Why can't Rachel Stevens sell singles?
Strange leading question, yes, but you might not have realised that her new single So Good, number 9 in the midweeks, is just her sixth solo outing, and the three that have been top five were her much hyped debut, the one off Sport Relief and the one off Sky's Premiership preview advert. If you look at most of the pop-centric blogs and online magazines they fall over themselves to praise her and her producers' electronic stylings and attempts to advance the cause of a style often dismissed as throwaway trash, yet the electroclash title track from Funky Dory peaked at 27 and nearly took her career down at the second attempt, the much praised Negotiate With Love (which didn't sound like Kraftwerk despite what many reckoned, but similarly didn't sound like Ashanti which was surely the point) got to 10 and now her second Richard X collaboration after Some Girls might not hang on to the top ten, yet she doesn't get the chart position criticism that others whose singles don't all immediately fly into the top three do. Notably the album, which contains these two recent singles, has been shoved back to September so they can fit a third lift in.
Here's the rub. Rachel Stevens is an enormous pop name, yet doesn't sell like one. It's not for the want of trying - you definitely know when she has a single coming, to the extent that many were surprised she didn't figure on ITV's G8 debate last night. That she'll disrobe at will helps this, but Jennifer Ellison does that and nobody took her recording career seriously. Maybe half the problem is that pop, or its financiers, have become obsessed with reversing the popular conception that this stuff isn't for mass adult consumption that the new breed of producers willing to show and simultaneously move ahead on their influences has been promoted as much as possible, yet these much vaunted production masterstrokes wash much better with critics than they do with the 13 year olds who most singles are now aimed at - also see Girls Aloud only ever going to number one with their uberhyped first single and a charity cover. No wonder So Good virtually ended up being sold on the premise that Stevens wears gloves in the video.
2 comments:
Very interesting post. Maybe some of these pop acts (or other outlets for all the writers of this kind of stuff) could actually cut down on their marketing costs a lot and still do well enough to survive on the support of the kind of people who write/read blog entris about how great they are?
You'd think so, but non-pop acts hardly sell on the support of blogs, as you'd find out if you ever asked 679 Records how MIA's sales figures look.
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