Word: clarksons
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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This ain't Mika or Kelly Clarkson. Cool teen Londoners are into "credible music," according to Sam Killcoyne, the15-year-old organizer of the Underage events. And the roster of young talent assembled at London's Victoria Park for the festival was dripping with cred. The Young Knives, Jack Peñate and Cajun Dance Party may have already made an impression on the charts, but even the likes of Nottingham's electro-popsters, Late Of The Pier and Brighton's Maths Class have mustered a substantial London following by word of MySpace alone...
...deceptively easy to take Clarkson's side: Artists should be able to express themselves, and anyone who's ever heard the slick, wan albums that the Grateful Dead and the Allman Brothers Band made while under Davis' wing has a right to be wary of his involvement. Nevermind the way Whitney Houston's gospel-rooted lungs were constantly undermined by the formulaic material Davis and his cohorts saddled her with...
Beyond any concerns with Clarkson's lyric-writing abilities, what supposedly made Davis and his company nervous about My December is the album's emphasis on "rock," which is even how iTunes refers to it. (Davis took over SonyBMG during the making of Clarkson's previous, and more pop, album, Breakaway.) In essence, Clarkson wants to rebrand herself, an extremely alarming move -- for record moguls, anyway -- when hit records are more imperative than ever to the life of the slowly expiring music business...
...problem with My December is that it isn't particularly great rock. Even those dismayed by what American Idol hath wrought (consider my hand raised) have to admit Clarkson has a strapping, swooping voice. But it lacks a defined personality, reflected in the bloated industrial-Pat Benatar knockoffs ("Haunted," "Don't Waste My Time," the single "Never Again") that dominate the album. When they aren't in that mode, Clarkson and her new, hardly avant-garde producer David Kahne (Bangles, Sugar Ray) dabble with proven formulae: They know a solemn ballad must start with a lone strummed guitar ("Sober...
...lyrics, an aggrieved and angry lot, are no more forgettable than what we hear regularly on the radio. But most of the songs, co-written by Clarkson, rely on wide-screen, processed production gimmicks, rather than genuine hooks. And as any pop Svengali knows, making a pop record is as much a matter of craft and precision as it is eccentricities. It's about the thin line between hackwork and magic. As much as one can applaud Clarkson for wanting to be taken seriously, neither pop nor rock should sound as labored as most of My December. A Svengali might...