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Kim Voynar

By Kim Voynar Voynar@moviecitynews.com

Posted Thursday, July 16th, 2009 - Comments Off on Girl Power
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Girl Power

kim_and_meg.jpgMy oldest daughter Meg scored some free tickets to the Demi Lovato concert the other night, so I grudgingly went along with her so we could take her two younger sisters to the show. I don’t recall, back when I was a preteen or young teen myself, there being much in the way of musical acts for kids our age. When I was 9-12 I was spending most of my time riding my horse or reading books; even when I got a little older, the music my friends and I listened to on our spiffy portable radios (complete with cassette deck!) while we were sunbathing ourselves into early skin cancer and wrinkles was your basic Top 40 fare: Journey, Michael Jackson, Billy Squier, early Madonna, Duran Duran. These days, though, it seems there’s more and more kids singing on the radio just for kids, thanks largely to Disney and its Radio Disney enterprise.
The show opened with another Disney property, all-girl band KSM, whose cover of Cheap Trick’s “I Want You to Want Me” is all over Radio Disney these days. I was fully prepared to roll my eyes over this one, but I have to say, Meg and I were both duly impressed by these girls. The lead singer has a powerful voice, and all the girls play their own instruments, and do so quite well — in fact, they were so good that Meg and I were speculating that they must be older girls, in their early 20s perhaps, who happen to look really young. So I did a little research and, surprisingly, they really are teenagers. Huh.


The backstory (according to their official page) is that the band was formed when the original Go-Gos decided to mentor a new all-girl band, and these girls are really playing and singing live on stage (according to their website, they want to write their own material, too). They had fantastic stage presence — the lead singer, 15-year-old Shelby Cobra (cool name) quickly warmed the crowd up, and after the first song the girls in the floor seats were on their feet enthusiastically supporting the band’s entire set. I thought it was pretty cool for my girls to see that teenage girls can get up on stage and rock out like that. My guitar-playing 12-year-old seemed to like them quite a lot.
Next up was the season seven runner-up on American Idol, David Archuleta. The 18-year-old had the girlies in the audience squealing in delight every time he flashed his smile at them — if he’d been around when I was 14, I would have been one of them, because he’s pretty darn adorable. He can sing, too — we enjoyed his part of the show
quite a lot, and judging by the girls around us, the rest of the crowd liked him, too.
lovato_crowd.jpg
After all that, my girls were psyched to see the headliner, Disney princess Demi Lovato, who starred in Camp Rock and also has a show, Sonny with a Chance, that just got renewed for its second season. Lovato’s a hot Disney property right now, with her second album coming out next week, and she certainly has an abundance of charm and personality that comes through on stage, but musically … meh. Her stage presence is good, though perhaps not quite as commanding as Miley Cyrus or the Jonas boys, but her songs, even for pop music aimed strictly at the pre-teen set, weren’t great. Her voice isn’t as good as Miley Cyrus or the lead singer of KSM, either, although to be fair, she’s been on tour and maybe her voice is just worn out right now.
She does a thing where she pulls a few girls up on stage to sing one of her better-known songs with her, and that was kind of cute — the little girls who got to go up there were thrilled, anyhow. And I do have to give Lovato credit for playing both piano and guitar, and for being very charming, thanking her fans repeatedly for their support, and having a great smile. But overall, we were much more impressed by KSM when it came to seeing girls rocking out on stage, and we ended up slipping out of Demi Lovato’s part early to beat the parking lot rush, so we could get home in time for the 12-year-old to make it to the midnight screening of Harry Potter with her dad. Neither of the younger girls seemed to mind skipping the end of Lovato’s set, so I guess either they’d just had enough music for the night, or weren’t really that into it.
The best part of the night, though? Checking out the other adults who’d been dragged to the show as chaperones for packs of pre-teen girls — especially the mom wearing the Demi Lovato t-shirt and glow necklace who danced and sang along with most of the show. I think she had a better time than the dad across the aisle from us who sat down, put in earplugs, and proceeded to Blackberry his way through the entire show without looking up once. Rock on, sir. Rock on.

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

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I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

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~ Hampton Fancher

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~ David Simon