by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Two nights ago, on December
12, NBC presented yet another one of their hour-long specials of Christmas
music, though regrettably dragged down with quite a few unfunny “comedy” bits.
This one was called You Make It Feel Like Christmas and featured Gwen Stefani, a singer I’ve long
liked but have never really followed that well. I know she started with an
alternative rock band called No Doubt and she’s defined on her Wikipedia page
as “an American singer, songwriter, fashion designer, actress, and television personality.”
She has a lovely voice, unusually pure for someone who started as an
alt-rocker, and after a long marriage with Gavin Rossdale of the band Bush she
recently broke up with him and took up with … Miranda Lambert’s ex, Blake
Shelton. Just how this unsexy and mediocre country singer has been able to get two women singer-songwriters of far more
attractiveness, charisma and talent to fall in love with him is a mystery to me; the Shelton-Stefani
coupling was celebrated on this show by a duet on the title song (which Stefani
said she wrote herself and Shelton liked so much he wanted to record it, though it’s credited on the
Wikipedia page for the album to both of them along with Justin Tranter and
Michael Busbee, Stefani’s usual writing partners) at the end of which they
locked lips.
The Gwen Stefani Christmas special was actually mostly good from her perspective — her voice is in excellent shape,
able to handle both the traditional holiday material and her originals — but
like so many other music programs these days it was way overproduced. Perhaps this is one of those respects in which my 64 years are showing, as was the fact that I came of age musically
in the 1960’s, in which the top bands, with a few exceptions (like Jimi Hendrix
and the Who), did very little on stage themselves. In San Francisco the
spectacular visuals were provided not by the bands themselves but by light-show
artists who projected colored lights, often with effects created by dyed oils,
and ironically in order to see the light shows the producers had to keep the
house lights so dim you couldn’t even see the band. As my tastes branched out
and reached back into the past, I tended to gravitate towards singers like
Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Carmen McRae and Frank Sinatra
who hadn’t needed big productions to
surround them: they made an effect just by standing up in front of the band and
singing their hearts out. I think that’s given me a prejudice against artists
who feel they need a big production behind them to “wow” audiences; perhaps
unfairly, when I see a show, a music video or a TV clip like that I think,
“What’s the matter? Don’t you trust your own voice to make an impact without
putting on a three-ring circus act behind you?” (In the case of Pink, one
artist of today I like but would like better without all that production crap,
the “circus” bit is literally true: the last time I saw her on TV, on the 45th annual
American Music Awards from November 19, she and the Cirque du Soleil wanna-bes
in her chorus were shown literally scaling the walls of the Marriott Hotel, inside of which the main part
of the show was taking place.)
The whole vogue for big productions in rock and
pop concerts started in the 1980’s, when music videos became popular and
audiences started wanting to see their favorite artists the way they saw them
on MTV. Between them, Michael Jackson and Madonna were the artists who did the
most to bring the world of music videos to the live stage, and while they were able to do it in ways that actually added to
the appeal of their shows, all too many who’ve tried it since have just looked
grotesque. I still can’t believe how Beyoncé, whose true talents are as a
straightforward soul singer in the tradition of Dinah Washington and Diana Ross
(the latter of whom she played, more or less, in the film Dreamgirls — she also portrayed Etta James in Cadillac
Records and turned in the best
performance of anyone in that film who was supposed to be playing a real-life
star), has surrounded herself with these ridiculous productions that just make
her look grotesque — I suspect even Busby Berkeley, if he’d had a chance to see
Beyoncé’s recent videos, would have told her, “Girl, don’t you think you’re
overdoing it just a little?” Getting back to Gwen Stefani’s Christmas special,
she opened with an O.K. version of “Jingle Bells” that as a swing version was
hardly in a league with Ella Fitzgerald’s (nor did anyone expect it would be)
but would have been perfectly acceptable if she hadn’t surrounded herself with
so many choristers cavorting around her it was difficult to spot her in the
crowd — a recurring problem with this show. After that Stefani sang a quite
haunting song called “When I Was a Little Girl” — it’s on her holiday album
that the show was promoting (the main sponsor was Target, with whom Stefani has
worked before, giving them an early exclusive on her last album) and, though it
has little to do with the season, it’s still a great song and indicative of the
straightforward singing she does best. Then she did a duet on “Let It Snow! Let
It Snow! Let It Snow!” — I’m not sure who her partner was (it was a man and it
didn’t look like Blake Shelton) but at
least they lit more of a fire under this inherently sexy song (“The fire is
slowly dying/But, my dear, we’re still goodbye-ing/And since we’ve no place to
go/Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow”) than the Pentatonix a cappella group had done in their remarkably unsexy version
from their own special six days earlier. After that came one of the dreary
“comedy” sketches that dragged down the energy level of this program in the
guise of warming it up — set at the North Pole and featuring little-person
actor Ed Lee as (what else?) a wise-guy elf.
Then Stefani did Eartha Kitt’s
early-1950’s hit “Santa Baby,” and her rendition compared to Kitt’s original
about the way her “Jingle Bells” did to Ella’s: Stefani has none of Kitt’s
ability to suggest sexiness with her voice alone, but she phrased the song well
and savored its openly materialistic lyrics. Then came an original called
“Under the Christmas Lights” and the Stefani-Shelton duet on “You Make Me Feel
Like Christmas,” after which she brought on another duet partner, Ne-Yo, for
George Michael’s “Last Christmas” (a largely forgotten song which got revived
big-time last year because George Michael died just before the Christmas
season). Based on his name, I keep thinking Ne-Yo is a rapper and suddenly
realizing he’s actually a neo-soul singer with a quite high, lovely and pure
voice, though I wish he didn’t copy Michael Jackson’s stage moves so blatantly.
Still, “Last Christmas” is a great song and Stefani and Ne-Yo did it justice.
After that Stefani did the song “My Gift Is You” that she had performed two
weeks earlier on the Christmas at Rockefeller Center program, also on NBC, a nice piece of original
material even if the “all I want for Christmas is you” theme has been done to
death by several generations of lyric writers. Then she did what was by far the
most moving song on the program, “Christmas Eve,” a lovely and intensely moving
song that went back to the Black gospel roots of all rock (and jazz, and blues, and rap), that though
it seems intended to be a song about a human lover would also work as gospel, as an appeal to Jesus on the day
celebrated as that of his birth. Significantly, Stefani had enough confidence
in this material to leave the choristers and the elaborate production out of it
and just sing her heart out — and when she sequenced the You Make Me Feel
Like Christmas CD she wisely put it last
because nothing could follow it.
Alas, on her show she wasn’t quite so smart;
she put “Christmas Eve” just before a commercial break, and when she returned
she did yet another of those unfunny “comedy” sketches in which she played a
bad elf who was drinking and playing hooky on the job, and trying to get her
“good elf” colleague to do the same. Then she closed the show with “White
Christmas,” and my hope when she announced that song was that she’d do it
simply and straightforwardly the way Bing Crosby did in the 1942 version from
the film Holiday Inn that
made it the greatest hit of his career and the biggest-selling record of all
time. No-o-o-o-o: she did it in a gloppy
arrangement that managed to combine the worst elements of rock, jazz and
modern-day dance-pop, and out came the chorus line again, along with vistas by
the show’s director that took the camera into the flies and put Stefani in the
center of a Berkeley-esque kaleidoscope effect with her choristers. No, I had
never wanted to see what Holiday Inn would have looked like if Busby Berkeley had directed it, and the sheer
overwhelming tastelessness of this last number put a damper on the program as a
whole and really took the edge off Stefani’s performance of “Christmas Eve.” Gwen
Stefani’s You Make Me Feel Like Christmas special was the sort of bad program that could have been great if Stefani had just sung her heart
out on holiday material (both her own and the traditional Christmas songbook —
judging from the effect she made on the gospel-tinged original “Christmas Eve,”
hearing her sing some of the traditional sacred Christmas songs might have been quite compelling!)
and trusted her songs and her voice to make an effect without all the horrible “production”
and those God-awful “comedy” bits. Still, the show was good enough to make me
want to buy the album, which after all was the whole point.
