Member Since: 3/30/2009
Posts: 79,408
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Mainly, Jessie J seems to be surplus to demand. The contemporary pop landscape is already crowded with well-defined female pop stars-- postmodern disco artiste Lady Gaga, fierce soul goddess Beyoncé, slovenly party girl Ke$ha, cheesecake goofball Katy Perry, cyborg sexpot Britney Spears, troubled ice queen Rihanna, and perennial underdog Robyn. Jessie J is much more of a cipher; she is set apart mainly by the fact that she is British, though her accent only occasionally comes through in her performances. She comes across like a severely dumbed-down Lily Allen at best, and at worst she seems like someone you would want to root against in a televised singing competition.
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In some cases, it is all too obvious that the writers are trying to write a "type" of song. "Casualty of Love", for example, sounds like Alicia Keys' wonderful "If I Ain't Got You" stripped of melodic complexity, ambiance, soul, and sentimental resonance. The single "Do It Like a Dude" is dancehall pastiche that isn't too far off from Robyn's "Dancehall Queen", but trades that singer's warmth and humanity for spiteful hectoring. The acoustic ballad "Big White Room" aims for beautiful simplicity, but its delicacy is drowned out by a clumsy and overwrought vocal performance.
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Cornish is an alum of London's prestigious BRIT School, the arts academy that has launched the careers of several notable young British singers including Amy Winehouse, Adele, Katy B, Jamie Woon, and Kate Nash. Weirdly, of this crop of singers, only Cornish very obviously seems like a person who went to a school for pop stars, with all the tackiness that would imply. She shares their polish and poise, but none of her peers' individual style. Whereas Adele and Winehouse also have powerhouse voices, they fit into clear aesthetic niches and invest their songs with depth and humanity. Jessie J doesn't have even a fraction of their restraint; her idea of showcasing her gift is to shoot for a blaring melisma on "Mamma Knows Best" that makes Christina Aguilera seem as subtle as Joni Mitchell by comparison.
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On the same weekend Jessie J was getting her first big push in America as the musical guest on "Saturday Night Live", the music video for Rebecca Black's "Friday" was just beginning to spread around the Internet as a viral sensation. "Friday" took off because people were calling it the worst song ever and mocking its dopey lyrics and awkward approximation of standard modern pop tropes. The biggest difference between Black's song and the contents of Who You Are is that while Jessie J gets the expected formula of pop "right," the hapless Black gets it "wrong." But in that "wrongness" lies a humanity that J cannot approach. Even through bad vocal processing, Black sounds like a specific person. Also, the lyrics of "Friday" may be undeniably clunky, but there is a magic to them that makes the song funny and immensely quotable, like a lot of great pop songs throughout history. Jessie J's lyrics are no less banal and artless, but they lack charm entirely. When she's not going off on bitter rants against those who doubt her, she mainly sings forgettable boilerplate or spouts vapid utopian nonsense, as on the utterly nauseating "Rainbow". Black gets attacked for representing the worst of modern pop, but she's a gawky 13-year-old amateur backed up by a Z-grade production company. If you need to rail against dumb, soulless music, Jessie J is a far better target.
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http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15246-who-you-are/
This just might be my favorite Pitchfork review of all-time.
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He's always known. It's just that he tried really hard to forget about it.
I want to see that video 
