You have not lived until you have drive a carload of Filapinos to the bank on payday and they insist on listening to Man, I Feel Like A Woman! at full blast. While they all giggle like loons and do “the dance.” In the car. At stoplights. In Saudi Arabia.
Waitaminnit…
Shania Twain SINGS too?
whoa.
I just thought she was HOT.
That would be Mutt Lange, one of the biggest of the big-time Nashville producers. His role in her success can’t be overemphasized.
Shania is hot as hell, but she represents everything I hate about where country music has gone.
While this is true, she can’t hold a candle to Ellen Cherry, who is hotter than, well, Shania Twain.
Cite?
But… I’ll admit I don’t look as good in a short skirt. :eek:
Two things.
First, about country music. You just have to remember that country music is like cholesterol: there is a good kind, too.
Secondly,
Of course you can sing as well as Shania Twain, just like you can sing as well as Jessica Simpson, and can write as well as the Harlequin Romance people, and can cook as well as McDonalds.
And the rest of music is the “gay games”?
Made as much sense as his comment.
I went to her concert last year because my BIL gave me a free ticket. It was okay. Honestly, I think she’s drop dead gorgeous (with the help of some major dental work. You should see pictures of her before she had her teeth done. :eek: ), but her song writing and singing is pretty weak, IMO.
I really do believe that if she looked like, I dunno, Roseanne Barr and wrote/sang the same music, she wouldn’t be famous today. That’s just MHO. YMMV.
I don’t like much of her music but I thought “Still The one” (from 1998) was one of the best pop songs I have ever heard.
Bwahahaha. That is awesome and so incredibly true.
I would exempt a lot of old country music from that categorization, but pop country sucks donkey dicks.
Record sales really are no indicator of someone’s talent. The best musicians I know of are basically unheard. Otis Gibbs ain’t got no titties to bounce around, so I guess he’ll continue to enjoy relative obscurity even though he is a musical genius far beyond the likes of Shania Twang.
Country music has become a sad parody of itself. There used to be “real” country (Western swing, Cowboy music, Willie & Waylon, etc.) but the “new and improved” pop-country stuff is just “lowest common denominator crapola” that serves only to sell records. Country is now where Pop music was in the 1950’s (it’s not about the music, it’s ALL about the money).
Think about how often the “I love my country” songs come up, you HAVE to like the song or you “hate America”, this is an incredibly smooth business model and when the records stop selling the producers just grab a new “flavor of the week”.
“I feel like a woman” was brilliant in it’s execution, a scantily clad major league hottie and a double entendre for the masses (I feel like a woman right now too, yuk yuk).
There are stand outs, people that actually seem to be “artists”, the guy who did “Guitars, Caddilacs and Hillbilly music” is the first one that I think of. The problem is that you have to wade through hours of “Achy breaky heart” crap to get to a few seconds of the good stuff and (for me anyway) that is way too high a price to pay.
Unclviny
Re: Otis Gibbs
In case anyone is remotely interested: http://www.otisgibbs.com/
Or you could just listen to KEXP on Thursday nights from 6-9 Pacific time.
I certainly agree that Shania Twain’s popularity has a lot to do with the fact she’s eye candy but there are also more things at work here. Shania Twain emerged into the public spotlight around the same time as another attractive (and more talented) country singer named Kelly Willis. Yet, while Twain has become a major superstar, Willis’ has achieved only modest success. The same is true for Neko Case who (to be sexist and superficial) is comely and talented but still mostly remains a cult favorite.
So why Shania and not Kelly or Neko? I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that the country music industry and country music radio (like the popular music industry as a whole) have done everything possible during the last 10 to 15 years to make things bland, safe, and conservative. They’ve done this by shrinking playlists and dumping artists who seemed too “challenging,” “different,” or “old country.” Twain’s handlers were certainly aware of this and they slickly packaged her and her music so that she sounded country–but not too “old country” or “alt country” like Willis or Case–and looked sexy–but not too sexy like Madonna (after all, country music fans are still a lot more conservative than people who listen to pop, rock, and/or hip-hop). Of course, the formula worked (and was successfully used again for Faith Hill).
Slick production (courtesy of Mutt) and an utterly corrupt system of legalized payola determining mainstream radio play.
If Neko Case had come along at the right time and had she allowed herself to be packaged and sold by Music Row, there’s no reason why she couldn’t have been where Shania is. She has twice the voice, twice the overall talent, and she’s twice as hot.
True, packaging has become as much a part of music as the songs themselves. It really determines who becomes a success and who does not. Talent CAN win out, it just has to take advantage of the situation and not be beaten to the marketing by less talented acts.
I love Neko Case. She’s one of my imaginary girlfriends. But she never would have gone for that anyway. She even turned down Playboy Magazine when they offered her money to pose nude, since she didn’t want to harm her musical credibility. It’s good to see other Neko fans giving credit where credit is due, though!
I was watching a Twain video for some reason in ~1999 with my popmusic-expert buddy, and we said, “Hey, they had a Def Leppard moment there!”
Then the end credits had “Lange” in the credits.
“Ahhhhh…”
Cite?