Member Since: 5/25/2009
Posts: 12,180
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Time Magazine: Jackie Album Review
http://time.com/3844308/ciara-jackie-review/
Quote:
If pop stardom is a high school—Beyoncé the straight-A valedictorian, Katy Perry the cheerleader, Lady Gaga the theater geek—then Ciara is the track star. It’s not just because of her athleticism, though her superhuman thighs and gravity-defying back-bends make for must-see videos and should probably be studied by scientists. And it’s not just because Ciara seems to play in a whole other league from the aforementioned artists, kept in the same breath as those women thanks more to the fervor of her fans—her die-hards’ devotion earned a New York Times mention—than record sales. (Though that may not be entirely her fault.)
No, it’s because, over the course of her 12-year-career, Ciara has developed a very specific set of skills, limited in breadth but impressive in their singularity. Like the best Olympic runners, watching her do her thing never gets old, even when you realize she’s technically running around in circles. If you made a drinking game around every time Ciara has asked you to “turn it up” in her career (“it” being the volume, the energy, your sex life), your night would go south very quickly, but to be mad about that would be to misunderstand the whole point of Ciara. Once billed as the first lady of Crunk&B, she’s become one of the most reliable suppliers of frothy, light-on-its-feet party music, mixing the freshest parts of R&B and hip-hop with the drum-machine beats of decades past. Yet though we typically demand two club-banger singles from our divas before a ballad ever hits radio, Ciara also routinely launches album campaigns on the strength of her breathy slow jams. Favoring friskiness over filthiness, they make the club feel like the bedroom and the bedroom feel like the club. She’s basically the closest thing millennials have to their own Janet Jackson.
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