Hollywood
Pop, 2004
I really want to win that brand new entertainment system but I guess I should have known things are too easy when I actually get through the radio station. Usually radio stations hold contests where you have to be tenth caller or something like that in order to participate in some easy quiz and win something. This time, I just get through and that’s it. I’ve won something. What have I won? A CD called Beautiful Soul by Jesse McCartney.
That name sounds familiar, I think, as I open the envelope in which the CD is wrapped in. Then I shriek in horror when I realize that Jesse McCartney is that Jesse McCartney, that hideous pedophile-bait Aaron Carter lookalike from that show Summerland. He was in some stupid boyband called Dreambeat or something, but he thinks that he can go solo now that he has lured enough preteen girls and pedophiles into his fan club.
First thing I notice as I play the CD out of curiosity is that this CD has an antiquated sound. It reminds me of those horribly corny, embarrassing fluff tunes of New Kids on the Block that can only appeal to preteen girls, the only group of people who can find such cloyingly vapid asexual “love songs” palatable. In a time when pin-up male stars like Usher go moody (oh, Usher is so sad, he must rip off his shirt while standing before a mirror and caress himself – how sad) because they are singing about cheating on their seventeen girlfriends and now that they are caught by this girlfriend, they want their girlfriend to forgive them, boo-hoo-hoo, McCartney is singing about how he finds his nine-year old girlfriend a “beautiful soul”. All the while, of course, he is singing in a voice that brings to my mind a chunk of cheese being put through a grater. If that cheese can squeal in agony, it will sound just like Jesse McCartney as he pouts and whines about Why Is Love So Hard to Find? in his reedy-thin voice.
In fact, the people behind the tracks on this CD are the same people behind the cheesiest moments of the Backstreet Boys. There are some contributions from the folks behind the music of Bon Jovi, the cheesiest faux-rock group of the 1980s, to top off the grotesque cheesiness of the CD.
In a way, I do feel quite sorry for this kid. At 17, he must be thinking that he is going to be a star. He is going to sleep with a million hot women with big boobs and get high until the cows come home. But he here is, having to pretend that he is just a blond little mannequin who just wants to hold the hands of ten-year old girls whose conversation ability extents to as far as “You are so hot!” while their mothers beam and look on. Meanwhile, he has to run about shirtless in a supposedly innocent scene in a music video that is actually designed with the more cynical intention of drawing a following of fans either from the male prison block or from pedophiles downloading images of him from some Geocities fan site created by a thirteen-year old fan. What kind of life is that, really?
Still, that does not in any way excuse the existence of this CD. That kid can’t sing, has no star charisma, and there is no way he is going to be as big as Justin Timberlake, not when Jesse McCartney has so little to deliver. Once the ten-year old girls grow up and move on to a more PG-13 rated teen centerfold, our poor little Ken doll here is going to have to start looking for a more mundane job like the rest of us mere mortals.
