raining_frogs (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} raining_frogs) wrote,@ 2005-12-10 01:32:00 |
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Disclaimer! This is a prototype rant and is entirely open to criticism and editing. It will eventually turn up on the new site, but any input or amendments would be appreciated.
Okay, this is the first rant I have posted here; usually my rants are a lot more lighthearted, but I haven't avoided the more unsavoury nature of Ms. Stefani's new image. I have a weird little picture though:
Love her, hate her, whatever, I want your opinions on this! If you think I'm wrong about anything, I'd love to hear your take on it. If you want to cite this article to anyone, you're more than welcome. Now, onto the lengthly, image-laden Gwen Stefani rant!!**
Let me start this by admitting a dark secret- I used to love No Doubt. Back in the day I would bounce on my bed shrieking “Just a Girl” into my hairbrush, and up until about the year 2000, No Doubt were one of my favourite pop rock bands. I sort of forgot about them until the release of “Rock Steady” in late 2001. I didn’t buy the album because I didn’t like the sound of the singles, which sounded to me like a clumsy foray into reggae and hip hop influences rather than ska-inspired Californian bubblegum rock. The sound was very eclectic, very hit and miss but it left me feeling ultimately empty. No Doubt’s lyrics were never wonderful, but they had an organic sincerity and a sweet vulnerability that was very endearing. Rock Steady, as well as being named after a character from Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles, was lyrically shallow and sloppy. Songs stopped being about emotions and relationships and started being about being awesome, looking awesome and having an awesome time.
If I thought Rock Steady was overly brassy and vacuous, I was in for a big surprise when Gwen went solo. Insisting No Doubt was still together and this project was something she had to get out of her system, she headed into the studio, working with high profile stars like Pharrell Williams, Linda Perry and Andre 3000 to make sure her outing was as commercially viable as possible. She emerged shortly after in late 2004 with a whole new look and a loosely conceptual “80’s dance album” titled Love, Angel, Music, Baby, L.A.M.B for short and coincidentally the name of her recently launched fashion label, a vainglorious collection of argyle, tweed and bras marketed as shirts. Speaking as someone who makes her own clothes, I have to say I found them really strange, because they’re odd looking yet boring at the same time. They seem to come exclusively in brown, grey and black, a girl would find it very hard to find anything in her wardrobe to pair them with, unless her school blazer was brown tartan or she went foxhunting often. And they also are ridiculously expensive, but I digress.
The conceit (and this is a conceited album!) is Alice in Wonderland, pop culture’s equivalent of a well-chewed dog toy. Alice is classical, colourful, endlessly inventive and marketable as hell. It’s all too easy for someone to cast oneself as Alice, the girl who just has to fall down a rabbit hole or step through a looking glass to emerge in a land of her own creation.
Siouxsie and the Banshees released an album called Through the Looking Glass, the Sisters of Mercy released Alice, and, er, Mcfly released Wonderland. The story has always been strongly linked to rock and pop artists and shows no sign of going away. The reason for it’s enduring popularity is the fascination with one’s imagination and what it can create, surprising even it’s creator. It comes as a surprise then, that Gwen’s album doesn’t show even a hint of that.
Gwen’s casting of Alice goes to herself, despite being 35. Age really shouldn’t be an issue, after all, Cyndi Lauper was 33 when she made her colourful, exuberant, girlish debut. Her carefree attitude made her appear more like an impish 20-something, and the notion that she was a bit old to be a teeny-bopping pop star with orange hair and bangles to her elbows seemed silly and irrelevant. Gwen would be endlessly more charming if she could emote some of that X-factor in her Alice persona; after all, Alice was always polite, but she had a definite spark that makes her an appealing character. Despite being dolled up in an ultra skimpy variation of Alice’s trademark look, a midriff-baring waistcoat, cravat , white tights and stripper shoes, Gwen exudes nothing but smugness. Her Alice is glossy and chilly to the touch, dressed in designer originals, manicured, toned, tanned and tightened, scarlet of lip and peroxide of hair, a shocking example of missing the point of something. And as always, it’s sellable.
"Making the album with all these people made me think of Alice in Wonderland, because it was kind of the trip I was on. It was as if I was being pointed into one room where I'd try making music with whoever was in there, before being pointed into another room where I'd get to try with someone else. It was magical, like the record was being written before my eyes." she explains. And that’s her entire reason behind the Alice concept, though since she admits that when she has kids she’ll dress up like Alice for them, I suspect this whole thing was just an excuse to wear a bustle and a bow in her hair.
Weirdly for a “concept album“, it’s not very conceptual. Gwen is singing about what’s important and prominent in her life, which seems to be money, fashion, success, and fame. It’s more of a dip into Gwen’s lifestyle, as she would like it to be perceived. I’ll be exploring her singles later on, but since I like to know of which I speak, I have checked out a couple of her album tracks too.
“Bubble-Pop Electric”: A 50’s inspired collaboration with Andre 3000, who is playing Gwen’s boyfriend Johnny Vulture. Gwen plays a virginal teenager (hey, maybe it is a concept album!) who wants to get laid at a drive in movie. Aside from the cringe-inducing spoken introduction, this doesn’t really stand out much. The production is good, there are some nice touches like the sound of popping bubbles making up a backbeat. It’s sort of ruined by Gwen trying to be cute and the car sound effects though.
“Harajuku Girls”: This is Gwen’s big tribute to Japanese street fashion. It sounds very latter-day Madonna, sort of like a clunkier Vogue. There’s not much of a tune to speak of, Gwen just half warbles the lyrics, which manage to be shallow, patronising and poorly written in one fell swoop:
“I'm fascinated by the Japanese fashion scene/ Just an American girl in the Tokyo streets/ My boyfriend bought me a Hysteric Glamour shirt/ They’re hard to find in the States, got me feeling couture.
What’s that you got on?/ Is it Comme Des Garcons?/ A Vivienne Westwood can’t go wrong/ Mixed up with second-hand clothes (Let's not forget about John Galliano, no)/ Flip the landscape when Nigo made A Bathing Ape/ I’ve got expensive taste (oh well)/ I Guess I’d better save up (cho takai)”
I might just be a white girl observing Japanese culture, just like Gwen is, but I haven’t seen too many girls in FRUiTS who walk around in John Galliano. Most “Harajuku girls” are just regular girls who attend school or have a job, the majority of them live with their family. They’re not affluent fashionistas who hurl money at every high end designer, they go for cheaper stuff like Milk or Baby the Stars Shine Bright and save up for several designer pieces like everyone else. Often they hand-make their own accessories or customise hand-me-downs. The point of Japanese street fashion is that it’s a personal style that can’t be emulated entirely by one designer. That’s why it’s so sad to see Gwen attempt it with her “Harajuku Lovers” line, a poor take off on Super Lovers and the Japanese street fashion leg of L.A.M.B. Needless to say, a simple hoodie from this line will set you back $96, and it comes with Gwen’s name spray painted garishly on the front.
As well as including a tribute to Japanese girls on the above track, Gwen’s Wonderland comes packaged with four of them. Named Love, Angel, Music and Baby, Gwen croons “I am your biggest fan,” to them and incorporates them into her videos as an ever-present entourage. In the promo for “What You Waiting For?” Gwen is seen drowning (a symbol, she explains, for drowning in the creativity of others) until two Harajuku girls sail over on upturned umbrellas and save her.
Gwen casts them in the role of her muses for the new album, but the way this is realised has been seen as decidedly unsettling by many. Gwen is never short of praise for Tokyo’s edgy teens, explaining in an interview:
“Everyone had this crazy personal style. The last couple of times I was there, it had evolved into all these different things like the Gothic Lolitas and girls with blonde hair and dark tans and high heels, like they were from Hollywood.”
The style is skewed somewhat for the “Harajuku Girls” look. For example, no fashion conscious girl in Harajuku would be caught dead in her school uniform, yet this look is the staple for most of the costumes, consisting of a school blazer or blouse and pleated skirt, albeit with a brightly coloured petticoat and lacy rumba panties underneath. The schoolgirl look is subverted further by neon knee socks, brightly coloured training shoes and gaudy hair accessories and headdresses. The Harajuku Girls almost invariably have Geisha-inspired makeup when in this garb. A huge inaccuracy setting this look apart from genuine street fashion is no girl has her own style. Colour scheme variations aside, the girls match at all times, and coordinate their look to compliment Gwen’s which is always a more elaborate, showier look. Disturbingly, they change their style completely to suit whatever Gwen is doing at the time- for example, during the “Hollaback Girl” video, all Japanese influence in their dress code is removed, and they are transformed into mongoloid booty shakin’ hip hop girls in Adidas tracksuits.
All this would suggest that Gwen is misunderstanding the ethos of this subculture, or at least hijacking it for her own ends. For all her compliments about the fashion and the girls who exhibit it don’t seem as sincere when her second single, “Rich Girl” contains lyrics like:
“I'd get me four Harajuku girls to (uh huh)/ Inspire me and they'd come to my rescue/ I'd dress them wicked, I'd give them names (yeah) ‘Love, Angel, Music, Baby/ Hurry up and come and save me”
You’d think that if Gwen was so taken with the way these girls dress, she would have no need to “dress them wicked”. As for giving them names, isn’t that what you do to pets as opposed to people? Instead of acting like someone who is impressed and inspired by Japanese street fashion, Gwen behaves more like she has discovered something nobody in the West has seen before, and now she’s bringing back four specimens to hawk to the slack jawed public. It’s King Kong with smaller, less hairy, prettier conversation pieces. Her fashion line is a blatant cash-in on the marketing of the girls, but Gwen is always the main attraction. By positioning herself centre stage, she takes quite a large chunk of the design credit for herself, even though she’s quite belatedly jumping on the bandwagon of Japan’s popularity. One only needs to glance at eBay to know what a cash cow Japanese inspired clothes are.
The role the Harajuku Girls play in Gwen’s world are no different from the roles a Chihuahua or a Louis Vuitton bag usually play in the world of celebrity; they are a strange mix of accessories and pets. Gwen says that they are figments of her own imagination, again taking credit for creating something that was thriving long before she latched onto it:
“They’re kind of here, they’re kind of not, they’re kind of in my head. I thought about them and they appeared one day.” They follow her to interviews and sit with her with stony expressions on their faces. If someone asks her a question that she has to ponder, they raise their index fingers to their temples, tilt their heads and mime thinking. On command, they giggle behind their fingers in a stereotypical way.
They always remain silent. When Gwen Stefani appeared on Jonathan Ross’ BBC 1 show, the Harajuku Girls were filmed in the green room sitting next to comedian Peter Kay, who was trying to make them laugh, engage them in conversation and offer them Flumps. When one of them struggled to keep a straight face, Gwen got rather alarmed and exclaimed to Jonathan “He was not in my imagination! He was my nightmare.” When in Gwen’s presence, the Harajuku Girls’ slightest movements are rehearsed and choreographed; spontaneity and emotion is something Gwen definitely does not encourage them to exhibit. Compare this to the exuberant, vibrant girls that fill FRUiTS’ pages- they are not silent, subservient geishas or programmable automatons; they’re just real girls having fun with their appearance. It’s very hard to picture girls like these nestling puppy-like around a throne Stefani lounges in, or flocking to her in awe while she towers, god-like above them in her platform heels.
The Harajuku Girls even bow to Gwen. And this is her way of showing she admires them?
As a highly visual artist, a lot is to be learned from her music videos, especially the first two, which were lavish and high-budget. The debut, “What You Waiting For?” is the best song on the album by a long shot, and the video is pretty impressive eye candy as well, with numerous costume changes and high production values. It documents Gwen, creatively blocked in a recording studio, falling asleep, entering Wonderland and pursuing a Japanese girl dressed as the White Rabbit in her new Alice persona.
Along the way she meets a variety of Wonderland and Looking Glass characters, all versions of herself. There’s Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, the Duchess and her pig-baby, who looks identical to the Tweedle twins, the Red Queen and the talking flowers.
Just like in the book, Gwen grows to an enormous size and creates a huge deluge with her tears, then shrinks down and almost drowns in them. I can’t help thinking it would be a lot more dramatic is she wasn’t clearly in the shallow end of a swimming pool. Celebrities, eh?
The Red Queen, according to Gwen, represents her ego. The Gwen-Queen pushes the Gwen-Alice into a void, where she plummets down to chase the maniacally giggling White Rabbit through a maze, crashing a mad tea party on the way. She wins no friends by jumping up and down on the table and whooping obnoxiously at the guests.
At the end of the video Gwen wakes up from the dream with the song written and her imaginary friends sitting silently in the studio. She treats them to a blast of the new track and they treat her to the most forced, submissive giggle ever. And the legend is born!
“Rich Girl” explores the Harajuku Girls’ imaginations around the age of seven or eight. It turns out that Gwen is their hero, and they love nothing better than to play with hideous, beestung lipped Bratz dolls (product placement!Gwen) of her and Eve, an artist who seems only to exist in other’s collaborations. Gwen was largely unknown in Japan before she started a publicity campaign, so the idea of Gwen and Eve being a bunch of little girls’ heroes over there is highly unlikely. It’s just another way of making Gwen appear connected to Japan, which she blatantly isn’t.
The video takes place on a pirate ship inside the girls’ imaginations, complete with a crew compiled of gymnasts and hiphop dancers who turn cartwheels and backflips in the background as if they were auditioning for CATS. Naturally, Gwen is the captain of this salty crew, Eve appears to be the first mate or bosun, and the Harajuku Girls are underwear-clad wenches.
The song is a take-off of the Fiddler on the Roof song “Rich Man” with the lyrics altered accordingly to fit Gwen’s lifestyle. Even if he did exist only in a musical, Tevye was a Russian peasant who dreams of getting poultry to fill his yard with. Gwen is already an extremely wealthy pop star who has married another wealthy pop star and isn’t shy of flashing her cash. She sings about acquiring all the hallmarks of celebrity wealth, but the thing is, she can and has bought much of the things she mentions:
“Think what that money could bring/ I'd buy everything/ Clean out Vivienne Westwood/ In my Galliano gown/ No, wouldn't just have one hood/ A Hollywood mansion if I could/ Please book me first-class to my fancy house in London town.”
Someone who already is incredibly wealthy pretending to be dreaming of things supposedly out of her reach for the benefit of the great unwashed masses really leaves a bad taste in my mouth. The paper thin phoniness is only enhanced by Eve’s lacklustre rap, which also contains a plug for the fashion label:
“See Gwen Stefani and her L.A.M.B/ I rock the fetish people, you know who I am.”
The only thing that stops the song and video from being one big L.A.M.B advert is the horrible “I’d get me four Harajuku Girls” part- considering this is part of all the things Gwen would do if she was a rich girl, this implies that she would like to buy them! I wonder if she has a bunch of black girls to pick cotton for her too?
“Hollaback Girl”, the third single, samples off Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust” and is Gwen’s “attitude song”. It’s a strange, strange song, and not very good with it. It’s laced throughout with a sample of Gwen going “This is my shit” and suffers from amiright.com related tragedies when the “shit” is censored out, because when it was played 24/7 by the DJ in the store I used to work, me and a few other people thought she was saying “kiss my shit”. Anyway, I’m digressing. The video is set in a high school, and Gwen, being 35, has the advantage of being female here, because a 35 year old male star going to a high school to hang with the kids for a music video has shades of Gary Glitter about it.
The video opens with Gwen taking a picture of the Harajuku Girls with her limited edition Harajuku Lovers digital camera, a gaudy HP Photosmart that’s a fairly unremarkable point-n’-snap, only has 4 mega pixels. You pay $60 extra to own the model with the Harajuku Lovers design. The Girl’s are all gangstered out for the video, with cornrows, tracksuits and teased hair. Gwen comments that they look “Super kuhwaheeh!” with her fantastic Japanese pronunciation skills. Then they go off with a bunch of school kids for a wacky adventure in the supermarket.
The rest of the video is held at a school pep rally inside a giant black space. Gwen is the head cheerleader, and …band… baton… pep person. Well, I’m not American, I have an excuse for not knowing what she’s meant to be.
Anyway, there is nothing else to this video, just some professional cheerleading and some dance moves, with Gwen gesticulating amongst it all. Then the video ends.
“Cool” is the only single that deals with a relationship; it’s about Gwen and her ex from some years ago learning to adjust, remain friends and deal with new relationships their old flame may now have. The video is very prettily filmed, I have to say, and has a very early 50’s feel. It’s a mixture of Gwen playing the gracious, classy, charitable person, accepting her ex and his fiancée into her giant mansion, and scenes from Gwen and Ex-Boyfriend’s relationship back in the day. Lots of makeup is applied to Gwen to make it look like she’s not wearing any. She also has her 50th stab at being Marilyn Monroe.
“Luxurious” is the last single from the album, and it would seem that Gwen has dropped her Japan fixation like a bad habit and is now all about being Latino. The Harajuku Girls are still in this one, but their appearance is completely American/Latino. A pretty blah video, all about material wealth, how much she has and all that Black Eyed Peas stuff. Gwen compares being rich to being in love, goes to a nail bar, hangs with her homies and wears the most obvious, unconvincing wig you’ll ever pay $700 for. And she also gets dressed up like Carmen Miranda and bursts piñatas without a blindfold. That’s cheating, Gwen!
For me, I’ll always look on Gwen as an ordinary girl who lost her way, someone who became obsessed with image over substance. Celebrities have a lot more opportunities available to them than they used to, but it doesn’t mean that it’s always a wise idea to take advantage of them. You know you’ve lost your edge when you’re a rock star who has dedicated their entire album to the promotion of a rather uninspired and inaccessible fashion line and are so desperate to latch onto the success that a certain subculture is having that you twist it to suit your own ends. And even if you are white and ethnically uninspired, it doesn’t help you find yourself to plunder the culture of other countries and ethnicities. Sadly, Gwen has spent much of her musical career trying on new guises, outfits and attitudes; Jamaican, Hindu, African American, and yet it still doesn’t make her a genre leaping culture ambassador, or even someone delighted by the world’s diversity, eager to learn more. It’s just an admission of how bored she is with her own identity.
As for the Harajuku Girls, despite how popular Japan is now in Western media, Asian people are still largely invisible. Don’t seize on Gwen’s use of the Japanese as an example of how they are gaining visibility, because it’s not the kind of recognition anyone would want. When the Japanese are shown as something more than mute, fashion obsessed, frivolous toys, then things will be improving. Until then, if you want to learn more about the Japanese, listen to their bands, watch their TV shows and movies, check out their own fashion labels and the real girls of Harajuku and let them speak for themselves. Don’t let Gwen try and sell you her knock-offs.
**I actually have some proper art for this that I have not scanned. I'm rubbish. It will appear in the next update for sure!
