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THE SHANIA SHOW

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By James Hunter
The Village People, May 1996

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Shania Twain is into it. In one warmly lit video directed (this is true) by John and Bo Derek, she's wearing jeans and a cropped T-shirt under a vest, taking an unsuspecting pasture by storm on the force of sheer denim. The vibe is country by Ethan Allen and Playboy. In another, the air grows golder, the mood pensive, and she executes small, contemplative steps through a kind of damp ballet, arms rising, fingertips meeting silkily above her head. The vibe is sex by Victoria's Secret, Danielle Steele, at Benatar, and the Falafel Palace. In yet another, she works up a sweat hanging out onstage with professional mall kids, dancing and laughing and, in silhouette, beating on a drum. The vibe is rhythm by Maxell and Janet Jackson. And in her latest, she dons leather, drives go-karts, outlines her lips in brown, and makes silly faces. The vibe--toy gearheads on the loose in leisureland--is Six Flags over Gucci.

Over a year after this string of clips from 1995's The Woman In Me (which has now sold over 6 million copies for Mercury Records) finally gave country its own videobabe, Shania Twain says she loves being an image. "Tomboy," as she characterizes "Any Man of Mine." So feminine that you get lost in it," as she remembers "The Woman In Me." "Youthful," as she describes "(If You're Not in It for Love) I'm Outta Here." And "funky-glam, corny-fun, goofy-fun," as she calls "You Win My Love."

Of them all, she says, most definitely "fun"--which is what these videos are: highly conscious attempts to convey fun. She says she seeks to be en of a "chameleon," in fact, to complement the characters of the songs she writes with Robert John "Mutt" Lange, her husband and scarily excellent all-purpose megaproducer. "I'm going to have a heck of a time when I go on tour," says Twain, whose refusal to take her success on the road until she's good and ready has mystified and, of course, offended Nashville. "There are a lot of sides to me, and I enjoy being all of them. It's what's so wonder about being an entertainer. I get to take on personalities that are naturally in me already."

Twain is a Canadian who had released one earlier album, done with relatively sober Nashville vets, and Lange is an elusive South African who during the '80s pretty much invented the scaled-back, big-ticket, unfazed juiciness of international mega-rock and pop styles. They spent much time and money--centuries and fortunes by country standards--making The Woman In Me. In retrospect, it should have happened at least five years earlier, this achingly professional outside interpretation of post-Garth country. But appearing on lazy Nashville time doesn't make the album anyless what it is.

On its own terms--which is how The Woman In Me requires you to take it--Twain's record is super. The producer of the Cars, Def Leppard, Billy Ocean, Bryan Adams, and others tweaks contemporary Nashville's beloved digital buzzes with flowing impersonations of analog: "I'm Outta Here" is virtually a country hommage to Janet Jackson and Jam-Lewis's "If"; and on a traditional excursion like "No One Needs To Know" the current single, Shania and Mutt actually sound as though they can imagine nothing more clever than jarring down like Gram and Emmylou in sneakers. Still, it's doubtful that Twain's fans fancy themselves in the company of a Reba McEntire or Trisha Yearwood, of a virtuoso country singer. What they hear, instead, is a woman customizing for herself what already makes Nashville magnetic for Jeep Cherokee drivers.

And, conversely, what makes it problematic for the keepers of good taste, who can't pronounce her name and wonder if Shania's related to Mark. For this sort of country observer, troubled by someone who proudly offers mall culture at a time when subcultures are seen as the pure sources of what eventually sends Doc Martens to national shopping centers, Shania's achievements with fun negate themselves on contact; they inspire a yearning for something else entirely: the naively imagined pure. So Twain becomes the villainess in an entertainment-world morality play where honky-tonk and old countrypolitan records (20 years after they actually were in the air, as Shania is now) get respect and Twain gets trashed for not doing something she isn't even trying to do.

Denied the star role of pure in this simple little play, Shania becomes phony by dramatic default; bluegrassy, folkie, or maximum-mood women like Alison Kraus, Mary Chapin-Carpenter, or this season's new ungaudy kid on the range, Gillian Welch, get awarded all the heroic parts. But these days, when audiences support both sides of this stupid and very outdated continuum, it's illogical to conceive either camp is real. Much more accurate is to say that Shania, Gillian, and millions of record buyers and TV viewers occupy a complicated world of often jarring points of view, and that what drives the latter may not inspire the former, and vice versa. Writing Shania off entirely misses not only the delight of a woman who has obviously worked hard and won, but more importantly the very complications that make pop interesting these days. Writing her off entirely misses enormous patches of (gulp) American culture.

Credheads usually find no place for Shania in their salons, but the reverse is far less true of Shania's fans. They aren't like '70s Bowie followers, for example, trying to build of pure glitter a society for themselves: flash is a welcome and mostly momentary diversion for them, not a worldview. It's something like this: where many Nashville hunks and divas still proudly weep over busted-up love, then recover with novelty tunes that sound like technological versions of Texan or Tennessee pinball, and where singer-songwriters frown and studiously compete at the country chess of emotions and origins (not to mention all those threatened traditions), Shania and Mutt offer vacation evenings of cagey backgammon. At Eurodisney.

Their view, however, is actually that country in the '90s needn't be, uh, foreign at all. Little about what might make country exotic or antique interests them; compelled by the plush instead of the creaky, they're off trying to be seen and heard as canny entertainment honchos, hardly flukes. "Listen," Shania told me, "the audience has sophisticated ears--and eyes. The audience that watches any kind of television and listens to any kind of audio gets the top quality just through ads. Hey, they have to be able to go from a Coke ad or a Janet Jackson record to my video or record ad not notice the difference in quality. There's no reason we shouldn't be at that level. That's absolutely been my goal right from the beginning."

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