With the controversy surrounding Kelly Clarkson's new album, the bucking against her history and her audience compounded by the noise that has surrounded her speaking out against her bosses and her critics, it has become a kind of Bob Dylan at Newport moment for poptimists, we have reached the point where an aesthetic response becomes an ideological one. Maintaining a position based on the independence of a performer and the centrality of immediate pleasure, if not pleasure then emotional tendencies becoming central, has been a useful corrective to previously held obsessions with virtuoso techniques. With Clarkson in mind, it also allowed for a liberation of discourses surrounding gender, sexuality and race.
Questions were asked about whether the work was interesting, or did it work with in its own contextual history. How a critic felt became an integral part of the experience of both listening and writing about the album. Everyone became critics, with fanzines; call in shows, downloading and public spectacles. The audience response to the work reflected the fracturing and absorbing of cultural choices as social identities. Clarkson seems to be an ideal model for this kind of environment.
Starting with American Idol, which is the ne plus ultra of Chuck Berry's maxim: "the boys don't know, but the little girls understand" Her first album trusted both the audience she made with the show, and the experience of her producers. The resulting work was a gorgeous piece of pop craftsmanship, which sold millions of copies at a time when almost ever other mark of sales in music was falling. This success gave her power and access. This should have been a good thing, how she would have used this power made her second album high anticipated.
Then things became interesting. Though it has been written about in business, mainstream and electronic media, and Davis, Cowell and Clarkson have given press releases, we don't have a comprehensive idea of the meltdown. Davis apparently didn't want o release the album, Clarkson suggested that her youth, in a classically romantic way, was worth more then any of the experiences of her previous mentors, and the tussle became a symbol for the evil record companies taking power of artists. Clarkson assumed her record sales and youth would result in another album of great effectiveness.
It leads to an interesting question: What happens when artists refuse record labels: will it result in something more interesting or to put it in poptimist terms, will the autonomy of a young artists trump the wisdom/capital of business executives. I am reminded of the screeds against record companies written by Steve Albini or Courtney Love, except neither of them were ever really that close to the machines, and both have not really been beloved by the audiences. Clarkson is beloved by both critics and audiences, she is in the central of the pop-making machine, if she refuses her Svengalis, does the work become more interesting?
Its not a correct answer in the current climate, but in the case of My December, it seems that the producers are required to make a work that fulfills its promises. Clarkson moving away from her advisors has resulted in a record that starts with a good idea, or a few pieces of interesting word play, or a couple of examples of musical intrigue, and then loses momentum almost immediately. She doesn't have a clear pan and she almost refuses her best instincts. Like most really successful pop artists working recently, she realizes pop's most significant strength is how it absorbs its discontents. She has a single on the country chat with Reba McEntire (lots of American Idol singers end up singing country, and making a fantastic go of it, but very few Nashville Star winners do the same, its an intriguing question about way) That single is not on the album; she beings a song with electronic noise, like Beyonce's Ring the Alarm or MIA Galang, but it becomes little more than a decorative frieze; She has a psycho-sexual meltdown about boyfriends and the mechanics of fame like all of Lindsay Lohan's album, but it doesn't strike me as genuinely crazy. Lohan made a commitment to losing it, this seems like bad theater. I think that Beyonce, Lohan and even MIA listen to their producers, and have something to offer besides. I am not pimping for Brooke Hogan's new pop career, even if it has some of the best-bought talent in the business. IT requires a give and take, an ability to give, and an ability to take.
Kelly Clarkson might have enough sway to push her career but she doesn't have enough ovaries to make an album of consistency or merit. Poptisim posits that a work made young, independently, has a kind of intrinsic value. Clarkson's attempts at independence makes the argument that allowing oneself to be a novitiate or to knuckle under a mentor or several mentors creates a work born through collaboration. What is disappointing here is its safety and lack of courage. Sometimes the Shangri-Las need the Brill Buildings.
