Deconstructing those themes: The English playing at being Americans is a pretty good place to start---it's the Rolling Stones ripping off Muddy Waters, the Beatles taking Chuck Berry, Dusty Springfield moving to Memphis to learn how to sing like Patsy, MIA working through her post colonial issues, or the Arctic Monkeys doing the sad indie thing, its all exotic enough to be safe. Coming from across the pond means automatically more respect. Her singing soul comes from the Northern Soul tradition, a cult movement for crate diggers, the kind of people who pay hundreds or thousands of pounds for 45s and have the slightly racist assumption that being African American and poor is more authentic than having disposable income and from Manchester.
Add that there seems to be this emerging genre from the mid 90s that damaged women who discuss the (especially sexualized) violence will be cathartic. I have to be careful here, because these things should be talked about, and the confessional is a legitimate form. But there is something unnerving in listening or hearing to it, and especially in how it is reported. I am thinking of the Esquire review of Fiona Apples; first album when they talked about "the ripeness of a bruised fruit" or her video for criminal, with the filthy hotel room and the writhing; or Tori Amos fucking the piano, masturbating with icicles, and also talking in a little girl voice about her first rape, or Cat Power shot by Avedon in the New Yorker, with her public hair showing, or Liz Phair's codependent exhaustion being taken as a liberation text (and her genuinely radical single Hot White Cum being ignored entirely) or the entire career of Courtney Love.
There is feminist rhetoric that explains this work as powerfully reclaiming, and there is space for that discourse, but how masculine critics absorb it is deeply problematic. I wonder if it is possible to split the public personae, the one of going out, showing up drunk, missed gigs, and being paparazzi fodder with the lyrics and music. Everyone knows that Blood on the Tracks is Dylan's divorce album, and Back to Black is Winehouse's addiction opus…does knowing that or reacting in a meta-contextual way function on the originating text at all? Do we ask these questions about Pete Doherty?
All of that out of the way, and its heavy baggage, can we talk about the album? It's good. Solid. Well constructed. She has an amazing voice, and it hangs low, blowsy, absorbing the chaos and brokenness around her. The album has all of the signifiers of diva-dom. There are places where it could be Dame Shirley Bassey, with the almost tenor gravel-ness, and there are places where it could be Aretha, or Billie or even Patsy. She has managed to make a timeless, almost perfect pastiche, of the blues, funk, soul and disco that have become the world's hurting and healing music, at least with issues of love. This is especially true when she swings, like the lines "sweet reunion, Jamaica and Spain, like how we were again, I'm at the tub, you in the sink", she makes the difficult go down easy. She can belt with almost the best of them, almost classical blues vocalism in places. Me and Mr. Jones will be the 3 AM drunk dialing anthem for a decade to come, and how she sings fuckery in that song is so iconic, like an aural bomb hitting your basic lizard brain.
The writing is equally strong. There are moments, where she talks about hating herself, ("I cheated myself, like I knew I would" from You Know I am Not Good) or being lonely ("I can't get joy thinking of you in the final throes" ibid), or drinking alone ("I Stay Up Clean The House, To Avoid Drinking" Some Unholy War), or having the wrong kind of sex with the wrong kind of men (Love is a losing Game, One I Wished I never played), or the moral ambiguity of personal care (The majestic Rehab, where one is never sure what the word Daddy means, and how serious that line of No No Nos really is) that seem both universal and intensely personal.
The album then is politically suspect, and I think more well loved then it has any right to, not quite over rated, but the kind of event that critics of a certain persuasion will love regardless of the actual product. Endless stories of people's self-destruction get kind of boring, and self-loathing gets tired really quickly. That said the woman has a unique voice, and a talent for a kind of explicit detail that is welcomed. It might be on my end of the year poll as well.
