What I want to know about Shania Twain is, can she cook?
She is very pretty. She has a very nice voice. But there are lots of models out there and lots of girls can sing. Why is she so successful? Is it because she exposes her belly button every time she is in a video? What’s so great about belly buttons?
So all these men are out there watching Shania Twain sing and wiggle her hips and they are thinking, “boy, she’s pretty. I’d like to buy her records.” No. What they’re really thinking is, “I’ll bet that if Shania would just get to know me, she would fall in love with me and want to marry me and live in my house and clean and cook and sew, and look just great in a frilly apron.” Do these same men look at Courtney Love and say, “I’ll bet she can cook.”?
Shania’s married. She married her manager or something. Don’t they always? I think Celine Dion married her manager too. And didn’t Sarah McLachlan marry her drummer? What probably happens is that six zillion men send her deeply personal, anguished, explicit letters, and they all sound a bit scary to a young artistic woman. So she retreats to the safety of someone she thinks she can trust. This is never another famous musician: they always fool around, don’t they? So it’s a drummer or road manager or agent or someone like that.
Shania’s husband probably looks like Rodney Dangerfield. Bad career move. Still, most men probably think, “I’ll bet he’d leave him in a moment if she ever gave me a chance.” Then they buy her CD’s and look at her pretty face and dream.
She does have an appealing face. In this one video, she’s dancing around with all these other people, and they keep trying to take the microphone away from her. She’s laughing and having a good time. It’s a remarkable video. Whoever thought of it was a genius. It makes her appear accessible and good-natured and kind and funny. You start thinking that if you walked right up to her out of the blue, she’d smile and give you a hug.
I’ve never understood popular culture. On my 13th birthday, my mother bought me a copy of the Archies, featuring their classic “Sugar Sugar”. I went “vomit vomit”. I was into Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, and the Beatles. Marie Osmond? Olivia Newton-John? I thought they were juvenile.
Today, it’s Shania Twain. Well, she’s better looking than Marie Osmond, but just as boring, as far as her music goes. She’s never going to do a really interesting song, like Sheryl Crowe or Ani DiFranco or Joan Osborne. She’s going to be the Danish Curling Team of women’s music: cheerful and sporting and far more successful than she ever expected to be.