"'Bleeding Love' reminds me of a Cronenberg movie."

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

That's what I said about it in comparison to "No Air," which I thought was nicely melodramatic but didn't take itself quite so seriously, or rather didn't take itself so somberly.

Roundabout way at having a go at the new Leona Lewis album, which I finally listened to after a negative Robert Xgau review in his Consumer Guide:

Simon Cowell's British Idol possesses an exceptionally delicate version of the sock-it-to-'em karaoke-champ voice Cowell has made the gold standard of '00s pop. The subtle flutter of her finest melismatics could give an open-minded person goose bumps. Her coarser melismatics, however, are the usual showoff BS and probably also a commercial prerequisite, like not having a harelip. And because she doesn't write, this is karaoke where nobody knows the originals. Of course, when OneRepublic provided your lead single and "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" is your literary highlight, it's just as well you don't write. "Forgive Me" would be a tolerable follow-up. Somehow I doubt Cowell cares.
Grade: B

A lot of Xgau's digs stick -- but I don't find "karaoke where nobody knows the originals" an insult necessarily, and the "showoff BS" that he's locating here is hardly an 00's staple -- rather, the album reminds me a lot more of OTT but still MOR 90's balladry, in the old-skool Mariah and even Vanessa Williams vein. What Xgau neglects to mention is HOW FUCKING HARD it is to really sell solid melodic pop like this. It seems as natural as not having a harelip (poor taste!) but if it really were there would be ten albums as good as Spirit in this vein. Most major producers and artists looking for pop anthem status these days are finding ways AROUND voices, or ways to distort, shape, and otherwise fuck up voices to get 'em to do what they want.

koganbot elaborates: "Is "sock-it-to 'em karoake champ" the popular gold standard? Hardly describes Rihanna or Amy or Nelly Furtado or Fergie or Taylor Swift (not to mention Lil Wayne). And none of them are particularly into the coarse melisma that Xgau is calling a commercial requirement, either. Nor is Mariah these days, for that matter. It can be a help in Cowell world, of course, and that's what was on Xgau's mind, but he should have limited his comments to that. I don't even think that "No Air" gets over on sock-it-to-'em or melisma, though it has a lot of both. If anything, this is the year of harmony and polyphony rather than of individual pyrotechnics. Or maybe that's just my taste, since it's what putting the Danitys at my number one and has made multi-tracked empty-voiced Vanessa Hudgens a contender."

There's something really satisfying to me about Spirit's particular generic sensibility; it's not quite a throwback, not quite a retread, sitting in a weird little semi-nostalgia zone in a big glop. The melodies are huge, the metaphors are pretty uniformly terrible (my favorite is the use of "homeless" as a metaphor for being emotionally uprooted -- unfortunately "homeless" doesn't have quite the same connotations as "without a home"), the lyrics are forgettable. It's about as deep as Kleenex.

But it also kind of stands in contrast to the 00's gold standard, which seems to by and large treat the voice as an electronic instrument rather than a stand-alone "organic" instrument: chops are about as important to singers as they are to, say, keyboardists -- that is, there's room for chops, but there's also (more) room for lots of other kinds of innovation having to do with arranging, layering, focusing on timbre. Some of the most useful discussions on this happened in the Amerie vs. Rihanna Fite of last year, which Rihanna seemed to win. But it was just a battle, and perhaps Rihanna lost the war; it seems like Amerie's complex harmonies are far and away the preferred gold standard (and even Rihanna's melodicism doesn't really match up with what Xgau is describing here).

Comments

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Yes, Cowell's created a gameworld in which coarse melisma is at least a bronze-standard, but it maps onto the actual popworld only very imperfectly, which is great for me as a listener (since I don't like Cowellism enough to want it more than a minor flavour note). But it is really annoying* when critics buy Cowell's line that this is good pop (only inverting the 'good') and assume that Idol/X-Factor winners can act as shorthand for "commercial pop music" and can-carriers for its ills.

*most US critics don't fall into this trap, I think, but it's a common enough trope here.

[koganbot]

Xgau's probably thinking of some combination of scare-quoted "class" and "chops" when he says "gold standard," but it seems to me that Amy, Tashbed, Adele et al. are more likely to get knee-jerk respect than Leona or Jordin or Kelly or Carrie do. In fact, of the Idol/X-Factor performers, Melinda Doolittle embodies it more than any of the winners, but she never got popular enough to be any kind of standard. Beyoncé might be a gold standard in a way that's different from Amy, but is she? I have this fantasy that with "Umbrella" Rihanna began to get a lot of respect as a singer without people insisting that she have a showoff voice, but this probably is just my fantasy.

My literary standard as a nine-year-old was "Spring Hill Mine Disaster"

[koganbot]

Strangely, this is the first version of "First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" I've ever liked. Every other has either been too heavy or too slow or both. This is plenty slow itself, though, so I'll have to figure out why I can tolerate it.

Free song from American Idol's Melinda Doolittle

[lou8.livejournal.com]

First i want to thank you for all the wonderful articles you post. Thanks again for let us spread the love we have for our's favorites one. Melinda Doolittle are really a talented singer with a big heart of Gold! Without website will be really difficult for any fans to share the great news about them. Thanks.
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