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[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

My unease with the new wave of nu-Amys has been steadily increasing, as anyone who's paid attention to poptimist comment threads recently will have noticed. It was heartening yesterday to discover that I'm not the only one: Kitty Empire's brilliant column in yesterday's Observer says it all.

Key paragraph for me is this:

What a shame, though, that brains and other important body parts - ears, guts, gristle, balls, belly, soul, that kind of thing - have also seemingly vanished from female pop's body politic in the wake of Winehouse's success. Every record label is chasing their own Amy - preferably a white one and one without all that ink and crack. (If you are black, British and - say - called Estelle, you have to take your retro soul-pop stylings to America to be given a proper hearing.) Suitable candidates are being fast-tracked into tidy marketing synergies and given generous press coverage. All these second- and third-generation Amys are, without exception, easier on the ear and a damn sight less trouble than Winehouse herself.

I'd also argue that the problem isn't only that the anaemic, polite reverence of Adele et al do the soul genre a disservice (tbh with Adele it's less reverence and more her total stupidity which is the problem). I've also seen this 'wave' being hyped up as a distinctly female-led one, as though it's a triumph for "women in pop" - women who are autonomous and charismatic, not pliable pop puppets. (This umbrella would include Allen, Nash, Robyn et al I guess. But not Murphy because she isn't lining anyone's pockets.) But comparing these girls to the women who were in the charts even 12 years ago - PJ Harvey, Courtney Love, Tori Amos, Björk, Beth Gibbons - they don't even begin to compare. Those were women who weren’t afraid to be aggressive, to be cathartic, to scare people, to experiment with language and sound. Now all we get is blah blah blah “my boyfriend’s a bastard and I am just like you” everygirl bullshit. You couldn't imagine any of the current crop, except Winehouse, actually scaring anyone.

Comments

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I think it's a good column BUT I think it totally overrates Winehouse. I think Back To Black sold because it was well-done classicist soul, and because AW is a fuck-up, but I don't actually think the two sales motors are hugely linked - i.e. I don't feel Back To Black, or at least the singles on it, links the style and the fucked-upness especially well.

The marketing of Winehouse DOES make that link though. AW started off being marketed as a jazz singer and an undertone has always been "now you, o 21st century punter, get to watch your own Billie Holiday disintegrate", the very first press I ever saw her get stressed how off-the-rails she was, so her off the rails-ness has always been PART of the package, not a dangerous disruptive exterior to it - she's certainly not 'scary' in that way (like Britney kind of is now).

There's also some insidious revisionism in some of the Winehouse commetary, viz. - Winehouse takes classic soul and pop and updates it for a filthy modern world - but there was always amazing amounts of trauma, threat and trouble in 60s pop and in soul, just less explicit. And it's also not hard to detect a string of "To sing the blues you must be fucked up" reductionism, which is likely to increase the more people like Adele etc get called 'safe'.

Obviously without Amy, these girls wouldn't get as much of an airing but I think there's differences in the kind of updating they're doing - Adele is purer retro-soul, like Joss Stone; Duffy on this one showing does a girl-group thing, and feels more like someone working out how to mass-market the "girl group = perfect pop" linkage that's been a part of indie culture for AGES.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

In summary I think what Empire doesn't point out is that all the stuff she's attacking in Duffy etc. don't represent any kind of point-missing about Winehouse: you can't draw a simple "here is the authentic, here are the fakes" line.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

I think that's exactly how Adele, Duffy et al do a disservice to soul, or even just to pop - there's absolutely no personality or edge or any sort of subtext to their songs at all.

When Amy W first emerged she wasn't fucked-up at all! I mean, circa her debut album, when she just had this incredibly strong, witty girl-about-town persona. There's always been an element of unpredictability about where she'd go next - her first album keeps undercutting itself, from the really heartfelt, sincere ballads to the filthy-mouthed bitchery of 'Fuck Me Pumps' (http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/Fuck-Me-Pumps-lyrics-Amy-Winehouse/A5D8415E143C857E48257290000F4B29) - but I don't think it was always tied to her trauma. Even when Back To Black first emerged the general attitude seemed to be "good time girl, likes a drink or five" (a la Sarah Harding) than "agh, trainwreck".

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

"even 12 years ago" is a very strange phrase! why would 12 years be more likely to be a time that things were more the way you wanted then then seven years ago or 23 years? i can't work out where the vector of assumed likelihood is pointing, or what size it is!

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

b/c 12 years ago was the peak of all the women I cited as an example!

[chezghost.livejournal.com]

pedantically i'd have said 14-15 years ago when perhaps all the artists lex mentioned were at their most striking (on record), altho gibbons only just overlaps with that and i suspect reducing it to 12 is just to accommodate her!

[koganbot]

I'm reserving judgment about Adele in that the lyrics you quoted and that I had managed not to pay attention to from "Hometown Glory" do seem massively stupid, but the warmth in the sound itself totally overcame the preciousness that beset all the other tracks on her MySpace, indicating to me that Adele may have musical smarts. (Or maybe she was just lucky that day.) Also, I think that the music can have all these half-assed girly qualities and still be great music, if the half-assed girliness happens to fit the performer.

(And Lily is just as aggressive in her way as Courtney-Tori-Alanis-PJ, and is very straight-up with how much of bitchy aggressiveness is motivated by fear and uncertainty. I always thought you were way too tough on her, not noticing how her personality was going in all directions, and misreading her as smug about her cleverness, whereas I think she comes off as the opposite of smug, owning to the inner terror. But that's a different story, and I'm probably over-influenced by her blog, where she was straight-up about her desperation. I'm basically with you as to what you're saying here. But I do recall "aggressiveness" being a huge excuse for mediocrity in so much '90s music, and crits being so proud of themselves for glorifying the riot grrls while simultaneously deriding flamboyant in-your-face talents like Mariah and Celine.)

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

A year on from Lily Allen she seems SO MUCH BETTER than she did at the time. With Lily I hated her musical choices most, though.

I wouldn't say Adele or Duffy are flamboyant in-your-face talents. I guess those would be Beyoncé and Xtina.

[datura800.livejournal.com]

But comparing these girls to the women who were in the charts even 12 years ago - PJ Harvey, Courtney Love, Tori Amos, Björk, Beth Gibbons - they don't even begin to compare

Talk about romanticising an era! 1996 was the year Spice Girls launched, an act a billion times more over-intellectualised and derided than the ones you write about but whom it suddenly became okay to like (then not okay again, but whatever). The biggest selling single was The Fugees' cover of Roberta Flack. You can bet that if any of these post-Amy women released a cover akin to that they'd be crucified for it (It REALLY irks me how smug journalists keep making casual references to the race of these singers and compare them to people like Estelle. It's a very serious point and doesn't deserve a trite, idiotic finger wagging in one sentence of an article).

There is so much I could write about this. It's irritating when journos pick up on the latest record company trend and attack it as if it's never happened before, when it is exactly what happens. ALL THE TIME. It's how it works. It is also bizarre but fascinating how it's only the women who seem to come in for stick regarding their 'authenticity' or whatever (perhaps to do with Amy's status as big tabloid fodder now). And any 'this wave is a triumph for feminism' shtick, which I have not seen myself, would clearly be something foisted upon them by journos looking for an angle and nothing they have claimed for themselves. I find the debate boring, to be honest. I don't care how 'authentic' they are. It should be utterly irrelevant. If you're bothered by such things then a hefty % of Poptimist acts would be out the door.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Yeah I was comparing these women to their closest equivalents of the time - ie the autonomous women who traded on their individuality, used their personal lives as inspiration for their songs, which they wrote themselves and so on; which isn't impt in terms of quality but it is in terms of perception. It makes very little sense to compare Adele to the Spice Girls or even the Fugees because they're not remotely in the same lineage.

Also, the reason Lauryn Hill can get away with a R Flack cover and none of these people can is because, with all due respect to the different traditions they're singing in...they are no Lauryn Hills. That comparison makes them sound evern worse.

I don't have anything against record company trends - I mean, watch me go WOO every time another bassline act gets signed, cf H2O following hot on T2's heels - I just think this is a really boring trend where the amount of hype lavished on these workaday singers with workaday voices and workaday songs is out of all proportion to their frankly average quality. And the averageness of the quality is directly correlated to the reasons I think they've been signed and hyped: because they're safe, reliable unit-shifters who won't scare the horses.

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

I'm finding the debate quite interesting!

I think the 'triumph for feminism' card shouldn't be underestimated in all this media hoo-haa. Journalists are looking for a hook to bolster up their column about an otherwise uninteresting singer, as it's much easier to write a lazy paragraph about someone's dress sense or what a bad/good role model they are, or how this is such a good trend for young women in the charts (well done, pat on the head dear), or any other 'triumph for feminism' than it is to spend time dissecting their songwriting or their vocal style or why they used a 'widdly-woo' sample instead of a 'obbly-obble' sample. Though to be fair, people want to read about ballgowns and trainers and not wibbly-woos. I want to read about ballgowns and trainers AND wibbly-woos!

Duffy

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

To try and get further to the bottom of this I've gone and listened to "Rockferry", Duffy's previous single.

It makes me think that the whole Amy debate is missing the point a bit - it's Duffy's relationship to the 1960s that's the issue for me really. More than "Mercy", which has Ronsonesque modern touches, "Rockferry" is pure 1960s, down to how her make-up looks in the black and white video.

Is she singing with emotion? Yeah. Do I like it? Yeah! It would get a tick, like "Mercy" did. I enjoy it more than any Amy Winehouse ballad, as it happens. Does it move me? No, not really, the period feel is too much of a barrier: Duffy is really young, though, and this might change - but here she feels kind of lost in time - constrained by the era and style she's referencing. To answer Lex's question upthread, I listen to pop I can relate to, but I also listen to pop as a way of relating to other people (the performers, their eras, imagined listeners): "Rockferry" doesn't tell me anything about the 00s, or myself, and it doesn't tell me anything about the 60s either, cos I don't think Duffy or her producers care about them other than a source for guidelines on how to make good records. Which leaves the actual content of the song - she's leaving a town, she's sad, I think that's what's happening anyway - and that comes across fine but it's only as engaging as an episode of Heartbeat.

So that's why I sympathise with Lex - to be reductive, I can listen to Winehouse and give her five out of ten but I can hear why someone would give her ten. I can listen to Duffy and give her seven out of ten but I can't hear why anyone would give her much less or more.

(Is it unfair to criticise good records for not being great? Almost certainly yes!)

[awesomewells.livejournal.com]

You know, I agree almost 100% with what both Lex and Kitty Empire are saying but at the same time...

BRITISH MALE POPSTARS ARE EVEN DULLER.

[awesomewells.livejournal.com]

Actually I sort of feel obliged to poke holes in the Lex's arguments even when I agree with him but I think isolating one interrelated if very successful British 'scene' and then comparing it unfavourably with artists as diverse musically and geographically as Courtney, Beth and Bjork isn't really very successful. Not least because only one or two of the latter group are actually British. Which is fine but if you're going to widen the pool then you're obliged to include Beth Ditto, Beyonce, Rihanna etc who don't really fit the argument at all.

Chasing Amy?

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty much 100% with Lex on this one. "Mercy" has a nice feel and I was happy yesterday that it stopped Nickelback getting to #1, to the extent that I was bopping around the kitchen to it last night when it got playd on the R1 chart show. It's "any good at all". But jeebus, where's the beef, lady?

I think Back To Black sold because it was well-done classicist soul, and because AW is a fuck-up, but I don't actually think the two sales motors are hugely linked
I really hope this isn't true (viz that these were the only sales motors, or even the main ones) - and I suspect the appeal of Amy's record is wider, especially in territories like the States where she's not in the newspapers every day. It's not why I bought the album anyway.

NB

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

I typed the above before Tom's post timed at 5:32pm above, which is OTM, and then got distracted / lost my train of thought. That post says what I wanted to say really.

[edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com]

Yeah but wheren't PJ, Courtney, et. al. coming out of a larger trend where aggressiveness and catharsis were valued (grunge)? It's not like their aggressiveness and catharsis came out of nowhere, and everybody went, "Wow, we've never seen that before!" In fact, there was a distinctly condescending tone to a lot of the coverage of the girls of grunge: "Oh look, unhappy girls! They are trying to hit you with their tiny, tiny fists! Isn't it funny how they think they can be Nirvana?"

Oh, or maybe they weren't coming out of a larger trend, in the UK. I was about to say, "Also, er, Tori and PJ were in the charts?" then went to Wikipedia to check -- and apparently Tori charted with nearly every single between 1991 and 1996 in the UK! PJ Harvey was all over the place! Bjork did really well too! None of this happened in the US: Tori was hit-or-miss, and often ranked lower than on the UK charts when she did hit, while PJ Harvey hit our charts just twice, apparently. Same with Bjork: tons of UK rankings, only a couple of entries on the US charts. So you and I are looking back on two very different musical worlds, maybe. (Hole did pretty well for themselves in the US, compared to the UK, but Courtney wasn't scary. Courtney was a joke, or that bitch who killed Kurt, unfortunately.)

I think you're also making a mistake by comparing the originals of 12 years ago to the copies of today. I mean, the women who were on my charts 12 years ago were not actually all that daring: you had pop-grunge Alanis, and angsty-piano Fiona, and the singer-songwriters all coalescing around Sarah McLachlan to form Lilith Fair. They were the Nashes and the Duffies to Courtney's Lily and Tori's Amy, and the same "women in pop" discussion happened around all of them. "Look! Ladies in music! Let's hurry up and sign some more!" and then the whole thing got diluted until it wasn't interesting anymore. And it happened again with the teen singer-songwriters, and the "neo-soul," and basically, I think all this talk about how record companies copy previous successes, and the copies aren't as good as the originals is like...come on. "Oh, hi, the music business is the music business. I had no idea."

But anyway, the point I was originally going to make was that those girls weren't cathartic and aggressive all by themselves. They were cathartic and aggressive because the prevailing movement was cathartic and aggressive, and if you put Adele and Duffy and whoever else into that scene, you might get catharsis and aggressiveness too. Whereas if you put Courtney and Tori into this scene, you might get Lily and Amy, instead. I really don't buy that 12 years ago was this magical place where women were just so much more awesome than the women making music today. You just liked that trend more than this trend.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

OK, this is a great post. I basically agree with a lot of it: but I think what's been missed in this thread (possibly because I didn't articulate it very well) is that my actual anger isn't directed at the Adeles and Duffys (who, you're right, would have easily fit into the mid-90s as the duller end of Lilith Fair - god, Sarah McLachlan sucked), but at their hype. Which presumably you haven't experienced; but the press consensus here is basically, be awed by these amazing new talents who are the very best Britain/women have to offer. So I guess my argument would be: why is there no room for catharsis and aggression now? Or indeed singer-songwriters also being experimenters and innovators? Why has the trend moved towards being a really boring Everygirl who can only pastiche the music of 50 years ago? And the answer might be, hey, welcome to trends! But it seems like a regression.

The half-popularity of Tori, PJ et al in this country is quite weird, I don't know who to compare them to. On the one hand they were never fully mainstream, never top 10 mainstays like Amy and Lily and Adele, because they were too kooky and scary; on the other it's not as if they existed completely outside the charts, like Joanna Newsom and Regina Spektor do.

US blah blah blah

[dickmalone.livejournal.com]

No one I know IRL here in the US has any interest in Back to Black whatsoever. Y'all got so excited about it that I figured it would be worth a shot, but it just sounds really boring, which I know isn't a particularly valid insight and all, but...well, basically, I think that the pop context of Winehouse in the UK really heightens her music, which is fine and good and all, but in the US I think she'd be grouped with like Cheryl Crow as like red hat society (http://www.redhatsociety.com/) music.

I think what makes PJ/Courtney/Tori distinctive is that they were forward-looking and innovative--their personalities were nice too, but the fact that they were pushing things forward seems much more important. I'd be willing to swing Lallen and Nash and Robyn into that category, but definitely not Winehouse, at least not with Back to Black.

Re: US blah blah blah

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Amy is pretty easily categorized as Starbucks-soul, here, I think!

Re: US blah blah blah

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

PJ/Courtney/Tori weren't all that forward-looking until further into their careers than Amy is now, though (well, Tori was baroque and complex, but she's the only actual traditional musical prodigy here). For the first few years they were just particularly accomplished variants on UK indie/grunge/girl with piano. Which isn't to say I think Amy will pull out a Boys For Pele or Is This Desire?, but it's not inconceivable that she makes a record with...ambition. Which is totally beyond Adele and Duffy, really. I can imagine Allen/Nash/Robyn trying to make music with ambition and FAILING.

"An extremely limited definition of women"

[koganbot]

A blast from the past:

This year, as always, many of my favorite records were made by women. Last year, six of the ten albums and seven of the ten singles I voted for were by women, but I never realized it until Poobah Christgau (who voted for one lady's album and no singles!) worried in his P&J essay that pop females aren't getting enough respect. When Ann Powers passed through Philly last Spring I told her she seemed to have an extremely limited definition of "women" - I asked how come she cites timid noise-skiffle shrinking violets like Barbara Manning and Juliana Hatfield as evidence that "women haven't vanished from the pop scene," but none of the recent women-fighting-phallocentric-rock roundups praise Mariah Carey or Lorrie Morgan or Corina or Amy Grant (none of whom play guitar much, two of whom wear new wave haircuts anyway, and all of whom move plenty of product). If you're just another teacher's pet kissing Babes in Toyland's butts because they "state their women's rights stance firmly and clearly," exactly what "paradigms" are you smashing? (Seems to me that the only clear thing about Babes in Toyland is that they try too hard to be hard like any dumb boy band. You want feminist firmness and clarity, try Judy Torres selling her baptized soul to the devil to escape domestic abuse in "My Soul.")...

I will now hereby demonstrate to Eveylyn McDonnell that I am as humble as any rock critic without a penis: "ALL THESE COMMENTS ARE ONLY MY OPINION. PLEASE DON'T THINK I'M TRYING TO PASS MYSELF OFF AS A MUSIC EXPERT." Did I pass the audition?
--Chuck "I'll Write For Food" Eddy Pazz & Jop 1992

In any event, for me the issue isn't so much whether Adele et al. are imitative or not, but that they get to represent a triumph for "women in pop" because they belong to a class that is acceptable to journalists. (Am I right about journalists here, do you think? Are they claiming that Adele et al. are representing a triumph for women in pop? And are they as class-blinkered as I'm saying?)(And what do I mean by "class"? Remember, in July I asked you all to help me figure out what I mean by class?)

Re: "An extremely limited definition of women"

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

My feeling is that the "women in pop" element in the hype is being very overstated by Lex. But I'm willing to have my mind changed by examples!

Sam Brown! Dee C Lee! Alison Moyet!

[mcarratala.livejournal.com]

Even...

Re: Sam Brown! Dee C Lee! Alison Moyet!

[mcarratala.livejournal.com]

Sam:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muDZD3wgoHI

Dee C:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itog_E5pPkc

Alison:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7Q1RoV7wbQ

Hast thou forsaken us, Roland Barthes?

[mcarratala.livejournal.com]

While I find their singles so far unengaging, I remain worried that Adele and Duffy are being judged on their lack of documented personal trauma... this is a fundamentally dim-witted approach to things that would probably make the Stone Temple Pilots the most important band in pop history, and has cursed us to years of fools being allowed to claim that Pete Doherty is a genius on the back of songs that sound like Wedding Present Peel session tracks.