Out of Eden

Ken Mok, an executive producer of the ABC television series Making the Band-- which foisted low-testosterone singers O-Town on an entirely deserving audience -- told Time magazine in April that "kids today are ten times more sophisticated about the [music] business than they were even five years ago." If only they were as discerning in their tastes. But then, Mok might have a harder time making a living if pop music hadn't reached the apex of its industrial age. Records are produced like widgets on an assembly line, with the youngest workers sharing the bulk of the labor as though trapped in a Dickens novel; somewhere, some teenager is holding a bankbook up to Lou Pearlman (the man who built the Backstreet Boys, 'N Sync and O-Town) and saying, "Please, sir, can I have some more?"

The savvy demographic Mok describes is a lot like the basketball fans who obsessively watch the NBA draft. It's more than the audience's perceived curiosity about the shape of music or sports to come that drives television's packaging of what used to be a closed negotiation. There's an unflattering hint of self-congratulation visible on ESPN during the draft -- and on Making the Band and its distaff cousin, the WB's Pop Stars. The last, which concluded this spring with the unveiling of girl group Eden's Crush, isn't really a document of how to become a singing star; it's backroom synergy between the music and television arms of AOL/ Time Warner marketed as Cinderella-story entertainment.

In the same Time article, Eden's Crush's Maile Misajon responded to a question about the group's contract (which even the average "sophisticated" young music fan couldn't decipher without a phalanx of lawyers, an advantage the fledgling stars didn't have, either) this way: "I would really hate to answer that question. I'd probably go in a direction I didn't want to go." Like toward the unemployment office or over to UPN.

In conversation, Misajon, at 25 the oldest of the Eden's Crush glass-slipper recipients, brightly deflects any attempt to blow the fairy dust off the quintet's tale. "I loved filming the show," she says from the Eden's Crush bus, which is winding through Cleveland to a photo op at a children's hospital. "We had laughs and cries and fights, which they couldn't capture all of, but there was never anything like conflict. We learned about being in the public eye. I miss the crew and production company taking care of us. It was our TV show. Some of the girls were relieved when the show was over, but I was bummed."

Misajon and the other "girls" -- Rosanna Tavarez, Ana Maria Lombo, Nicole Scherzinger and Ivette Sosa -- have more in common with your average Real World cast member than with Britney Spears. (The youngest is 22.) Each auditioned for Pop Stars with a nebulous desire to make it in showbiz rather than an exclusive ambition to sing. The dominant college major among them is theater; Tavarez stopped just shy of getting a master's of fine arts in dance degree from Ohio State. Most of them had performed professionally before folding their talents into Eden's Crush. But being on television as a hopeful beats a steady backup gig for Julio Iglesias Jr. (Lombo's former gig), right?

"There's tons of pressure," Misajon says. "But we try to do a good job, the best we can do." (Quotes from Eden's Crush members wouldn't sound out of place on ESPN.) "We try to be as tight as we can be and get out there and sell records. We want people to buy our album."

The extent to which Eden's Crush can claim its debut disc as its own is minimal. A visit to the Pop Stars Web site reveals an emphasis on the star-making process, not the new stars. There are makeup tips, a smug advice column from a voice coach and notes on how to prepare for a singing and dancing audition such as the one the WB requires for its next season of Pop Stars. It takes a couple of clicks to get to the women and their rote biographies; it's easier -- and more interesting -- to check out interviews with the teams of producers and songwriters hired to cobble together the album.

"When we went in the studio," Misajon says, "we were given demos a couple of days in advance. We'd hear them and make them our own, do what we wanted to do. What came out was a combination of five different voices molding together. It's a cool process. But there's a lot of leaving it in the hands of the producers." Misajon says the five recorded only individually, a fact the producers corroborate on the Web site by explaining that each woman sang the songs "top to bottom four or five times," with the results heavily edited and "corrected" for pitch. Which means the women endured a rigorous rehearsal schedule -- six hours a day for two and a half weeks -- before their first promotional tour last month, having to learn the songs again as constructed by the studio Drs. Frankenstein.