Competitive Intelligence

Gwen Stefani (& the Harajuku Girls) – The New Anti-Diva

Gwen Stefani - reinventing and rebranding herself as she has to compete with a whole new collection of divas (the best part of the ensemble are the Harajuku Girls), this "anti-diva" finally got a good write-up in Slate.com:

This woman has a Madonna complex. The plan is not to make a nice little solo album before returning to the ska-punk circuit with No Doubt. "What You Waiting For?" is a warning shot fired in the direction of Beyoncé, Britney, and J. Lo—not to mention a certain Kabbalah Centre habitué. There's a new competitor in the global pop diva stakes.

There are all kinds of pop divas: tragic-romantic divas in the Piaf-Garland-Holiday mold, ice-bitch MTV divas like Madonna and her followers, even four-octave-range total nut-case divas like Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey. But there's never been a diva clown. Divadom is a deadly serious business. You have to march through your music videos with steely resolve. A certain humorlessness—about yourself and your music—is a prerequisite for the job. (There's a reason why Madonna is Madonna, and Cyndi Lauper is doing guest spots on Deborah Norville Tonight.) However infectious her record is, Gwen Stefani may not quite be able to summon the gravitas we demand of our Queens of Pop.

But then Stefani launched her rebranding campaign, an effort undertaken with such gangling good cheer—and, apparently, without the usual battery of professional stylists and other hired help—that it endeared her to the editors of Jane magazine and other tastemakers who normally cast a jaundiced eye on the careerist machinations of pop divas. First came a cameo singing the chorus on Eve's "Let Me Blow Ya Mind" (2001), a Grammy-winning hip-hop single produced by Dr. Dre, which gave the Orange County skate-betty a ghetto-fabulous makeover. She cashed in her newfound hip-hop credibility on the next No Doubt album, Rock Steady (2001), and the result was a sleek, beat-happy party record. Meanwhile, the glammed-up Stefani strolled down red carpets on two continents and launched her own fashion line, L.A.M.B., which is none-too-subtly plugged in the title of her new record. Later this month, Stefani will make her movie debut as Jean Harlow in Martin Scorsese's The Aviator. All of which leaves Stefani a hit solo album away from a place in the diva firmament.

By all rights, Love. Angel. Music. Baby. should be that album. Stefani has hired a bunch of big-name collaborators (Dr. Dre, the Neptunes, Outkast's Andre 3000, Eve, Nelle Hooper, two members of New Order, and pop-rock hack Linda Perry among others) and made the most gleefully overcooked pop record in recent memory. Love. Angel. Music. Baby. bombards listeners with party chants, vocoder-smudged vocals, superstar cameos, cheesy hip-hop samples—an exhaustive, exhausting grab bag of pop tricks, topped off by the manic presence of Stefani herself, who has always been a kind of one-woman musical shock-and-awe campaign. At a time when production minimalism rules the charts—when producers squeeze hit songs out of little more than a few percussive thumps and a snatch of melody—Stefani has gone in the opposite direction. This is pop maximalism: rococo 'n' roll.

The result is a mess—for the most part, a delightful mess. Critics have sniffed at Love. Music. Angel. Baby. for its promiscuous use of different producers and overall jumbled feel. But rappers regularly put out albums with a different producer on every track and get away with it. It's hard not to suspect that Stefani's critics are falling back on the canard that pop chanteuses are putty in the hands of producer-Svengalis—a charge that has dogged Madonna for two decades and seems particularly wrongheaded in the case of Stefani, who is so audibly in command of this ramshackle album. (Not just any broad could make tracks by Dr. Dre and the Neptunes, those masters of tidy funk, sound so discombobulated.)

So, here's to Gwen, shaking up the music industry in perhaps just the way it needs to be in 2005.

- Arik