Friday, Sep 5, 2008
The diva school has had to weather the effects of Whitney and Mariah and all their progeny, that group of singers who have negated emotional content in favor of vocal gymnastics. Writing in the New York Times Magazine, Rob Hoerburger, one of the most sensitive of the current crop of pop critics (in thrall to the music, he writes to recreate it), refers to them as singers who have abandoned the power of suggestion in order to flog a song within an inch of its life. There have been a crop of singers -- Macy Gray, Alicia Keys (who may have to wage a battle with her own tendencies towards grandiosity), and especially Angie Stone -- who are working to restore the nuance and tenderness of mid-'70s soul.
But the defining quality of diva pop has been the tendency for the singers (and the music press) to treat every new record as if it were a chapter in the psychobiography of the artist. It's a notion that wipes out the very idea of the interpretive singer, and envisions the song less as a vessel for emotional power than a roman à clef to which the celebrity provides the decoder ring. New releases are routinely accompanied by fawning profiles about how the singer overcame great obstacles (the blue thong or the pink one?) to deliver a brave personal statement.
Sometimes there is something to talk about in these records. Janet Jackson (who has turned into a more interesting figure than Madonna, and a maker of better music) did deliver something strong with "The Velvet Rope." It wasn't just the teasing is-she-or-isn't-she lesbian references or S/M stuff, it was in the scarifying "What About," which starts out as a syrupy ballad (replete with the sound of seagulls) before veering into harsh, zigzagging accusations: "What about the times you kept on when I said no more please ... / What about the times you shamed me/ What about the times you said you didn't fuck her/ She only gave you head." But even "The Velvet Rope" didn't go so far into psychodrama that it neglected the velvety pop typified by numbers like "Got 'Til It's Gone" and "Go Deep," songs that kept sounding good on the radio weeks after they debuted. By contrast, Jackson's latest album, "All for You," despite the presence of a few catchy numbers, works largely off of the publicized end of a secret marriage and is an I'm-OK-I'm-just-working-on-myself bore.
The truest sign of maturity and substance I see anywhere in recent diva pop was on Aaliyah's eponymous final album. It was a musical maturity, proof that she had settled comfortably and confidently into the new sound she had been creating with her producer Timbaland on great singles like "Try Again" and the flabbergasting "Are You That Somebody?" Aaliyah's music, as well as her image, was a study in contingencies, sexual without being blatant, insinuating without being demanding, emotional without being melodramatic.
While Aaliyah's death was given the full-blown celebrity news coverage, barely anything was written about her music. (The lone, superb exception was Kelefa Sanneh, an editor at the black cultural journal Transition, in a piece written for the New York Times.) The mainstream press has never been adept at dealing with the significance of rock deaths. Still, the inability to consider Aaliyah as a musical figure (as opposed to just another dead celebrity) shocked me. Part of it was, I'm sure, an age thing on the part of editors and producers, a (not altogether unfounded) belief that she didn't make the type of music their audience would care about. But I can't help feeling that race played a part, that for all the ways in which black music and black-influenced music dominates the pop world right now, the press cognoscenti still don't believe that a black pop artist can be musically significant.
Significance should never be determined by the numbers, by record sales or box office grosses. Yet here was a young woman who had been selling millions of records since she was 15, and more important, had been changing, developing and refining one of the most sophisticated styles in current pop music, who simply didn't exist for the white press. That condescending phrase used to describe the appeal of pop music -- "the little girls understand" -- was, in Aaliyah's case, entirely right. Certainly, the pop audience understood what they lost better than their elders. That's how, even though she sold millions of records, the most sophisticated pop diva to emerge in the last few years still feels like a secret others have yet to catch on to.
It may be significant that Sade, who largely shuns interviews and has, with unshakable confidence, stuck to the same style since her 1985 debut, still makes records that, maybe because they retain some mystery or maybe because she's smart enough to hold something in reserve, are durable and pleasurable months after their release. Instead of overpowering you with diva drama, Sade makes some space for the listener to enter into the music, to uncover it slowly.
As successful as Sade is, she's an anomaly next to the likes of Mary J. Blige. Blige has made some good, showy pieces of emotionally pushy diva soul. It was hard, though, not to watch her recent Grammy performance of "No More Drama" and think: What is she talking about? Mary J. Blige proclaiming "No More Drama" is like Soupy Sales proclaiming "No More Pies." Drama is her raison d'être, and not the fat, juicy theatrics of singers like Teddy Pendergrass or Thelma Houston, who aimed to live up to the melodrama of their numbers. The tension in their performances derived from the question of whether they'd be able to stand up to the florid emotionalism they created around them; the excitement of their performances was that they did.
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