CHER: IT'S A MAN'S WORLD (1995)
1)
Walking In Memphis; 2) Not Enough Love In The World; 3) One By One; 4) I
Wouldn't Treat A Dog (The Way You Treated Me); 5) Angels Running; 6) Paradise
Is Here; 7) I'm Blowin' Away; 8) Don't Come Around Tonite; 9) What About The
Moonlight; 10) The Same Mistake; 11) The Gunman; 12) The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine
Anymore; 13) Shape Of Things To Come; 14) It's A Man's Man's Man's World.
Stuck in between Cher's two triumphant eras
(the ʽIf I Could Turn Back Time /And Bring The Fishnet Look Into The Sixties/ʼ
one and the ʽI Believe /In Plastic Surgery/ʼ one), It's A Man's World is kind of an odd record, largely overlooked and
forgotten, but not without its own special twist. By the mid-Nineties, glam-pop
was dead and gone, so trying to release a follow-up to Love Hurts would have made no sense; however, latching on to some
new fashionable direction did not seem to be an easy task, and was made even
harder by a personal crisis she was going through at the time (diagnosed with
chronic fatigue syndrome, among other things). Going the alt-rock route would
not be natural, yet neither would be turning into Celine Dion (what with Cher
still sticking to a few crumbs of «rock authenticity» that she had always had
in her).
In the end, signing up with Warner Bros. for
this record, she went for a «soulful» approach: It's A Man's World kind of walks the line between neo-soul,
neo-country, modern R&B and adult contemporary. I know, I know — sounds
awful, right? Well, this is definitely no masterpiece: for starters, most of
the songs are slow, lazy on the hooks, conventional in terms of arrangement,
and there's fourteen of them, meaning that the record drags on for over an
hour, when the typical length for a Cher record used to be 35-40 minutes. Add
to this the usual reliance on corporate songwriters (though, fortunately, her
love affair with Diane Warren, Desmond Child, Michael Bolton, and Bon Jovi has
come to an end) and the unusually somber / introspective mood on many of the
tracks (not the best emotional setting for Cher), and it is easy to see why the
album was both a commercial and critical letdown at the time.
On the other hand, revisiting it in retrospect shows
quite definitively that it is at least an attempt to make something serious —
not merely a conveyer-produced glossy pattern like «The Trilogy», but a
collection of songs somehow reflecting Cher's own state of mind at the time.
Even the title, as well as the decision to cover the respective James Brown
chestnut, reflects that, as she said something about the wish to sing a bunch
of «men's songs» from a woman's standpoint. Granted, portraying herself as Eve
on the front sleeve, snake-clad and ready to tempt her man with the big red
one, is not necessarily as «self-empowering» an image as one might think, but
then again, you never can tell with feminist / anti-feminist standpoints (was
Eve the first «self-asserting woman» or the first «dumb bitch» in existence? Or
both?...). Anyway, on the whole It's A
Man's World is not an emphatic feminist statement — just a collection of
pensive, occasionally intriguing, but usually rather languid and dull songs
about... uh... relationships.
The first song already illustrates all that is
good and bad about the record — Cher's take on Marc Cohn's ʽWalking In Memphisʼ
stays fairly close to the original, retaining its Roy Bittan-ish keyboard
melody and glossy production, and although the intention is good (a sincere
tribute to the «Memphis feel» is always welcome), the realisation hardly ever
makes it come across as something special. The line about "he said, ʽTell
me, are you a Christian?ʼ, and I said, ʽMan, I am tonight!ʼ" certainly
does not have that special appeal for Cher that it has for the Jewish heritage
of Marc Cohn, but she delivers it with all the strength she can gather, and the
desire to churn up a rootsy-spiritual aura is clearly felt — too bad that she
and her backing band did nothing to actually make the music ring out with at least a bit of that good old Memphis vibe.
The second single from the album, and the only
one that charted, was ʽOne By Oneʼ — not surprisingly, since it is one of the
few songs here that would have fit in with the upbeat glam formula of the
previous three records. Originally written by Antony Griffiths of The Real
People and recorded by Eurovision hero Johnny Logan... okay, it's not really a
musical horror: it's actually fun when it gets to the chorus, and it's also fun
to see Cher aim for these falsetto notes in the verse while at the same time going
for her bottom range on the chorus. She also does okay turning blues-rock into
dance-pop (ʽI Wouldn't Treat A Dogʼ), and even some of the slower ballads have
special touches of moodiness (ʽThe Gunmanʼ, with a mildly threatening funky
guitar line), but in the end, there is only one song here that I would be
taking home with me — ʽShape Of Things To Comeʼ, nothing to do with the old
Mann/Weil classic, but rather an entirely new composition by none other than
the Buggles' Trevor Horn and 10cc's Lol Creme.
That number is actually a mini-masterpiece of
moodiness — fast, tense, paranoid, literate, and ambiguous (you can't even lay
a definitive claim to the song being all about man-woman relationships — after
all, no song whose hookline is based on the phrase "shape of things to
come" can be centered exclusively around personal stuff). There was
nothing like this on any part of The Glam Trilogy, and there would never be
again — in musical and atmospheric terms, it is arguably the best thing to come
out of the Cher camp in the past thirty years. And then she follows it up with
a really good reading of the James Brown track — this time, adding in some
extra layers of tragedy, with a rip-roaring guitar break and a hushed, husky
coda that turns the tables radically against the song's protagonist: "He's
lost in the wilderness... he's lost in the bitterness".
Ultimately, my rating shifted from a thumbs
down to neutral as I was writing this review. Trim some obvious filler, replace
some of the drum machines with normal drumming, get her a good guitar player,
speed up one or two tempos, and it might be real close to a thumbs up — and, as
it usually happens with Cher, this is precisely the album that nobody rushed out to buy, because nobody
wants a Cher that's getting too serious for her britches: everybody just wants
the glitzy pop diva of ʽTake Me Homeʼ and ʽIf I Could Turn Back Timeʼ. Three
years later, she'd give them what they wanted, but this one, it seems, was made
more for herself, and, fortunately, it still shows after all these years.
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