Word: lennox
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...NICE THING ABOUT FEMALE singer-songwriters is that they don't have to pretend to be guys. Guy singers do. Dead scared of being tagged sensitive, they get muscle-bound in machismo; it cramps their style and muddies their palette. But Annie Lennox or Bonnie Raitt or Mary-Chapin Carpenter can find shading in passion, a smile in sorrow. Especially in sorrow. For these artists, love is a thing felt most deeply when it's lost. So their songs are mostly past tense: the awful stuff that happened to them, the brave face they can put on it. They must...
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...
True to its title, the album contains no guest duets by visiting pop royalty. All the voices -- the doo-wopping backup singers, the chanting imam, the heavenly choir -- are Lennox's. And in seven of the eight videos made of songs in the set, Lennox is seen alone; her only company is her image in the mirror. There's plenty of 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...