Idolator

Our headline was actually one out of the several hundred text messages that scrolled across a video ticker high above the stage at Madison Square Garden on Friday night, when a sold-out crowd of tweens and teens (and Idolator) took in the pop chart mish-mash of New York radio station Z100's annual Jingle Ball, and the junior high horndogs who sent in that text weren't talking about James Brown's sidemen, but the Jonas Brothers, the pre-fab pop-punk puppy dogs fresh off a leg of the Hannah Montana tour. All night, the mere mention of the Brothers' names prompted screams so loud you'd think the arena had spontaneously popped a collective cherry, and for four hours, hundreds of exclamation point-riddled messages pledged love to one Brother or another, though usually more along the lines of a chaste hug than fellatio. And taken against the rest of the evening's performances, America's squealing affection towards Disney's latest attempt to bail out the industry (for at least another 12 months) wasn't necessarily misplaced.

Said performances ranged from stadium-pro competent (Fall Out Boy) to so forgettable that even detailed notes wouldn't have helped (Boys Like Girls), but the show was invariably at its weakest when the girls in the stands exuded more pep than whoever happened to be on stage at the time (Avril Lavigne, we're looking at you), with Jordin Sparks resorting to a Christmas song (because even a spunky American Idol winner knows better than to bait a packed MSG with an album cut) and soft-rocking harridan Colbie Caillat mercifully only allotted the time to nervously strum through the excreable "Bubbly." (Her "backing band," especially the guy keeping time with the egg shaker, have the sweetest gigs that a lazy session guy could ask for at the moment.)

The grownups and the survivors, Alicia Keys and the warmly recieved Backstreet Boys (side note: when did AJ start looking like the emo Dave Attell?), unsurprisingly proved to be the only performers who had the biz-honed ability to command a crowd that size, but even with Timbaland interminably padding out three songs with the kind of between-song rambling that you'd expect from a pop genius with an entitlement complex bigger than his neck rolls, Jingle Ball still intermittently offered the rally-esque rush you get from the arena-sized pop show. During the hits, everyone sang. During the songs yet (or never) to be hits, everyone tapped out mash notes to the Jonas Brothers on their phones.

And at the end of the day, we were watching a Jonas Brothers show that just happened to feature some former (and current) Billboard chart-toppers as openers. There are all sorts of marketing and promotional reasons to help explain Disney's current chokehold on pop, and no svengalis will ever go broke banking on three nonthreatening, babyfaced cuties playing uptempo bubblegum. But the Jonas Brothers could have spent their set armpit-farting into their mics and the little girls still would have collapsed lungs and shredded vocal chords to show their approval. You could almost see the industry on its knees, thankful for another tweener bandage on hemorrhaging sales. There will come a point when even the well-scrubbed middle school idols can't control the bleeding, but based on Friday night's reception, the Jonas Brothers should keep the body from flatlining at least through 2008. So, um, hooray?

Jingle Ball 2007 [Z100]
[Photo: Getty]