VIDEO: Kelly Clarkson, "Never Again"
Poor Kelly Clarkson. The breakout star from the first season of American Idol had to wait months before RCA agreed to release her third and latest CD for the label, My December — and even then, RCA chief Clive Davis’s middling faith in Miss Independent’s commercial appeal had him doling out veiled potshots during the 2007 American Idol finale. Kelly has since revealed that Davis offered her $10 million to remove five of the songs she’d written from the album and replace them with tracks that had better hit potential. She couldn’t fire Davis for wanting to make money off her, so she canned her manager, Jeff Kwatinetz. To top it all off, ticket sales for her summer tour weren’t what Live Nation expected. So she canceled it. The Kelly Show has gone to shit. It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way, was it?
Kelly has put on a brave face. Her spin: “I’m a singer-songwriter y’all, not just a mouthpiece. Don’t tell me to shut up and sing!” The earnestness of this effort hasn’t been lost on me. Kelly’s perverse stubbornness is one of the things I love about her: it’s the “Don’t Mess with a Texas Former American Idol Harboring Severely Unpleasant Relationship Issues” maxim she’s perfected over time. But I do find her naïveté absurd, particularly at this stage of her career. “If I were to make a Breakaway II, I would have failed myself,” Kelly told Elle magazine in its July music issue. “I don’t mind sucking, as long as it is my decision.” My December doesn’t exactly suck, but it’s got no Top 40 standouts, no supremely hook-filled choruses, no heart-stopping, scale-climbing crescendos. In fact, it’s as cold as the title implies. After a few cursory listens, you feel you’re forcing yourself to drink a cheap cup of coffee. There are pockets of energy to be found here, but there’s no pleasure in discovering them.
It feels sacrilegious to say these things about Kelly, who earned my adoration partly by being the rare pop star who is confident of her talents and yet also self-aware. She has said that even when the tweens who are so rabid a part of her fan base profess their devotion, she’s ambivalent about their worship, certain that, like the Britneys and the Christinas before her, she too will be weeded out. What a shame, then, that she couldn’t display the same perceptiveness when it came to assessing what her audience desires for her evolution. If she wants to be a rocker, that’s fine. Rather than simply inviting Mike Watt to play bass in her backing band, why not go all the way? She could’ve hired Kevin Churko — who collaborated on and produced Ozzy Osbourne’s latest venture — to help her realize her sleaze-metal dreams. (Type “Sweet Child o’ Mine,” “Jack Daniel’s,” and “Kelly Clarkson” into a YouTube search if you don’t know what I mean.) Kelly is a fantastic singer. But she didn’t win an ASCAP Award by herself. She’s not an indie chanteuse or a solo songwriter, and she never has been.
Although Thankful, her debut disc after her American Idol win, was white-bread and whole-milk, her Grammy-winning follow-up, Breakaway, was a surprise. Breakaway allowed thousands of girls to take a vicious pleasure in the act of being dumped by their douche-bag boyfriends. Written by Swedish phenoms Dr. Luke and Max Martin, the main rally call, “Since U Been Gone” is an emo-rebel anthem that’s also a defining brand of pop, a delicious sort of song that you at once know is pure sonic paydirt. Even Avril Lavigne, who co-wrote “Breakaway” and gave the song to Kelly, was jealous of “Since U Been Gone.” When indie hero Ted Leo covered it, the blogosphere dutifully posted MP3s, and these were downloaded until Kelly had won a seal of Ironic Hipster Approval.
Leo later told Los Angeles Times pop critic Ann Powers that “Since U Been Gone” was a “cheap trick,” a “perfect amalgamation of everything that was ‘hot’ and ‘edgy’ in pop music that year.” True enough. But that cheap trick was what distinguished Kelly from any number of other tween-pop sensations. My December doesn’t pull off any expensive illusions, and neither does the renewed vigor of her bitterness seem as purely fucked up as it did on Breakaway.
In some ways, My December actually is a Breakaway II. Kelly might bristle at the thought, but just because the pop flavor is missing doesn’t mean our girl has altered her methods. It’s clear she learned something from the professional song doctors she’s now distancing herself from. “Hole,” “Sober,” “Judas,” “Haunted” — the titles alone match the banality of the text-messaging parlance Dr. Luke inserted into “Since U Been Gone.” Yet her compositions are, for the most part, complete and total bummers that don’t end quickly enough. Kelly keeps citing Pat Benatar as a muse, but what she’s created is more Jagged Little Pill than Crimes of Passion. Which wouldn’t be such a letdown if her songwriting were as strong or as consistent as Pat’s or even Alanis’s. Were Mutt Lange, Serban Ghenea, any of the trained professionals in Davis’s Outlook contacts booked up? Or is Kelly just a snobby control freak in the studio?
