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Feb. 18th, 2008 02:38 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
alexmacpherson.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
poptimistsMy 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.
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.
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Duffy
Date: 2008-02-18 05:32 pm (UTC)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!)