Corporate tot exploitation is as heinous a concept as going to Prince Minsky’s birthday party and expecting nothing more than cake and ice cream. Phenomena such as the Bay City Rollers, Leif Garrett, and to a certain degree Shaun Cassidy are nothing more than cool, calculated exercises in corporate management. Give it the right marketing, the right hype, the right amount of money and you could make people think a cute teenage boy with long, blond hair farting into an echo chamber is the latest rage, the latest hipness, the latest super-talent to hit the pipeline in a curl of sweaty, steamy hot pre-pubes...I mean whatever happened to learning about sex on the street where it meant sumthin’, who needs companies to give the teenhoodery of this nation objets de sex, give ’em a chance to get into each other instead of a plasticized edition of some lobotomized ideal teen. Rage. Rage. Rage.
I was interviewing one of the current teen dreams, can’t mention his name or I’ll get sued, and kept getting amazed at the condescension he felt for the hordes of teenage girls who were outside tearing apart a record store because he couldn’t make his way out. From the crowd of employees of the store came a question, an ace of a question for the circumstances, “Hey,...what ya think about with all those little girls screaming at ya?” And the performer replied, “All I think about is having ’em all sucking my cock.” Now that’s the kind of monster that’s sending teenage girls to bed in tears of suppressed sexual rage.
So what’s this to do with Rosetta Stone? Easy, an offshoot of the Bay City Rollers, these inepts couldn’t make pop music if they wanted to; they play pablum with as much interest and excitement as making sex with a pillsbury doughboy--without oil. Yet without any doubt this is a group that’ll be riding to the top very soon. They are a programmed success, guaranteed to return the investment, and maybe some think that’s rock’n’roll but I don’t have to like it. As a matter of fact nobody has to like it, except maybe those poor unfortunates who are force-fed it until that’s all they think about.
Whatever happened to the harbingers of tot power, the Partridge Families, the DeFrancos, the Cowsills, and even the Bantams? What happened to the people who cared about the kids they played for? Whatever happened to Luke Halpin? Whatever--oh, never mind.
Instead of kissing this Rosetta Stone and getting the curse of blarney, sit back and dream about Kristy McNichol in a bathing suit, then carry the fantasy along and think about Kristy McNichol in a bathing suit on her way to Prince Minsky’s birthday party for cake and ice cream--hubba hubba.
So I didn’t review the album, why add further fodder to fan the flames of this faithless garbage already corrupting our sonic atmospheres, those who buy this record WILL buy it, and those who won’t GOD BLESS and those who have to make up their mind ain’t gonne get any encouragement from this reviewer, no siree.
--then you can picture Kristy McNichol in a giant bowl of jello wearing a rubber suit and bunny rabbit ears, then...later.
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