Tweenage Riot

The first thing you notice about 15-year-old AJ Michalka’s bedroom is that it’s crammed with Disney toys. A glass showcase trimmed in faux-weathered bronze stands in the corner, lined with ceramic statuettes of Simba, Ariel, Belle and a dozen other animated characters.

The second thing you notice is that they’re the kind of toys you can’t play with. Above AJ’s four-poster bed is a shelf of old Disney dolls and dress-up sets, each still in its packaging. The room could pass for the treasure trove of a Cinderella-obsessed teen with a serious eBay habit — except for the third thing you notice. All the pictures on the boxes are of the same beaming little girl: AJ herself, aged 9.

“That’s right when I started print modeling,” she says, leading Blender on a tour of the multimillion-dollar Calabasas, California, house she shares with her parents and 17-year-old sister, Aly. “I grew up loving Disney, and suddenly I was a part of it — it was totally surreal.”

Sibling act Aly and AJ — fair-skinned, green-eyed and impossibly blonde — have been hamming it up and belting it out on Mickey Mouse’s payroll since their early adolescence. Today they’re at the center of a burgeoning empire of button-cute precociousness: Turn on Disney Radio and you’ll hear one of their songs; flip to cable’s Disney Channel and you’ll see them acting in their movie, Cow Belles; rent Disney’s Herbie: Fully Loaded DVD and you’ll hear them on the soundtrack.

The sisters released their debut CD last August. Eight months later, with no help from Top 40 radio or MTV, Into the Rush has sold nearly 500,000 copies. It’s a collection of soaring, motivational pop-rock and slow-stirred ballads that Aly and AJ largely wrote themselves, and on which they play guitar and piano. Their fans are the same legion of 8- to 15-year-olds who have made the Kidz Bop series and the High School Musical soundtrack such chart-topping dynamos. It’s a market still in training bras but flush with allowance money; one that buys impulsively and downloads legally — and one that Disney has firmly in its grips.

But Aly and AJ are more than just Mouseketeers of the moment: they’re the culmination of a decade of blonde, god-fearing, American pop adolescents. Like Hanson, they’re home-schooled, songwriting moppets; like the Olsen twins, they’re adorable acting stars on the G-rated scene; and, like the Simpson sisters, they’re pop singers whose love for Jesus does not distract from the fact that they are more than a bit cute. In 2006, Aly and AJ are the new Girls with the Glass Slippers, Princesses of the Enchanted Kingdom — and they’re about to mount a full-scale invasion on the world outside the gates.



It’s a breezy Sunday evening and Blender has been invited to the Michalka house for dinner. Walking into the swank two-story—perched in the same hilly development as Travis Barker’s house and one over from the place Nick and Jessica used to share — you get the feeling you’ve entered a reality show. Which is to say, things don’t feel quite real.

When Blender arrives, Aly and AJ’s mother, Carrie Michalka, proposes an impromptu performance: “Right before you got here,” she says, “the girls were writing a new song — wanna hear it?” She ushers us into a large rehearsal space with a view of the family’s pool and fire pit. The girls sit at a keyboard, beneath one of the many glamour shots of themselves that hang throughout the house, and begin a pretty, sorrow-tinged ballad about tears and storms. They stop after one verse. “That’s all we’ve got so far,” AJ says. For a song scribbled hours ago, it’s remarkably polished. “That’s got to go on the second album,” Carrie says.

Aly and AJ, born Alyson and Amanda Joy, call Mom their earliest inspiration; she used to sing in a Christian rock outfit called the J.C. Band. As toddlers, when they weren’t singing, they would hole up in their rooms — they grew up in Seattle and Southern California — acting out elaborate scenarios with dolls. “We’ve been performing and role-playing since before we can remember,” Aly says.

When they played their first concert, Aly and AJ were 5 and 3. They sang a cappella for a guinea pig named Brownie. Trying their hands at gospel and church standards, the girls started piano lessons about a year later, and guitar a few years after that. They began modeling and acting at 11 and 9; AJ’s first gig was a commercial for the now-defunct department store Montgomery Ward. She went on to roles on General Hospital and the short-lived Fox comedy Oliver Beene, while Aly joined the cast of the Disney Channel’s tween sitcom Phil of the Future. Carrie got the girls their first big musical break when a friend of hers offered to introduce them to manager Gerry Cagle. It was Cagle who scored the girls an audience with Hollywood Records president Bob Cavallo. “They were sitting on stools, playing five songs they wrote,” Cavallo recalls. “I signed them on the spot.”

The first person thanked in the liner notes for the Into the Rush CD is “our Bestest Friend and Savior.” Aly and AJ say they do not make Christian rock and, indeed, they never sing the word “Jesus,” but their music flows from a Christian perspective. Backstage at Live With Regis and Kelly before a performance of their fantastic single “Rush,” the girls, Mom, vocal coach and hairdresser join hands to form “the power ring,” praying for strength. It might be the first time Jesus and Regis have been invoked in the same sentence.

“We don’t ever wanna preach or shove anything down people’s throats,” Aly says, “but AJ and I want our music to be inspiring — ” “We don’t want to exclude anybody,” AJ adds, finishing her sister’s thought (they do that a lot). “If we have a Muslim fan or an atheist fan, that’s their thing — I’m gonna love them no matter what.”

On “Rush,” the girls exhort listeners to “Be every color that you are,” and the rest of the album features a similarly up-with-people-and-puppies spirit. Song after song encourages kids to just be themselves, to follow their hearts no matter what parents, bullies or any other haters say. “It’s just positive, uplifting messages,” Aly says.

The strangest song on the album gets a bit darker. “I Am One of Them,” a track that Aly and AJ say God put in their hearts, was written in early 2004 after the girls saw several news reports about child kidnappings and decided to confront the subject. “I will do my part and stay on alert,” the refrain goes, “For all the kids out there who are gettin’ hurt.”

Throughout dinner — where we’re joined by the girls’ dad, Mark, who owns a successful contracting company — kidnapping comes up in conversation. Carrie says that when the girls were invited to a party Elton John was giving, she sent a bodyguard with them, because “if they got in someone else’s car, I could never see them again.” Hollywood, mom and daughters agree, is “full of freaks.” Later on, Aly pets her big black dog Saint vigorously (they’re about to get two puggle pups, too), and says he’s there to protect them from “perverts.”

You’re home-schooled girls in a gated suburb — why are you so afraid of kidnapping?

“It’s not a fear of ours,” Aly says. “We just want people to be aware. You could live in a nice neighborhood and there could be some perv there. You never know.”

Over after-dinner pie, Mark and Carrie excuse themselves, and talk turns to home-schooling. The girls say it gave them an opportunity to structure their own educations and to graduate earlier than they would have at a normal school. Given the pronounced Christian overtones in the home-schooling movement, we can’t help but ask the girls for their thoughts on that cultural hot potato, intelligent design.

Do you believe in evolution?

“No,” AJ says, shaking her head and frowning.

“Wait,” Aly says, bolting forward. “Are they teaching that in schools now?”

They’ve been teaching it for the better part of a century.

“I think that’s kind of disrespectful,” Aly says. “Anything that has to do with anybody’s beliefs on religion, that should stay out of the classroom. I mean, I think people should be able to pray in school, if people were into that. Everybody should just do their own gig.”

“Evolution is silly,” AJ adds. “Monkeys? Um, no.”

 

One week later, Aly and AJ sit backstage at MTV’s New York City headquarters, calmly checking their hair and makeup in their compacts. After more than half a year in heavy rotation among the playground set, MTV has decided to add the video for “Rush” — a major step, label boss Cavallo says, in launching the girls’ mainstream offensive. The girls are celebrating on TRL with a live acoustic version and a quickie interview with a rosy-cheeked VJ named Susie.

“Is there anything you don’t want to talk about?” a producer asks Aly and AJ.

In unison: “Just don’t call us Disney girls!”

This wariness — like the two guitars they will strum on the TRL stage — reflects the girls’ desire to be taken seriously as songwriters and musicians, and not dismissed as two lucky benefactors of the Disney-Industrial complex. Indeed, they had a hand in writing all but two of the 15 songs on Into the Rush — some all by themselves, others with Mom, others, like “Rush,” with hired guns. TRL proves they can sing live, nailing their crystalline harmonies and rousing choruses.

Cavallo says that this talent will ensure that Aly and AJ’s young fans grow with them, not out of them. “I can see them in five years selling out arenas,” he says. Several of the songs on Into the Rush sound like would-be Top 40 smashes, but Cavallo acknowledges that radio programmers are reluctant to give slots to groups perceived to have a fanbase that watches concerts from atop their dads’ shoulders. It’s a hurdle, he says, they’ll overcome.

The girls are also expanding into more-mature acting roles (at press time, AJ is one of two actresses up for consideration for a new film Sean Penn is directing). “They’re going to have huge movie careers,” Cavallo says, indicating that music will be only one component of Aly and AJ’s overall “brand” — another will be, yes, a fashion line. Aly, who cites Gwen Stefani’s L.A.M.B. line as a major influence, wants to start designing clothes.

What the future doesn’t hold, the girls insist, is a transformation from girls-next-door to club-hopping, extreme-dieting party junkies. “It’s tiresome to go out to parties, fake your way through them and pretend you’re having a good time,” Aly says. She sees Sidekick pagers as the ultimate signifier of that lifestyle: “To me, getting a Sidekick would be like trying drugs. Don’t do Sidekicks!”

Aly and AJ say that if they’re ultimately unsuccessful, it’ll bum them out, but it won’t be the end of the world. “If we don’t book the next movie, or we stop selling CDs, we’re not gonna freak out and crawl into a hole,” AJ says. “It’s a true passion. We’d still be doing it, professionally or not. On MTV or in our rooms. Out in stores or selling CDs out of a car.”

“Well, that’s taking it a little far,” Aly says, raising her eyebrows skeptically.

“Yeah, you’re right,” AJ says. “That’d be weird.”