In recent weeks we have been bombarded with a package of women’s records. Laurie Anderson can continue her strange experiments, Ricky Lee Jones will continue to appeal to connoisseurs and Pat Benatar will bring the best rock ‘n’ roll to our world, but the record industry needs one hit by Laura Branigan (‘Self Control’, for example), for such a hit should continue to operate the production machine of the records.
Pop singers for the disco service. Today, it is not just disco, but ‘high energy’, a combination of modern electronic rhythms, catchy melodies and soulful singing in the style of disco singers. To be ‘high energy’, the singer does not have to be black. Tina Turner and Chaka Khan are on a separate scale. To be ‘high energy’, you need a singer with vocal power, preferably a sex bomb who will provide a lot of image and style to the broadcasters of the choruses in the discos of New York, Paris and London, which are the antithesis of the new wave that is beginning to collapse under its own weight.
Let’s put it this way: the ‘high energy’ of singers like Hazell Dean will not bring salvation to the pop world. The music at most moves your behinds. The bass works overtime, the guitars mow at full volume. Here is a Pix arrangement of the melody. Very banal. The lead voice is clear, but soulless. Hazel Dean with all the talent inherent in her, is first and foremost a product of the industry. Hazel Dean s far from a bombshell.
Madonna is, as I imagine, the holder of the title “Hot femme fatale”. I prefer her to Hazel Dean. Madonna has balls, she walks a tightrope between sophistication and sexuality, she may be high energy but can’t compete with Chaka Khan’s finest whose 12″ single (‘I Feel For You’) pops out of the speakers in stereo.
From Chaka Khan I move on to Kim Wilde, who broke out like a storm three years ago with ‘Kids in America’, ‘Cambodia’, ‘View From a Bridge’ with the help of her father Marty Wilde, hit of the fifties and sixties, and her brother Ricky who custom made hits for her like a hi-fi machine.
The honeymoon of success is over. RAK Records pressed for more hits, but something in Wilde’s hit machine squeaked until it completely stopped. Now she is making her comeback with the album ‘Teases and Dares’. The music is quite superficial. The voice is fragile, but there are those who know how to sell Kim Wilde as a pop star. Pop singers like Kim Wilde want to be taken seriously, and some are absolutely right. Some look great on their record covers, but when you take the record out of the cover and listen, the whole product looks like a bonbonniere filled with sawdust.
From the ‘female records of the month’ I chose Alison Moyet, formerly from Yazoo. Try it. There is no commercialization to her name. What a deep voice. Alison Moyet needs no label of ‘high energy’, because her voice is natural and real.
