Browsing Tag

smokey voice

Music, Pop Culture

Lady Crush of the Day: Nicole Atkins

Nicole Atkins

Sad fact: I typically don’t gravitate towards female singers. Their voices often sound too perfect- too clean– and in the great words of David Byrne, “The better the singer’s voice is, the harder it is to believe what they’re saying.”

Only the ladies with stories to tell in their voice and lyrics such as Janis Joplin and Stevie Nicks, or the ones who challenge gender norms such as Annie Lennox and Patti Smith, or the ones who are just as gritty as they are beautiful such as Deborah Harry and Chrissie Hynde are of interest to me. As for the the Gwen Stefanis, the Beyonces and the Taylor Swifts: I will not argue their talent, but their music does absolutely nothing for me.

To me it is all pop drivel.

It has been a very long time since I had a contemporary female music idol.

I wasn’t very familiar with Nicole Atkins’s music until recently. Why? I’m not sure, other than that I’m really bad at checking out new music (side note: Nicole Atkins is not new new; her first full-length (more…)

Fashion/Design, Music

Fashion Friday: Happy Birthday, Amy Winehouse!

Today would have been Amy Winehouse’s 29th birthday.

Though I never took a strong interest in her music or her life, there’s no doubt that she was a falling star that burned through the universe too brightly and exploded into a million little stars into the  great abyss (or insert whatever cliche you want to put there).

She was an anomaly, a slew of contradictions both aesthetically and musically:  a Jewish girl from Britain who sang with guttural and smokey intensity, a cotton candy beehive hairdo and cat eye-wearer who enjoyed the heroin chic look of tank tops, wilted and tattooed arms and missing teeth.

She had the sound of Etta James, the look of Dusty Springfield and the self-destruction of Sid Vicious all rolled into one.

The majority of Winehouse’s pictures circulating the web are images of a sad, dirty and sickly young woman who looked much older than her age. Photoshopped photos emphasizing her cocaine-laced nostrils, her track marks or any other abnormality on her (more…)