Archive for the ‘Jessie J’ Category
Jessie J – Megastar
Pop star, Jessie J was shocked to see so many young girls falling down drunk during her performance at last weekend’s Trinity Ball. She will be in for an even bigger shock this July when she returns to sing at Oxygen, the annual orgy of music and drunkenness for Ireland’s youth. So who is this Jessie J who questions how much we drink? Does she not understand that young Irish people, including girls, love to party and get drunk to the point where they vomit down the front of their ball gowns? What’s your problem Jessie?
Jessie J was hardly known outside of her bedroom just fifteen weeks ago. So, apart from music industry insiders, no one knew about her at Christmas and before this Easter has arrived she is an international phenomenon. She is top of the charts and is being tipped by respected music critics, on both sides of the Atlantic, as the next global music sensation.
So what’s different about Jessie J? First she wasn’t manufactured on some show like The X Factor. She is a real star and they are born not made by some TV company.
Her talent has been nurtured on the West End Stage where she was a child performer. Many of the really big megastars, like Michael Jackson, have all clocked up a lot of stage miles before they go solo. Jessie J has served her time and thus brings an exceptional presence to her live performances, in this regard, on a par with Robbie Williams
She is a prolific songwriter, so prolific that when she writes a hit that doesn’t suit her gospel, which I will come back to later, she gives that hit to other stars such as Mylie Cyrus, or Alicia Keys. Yes, as a teenager Jessie J just happened to write platinum selling hits for the big stars.
She claims she has a catalogue of six hundred songs ready to be released to the world. Oh and by the way she is the best singer on the planet according to Justin Timberlake one of her many, many fans in the music industry. If you need any convincing about her amazing voice, check out her acoustic performances on You Tube. I direct you particularly to the BRMB recording of Price Tag.
But Jessie J isn’t just a singer, she is on a mission. She has a gospel and she is proselytising. She doesn’t drink, smoke or do drugs and she preaches purity. Listen to the lyrics of her current number one Price Tag. The message from Jessie J is we all got carried away in the boom, obsessed with money and bling. She sings it was a bad time “when the sale came first and the truth came second”.
If you watch the music video of Price Tag, you realise she is against materialism, against big fancy cars, against girls in music videos displaying themselves as mere sex objects and so on.
Following economic crashes, societies not only adjust but they overturn the past. “Jessie J-ism” could become the new Victorianism of the 21st Century.
To see where this young woman is coming from watch the iconic music video of the global economic boom, I got a Feeling from the Black Eyed Peas. That’s the one that goes “tonight’s goin’ to be a good, good night”. The song was written just before the Lehman Bros crash that has lead to the banking meltdown in the developed world. It is a most superb anthem to excess. Its message is fill up your cup, let it over flow, if you go out tonight – get smashed. All the scenes in the video feature girl on girl, lesbian action to make it risqué and excessive.
Again check out You Tube and see for yourself that in the last sixty seconds of this video ten girls, not one guy, fall down on the floor or on the street or in the gutter because they are drunk or have overdosed. The message from this music video to young women is you can’t have a good time if you have enough brain cells to recall it the next day.
Jessie J challenges all this. Do it Like a Dude, her first hit, she has explained is partly about how girls make such great efforts to look pretty but still the boys go around with their trousers down around their butts and in hoodies. Maybe the girls should behave badly like the boys or act like dudes. Who You Are, the title track from her first album says to women not be crushed by the air brushed models of the magazines but be yourself because you are special.
It would be a mistake to dismiss her as just a mere singer-songwriter from Essex. Despite all the hype about social networking music is still the soundtrack and staple diet of youth. Songwriters can’t change the world but they do have immeasurable influence. John Lennon’s Imagine hasn’t delivered world peace but from the moment we heard it, the world had changed.
One thing is very clear. Under 25s listen to music radio and their parents, the over 45s, listen to talk radio. The under 25s have already moved on from our economic crash but the over 45s are still looking for someone to blame and venting their anger on radio talk shows. The kids have already got over it. The older generation, their parents can’t get out from underneath it.
Since the economic downturn the music soundtrack has been changing and with that, perhaps, the moral compass of the world’s youth. The male American rappers, partying by the pool with all the sexy girls and showing off their pimped cars and possessions, are fading fast and the purity girls have taken over. Adele, followed by Ellie Goulding and now the campaigner, Jessie J. Coincidentally the last three Brit Award Critics Winners.
Pop music is the ultimate fashion and is ever changing and mega trends come and go. The soft porn era of music videos all started on a Sunday afternoon on the late Vincent Hanley’s MTUSA with Madonna writhing around on that boat in Venice singing “Like a Virgin” and the era officially died in 2011 when Jessie J’s Price Tag lyric posed the question regarding all these soft porn type music videos “Am I the only one getting tired?”
It is far too early to say if Jessie J will have any significant, lasting impact on global youth culture but she is a very different role model than anything we have seen before. So the stage is set at Oxygen for the ultimate music culture battle between, in the red corner, the Lords of Excess, the brilliant Black Eyed Peas, representing the boom and the past and in the blue corner, the challenger, Miss Purity, the awesome, Jessie J representing hope and a new future but not as we know it Jessie.