Gwen Stefani | The Sweet Escape (Interscope)
Anyone who’s been conscious of Top 40 in the last ten years understands No Doubt front woman Gwen Stefani as an icon first and a singer second. For her 2004 solo debut, Love.Angel.Music.Baby., the rude girl in a half shirt underwent a fashion transfiguration, full-bore co-opting the style of Japan’s Harajuku girls and even hiring a gaggle of them to serve as her posse. They dance behind her onstage, trail her at public appearances, and even pose behind her while she gives interviews. What it means to have four mute punky Stepford geishas working full-time as your accessories (pets?) is just too mammoth to unpack here–Stefani has explained them as an embodiment of her imagination–but more than two years later, even after the release of the new The Sweet Escape, the Harajuku girls are still the primary totem of her “vision.”
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On the surface Stefani and Ciara, the “princess of crunk ‘n’ B,” might seem to be cut from the same cloth–both make hyperaccesible club music, both have hits produced by the Neptunes, both are resourceful with a rather limited singing range. But they aren’t. Ciara’s sheer alacrity on her latest, The Evolution, makes The Sweet Escape look like a zombie march. It starts off with a spoken segment and two songs that establish, in the plainest English, that Ciara defers her dreams for no man. On “That’s Right,” while Lil Jon foghorns a call to arms for women who love too much, Ciara sends booty-calling cads straight to voice mail so she can party with her girlfriends. “Tonight I’m doing me,” she coos. “I’ll call you in the morning.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Gwen Stefani photo/Mark Squires.
