Death, Taxes and DeRo

Sometimes a brutal Jim DeRogatis CD review is just the thing for a dreary Monday morning. As is typical of Jim -- and let's be honest, every rock critic in existence -- the key here is that he thinks Gwen Stefani should be on a different path:

Stefani is now a 37-year-old mom -- she and former Bush bandleader Gavin Rossdale gave birth to son Kingston in May -- with increasingly distant but nonetheless genuine roots in punk. Yet instead of exploring either of these legitimate identities in her lyrics, which would be both more honest and more interesting, she persists in playing the role of pre-teen mall-rat Lolita so ubiquitous during the late '90s bubblegum-pop boom.

I'm of two minds on this sort of critique. On the one hand, that an artist zigs when you think they should zag is not really an artistic failing, it's an artistic choice. That it doesn't conform to your aesthetic is, largely, your own problem. Of course, I think DeRo knows this. On the other hand, the trickier way to frame it is that an artist somehow does not sound compelling or honest with themselves because they're doing something inherently dissonant from their personality.

But if you're the one defining that personality, you see how this can get complicated.

Anyway, I have no opinion on the Gwen Stefani record, and I really just thought the acerbic response to it was amusing. The rest is just tangent.