The problem with the first song on the album, Last Night, is that it simply doesn’t sound like Vanessa. Seems like they wanted to add a soul feeling to the song with the lower voice. I first wasn’t sure if the voice was manipulated but listening to the rest of the album where she sounds completely different I just can’t get around it. I think the pitch of her voice was changed in the computer to fit the song more, not that it really worked. It’s just not Vanessa.

The song Identified actually has a nice beat to it but again her voice was altered in the computer though now they’re obvious sound effects. Please record companies; stop doing that. Once in a while it’s fine but don’t do entire songs where you never hear the actual natural voice of the singer.

First Bad Habit isn’t half bad actually with a nice quick beat interrupted with slightly slower sections. It also seems that Vanessa is singing most of the song without help from the computer though there are altered sections in this song as well. The main clue to that is another thing that’s like a disease on records these days, hearing a singer twice at the same time.

Hook It Up, I don’t know what to say. Vanessa, you’re not a gangster rapper (not that the lyrics are like that), don’t try to fool people into thinking you’re something you aren’t. Especially not if you follow it by a song like Don’t Ask Why which is more of a ballad. Not bad but nothing that really sticks and makes you want to hear it again. After this comes Sneakernight, which I already mentioned before I don’t like. It’s just a dumb song to be blunt, I don’t get why this was chosen as the first single though. It’s hardly the best song on the album.

Amazed comes straight out of a computer so in all good conscience I can’t like this. Don’t Leave is another standard ballad, not really bad but nothing that makes you want to listen to it again right away. Paper Cut is also a ballad but has more of a listen again factor, I actually like it even though it’s nothing I haven’t heard before.

Party On The Moon yet again comes straight from a computer, just one question Vanessa: Why? Not to mention that the lyrics of the song are on a same level as Sneakernight, just no meaning behind it. So this is a song that’s not really sung by Vanessa and it has no meaning. Why is this song even on the album? Did It Ever Cross Your Mind suffers from the computer syndrome again, I’m starting to wonder if Vanessa can actually sing or is there another reason for her voice never being untouched on this album?

The last song is Gone With the Wind which is a ballad again and again it’s not really special. I can’t say it’s really bad but it’s nothing that sticks with you. So after about 38 minutes the album comes to an end. I don’t know why record companies don’t know that you can fit 80 minutes on there but in this case I can’t say that I’m too upset about it. I wouldn’t say this is better or worse than the last album, even though there are some different sounds on it I still don’t think that Vanessa has found hers. Though I don’t think she has a lot of involvement in writing the songs. I can’t give this a high rating but it’s not too bad seeing there are a couple of nice beats on it and one or two songs are actually somewhat enjoyable. I don’t see this making big numbers in stores though. The rating would have been a lot better if half the album hadn’t come out of a computer.

I have to make clear that I support the writers (I’m trying to be one myself so I have to really), though I also understand the AMPTP (Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers). The main point of argument is the compensation for online content, so when they’ve made a TV show or movie and it’s also streamed on the internet. Of course the writers want to be paid for this but no one knows how the internet market will develop.

It’s a time where developments go really quickly, you can’t actually know how much money the internet content will make over the years. So it’s understandable that the studios were very hesitant, though pretty much paying them nothing at all is a bad idea when going into talks. At some times the strike got a bit silly though, there were some AMPTP and WGA mud slinging matches.

The real victims right now aren’t the big actors though, they have plenty of money to live of, it’s the production crews that are suffering. Studios responded to the strike by firing the “common” man working in their studios. So in that regard it will take some time until the industry recovers, some people have left to get other job because they need to eat. That’s not really what this site is about though, so lets take a look at what consequence it has had on our featured actresses in particular.

The strike pretty much meant that production halted on movie projects and TV shows. The damage to movies is actually limited because it sometimes takes years before a movie gets from script to actually finished movie. Except for projects that have shorter production times, we’re talking popular projects that require a fast production time before it becomes unpopular again. In our case there’s only one clear victim: Disney.

Shooting for High School Musical 3 and the Hannah Montana Movie should almost have started already but they won’t. Simple reason is that their scripts aren’t done yet, they’re in the rough draft stage and they still need some work. It will probably mean that High School Musical 3 will be delayed until late 2008 while it’s very likely that the Hannah Montana Movie will be delayed until 2009. They don’t want both movies in theatres at the same time so even if they did rush them they’ll have a hard time fitting them into 2008 without them interfering with each other.

So in that regard it’s only a problem for people like Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Tisdale and other High School Musical Stars. For other movie projects our actresses are featured in it’s not really a big problem. They’re more long term projects and the ones that are planned for this year are already done or are already in the shooting stage so those should be released on time.

For TV it’s a bigger problem, the production time on TV shows is a lot shorter. Several TV shows have already run out of episodes, some even weeks after the strike started. Main victim of that was probably Kaley Cuoco when The Big Bang Theory stopped production just weeks into the strike (Not that it’s a show that would be missed on TV, I’m not too fond of it but that’s beside the point). Who knows when that will go back into production, it will be one very short season that much is certain.

Again Disney has to deal with it, production on a lot of their Disney Channel shows stopped. They seem to be trying to stretch their seasons until they have new episodes, new episodes of Hannah Montana have slowed to under one new episode per month. They’re done shooting season two but they probably want to stretch it until they can start production on season three (and the movie). Not that Miley Cyrus has had much trouble with it, she simply extended her concert tour by a month. Co-star Emily Osment has been keeping busy shooting a TV movie for Disney, so they’ve been doing fine. Though Hannah Montana fans are upset with the lack of new episodes.

For some shows I don’t actually know how many shows they have on reserve, for example Medium. It didn’t start its season until 2008, they probably produced most of the shows in advance but not all. Sofia Vassilieva has once stated that they get their scripts about two weeks before shooting so the time between writing ans production is very short. That also means that once the strike is over they can go back into production quite quickly again, depending on whether they can get all their support staff back.

One of the other most notable victims is Heroes, they’ve only put out eleven episodes this season. They planned to do the season in two halves which probably will save them, seeing they can go into a third season without real continuity problems. It does mean that people like Hayden Panettiere haven’t been really busy so far, even though she signed on to a new movie project, that just hasn’t started shooting yet.

That’s another thing with the strike, pilot season is coming up as they call it. It’s when production companies make pilot episodes of new shows, based on those episodes they decide whether to take a show into their programming or not. The main problem right now is; there are no pilot scripts so there’s nothing to shoot. It might very well mean that there will be no to very few new TV shows for the 2008-2009 season. It’s also good news for people that fear their favourite show might be cancelled though, the studios will be more likely to renew existing shows.

So that’s good news for people that enjoy shows like Medium (Sofia Vassilieva) and One Tree Hill (Sophia Bush and others); they’ve been renewed on a season to season bases in recent years. The strike might have improved their chances of renewal considerably. It also means that a lot of the crappy new shows (somehow all new sitcoms that came along this TV season were horrible to complete crap) might get renewed as well. So it might very well be a very boring 2008-2009 TV season, just a good thing that the movies coming out this and next year haven’t been influenced a lot.

I just hope that something like this doesn’t happen again, a lot of behind the scenes people have suffered from the strike and will probably need some time to recover from it. Three months without income is a disaster for any family with a normal income. Good thing the DGA (Directors Guild of America) has already agreed on a deal so they won’t be striking. However the SAG (Screen Actors Guild) is coming to an end and they have similar issues with the AMPTP as the WGA had, so lets just hope it doesn’t lead to another strike.

Best known example of the year probably are the naked pictures of Vanessa Hudgens; to a lot of people it seemed to be a big deal. A lot of people seemed to think that she would get fired by Disney for no longer reflecting the Disney image. This of course didn’t happen because Disney is a business and in the long run a business won’t care about something that will only be a vague memory a year from now.

Of course the images were never supposed to see the light of day; they’re personal. So why does it make a scandal if they’re leaked? Just because she works for Disney? There probably are naked pictures of hundreds of celebrities out there we just don’t see them. It’s not like no one has never seen a naked person before.

All of a sudden two weeks ago there were pictures of Miley Cyrus pretty much just fooling around with a friend. She’s a fifteen year old teenager, goofing around with friends is what they do. These pics were leaked to the internet but didn’t really get much notice until a certain celebrity blogger named Perez Hilton saw them (just to clarify, I had seen those pics several days before he posted them I just didn’t see anything worthwhile in them).

He dubbed the photographs as a faux lesbian photo shoot. What on earth is lesbian about two girls fully clothed on the floor of a hallway? I’ve seen girls do far weirder things without them being lesbians. If they were up to anything lesbian they would make sure not to do it in a public place. Even if they were Lesbian I don’t see how that matters. After Perez posted them other media outlets seem to take it more seriously. I’m now exactly doing what Perez Hilton wants though, I’m reacting to it, that’s all he wants he wants to get a reaction out of people. That and he seems to hate Miley for a non-existing reason, though my guess is that it’s because most people do like her.

Miley has stated that she would quit her career as soon as she didn’t have fun any more, stories like this don’t help with that. Though she has stated that she’s more upset about her friend having to deal with the fall-out seeing she’s not famous and has to deal with all of this in school. She’s not quitting the business because she loves doing what she does too much. Everyone has their limits and if things like this happen too often she might actually do it, which would be a shame. All of this upset just over some pictures of two girls goofing off, it sure is a weird world we live in.

Certain media outlets just want to turn things into a scandal for publicity; they just don’t seem to care that they’re hurting the people involved. In some cases a certain amount probably is justified but not with these kind of stories. It’s just the eternal quest of people looking for bad things in celebrity lives. Yes they’re human we already know, doesn’t mean everything they do has to be dragged out and analysed to the extreme.

I even dare to say that Jamie Lynn Spears pregnancy is being blown out of proportion; of course she’s only sixteen and she’s pregnant but it’s not like it never happened before. Just let her be, she doesn’t need bullshit stories about some old guy being the father. She already has enough to deal with, that’s just the disadvantage of being the sister of popwreck Britney Spears. It would have been bad enough if she just had been pregnant but being Britney’s baby sister just makes it worse. For the child itself it would probably best if it grows up without media attention.

It’s easy to say that celebrities should ignore all of this; the truth is they can’t. Every time something like this happens journalists will ask them about it which isn’t just annoying to them but also to us, because we basically get the same interviews every single time. Interviews are usually about personal lives instead of careers these days. It wouldn’t be that shocking if some of them at some point really would call it quits because they just can’t deal with all the bullshit anymore.

It can be funny sometimes if you look at filmographies and it turns out that you’ve seen them in movies before without even realising it. I’m not counting tiny guest spots on TV shows right now; if I did that I could be going on forever seeing that’s pretty much how every actor gets started.

The first time I really had that was when I was looking at the filmography of Jena Malone. Granted, she’s not really a superstar but she still gets a fair amount of movies done. At some point I did check out her filmography because I didn’t really know her, turns out I have a on DVD with the woman; Contact in this case which she made when she was twelve years old. Her role in that movie is better known for a difficult special effect (It’s extensively mentioned in the extras; Jena is running towards a mirror but you can’t see the camera. In 1997 that was a lot more difficult than it would be these days.). She plays the younger version of Jodie Foster in the movie.
Another case like this is Hilary Duff, though I had seen her on Lizzie McGuire before seeing the movie Human Nature. Human Nature is a movie by Studio Canal, a European studio, in which she plays the younger version of Patricia Arquette. It did take some time before the movie was released which is clearly shown by the fact that Hilary looks a fair amount younger than on Lizzie McGuire. I didn’t even recognise her in the part.

Most recent example would be Miley Cyrus; people in general think that Hannah Montana is her first acting job. Well it isn’t, I only saw part of the movie Big Fish before every hearing of Miley Cyrus but it turns out she’s in it. Granted she only says two words in her whole appearance but she’s still there. She’s not even on the cast list as Miley but as Destiny Cyrus, I guess she was still a bit behind on her growth back then seeing she was playing an eight year old when she was ten.

For another Disney star, Vanessa Hudgens, it’s known that before doing High School Musical she was in the flopped Thunderbirds movie. Not that many people realise that she was in the critically acclaimed Thirteen; which launched Evan Rachel Wood’s career. I sure hadn’t a clue that she was in it before her name was known to everyone.

Even Dakota Fanning played the young version of Reese Witherspoon in Sweet Home Alabama before anyone really had heard of her as a child actor. It just shows that real overnight sensations are extremely rare though some studios are now trying to create some. Like New Line which is trying to launch Dakota Blue Richards through the Golden Compass movies.

So the next time if you think you see an overnight sensation you might want to check out the rest of their filmography, it might turn out that you’ve seen them before.

What I mean by that is that 90% of pop music just lacks an identity of its own; you wouldn’t even notice if someone else was singing the song. In the past you could tell what band or artist was doing a song by listening to a song for about thirty seconds, that’s something rare these days. The explanation for this is quite simple looking at the singing actresses; they don’t write their own music. The music is written for them and in some cases even by the same people. I’m not judging the singing ability in this editorial; all of the girls mentioned can sing (or can be enhanced electronically enough). I’m just looking at the music itself.

Just look at the discography of Kara DioGuardi there are dozens of artists she’s written for on it. For this site the two main examples are Hilary Duff and Lindsay Lohan for who she took care of the bulk of the writing for all their albums. Kara is an incredibly talented woman, I doubt anyone manages to write that many successful songs but her success is also the problem. All songs might be different but most of the songs have a similar style which is just noticeable at times.

Vanesssa Hudgens and Ashley Tisdale of course know each other from High School Musical but are signed to different record companies. I still think their case is the best example of how interchangeable music is; they both try their hand at a pop sound with a little R&B mixed in. The voices are different but the general sound of the album is the same. This all just means one thing; they’re lacking their own music identity.

It’s still not the most generic music out there; I would have to say that that’s the music by Mandy Moore. I’ve listened to her music and there are maybe one or two songs that I like the other songs are just boring. You can listen to Mandy Moore music all day and at the end of the day you wonder what you’ve been listening to. I also wouldn’t be able to tell you what a typical Mandy Moore song sounds like, it’s just too generic. The best analogy I can think of is elevator music (Mandy Moore fans are probably going to hate me for that comment); you can listen to it all day without really hearing anything. Mandy has five albums out now and she only co-wrote multiple songs on the last one so she’s quite late with trying to develop her own sound (though I can’t really hear a big difference to her earlier albums).

Of course it’s not easy to find your own musical identity, a while back Emmy Rossum released her first video clip and I thought this might be someone with their own identity. Now that I’ve listened to her entire album I can say that I was wrong, it might not be the most generic pop sound it’s still nothing special. The single featured in the video clip probably is the best song of the album which would explain why it’s the first single.

I actually had some hope when I heard that Emily Osment was starting to sing (even though only on the soundtrack of one of her movies). When talking about her favourite music she talks more about music like AC/DC so I figured she would have a different sound. Though it was not to be, the soundtrack to her movie is pretty much generic pop. That is a bit weird really; seeing she plays a gothic girl in the movie.

Miley Cyrus hasn’t really managed to find her own identity yet either, both the Hannah Montana soundtracks are songs that she didn’t really have a lot to do with. They were written to fit the show and are only performed by Miley. Her own album is different however, she has written the bulk of the songs on it (though with help from the Hannah Montana songwriters, Miley only plays the guitar and just guitar and song don’t make a complete composition). For the people that are going to say that she’s not being credited with the songs; the official credit is to Destiny Hope Cyrus, her actual name.

The difference with other people besides the writing of the songs is that she’s experimenting, not the entire album is one specific sound. Most of it is pop but there’s also a bit of dance, a bit of rock, even a very little bit of rap (what was she thinking) and an attempt of a song with a bit of a reggae sound. This means she’s experimenting; she’s looking for her own sound. I don’t think all of the songs turned out as she hoped, she even says herself that she can’t rap. Some of her songs might even be considered by some people.

Now I’m going to say something that will sounds strange; that’s a good thing. It’s not a good thing that some of her songs are bad but it’s a sign that she’s willing to experiment and willing to take risks, something most current artists aren’t really willing to do. Hilary Duff has completely changed her sound from one album to the next she’s now trying to profile herself with dance music; which isn’t a good idea either if you ask me. If she really wants to find a sound of her own she should experiment more with different genres like Miley does. The fact Miley is also one of the few that actually seem to know how to play an instrument is also a sad thing. I’ve never seen anyone else with an instrument anyway, let alone on stage (Miley Cyrus again is an exception, she plays her song I Miss You accousticly as an encore at her concerts).

Most of them really only sing songs that are written for them, to be a real musician you also have to be able to make music. Not that I blame them for signing record deals, it’s a good source of income. I just wish that some of them would make more of an effort of creating a sound of their own.