I’m sure I’m not the only octogenarian out there who has been surprised, repeatedly, by the durability of certain kinds of songs chosen by America’s youth to massacre at karaoke. (I’m also surprised by the durability of of karaoke itself, but I’m not complaining.)
The number of times I’ve heard someone under 30 tear off a number by Third Eye Blind, Matchbox 20, or Creed—groups I’d assumed, without value judgment, to have been consigned to future nostalgia compilations (like my old band), or, in the case of Creed, to the sea of forgetfulness—is, well, a high number.
But the one artist whose durability has been the most surprising, in karaoke and elsewhere, surely must be Shania Twain. Despite the news that her work has sold somewhere north of 75 million records (and that during the CD era, when they cost $20 to buy and nickels to manufacture), I guess I just consigned her to the heap of artists whose hits were once ubiquitous but not quite ubiquitous enough to be meaningful after they stopped being ubiquitous.
I always reckoned Twain to be the kind of video-and-fashion-forward, mobbed-up-with-the-industry performer a lot of people liked and a lot of radio stations programmed, but no one felt passionately about. Kind of the opposite of Madonna, or even her pop-country-to-just-pop progeny, Taylor Swift. More along the lines of Faith Hill or Celine Dion, whose music is like a spoonful of plain yogurt, sweetened with Stevia. Or maybe like Michael Bolton or Bryan Adams or Josh Groban or Curtis Stigers. Less bland than Jewel, less interesting than Sheryl Crow. I didn’t like her hits, but only a fool would deny they were catchy as hell.
As is almost never not the case, I was utterly wrong about the temperature of the pop loving audience, particularly the members who were born during the decade of Twain’s ascension, the decade I spent thinking it was somehow morally suspect to like truly popular major label music (tra la la).
I have been set straight by several younger colleagues. Then I did some further poking around and found that a lot of people seem to legitimately revere Twain. That appreciation may have roots in ’90s kitsch, but it seems to run deeper. Or maybe kitsch and depth are the same thing now? Not for nothing did she appear as a guest judge on RuPaul’s Drag Race (a more reliable relevance index than most) the other night.
(I suppose I should go listen to one of her records, ever.)
Anyway, this is all a long way around saying that a great number of Shania Twain adherents, regardless of age—though, again, age is a significant ingredient in this matter—were severely bummed out by the interview published in The Guardian yesterday, in which Twain, on the verge of a world tour in support of Now, her first album in 15 years, disclosed a lot of very private information about the hellish abuse she suffered as a child, the bitter feelings about the end of her marriage to producer Robert “Mutt” Lange, and the severe health problems she’s battled in recent years.
But no one really noticed all that information, on account of the quote that appeared in the second-to-last paragraph:
Inevitably, Twitter lost its shit.
The most common response among the tweets I read was, perhaps equally inevitably, “that don’t impress me much,” which was pretty good. The fact that Twain’s political remarks were not heavily featured in the Guardian‘s layout of the piece (no mention in the header or pull quotes), coupled with their essentially hypothetical nature, did little to diminish the outrage that follows a figure from the popular arts expressing anything like sympathy for the current president.
And frankly, why should it?
Especially when she had just gotten through detailing A) her psychological, physical, and indeed sexual abuse at the hands of her father; B) her unshakeable rage at her husband’s infidelity; and C) the toll taken on her body and her career by a health problem (Lyme Disease) that is little understood by doctors and sometimes unacknowledged by insurance companies.
To go through all that only to conclude that you would have voted for most flagrantly dishonest man in a profession defined by the dishonesty of dishonest men, because he was honest?
In the immortal words of the woman herself:
Less than 24 hours later, Twain has apologized in a series of tweets:
I would like to apologise to anybody I have offended in a recent interview with the Guardian relating to the American President. The question caught me off guard. As a Canadian, I regret answering this unexpected question without giving my response more context (1/4)
— Shania Twain (@ShaniaTwain) April 22, 2018
I am passionately against discrimination of any kind and hope it’s clear from the choices I have made, and the people I stand with, that I do not hold any common moral beliefs with the current President (2/4)
— Shania Twain (@ShaniaTwain) April 22, 2018
I was trying to explain, in response to a question about the election, that my limited understanding was that the President talked to a portion of America like an accessible person they could relate to, as he was NOT a politician (3/4)
— Shania Twain (@ShaniaTwain) April 22, 2018
My answer was awkward, but certainly should not be taken as representative of my values nor does it mean I endorse him. I make music to bring people together. My path will always be one of inclusivity, as my history shows. (4/4)
— Shania Twain (@ShaniaTwain) April 22, 2018
Apologizing for having said something “awkward” is a very 2018 way of expressing oneself. But you can hardly blame her for wanting to walk it back. Maybe the better question is to what degree having said it in the first place was a calculation.
It’s obviously true that you can’t sell 75 million records and fill stadiums around the world by appealing entirely to disgruntled supporters of Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders. Particularly when you consider the appallingly low 2016 turnout, and the lamentable truth that shopping has become a more useful barometer of Americans’ convictions than elections anyway, it’s safe to say that more people have voted for Shania Twain than for Clinton and Trump combined. Like 18 million more.
Twain may have gone pop, but she started off as a (pop-) country artist. I don’t imagine anyone needs that particular bit of speculative demography spelled out, right? Meanwhile, super-mainstream performers like Taylor Swift and to a lesser extent Britney Spears have been criticized for not publicly renouncing Trump or the pro-Trump faction of their audience.
If they did—leaving aside the fact that not one note or beat of their work has ever hinted at the slightest impulse toward divisiveness or principled stands of any kind—it seems likely their footprint would shrink significantly (particularly given the fact that the rest of the world loves to hate Swift and Spears alike).
Perhaps Twain was just trying to cover her bases with the basest elements of her audience, knowing she’d get hammered for it by the more humane contingent of her listenership, intentionally giving the quote to a liberal publication, intentionally couching the language in a weird, hypothetical, past subjunctive mood, almost as if she knew she’d have to issue an apology to someone and deciding that anti-Trumpers would be more easily mollified.
Or maybe she actually was trying to characterize the mistake so many people made on election night of 2016 by imagining herself in their shoes.
Or maybe she was high on pain meds from her then-recent laryngoplasty and was, as the language reflects, not all-the-way-coherent.
Or maybe, after a long career of being an essentially innocuous personality, she was doing some experimental showbiz controversy brinkmanship, seeing how close she could come to being shocking and controversial without going full Roseanne.
Or maybe she actually believed it.
Or maybe she really believed it in the moment and afterwards grabbed her assistant’s arm and was like, “holy shit, what the fuck did I say about Donald Trump back there?”
Whatever the case, a lot of people wondered:
And a lot of people implored Twain to:
How will it turn out? I guess we’ll find out on Thursday, May 3 when her Now tour comes to the Tacoma Dome.
Either way, it seems very likely that before the tour is over, team Twain will be hearing a lot of this:
