"The Queen has no image!" said the child

Neil Strauss from the NY Times says:

For better or for worse, the moment in pop belongs not to the Courtney Loves of the world, but to the Norah Joneses, the Josh Grobans and the American Idols. Their songs can be played in schools and in supermarkets; their promotional campaigns are engineered to be as safe and scandal-free as political ones; and their songs are so vague that no listener feels left out.

Ben Ratliff reviews the new album and expounds on a similar feeling:

If every pop star transmits a persona, hers remains sweet and blank and diffident.
(...)
Instead of being a cipher that nobody can identify with, she has calibrated her crème-fraîche voice to the point of becoming a singer that anyone can identify with, if only in general terms. "Feels Like Home" (Blue Note) is more one-size-fits-all than her first album, the 18-million-selling "Come Away With Me."

The persona in her songs — let's not call it Ms. Jones herself, because her life couldn't be this dull — might have lived practically anywhere in the developed world, at any time during the last century. Somehow Ms. Jones's work has managed to make a virtue of vagueness. ... This is multipurpose music: whatever your circumstances, you can plug in your own life's coordinates and project yourself into her songs.

It's interesting to see that Ratliff and I agree:

Still, there's an even stronger precursor for the general sound of her records, over and above those memory trip-wires. Simply put, it's hard to imagine this music without Cassandra Wilson.

I'll add his description of Wilson's music, even though it's irrelevant to the current topic, because it's a very good and concise one:

On a run of albums starting in the early 90's, and with her original producer Craig Street — incidentally, the original producer for Norah Jones's first album, before Arif Mardin was called in to remake it — Ms. Wilson crafted an upside-down version of what's considered elegant in jazz, with the roots on top and the leaves on the bottom. Saxophones were out; acoustic guitars and mandolins were in. The usual cosmopolitan images were out; evocations of rural America under dark skies were in. The Wilson records smushed entire traditions together without a second thought, with simplicity as a common denominator. But underneath it all were elements that came unmistakably from jazz: a sense of controlled soloistic ideas, an organic feeling of a group playing together in real time, even within the songs' pop brevity, and in her singing, a lot of patience.

Clap clap explains Norah thusly:

Well, I feel pretty left out of Norah Jones, and a lot of people do--indeed, I think that's at the heart of the complaints that indie fucks (a term I'm using here in an entirely neutral way, mind you) have about mainstream pop. All the little bits of it, the signs and signifiers, the production and the lyrics and the drums and the guitars and the mastering, it all puts them off. Readers of this blog probably don't need me to document instances when people have ignored a great song simply because it was by an artist they distrusted, or because you could dance to it, or because you could hear the lyrics, or whatever. But it's not just 28-year-old Modest Mouse fans that have this reaction: it's 14-year-old hip-hop fans, it's 35-year-old metalheads, it's 55-year-old classical fans, it's 47-year-old avant/free-jazz fans...it's a whole lot of people.

Norah Jones is not successful because she appeals to everyone, she's successful because she appeals to older people. And that's OK. But no doubt part of her very appeal to these older people is her jazz roots, and the way that they can feel like they are, in fact, not 'falling for' an American Idol winner, but are instead listening responsibly to a 'real musician' working in a 'real genre.'

It's easy to dismiss image as superficial (yet another bid for realness), but I think it's a bit more complicated than that, as Clap Clap points out. The "real musician/real genre" thing is the key: it shows that jazz fans, classical fans, underground hip-hop fans, "indie fucks" etc. are often looking for an alternative image just as much as (and sometimes more than) an alternative music, thus reducing pretensions of greater profundity to empty platitudes. I've always been surprised by how much commentary the 80s/early 90s Young Lion In Expensive Suit look drew from critics as signifiers of the YLs' serfdom to staid corporate America: looking at old photos from swing bands, beboppers or bluesmen, that tradition of sharp dress has always existed in Black America. Look at the flamboyance of West African clothes or the gaudiness of new sneakers on the basketball court, it's the same thing. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but this line of criticism troubled me because it seemed to deny that Black people could dress well and expensively, even though there's a mountain of evidence from around the world to refute that notion (I don't often make the effort to dress sharp, much to my parents' despair).

Stepping outside of the accepted image of your genre is a risk: Miles was reviled equally for his change of clothes as for his change of music (granted, those 80s polka dot shirts were awful), even today no mainstream rapper (or rapper who wants to be mainstream) can be openly gay, an overly glossy album cover in a purportedly "real" genre will put certain critics off (The Bad Plus generated this kind of reaction recently, in certain quarters). Take a young rebel's surprise expressed at the sight of a suit-clad Art Ensemble of Chicago: did you really expect them to go about everyday business in ceremonial face-paint? Do you think the Africans that inspired them do that?

Image is embedded in our perception of sound because of the theatrical element of the performance of music, expressed either in the music itself or in a myriad of visual ways: from closing one's eyes during a solo ("He looks really intense, this solo must be really good!") to looking bored ("He looks bored, I'm bored too.") to a massive smoke-and-mirrors show ("What a production!") to a stripped-down stage set ("These guys are ALL about the music!").

I, being used to the musicians+instruments=music equation, was destabilised by Kraftwerk's 4-immobile-men-behind-laptops performance at the MTV Europe Music Awards: "What's the point," I thought "What are they doing?" Had they brought out a few synths and beatboxes, I might have been more welcoming and accepted it as a "real" musical performance.

Not sure what the conclusion to all this is, so I'll just end it here.