adma
Superstar
Maybe a touch under the radar (so far), but Marc Weisblott's returned to Eye Weekly (.com), and I found myself amused by his inimitable meta-upon-meta-spin on Carl Wilson on Celine Dion...
http://www.eyeweekly.com/city/scrollingeye/article/15442
Selling Celine Dion
BY Marc Weisblott January 17, 2008 12:01
Today on the Scroll: How critic Carl Wilson reached a broader audience by writing about Celine Dion than Celine herself has with her new album.
Did you hear that Globe and Mail scribe Carl Wilson wrote a pocketbook about his attempt to make some sense of Celine Dion? Its publication provided its share of fodder for the upper-middle-lowbrow media last month, including most of the new wave of public-radio shows dissecting pop culture, like NPR’s The Bryant Park Project, PRI’s Fair Game and the CBC’s Q.
Not all the show hosts were entirely sure how to explain the source material, as Wilson corroborates, although he relished the soapboxes all the same: “Some of the interviews had a very jokey approach, which makes it hard for me to get to the stuff the book’s more centrally about.
“I don’t think of it as an approach to selling the criticism,†he offers, “I think of it as an approach to the criticism itself.â€
The attention from either side of the border for Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste was unprecedented for a volume in the 33 1/3 series of single-album, self-indulgent critical discourses from Continuum Books. Then again, so was the concept of an American publisher issuing a book by a Canadian writer on a Canadian subject, even if her act was stationed at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas for the past five years.
Just as Wilson’s book was being readied for release, Celine Dion was celebrating her release from captivity with a new album, Taking Chances, where the material was billed as a bit more complex than what she played on the casino stage. At least three major reviews, including Wilson’s in the Globe, used the word “grit†— which is presumably the opposite of glitz.
Could it be that the Celine machine was staying one step ahead of the critical deconstruction of her decade-ago Titanic anthem? “My Heart Will Go On,†contained on the album Let’s Talk About Love, was Dion’s solo swan song from the top of the Billboard Hot 100 (although a 1998 duet with pre-prosecuted R. Kelly, “I’m Your Angel,†also hit number one). From that point onward, play for her English-language singles was confined to the sleepier adult contemporary domain, where past favourites stick around forever.
With the single “Taking Chances,†however, Dion was being spun alongside rap anthems and blasts of emo on outlets like XM’s teenybopper channel 20 on 20. She was, after all, belting out a tune from a collaboration between Eurythmics mastermind Dave Stewart and Kara DioGuardi, writer of hits for Ashlee Simpson, Hilary Duff and Kelly Clarkson that at least evoke something that resembles self-awareness.
Despite an accompanying sci-fi hip-hop video, the gambit didn’t really take, though. “It just wasn’t a great fit,†reports Michelle Boros, the program director for 20 on 20, where songs that fail to make the grade are swiftly voted off the island. Locally, the song got 175 airings over 12 weeks on CHUM-FM, where Celine was a '90s staple (even though few of her hits ever qualified as Canadian Content under the MAPL system) before the station shifted to a brighter sound. But the single didn’t take off as intended, and it dropped off the playlist.
So, this kind of comeback with a younger generation just wasn’t in the cards. Celine’s follow-up single, a more bombastic cover of Heart’s 1987 power ballad “Alone,†should delight her fellow 39-year-olds who can recall it from prom night.
The fleeting hope that Celine Dion would make an entire album about her media image, a la Britney Spears’ Blackout, was too good to be true. Better off trying to make sense of her motivations from afar, like the YouTube-hosted montage of deranged moments from her A New Day DVD (assembled by fourfour blogger Rich Juzwiak) that shed light on her manic mannerisms.
As for sales of Carl Wilson’s book, Continuum publisher David Barker is so uncertain of how it would be received that he’s holding a contest to predict where Let’s Talk About Love will stand in March compared to the other 49 titles in the 33 1/3 series (#1: Neutral Milk Hotel, #2: The Beatles), drawing guesses that have ranged from first place to last.
As part of the promotion, prior to the book’s release, Barker also sent out PDFs of its opening chapters to anyone who asked via sites like Idolator and Pitchfork.
“We faced a lot of resistance from the very start,†he emails Scrolling Eye, “even from people who were very supportive of the series. Many felt that the book didn't fit the series profile, and that their customers would not be seen dead buying a book about Celine. Even when our sales people pointed out the angle of Carl's book, at great length, it was often hard to convince stores to stock the book.
“It's interesting that the same cultural snobbery Carl writes about so well in his book is actually preventing people from reading the book itself, to a degree.â€
None of this apprehension was evident at the Gladstone Hotel on Jan. 9, as the ballroom was filled to capacity to watch Torontopia fixtures Owen Pallett, Laura Barrett and Steve Kado interpret Celine songs, a performance excerpt from Celine impersonator Laura Landauer, and the author being chatted up by philosopher Mark Kingwell. And he sold around 100 books at the launch itself.
Scott Woods, proprietor of rockcritics.com and the co-author of possibly the only other book comparable to Wilson’s study ever published in this country, the long out-of-print I Wanna Be Sedated: Pop Music in the Seventies, was one of the few in attendance who left feeling annoyed by it all.
“I never felt convinced that [Wilson] really confronted his personal demon — Celine’s music — which I thought was the entire point of the book, no? His one-chapter summary of the record feels passionless and a bit perfunctory. Which is fine, I suppose, if that’s the response the music evokes in him. That chapter just reads like a regular album review, the kind of ‘sympathetic’ treatment I can imagine reading in The New Yorker.
“The way he writes about the music doesn’t convince me that he really did delve in, or that he has much feeling at all for the stuff — his investment in Celine’s music seems entirely guarded,†writes Woods, who’d rather read a similar book from someone who’s lived inside the music. “The whole arm’s-length approach didn’t work for me in the end.â€
Woods found the performances from Wilson’s musician cabal — not known for their technical proficiencies — to be “painl,†irritated by their smug flubs amidst what he perceived as mockery. “I remembered pretty early into it why I made a point 20 years ago of not going out much.â€
Send news, tips, links about arts, culture, media: scroll@eyeweekly.com
http://www.eyeweekly.com/city/scrollingeye/article/15442
Selling Celine Dion
BY Marc Weisblott January 17, 2008 12:01
Today on the Scroll: How critic Carl Wilson reached a broader audience by writing about Celine Dion than Celine herself has with her new album.
Did you hear that Globe and Mail scribe Carl Wilson wrote a pocketbook about his attempt to make some sense of Celine Dion? Its publication provided its share of fodder for the upper-middle-lowbrow media last month, including most of the new wave of public-radio shows dissecting pop culture, like NPR’s The Bryant Park Project, PRI’s Fair Game and the CBC’s Q.
Not all the show hosts were entirely sure how to explain the source material, as Wilson corroborates, although he relished the soapboxes all the same: “Some of the interviews had a very jokey approach, which makes it hard for me to get to the stuff the book’s more centrally about.
“I don’t think of it as an approach to selling the criticism,†he offers, “I think of it as an approach to the criticism itself.â€
The attention from either side of the border for Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste was unprecedented for a volume in the 33 1/3 series of single-album, self-indulgent critical discourses from Continuum Books. Then again, so was the concept of an American publisher issuing a book by a Canadian writer on a Canadian subject, even if her act was stationed at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas for the past five years.
Just as Wilson’s book was being readied for release, Celine Dion was celebrating her release from captivity with a new album, Taking Chances, where the material was billed as a bit more complex than what she played on the casino stage. At least three major reviews, including Wilson’s in the Globe, used the word “grit†— which is presumably the opposite of glitz.
Could it be that the Celine machine was staying one step ahead of the critical deconstruction of her decade-ago Titanic anthem? “My Heart Will Go On,†contained on the album Let’s Talk About Love, was Dion’s solo swan song from the top of the Billboard Hot 100 (although a 1998 duet with pre-prosecuted R. Kelly, “I’m Your Angel,†also hit number one). From that point onward, play for her English-language singles was confined to the sleepier adult contemporary domain, where past favourites stick around forever.
With the single “Taking Chances,†however, Dion was being spun alongside rap anthems and blasts of emo on outlets like XM’s teenybopper channel 20 on 20. She was, after all, belting out a tune from a collaboration between Eurythmics mastermind Dave Stewart and Kara DioGuardi, writer of hits for Ashlee Simpson, Hilary Duff and Kelly Clarkson that at least evoke something that resembles self-awareness.
Despite an accompanying sci-fi hip-hop video, the gambit didn’t really take, though. “It just wasn’t a great fit,†reports Michelle Boros, the program director for 20 on 20, where songs that fail to make the grade are swiftly voted off the island. Locally, the song got 175 airings over 12 weeks on CHUM-FM, where Celine was a '90s staple (even though few of her hits ever qualified as Canadian Content under the MAPL system) before the station shifted to a brighter sound. But the single didn’t take off as intended, and it dropped off the playlist.
So, this kind of comeback with a younger generation just wasn’t in the cards. Celine’s follow-up single, a more bombastic cover of Heart’s 1987 power ballad “Alone,†should delight her fellow 39-year-olds who can recall it from prom night.
The fleeting hope that Celine Dion would make an entire album about her media image, a la Britney Spears’ Blackout, was too good to be true. Better off trying to make sense of her motivations from afar, like the YouTube-hosted montage of deranged moments from her A New Day DVD (assembled by fourfour blogger Rich Juzwiak) that shed light on her manic mannerisms.
As for sales of Carl Wilson’s book, Continuum publisher David Barker is so uncertain of how it would be received that he’s holding a contest to predict where Let’s Talk About Love will stand in March compared to the other 49 titles in the 33 1/3 series (#1: Neutral Milk Hotel, #2: The Beatles), drawing guesses that have ranged from first place to last.
As part of the promotion, prior to the book’s release, Barker also sent out PDFs of its opening chapters to anyone who asked via sites like Idolator and Pitchfork.
“We faced a lot of resistance from the very start,†he emails Scrolling Eye, “even from people who were very supportive of the series. Many felt that the book didn't fit the series profile, and that their customers would not be seen dead buying a book about Celine. Even when our sales people pointed out the angle of Carl's book, at great length, it was often hard to convince stores to stock the book.
“It's interesting that the same cultural snobbery Carl writes about so well in his book is actually preventing people from reading the book itself, to a degree.â€
None of this apprehension was evident at the Gladstone Hotel on Jan. 9, as the ballroom was filled to capacity to watch Torontopia fixtures Owen Pallett, Laura Barrett and Steve Kado interpret Celine songs, a performance excerpt from Celine impersonator Laura Landauer, and the author being chatted up by philosopher Mark Kingwell. And he sold around 100 books at the launch itself.
Scott Woods, proprietor of rockcritics.com and the co-author of possibly the only other book comparable to Wilson’s study ever published in this country, the long out-of-print I Wanna Be Sedated: Pop Music in the Seventies, was one of the few in attendance who left feeling annoyed by it all.
“I never felt convinced that [Wilson] really confronted his personal demon — Celine’s music — which I thought was the entire point of the book, no? His one-chapter summary of the record feels passionless and a bit perfunctory. Which is fine, I suppose, if that’s the response the music evokes in him. That chapter just reads like a regular album review, the kind of ‘sympathetic’ treatment I can imagine reading in The New Yorker.
“The way he writes about the music doesn’t convince me that he really did delve in, or that he has much feeling at all for the stuff — his investment in Celine’s music seems entirely guarded,†writes Woods, who’d rather read a similar book from someone who’s lived inside the music. “The whole arm’s-length approach didn’t work for me in the end.â€
Woods found the performances from Wilson’s musician cabal — not known for their technical proficiencies — to be “painl,†irritated by their smug flubs amidst what he perceived as mockery. “I remembered pretty early into it why I made a point 20 years ago of not going out much.â€
Send news, tips, links about arts, culture, media: scroll@eyeweekly.com
