Tag: pop-music-tag/news-features

Taylor Swift’s 1989: The real meaning of the song Slut

[ad_1]

If the mood is less righteous anger than weary resignation, it makes sense. This was a song written a decade ago, when Swift was still figuring out how to deal with the media obsession over her relationships. If 1989 is the album that signalled Swift’s transition from country star to fully fledged pop icon (“I was born in 1989, reinvented for the first time in 2014” she writes in the accompanying album notes), it was also the record that saw the then 24-year-old start to grapple with her public persona.

In her late teens and early 20s, Swift dated several high-profile men, including Joe Jonas, Harry Styles, Jake Gyllenhaal, John Mayer and Taylor Lautner. She wrote about the good, the bad and the ugly of these early loves in her songs – turning heartbreak into material, as songwriters have for decades. But besides inspiring some of her best music (fan favourite All Too Well chronicles a doomed romance with actor Jake Gyllenhaal), her relationships also became the subject of intense fascination for the media and public.

While the word “slut” wasn’t explicitly used, Swift was nicknamed a serial dater and called “boy crazy”. One TV commentator said: “She’s going through guys like a train.” At the 2013 Golden Globes, hosts Tina Fey and Amy Poehler joked about keeping Swift away from Michael J Fox’s son. In an appearance on Ellen Degeneres’ show, the host flashed up images of famous men on the screen and told Swift to ring a bell when the man she’d written a song about appeared. Swift appeared uncomfortable, but tried to laugh along. For a while, that seemed to be her coping strategy.

She started playfully referencing her public persona in her songs – notably on 1989’s Shake it Off (“I go on too many dates, but I can’t make them stay”) and Blank Space (“Got a long list of ex-lovers, They’ll tell you I’m insane”). For the latter, she created a character inspired by the media coverage that was “so opposite my actual life.”

[ad_2]

Source link

October 30, 2023
What the Celebration tour reveals about ‘my spirit guide’ Madonna

[ad_1]

(Image credit: Getty Images)

With her current tour, the Queen of Pop is finally celebrating her legacy – and showing her vulnerability. Lifelong fan and author Matt Cain reflects on the star’s extraordinary influence.

S

She’s the biggest-selling female recording artist of all time, a woman who’s made an indelible mark on our culture, and contributed to lasting social change. But, for a long time, Madonna sustained public interest by refusing to look back on her career, insisting on maintaining a focus on present and future projects. Now – finally – she’s ready to celebrate her cultural legacy. And, perhaps most importantly, to show her vulnerability.

More like this:

–          The most influential hip-hop tracks
–          The best pop star of her generation?
–          The riot that ‘killed’ disco

I watched, transfixed, as Madonna performed Open Your Heart. Wearing a bustier, fishnets, and writhing around a chair, she reprised her role as a dancer from the famous 1986 video, in which she danced for an audience of gay men and a lesbian drag king. On stage she danced with gender-nonconforming performers.

Writer Matt Cain first saw Madonna live in 1987 when he was aged 12 – it was a formative experience (Credit: Getty Images)

It’s a key moment in Madonna’s Celebration tour, a sumptuous, emotive and self-referential show that not only celebrates Madonna’s cultural legacy but proves that her fire is still burning, her drive is undimmed, and her rebel heart is still beating.

I saw the show in London’s O2 Arena on Sunday night, but it took me back to Roundhay Park, Leeds, when Open Your Heart was the opening number in Madonna’s first ever world tour, in 1987. Twelve years old, I was in the audience, a bullied gay kid struggling to find his place in the world. But I felt emboldened by the energy and attitude of the invincible warrior on stage. This was only bolstered when I saw the Blond Ambition tour in 1990, when Madonna’s costumes resembled armour, and her signature look of steely defiance reached its zenith.

Madonna saved my life. She inspired me to follow my own creative dream, drawing on my experiences in my debut novel The Madonna of Bolton. It’s about a boy growing up in the 1980s who clings on to Madonna to help him survive the trauma of growing up gay – but who then needs to let go of his obsession in order to find his own voice as a writer.

Changing role

But the past 10 years have been a difficult time to be a Madonna fan. There were signs that my spirit guide was struggling to accept her changing role in the cultural landscape. When she announced her new show, I – like many fans – invested a lot of hope and emotion. And Madonna has delivered a dazzling show that succeeds on the level of spectacle, stagecraft, reflection and political bite.

With the 1990 tour Blond Ambition, Madonna reinvented the traditional notion of the concert tour (Credit: Getty Images)

It opens with Nothing Really Matters, a song saying that love – and motherhood – are more important than fame. There are no distracting theatrics, just Madonna, her image and her voice – which has never sounded better. She’s beautifully lit, raised on an altar and wearing a crown, offered up to the audience as a goddess. After that, the crown comes off. Madonna appears more human – and more vulnerable – than ever before.

On past tours, she moved with machine-like precision, showcasing her stamina and athleticism, never deviating from the show as rehearsed. In this show, her vulnerability could only ever be front and centre. In June, the opening North American leg of the Celebration tour was postponed when she was hospitalised with a serious bacterial infection – a brush with death that seems to have had a profound impact on her. On opening night, she commented that “the angels were protecting me”. During an acoustic cover of Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive, she paused after the line “Did you think I’d lay down and die?” to ask the audience, “Well, did you?”

And who can forget her famous fall on stage at the Brits in 2015? She may have picked herself up, made it through the number, and ended with a triumphant fist in the air, but no-one would ever see her as invincible again.

On the new Celebration tour, Madonna opens with a heartfelt rendition of Nothing Really Matters (Credit: Getty Images)

At the age of 65, Madonna still moves – more than artists half her age – but within a limited repertoire. In the show I saw, she wore a bandage on her knee, and at one point had to stop singing when she had a coughing fit.

But what we lost in choreography, we gained in fun. Gone was the steely defiance, replaced by smiles and even laughter. In between numbers, Madonna was chatty and reflective, discussing her struggle as an artist but also her love for her children – several of whom joined her on stage. And it was great to see a warmth towards her fans coming from a star who’s so often had to switch into warrior mode that she’s sometimes come across as abrasive. After brutalising experiences at the hands of the press and the patriarchy – many of which are documented in this show – her barriers went up. Now she was basking in the audience’s love.

And this show has much more of a narrative than past ones, beginning with her move to New York in 1978, it told the story of her life and career through music, dance, design and social activism.

Past glories

Her costumes nodded to past glories, and replicas of her classic costumes were worn by dancers playing her younger self. These imitators sometimes interacted with Madonna – at one point one of them on the same red velvet bed performing in the infamous masturbation scene in Blond Ambition.

The current tour references past glories, with dancers performing as Madonna’s younger self (Credit: Getty Images)

There was a sharp focus on her social activism in the show, such as her support for gay men in the 1980s. Live to Tell was performed in memory of all the men lost to Aids, beginning with her close friends, the dance teacher who inspired her to be an artist, and so many of her collaborators.

But Madonna’s greatest contribution to society has to be fighting against the double standard that allowed men to express their sexual desires but forbade women to do so. And it is a treat to hear songs like Erotica, Justify My Love and Bad Girl, and see her reclaiming that chapter of her career from the early 90s, when she became the most vilified woman in the world.

The boxers from the 1993 Girlie Show tour reappeared to remind us why she became a fighter. Perhaps the strongest political point she can make now is about ageism. Her messaging on this front hasn’t always been clear enough to hit home; not so here. An interlude revisits a speech she made in 2016, proclaiming “The most controversial thing I have ever done is to stick around”.

Madonna has, it seems, reached the point where she is unafraid to show her vulnerability (Credit: Getty Images)

Ultimately, though, the most important component of the show could only ever be the music. For the first time on a Madonna tour, there was no live band – according to musical director Stuart Price, this is to let the original recordings shine. But this is Madonna. She doesn’t play by the rules. And – following the collapse of her self-directed biopic just before the Celebration tour was conceived – she was clearly determined to tell her story, her way. But maybe we all have our own Madonna: we all see her as representing something different, based on what we wanted or needed when we first encountered her work.

That 12-year-old boy could never have imagined the journey Madonna’s career would follow for the next few decades. As a man, I can’t imagine where it will take her next. But now that she’s been brave enough to show her vulnerability, I’m excited to find out.

The Madonna of Bolton by Matt Cain is published by Unbound.

If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called The Essential List. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Worklife and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.

If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.

;

[ad_2]

Source link

October 17, 2023
Why Sinéad O’Connor refused to be silenced

[ad_1]

O’Connor’s values and priorities were formed in childhood, a period when she later said she had suffered abuse at the hands of her devoutly religious mother. She found solace in music – specifically in the Bob Dylan albums her brother shared with her – and in a book of Dylan’s songs given to her by a kindly nun at the Catholic girls’ reform school she attended in her early teens. By 18, O’Connor signed a recording deal with Ensign/Chrysalis, shortly after her mother died in a car accident on the way to Mass.

Rejecting her path

These connections were largely unknown by the public, our perceptions about O’Connor filtered through the star-making machinery of the music press. Nevertheless, it was impossible not to grasp that O’Connor wasn’t interested in becoming a typical pop star. Rejecting the marketing advice of her label, she had her hair shaved and wore ripped jeans and combat boots as a protest against what she perceived as the music industry’s sexism, valuing female artists for their looks rather than their music.

Although there were few precedents for a young woman to express complex emotions in pop music, O’Connor did just that, with an incredible, almost supernatural voice that could swing from whisper to scream. When the producer assigned by the label failed to see her vision for her 1987 debut album, she took the reins herself. Although The Lion and the Cobra wasn’t engineered to chart, O’Connor found a receptive audience thanks to radio airplay on college and alternative stations and on MTV, where her striking appearance matched the intensity of her songs.

Her 1990 follow-up, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, made O’Connor a global superstar, owing in large part to her cover of the Prince-penned song Nothing Compares 2 U and its instantly iconic music video, where she sheds a single tear as she grieves for her late mother. By the time O’Connor’s album went to number one in multiple countries, she had already had enough of the silence and complicity that fame demanded of her, which was at odds with her desire to use her voice and her growing platform to become a voice for the disempowered.

[ad_2]

Source link

July 27, 2023
The Beatles’ ‘final’ record: Should we bring singers back from the dead?

[ad_1]

“I think we’re actually on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying… it’s an alien life form.” When Bowie voiced these thoughts in a 1999 interview, he was greeting the creative dawn – or potential cataclysm – of the digital age. His words seem even more spookily resonant several years after his death (the Starman left this world in 2016). The music industry remains in a state of flux, and tech continues to connect realms – and maybe even raise the voices of long-departed singers.

More like this:
– Paul McCartney’s unseen photographs
– James Bond and The Beatles
– The Beatles’ greatest album

AI music is frequently taken to mean the buzz around “deepfake” digitally generated vocal sounds, whether imitating the styles of contemporary stars (for instance, the recent AI “fake Drake”/The Weeknd track Heart on my Sleeve uploaded by TikTok user ghostwriter977) or dead legends – including a flurry of AI Bowie “new songs”, covers and imaginary duets (such as Life on Mars featuring a digital Freddie Mercury). At the same time, slightly confusingly, AI music relates to the cutting-edge tech used to restore recordings actually made by a singer in their lifetime – such as The Beatles’ recently announced “final record”: as yet untitled, but thought to be a 1978 John Lennon composition called Now and Then.

This isn’t the Fab Four’s only “new” record following their original split, or Lennon’s death in 1980; Free as a Bird (featuring Lennon’s hazy lead vocals) became an international hit in 1995 – but tech capabilities have soared since then, and the Peter Jackson-directed archive doc series Get Back (2021) proved pivotal. McCartney explained in a recent Radio 4 interview that John Lennon’s voice was extracted from “a ropey little bit of cassette” using tech trained to detect individual voices and distinguish them from surrounding audio.

“We had John’s voice and a piano and he [Jackson] could separate them with AI,” said McCartney. “They tell the machine, ‘That’s the voice. This is a guitar. Lose the guitar.’

“So when we came to make what will be the last Beatles’ record, it was a demo that John had [and] we were able to take John’s voice and get it pure through this AI.”

The draw of the familiar

While machine-learning software is rapidly evolving, there are various deep-rooted motivations behind such posthumous expressions. As music fans, we’re usually excited to hear anything featuring our favourite singers; if they’re no longer with us, that sharpens the desire. There’s an emotional hook as well as a novelty factor when Lennon “reunites” with McCartney (including their “virtual duet” at the latter’s Glastonbury set last year), or when multi-genre holograms (Tupac, Maria Callas, Ronnie James Dio) materialise onstage, even with noticeable glitches. Obviously, commercial corporations are also keen to draw as much revenue as possible from artist legacies, and posthumous releases can be lucrative business; alt-rock icon Kurt Cobain was just 27 when he killed himself in 1994, but he continues to generate millions, through releases of extremely variable quality.

A moral dilemma persists in bringing singers back from the dead. Most artists have creative ideals, and we can only guess what they would have wanted once they’ve gone; “deepfake” tracks suggest that singers are infinitely malleable – serving industry whims and viral gimmicks, even as raves beyond the grave. The AI-generated craze hasn’t been limited to dead Western stars; international examples have included “new” tracks from South Korean folk hero Kim Kwang-seok as well as Israeli singer Ofra Haza – but as it stands, most “deepfake” music sounds depressingly bloodless, like a bot version of ’90s TV show Stars in their Eyes.

While nostalgia is a powerful force, there’s also an “ick factor” to the sentimentality of many posthumous projects – perhaps most luridly demonstrated in Barry Manilow’s 2014 album, My Dream Duets, which featured him crooning alongside recordings of dead icons including Judy Garland, and Whitney Houston.

Despite this, some contemporary vocalist/producers have responded positively to “deepfake” tech – notably, electronic artists such as Grimes and Holly Herndon (whose 2021 custom voice instrument Holly+ invited users to upload tracks for reinterpretation). Even the trailblazers admit that they’re feeling their way, though, and global laws remain nebulous around AI and intellectual property.

“As an artist, the AI possibilities of collaborating with vocalists who have passed away evoke a mix of excitement and unease,” admits J Lloyd, co-founder/frontman of Jungle, whose original tracks including latest single Dominoes dig deep into classic soul and funk styles. “When considering how future generations will connect with our own music, AI sparks a sense of curiosity and wonder – will our expressions be experienced in new, immersive ways, or will the human touch and emotional resonance that defines our music be overshadowed by technological advancements?”

Some singers have reacted more emphatically against posthumous projects; in 2021, Anderson .Paak had part of his will tattooed on his arm (“When I’m gone, please don’t release any posthumous albums or songs with my name attached”). Although Amy Winehouse’s estate approved the posthumous collection Lioness – Hidden Treasures (2011), Universal label CEO David Joseph later announced that her vocal demoes had been destroyed as “a moral thing”, to avoid future releases she couldn’t have consented to.

Ultimately, the most sensitively treated posthumous releases tend to be nurtured by those who genuinely knew and loved the artists. The posthumous Sparklehorse album will be released in September, with Mark Linkous’s younger brother and sister-in-law completing the work they started before his tragic death in 2010.

The emotional and creative bond to a late singer is also expressed in far-reaching ways; out in July, album The Endless Coloured Ways centres on the songs of Nick Drake (who was just 26 when he died in 1974), with reinterpretations from artists including Emeli Sandé and John Grant. The project was overseen with a distinctly human touch by Cally Calomon (manager of the Nick Drake estate, who has worked closely with Drake’s family since the ’90s), and Jeremy Lascelles, co-founder of Blue Raincoat Music and CEO of Chrysalis.

“All art is artifice… No intelligence is ever ‘artificial’,” Calomon tells BBC Culture. “Calling intelligence, however so generated, ‘artificial’ is yet another example of humankind trying to absolve themselves from the blame and consequences of their invention.”

Lascelles points out: “AI is only the latest in a long run of technological advancements, and as with all things that involve disruptive change, it is both threatening and brings about huge opportunities. Artists and songwriters have forever written songs inspired by their peers – sometimes brilliantly, sometimes in ways that are cringingly and crassly obvious. The same applies to posthumous recordings being brought life by means of modern technology. In the end, the only judges will be the listener. Does this sound emotionally engaging and ‘authentic’, or does it sound fake and contrived?

“With The Endless Coloured Ways we asked a range of artists to re-invent these songs in their own style, requesting only that they don’t copy Nick’s original recordings. We think the results are spectacular. And we can assure you that no modern piece of technology was mistreated or harmed in any way during the process.”

If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.

And if you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called The Essential List. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Worklife and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.

[ad_2]

Source link

June 16, 2023