...and probably wouldn't have even if I were one to do Christmas or gift exchanges.
1. A round-trip plane ticket to Ethiopia or Morocco -- one of them is next on my to-go-to list -- and a lifetime guarantee to be seated in Premium Economy or higher on every Qantas flight. Oh, and a lifetime guarantee to never have to fly any airline other than Qantas.
2. A dog.
3. The perfect man (see example above). Not perfect perfect -- just perfect for me: intelligent, funny, well-traveled, with a car (because I'm still afraid to drive on the left) and good looks that weren't labored over in the gym, at the salon, in the bathroom mirror or under the knife.
4. A box set (on mp3) of every Casey Kasem American Top 40 countdown from the '70s.
7. New diva albums that I've actually been waiting for, from Kate Bush, Sade, Shara Nelson, Everything But the Girl, Tracey Thorn solo, Billie Ray Martin and Shania Twain.
8. An invitation to the Oscars (and a nomination to go with it?).
9. My own personal driver like the one Big had on Sex and the City.
10. The one that got away.
Madonna "Addicted (The One That Got Away)"
On the bright side, I have my health, my words, my friends and thanks to one of them -- take a bow, Zena! -- enough Tend Skin to last me another few years abroad. Come to think of it, I couldn't seriously ask for anything more.
Scratch that. Make it the two best things. For the most part, I found the November 4 episode of Revenge (the sixth of season two) to be somewhat underwhelming, but that's mostly because it felt like a tame set-up shot for future far more explosive frames.
Two particular scenes, however, stood out. The first was Madeleine Stowe vs. Jennifer Jason Leigh on Victoria Grayson's bedroom balcony. You've got to love a house guest who just strolls into her host's master bedroom like she belongs there. I loved the look of sheer terror in the eyes of Victoria Grayson as she wondered whether Kara Wallace Clarke was about to go all single white female on her and push her right over that edge. Stowe and Leigh were two of my favorite film actresses of the early to mid '90s, and watching that scene made me feel like it was 1993 all over again.
That was the year they both appeared in Short Cuts. I remember loving the Robert Altman-directed ensemble film when I saw it in the theater in 1993, but I can't recall if they actually shared any scenes together. I doubt it. Watching their acting tango on Revenge, though, I had the strangest deja vu feeling. Weren't they cast as warring sisters in some other '90s movie I used to love but have long ago forgotten?
Maybe not, but I wouldn't mind the dropping of a few unnecessary Revenge story threads -- chief among them being the financial woes of those adorable-but-oh-so-boring Porter brothers -- in favor of more staring matches between two of the baddest movie divas of two decades ago.
More memories of the '90s came roaring back at the end of the episode, thanks to the song playing on the soundtrack during the final moments: "Paradise Circus," from Massive Attack's 2010 album Heligoland. The track's featured vocalist -- Hope Sandoval -- puts it right up there with the best of the duo's work with world-class singers, namely Massive Attack's collaborations with Tracey Thorn on 1994's Protection and Shara Nelson on '91's Blue Lines. Ah, those '90s!
Massive Attack "Paradise Circus"
Remember Hope Sandoval? If you do, it's probably from "Fade Into You," the near-hit single (No. 44 on the Hot 100) from Mazzy Star's platinum 1993 album So Tonight That I Might See. I haven't heard a peep out of Sandoval's old band since Mazzy Star's less-successful 1996 follow-up Among My Swan (Read my People review of it here), whose title always annoyed me because it was so frustratingly ungrammatical, but she hasn't dropped off the face of this bitter earth.
Mazzy Star "Fade Into You"
In fact, it's Sandoval's post-Mazzy Star work -- as well as her extracurricular appearance on the Jesus and Mary Chain's 1993 "Sometimes Always" single -- for which I most fondly remember her. As much as I loved JAMC back in the day, when I saw them live at the Academy in NYC in '93, and Sandoval joined the brothers Reid onstage to perform the duet, I don't think I once looked at either Jim or William, who was dating Sandoval at the time. It was all about Hope.
The Jesus and Mary Chain "Sometimes Always"
She'd unexpectedly catch my ear again in 2001 with Bavarian Fruit Bread, the debut album by her second band, Hope Sandoval & the Warm Inventions. I first heard it during a trip to London while I was browsing through an indie record store (Remember those?) near Covent Garden, and for months afterwards, it was in heavy rotation on my DVD player. Thanks to Revenge, a show that's proving to be better than any other when it comes to closing arguments to tune in next episode, my faith in Hope has been renewed. She's going to sound great on my iPod tomorrow.
How can you tell an album is a timeless classic, transcending time, place and chart performance? Every time you listen to it feels like the first time. Fourteen years after the then-former Brand New Heavies frontwoman released her self-titled solo debut, whenever my iPod stops on one of its songs (and it seems to happen at least once a day, thank God), I'm transported back to 1998.
The reason for my near-daily time travel? It's certainly not that the album is dated -- it could be released tomorrow and sound completely of its time. It's that I can still vividly recall the way songs like "Bring It On," "No Never Again" and "Oh Mother Earth (Embrace)" made me feel the day the advance cassette arrived in the mail and I pressed play, because I feel a near-identical rising surge of delight whenever I listen to them now.
N'dea Davenport is one of those '90s albums -- a list that includes k.d. lang's Ingenue, Annie Lennox's Diva, Radiohead's The Bends, Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach's Painted from Memory, Shara Nelson's Friendly Fire, Morrissey's Vauxhall and I, Joni Mitchell's Turbulent Indigo, Alison Moyet's Hoodoo, Soundgarden's Badmotorfinger, R.E.M.'s Automatic for the People and New Adventures in Hi-Fi -- whose songs I actively seek out on my iPod, albums I can listen to from beginning to end and still want to press repeat when it's over.
There must be something about former band members who created uncompromising solo music during that decade. Shara Nelson on Friendly Fire (1995) sounded nothing like she did on Massive Attack's Blue Lines (1991) -- or even on her own 1993 solo debut What Silence Knows, equally great -- and she paid for it commercially. One-off collaborations with dance producers aside, we've barely heard a peep out of her since.
Davenport also played it purposely unsafe. On ND, she was every woman indeed, New Orleans funktress one song, dance diva the next, then soul mama, and later jazz folkie (on "Old Man," the album's only misstep, but mostly because I was never a fan of Neil Young's original, and perhaps neither is Davenport, or she wouldn't have felt the need to restructure it so radically), making all the unpredictable stops in between. Naturally, it would be her final solo stand. (She's since rejoined the Brand New Heavies.)
To both its credit and disadvantage, ND didn't really sound like the sort of album one would have expected the former mouthpiece of the Brand New Heavies to make, as there's no overwhelming acid-jazz influence, which probably would have made it a far more dated effort today. Acid jazz practically screams 1994, doesn't it?
She certainly wasn't have the first band expat to travel to a completely different musical country, though. Sting comes immediately to mind, but to his commercial benefit, the former Police frontman immediately set a new stylistic template on 1985's The Dream of the Blue Turtles and rarely strayed far from it. For Davenport, her musical restlessness did her in -- at least in her home country: The U.S. prefers black female singers -- hell, female singers in general -- to be as stylistically narrow as possible. (See Rihanna, currently typecast as a dance artist, who, after three middling singles from Talk That Talk, is once again flying up the charts with "Where Have You Been," or "We Found Love Part 2.")
Or maybe it's just that Davenport's label V2 Records didn't have enough industry pull to get the word out. I recently met a massive Brand New Heavies fan from Australia who had no idea that Davenport had ever released a solo album. Some No. 1 fan he is, but I suspect he isn't alone, which might be why N'dea Davenport never rose above No. 56 on the U.S. R&B album chart. But it's never too late to give a little belated love to an overlooked should-have-been-a-classic.
A lifelong musical Anglophile, I've tossed and turned, spent many deep sleepless nights wondering why some of my favorite British artists never made it big on the left side of the pond.
Well, not really. I've got more pressing matters keeping me up at night. But seriously, why? Why only one Top 40 hit for a singer as awesome as Alison Moyet ("Invisible," No. 31, 1985). Why does Tori Amos have six platinum albums in the U.S., and the woman who probably inspired her most, Kate Bush, have none. What did Sweet -- whom I adore and who sneaked a string of singles into the U.S. Top 10 in the '70s, including the immortal "Ballroom Blitz" (No. 5, 1973) -- have that Roxy Music didn't? The legendary Bryan Ferry-led band managed only a single trip into the U.S. Top 40, with "Love Is the Drug" (No. 30, 1975).
At least all of the above-mentioned acts had their one moment, a platinum album here or there and/or one single that managed to claw its way into the lower reaches of the U.S. Top 40. But the annals of pop history are filled with superstar British acts who barely made a ripple crossing the Atlantic. I was reminded of just how much the U.S. has missed out on the other day when I was watching Must Be the Music, a U.K. American Idol-style show that originally aired in 2010 and is only now being shown on Bangkok TV. Dizzee Rascal, Sharleen Spiteri from the band Texas and Jamie Cullum were the three judges.
The competition was fierce, and surprisingly good, but it was the performances of Rascal and Spiteri, two artists I've loved for years who have never had a hit in the U.S., that got me thinking about how much great British music mainstream U.S.A. has missed out on over the years.
Here are six other greats that America slept on.
Massive Attack
Sure they do have a rather sizable underground following in the States and could probably sell out Roseland Ballroom in New York City, but they've never had a chart single, nor a hit album, in the U.S. (Blue Lines, MA's landmark 1991 debut, didn't even chart in the U.S.!) As producer/musician-led acts featuring rotating singers on their singles go, I'll never understand why David Guetta gets to go gold and platinum, and Massive Attack doesn't. That goes for Chemical Brothers and Basement Jaxx, also under-sung in the U.S., too.
Saint Etienne
Perhaps the trio's sound was simply too confusing: a pastiche of the '60s and indie pop and underground dance music, with little bit of kitsch on the side. It was accessible and catchy, yet unlike anything of its time (the early '90s) -- or any other time. And any act who can take a Neil Young classic ("Only Love Can Break Your Heart") and turn it into one of the greatest dance singles of the '90s deserves all the multi-platinum love they can get, which, sadly, in St. Etienne's case, was none.
Sugababes
They had beauty, big hits and internal drama that at times threatened to overshadow the music (yet somehow never did). I'm not talking about Destiny's Child in the U.S. I'm talking about Sugababes in the UK. The trio, in its original incarnation, visited the Teen People offices once when I was an editor there, and I was absolutely certain they'd make it at least as big in the States as Bananarama did in the '80s. Despite scoring six No. 1 singles in their native UK and a string of platinum albums, not once did they ever chart in the U.S. Their loss -- and America's.
Rachel Stevens
Okay, I'll admit it. I never really expected the former S Club 7 member to make it big in the U.S. I mean, look where she came from: a kiddie-pop band who made A-Teens look kind of cool. (Though S Club 7 did score one U.S. hit, "Never Had a Dream Come True," which reached No. 10 in 2000.) Her solo success in the UK would be short-lived (two solid albums, 2003's Funky Dory and 2005's Come and Get It, mid-'00s Britpop at its best), but Stevens, who hasn't released any new music in seven years, deserves all of the commercial rewards that Cheryl Cole has reaped in the UK for not even being the standout in Girls Aloud.
Shara Nelson
A sweet soul sister and the sort of UK flipside to former Brand New Heavies frontwoman N'Dea Davenport, equally underrated, whose urgent, yearning vocals made "Unfinished Sympathy" the aforementioned Massive Attack's crowning musical achievement. Interest in her solo work was middling in her native UK, and aside from sporadic guest stints on
other people's dance singles, she hasn't released new music since 1995's stunning Friendly Fire. Hers is the pop comeback I'm praying for most.
Robbie Williams
America has never really embraced camp in music, which might be why the U.S. mainstream resisted acts like Mika and Scissor Sisters. Williams was even more confusing because his camp came in such a masculine package. For a moment, in the early '00s, it looked like he was finally about to get his U.S. close-up, but the camera shifted to Ricky Martin, and never again pointed in Williams' direction. At least he's got all the millions he's pulled in from international superstardom, both solo and with Take That, to keep him warm at night.
Sometimes, when I'm wide awake in dreamland (to quote the title of one of Pat Benatar's '80s albums, her final one to go gold), I fantasize about a world where Benatar is a chart superstar again.
But that's one dream that won't likely be coming true. I once had a conversation with a publicist for EMI Records, an affiliate of Benatar's then-label, Chrysalis Records (a publicist who, incidentally, later married Curt Smith from Tears for Fears, speaking of comebacks that would be most welcome) right around the time that Benatar's 1993 Gravity's Rainbow album flopped. I asked if she thought Benatar would ever return to her '80s chart glory. She shook her head, sadly. Nope. It's over.
I thought to myself, "We'll show her," but we never did. Now, with Chrissie Hynde, Stevie Nicks and Benatar out of regular circulation, it's been decades since female rockers regularly ruled the charts. Pink called herself a "rock star" on "So What," and the other day I heard Sheryl Crow calling herself one on The Marriage Ref, but then, Shaun Cassidy once had a Top 3 hit with an Eric Carmen song called "That's Rock 'n' Roll," which was as rock 'n' roll as "Hey Deanie," another late-'70s hit sung by Cassidy and written by Carmen. Pink and Crow are pop singers who accessorize with rock & roll swagger. Not that there's anything wrong with that!
But as usual, I digress. Here are nine other comebacks I'd like to find under the Christmas tree this year, or next.
Cyndi Lauper Back when it was all about Madonna vs. Cyndi Lauper in 1984, who would have guessed that the less-talented singer would be the one still charting high this century? If Lauper's 2008 album, Bring Ya to the Brink, one of the best of the '00s, couldn't resurrect her chart career, I'm afraid that ship that sailed circa 1989 isn't returning to port.
Ciara She never had the greatest voice, and she always had a bit of an image problem (as in, not really having one), but over the course of four albums, Ciara has released some of the most consistently solid R&B of the last decade. Alas, with rap and Eurodance-inflected R&B currently hogging the crossover field, it's been way downhill saleswise for Ciara since Goodies, her 2004 triple-platinum debut. "Work," her brilliant 2009 collaboration with Missy Elliott (4:13 was one of the best musical moments of that year -- thank you, Danja), couldn't even touch Billboard's Hot 100. Hopefully, she can get back to where she started without having to slum with David Guetta.
George Michael His recent brush with pneumonia -- and death -- made me realize how much we need to value our musical treasures. Michael has released far too little music in the last two decades, and he had to cancel his recent tour featuring symphonic versions of his previous work (how Sting of him) due to his illness. I say he scrap it for good, offer full refunds and get back into the recording studio as soon as his health allows. As sublime as I'm sure it would be to hear Michael performing his past work with new orchestral arrangements, now that he has so much real-life fodder to draw from creatively, why revisit past glories when he can be recording new ones and (hopefully) topping the charts all over again?
Christina Aguilera She's had a glimpse of what it's like to be back on top as a featured artist on Maroon 5's "Moves Like Jagger," so it only seems fitting that Aguilera get there on her own now. And let's face it: on the charts, Katy Perry vs. Lady Gaga vs. Rihanna will never be half as exciting as Britney Spears vs. Christina Aguilera was at the turn of the century.
Soundgarden I'm hoping that my favorite grunge act's upcoming reunion album will be one of the few that succeeds commercially, and that just as grunge led to a revival of old-time rock & roll on the charts in the early '90s, it will do so once again in 2012. After an extremely lackluster post-Audioslave solo run, Chris Cornell, owner of one of the best voices in hard rock, deserves it.
Duffy Was the sophomore jinx that befell 2010's Endlessly the beginning of the end for my favorite Welsh performer since Catherine Zeta-Jones? May she return from her current hiatus inspired, rejuvenated and ready to create music as magical and undeniable as Rockferry once again.
Donna Summer If they're never going to induct her into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, can we at least get one surprise late-career hit a la Cher's "Believe" for the woman who helped make Madonna and Lady Gaga possible?
Dionne Warwick A legend as classy and classic as Warwick deserves to be best remembered by the 20-to-40 crowd for something other than Psychic Friends Network and Celebrity Apprentice. Maybe Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach could write her an entire album similar in musical spirit to their 1998 collaboration Painted from Memory, leading to a late-in-life revival Tony Bennett-style.
Lately, I've been dwelling on something -- in this blog, in the gym, on the street and pretty much anywhere I never venture without my iPod: great singers who either fell short of finding a sizable audience or ones whose heydays were far too brief. In my quest to give a few of them a little bit of their due, I posted a video by Shara Nelson -- whose stunning voice made Massive Attack's "Unfinished Sympathy" one of the most powerful musical statements of the '90s -- on my Facebook wall.
My Facebook friend Anthony, a guy who knows a great song when he hears one and possibly the biggest Duran Duran fan alive next to my best friend Lori, not only commented that he has all of Shara Nelson's music, but he also invoked the names of two other neglected singers: Andrea Martin and Terry Ellis.
Although I can't say that I've ever delved in Martin's discography, I know Ellis's quite well. She did enjoy substantial success as a member of En Vogue in the '90s, but pop history since the '80s has shown that for the most part, male and female vocal groups have limited life spans. Unless you're lucky and talented enough to be Justin Timberlake, you generally don't emerge from them alive and still kicking out the jams and putting out the hits.
I doubt that anybody expected En Vogue to still be going platinum in 2011, but I wish they were. God, I miss the good old days when non-cookie-cutter songs like En Vogue's "Don't Let Go (Love)" were regularly topping the pop charts. Now we've got LMFAO, quite possibly the emptiest act to score back-to-back smashes since Ke$ha's 2010 reign.
I remember interviewing Ellis right before she released her solo album, Southern Gal, in 1995. I was sure that she would be En Vogue's breakout star, the one that maybe, just maybe, would still be hot this century, long after that girl/boy group era had run its course.
Sadly, as was the case with Des'ree, Dionne Farris, Maria McKee and so many other promising singers of songs from the last century, it was not to be. I'm fortunate enough to have seen all three in concert, and McKee, in particular, is one of the most riveting live performers I've ever seen. Her 1993 solo album, You've Gotta Sin to Get Saved, ranks among the best albums ever (for months that year, it was stuck in my CD player), but despite decades of great work with Lone Justice and on her own, her only major hit to date was thanks to its inclusion in that 1990 Tom Cruise stinker Days of Thunder, a movie that was good for two things only: introducing Nicole Kidman to the U.S. mainstream and sending McKee's "Show Me Heaven" to No. 1 in the UK.
Thankfully, we'll always have the musical memories of these under-appreciated greats.
