Over the years, Gwen Stefani fans have gotten used to the star constantly reinventing herself – I personally loved the ska, tolerated the new wave, danced to the reggae and hoped the posse of Harajuku girls wouldn’t cripple the sometimes-singer of No Doubt – after all, “Hollaback Girl” was an act of stupid genius.
But on The Sweet Escape, Stefani’s new and cavity-inducing pop sensibility has ruined nearly everything that made her unique, warping her into a caricature of her former self. Yes, nearly all of the 15 songs on the album are disturbingly catchy, danceable and will get tons of radio airplay.
Yet the proverbial pith of Stefani – what made her an iconic balance between wry girliness and clever intelligence – has disappeared as she has chosen style over substance for The Sweet Escape.
The ingenious blend of musical styles that made Stefani’s her work with No Doubt genre-shattering and her solo album, Love. Angel. Music. Baby., acceptable has taken a backseat to bad rapping skills and overproduced beats by The Neptunes on this album. Too often, The Sweet Escape sounds like Fergie’s The Dutchess, which raises a chin-scratching question: If Fergie made a career out of pretending to be a trashier Stefani, now who is copying whom? And has Stefani really sunk that low?
Unfortunately, she has. Although now 37 years old, happily married to Gavin Rossdale – the former singer for the post-grunge band Bush – and the mother of a baby son, Kingston, Stefani still has a need to write inane, immature songs about heartbreak and romantic tiffs. Back when Stefani was with No Doubt, such lyrics were believable and expected of a single rock star who was yearning for a meaningful relationship after her failed endeavor with No Doubt bassist Tony Kanal.
But years later, as a grown-up woman, how believable are Stefani’s songs like “Breakin’ Up,” a disappointing little ditty about how her cellphone’s constant static symbolizes her lackluster connection with a romantic interest? “The battery’s getting low/Keep it charged” is Stefani’s stab at eloquence, and it misses the meaningful-love-ballad mark by a long shot.
The majority of the rest of the album follows along the same one-dimensional vein of faux-rap, shallow lyrics and bass-heavy beats. Songs like “Orange County Girl” embody this horrible formula to a T: Stefani basically speaks her lyrics – to call it “rapping” would do actual hip-hop artists a grave injustice – about how she’s just an “ordinary girl” living in her “extraordinary world,” blah, blah, blah. The thing is, Stefani has already made this song; it was called “Just a Girl,” it came out in 1995 and it was a million times better than this “Orange County Girl” sham.
Stefani keeps stealing things from herself all over the album, like the overall recycled feel of “4 in the Morning” – strangely similar to the reggae-tinged “Underneath It All” – and the lyrics of “Early Winter,” which is suspiciously like the endearing, heartbreaking “Simple Kind of Life” from Return of Saturn. “Winter” is emotionally grabbing and the simple new-wave beat is catchy, but listening to it only makes you remember who Stefani used to be: A girl driven by passion, feeling and creativity, whose lyrics were far more engaging than “Looks like an early winter for us/It hurts and I can’t remember sunlight.”
The album’s most obvious moment of embarrassment, though, comes with the track “Yummy.” Stefani is “feeling yummy” just as Fergie is “Fergalicious,” and the two songs are alike in more ways than one: Each has a looping clap-and-drum instrumentation (Stefani calls the music “disco Tetris,” but it sounds stolen from Lady Sovereign’s “Love Me or Hate Me”), a bad faux-rap delivery, a featured stint from prominent rappers – Pharrell for Stefani, will.i.am for Fergie – and the pathetic parallels go on and on. The only good part of this song is the unprecedented techno breakdown toward the song’s end, accentuated by power-tool sounds and horror-themed keyboards; even Italian techno genius Benny Benassi would be proud.
Sure, there are some songs that aren’t complete embarrassments to Stefani’s legacy. “Don’t Get It Twisted” has an entrancing circus-beat, but that’s about all it has going for it. The album’s first single, “Wind It Up,” is catchy, but sampling The Sound of Music is almost sacrilege. Really, what would Sister Maria think about her innocent song about “the lonely goatherd” being turned into an awkward sex anthem? Hopefully nothing positive.
By the album’s last song, “Wonderful Life,” it is obvious that Stefani has had her share of fun and games on The Sweet Escape. This slower song seems to be an ode to Kanal, as Stefani sings, “Thank you for those special moments/You will always be here, in my mind/And did you know you changed my life/I’m thankful for that time.” But the track reeks of insincerity and pales in comparison to “Don’t Speak,” Stefani’s anthemic ballad about her relationship with Kanal.
The slow “Life” isn’t what Stefani does best, and nothing on The Sweet Escape really is; it’s too forced, too superficial and too immature for someone of Stefani’s talent. What happened to the Stefani all of us Spice Girls-bred, empowered young women used to know and love? Let’s hope she finds herself again on her fast descent into pop-music mediocrity, thanks to The Sweet Escape.
Contact reporter Roxana Hadadi at roxanadbk@gmail.com.
