Friday, January 5, 2007
Music / Post No Bills Fantasia trumps fantasy
Posted by Peter Margasak on 01.05.07 at 06:09 PM
I 've watched American Idol exactly once, for about five or six minutes, at a party where the ostensible focus was watching the first season finale. I’ve heard a bunch of albums made by the show’s various winners and runners-up and they’ve all seemed like the product of a molded “entertainer” meeting this or that demographic. Fantasia won the competition back in 2004 and released her first album on J later that year. I must’ve listened to it at some point, but it made no impact.
That’s why I was so shocked by her eponymous follow-up, released in December. It’s not a flawless album by any means—when you hire a big team of songwriters and producers, including Missy Elliott and Swizz Beatz, inconsistency is practically a given—but it’s surprisingly good for someone who’s essentially musical modeling clay. Fantasia possesses a powerful, flexible set of pipes, and while she can lay it on as thick as anyone, what's refreshing here is that she doesn't. The album features a bunch of tough, hip-hop inflected jams, but even on the treacly ballads (the worst of which is aslice of Diane Warren schlock produced by Babyface) she manages to avoid melismatic overkill. Fantasia performs on Saturday, January 6, opening for actor Jamie Foxx—who's still trying to convince the world he’s a serious singer—at Allstate Arena.
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Having actually watched some of the Fantasia episodes of AI: she's a good and kind of interesting singer, which already starts her off with more potential than most (including non-Idol) premanufactured stars. I was convinced this sort of formula could work when the totally forgettable Kelly Clarkson was somehow convinced to make a pop version of Interpolmuzic that turned out to be 50 times better than actual Interpol. Now Taylor Hicks, he's hopeless, though I'd love to hear DFA or Air take a crack at producing him, just for kicks.
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First of all, anyone who admits to only watching something once has watched it on more than one occasion. Whether it's American Idol or According to Jim. Secondly, I keep waiting for the day when American's realize both voting for President and the next American Idol is so utterly pointless. They are practically the same institution only Fantasia probably has a better fucking foreign policy than Bush. And Taylor Hicks? He made all of his money on that damn truck commercial I had to hear 97,000 times during the football season so his record can flop. But, Whet, I am seeing the future right now and it looks like this: VH1 doing a reality show where they pair up washed up ex-Idols with washed-up pop music producers. So your dream will eventually come true because, in my opinion, DFA and Hicks are already washed up and we can start the show right now. Plus, AIR, in part, just made the almost non-existent voice of Charlotte Gainsburg into one of the most interesting albums of the year and anyone could do Interpol 50 times better than they do it themselves. Live they do it 50 times worse!
