*From Las Vegas Mercury - September 25th, 2003*

For Rooney, there's no shame in mainstream appeal

Contrary to popular opinion, the five mopheaded pop-rockers who make up L.A.'s Rooney don't hate Britney Spears. Sure, their song "Popstars" rails against the ditzy diva, calling her--among other things--a "bitch on strings" and the "killer of rock 'n' roll." But according to 19-year-old Rooney guitarist Taylor Locke, it was only a joke--albeit one that's maybe gone a little too far.

"First of all," says Locke, "I think that song's developed a heavier tone than we first intended. As a band, we're way more offended by pop-punk or nu-metal--the kind of stuff that affects our age group. To me, Britney Spears plays, like, children's music, and if some 11-year-old girl really gets a lot of joy out of listening to Britney's songs, then who am I to rob her of that? That'd be like walking into a bookstore and freaking out because some kid was reading The Little Engine That Could."

Besides, the Rooney boys, none of whom is older than 24, are swiftly becoming pop stars in their own right. Seducing hordes of shrieking pre-teens with their throwback guitar hooks, quirky choruses and boyish wiles, Rooney reminds of a trendier--more mod, less nerd--Weezer. Actually, to discover Rooney's roots, you might have to delve even deeper into the cobwebbed recesses of pop history--back to the Kinks, the Animals and the Dave Clark Five.

"Back in the '60s, you could be a rock 'n' roll band that wrote its own songs and put on a great live show and still be considered mainstream and relevant," says Locke. "Nowadays, though, if you try to play anything that's at all poppy, it's like you're somehow sacrificing your credibility--as if a band like Limp Bizkit has any more integrity for appearing on alternative radio than a band that gets played on the Top 40."

Perhaps Locke is too young to realize the depth of his insight. As Nik Cohn observes in his seminal study of the '60s "pop boom" Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom, pop music once served as a vehicle for independence and self-expression--a far cry from the crass commercialism of modern pop. "All of a sudden," writes Cohn, "you could dress like a rainbow, grow your hair down your back, make noise, act most any way you felt like, and you didn't automatically get your face pushed in. Sometimes, you didn't even get called dirty names in the street."

While it's doubtful that Rooney will be able to resurrect such an idyllic spirit, the band certainly has tapped into society's most impressionable social stratum: the junior high. "When we first started touring, we noticed that our shows were literally filled with 12- and 13-year-old girls," says Locke. "On the plus side, they buy the record, they scream and make noise and they're cute. On the other hand, we kind of had to wonder if these were the only people that were ever going to like our band. We certainly didn't get together thinking that 12-year-old girls would really dig our sound."

Of course, there are costs to such adolescent adulation--not the least of which is the seemingly endless torrent of tour gifts (a barrage that includes everything from homemade T-shirts to sketchy baked goods).

"We get all sorts of shit," says Locke. "There's one particular girl who's kind of gone down in band history for sending us her modeling photos. The problem is, they're very amateurish and she's not real attractive and she scribbles these bizarre comments all around the borders. To be honest, it's a little disturbing."

So goes Rooney's meteoric rise to rock 'n' roll superfame. You have to wonder, though, if it won't fall victim to the whims of the industry's "unsophisticated money machines" ("Popstars")--the same whims that sent sometime teeny-poppers Take That and Hanson spiraling into the bleak obscurity of county fairs and chain-store grand openings. Then again, maybe they're the next Beatles. Says Locke: "It's a risk we're willing to take."

-Newt Briggs