CHER: LIVING PROOF (2002)
1)
The Music's No Good Without You; 2) Alive Again; 3) (This Is) A Song For The
Lonely; 4) A Different Kind Of Love Song; 5) Rain, Rain; 6) Love So High; 7)
Body To Body, Heart To Heart; 8) Love Is A Lonely Place Without You; 9) Real
Love; 10) Love One Another; 11) You Take It All; 12) When The Money's Gone.
I shall hitherto abstain from resorting to
crudely offensive jokes based on unscientific correlation of the title of this
album with the photograph of the artist on the front cover. We take civility very seriously here at Only Solitaire —
it is impolite and tasteless to produce jokes on subjects that have already
served as the basis for entire joke pools and countless running gags — and
prefer to treat the issues of Cher discontinuing a certified existence as a
real human being and of Cher's music discontinuing the right to be called
«music» as two completely separate issues, unrelated until proven so by a joint
commission of expert plastic surgeons, fashion designers, musicologists, sound
engineers, and cocktail waitresses.
In the meantime, we are going to keep this
brief and state that since Living Proof,
a bona fide follow-up to Believe, is
everything that Believe wanted to be
and less, the only people who would be interested in this second libation to
the Great Goddess of Techno-Pop are those who actually dug the hypnotic grooves
and mesmerizing textures of the lady's 1998 spiritual masterpiece. For the rest
of us, the inclusion of ʽSong For The Lonelyʼ, the agonizing terror song of
2002 that may have cost more people their psychic sanity than 9/11 cost people
their lives, will be sufficient reason to stay away from this abomination. Of
all the songs written and recorded in memory of the tragic event, ʽSong For The
Lonelyʼ, with its awful lyrics and generic techno beat, may indeed have been
the most gruesome. The only way "I'll be by your side" is through
radio overkill, and, indeed, the song was all over the place in 2002, almost
like ʽBelieveʼ before it, and boy, have I ever suffered in public places (yes,
even in Mother Russia) — you had to run for shelter from its shrillness,
loudness, and total cheapness.
Unfortunately, the rest of the album is hardly
better. There's nothing here, really, but a steadily calculated attempt at
repeating the success of Believe —
one flat, forgettable, trivial techno-pop piece of garbage after another. The
European hit ʽThe Music's No Good Without Youʼ, with its light acid overtones
and computerized chorus (which sounds as if they were teaching a robot some
pickup lines), is, at the very best, just danceable (like everything else on
here), but has less emotion than a Pepsi jingle. The near-obligatory Diane
Warren contribution is the faux-Spanish «flamenco ballad» ʽBody To Body, Heart
To Heartʼ that continues the «Latin exploitation» theme begun by ʽDove L'Amoreʼ
and does it in an equally embarrassing manner. And if you try to dig a little
deeper, in faint hopes of discovering some minor accidental nugget, beware — it
is far more probable to hit a hot stream of shit under heavy pressure, such as
ʽLove One Anotherʼ, a techno anthem taken from Dutch singer Amber whose chief
achievement is setting the mantra "love one another, sisters and brothers"
to a techno beat.
Ugh, no. It was pretty hard for me to imagine a
sequel to Believe that would be even
worse, but yes, this here is a sequel to Believe
that is much, much worse — and did I even mention the Autotune abuse that is
now all over the place? No? Go ahead, listen to ʽReal Loveʼ: it's like she's
making fun of Stephen Hawking or something. Thumbs down does not even begin
to describe the true reaction to the album — «six feet under» would be much
closer to the truth.
Unlike Believe this album is no good. Lifeless, tuneless, boring.
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