{grate 1} Blaming the young and impressionable for their own pop music
indoctrination is too unapproachably circular. Instead, let’s blame Natasha
Bedingfield and people like her, or at least her marketing team.
Unabashed posturing for the sake of increased consumption
number one: an “American” image. Bedingfield’s striving for soul in the voice
and country in the big white hair and the big white teeth, but this lady was
born in
One of her higher-ups must have determined that, given the current climate, her
Sunday-school style import was good enough to send back as is.
Unabashed posturing number two: content that suggests
audience-comparable age and experience. Pocketful of Sunshine is blatantly engineered
to resonate specifically with preteens whose hormones ensure both a market for
discussions of body image (“Freckles”, “Pirate Bones”) and a market for
storybook semantics of eternal love (“Soulmate”, “Put Your Arms Around Me”) —
or is it eternal “like”? The album’s appeal is so narrowly directed that, when
this nearing-30, mix-messaged figurehead breaks from being, yes, “in like” to
offer a few lines about landlords and unemployment, these seem more out of
character than others about tutus and plastic bazookas.
But the power in the melodically moribund middle-school
dance punch is that, on top of all of the noted misconstructions, Bedingfield’s
marketing team still got her on “Ellen” this week and she still sang with
enough sincerity to bump her up at least one notch on the top 20.
