Word: diva
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...these people had the intent, critically attentive gaze of opera buffs checking out a diva's pitch. "Was that spurt realistic enough?" they seemed to be mentally debating. Was that a clean whack that took off the arm of the papier mache fan? Periodically they moved their heads in a sort of approving nod: good spurt, good whack...
MUSIC Annie Lennox proves she's a fine Diva...
...ALBUM'S TITLE IS COMpletely ironic," Annie Lennox says of Diva. That sounds about right. From the moment 10 years ago when the young Englishwoman in the orange crew cut emerged as half of the hitmaking Eurythmics, artifice has seemed her form of art. Like David Bowie before her and Madonna just after, Lennox brought a chameleonic theatricality to pop music. Each new Eurythmics video presented a new Annie: the vamp, the gigolo, the ambassadress from another planet. So why not, for her first album without longtime partner Dave Stewart, the diva? In the videos she can wear beaded gowns...
...must have meant iconic. For what is a diva but a singer -- Callas in opera, Garland on the screen -- whose mission is to suffer, and to interpret suffering, for her faithful? Last we heard, Lennox was agreeably married, but that's not our business; besides, it's irrelevant to the authenticity of the pain in her strong and subtle alto pipes. What she has done in Diva is to marry that voice to a sheaf of memorable songs that map the doleful soul of a modern woman. This is angst for art's sake, something she can believe...
...variety in Lennox's music (long-lined ballads, driving Euro-pop, plaints in the French style), but the tone is consistently, nicely rueful. The sunniest tune, with a piano chirping in a Caribbean accent, is called Walking on Broken Glass. With self-absorption comes the dramatizing of the diva's ego. No one has experienced or endured what she has; no one has been so mad, bad or sad. The woman in these songs is "blind, viciously unkind" (Why), "cynical, twisted" (Precious). If Emily Dickinson were to show up at the Betty Ford Center, she might testify, as Lennox does...