Verwandte Artikel zu Cat Power: A Good Woman

Cat Power: A Good Woman - Softcover

Goodman, Elizabeth

 
9780307396365: Cat Power: A Good Woman
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0307396363 ISBN 13: 9780307396365
Verlag: Crown, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

How Chan Marshall, aka Cat Power, Survived Herself–and Became the Indie Rock Queen.

Chan Marshall’s stark lyrics, minimal arrangements,and wounded, smoky vocals, were an instant indie hit in the nineties–but her mental instability nearly derailed her career. How this sensitive but headstrong Georgian daughter of an unstable mother and a relatively unknown musician father–managed to make it big, burn out, and rise up again to become not only the darling of the indie music scene but also a fashion and Hollywood icon is the fabric of this irresistible story.

Covering her musical beginnings in the south and her booze-soaked rise to fame in New York City to her eventual breakdown and subsequent reclamation of herself and her music, Cat Power delves into the soul of this fragile but ferociously gifted young talent. With seven albums behind her, the hottest designers clamoring to dress her, and perpetually sold-out venues, Marshall is at the height of her career–a perfect vantage point from which to look at her notorious and intriguing history.

From interviews with her family, musicians such as Thurston Moore, Nick Cave, Dave Grohl, and Jack White, past loves like Bill Callahan and Vincent Gallo, and current friends such as Karl Lagerfeld and Wong Kar-Wai, Elizabeth Goodman gives us the real Chan Marshall–the little girl, the woman, the artist.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

ELIZABETH GOODMAN is the editor at large at Blender magazine and has written for Rolling Stone, Spin, and Nylon.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1.

Redemption

June 9, Town Hall in New York City. Cat Power’s sold-out engagement at the prestigious, eighty-six-year-old venue where Leonard Bernstein and Miles Davis once performed featured the Memphis Rhythm Band, a full Southern soul orchestra. They were all onstage. Chan Marshall was not, and people were starting to worry. This show was originally scheduled for February, but had been canceled for what were then referred to as “health reasons.” By now everybody in the venue knew what that really meant. Chan had suffered one of the most highly publicized mental and physical flameouts in the modern rock era, with the New York Times reporting on the details of her institutionalization and one million fans all over the world wondering if her return to the stage would bring the same vulnerable beguiling presence they’d come to cherish and rely on. Chan Marshall had been long gone all winter, and almost for good. Would she be back with the spring? And if so, how damaged would she be?

After nearly an hour, the singer finally took the stage barefoot, wearing a strapless beaded Chanel couture dress carrying a hot-pink commuter mug filled with what she kept triumphantly insisting was chamomile tea, not single malt scotch, or wine, or beer, the preferred onstage beverages for most of her career. So invested in Chan’s well- being were many of the fans in the audience that this revelation itself drew applause. The gown’s pale, creamy tone showed off her deep tan and lithe frame, achieved during winter months spent trading booze and dark hotel rooms for the Miami sunshine, novels read by the pool, and Pilates. She looked happy, which, for anyone who knew her personally or had followed the evolution of her career, was stunning to witness: the mental-hygiene equivalent of onstage pyro.

She was tentative as she led the band, who were clearly pulling for her as well, through the first few songs, relying on weirdly equine galloping dance steps to neutralize the tension.

During the minimalist ballad “Where Is My Love” she left the stage for a while, prompting the background singer to add a wry tone to the lyric. It seemed like Chan was gone too long and a sense of here-she- goes-again nervous energy permeated the crowd. Her eventual return drew another wave of relieved whoops and applause. She flashed a huge grin, cantered over to her piano, and proceeded to sing with such smoky, lived-in authority that it was as if she finally knew her lines after fifteen years of tense rehearsal. It was the best Cat Power show I’ve ever seen.

Delayed gratification has always been Chan’s signature stage move. During her earliest shows she would often stand feet away from the mike so that the audience could hear exactly enough to know what they were missing in not being able to hear more. This sort of vocal titillation was defiant, as if she resented being onstage and wanted to taunt her listeners. When Chan reappeared at Town Hall that night, beckoned by the increasingly insistent “Where is my love?” refrain sung by her backup vocalist, that sense of performance as being punitive was gone. In its place was unadulterated joy.

Onstage at Town Hall that night, the contrasting sides of Chan Marshall, which had been struggling vigorously against each other for most of her then thirty-four years, united for a brief two hours of fragile perfection. She was both shy and confident, glamorous in her gown and tomboyish in her ponytail and bare feet, nervous but happy when she played the piano alone, and forceful like a blues diva when she led her band through songs off her recently released album, The Greatest. Former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne, who was in attendance, wrote on his blog that the show was one of the best he’d ever seen. “This combination of Memphis rhythm section and her hesitant...phrasing was...a very strange idea,” Byrne wrote. “The result is somewhere in the middle of two worlds. Some new thing came into being that had elements of both worlds but that was neither.”

Those who are familiar with Chan know two main things about her: She has the voice of a damaged angel, and she’s probably crazy. Beginning very early in her career but reaching an apex during 1998 and 1999 when Chan toured in support of her fourth album, Moon Pix, Cat Power played a series of shows during which Chan would regularly self- destruct onstage. These displays were so gory—a combination of genuinely alarming psychosis and weirdly compelling performance art— that the singer soon became as famous for her eccentricity and mental instability as she was for her music. In the following years Cat Power released three more albums (2000’s The Covers Record, 2003’s You Are Free, and 2006’s The Greatest), each of which earned her increasing amounts of mainstream media coverage. She used her access to the press to speak with disturbing candor about the history of mental illness in her family, the scary household she grew up in, and the paralyzing sense of worthlessness she felt every time she stepped onstage, walked outside, or took a breath.

When Chan opened her mouth to sing, fans and critics heard generations of poor Southerners crippled by a sense of inescapable illegitimacy. We longed to hear that voice really open up, to surpass the limitations imposed on it by Chan’s evident self-loathing and insecurity. Every implosive Cat Power performance carried a sense of rooting for the underdog. We the fans knew what she had, what she was, what she was worth, and we longed to make her know, to make her see. If she saw and heard what we saw and heard perhaps she could get onstage and sing with strength, confidence, and freedom the way she did when she was just a little girl, singing hymns in church.

Chan has been struggling since birth. She was raised in a wild and unstable home, exposed to drugs and alcohol as a kid, endured her parents’ divorce, attended countless different schools before dropping out of high school at seventeen to work in a pizza parlor, and by the age of twenty she was pregnant. If Chan Marshall had amounted to nothing, it would have surprised no one, especially not herself. And yet just as consistently as she has been underestimated, she has also defied expectations. Chan learned from her parents’ mistakes and stayed clean while many of her friends became casualties of the nineties heroin scene. When she got pregnant at a young age by the wrong guy, she had an abortion, collected the money she’d wisely saved, and moved to New York City, becoming the first person in her family to leave the South for good.

When Chan first started playing her unusual breed of dour blues rock, she was marginalized by many as a cute girl with a dark past and an indie record deal. But Chan propelled Cat Power to international fame and her artistic potency went well past the sell-by date of most of her contemporaries. When success didn’t exorcize the demons she’d been running from since childhood, Chan experienced a psychological breakdown and public tour cancellation that could have signaled the end of Cat Power. Instead, her return marked the most triumphant moment in her career and heralded the most spectacular critical and commercial success Cat Power has ever had.

“God shined on her,” Spin editor Charles Aaron says of the Greatest shows with the Memphis Rhythm Band, a collection of extremely venerable bluesmen with decades of experience. “It made her realize she’s not existing in this whole indie-rock world where whether you can or cannot sing is viewed as an interpretive thing. It’s like, ‘Okay, either perform to the very best of my ability, or I will be humiliated onstage. They’ll be nice. They’re...

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Verlag
Crown
Erscheinungsdatum
2009
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0307396363
ISBN 13 
9780307396365
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
312
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
GPSR Kontakt
gpsr@libri.de

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