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Words » In Tune

Attack of the cute singers

Have you noticed that every time you turn on the TV, someone is jumping out at you saying, "Be young! Be happy! Happy Girl! Happy Boy!" Baby pop fever is invading Taiwan in a big way, and for us producer types, we're scrambling for the diapers. Suddenly we're forced to think of everything on the level of a six-year-old. "Should we include the Hello Kitty coin purse with the CD? Let's repeat "Happy Happy Happy" a zillion times so that even my dog can sing it. Maybe we need to make the cover pink and yellow with plastic flowers."

Don't get me wrong, I like kids, but what we're dealing with here are not little kids, but rather a whole industry obsessed with getting little Johnny to bust open his piggy bank. This has really changed the way we make music, and it’s hard to adjust to the change. It used to be that we only had to sell good songs. We would find a good song, an artist would get up on stage and sing it, and everyone would say "Hey that's a nice song, I think I’ll go out and buy the record."

Then gradually we started focusing on the person, and music became more of a by-product. This led us into the glorious era of bimbo idol singers. Who cares about singing, if you had the right look, you could sell records. Our production meetings were mostly about hair styling, makeup, clothing design, dieting, and if we really had to, we would sometimes talk about the music.

So just when we thought we had that it all figured out, and could crank out idol singers like Big Macs, we get hit over the head with this "Happy Girl! Happy Boy!" stuff. Now everything is about cute. If it ain’t cute it doesn’t sell.

When an artist gets on stage these days, she’s wearing a pink plastic dress with light green go-go boots, and sings into her yellow flower microphone, “I’m a Happy Girl in a Happy World. I love my kitty. She’s so pretty, ” and the audience of six year olds pull on their moms arm in unison and say, “Looky, Looky, It’s Happy Girl!” Then mommy goes out and plunks down $450 for the record, which comes packaged with a fuzzy pink Happy Girl key chain and a sheet of Happy Girl Happy Stickers.

It’s all so cute, but it's not pretty.

"Cute cute cute, it's got to be cute!" I found myself yelling at my lyricist the other day. "Can't you do cute?" She looked at me in desperation. "Listen, I can do silly, I can do smart, I can do sensitive, stylish, sexy, sad, serendipitous, and sultry, but I don't do CUTE!!" She slammed the door and walked out.

So I called in another lyricist who had several decent hits in the past few years. "Hey I got this song I just wrote for "Bubble Pinky" that new girl duo. Think you can whip up some lyrics for me? It's got to be cute!"
“Give me an hour, I’ll come up with something,” she said. So I faxed over the music, and sat around fiddled around with my Happy Girl pencil sharpener waiting for her to deliver something cute.

An hour later the fax came back:

I was walking down the street with my little doggy
We stopped to get some ice cream, and it began to get foggy
I didn’t know what to do, I was feeling scared

Then a big monster, he popped up after me
He was all green, and acted so mean
I didn’t know what to do, I was feeling scared

There’s a monster, there’s a monster, there’s a monster, chasing me
There’s a monster, there’s a monster, there’s a monster, laughing at me
What am I going to do? Oh I feel so scared….
(repeat chorus 500 times)

I called her right back. “What is this? You’ve got to be kidding. You don’t mean to tell me that this unbelievable garbage will sell?”

“Trust me, I know,” she said, “I just had my six year old write it for me.”

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