Why does Joss Stone look like such a whore?
While flipping through one of those vapid glossies the other day, I landed on the picture of a familiar-yet-horrible looking woman, a crimson haired Gorgon who looked like she just stumbled out of a Newark go-go bar. And then it hit me: Hey, that's Joss Stone! And she's shilling her new record, Introducing Joss Stone, which is filled with the kinds of songs she would have just danced to at the aforementioned Newark establishment. What the hell happened to her? Is this the same 15-year-old prodigy that Rolling Stone compared to Delta bluesmen? Wasn't this the white British girl who was touted as the flag-bearer of the neo-soul movement? How did she end up singing Destiny's Child castoffs and strutting around in dresses that look like they were swiped off a table at Scores?
Like Nelly Furtado, Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears, and Jessica Simpson before her, Stone has become another victim of the "Butterfly Effect". See, when a promising female artist reaches her third or fourth album, they will invariably announce their latest work showcases the "real them". And sadly, that "reality" falls somewhere south of the third-string bartender at Hogs & Heifers and just north of a Hunt's Point pavement pounder.
"The biggest magazine success story of the last 10 years has been Maxim, and in the Maximization of the music industry, the only way in if you're a female artist is to show ass," said Jim DeRogatis, rock critic at the Chicago Sun-Times.
The phenomenon takes its name from the album that spawned it, Mariah Carey's 1997 opus Butterfly. "Fantasy", her 1995 collaboration with Ol' Dirty Bastard, was a peek at things to come, but that album still bore the saccharine-laden "One Sweet Day" and other territorial markings of then-husband Tommy Mottola. Once the divorce papers were signed, Carey's inhibitions and clothing disappeared faster than free sandwiches at a sportswriter's convention and the cry went out: Get me a rapper, any rapper. Diddy answered the call and Mariah's turn as a Bond-girl wannabe in the "Honey" video led to bikini car washes, hotpants flag waving at NASCAR races and, most regrettably, Glitter.
"But how long can you really do the coquette thing, especially with Mariah in her 40s?" asks DeRogatis. "But what do you want her to be - Patti Smith?"
After Mariah, the Butterfly Effect began spreading like the influenza outbreak of 1918. Jessica Simpson abandoned her Christian roots before pimping out her marriage on a reality TV show, "acting" in The Dukes of Hazzard, and ultimately returning to the Carey blueprint with the post-divorce "real me" album Public Affair last year.
The Butterfly Effect cannot be stopped by national boundaries, either - witness the profound affect it's had on the budding Canadian songbird. Five years ago, Nelly Furtado was a baggy jeaned, white T-shirted Portuguese-Canadian whose rhythmic delivery was more "Like A Bird" then a "Butterfly". Despite disappearing to have a child and releasing a second album that went ignored by much of the world, she seemed well on her way to carving out a inoffensive globalbeat niche for herself.
And now she buys body glitter by the pound, thanks to Timbaland, who turned her out like a proper female artist. Her new album? It's called Loose. The first single? "Promiscuous Girl". How subtle.
"It's for the same reason hair bands made ballads back in the '80s: their audience was a bunch of beer-drinking wannabe biker boys and they needed something that would get their girlfriends to come to the shows," says DeRogatis. "With the 'Butterfly' artists, they're making girlish pop, but there's the added element for the guys. The girls scream and the guys drool."
So is there any hope for these young ingenues? Oddly enough, the biggest hope is the worst offender: Christina Aguilera, who bypassed butterfly and went straight to Mothra with 2002's Stripped, where her tour costuming largely consisted of making sure her hair extensions covered the naughty bits. But in the five years since, Aguilera has gone back into the cocoon, reincarnating herself as one of the Andrews sisters (granted, an Andrews sister with an amazing boob job) and cancelled her membership in the Pussycat Dolls poledancers union.
Nothing against Joss Stone growing up and expressing her feminine wiles - but just because you have wings doesn't mean you have to spread them. (Esquire)
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