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What do you think of when you think of Shania Twain?
Here's what I think of: A circle of women, dancing together at a bar that has a name like Crocodile Rock or Jitterbugs. It's the kind of bar that employs a DJ who calls out intermittently, "Portland, Oregon!" or "Stamford, Connecticut!" or "Winnipeg, Manitoba!" or "[Insert city/state name here] -- are you ready to party?!"
Each woman in the circle is holding a Lite beer in one hand and a small handbag in the other. When the first, rousing bars of a Shania Twain song sound -- let's say, that horn blast from "Man, I Feel Like A Woman" -- the women in the circle whoop loudly. They dance a little faster. They step a little livelier. They raise their Lite beers higher and wave them happily in the air.
Let me say this: I am in no way intending to demean any of: Lite beer; tiny purses; ebullient DJs; Stamford, Connecticut; happiness; circles of dancing women; or -- most certainly not -- Shania Twain. That's just the image that comes to my mind -- which, when you think of all the potential images that could come to mind when thinking of other enormously famous international pop sensations, isn't such a bad image at all.
Or, more specifically, here's what I don't think of when I think of Shania Twain: Frozen embryonic twins kept on ice; hyperbaric sleep-chambers; surgical masks; crack addiction; skeletal shuffle steps; expansive estates with self-contained theme parks; disturbing Svengali-esque relationships (well, we'll get to that later); tortured genius; shotguns, suicide, death, anguish, sadness, or pain.
Which means she must be doing something right.
I will submit that Shania is a genius. Not a tortured genius, surely, and not a musical genius either -- she leaves that terrain to her husband/producer, the admirably reclusive Mutt Lange, who's spent his career crafting tiny, perfect pop confection like some bubblegum-pop Willy Wonka. No, Shania is a genius at happiness, for starters. She exists to make everyone happy. She's a making-happy machine. She doesn't always succeed, of course -- not everyone is cheered by her spotlight smile and her horn-blast heavy honkytonk and her vaguely disingenuous up-with-gals attitude.
Then again, I'd contend that she doesn't make anyone really, really mad or really, really sad either -- in the way that most other pop icons can. She's pleasing at best, innocuous at worst. But no one can accuse her of anything less than the best intentions, if by "best intentions," you mean the wish to make lots and lots of people dance a with a little more pep at their own weddings.
Twain's most recent album, Up!, is an instructive example of her approach. The North American copies came with two discs, each featuring the same nineteen songs, but arranged differently. There was a red, pop-flavoured disc and a green, country-flavoured disc. In other continents, the country disc was swapped for a blue, Bollywood-influenced disc.
For any other artist, this would seem outrageous. This would stink of calculated marketing. She would have broken the sacred pop-music covenant -- the one by which most singers at least pretend that their songs come from some magical, personal place of inspiration, and not from a brainstorming meeting of professional pop marketeers.
But Shania doesn't have those kind of airs. Her goal is to sell tens of millions of records. She understands that the pop in "pop music" is short for popular. In fact, she's made this her credo. She strives to be popular. And she succeeds.
As for all the usual criticisms -- she's a package, she's a puppet, she only cares about selling records -- well, they don't stick to Shania. That doesn't mean they're not true, or not appropriate -- just that they don't impede her. Maybe this is because she shrugs and readily admits that they're all true.
Of the multiple discs in her album Up!, she's said, "We geared the music to please everybody." Of herself, she's said, "I am a commercial singer. When I write a song, I'm thinking about the people who are going to be listening to it...I hear other singers say, 'What I do is artistic, and I do it for myself,' I don't get that. If you're making it for yourself, why sell it?"
In fact, Twain's revealed that she occasionally records personal songs for herself -- but she has no interest in playing them for the world. "Who's gonna relate to that, anyway?" she says. "People are going to go out and pay for the record, and I want my music to relate to their lives, not vice versa."
So here we have a commercial singer who views her career as a job, who considers her onstage persona a crowd-pleasing creation, and who readily admits that her #1 priority is making music that appeals to as many people as possible. Is there any other pop star you can think of who'd say all this so unashamedly?
And wouldn't the world be a better place if more artists followed her lead? If we lived in a world where a band like, say, O-Town or even, say, Sheryl Crow, didn't waste even an ounce of energy defending their credibility and instead said, "Yes, I'm a package, I long to sell millions of records, and what about it? Now leave me alone, so I can put a final spit-polish on this irresistible new hit"?
This is Shania Twain's genius. She's subtracted the notion of artistry from her career entirely and replaced it with a rarefied brand of craftsmanship. Twain's music is designed to be catchy, in the way a well-made table is designed to be sturdy. And she's not ashamed of her consuming interest in carpentry. She's probably gleaned this philosophy in part from her husband, who reportedly once said to a colleague about some personal music he'd written, "As your friend, I like it. But it's not pop and it's not going to sell, so shut it."
Shania Twain long ago learned how to shut it.
And when Twain releases the same songs in three different formats, it doesn't seem calculating, because calculation suggests subterfuge, and Shania's never tried to pull anything over on anyone. This tactic has had another unexpected and bolstering benefit for her career: We don't suspect that she's secretly crazy.
Beautiful: yes; boring: maybe; vaguely robotic: sure. But because she hasn't been sold to us as having any sort of outsized talents -- quite the opposite -- we don't suspect she has outsized eccentricities either.
Compare her to a recent and timely example: Michael Jackson. One the one hand, he's incredibly talented. On the other hand, he's nutters. He's an extreme example, to be sure. But with many pop icons -- Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, Céline Dion -- we sense that the more we scratch the surface, the more likely we are to reveal shocking layers beneath. Creepy managers! Drug-induced fogs! "Exhaustion and dehydration"! Voodoo hexes!
Can you even imagine a story about Shania Twain checking into a hospital for "dehydration"? The most controversial thing she and Mutt have ever done was move to Switzerland. Switzerland! Can you get any more neutral -- any more competent, any more passionless but well-crafted -- than that?
If Michael Jackson is a Van Gogh painting, then Twain is a really well-built and attractive cabinet. She doesn't inspire fervour, but rather admiration at the quality and precision with which she's been put together. And as any carpenter will tell you, there's real joy to be found in a well-made piece of furniture.
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