The Clap Your Hands Say Yeah frontman returns with two markedly different albums, one recorded with help from Philly pals and one recorded in New Orleans.

Flashy Python / Alec Ounsworth: Skin and Bones / Mo Beauty

Skin and Bones / Mo Beauty

Refracted through rock mythology, the first chapter of Alec Ounsworth's story plays out in one of two stock ways. The first: Wanting nothing to do with the online hype typhoon attending Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's first album, he kills the band with a Difficult Second Album, 2007's Some Loud Thunder. The second, equally familiar way to frame the narrative comes from Ounsworth himself: "If I want to do something with a particular group of people, I will. And if I don't, I won't. If people are willing to work on those terms, that's good. If not, I'll just have to figure out a different way." Though I suspect his full story includes elements of both tropes, I'll give Ounsworth the benefit of the doubt-- at the least, it makes chapter two easier to understand.
This latest stage sees Ounsworth as an itinerant songwriter, recruiting collaborators to flesh out a heap of previously written material. On Skin and Bones, credited to Flashy Python and available only from his website, he hires all manner of Philly indie luminaries/friends (members of Dr. Dog, Mazarin, the Walkmen, and Man Man appear) to collaborate on a wheezy, dark song cycle-cum-inebriated stumble down South Street. Mo Beauty, released on Anti-, is more a proper solo album as we know these things, yet also recorded with significant help: at New Orleans' Piety St. studio, with a dozen or so local pros. Thus, two fresh plot-twists: Bones is druggy rock'n'roll so uniform in sound and sentiment it feels like a one-off concept album; Beauty is more variegated and takes more chances: Ounsworth showing his chops.
Lyrically, Skin and Bones is a sort of treatise on growing up and settling down while staying weird, cut with lamentations on the false consciousness of those who've chosen to follow the herd. The vibe is overwhelmingly woozy, with Wurlitzer and Hammond-laden arrangements spiked with jagged guitars and Ounsworth's instantly recognizable squawk, which more than ever evokes some anachronistic eccentric, twirling around a bar and liberally quoting Ezra Pound. On the title track, he bleats out a skewed requiem for life passing him by ("Nothing's wrong, the spaceship comes from inside!") before crying out to his wife Emily to take him home. "Cattle's New Clothes" is spiked with pedal steel, as Ounsworth lays into an ex-undergrounder-turned-square ("Look at him go down with the businessmen cattle").
Though it's possible to enjoy the atmosphere of Bones without worrying about lyrics, one does need a taste for murky and tipsy ambience. Ounsworth gets fucked up straightaway on the opening track, a giddy, staggering thing held up by Toby Leaman and Matt Barrick's muscular rhythm section. He free-associates for a few minutes before the piece trails off with Billy Dufala's skronking saxophone coda, the musical equivalent of belching loudly while getting pushed out of the bar. "Ichiban Blues", a sour take on exotic travel, is the most straightforward song on the album, and cinema ode "In the Darkness" will satiate those looking for a return to the gangly new wave of the CYHSY stuff. Like those lost evenings we've all had, Bones is a good time while it lasts, but not necessarily something to return to all that often.
Ounsworth's likeness to David Byrne began with CYHSY's still lovely "Over and Over Again", and the comparisons won't stop with Mo Beauty-- though for slightly different reasons. Where Byrne himself once decamped in the Big Easy to work with the Dirty Dozen Brass Band for the spare, stately score of Knee Plays, Ounsworth went to New Orleans to hook up with former Meters bassist George Porter, Jr., keyboardist Robert Walter of the Greyboy Allstars, and a dozen or so others. "I've romanticized that city's aesthetic since I visited there when I was 12," he told our news section last August. "The music seems to just flow out of people naturally."
The result of Ounsworth bottling this "flow" and working it into a set of songs is an album that showcases the breadth of his talents much more than the limited palettes of Flashy Python or CYHSY. Steve Berlin's crisp production highlights the collaborators' vibrant contributions while keeping Ounsworth front and center, resulting in a balanced, evocative work with a focus, appropriately enough, on place. Between the solemn, achingly pretty ballad "Holy, Holy, Holy Moses (Song for New Orleans)" and the jaunty, acoustic "South Philadelphia (Drug Days)", Ounsworth is able, like Byrne, to balance tics with songcraft, and play in opposite ends of the emotional spectrum (post-Katrina anomie, getting fucked up as a kid) with an aura of effortlessness. Elsewhere, "Idiots in the Rain" brings the brass to bear on a tune about the exuberance of a French Quarter band revving up, and "Bones in the Grave" is a creaky, spooky bit that by itself explains the LPs release on Anti-.
Yet speaking about both records, Ounsworth told us that Skin and Bones was "more about me trying to erect some grand statement," while Mo Beauty is "going down to New Orleans for a short period of time and trying to piece something together based on a collection of mostly old songs." Hmmm, okay. But one of these "pieced-together old songs" happens to be "That Is Not My Home (After Bruegel)", a set of vignettes each beginning with "me and the wife," set to a wonderful blend of swoony new wave, punchy brass, and torrid string swells, which just might be the best song he's ever done. That's one of the ironies of authorship, though: Too often, the author himself can be his own worst enemy when it comes to his own real-life narrative, dismissing his most inspired work in lieu of something which, for whatever reason, he finds himself closer to. For our sake (and his), let's hope he relegates future Flashy Python work to footnote status, and continues staking his persona on more adventurous projects.


Self-funded, self-released, self-produced, and self-referential, the Welsh rock band’s seventh album has a big-tent sound with all the requisite wit and panache. It is unquestionably the ultimate Los Campesinos! album.

All Hell

How does one best measure the Los Campesinos! experience—in years or albums? Sexual humiliations or World Cup disappointments? Pints of lager or mouthfuls of vomit? Whichever you prefer, they’ve come a long way to reach a recognizable form of “maturity.” All Hell, the Welsh band’s seventh album, ends with a solo acoustic guitar, musings on the afterlife, and hushed backup vocals that make it kinda sound like a late-period Blur song. True to form, it’s also called “Adult Acne Stigmata.”
If the embarrassments of adolescence have become badges of honor in adulthood, well…there’s probably a Los Campesinos! album to which you have an unhealthy attachment, so I won’t dishonor that by calling All Hell their best. But it is unquestionably the ultimate Los Campesinos! album. Self-referential, self-funded, self-managed, self-released, and self-produced, All Hell is a triumphant validation for the coalition Los Campesinos! have amassed in two decades of wandering the margins: emo-curious indie adults, indie-curious emo kids, DIY scenesters and Genius annotators, avid consumers of hard cider and hard-left politics, obsessives of European football and American Football alike.
To call All Hell a form of fan service is hardly a slight, since that’s been the entire point of Los Campesinos! from their very beginning—from their early zines to the “Blood Pact” badge to the “Doomed” football jerseys to their listening party bingo cards or even just the socialist leanings inherent in their name. Throughout their new record, Gareth David pledges allegiance to Hunt sabs and ACABs, secular girls with Catholic guilt, backbreakers of the spineless, cheapskates with costly words. Conversely, the ever-present “them” in positions of authority are anonymous and off-screen, interested solely in protecting their power. “Tell me how many hours in any single dull day/Can I pray to a league table but still it don’t change?” he sneers on “Long Throes,” a perfect expression of the existential dread that comes after years believing that outcomes in politics, sports, or the supernatural could actually be changed by the average person.
Maybe there’s a German word that captures this feeling, but until then, Gareth does his best with a series of truly one-of-one metaphors. As ever, the dizzying array of football, video game, and wrestling references illuminate rather than obscure the syllabus of “adult friendship…drinking for fun and drinking for misery…the heart as an organ and as a burden…climate apocalypse.” The grim jest of life is a “cavalcade through antemortem, terminal suburban boredom,” ground-level organizing is “pooling pennies for the coin-op guillotine”; lust is rendered as familiar greed (“You’re a million bucks and I am avarice”), whereas the climate apocalypse might come before finding true love (“You and me, antipodes/The Earth’s collapse, we finally meet”).
At this point, Los Campesinos! aren’t trying to sway critics who found them too wordy, too effusive, or just plain too much. The band wasn’t writing songs as streamlined and propulsive as “Moonstruck” in their early, bad-diary days, even if the chorus still rests on the word “selenograph.” “Feast of Tongues” builds towards the first true Los Campesinos! lighter-waver, the only lovers left alive survive on “the tongues of the last bootlickers.” But All Hell expands their sound and vision, welcoming diehards who’ll recognize the callbacks to “I Broke Up in Amarante” or any of the “Heart Swells” medleys, casual listeners who crammed “You! Me! Dancing!” into all of their 2007 mix CDs, and the newly converted teens whose parents need explainers of how to act at a Los Campesinos! show.
“Holy Smoke (2005)” finds LC! back in their spite-spitting, scenery-chewing MySpace voice, when Gareth’s top priorities were getting drunk and getting laid. Now with “no children and no profession, walking dead at 37,” Gareth takes a more considered approach, trying to suss out the generation gap between himself and the future of the left (“They don’t buy the beers I drink/And they don’t drink the beers I buy”). “Clown Blood/Orpheus’ Bobbing Head” is a welcome return to the scabrous post/pop-punk of We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed, with its production enlarged for texture—the better to pick up on the nods to Black Desert Online, Leisure Leagues, and Bundesliga.
Every proper song on All Hell honors some past iteration of Los Campesinos! from a more refined perspective, none more so than the one featuring the first Kim Paisey lead vocal in nearly a decade. It’s 18 years of evolution crammed into 156 seconds: the verse is also basically the chorus, Tom Bromley rips off a hotshot solo that would’ve required a session hand on 2008’s Hold On Now, Youngster, the gang vocals sound piped in from a church rather than a pub, and having refrained from barging in over his bandmates for nearly two minutes, Gareth comes in to steal the bridge. But again, if this all sounds like a “mature” version of Los Campesinos!, the song is called “kms” and played for laughs.
“kms” sets the tone for All Hell’s remarkable final stretch, one that amplifies the tender mood that Los Campesinos! have taken since they reclassified themselves “the UK’s first and only emo band” upon seeing their influence spread amongst Tumblr power users and maximalist revival bands. “Grind my bones into the finest snow,” Gareth shouts on “0898 HEARTACHE,” a callback to his early tendencies to envision no better outcome for his life than the most gruesome, awesome death. The message soon changes, as he hopes to be “restored to Earth, afforded a second birth,” providing a feast of rotten fruit for years to come. By the end, Los Campesinos! view mortality with more acceptance than resignation. Maybe this is just the inevitable subtext for a band that once put out a new album every year and now does so once every half decade; especially one surely aware of the precarious longevity of any peoples’ movement.
So yes, Los Campesinos! are thinking about their legacy at a time when formerly beloved athletes, television shows, and politicians have disappeared up their own ass doing the same. The difference here is that, for all of the “self” that went into making All Hell, it’s all in service of endless generosity and respect for the people who made it possible. After 18 years, the members have finally dropped the Campesinos! surnames, the last thing that distinguished them from their own fans. The astonishing amount of care and detail that went into All Hell might just be the result of seven and a half years of creation, or maybe it’s Los Campesinos! giving us an album big enough to live in case it needs to last a lifetime.


Just a few months after the reunion of her "Making the Band" group Danity Kane landed with a flop, singer Dawn Richard returns with Blackheart, a fierce and sometimes harrowing album.

Blackheart

Dawn Richard has spent her solo career blowing up emotions to near-mythical levels. Her last solo album, 2013's self-released Goldenheart, portrayed a love affair in the language of battle and war, while 2012's Armor On channeled it through religious devotion. It's potentially hammy territory, but it works because Richard sells it so well—she's a tremendously evocative singer who can turn a song as fluffy as Katy Perry's "Dark Horse" into something truly exotic and alluring. And with help from her close partner Druski, she dressed it all up in sleek, futuristic production. All of that made last year's reunion of Danity Kane, the "Making the Band" group with which she got her start, almost shocking, at least on Richard's part. Jettisoning her independent freedom in favor of cookie-cutter girl-group pop she already managed to escape once, it turned out the group couldn't contain her anyway. The reunion only lasted a few months, resulting in a nearly-unlistenable album and an alleged physical altercation involving Richard. Now, just a few months after DK3 landed with a flop, we get Blackheart, a fierce and sometimes harrowing album that feels all the more potent given the shaky year that preceded it.
Blackheart is the second installment in Richard's planned Heart trilogy, and it also launches a new phase in her career which she calls "The Black Era." Appropriately, the music is darker, more paranoid, and more personal. Where Goldenheart's themes of romance were intentionally universal, Blackheart deals with Richard's own experiences in the music industry, her frustrations and her frayed nerves. She also plays a much larger role in the production, co-producing most of the tracks herself with Noisecastle III. Don't be fooled by the bump and grind R&B of first single "Blow"; Blackheart offers a sprawling and sometimes knotty take on songwriting, sometimes doing away with verse and chorus structure altogether and settling on a stream-of-consciousness barrage instead.
The album's opening run seems purposefully designed to scare away less adventurous listeners with rushing synth runs, jungle breaks, and sharply-cut vocal samples. Dawn doesn't even come in for three minutes on "Calypso", and once she does, she's nearly taken in by the tide anyways. The idea might be a cliché at this point, but on Blackheart Richard truly uses the studio as an instrument. Organic sounds are few and far between, and just when you think you've got a hold on a song, it could all melt away and morph into something else entirely. "Billie Jean" turns from side-eye rant into an orchestral ballad, and the cautionary tale "Adderall/Sold" swells into a passionate vocoder hymnal where Richard bellows "She was living/ Like she's dying soon" with such conviction that it's hard to believe she's not talking about herself. The vocoder aappears over and over on Blackheart, embellishing her cries with a gravity that meshes with the already otherworldly texture of her natural voice.
There are a few more traditional moments on Blackhear**t, beginning with the power ballad "Warriors", which sounds like a holdover from Goldenhear**t. "Projection" is a stunning rumination on memory that sounds illusory, transient, and in danger of simply flickering out at any moment, while "Castles" focuses on themes of fragility and solidarity amidst a torrent of vocal ad-libs both sampled and Richard's own. This section of the album forms a redemptive arc that peaks with "Phoenix", a feel-good duet with ex-Danity Kane partner Aundrea Fimbres that would be overbearing if it didn't feel so triumphant. Look at it one way and it's a typical radio song about coming back from heartbreak, but put it in the context of Richard's career outside her solo work—a series of false starts unbefitting of such a uniquely talented artist—and it feels transcendent. Even its relatively simple structure and Top 40 sonics register as a renewed sense of clarity rather than a compromise.
The excess of "Phoenix" is tempered by "Choices", a short interlude where Richard croons "I love you/ But I love me more" over gilded threads of synthesizer. It's one of the many little moments on Blackheart that feels like an emotional punch in the stomach, especially once she starts cooing "I choose me" in gorgeous falsetto melisma that sounds as effortless as her talk-singing on "Billie Jean". "Choices" and penultimate track "Deep"—a bare, conciliatory climax—are a reminder that beneath all the production flourishes and high-art concepts, Richard is also a deft and powerful vocalist.
"Deep" is a heartbreaking conclusion where Richard acknowledges her mistakes. "Trying to save the little soul I have left/ I lost it in a poker game to the highest bet/ And if you ask me I'm not the kind to play and quit/ And even though I lost the best of me/ It was worth it," goes the opening verse, a confession from someone who was, at one point in her career, part of a major pop group. As she stands now, Richard is a lone wolf, and Blackheart reaffirms it. The album pulls her back onto the path she she started with Armor On and into unknown territory.
"I took it to the deep," she sings on the song's chorus, "because my heart doesn't swim in shallow creeks." She's not exaggerating: if there's anything that defines Richard's music, it's her grand, sweeping feelings that she lays bare for all to see and hear. Blackheart takes it down a peg from the mythology of Goldenhear**t into a more introspective, earthy realm—that it's wrapped up in inventive production that feels about five years ahead of mainstream radio is just icing on the cake. She begins the album howling "I thought I lost it all" into the void, but by the end, it feels like she found herself, and her voice, again—Blackheart is the singular, visionary work that she's been hinting at since she struck out on her own post-Diddy in 2011.


The bright lights flashed in unison like cheap aluminum UFOs in a starless sky. My eyes convulsed in time with ...

Radiohead: I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings EP

I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings EP

The bright lights flashed in unison like cheap aluminum UFOs in a starless sky. My eyes convulsed in time with the massive flashes of white, but I didn't really mind. Somehow, Franky and I had made it to that sacred place where the lights are far too bright and the sound is far too loud. The excitement was palpable. Though the vast majority of the 10,000 or so people present was directly behind me, and well outside of my field of view, I could sense the size and excitement of the crowd around me. I turned to Franky, who stared in rapt attention at the stage, absolutely silent.
Finally, the moment arrived. These five beings graced the stage like the gods of old descending from Olympus, illuminated by the fiery rays of Helios' chariot. The scene was as heavenly and beautiful as Jesus and Buddha playing handball on Jerry Garcia's assflab. The crowd's response was as loud and forceful as a tidal wave of live kittens. Yet, Franky remained silent. Finally, as the band prepared for their first song, he turned his head to me, his brown eyes shiny and round like a sheep turd soaked in glitter. Surely, he was aware that this was the single most magical moment of his life ever. Staring awestruck at the massive crowd behind my head, Franky opened his mouth slightly, prepared to speak. And the words he spoke, which seemed to flow straight from his soul like a leaky thermos of godly ambrosia, have remained with me to this day:
"Thom Yorke just got 10,000 people to pay $60 to stare at his ugly ass."
Sure enough, the audience seemed to be positively transfixed by the image of Yorke, his lazy eye dragging two or three centimeters behind him, twitching and wailing. It wouldn't be much of a stretch to equate the show to Radiohead's music itself-- big rock laced with intrigue, fragility, and ugliness. On I Might Be Wrong, a good deal of the essence of Radiohead's live show is distilled onto an eight-track EP. And while some moments are absolutely stellar, I Might Be Wrong is only a shadow of what a Radiohead live album could have been.
Like most Radiohead shows, I Might Be Wrong opens with "The National Anthem." The song's introduction, with Thom Yorke breathing in staccato over Colin Greenwood's thunderous bassline and Jonny Greenwood's skillful manipulation of the primitive Ondes-Martenot, is absolutely wonderful. Without a horn section, though, the song never really develops as it does on Kid A, trailing off without a satisfying conclusion.
"The National Anthem" is followed by "I Might Be Wrong," a song that wouldn't be even remotely interesting in its live incarnation if not for the subtle shifts in dynamics that grace the middle and end of the song. "Morning Bell," like "The National Anthem," builds to a meandering ending. But it meanders with enough grace to keep it interesting, with Ed O'Brien and Jonny Greenwood working their trademark magic with effects-laden guitars and synthesizers.
With "Like Spinning Plates," I Might Be Wrong hits its stride. Recasting the song as a piano ballad with eerie synthesized strings, Radiohead turned one of Amnesiac's most cryptically brilliant tracks into something much more emotional and accessible without being at all sappy or manipulative. With this new version, the song's melody-- complete with the eerily, vaudevillian quality that inhabits it during the chorus-- takes center stage, showcasing Radiohead's songwriting virtuosity rather than their sonic adventurousness.
"Like Spinning Plates" is followed by "Idioteque" and "Everything in its Right Place," possibly the two finest tracks from Kid A, and certainly one of the better sections of this EP. The former succeeds in capturing the energy Yorke channels during live interpretations of the song, whereas the latter takes the aural experimentation of the album version one step further, with sublime digital manipulations building electronic tapestries of sound.
After the schizophrenic meltdown of "Idioteque" and the catharsis of "Everything in Its Right Place," an entirely unexceptional version of "Dollars and Cents" is more than a little bit of a letdown, as it lacks both momentum and innovation. But "Dollars and Cents" is followed by I Might Be Wrong's main attraction, the previously unreleased "True Love Waits." An acoustic outtake from the OK Computer era, "True Love Waits" is absolutely gorgeous. With signature unexpected chord changes and a melody that both aches and soothes, "True Love Waits" can hold its own against any song on OK Computer, and makes a very welcome ending to I Might Be Wrong.
But while tracks like "Like Spinning Plates" and "True Love Waits" certainly justify the existence of I Might Be Wrong, the EP seems purposely limited in a way that's immensely frustrating. At only eight songs, the disc is being sold and marketed (and priced) as a full-length album. Given the fact that so many shows were recorded in preparation for this EP, there's absolutely no reason that I Might Be Wrong should have been limited to eight tracks. Similarly frustrating is the fact that every single track here, aside from "True Love Waits," is taken from either Kid A or Amnesiac. The inclusion of a live version of "Fake Plastic Trees," "Karma Police," or "Just" would have rounded off the record nicely. Sadly, one can't shake the feeling that this disc exists largely as a promotional item for Radiohead's last two albums.
The quality of the recordings and performances on I Might Be Wrong is certainly top-notch. But Internet bootlegs-- most notably a soundboard recording from Nijmegen, a small city in Holland-- present a better, more complete picture of the Radiohead live experience. Still, even with better live documents available for free, it's hard to resist an officially sanctioned live EP with a few absolutely stellar tracks. And although I Might Be Wrong is obnoxiously incomplete, the fact remains that Thom Yorke just got 100,000 people to spend $17.99 for eight songs. Good for him.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit Katy Perry’s second album, a sugary pop juggernaut with big misses and even bigger hits.

Teenage Dream

When it’s on it’s on: Teenage Dream has the endless promise of summer vacation. It lives in suspended animation, always excited for the weekend, never clocking into work. Katy Perry’s second album is ostentatious, off-color, fearlessly optimistic even when the music isn’t great. It is forever young, but—as teenagers often do—still loudly announces its age. And it was a smash: Its five No. 1 hits tied a record set by Michael Jackson’s 1987 album Bad. Half of the tracklist went Top 10. Teenage Dream was the last gasp for guitar-powered bubblegum; the following year, Adele’s 21 would shatter sales records and kick off a moody new era in pop. To look back on it now is to realize just how fast it all changed.
Teenage Dream’s subject, like the subject of young life broadly speaking, is love. Some of the album was supposedly written about men from Perry’s own life, including then-fiancé Russell Brand (“Hummingbird Heartbeat,” “Not Like the Movies”), Gym Class Heroes’ Travie McCoy (“Circle the Drain”), and nice boy Josh Groban (“The One That Got Away”). But the appellations might as well have been added after the fact; these songs aren’t confessionals, they’re two-ingredient cocktails, party-starters just waiting for you to arrive. Teenage Dream boasts some of the stronger writing in Perry’s catalog, maybe because she hadn’t yet had time to repeat herself. And even then: There are two hurricanes, one representing the passion of youth and another followed by a rainbow, and then there’s another rainbow, except this one ends in a giant penis.
If Perry seems like she’s really trying, it’s because she was an unlikely success. She grew up in Santa Barbara, California, the middle child of Pentecostal preachers who sent her to private religious schools. She dropped out after freshman year and released her first music, as Katy Hudson, on a small Nashville Christian label. Her eventual pivot to Katy Perry, flirtatious and foul-mouthed pop star, made for a contrast as bold as her outfits, and she had to try the whole time: years in major-label purgatory, entering and exiting contracts with Def Jam and then Columbia with no album, no single, nothing except a soundtrack cut for The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. She worked for a time critiquing other singers’ demo submissions at a small label outside Los Angeles. It was, she remembered later, “the worst music you’ve ever heard in your entire life. … I wanted to jump out of the building or cut my ears off and say, ‘I can’t help you! I can’t catch a break. What am I gonna say to you? And you sing off tune.’”
Perry finally caught her break with Capitol A&R executive Chris Anokute, the twenty-something son of Nigerian immigrants from New Jersey who’d caught his break by approaching Whitney Houston’s father in public. At a Grammy party in 2007, Anokute heard a tip from Angelica Cob-Baehler, a Columbia publicist: Perry had potential, but the label was going to drop her anyway. Cob-Baehler was plotting her own career move from Columbia to the Capitol umbrella, and she was determined to take Perry with her. “I stole all the Katy files,” she recalled in Perry’s 2012 documentary Part of Me. “I just grabbed them and I put them under my arm and I just snuck out.” Anokute and Cob-Baehler persuaded Capitol to take another chance, though expectations weren’t high. “It was a really bad deal because she’d been dropped, so it’s not like we were going to give her a huge advance,” Anokute later told Billboard.
At Columbia, Perry had been recording a pop-rock album with production trio the Matrix, who’d worked on 2002’s Let Go and 2003’s Liz Phair. She liked rock music; she wasn’t allowed to watch MTV growing up, but she admired Shirley Manson and Gwen Stefani. After landing at Capitol, she revamped some leftover tracks, wrote new material, and assembled her official debut, 2008’s pop-punk-inflected One of the Boys. To re-introduce herself, she released an mp3 download: “Ur So Gay,” a casually homophobic takedown of “metrosexuals,” that elusive, well-groomed, adamantly straight figure of ’00s cultural anthropology. Madonna called it her new favorite song. If this was gasoline, “I Kissed a Girl” was a blowtorch. Perry’s bicuriosity anthem felt a little retrograde, but it was still risqué enough to annoy prudes, and there was no other song quite like it. Wide-eyed and media-trained, she rode to her first-ever No. 1 hit on an updraft of semi-manufactured notoriety.
One of the Boys made Perry a star, but it came with qualifications: The relative novelty and runaway success of “I Kissed a Girl” put her close to one-hit wonder territory, and the perky pop-rock sound was on its way out. “The second record I’m more buckled in because, God, how many times do you see people slump on their sophomore record? Nine out of 10,” Perry told the Guardian. “I want to sell out, but just not in the ‘I’ve sold out’ kind of way. I want to sell out arenas and sell millions of records.” She’d spent years on projects that amounted to nothing, and now that she was finally inside the gates, anything less than improvement would look like a failure. She had to prove she could do it again—become impossible to ignore.
Perry co-wrote every song on Teenage Dream, but she got help from the biggest names in ’00s pop production: Max Martin, Stargate, and Christopher “Tricky” Stewart. She also reunited with Dr. Luke and Benny Blanco, the producers responsible for One of the Boys’ two most popular songs, “I Kissed a Girl” and “Hot N Cold.” In 2010, before he would be accused in a lawsuit of sexual abuse and battery, Luke’s career was on the upswing, powered by megahits like Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone” and Miley Cyrus’ “Party in the USA.” At the time, Blanco was Luke’s protégé, working on music for Britney Spears and, of course, Kesha, whose debut single “TiK ToK” became the first No. 1 song of the new decade.
The final key to Teenage Dream was Bonnie McKee, a friend from Perry’s first years in L.A. Once an aspiring pop star herself, McKee switched to songwriting but, much like Perry, spent years languishing in the industry. “After we got dropped from our labels, we used to play shows together,” she said later. Teenage Dream changed her life. It was McKee who came up with “Teenage Dream”—not the entire song, but the phrase, the first of Teenage Dream’s many flytrap hooks. Like sex scenes in high-school movies and “...Baby One More Time,” “Teenage Dream” brushes uncomfortably against pop culture’s obsession with the barely legal, but Perry and McKee pull it off. “Teenage Dream” is sexy, but it’s written from an adult perspective: Perry’s narrator is a (slightly) more mature woman getting back in touch with the kind of young dumb love that feels like a distant memory until it happens again. Hear the nods to nostalgia in the elastic guitar chords of the intro, as if “Good Vibrations” started with the chorus, and in the climactic line, “Don’t ever look back, don’t ever look back,” like an echo from “The Boys of Summer.” If Perry wasn’t listening to Don Henley, she probably heard the Ataris’ Top 40 pop-punk cover.
Perry and McKee collaborated again on “Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.),” a song inspired by their own youthful party days, and on “California Gurls.” Bouncier than a beach ball, “California Gurls” is Teenage Dream’s towering lead single, with a scene-stealing cameo from Snoop Dogg, identified in the Candy Land-themed video as the “Sugar Daddy,” winking and nodding as he takes in the scenery. It’s the biggest song on the album, not by sales, but because it sets the backdrop: Teenage Dream is a California record, and from the cover art to the concert tour, it all happens in Candy Land. The “California Gurls” video is the single most memorable part of the album, and the single most memorable part of the “California Gurls” video—well, you already know. Mashing up Madonna’s Jean Paul Gaultier cones with a little Varsity Blues-style Americana, Perry’s whipped-cream-can bra was so critical to the Teenage Dream aesthetic that she closed concerts by spraying foam from a red-and-white bazooka.
To the media, Perry pitched “California Gurls” as the West Coast answer to JAY-Z and Alicia Keys’ “Empire State of Mind,” which conveniently had spent five weeks at No. 1 earlier in the year. But “Empire State of Mind” is about ambition; “California Gurls” is about having it all. It’s the sped-up, tarted-up update of the Beach Boys (whose label was apparently successful in removing Snoop’s ad-libbed “I really wish you all could be California girls” from the album version) and the carefree party girl’s reply to 2Pac’s streetwise anthem “California Love” (whose talkbox vocal hook sneaks into the outro). Perry’s first real flirtation with hip-hop was anything but hard, which is why it’s so much fun—Snoop Dogg sounds as game and as goofy as she does.
But more often, Teenage Dream feels dated, and not just because of the white girl with a feather headdress in the “Teenage Dream” video or 2010-vintage lyrical clunkers like, “That was such an epic fail.” Ironically, it’s the fresh-faced power-pop of One of the Boys that aged better; the attempt to outdo it sounds loud, insistent, compressed. The tracklist takes a nosedive with “Peacock,” a song-length dick joke that aims for high camp and misses. Even that isn’t as grim as “Who Am I Living For?” a dreary power ballad for the Serious Person that previews Perry’s future lyrical woes. Her 2008 Warped Tour jaunt resurfaces on the powderpuff hard rock of “Circle the Drain,” a chronicle of a crumbling relationship that can’t stand up to its inspiration, Alanis Morissette’s “You Oughta Know.” But Teenage Dream refuses to take itself seriously for long: “E.T.,” a bizarre, shouty sci-fi romance, magnifies a confused lyric with a stadium-sized beat originally created for Three 6 Mafia. The No. 1 hit single version, which picked up an absurd, Avatar-looking video and a shitpost-tier Kanye West verse—“Tell me what’s next? Alien sex”—is the type of weird-monoculture monument that feels almost impossible to explain in retrospect.
Teenage Dream’s emotional peak, though, is “Firework,” yet another No. 1 hit, a brassy positivity banger with a soaring chorus note doomed to embarrass you at karaoke. It is very, very easy to be cynical about “Firework”: “More than her Christian background or the chick-lit limits to her take on sexual liberation, what makes Perry a controversial artist is her essential hollowness,” wrote Ann Powers for the Los Angeles Times in 2010, citing its stupidest, funniest lyric, a line straight out of American Beauty, the question that has endured as a kind of ironic synecdoche for pop culture’s vast, vapid ocean of motivational bullshit. And yet—there’s Perry singing it for the president, replacing Stargate’s pneumatically powered strings with a tasteful cinematic arrangement: “Do you ever feel like a plastic bag?”
Do I ever. Stare too deeply into Teenage Dream and strain your vision—it’s plastic bags all the way down. One more outrageous detail: The inspiration for “Firework” is Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, that formative text of artists and teenagers, specifically the passage where Kerouac’s narrator claims “the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time,” who “burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles.” “Firework” is Teenage Dream’s American dream, and it’s not about freedom but desire, desire for redemption, for recognition, for the kind of infinite, desperate consumption that necessarily burns itself out in the end. Perry changes her look, but she has only one true aesthetic: It’s gaudy, explosive maximalism, and Teenage Dream is the most maximalist of all.
So forget about nuance and forget about Kerouac; put both hands in the air and submit to plasticity. Teenage Dream came to have a good time and to hit it really, really big. “Teenage Dream,” “Last Friday Night,” “California Gurls,” and “Firework”—four No. 1 songs in a row. Some pop stars spend their whole lives trying to put together a string of hits that amount to a lasting legacy; Katy Perry did it in the first 15 minutes. This album is a crowning achievement, not just of her career but of its style: EDM and disco and pop, bold and belting, entirely processed yet instantly recognizable, robust yet chintzy. In 2010, having it all was still enough.

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Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the timeless 1992 debut from Dr. Dre, a historic moment in hip-hop that redefined West Coast rap.

The Chronic

Dr. Dre’s solo rap career began like a yarn out of a mob epic: coercion, conspiracy, guns strategically placed near jacuzzis. As a member of N.W.A in the mid-1980s, the producer was a star, but he was convinced that Eazy-E—the head of his record label, Ruthless, and fellow N.W.A. member—was fleecing him. Dre was seeking freedom from the World’s Most Dangerous Group, but he ended up dealing with someone far more treacherous.
Pro football prospect turned hulking enforcer, Marion Knight, Jr., nicknamed Suge for the sweet sugar bear he was as a child, had a reputation for intimidation that was the stuff of industry myth: punching a guy through a closed door and dangling Vanilla Ice off a balcony. He’d been hanging around Ruthless as the D.O.C.’s bodyguard and had grown close to Dre during his conflict with the label. With an eye on becoming a music mogul, Suge saw Dre as his meal ticket. Dre was already done mastering the final N.W.A. album, 1991’s Niggaz4Life, and he wanted out so he could finish work on his solo material. All that was standing in his and Suge’s way was Eazy.
On April 23, 1991, Eazy-E went up to the studios at Solar Records where he was greeted by Suge and a small entourage of men with pipes and Louisville sluggers. Suge delivered contract releases for several Ruthless artists and planned to squeeze Eazy into signing them so he could poach the artists for the fledgling label he was starting. He told Eazy he had N.W.A.’s manager Jerry Heller tied up in a van before offering a final warning: “We know where your mother lives.” With that, Eazy signed. The documents weren’t deemed legally binding, but the wheels were in motion. Eventually, Suge got his way: Dre was no longer a Ruthless artist, and Death Row Records was born.
In 1992, Dr. Dre was the biggest producer in hip-hop music, a pioneer drawing comparisons to Quincy Jones and Phil Spector; he was also its most unemployable one. Plagued by legal battles and beset with a number of open court cases, nobody would touch him. Five of the eight albums Dre produced for Ruthless from 1987 to 1991 went platinum, but he was a volatile figure prone to violence. He was accused of a savage, public assault by journalist Dee Barnes and another assault on a police officer during a 50-person brawl he allegedly started. On top of that, neither he nor Suge had much of a business acumen, and they were hemorrhaging cash.
Death Row was ostensibly up and running with a master architect at the helm, but the young label needed a big victory upon which to build its empire. The Chronic became that cornerstone achievement, kicking off a historic four-year run that ended with the death of the label’s other major star, Tupac Shakur. In that time, Dre established himself as not just a peerless producer but a visionary. His debut album, 1992’s The Chronic is an imaginative crusade with half-truths so vibrant they blurred the lines of what was real. He collapsed the distance between the lawless Los Angeles of the persona he created for himself and the real one right outside Solar studios, giving his songs texture wherever possible: prank calls; Rudy Ray Moore skits; clips from blaxploitation flick The Mack; an earlier Chronic song playing as background music for a sketch in a later one; live commentary from protestors; exasperated TV news anchors announcing a city on fire. It is so meticulously crafted, so magnificently designed.
Thanks to some last-minute minute legal negotiations that set the price for Dre’s freedom from Ruthless at royalty payments for all of Dre’s Death Row projects including The Chronic, the same album Dre used as a megaphone to badmouth Eazy-E and Jerry Heller was also paying them handsomely. They are the album’s primary antagonists, and Dre’s ire for them powers his performance. The triumphant lead-off “Fuck wit Dre Day” couches celebration of his success in the broader context of the streets losing respect for Eazy. The taunts on the intro are aimed squarely at Ruthless, as if their demise was the postscript on Death Row’s ascendence, and Eazy was the bitch that ain’t shit. Despite all the direct provocation, Dre’s greatest insult was the album itself: He’d pried The Chronic right out of Eazy’s hands. In Ronin Ro’s Have Gun Will Travel, Heller lamented its loss: “That album would’ve been ours if it hadn’t been stolen.”
Death Row was a seedy operation with drug lord investors, secret incorporations, and nefarious loans, according to Ben Westhoff’s Original Gangstas, but the men at the top both knew how to spot talent. The album sometimes plays as promotional material for the label, partially because everyone there was trying to will future success into existence, but also because the label was the center of Dre’s entire world at the time. “I needed a record to come out,” Dre admitted to Rolling Stone in ’93. “I was broke. I didn’t receive one fucking quarter in the year of ’92.” Dre desperately needed to find a new voice. In N.W.A, he had the luxury of working with one of rap’s best-ever writers, Ice Cube. Those were big shoes to fill. He found his new scribe in Snoop Dogg, a slinky teenager from Long Beach who quickly became one of the greatest rappers ever.
Dre wasn’t a songwriter, he’d only ever performed in a posse, and the hearty voice of the rapper he banked on, the D.O.C., had been irreparably damaged in a car accident. He was a great director without a star. It was Snoop, with his sneering yet relaxed flow, that so casually stole the role. He seized every opportunity. “When I listen back to The Chronic album, I’m like, how the fuck was I on damn near every song?” Snoop remembered. “I was whoopin’ niggas! They would be going home to go get chicken, I’d be in that motherfucker all night. If Dre even had half of a beat or had the drums, I’d write some shit to the drums and come up with a melody. Before you know it, I’m on a song.”
As both a purveyor and connoisseur, Snoop also brought to the table one of the album’s most critical ingredients: weed. His incessant use introduced his producer to the chronic, slang used in reference to sticky hydroponic bud that was of the highest quality; the term, which became a metaphor for the quality of the music, stuck as a title. Dre, who’d rapped on 1988’s “Express Yourself” that he didn’t smoke marijuana because it caused brain damage, was now naming his entire album after a potent cross-strain. The aromatic puffs of smoke that filled the studio inspired slower, smoother music.
Snoop was at the center of a writer’s room that Dre had taken to calling the Death Row Inmates: The D.O.C., rapper-producer Daz Dillinger and RBX (two of Snoop’s cousins), Kurupt, Lady of Rage (who Dre flew in from Manhattan), Snoop’s group 213 with Dre’s stepbrother Warren G and a little-known singer named Nate Dogg, and the First Lady of Death Row, the R&B vocalist Jewell. This oddball crew convened at Dre’s Calabasas mansion and the Solar studios with musicians Colin Wolfe and Chris “The Glove” Taylor, smoking, bonding, writing, and recording, punching in and exchanging ideas.
Suge Knight wanted Death Row feared and revered around the land like a lauded crew of bandits in a spaghetti western. According to Original Gangstas, the label head would send his rappers to little amphitheaters and housing projects to battle anyone. Those battles spilled over to The Chronic, fostering both a familial closeness (beyond the obvious blood ties) and a competitiveness that fueled many sessions. The Inmates were all broke and eager to rhyme back then. Every member wanted to cut the best verse and meet Dre’s impossibly high standards. Songs like “Lyrical Gangbang” and posse cut “Stranded on Death Row” in particular had this battler’s edge, pure showcases of raw rap talent from Lady of Rage, Kurupt, and RBX. The artists on The Chronic team were written off, as many West Coast rappers were, as lesser rappers (the headline on Jonathan Gold’s review in the Los Angeles Times read, “The Rap’s Flat, But Ya Can’t Beat the Beat”). They weren’t working as hard to be clever as most of the rappers back East, and while they weren’t quite the writers Ice Cube and MC Ren were, their verses were still striking, charismatic, imposing, and idiosyncratic.
Criticism of the rapping on The Chronic also took aim at Dre, who was never quite a natural rapper, even in N.W.A’s heyday. Gold called his verses “forced,” and deemed him a lesser rapper than producer. If the former is an overstatement, the latter is true. But both were pervasive judgments of Dre. One of the album’s greatest feats is how it mitigates his limitations with a chorus of other voices. Dre goes to painstaking lengths not to appear too frequently, and when he does, he comes off as part of a dynamic one-two punch.
The force of the combination is felt most heavily on the attack, and much of The Chronic offensive continued N.W.A’s longstanding war with cops and L.A.’s violent policing initiative. The spark was an acquittal of the four officers caught on videotape beating motorist Rodney King with batons. For six days after, in Spring 1992, L.A. was ablaze.
The LAPD was the first militarized police force in America, a hostile occupying mob that went to war with the Black Panthers and invaded Southern Los Angeles. Chief of Police Daryl Gates, who, in 1990, infamously said casual drug users “ought to be taken out and shot” because “we’re in a war,” had encouraged the kind of treatment seen in the Rodney King video across the city, and now that black citizens were rising up in response he was sitting on his hands. While the violence of the riots spread from the corner of Florence and Normandie like a wave overtaking the city, Gates was at a fundraising dinner in affluent Brentwood. (As the city outside was catching fire, one woman at the dinner said of Gates, “We’re behind you all the way and I want to see you as President of the United States,” to laughter and cheers from the crowd.)
The original version of Chronic track, “The Day the Niggaz Took Over,” called “Mr. Officer,” imagined a vengeful Dre switching places with King and rising up in a way he couldn’t. “Fuck Daryl Gates and the whole police staff,” he raps venomously. “Mr. Officer” spoke more directly to hatred for police, but the song is better for the change: foregrounding not the crooked cops killing with impunity but the people standing up to them. “You see when niggas get together,” Dre rapped, “they get mad ’cause they can’t fade us.”
Cops were often the villains in N.W.A songs (see: “Fuck the Police,” “Real Niggaz Don’t Die”), but their influence throughout The Chronic is more insidious. Dre’s Los Angeles was a direct product of the LAPD’s anti-black and commando agenda. They raided the Panthers’ L.A. headquarters in 1969 on a bad warrant, which in turn created a vacuum filled by gangs like the Bloods and Crips, they cultivated one of the most trigger-happy departments in the country by the early ’90s, and they tagged crimes between black victims and perpetrators as NHI, for “No Human Involved.”
Twenty-seven years later, when I hear “The Day the Niggaz Took Over,” I still see Los Angeles burning. It’s doomsday rap seeking a reckoning, the sound of a city swallowed whole by a sweeping black rage and defiance: As RBX puts it, “Hell no, the poor blacks refuse to go.” But I also see Ferguson, its streets covered in tear gas, its police occupation; a protester in an American flag T-shirt throwing a fuming canister back at tactical officers; paramilitary units convening under a Seasons Greetings banner. I see Baltimore during the Uprising. Protesters standing on ravaged cop cars; bikers in gas masks, fists raised before a wall of officers in riot gear; a convoy of black civilians rolling through the city, arms interlocked. I see fed-up communities crying out—for Freddie Gray, for Mike Brown, for Rodney King, for every act of racist violence unanswered for—taking to the streets, refusing to be ignored. It’s about victory over corrupt law enforcement, however briefly.
It’s no wonder that, under the constant antagonism of an aggressive and bigoted police state, the man with a master plan on The Chronic was a nigga with a muthafucking gun: “Cause it’s the city,” Dre explained, “and for you to survive a nigga gotta be a gangsta.” Dre wasn’t a gangsta, per se, but he had gangstas of many different varieties all around him, so his definition of what constituted being one was fluid. Sometimes he was a larger than life mob don, as on “Let Me Ride,” leaving headless bodies on Greenleaf. On the plaintive, Donny Hathaway-inspired “Lil Ghetto Boy,” he plays a street-weary veteran of only 27, a link in a chain of generational violence. His theory of gangsta is clearest and coolest on “Nuthin’ But A G Thang,” a perfect rap song if ever there was one. Together as a united front, Snoop and Dre are swaggering, unfadable. But more than anything, across The Chronic being gangsta is a state of mind; its core tenets: better to strike preemptively than to be caught slippin’ and never let anyone take what’s yours.
The Dre verse on “The Day the Niggaz Took Over” prioritizes looting as a weapon against the status quo. His gotta-get-mine perspective is a direct response to the King verdict, and he sounds like an avenging angel. In the essay “Black Riot,” writer Raven Rakia explores looting as a means of indemnification and protest. “Nothing gets the attention of the elite like taking away or destroying what they value above all else: property. In America, property is racial. It always has been,” she explains. “Looting is the opposite of apolitical; it is a direct redistribution of wealth.” The Chronic may be most unmistakably political on this song, but the rest of it understands the spirit (and principles) of black revolt well. How fitting that the album is all about not just getting back what is owed but taking it by force.
The confrontational machine gun funk of “Rat-Tat-Tat-Tat” and the sinister squeal of the creeping “High Powered” were emblematic of a territorial mentality. Both Dre and Snoop rapped as if on standby, calm yet poised to strike at a moment’s notice. Many of the album’s best sequences are just them standing their ground. In Daryl Gates’ Los Angeles, this was radical. “Old buster ass nigga talking bullshit/Don’t know that I’m the wrong nigga to fuck with,” Dre barks on “A Nigga Witta Gun.”
At Solar, Dre produced on a cutting edge SSL mixing console that producer Rhythm D likened to the Starship Enterprise, which felt particularly fitting since they were making beats by reworking about a dozen Parliament-Funkadelic songs in their sessions. A connection with the Mothership had yielded a magnificent and funky new subgenre. They were building songs from the ground up, according to Wolfe, “drums, bass, keys, guitar, in that order,” with drums and bass being fundamental to their hydraulic, shock-absorbent bounce. Instead of sampling records, as he had for N.W.A, Dre had his live musicians channeling the deep alien grooves of Bernie Worrell and George Clinton.
Dre helped to reshape the sound of the West using whining Moog synthesizers. The initial wave of West Coast gangsta rap was (naturally) still indebted sonically to hip-hop’s birthplace, New York City. N.W.A songs sampled Big Apple rappers Whodini and Beastie Boys. AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted was produced by Public Enemy’s team the Bomb Squad, and Cube was “obsessed with” Run-DMC. Many of the West Coast rappers that had come before Dre brought an undeniable California flavor to rap, but there wasn’t yet a distinctive sound separating them from their East Coast predecessors. The Chronic was instrumental in changing all that. The album’s reinterpretation of ’70s P-Funk, dubbed G-Funk, was altogether different. Dr. Dre’s songs moved more leisurely, a tonic for the hustle and bustle of East Coast rap.
It’s an oversimplification to say Dre beats sound good, but the man did sell a line of high-performance headphones to Apple for $3 billion on the strength of his music’s supreme fullness and fidelity. He is a production genius. “I used to spend all my time trying to make my beats be mixed as good as Dr. Dre,” Kanye West recently admitted. Q-Tip called Dre the bar for producing A Tribe Called Quest’s The Low End Theory. Dre, in turn, was pushed to match that classic’s resonant bass, and The Chronic set a new mark.
In addition to launching Dr. Dre into rarified air, the album launched about a half dozen successful solo careers. It is the nexus of an entire chunk of rap history. Death Row peaked with the February ’96 Vibe cover, more an endnote on an era than anything else; Dre left the company a month later, and by that fall Tupac was dead. In the end, the label Dre built with Suge was just as combustible as the one he left to start it. But The Chronic lives on as a timeless show of strength when the stakes couldn’t have been higher, and as the herald of a tectonic shift in rap. Without it, or Dre, there is no Game, no YG, no Kendrick Lamar or To Pimp a Butterfly, no Nipsey Hussle. Dre gave shape to L.A.’s present and future. His dispatch from inside a city in transition not only furthered its sense of place in the world beyond but helped affect the place it was becoming.


Taylor Swift’s project to re-record her albums to reclaim legal ownership of the music begins here with 2008’s Fearless, an almost identical, polished, and somewhat melancholy version of it.

Taylor Swift: Fearless (Taylor’s Version)

Fearless (Taylor’s Version)

When Taylor Swift announced that she planned to re-record each of her albums to effectively take control of her masters and stick it to famed music manager Scooter Braun, the move was quintessential Taylor: strategic, savvy, and easily mapped onto an empowerment narrative. This wasn’t simply a cynical IP grab with purely financial implications; this was also a woman quite literally reclaiming her past selves. For listeners, however, the value proposition seemed less clear. So much of the relationship between pop star and fan revolves around the idea of “blessings,” with the generous artist bestowing gifts to her listeners. With “new” versions of old albums, Swift seemed to ask her fans to accept the re-done albums as a new canon to replace the beloved decade-old records.
Fearless (Taylor’s Version) is the first of six of these planned “new” versions. Starting with her second album is a deft choice; her writing is stronger than on her 2006 self-titled debut, and Fearless contains some of her more iconic and commercially successful tracks. Instead of cosplaying a caricature of her 18-year-old self, we get present-day Taylor in conversation with the Taylor of the past with a wrenching intimacy.
What is to be gained from parsing the gap between remix, recitation, and reincarnation? Dissecting the Easter eggs tucked into Swift’s songs has always been part of the Taylor listening experience—decoding which lyric corresponds to which break-up, tracing the lineage of each biting remark. Fearless (Taylor’s Version) presents a different puzzle: spotting the difference between the original and this almost-identical copy. These versions are slightly more polished, like photos touched up on Instagram with a press of a button: The sound is brighter, the mix is clearer, each peal of guitar is sharper. Most of the alterations to original songs are barely noticeable, besides an invigorating blast of fiddle on “Love Story”; each song’s runtime remains either exactly the same or off by a single second.
Most obviously changed is her voice, which has strengthened and deepened over the years. Her choruses are a bit less breathy, and she glides into belting without sounding strained. There are micro-changes in inflection: “You ask me for my love and then you push me around,” she cries on “Tell Me Why,” the note a bit more strangled and snarling. The seconds-long “Hallelujah” in the bridge of “Change” sounded exalted on the earlier version; here it sounds more like a sigh, somewhere between relief and remorse.
The songs on Fearless surge between hope and pain, bitterness and awe. The tension in Taylor’s early albums drew from that dichotomy: to reach for fairytales while listing their fallacies, to decry white horses and still believe there’s redemption in the perfect dress. “Today Was a Fairytale,” a song she wrote to accompany her cameo in the 2010 rom-com Valentine’s Day, slots right into this context with buoyant guitar and Swift’s ode to “magic in the air.” The other “new” songs on Taylor’s Version, released from her famed vault, blend into that bland, twangy sweetness—with the exception of “Mr. Perfectly Fine,” a delightful, strumming takedown. “I don’t know how it gets better than this,” she sings on the title track, and that glow remains even as she describes a breakup that leaves her breathless.
“Forever and Always” is Fearless’ best song, but the shock from the original album gives way to something cooler—more disgusted than aghast. In the 2009 version, Swift sounded wounded as she sings: “You looked me in the eye and told me you loved me/Were you just kidding?” In the newer versions (she also includes a slowed piano iteration among the bonus material), her voice is subdued but more full as she sings those lines, no longer litigating the cruelty of an ex, but allowing the sorrow that comes with accepting your own anger.
That mournfulness hangs over this new recording session. It’s hard to distinguish whether there are actual sonic differences in how she re-performs a song or if the knowledge that a 31-year-old is embodying songs she wrote as a teenager permeates each track. On the new recording of “Fifteen,” she clings to the last note of “Count to 10” for an instant longer than the original before she cries: “This is life before you know who you’re going to be.” Part of listening to Fearless (Taylor’s Version) involves tracing its link back to our own past selves, when we could pretend that wanting was worth more than knowing, that wanting could be everything. The meta-layers of control and contrition tangle in these recordings; Swift was 15 herself when she signed her deal with Big Machine’s Scott Borchetta, who eventually sold her catalog to Braun. She is making some of the best music of her career now, and presumably putting that on hold to wrangle control over her old records. The past always becomes a difficult place to revisit.


The Replacements: Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash / Stink / Hootenanny / Let It Be

Their persona is so well defined: The Replacements were the working-class kids bursting with talent but always ready to squander it; the bratty wise guys with a sensitive streak who refused to play by the rules. But the group's persona has a distancing effect for those who are new to the band. There's never been a shortage of thirty and fortysomethings reminiscing about the 'Mats. You read about the sloppily brilliant live performances, the massive quantities of beer consumed, the backstage hijinks; questionable theories are proffered, something about how this band should, if there were any justice in the world, have had pop hits and been on the radio. You hear such things from the people who were there, man, and it's tempting to dismiss the Replacements as a Gen X nostalgia trip and turn your attention to some unexplored corner of post-punk, maybe a boundary-pushing band with an experimental bent. The idea of the Replacements has a lot to do with why they've endured, and as archetypes go, it's a compelling one. But sometimes it gets in the way.
It'd be nice if these reissues from Rhino, which remaster and generously expand upon the band's four early records for their hometown imprint Twin/Tone, can bring us back to what the Replacements were: a creative, smart, silly, exuberant, and often hilarious rock'n'roll band. Rhino has done everything right with these records, giving them the sort of treatment they deserve. The liner notes and documentation are detailed; the bonus cuts generous and well chosen. This crucial part of the Replacements story is finally available in all its detail, and hopefully, it'll help us hear the music again in a fresh way. There's a lot worth exploring.
Hearing these records again, after having the originals in mothballs for quite a while, has been a revelation. It's not that they're top-to-bottom great (well, except for one of them, but more on that in a sec), because the Replacements weren't really that kind of act. But boy, they had songs and they could play, right from the start. Before these reissues, when someone would say that the band peaked with their first album, 1981's Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash, I'd assume they were either: 1) a serial contrarian, 2) someone who finds punk rock to be music's greatest expression, or 3) crazy. Surely, the Replacements improved as they went. But now, returning to these records after so long, the "debut is best" take finally makes some sense. I don't agree with this assessment, not by a long shot, but I can understand why someone might. For a supposedly sloppy and tossed-off record, Sorry Ma comes across as weirdly majestic and strikingly consistent. Also, amusing: singer Paul Westerberg's self-deprecating liner notes, which helped launch the Replacements myth, suggest that he might have had second career writing comedy: "This song is proof that Chris Mars is one of the best drummers we could find at the time," he says of "Otto".
As the short, sharp tracks tick off, each is immediately arresting. If Mothers Against Drunk Driving hadn't formed the year before, the invigorating and dangerous jolt of "Takin a Ride" might have served as the organization's catalyst; "Customer" is comical fast-talking portrait of an instant crush; "Shiftless When Idle" is an early statement of purpose. Bob Stinson can't wait to bust out his searing solos. Everything sounds loose, live, and brimming with energy. Over 18 songs, only a couple are less than great. Among the 13 bonus tracks, the highlight is the four-song demo from 1980 the band originally gave to Twin/Tone's Peter Jesperson, hoping to get some club gigs. I'm trying to imagine the excitement when he popped it in his tape deck and heard "Raised in the City", with its relentless drive and chugga-chugga riff and a 20-year-old Westerberg sounding like he already knew a hell of a lot about it melody. No wonder Jesperson became their manager.
Then came Stink, the quickie EP follow-up from 1982. The cover's subtitle used to say "'Kids Don't Follow' Plus Seven" and its expanded version now reads "'Kids Don't Follow' Plus 11". Well, it's true: "Kids Don't Follow" is much better than these other songs. This is their true-blue punk record, and, while they pull it off, they sound too one-dimensional. The songs are entertaining, with titles alone that are good for a chuckle: "Fuck School"; "White and Lazy"; "Dope Smokin' Moron"; "God Damn Job". You can guess how they go without even hearing them; it's a record for a single mood. Some the outtakes are actually better: There's a great cover of Hank Williams' "Hey, Good Lookin" that was a live staple of the time, and their disemboweling of "(We're Gonna) Rock Around the Clock" is worth a few laughs. Stink is an important piece of the puzzle, but less interesting on its own.
Hootenanny is occasionally mentioned as the Replacements finest moment, the precursor to Let It Be that is funnier, more tossed-off, (i.e., more "Replacements") and also the most diverse offering in the band's catalogue. No argument on the latter; this thing is all over the place, and it has one example of just about everything they ever did. But too much of it sounds purposeless, the band amusing themselves rather than the listener. Some tracks have the whiff of something that would have been OK as B-sides, but sound underwhelming on an album proper. The title track isn't nearly as funny as it thinks it is; "Mr. Whirly", which mixes snippets of "Strawberry Fields Forever", "Oh! Darlin'", and "The Twist", is clever but skippable; "Lovelines", in which Westerburg half-sings personals ads while the band plays a peppy tune behind him, is infectious in the way that hearing someone else laugh makes you laugh, but it's also easy to forget. All that said: "Color Me Impressed" is possibly the best of the 10 or so proper Replacements Anthems, the moody "Willpower" improves on Stink's "Go", and "Run It" is as intense and joyous as any of the rave-ups on the debut. Bonus tracks here are also strong, mostly loud, fast, and snotty, with the exception of the bluesy acoustic demo "Bad Worker", about giving minimum effort for minimum wage. Essential for fans, but not the place to start.
Hootenanny's "Within Your Reach" found Westerberg stretching out and trying a love song of sorts, but it would take one more record before he really hit his stride with this sort of material. The leap in songwriting on Let It Be, the final Twin/Tone album, is dazzling. As a record, it's both simpler and more complicated than anything that came before. You want hardcore? "We're Comin' Out" is the most intense punk song they ever made. A no-frills declaration of love? You can't get much more concise than "Favorite Thing". There's the perceptive "I Will Dare", which seems like it's about a relationship but is also about the band ready to take on the world; the wailing "Unsatisfied", with its disarmingly direct expression of frustration. All of the contradictions and wild mood swings of youth can be found here somewhere.
Let It Be is widely praised as an independent rock classic and one of the finest albums of the 1980s, but before I started listening to this set, I didn't expect to rate it so highly. I kept thinking of songs that even fans of the record consider insignificant, namely "Tommy Gets His Tonsils Out", the cover of Kiss' "Black Diamond", the near-instrumental "Seen Your Video" and the silly "Gary's Got a Boner". Surely, this was filler.
But the more I listened, the more I realized that all these songs have their place, and each does work on the album that needs doing. Film critics like to speak of emotionally charged moments being "earned" by carefully laid groundwork in character development. The farther Westerberg went out on a limb with songs like "Androgynous" (all of a sudden he's the indie rock Cole Porter, looking out for the shy, arty types that didn't fit in) and "Sixteen Blue" (the ultimate articulation of teenage angst), the more empathy he showed and the more he needed ballast. The dumb songs offer relief and make the ballads hit that much harder. They also rip. It helps that this is the best-sounding record they ever made, and the rockers pummel like never before. The mix is clear; the guitars tear the space in half when they need to and ring clearly when they don't, when they throw in unusual instruments, they work. The six outtakes-- a couple of covers (of T. Rex and, uh, the DeFranco Family featuring Tony DeFranco), and two choice originals-- are strong, but they wouldn't have fit on a record that doesn't waste a note. Let It Be is, in its own way, perfect.
Being a fuck-up with a good heart is endearing when you're young; if you've not changed by the time you hit your late twenties, well, you're probably just pretty much a fuck-up, and eventually, you become annoying. All the contradictions in the Replacements' music, and in Westerberg's songwriting, are not something you can easily carry into adulthood, which is partly why the band would run into some trouble later on. But none of that matters here, when they were young and understood so much about youth. People change, but records don't, and that's part of what makes them great. They're frozen in place, ready to be found by people who need them. And if you haven't found these yet-- well, I'm jealous.


Compiled from the band’s 2012 world tours, Not Here/Not Now is the fourth release and second double-live album Michael Gira has issued since reviving the Swans name in 2010. Of the songs featured, only three have appeared on previous recordings, and the lone 80s-era track that figures offers an idea of where Swans are heading on their upcoming album.

Not Here/Not Now

Contrary to popular belief, Swans are not a noisy band. Noise is a dissonant irritant, something that makes you wince momentarily and prompts you to plug your fingers in your ears as a defence mechanism. However, a Swans concert presents a symphony of cacophony from which even deafness provides no relief. Because Swans deal not in noise, but loudness—a gusty, wall-crumbling, tectonic-plate-shifting loudness that doesn’t so much give you a headache as an ulcer. As I discovered during a show last fall, even when you’re taking a mid-show piss in a bathroom that’s two storeys and several walls removed from the venue stage, Swans are still the most punishing band you’ve ever experienced.
But for all the abuse and misanthropy they project in concert, Swans consistently reward their fans’ tolerance with great acts of generosity. Compiled from the band’s 2012 world tours, Not Here/Not Now is the fourth release and second double-live album that Michael Gira has issued since reviving the Swans name in 2010, and like the previous concert document—2012’s We Rose From Your Bed With the Sun in Our Head—it’s a limited-edition, hand-crafted package that will help fund the next Swans studio opus. (And given that we got The Seer out of the last deal, it’s no surprise that Not Here/Not Now’s first run sold out almost immediately. Though you can still donate to the cause by ponying up $500 for something even better than a mere record: a new Gira song written in your honour.) But Swans live albums have come to represent more than just fancy souvenirs for charitable fans. They’re opportunities for Swans enthusiasts to observe the band’s ever-evolving aesthetic in action: Of the songs featured on Not Here/Not Now, only three have appeared on previous recordings. And any worries that Swans are showing too much of their hand are defused by the fact that new Swans songs rarely make it from the stage to record in the same form, and, once officially released, mutate even further in subsequent performances.
So if you’re wondering if you need another version of “The Seer”, the answer is: hell yes. After debuting as a brawny, pulsating rocker on We Rose and then transforming into the exotic, cinematically rendered 32-minute centerpiece of its 2012 namesake album, “The Seer” reappears on Not Here/Not Now as an oozing piece of toxic sludge that just gets thicker and nastier over its marathon 44-minute runtime, with two new songs bubbling up from its miasma: the scorched-earth psychedelia of “Bring the Sun” and “Toussaint L’ouverture”, a maniacal Francophone rant couched in an opium-den ambiance reminiscent of the comedown on Sonic Youth’s “Expressway to Yr. Skull”. But even those developments feel natural compared to what’s happened to “Oxygen”, a song that first surfaced as an acoustic meditation on Gira’s 2010 solo album I Am Not Insane, but has been unrecognizably reworked into a gut-punching, Jesus Lizardian rumble. (The original describes Gira’s experience with asthma; the new version feels like it.)
You can get a pretty good idea of where Swans are heading on their upcoming album from the lone 80s-era track that figures here: the Holy Money-era sludgefeast “Coward” is the perfect complement to the bone-crushing heft of new 10-minute dirge “Just a Little Boy”, which sounds even more like how you’d imagine a Melvins cover of David Bowie’s “Station to Station” would sound than the Melvins’ actual cover of “Station to Station”. And that’s just the third-longest new song unveiled here: the stormy 16-minute opener “To Be Kind” sees Gira gravely repeating the title with the solemn cadence of a cantor, as if the sentiment expressed within was an impossible ideal; “She Loves Us!” deviously appropriates the title of a bygone Beatles hit in service of a 15-minute maelstrom that builds up a drum-battered drone into a mutant stoner-metal groove.
By comparison, the sand-swept drift of “Nathalie Neal” can’t help but feel like the least momentous of the new-album previews on offer here, but it serves as a logical bridge out of these caustic concert recordings into Not Here/Not Now’s pair of lo-fi acoustic-demo denouements. More than just expose the psych-folk underpinning of Swans’ seismic sound, the rough sketches for “Kirsten Supine” and “Screen Shot” offer a disarmingly intimate glimpse into Gira’s songwriting process, complete with his play-by-play, strum-by-strum commentary. After nearly two hours of being subjected to Swans’ highly orchestrated onstage onslaught, these human, off-the-cuff moments come as a great relief; in sharp contrast to the authoritative, stentorian presence Gira casts in concert, the demos present him in charmingly self-deprecating mode, questioning himself about what direction he should steer the song into, or even if it’s any good to begin with. Just as the double-tracked vocal incantations and needling acoustic jabs of “Screen Shot” approach peak hypnotic intensity, Gira stops the song cold and admits, “I have no idea where it’s going to go from there… but we’re going into the studio in a couple of weeks and we’ll figure it out.” Given Swans’ recent track record, those words feel less like glib reassurance than a distant early warning of what’s to come.


One way to look at the Boredoms is as the Andy Kaufman of rock. Through meticulous study, they have completely ...

Vision Creation Newsun

One way to look at the Boredoms is as the Andy Kaufman of rock. Through meticulous study, they have completely mastered the architecture of the transcendent rock jam. But instead of celebrating their achievements, they choose to undercut their monuments to riffology in service of the first commandment of Dadaism: Thou Shalt Fuck With People's Heads.
Just as Kaufman's killer Elvis impression turned his hapless, unfunny "foreign man" character into a surreal comic enterprise, so does the Boredoms' overreaching rock power achieve extra poignancy through their unwillingness to leave well enough alone. The classic Boredoms song inches us ever closer to the brink of orgiastic musical communion, until Yamatsuka Eye and Co. derail the groove train at the last minute, sending us spinning off into a ditch in a messy tangle of open reel tape. We are frustrated, but as Frank Sinatra once said, "That's life."
The best example of this sort of monkeywrenching on Vision Creation Newsun (the follow-up to 1998's Super Are, which is currently only available as a pricy Japanese import) comes with the second track. The song (there are no titles here, only unpronounceable symbols) begins in a swell of chiming guitars and shimmering percussion, opening slowly like a lotus flower, and eventually takes root as a driving, circular psychedelic guitar workout reminiscent of Spacemen 3's "Suicide."
As the band moves through variation after variation on the simple theme and the track gains in volume and power, Eye suddenly seizes the tape machine and begins cutting the song to ribbons, splicing in air raid sirens, EQing, and phasing like a tone-deaf janitor trapped in the Radio One control booth. In this instant, Eye makes an unholy pile of shit from a perfect specimen of guitar rock ecstasy. How could he do such a thing when we were feeling so good? But then, just as we're about to hit the Stop button in disgust, he gets the song back on the rails and shoves it forward with even more thrust. And as we appreciate the authority of the song that much more, we thank him for the moment of discord.
No music writer can resist the occasional "x meets y" sort of comparison, and the one that describes latter-day Boredoms is too unusual to pass up: The Ramones meets the Grateful Dead. Strange as it may sound, it could be the only way to describe a band that once cut a 34-minute cover of a single Mekons riff-- it appeared on Super Roots 7, a tremendous achievement that remains the band's trance rock pinnacle. But if anything, this odd amalgamation only points out what's so great about Japan: musicians there don't waste time trying to figure out why the Sex Pistols are cooler than King Crimson, they merely combine the best elements of both.
Vision Creation Newsun takes the Boredoms even further into neo-hippie psychedelic territory, though a few songs (like the aforementioned Track Two) rock more thoroughly and convincingly than any pre-punk band apart from the Stooges. Though there are a handful of lengthy, evolving crunchers, the majority of the album consists of exercises in atmosphere. This largely instrumental LP leans mostly on plucked guitars, gurgling synths, and tribal drumming, sometimes reminiscent of folky psyche travelers Ghost. It's a beautiful sound-- one that gains in complexity with repeated listens-- but it never quite reaches the heights of Super Are. I guess you have to take what you can get with the Boredoms.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Shania Twain’s 1997 blockbuster, one that showed the world the power of a true pop-country crossover.

Come On Over

Seven notes of hot, crackling guitar. Let’s go, girls. Three words, beamed forth like a cosmic directive, spoken with the Mona Lisa’s suggestive sense of mischief. Mother isn’t calling, but her fun younger sister sure is.
Though it was the eighth single from Shania Twain’s Come On Over, “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!” is the first volley and thesis statement of the singer-songwriter’s third album. Celebrating girls’ nights out and their grooming rituals, the song embodied the liberated lady’s lifestyle with “the prerogative to have a little fun.” In the video, an inversion of Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love,” Twain gradually ditches layers of her outfit amid a troop of synchrony-challenged beefcakes. The song revamped the spirit of Cyndi Lauper’s 1983 hit for the blossoming bosslady feminism of the late 1990s—girls just want to have fun, but women go out and get it for themselves.
Released in November of 1997, Come On Over arrived on the high tide of the pre-Napster Clinton economy, before the music industry could sense that the bottom was about to fall out. Everything about Come On Over radiated enthusiasm, from the invitation of its title to the six exclamation points sprinkled across its tracklist. With its hard-charging hooks, sassy kiss-offs, and radiant sparkle, it became one of the defining titles for the “I don’t like country, but…” crowd. With Robert “Mutt” Lange in her corner as producer, co-writer, and husband, Twain set a new standard for pop-country crossovers. She started a new chapter of the decades-old grousing over who gets to be country and make country music, kicking open opportunities for a new generation.
For a record that had dramatic consequences for Nashville, Come On Over had very little to do with the city itself. Twain was an early-thirties singer-songwriter who’d grown up poor in Canada; Lange was a hermetic South African-born producer whose pre-Shania credits were mostly big-ticket rock records: the Cars’ Heartbeat City, Def Leppard’s Hysteria and Adrenalize, plus the AC/DC hat trick of Highway to Hell, Back in Black, and For Those About to Rock We Salute You.
By some measures, Twain developed her success from the hardscrabble hunger of her working-class upbringing, but by others, she was a genre-wrecking false prophet who could nonetheless pull off a great smoky eye. She had grown up in rural Ontario, developing her musical interest as a child and playing gigs around town—including last-call appearances at bars—at her parents’ behest. As a 21-year-old, she began to look after her four siblings following their parents’ death in a car crash, supporting the family by singing in a variety revue at a resort. Her aspirations were never limited to country music, as she told the Chicago Sun-Times in 1997: “I wrote every kind of music...I wanted to sing rock’n’roll at 12 years old.” Still, she settled on a relative country comfort zone for her first album, 1993’s Shania Twain.
Lange brought his arena-tuned ear to 1995’s The Woman in Me, which eventually sold 20 million copies after a disappointing showing from Twain’s debut. The album’s boisterous singles toyed with new country combinations, establishing Twain as a pop-forward up-and-comer: the slick barroom swing of “Whose Bed Have Your Boots Been Under,” the accelerating stomp of “Any Man of Mine,” the rock edge of “(If You’re Not in It for Love) I’m Outta Here!” She built steam in resisting touring for the record, and by 1997, she had Springsteen star-maker Jon Landau as another asset in her corner.
While drenched in crimson-velvet glamor, Come On Over feels like a complete manifestation of a small-town girl’s ambitions, where you’ve got a hold on yourself and a hot man available for treats and foot rubs, and you’re also somehow able to be incredibly sexy in bold red lipstick. It’s no small wonder that Come On Over sold 36 million copies by the end of the millennium, still holding the distinction of being the 12th best-selling record ever in the United States.
At 16 tracks, Come On Over is hardly lean. But the hits are so potent that the duds mostly fail to register. Lange’s fastidious attention to production makes Come On Over a power-couple masterwork: Beneath its high-gloss finish sits an engine of uncompromising bridges and choruses. It’s difficult to hit pause at any point in the album’s first four songs, and after a few minutes of breathing room, Twain lunges into the unstoppable three-song run of “You’re Still the One,” “Honey, I’m Home,” and “That Don’t Impress Me Much.” That Twain is but a so-so singer becomes immaterial as she coasts through her agreeable numbers—which are, as it turns out, very easy for a regular person to sing along to.
Come On Over is also assertive. It channels all the gusto of someone living their dreams in real time, matching a blockbuster sense of confidence with arena-size sounds and attendant energy. When Twain says “Let’s go girls,” the answer is unquestionably, “Yes ma’am.” Her band of bruisers hurtle along, with “I’m Holdin’ on to Love (To Save My Life)” picking up at a gallop from “Man!”’s opening salvo. Its underlying early-rock rhythm jumpstarts a sense of anticipation as Twain sings about the trials and triumph of true love.
From there, Twain and Lange make good on their then-indelible bond by transforming the phrase “gol’ darn gone and done it” into an implausibly great earworm on “Love Gets Me Every Time.” The record’s title track is loaded with pomp and hospitality, slowing to a parade’s pace as Twain encourages relaxation and cutting loose. Aligning Twain’s French-Canadian heritage with the day’s brief zydeco fascination, an accordion gives the Acadian-flavored track a curious edge. Declining an invitation so obviously ready to please, so unburdened of pretense—well, it would just be rude.
Twain put her foot all the way down with “That Don’t Impress Me Much,” a killer cruiser that gleamed like a chrome bumper as it rode the Top 40 for 22 weeks. It arrives later in the record as a sharp dismissal of gasbags who can’t keep up with her needs. Cars, looks, attitude: None of it compares to a man who shows up where it counts. The song’s quicksilver guitar lead catches with the same immediacy as “Man!”’s primary declaration, the spicy edge of Twain’s rebukes cooled by the gliding guitar and smooth backing harmonies of the chorus.
Twain applies her all-in approach to every second of Come On Over. At their most capital-B Basic, the songs at least respect the tradition by going full-tilt gushing romantic. “From This Moment On” arrives as the first of Come On Over’s most saccharine ballads, which feel like appeals to recently surrendered bachelorettes seeking a perfect first-dance number for the reception. A duet with young Oklahoma crooner Bryan White, it is a breathy vow with a Disney-level cinematic sweep. “You’re Still the One” follows with a gauzy reaffirmation of the sentiment a few minutes later. Though they offer calm between gales, they keep the record’s passionate throughline running without sacrificing too much ground to the treacle.
Fiddles are the key element in transmitting Come On Over’s country core, one of the most hotly contested qualifiers of the record’s gatekeeping detractors. The players are all bona fide country pros: Larry Franklin (Asleep at the Wheel, Randy Travis), Rob Hajacos (George Strait, Brooks & Dunn, Garth Brooks), Aubrey Haynie (Trisha Yearwood, Clint Black), and the bluegrass-inclined titan Stuart Duncan. But in the “Don’t Be Stupid” video, lines of hard-heeled steppers join Twain and a cadre of plainly dressed fiddlers on screen, shoving the song into Celtic associations (and hooking it to another intense late-’90s cultural obsession: Riverdance). Whether swinging forward in a surge or skirting around a jock-rock stomp, the fiddles are Come On Over’s Rosetta Stone, playing all sides into an appealing middle.
With the smeared edges of their production, Twain and Lange master the illusion of genre, as if they fashioned Come On Over into a plastic lenticular print. Tipped toward the honky-tonk hop of “Honey, I’m Home” or the unabashed twang of “Love Gets Me Every Time,” Come On Over can boot-scootin’ boogie with the best; the glimmering facets of “That Don’t Impress Me Much” and “You’re Still the One” bear the blinding shimmer of full-strength pop. Twain could be anything to anybody, a principle that bolted past genre as “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!” spawned thousands of drag homages.
Twain drew criticism in the press for perceived shallowness. Garth Brooks’ shadow loomed in almost every critique, having filled arenas by making a big deal about his status as an affable everyman who also appreciated the occasional spectacle of pyrotechnics. But where Brooks made an almost frightening display of his affection for over-the-top production, Twain was more relaxed, leveraging Lange’s super-producer abilities into melodies and hooks that just won’t quit.
Her lyrics, while upbeat and assured, largely stayed away from any controversy. It’s clear from Twain’s interviews around her work that she never claimed to be a brilliant genius or the poet of a generation. She’s the first to insist that her songs are meant to be fun, and it is OK to enjoy them on those terms alone. Twain and Lange were funneling all of their energy into making a towering monument to their ability to produce a direct and powerful kind of neurological pleasure. The inexplicable appeal is by painstaking design.
Despite dazzlers like Dolly Parton, Reba McEntire, and anybody else who’s ever worn a Nudie Cohn suit, the country music industry has long sagged under a masculinity-fueled obsession with a particular sense of authenticity. In Christopher Cain’s 1992 drama Pure Country, celebrated Texas gentleman George Strait stars as an ascendant (and distressingly ponytailed) country singer named Dusty Chandler. Corrupted by the demands and excesses of his rising fame, Dusty skips his big gigs in favor of a temporary break on a stranger’s ranch. One overall message of Pure Country, favored by a subset of fans and artists across decades, is that real country music exists apart from pageantry. But the country music industry that allowed these artists to achieve icon status, regardless of their angle, was established as a way to market “hillbilly” music to a growing white middle class.
It’s disingenuous to insist on some sort of undefined ideological genre purity from Twain (or Brooks, for that matter), who was pursuing one of the values foundational to country music from its first shellacked 78s: selling stuff to white people. George Strait may not have allowed himself to be hoisted by his britches over arenas full of his adoring fans, as Garth Brooks did, but he still has his own line of Wrangler apparel. Hank probably hadn’t done it that way, either. Twain sang about how women’s perceived trifles are in fact serious business. That she draped them in contemporary charisma and adapted them to the media of the day makes them no less meaningful.
Come On Over’s many visual counterparts—arriving in Pop-Up Video’s peak era—shaped the public perception of country music while leaving an imprint on future stars still in their tender years. Twelve songs from the record were made singles, and while not all of them got videos, the campaign’s high femme aesthetics underscored Twain’s sizzle. The airplay across VH1, MTV, and CMT cemented her in hearts and minds with soft-focus semi-psychedelia, a tilted tophat, a pseudo-casual behind-the-scenes shoot, blue beachy dreams, and even a questionably en vogue bindi. Her head-to-toe cheetah look in “That Don’t Impress Me Much” sealed her as an icon of the decade (not to mention the lipstick, the matching luggage, the bangs). As she waits out a ride in the desert, she’s a damsel less in distress than disgust at her lack of acceptable suitors.
Still, ascribing Come On Over as some sort of major feminist manifesto is an overstatement—for all of its finessed charms, it is the result of major-label music-industry machinery humming along at full operating capacity. Indeed, Come On Over curdles as it drops into its sloughable back quarter. It begins with “Black Eyes, Blue Tears,” which presents escaping domestic violence as a matter of self-worth and features Twain delivering a wispy, “Find your self-esteem and be forever free to dream.” The track worsens with the footnote that it was inspired by the O.J. Simpson trial.
As the Chicks were revving toward righteous murder plots and mattress dancin’, Shania’s politics were more muted and, at times, contradictory. “I think we’re kind of spoiled in a lot of ways, with the advantages we have. Feminists may not feel that way, but I do. It’s pretty darn fun to be a woman,” she once said. And, true, “If You Want to Touch Her, Ask!” is too clumsy to earn much credit as a victory for bodily autonomy, but Twain wrote it as a sincere response to her own experience with handsy men. Within the major keys and kicky romps, she still conveyed direct realities about life as a woman in the middle of the road.
“Honey, I’m Home” is a particularly forceful number, cribbing the booming authority and jagged guitar of “Any Man of Mine” for one of Come On Over’s more rollicking country-rock entries. While Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5” addressed workplace woes with chipper sweetness, Twain was content to declare that work sucks, actually, and so does all of the other bullshit that comes with it. “Honey, I’m home and I’ve had a hard day,” she crows, detailing her grievances and escalating into a loud haze of heys. It’s one for when “Take This Job and Shove It” and “Oney” are a little too heavy-handed, scorching with the sincere frustration of everyday existence.
Between the lines of its super-charged numbers, Come On Over inadvertently outlines the ways that heterosexuality, like capitalism, is a scam. Get past the various creeps, no-counts, and ain’t-shits that Twain warns you about, and you still might end up with a guy who’s suspicious of your phone calls or gets weird about your mail (“Don’t Be Stupid”). And then, some years later, he still might cheat and leave you for your best friend anyway, which is what precipitated Twain’s divorce from Lange that was finalized in 2010.
But all that is what turns “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!” into an antidote against everything. Like the saucier niece of Helen Reddy’s unwitting second-wave anthem “I Am Woman,” Twain’s stunner strikes at a universal ache for self-determination and emancipation from a society that still says you can’t. “I want to be free to feel the way I feel,” she sings. Twain had taken her potshots at feminist politics, but that single line is the gist of a lot of it.
She drops three sharp, yelped exhalations before belting the titular battle cry. It’s impossible to recreate quietly. One thing about feeling like a woman is that, in addition to all of the nail polish and good gossip and such, it involves a lot of feeling like the whole world is screaming at you all of the time. The constant message is one of being too much and not enough, a criticism repeatedly lobbed at Twain and Come On Over. There’s no right formula, and the goalposts never stay put, if they’re even acknowledged at all. It’s exhausting. I want to be free to feel the way I feel. Screaming right back—it feels pretty good, when you can swing it.
Though Twain maintained her status as a country favorite, she continued to push further into pop aspirations. Come On Over got a remixed “International” edition with pulsing club beats and other flourishes, further juicing her popularity in Europe. Perhaps overestimating his capacity for mystique, Brooks expanded his efforts to keep up with pop-music maneuvers through his Chris Gaines alter ego in 1999. Though Brooks had his only Top 40 hit with Gaines’ “Lost in You,” Twain played better to her charming strengths with more evenly applied Lange-loaded hits. Her next record, 2002’s Up!, arrived in three different color-coded editions: one pop-inclined (red), one country (green), and an “international” reprisal, a blue iteration remixed by the English-Indian duo Simon and Diamond Duggal.
Sometime in the early or mid-2000s, Twain contracted Lyme disease, which sidelined her singing career. She retreated without explanation after wrapping the Up! tour in the summer of 2004, and eight years passed before her grand return, a two-year residency at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas beginning in late 2012. As Shania excused herself from public life, a teenage Taylor Swift began her ascent as a wholesome young successor, releasing her self-titled debut thirteen years after Twain’s.
Though Swift pursued Twain’s pop-forward model most aggressively, the pervasive influence of Come On Over stretched well into the 2000s and far beyond any fussed-over boundaries of pop and country music. Harry Styles, Haim, Miley Cyrus, and Sheer Mag have all kissed the ring with covers. Twain’s celebrity—and the girl-power awe it inspired—was a series-long joke on Broad City that culminated in her appearing in a 2017 episode. Halsey borrowed the cheetah look for “You should be sad,” and Post Malone was belting along with her 2019 American Music Awards performance.
Despite Twain’s accomplishments, the country music industry still struggles to recognize women’s talent in the moment on their terms, or cede any power to those who might. Women have continued to face what seems like endless sandbagging and howling egotistical storms, to say nothing of how Black women like Mickey Guyton have effectively been shut out of the industry. Some radio programmers have insisted that women artists just don’t have the same appeal to audiences as men do; Twain’s enduring adoration has long been authoritative evidence to the contrary. It was an excuse handed ad nauseum to Kacey Musgraves, a direct heir of Twain’s sparkling empire who nonetheless followed her arrow toward the commercial and critical success of 2018’s Golden Hour.
Shania Twain reached the rare stratosphere of country-music fame by trusting the unifying appeal of pop music, by pointing at underseen, under-engaged women and saying “Yes, you, too.” “Be a winner, be a star,” she declares on the title track. It’s a vague, ridiculous proposal, but she makes it sound fun and feasible enough to try.

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