Our favorite country-pop songstress redefined the age and helped the ’90s feel like our last good decade.
Shania, where have you gone?
Coming out of nowhere to basically invent an entirely new genre of loud, over-the-top, female-led country-pop music in the nineties, Shania showed up, bare midriff and all, with “Whose Bed Have Your Boots Been Under” and “Any Man of Mine,” and we lost our collective minds. Taylor, take note: You have nothing on Shania and never did.
I’m not suggesting Shania was in any way responsible for some never-before-heard-of popularity of female country artists – after all, she’s no Dolly Parton or Patsy Cline – but in her wake, country music’s focus seemed to change overnight, and suddenly it didn’t have to be so “traditional” or “straight-laced” anymore. Seemed like every week after The Woman in Me (1995) came out, a new female country artist materialized, wrapped in a generous glow of sexual confidence and ownership, to challenge the patriarchy. Female country artists seemed freer in a way they hadn’t been before after Shania dropped into our lives, or least they weren’t beholden to the same narrow window of possibilities, and Shania perfected her strange sexual revolution that laughed in the faces of Grand Ol’ Opry traditionalists and thick-neck drunkards.
Shania was charismatic, and she yelled “WHOO!” a lot, but none of that would have mattered had her songs not worked. I mean, it might have mattered a little, but her midriff alone didn’t sell 20 million copies of the album.
Produced and co-written by Robert “Mutt” Lange, her eventual husband and ex-husband, respectively, Shania’s songs were brassy, confident, crystal-clear, and loud – just the way Mutt produced everyone. This felt new for country music, though, all this boldness and none of the self-pity. Mutt and Shania came right at their audience with no apologies, and they colored the music with steel guitar, violins, and classic country music song structures just in case. This was pop music, though – don’t be fooled. The gloss and blatant sexual agency (confused by many old-heads as “tarting” it up for the camera), sparked some interesting conversations about genre and how much sex was too much when it came to pitching to an audience: “Is it country? Is it pop? Why is her belly button out?” The answer was, of course, “Who gives a shit?” You can see how much it matters now, which is not at all, and how tame she actually was. But no one dared present themselves that way in country music at the time, and it had to start from somewhere. That’s part of her legacy.
Shania made fun, bubbly music with melodies, flirty come-ons, and a big dumb sound that gave country music a much-needed kick. She played it up to the hilt, her concerts from this time showing a mastery of showmanship that played well in all the sold-out stadiums to come.
Just what was this Zeitgeist she captured? Because, holy shit, her follow-up Come On Over (1997) also sold more than 20 million copies and released no fewer than eleven singles. She ticked every box you could imagine: She created a pop-country-rock genre, she wrote catchy songs in sunny major keys with plenty of perfect layering (I don’t have a favorite Shania song – they all kind of sound alike, but I absolutely love the duet version with Bryan White of “From This Moment” – check out the low harmonies), she seemed to have a sense of humor in her videos (one of those, “hey, I know this is ridiculous, but it’s kind of fun” things), she was empowering (her reclaiming Robert Palmer’s sexist, ridiculous ’80s videos is a key moment), and she had that “it” factor whatever it is, whether it’s looks, personality, or a combination of both.
Shania seemed wholesome in her way and perfectly suited to our Clintonesque times. There was no anger in her music. It wasn’t grunge, it wasn’t rap rock, it was straightforward to the point of parody, and it gave a silent majority of people who aren’t interested in music for any other reason than enjoyment to cash in on a trend and feel good doing it.
Shania rode the wave of our era of good feelings and even managed post 9/11 success with Up! (2002), which sold another boatload even if there was some flop sweat forming on her perfectly Botoxed forehead. And why wouldn’t it? How much was enough? She gave us about 48 versions of the album in a desperate attempt to please everyone because more is all we know and all we expect. Then she metaphorically collapsed, spent. She went a little nuts, went missing, went to Vegas, swapped spouses, and emerged as a strange, damaged reality TV star with lots of plastic surgery who was still more interesting than some modern pop sensations. She emerged as someone who had been through some trials. She’ll never recapture her magic in this new culture of ours. Hell, can anyone? She can’t recreate that positivity because there’s precious little of it left.
Everything will change? No, nothing changed
Hey, do you remember after 9/11 when everyone said everything would change? We got all sober-faced and looked one another in the eye with sincerity and trembled: “Nothing will ever be the same.” We all held hands and promised we would value one another and get away from the more facile side of our nature.
Didn’t happen. Not even a little bit. In fact, it all got worse, what with Paris Hilton reality shows and the rise of the Kardashians and every other disgraceful display of American vomit culture that we’ve suffered since then. I like to think only Gen X fully realizes what we lost since, as usual, we had our head in two worlds, two time periods. But I think we’re so far gone now that we all basically accept that’s what our culture is, and we’re all just cool with being screwed up. It’s how we cope.
I think of Shania now as the last gasp of harmlessness in our culture before our society went off the rails. As a Gen Xer gazing backward at all these fads and movements and trying to figure out what I was feeling, where they came from, and why it matters, she hovers there right before Britney and Christina happened, before pop stars became children that gross dads drooled over, before we rolled over into the 2000s and started a completely new American experiment. As nineties as Kurt Cobain and Fred Durst, Shania Twain gave us all really something to think about by not asking us to think about anything. And that was a great gift.
Postscript: Glorious Song Structure
Incidentally, one of the best songs that exploits the beauty of form and song structure to an almost absurdly pleasurable degree came from a place I never expected to find it: Shania’s “No One Needs to Know,” co-written with Lange (from The Woman in Me), shows off a conventional pop/traditional country structure, but after two repeats of the bridge, the song suddenly throws in a second bridge that is only dimly related to the first.
This second bridge gets repeated later with a drastic bit of falsetto. The song then totally jettisons the first bridge. Then we get an instrumental break complete with a key change. The ingenuity and sheer joy of what could have been just another vapid pop-country song (from an important member of Gen X) shows more flash, wit, and style than nearly anything by current pop stars, and it also puts all of “bro country” to shame. Songs like this, no matter the genre, prove that form influences emotional intensity, taking a song where it can’t always go with just words and instrumentation.
Shania understood that pop songs require ingenuity, hooks, something for the ear to latch onto that goes further than just all this naked expression, as important as that can be.
The Beatles played with the standard pop song structure popularized by Tin Pan Alley producers and songwriters. They relied on this formula that scratches a very particular itch we have for distinct and identifiable themes, rising and falling action, contrasting sections, and resolution. It’s a trait we’ve evolved with – a need for finding logical, mathematical, and beautiful patterns amid chaos so we can connect invisible dots in our mind. Our pleasure centers get activated when the sequence is completed. The Beatles intuitively knew this, and they nearly always included a contrasting bridge in their songs that either employed a different key, juggled chords previously used in the song, or switched tempos. This made a song sound like it had parts, constructed like a stepladder to help us reach something we desperately need.
Sometimes, songs add an instrumental break that restates the melody (think of “Smells Like Teen Spirit’s” guitar solo or pretty much all of Weezer’s catalog), and sometimes the solos take on a life of their own.
Sometimes, we might hear a chord not in the song’s musical key (an unusual chord broke the pattern and stood out in our ears, but only after a normal sequence had been established), or sometimes we start the song with the chorus rather than the verse.
Point being: Within the framework of a stereotypical pop song, there are ways to show a bit of flair without just throwing in random stuff just for its own sake – something an amateur would do – otherwise it’s noise. Brian Wilson did this all the time. He took simple doo-wop chord sequences and moved them around slightly, adding a sharp here, a flat there, or tiptoed around familiar chord changes, giving the ear a sample of what it was looking for before moving on to something else.
This all loses something on the page, of course. But maybe it also emphasizes the point. Science tells us that humans learned to communicate with emotional expressions long before we developed a firm language. We were emotional beings before anything else. That explains the lure of music.
As we developed a keen sense of pattern recognition to keep us alive, we also learned to admire beauty all around us as part of the sexual impulse: A woman’s body, a towering building, a balanced row of colorful flowers on a green bush, the curves of a sports car. We are wired to recognize well-constructed things — they emphasize safety but also how we can, for a brief while, carve out something that’s ours. The guys who trim your yard’s bushes know the foliage is going to grow back and turn into a giant lump, but we keep trying anyway, and we try to control the random noises and blurring of sounds. We admire a steady flow of raindrops and the rhythm of traffic we can hear through the window on an otherwise still night.
The form in a song like “No One Needs to Know” fools us into thinking we can tame the world and build things that make of sense in the void. It’s like drawing the lines of the Zodiac in all the random points in the sky. We put that meaning there because it comforts us. When we see the shape we’ve arbitrarily assigned to them, we feel a brief victory in this messy life.
Some artists made entire careers out of exploiting form and eventually figuring out which kind of song structure worked best for what kind of song. Shania might not be on the level as The Beatles, Brian Wilson, XTC, the Kinks, or any number of pop musicians from the eighties, but the feeling of surprise and the dawning recognition of how you’ve been gloriously toyed with — just for a few seconds — is a skill sorely missed today.