Christina Aguilera flops. Ciara stalls. Are the top divas of the ’00s already an endangered species?
Jun. 11 2010 - 6:41 pm | 646 views | 0 recommendations | 3 comments
Back in April, I asked the age-old question “Will Ciara’s sex sell?” The answer: Hell, no! Despite the brief controversy she stirred and the attention she received for the just-this-side-of-lewd video for “Ride,” her latest single, it quickly ran out of gas and couldn’t manage to cruise past No. 71 on Billboard’s Hot 1oo singles chart. This doesn’t bode well for Ciara’s fourth album, Basic Instinct, the follow-up to underperformer Fantasy Ride which is due to be released this summer. (Time to let somebody else “ride”?) It probably will be pushed back in order to rework the marketing plan and the album itself to give it more hit potential.
The movers and shakers at Ciara’s label, LaFace Records, will have their work cut out for them. These are hard times for many of the top turn-of-the-century pop divas, and the career of the once-multi-platinum Ciara is just one apparent casualty. Popular music always has been cyclical, especially for female pop and R&B stars. (Country fans tend to be less fickle, which should be good news to Taylor Swift and Carrie Underwood.) Any act is lucky to spend more than a few years — or two albums — near the top of the charts. Usually, sometime around album No. 3, the returns start to diminish, and before long, a one-time superstar is struggling to sell records and fill concert halls.
But over the last decade, multi-platinum female stars have been plummeting from the sky at an alarmingly rapid rate. No, time has never been kind to flavors of the month, or year, in pop, but in the ’70s, ’80s and early to mid ’90s, the top-draw female music stars — Diana Ross, Olivia Newton-John, Barbra Streisand, Linda Ronstadt, Stevie Nicks, Madonna, Janet Jackson, Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, Celine Dion — had hits that spanned more years and more albums. Here today, gone today, Chris Rock joked while hosting the MTV Video Music Awards in 1997, back when Spice Girls and Fiona Apple were the hottest ladies around. An exaggeration yes, but not that far off — and even more true today.
I thought about the ephemeral nature of pop last night while watching the video for Monica’s current single, “Everything to Me,” on MTV. In the late ’90s, Monica was duking it out with Brandy for teen-queen supremacy, selling millions of records and charting hit after hit (including their massive duet, “The Boy Is Mine”). Recently, “Everything to Me,” a beautiful, soulful ballad that went to No. 1 on Billboard’s R&B singles chart, missed the Top 40 on the Hot 100 by four notches. Between 1995 and 1999, Monica scored seven Top 10 Hot 100 hits in a row, including three straight No. 1s. Her one-time rival and duet partner, Brandy, didn’t even go gold with her last album, 2008’s Human.
At least Brandy and Monica, unlike so many of their successors in the ’00s, had modestly successful runs in terms of longevity. Remember back when Ashanti was selling 500,000 albums a week? Remember Ashanti?
This week, according to Hitsdailydouble, which measures weekly album sales, Christina Aguilera’s new album, Bionic, is on target to sell between 120,000 and 125,000 copies in its first week, below the latest Twilight and Glee soundtracks, which also were released on June 8. That’s more than 200,000 less than Back to Basics, Aguilera’s last studio album, moved in 2006. Meanwhile, Sweet and Wild, the latest from Jewel, whose sales have been dwindling for the better part of a decade now, can expect to sell a meager 20,000 to 25,000. Gold help Sarah McLachlan when her under-promoted Laws of Illusion is released on Tuesday.
Of course, the entire music industry is in crisis. Thanks to illegal downloading and a worldwide economic downturn, albums sales just aren’t what they used to be. Yet relatively new girls on the block, like Lady Gaga, Katy Perry and Ke$ha, continue to produce hits in fairly rapid succession. But despite logging a recent No. 1 single with “Rude Boy,” Rihanna is slipping commercially; so is Norah Jones, whose last album, 2009’s The Fall, in its first week sold less than one-fifth of the one million that 2004’s Feels Like Home sold in week one, and in seven months has barely surpassed Feels Like Home’s one-week U.S. tally in worldwide sales.
Alicia Keys, whose current album, The Element of Freedom, has only gone platinum, can’t seem to produce a solo single that rises above No. 27 on the Hot 100. Jennifer Lopez doesn’t even register anymore. Ditto Hilary Duff. Beyoncé’s hitmaking reputation seems to be safe and secure, and Pink and Kelly Clarkson should continue to sell respectably, if more modestly. I’m not so sure about Avril Lavigne, whose Alice In Wonderland single, “Alice,” topped out at No. 71. And if Britney Spears were to return tomorrow with a new album, where would she fit in?
The good news is that if you’re no big fan of Lady Gaga, Ke$ha, Miley Cyrus or Katy Perry, a few years from now, only one of them probably will still be invading the charts on a regular basis (my money’s on Gaga), and the others will have been replaced by an entirely new crop of female singers on the two-to-five-year superstar plan.
http://trueslant.com/jeremyhelligar/...gered-species/
we'll never know..