Can't Speak French for August 14th
So I'll let the funky music do the talkin' talkin' now...
I. CAN’T SPEAK FRENCH
“Can’t Speak French” was released in March of 2008 to unfettered excitement from the GA fanbase. Smooth-jazz guitar licks and a throw-back drum swing buoyed the coy, flirty skip of each verse to saccharine new heights. The video (not on Youtube…wtf?) featured our intrepid favorites shimmying behind 18th century French fans and wiggling their powdered wigs at pastel waist-coated male models. In a word, perfection.
Promotion was delayed a month so Cheryl could cope with the disturbingly disrespectful behavior of her footballer husband, Ashley Cole, who’s cock seems to have caught the same cold as Anthony Weiner’s, although Cole’s extension made good on its promises in a case or two. Karma is real, however, and Cole found himself fired, fined, and punched in the face more than once by a female American bartender after his final split from Cheryl in 2010. The fact that Cheryl took Ashley back at all provided the catalyst for her first round of sympathetic solo interviews with news outlets and chat show hosts alike; her first single as a lone artist, “Fight For This Love”, exploits Cheryl’s personal narrative of the scandal, propelling her to a level of superstardom the other girls could never quite emulate.
Cool as “Can’t Speak French” was, its B-Side , “Hoxton Heroes”, deemed too aggressive for mainstream radio play, showed a side of GA heretofore uncovered by Xenomania’s power-pop treatment.
Miranda Cooper, an in-house writer for Higgins, wrote “Hoxton Heroes” after a drunken conversation with the girls about British indie-scene pretension exploded into a series of direct, impassioned rants against Hoxton-area posers. Camden rock culture roared into overdrive around 2008 (note that Pete Doherty et all were at the height of their powers during this era, as was Amy Winehouse), and Girls Aloud, despite having their songs covered by the likes of the Kaiser Chiefs, did not appreciate the perceived attitude of their skinny-jeans-clad peers. “Hoxton Heroes” doesn’t take a single prisoner. Every target’s dead as a fuckin’ doornail, kids.
You only follow Sinatra
Cos you, you couldn’t get into RADA
So let’s try a little bit harder
Cos you need more than jeans and a parka
Just cos your dad knew the Rolling Stones
You’ve got the Primrose set in your cell phone
Don’t kid yourself, you’re an indie clone
We’ve seen it before, get a sound of your own
SHIT, girl! Might I humbly implore you for the safe return my scalp? God-DAMN.
“RADA” stands for “Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts”, by the way, which makes the second line a Fahrenheit 451 on the burn scale–dystopian, bruh. And what about this snarky dig at the culture of rock excess that ultimately took the life of one of the greatest young artists England ever produced?
You could make history
If you just stayed off the whiskey
And yeah you might just look like a rockstar
But how much soul did it cost ya, cost ya?
SAVAGE, am I right? That outro is delivered by Cheryl in a low, teasing purr at the bottom 30 seconds of the track, just in case any of these subsidiary-label hoes remained confused about the force of her derision.
A petty GA is a fiery GA, and I’m not just here for it, I’m ten minutes early, time-card in hand, bitch.
And we haven’t even gotten to Nicola, yet.
II. YO-YO
For all the time I’ve invested as a GA acolyte, I’ve never found myself moved to learn more about the individual member’s personal lives than the most perfunctory Google search could unearth. The humanity of my idols seems immaterial, secondary to their bumpless beauty and all-but-mechanical panache. I liked Kimba, Sarah, and Nadine, but their romantic histories and opinions didn’t matter to me. It was difficult to participate in the GA fandom without encountering Cheryl’s dating life and opinions head-on, but Nicola, strange, sylphine, distant Nicola—she was a different story.
Nicola Roberts’s quiet reputation proceeds her; long considered the shyest member of Girls Aloud, her somewhat sullen exterior drew no shortage of criticism from tabloid reporters. Sixteen, red-haired, and constantly smothered in the wrong shade of bronzer, Nicola stared back from early paparazzi photographs with a cast of genuine, heart-breaking terror. She looked scared because she was scared. While she managed to hit her marks and project her voice competently from the start, she faded into the background at any given opportunity. Nicola’s fanbase didn’t fully understand quite how harrowing the stratospheric rise had been for her until she released her solo album, Cinderella’s Eyes, in 2011. The jarring, clever, autobiographical pulse cohering the project’s tone offered us unprecedented insight into the emotionally exhausting, contradictory world of a girl who’s childhood was forked over to the press at an all-to-tender age.
I’m reading Dorothy Allison for the first time. She’s a clean writer, a quality I admire but struggle to emulate. More importantly, she’s an honest one. Allison can harness the very telos of rhythm, story to story, image to image, until meaning boils through the bottom of any reader’s conscience. I’m leaning lately that good, real art doesnt rest on the assumption that vulnerability alone yields truth. Vulnerability can be bottled and pumped into the air at department stores. Vulnerability smells of lavender and looks best placed diagonally on a small pink pillow. Truth knows its bareness. A thorough heart can’t hide for long.
Nicola Roberts has a taste for good, real art, even if her stomach’s not there yet. She’s also got trauma for sale. The minute the woman went solo, it became clear that Roberts had been working with a slightly fatter deck than that of her accustomed company for a while. Her visuals mixed high-fashion and high street to effortlessly cool effect. She intuitively understood the weight of each note, the value of each breezy creative gimmick. That lazy, mewing Scouse twang she’d be encouraged to streamline during her GA studio days came zooming to the forefront of each track. Her hair was ombre blonde. Most notably, she tossed the fake tan, and that flawless alabaster complexion she’d taken such care to conceal generated its own halo whenever she sang on camera. Nicola had arrived, and not in the way Cheryl Cole or Justin Timberlake had. She was clearly an artist, and the industry treated her like one. Google tells me she signed a writing deal with the largest independent music publishing company in the world yesterday.
The first song she finished for the album was called “Yo-Yo”, which dreamily recounts the fragile fall-out of love without labels. Nicola’s team released it as the follow-up single to “Beat of My Drum”, a driving Major Lazer banger with matching step-routine. “Yo-Yo” rings nimble and entreating without a stoop to desperation; the listener finds herself locked inside Nicola’s music box, peeking out its keyhole to better watch Roberts anxiously rehearse the ultimatum she’ll deliver later. “Yo-Yo’s” video denies us the unreachable pop princess GA fans had come to expect. Instead, we were shown a person, a stylish, introspective, writerly person, admitting the imminent inevitability of her heartbreak. She bops mournfully at a Brooklyn-esque house party. She fidgets at the neck of her adorable crushed velvet dress. Not a cyborg in sight.
It was 2015 by the time I could understand the full lyrical import of “Yo-Yo”, and I found myself looping that song on more weepy train rides than I care to acknowledge. While “Cinderella’s Eyes” had larger bones to pick than boys, I relished the opportunity to recapture some unanticipated solidarity with a woman I doubt has ever been dumped before. Or, maybe no one’s truly immune to break-ups. Is that the lesson? These days, I’m trying to make some changes—and it’s not Benglis or Bourgeois who lower my tides enough to breathe. I look to fighters whose sharpest weapon was a hard-won voice. I look to women who went through hell and emerged ready to articulate its vilest depths.
Dorothy Allison said in an interview that a writer’s primary goal is to see his or her wave of truth returned by an audience, by folks hungry for story. I think Nicola would agree.
III. STICKS + STONES
Even if we decide to entertain the question of whether or not “Cinderella’s Eyes” is a feminist album, the answer registers in color. Ariana Grande prancing around in a miniskirt begging to get fucked might be super fun, but doesn’t do much for women’s equality. She has an inalienable right to prance around in a miniskirt and beg to get fucked, absolutely. (I’ve been known to do the same thing, of an eve). But does a diaristic, daringly produced electropop album detailing the traumatic toll teen stardom takes qualify? Does interrogating a artist’s stated or unstated political affiliations get us anywhere with the work itself? Because truth is never neat, and curated truth is rarely real.
Nicola wrote the raw, defiant final bridge to “Sticks and Stones” over an Eminem beat she heard on Radio 1. Given that Eminem presides as the poster-child of unhinged frustration, Robert’s blisteringly personal lyrics make a ton of sense:
Too young to buy my own bottle of vodka,
So I begged the driver please I need another,
How funny I was too young for so many things yet you thought I’d cope with being told I’m ugly,
Over and over I pleaded believe it,
Say no to the shrink I can fix me I think,
I’ve got friends in my head,
They’ve got me on the mend,
I am pretty in my mirror,
Easy to pretend,
Seventeen and thought I’d won the jackpot,
Seems I didn’t read between the lines of this one,
Can’t think what I could of made you so angry,
Your bullet I don’t feel them coming firing at me,
“Sticks and Stones”, a plodding anti-bullying anthem, doesn’t waste time mincing metaphors. She’d rather be alone in her world; she’d rather be the girl that gets hurt. Hurt throbs from the center of her script outwards. Her pain is palpable. This is not the only song on the album to contain bully-goading phrasing; “Take a Bite”, Robert’s breathless challenge to her less charitable critics, issues a similar provocation:
Get your teeth round this, open wide
Eyes bigger than your belly tonight
If you think you’re hard take a bite
You push and push and push, pushed me to fight
Everybody’s got a limit, alright?
So put ‘em up, put 'em up, take a bite
Just because you’re twice the size of me
Doesn’t mean I’m scared of world war III
Sit back and grab a cup of tea
I’m gonna kick your arse now in 3D
She raps the bridge before the final chorus of this song, too; another stylistically mirrored but far less molten parallel to “Sticks and Stones” .
So I was just a shy girl, from Halton Brook
I’d always write all my dreams, down in my story book
We didn’t have many pennies, used to sit 'round the telly
Never been wrapped up in the way I look
So when I got down to London, had the press on my case
Cause I didn’t walk 'round with a smile on my face
Called me a rude ginger bitch, and say I bought bigger tits
They’re gonna eat all their words, they’re talkin’ absolute shit
Nicola pulls no punches here. It’s not that she doesn’t care. She cares a lot, she cares more than she should, and she’s taking back her agency in the best way she knows how—through music. She’s no longer the miserable backdrop to her flashier peers. Nicola emerged in 2011 with dukes up, ready to reclaim the agency stolen from her childhood by entertainment capitalism’s casual cruelty. “Cinderella’s Eyes” may be peppered with breakup stories, but those stories apply just as aptly to her formative career history, boxing with a mediascape that ravaged her body and frayed the sane edges of her patience. Take “Fish Out of Water”.
Even if I have to go alone
I’d rather never let you go
So I’ll face the road unknown
I’m a day without the night
A fish out of water
Music you are my life
I can’t handle a goodbye
Nicola Roberts is an artist. A complicated, messy, angry, lonely girl artist, rife with all the contradictions truth-telling entails.
Thanks for reading and subscribing! More tomorrow, as promised.
-Baubo