"Perhaps the reason the Dolls have been so misunderstood is that they don't play to an existing audience; it's an audience that has yet to reveal itself. More than simply latching onto an audience, the next phenomenon will be that which creates its audience. The Dolls have very little choice: they either create that audience or they have none at all. They don't really belong to anything else." (Ben Edmonds, "The New York Dolls' Greatest Hits Volume 1," Creem, October 1973.)

Here is something I wrote to John Wójtowicz last year while working on my Marit Larsen review. Obviously, I'm identifying hard with teenpop in that just as I don't see a path for the teenpop girls into the future, I don't see a path for myself either - which isn't to say that there's no future for me, or for them, but my path isn't given, my way isn't clear, so we're going to have to invent one.

Current "teenpop" - or the strain within it that most currently is capturing my attention, the part I'll call "rock confessional" - is actually without precedent, kids in their teens and early twenties working with a handful of music pros in their mid thirties, but the kids all included in the songwriting credits and creating (with the aid of those veteran pros) songs that are smarter and more emotionally complex than most of what you're getting from real grownup pop and rock performers (including the grownup pop and rock performers that the veteran pros also work with). But what this means is that these girls have no good models for how to expand and deepen their music as they grow into their twenties, and no preset market or genre to inhabit once they do, unless they create it for themselves. Well, no good models is my opinion. The girls probably all want to be Alanis, not realizing that they're already better. Kelly Clarkson's commercial success is heartening, as she's managed to do her agony and angst without shedding the sugar pop, at least as of last year. But Ashlee, who's the best of the lot, is now only getting middling sales and poor airplay and is probably reliant on the tweeny-market that she'll shortly be losing. Maybe there's a way for Ashlee and the others to carry on with their pop craftsmanship and exuberance yet do Alanis and Fiona and KT Tunstall and Tash Bedingfield and Courtney Love and Craig Finn and Conor Oberst, but without Alanis et al.'s bullshit and obfuscation.

Hmmm, don't know why I didn't tell John the truth, which is that I'm hearing in Ashlee the potential to do Jagger or Dylan 1965 but take it somewhere else, since she's basically a "nice girl," which means for better or worse she won't be tied to the alienation of a counterculture, so maybe she'll grow where Dylan and Jagger stopped dead. These are sketchy thoughts on my part, and I don't know how much to credit to Ashlee as opposed to Shanks and DioGuardi et al., except none of what S & D have done with anyone else shows this promise, so I might as well credit Ashlee. Someone's got to. "Ashlee" is an amazing creation anyway, no matter how many hands are involved.

But it's our own self-creation that's at issue, meaning the people who actually might read this, and the people like them. The journalism model for rock criticism is broken and can't be fixed, but no paying alternative has emerged. So we've got a rock press that refuses to allow its writers to be heroes, and an Interweb where most writers refuse to be the hero, refuse to think through their thoughts, because they're content to imagine that the real conversation is happening elsewhere, in academia or in the legitimate press. So the conversation I began so long ago is barely sputtering. We have to figure out how to finance this thing, we have to figure out how to do this thing, this mad anthropology of mine. No one's going to do it for us.