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Sustaining success
in the music business is tough. Elvis Costello said you get twenty years to
write your first album and six months to write your second. A lot of women
would argue that Costello was an optimist. Just as in film and television,
musical career longevity has always been more elusive for female performers
than their male counterparts.
It all comes down
to who’s calling the shots. Women who steer their own careers, navigating
each bump and curve themselves, last longer. Those who take a backseat
attitude to their own destiny and let others do the driving typically burn
hot, but quickly burn out.
Aretha Franklin
tops the list of savvy survivors. Few female singers can match Lady Ree’s
career mileage. As a child she sang in her father’s Detroit church, and the
Rev. C.L. Franklin observed that she’s never really left; those gospel roots
have given depth and resonance to everything she’s done since. A big part of
Franklin’s faith is belief in herself. Managers and record companies tried
to get her to do things their way, but she wouldn’t. Columbia Records signed
her in 1960 and struggled for five years to shape her into an uptown torch
singer like Nancy Wilson. But Franklin never felt comfortable in such plush
surroundings. Rather than compromise her musical vision, she signed with
Atlantic Records where, instead of trying to tone down her gospel fervor,
producer Jerry Wexler encouraged her to use it on secular material. That
worked, starting with four consecutive million sellers in 1967, including
the seminal “Respect.” Franklin has stayed true to that path ever since,
following her heart and her artistic instincts to earn hits in every
subsequent decade — scoring with everything from the raucous “Freeway of
Love” to her soaring 1987 duet with George Michael, “I Knew You Were Waiting
(for Me)” — and 17 Grammys.
Elsewhere, things
were different. At Motown, artists like Mary Wells, Martha Reeves and The
Marvelettes where expected — indeed, commanded — to adhere to boss Berry
Gordy’s assembly-line model for making hit records. That meant charm school,
grooming and cookie-cutter choreography. More important, it meant that most
Motown stars learned to deliver other people’s musical statements without
ever learning how to make their own. When the formula ran out of gas, so did
the careers that depended on it. There were exceptions — Stevie Wonder and
Marvin Gaye, to name two. Some would add Diana Ross, a woman who continued
to thrive long after the Supremes faded. But Ross stayed on the
merry-go-round without learning anything new. Through the early eighties at
Motown and then for another half-decade at RCA, she let others choose or
write the songs, produce the records and make the decisions. After 1985’s
“Missing You” — ironically, a paean to one Motown artist (Marvin Gaye)
written by another (Lionel Ritchie) — the public had had enough. Her biggest
splash since then has been her DUI arrest in Tucson, Arizona.
Ross has, however,
fared better than other pre-packaged female pop stars. Tiffany, for
instance, came out of nowhere in the mid-eighties, was all over the charts
for a few months, then disappeared just as suddenly, presumably back to the
same mall where she was discovered. Her 2002 comeback plans were predicated
on breast augmentation surgery and a spread in Playboy. “I have grown
significantly, both personally and professionally, after nearly a decade
raising a family and exploring my craft,” Tiffany said, unclear about
exactly what kind of growth she was talking about. “I view my appearance in
Playboy as the first step in presenting myself to the world as I am.”
And how was that, exactly? Desperate? Half naked? Tiffany didn’t explain,
and her subsequent return to total obscurity suggests there weren’t any
other steps in her campaign.
Contrast Tiffany
with The Pretenders’ Chrissie Hynde, who made tough, challenging and utterly
captivating records in the 1980s and ’90s. Writing about music — as she did
before making her own — helped her better understand the industry and avoid
many of the mistakes others made. She adroitly sidestepped all the clichés
that have typically defined female performers: no kittenish cartoon
sexuality, no provocative outfits. She was unmistakably female — defiantly
so — but utterly on her own terms. She took breaks to deal with the deaths
of two band members, to marry and divorce The Kinks’ Ray Davies and Simple
Minds’ Jim Kerr, and to give birth to two daughters. Each time she returned,
her audience was still there, eager to hear what sort of noise she wanted to
make next.
Joni Mitchell,
whose most recent release, Travelogue, is a career retrospective that
covers three decades, has been entirely her own artist since the mid-1960s.
Even her guitar tuning didn’t match anyone else’s; she needed a mix of open
blues and modal tunings to accommodate a left hand weakened by a childhood
bout with polio. Embraced for practical reasons, her tuning was one more
thing that set her apart and cemented her singularity. She also stayed true
to what she believed made sense artistically and in terms of her career. In
1969, her label, Reprise, wanted her to make a folk-pop record with a group
of session players. Joni refused, pushing instead for a solo acoustic album.
As a result, she stood out from her contemporaries with starkly beautiful
and different work. Most players would have bolstered their first blush of
success by working tirelessly to maintain the momentum. Not Mitchell. She
insisted on taking a year off. Career suicide, warned her record company.
The rapturous reception that met the release of Blue proved them wrong.
Three years later she charged in the opposite musical direction with Court
And Spark, which proved her capable of constructing flawless pop with a full
band, engaging people’s feet as well as their hearts and minds. The
possibility of alienating an audience that knew her as a solo acoustic folk
artist seemingly didn’t occur to her.
Every time industry
experts have told Mitchell she’s going the wrong way, she has ignored the
advice and proved it wrong. No wonder she ha, little use for the music
business, and has been threatening to walk away from it since 1972.
Thankfully, she has yet to follow through on that threat. But she remains
deeply ambivalent about it, apparently having come to an uneasy
understanding that the “star-making machinery” she so despises (and so
cleverly derided in Court And Spark’s “Free Man In Paris,” a
backhanded salute to her former mentor, record mogul David Geffen) is a
necessary evil.
Mitchell’s artistic
authority, coupled with her suspicion of undue influence, has helped ensure
a long career. Deliberate, constant reinvention can work too. Madonna, whose
role model seems to be David Bowie, is the prime example. Continually alter
your image, ethos and musical direction, and each new album will sound like
it’s your first. Fans will call you versatile. Critics will admire your
resourcefulness. And if some in the audience don’t like a particular
incarnation, they can wait six months, when you’ll be somebody else.
Among contemporary
artists, Norah Jones comes closest to matching Aretha Franklin’s feistiness,
and not just because her début album was produced by Arif Mardin, who also
produced many of Franklin’s biggest hits. Citing such personal heroes as
Stevie Wonder, Sly Stone, Hank Williams and Dinah Washington as inspiration,
Jones demonstrates her artistic independence by defying easy categorization.
Jazz aficionados cavil that she’s not a “real” jazz artist; pop critics
complain she’s too jazzy. Audiences don’t seem to know what she is, and
don’t care — they just want more of it. She’s never been easy to pin down.
Working in New York before her record deal for Come Away With Me,
she split her time between playing and singing standards in a piano bar and
tearing up clubs in what she described as the “loud rock-and-roll band” Wax
Poetic. She connected with audiences in both arenas. A lot of traditional
music business folks would probably have counseled her to stick to a single
genre, which would have made packaging and marketing her easier, but would
have limited her musical and creative scope.
It is, of course,
still too early to know if Jones’s fierce independence and genre-hopping
ability will result in a long career. She does, however, appear to have
resisted every attempt by every kind of advisor to shape her into something
she isn’t. Asked her opinion of the type of pre-packaged pop typified by
artists like Britney Spears, Jones said she couldn’t imagine herself doing
that sort of thing. Instead, she adheres to a philosophy that seems to
comprise equal parts of Chrissie Hynde’s contempt for hypocrisy, Joni
Mitchell’s insistence on artistic and emotional honesty and, most
importantly, Aretha Franklin’s demand for respect. And that, to borrow
another line from Franklin, makes her a do-right woman, one who should
continue doing right for a long time to come. |
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