LITTLE BOOTS
She won the BBC Sounds Of 2009 poll, giving her unrivalled early media coverage, but since then her music seems to have been less about how cool it is that Little Boots uses a Tenori-on (a newfangled Japanese electronic instrument obv) and more about trying to make her marketable (read: bland). The video for single New In Town features Little Boots perusing a ghetto in a backless blue dress while singing “I don’t have a penny but I’ll show you a good time.” I’m sure there’s a name for girls like that. The whole thing – music, styling, setting – is only a synchronised Steps dance routine shy of belonging in the nineties. Oh no, wait, it has one of those too. Nice one.
FLORENCE AND THE MACHINE
Bat for Lashes is weird? Adele is soulful? But we want more! We want both! We want all the glitter and costumes AND lung-splitting power-melodies! Internationally raised, independently educated Florence and The Machine won critics choice at the Brits because two of the judges went to the forest party in The Dog Days Are Over video and had sex with fairies. Probably. Her aptly debut album ‘Lungs’ is released in July, which is nice, because hopefully by then she’ll have enough songs to stop bastardising other people’s at her live shows. It took the Cold War Kids frontman three days to stop crying after he heard her version of Hospital Beds.
LADY GAGA
Of all the solo female artists to emerge Of all the creatures to grace this earth, Lady Gaga smacks of the most depraved combination of pretension and twattery thus conceived. After she outgrew the Petri-dish in which she was accidentally fused together from essence of latex and a lesser known strain of gonorrhoea, she moved to New York where her live ‘art’ show consisted of setting hairspray on fire while dressed in a bikini and an Indian headdress. Christina Aguilera recently said of her “I don’t know whether it is a man or a woman,” which is obviously a bit rich, but we were all thinking it. Googlemaps is in talks to set up a new application which will locate every Gaga fan in the country and routinely eliminate them as part of David Cameron’s lesser known ethnic cleansing policy. If pop music is about entertainment and escapism, Lady Gaga is a milestone in our obsession with the plastic and inane. Just say no.
LA ROUX
Ellie Jackson recently finished a five-year stint playing Oliver in London’s West End to concentrate on creating some of the smartest pop music since Prince. She professes to want to put some personality back into pop and so she has – she mixes savvy musical influences with her own (glitter and latex-free) style, and her music is unpretentious, unfettered and intelligent. The solo-female invasion was heralded as the culmination of girls taking the music industry into their own hands, but in reality very few of the artists mentioned here or elsewhere have managed to break free from the existing stereotypes of female artists either being sexy, or ‘weird’. Jackson might just have managed to carve a middle road.
The lazy music press loves trends because it makes it easy for them to stick a load of diverse artists in a box and stick a label on it. Voila the year of the female, a myth based on the imagined collective virtues of female individualism, musical authenticity and fun. Sadly the only fun left to be had with most of the ‘artists’ in question is if they were in a fight to the death armed with only their overblown egos and a Barry M glitter lipstick. Though that would be quite amusing.
WORDS: HAZEL SHEFFIELD
ILLUSTRATIONS: SOPHIE WOLFSON
