. "Let you beat me black and blue/ Spray paint your name on the moon/ God, I'd do anything," Mr. Bice sings, and you wonder if he's going to go on listing difficult and/or unpleasant tasks forever.

Rock stars, more than behind-the-scenes songwriters, are expected to write music full of oversize gestures and potentially embarrassing lyrics; they're supposed to write songs that couldn't possibly have been written by anyone else. And so when Mr. Bice sings "Nothing Without You," written by Mr. Bon Jovi, Richie Sambora and John Shanks, it's not hard to hear it as a potential Bon Jovi song, especially when the guitars come crashing to a halt right before the chorus.

By contrast, the songs from pop professionals are a bit more elusive, a bit harder to trace, evoking everything from Avril Lavigne to Temple of the Dog. And the two songs written and produced by Mr. Martin (with his partner, Lukasz Gottwald) help demonstrate the strange things that can happen when a team of pop professionals gets to work on a rock 'n' roll song. If you're expecting these confections to be the blandest, you've got it precisely backward: if anything, Mr. Martin's songs are louder and weirder than the ones by his rock 'n' roll counterparts.

One of them, "Lie ... It's Alright," has a drum-machine beat, a nervous guitar line, a super-sweet refrain and a spoken-word interlude - all of that within the first minute. The other, "U Make Me Better," which was also written with Jill Latiano, opens with a snarling (but sparkling) guitar line, then transforms into the kind of upbeat power ballad that's built especially for car radios. "Please don't tell me it's the ending/ You're all I ever wanted from the beginning," Mr. Bice sings, and you can almost imagine the spotless Swedish workstation where the chorus was engineered. Who needs a band when you have a laboratory like that?