Something's always seemed a bit off about Amy Diamond, which is part of why I like her, and part of why I'll take an hour out of an otherwise busy day to create a somewhat superfluous 1-CD compilation of her greatest hits. Never really put my finger on it, though going into the general message of some of her songs hints at something a little dark, a little ambivalent, a little...y'know sad. Despite cheezeball TMBG-tinged follow the bouncing ball pop surroundings.
Or because of? Because now that we're reaching the OMG Depression (I was going to call it the O.K. Depression, but it felt too 90's), I'm thinking about her somewhat differently. The Swedish-Broadway pedigree, not totally unlike what I understand about Celine Dion's early career, puts her in a fairly unique place as an artist: she's one of the few pop stars that I follow regularly who seems to be in an older mode of singer, something I might hesitantly call a professional singer, whose job is one of interpretation and somehow serving as both a personality and a chameleon. There are plenty of chameleons in teenpop, and plenty of personalities, but the combination strikes me as something out of an older tradition, something more out of musical theater.
So Amy Diamond's got some Judy Garland in her, though not as much Shirley Temple as you'd think. For one thing, she's too weird to hang your optimism on, and this might as a side effect de-sexualize her star image a bit, too -- it's hard to find typical sexualized connotations in a song about how you have to go to the city so it can eat you whole, or about how things can only get better when you've hit the bottom, or about how kids need to rise up against The Man by disowning the dual opiates of cookies and television.
But here's the thing...she is asking you to hang your optimism on her. It's just that the situations she's describing are (presumably) far more desperate than the ones her target audience might actually be living -- I'm making a wild assumption here, but she codes pretty safely middle class. If I'm wrong about this in the context of Swedish pop-consumin' society, let me know. But she often seems to be singing to archetypical urchins; I close out Mest Gillade with her "Tomorrow" cover not only because it's awesome (which it is), but because it offers a potential for a less obvious interpretation than just "Broadway-belting child star standard" -- it's actually a recurring theme in a lot of Amy Diamond's songs.
Basically, the narrative goes: "Life is really hard. Life can be cruel, and there's not necessarily any good reason for it. But you have to try to make your life better (even if this ultimately proves impossible, for reasons beyond your control) because if you don't..."
Not sure what comes after that ellipsis. Death maybe (um, nah), or uh, more figuratively, the dark potential of many an Amy Diamond song that goes unrealized: a song that actually makes you feel worse about life. In her own way, Amy kind of stares into the abyss; in "It Can Only Get Better," she spells it out most succinctly, with appropriately weepy balladry acting as a less counter-intuitive than usual musical blanket:
It can get only get better
Be still my heart
It can only get better
We've come this far
It can only get better
I know it hurts
For what it's worth
It can only get better
I mean it's optimistic I guess but COME ON. She could also do the Beatles flipside and say "it couldn't get no worse." And there's actually a lyric even more blunt right at the start: "If every step's an uphill climb, oohh / Carry on until they feel much lighter."
Except y'know they really DON'T get that much lighter when you're hanging out with Amy. She doesn't seem to have any songs about ecstasy, about the time when the work actually pays off. She has standard pop diversions -- either side of the relationship empowerment song, in which the start of the relationship gives her strength ("Stay My Baby") or the end of the relationship gives her strength ("Thank You") (both from her third album, the one least characteristic of what she's done to date).
But these are some pretty depressing hooks!
"Don't Lose Any Sleep Over You": "I'm still standing / I made my way through the bitter nights / I'm letting go, I'm turning out the light"
"Champion": "You gotta hit that high when the odds are low / Now here's how to get to the next plateau / Be the first one in and the last to go" [Protestant work ethic, set to a weirdly mechanized, insistent, hyperactive pop-punk chug, w/ warp-speed Diddleybeat variation]
"My Name Is Love": "These are uneasy times / Good friends are hard to find / In this life that we live" [scans as cliche, as most Amy Diamond lyrics do, yet there is a strangely pessimistic vision on display here, a loveless world in which individuals are responsible for reinjecting basic kindness into a dream that needs to be "rebuilt."]
"Life's What You Make It": "Walk through the wilderness with a laugh / A smile makes everything better / Life's what you make it" (note inverse proposition to Hannah Montana's song of the same title -- as rife with cliche, yet the basis of the song, again, is that life is tough but if you work hard enough at it, you won't get burned; compare to a cheerier, and far more insipid "life is great, isn't it!" sorta thing Hannah is pushing).
And hell, how about some straightforward, antiquated pipe dreaming in "Diamonds Are Forever": "Why settle for less than perfect / The luster alone is worth it / Remarkably , sparkly thing I adore / Glamour galore"
Forget Young Jeezy, the real recession artist here is AMY DIAMOND. The 30's are coming back in a big way -- watch for some neo-Depression documentary modes starting to resurface, which I might write about later, watch for escapism to continue to get weirder, maybe trending toward "meta-bling" (and anyway, meta-bling is distinctively 30's musical in its ancestry, since the wealth on display in these musicals isn't an attainable wealth; it's a sort of imaginary wealth not literally flaunted by its anonymous purveyors (a la Busby Berkeley), but in essence, as a kind of idea that exists purely as escapism, with no hope of being achieved through any kind of social mobility.
Instead the underpinning of the escapism is actually social stasis, a kind of social futility. And futility, I think, is a major aspect of that weirdness that keeps my ears tuned to what Amy Diamond is doing. Her form of escapism is simple: she tries to sell you the idea that things can actually get better, when everything else she's telling you gives you the unmistakable feeling that things are, in fact, only getting worse.
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