Thursday, December 14, 2017

Gwen Stefani’s You Make Me Feel Like Christmas (NBC-TV, aired December 12, 2017)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago, on December 12, NBC presented yet another one of their hour-long specials of Christmas music, though regrettably dragged down with quite a few unfunny “comedy” bits. This one was called You Make It Feel Like Christmas and featured Gwen Stefani, a singer I’ve long liked but have never really followed that well. I know she started with an alternative rock band called No Doubt and she’s defined on her Wikipedia page as “an American singer, songwriter, fashion designer, actress, and television personality.” She has a lovely voice, unusually pure for someone who started as an alt-rocker, and after a long marriage with Gavin Rossdale of the band Bush she recently broke up with him and took up with … Miranda Lambert’s ex, Blake Shelton. Just how this unsexy and mediocre country singer has been able to get two women singer-songwriters of far more attractiveness, charisma and talent to fall in love with him is a mystery to me; the Shelton-Stefani coupling was celebrated on this show by a duet on the title song (which Stefani said she wrote herself and Shelton liked so much he wanted to record it, though it’s credited on the Wikipedia page for the album to both of them along with Justin Tranter and Michael Busbee, Stefani’s usual writing partners) at the end of which they locked lips. 

The Gwen Stefani Christmas special was actually mostly good from her perspective — her voice is in excellent shape, able to handle both the traditional holiday material and her originals — but like so many other music programs these days it was way overproduced. Perhaps this is one of those respects in which my 64 years are showing, as was the fact that I came of age musically in the 1960’s, in which the top bands, with a few exceptions (like Jimi Hendrix and the Who), did very little on stage themselves. In San Francisco the spectacular visuals were provided not by the bands themselves but by light-show artists who projected colored lights, often with effects created by dyed oils, and ironically in order to see the light shows the producers had to keep the house lights so dim you couldn’t even see the band. As my tastes branched out and reached back into the past, I tended to gravitate towards singers like Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Carmen McRae and Frank Sinatra who hadn’t needed big productions to surround them: they made an effect just by standing up in front of the band and singing their hearts out. I think that’s given me a prejudice against artists who feel they need a big production behind them to “wow” audiences; perhaps unfairly, when I see a show, a music video or a TV clip like that I think, “What’s the matter? Don’t you trust your own voice to make an impact without putting on a three-ring circus act behind you?” (In the case of Pink, one artist of today I like but would like better without all that production crap, the “circus” bit is literally true: the last time I saw her on TV, on the 45th annual American Music Awards from November 19, she and the Cirque du Soleil wanna-bes in her chorus were shown literally scaling the walls of the Marriott Hotel, inside of which the main part of the show was taking place.) 

The whole vogue for big productions in rock and pop concerts started in the 1980’s, when music videos became popular and audiences started wanting to see their favorite artists the way they saw them on MTV. Between them, Michael Jackson and Madonna were the artists who did the most to bring the world of music videos to the live stage, and while they were able to do it in ways that actually added to the appeal of their shows, all too many who’ve tried it since have just looked grotesque. I still can’t believe how Beyoncé, whose true talents are as a straightforward soul singer in the tradition of Dinah Washington and Diana Ross (the latter of whom she played, more or less, in the film Dreamgirls — she also portrayed Etta James in Cadillac Records and turned in the best performance of anyone in that film who was supposed to be playing a real-life star), has surrounded herself with these ridiculous productions that just make her look grotesque — I suspect even Busby Berkeley, if he’d had a chance to see Beyoncé’s recent videos, would have told her, “Girl, don’t you think you’re overdoing it just a little?” Getting back to Gwen Stefani’s Christmas special, she opened with an O.K. version of “Jingle Bells” that as a swing version was hardly in a league with Ella Fitzgerald’s (nor did anyone expect it would be) but would have been perfectly acceptable if she hadn’t surrounded herself with so many choristers cavorting around her it was difficult to spot her in the crowd — a recurring problem with this show. After that Stefani sang a quite haunting song called “When I Was a Little Girl” — it’s on her holiday album that the show was promoting (the main sponsor was Target, with whom Stefani has worked before, giving them an early exclusive on her last album) and, though it has little to do with the season, it’s still a great song and indicative of the straightforward singing she does best. Then she did a duet on “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!” — I’m not sure who her partner was (it was a man and it didn’t look like Blake Shelton) but at least they lit more of a fire under this inherently sexy song (“The fire is slowly dying/But, my dear, we’re still goodbye-ing/And since we’ve no place to go/Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow”) than the Pentatonix a cappella group had done in their remarkably unsexy version from their own special six days earlier. After that came one of the dreary “comedy” sketches that dragged down the energy level of this program in the guise of warming it up — set at the North Pole and featuring little-person actor Ed Lee as (what else?) a wise-guy elf. 

Then Stefani did Eartha Kitt’s early-1950’s hit “Santa Baby,” and her rendition compared to Kitt’s original about the way her “Jingle Bells” did to Ella’s: Stefani has none of Kitt’s ability to suggest sexiness with her voice alone, but she phrased the song well and savored its openly materialistic lyrics. Then came an original called “Under the Christmas Lights” and the Stefani-Shelton duet on “You Make Me Feel Like Christmas,” after which she brought on another duet partner, Ne-Yo, for George Michael’s “Last Christmas” (a largely forgotten song which got revived big-time last year because George Michael died just before the Christmas season). Based on his name, I keep thinking Ne-Yo is a rapper and suddenly realizing he’s actually a neo-soul singer with a quite high, lovely and pure voice, though I wish he didn’t copy Michael Jackson’s stage moves so blatantly. Still, “Last Christmas” is a great song and Stefani and Ne-Yo did it justice. After that Stefani did the song “My Gift Is You” that she had performed two weeks earlier on the Christmas at Rockefeller Center program, also on NBC, a nice piece of original material even if the “all I want for Christmas is you” theme has been done to death by several generations of lyric writers. Then she did what was by far the most moving song on the program, “Christmas Eve,” a lovely and intensely moving song that went back to the Black gospel roots of all rock (and jazz, and blues, and rap), that though it seems intended to be a song about a human lover would also work as gospel, as an appeal to Jesus on the day celebrated as that of his birth. Significantly, Stefani had enough confidence in this material to leave the choristers and the elaborate production out of it and just sing her heart out — and when she sequenced the You Make Me Feel Like Christmas CD she wisely put it last because nothing could follow it. 

Alas, on her show she wasn’t quite so smart; she put “Christmas Eve” just before a commercial break, and when she returned she did yet another of those unfunny “comedy” sketches in which she played a bad elf who was drinking and playing hooky on the job, and trying to get her “good elf” colleague to do the same. Then she closed the show with “White Christmas,” and my hope when she announced that song was that she’d do it simply and straightforwardly the way Bing Crosby did in the 1942 version from the film Holiday Inn that made it the greatest hit of his career and the biggest-selling record of all time. No-o-o-o-o: she did it in a gloppy arrangement that managed to combine the worst elements of rock, jazz and modern-day dance-pop, and out came the chorus line again, along with vistas by the show’s director that took the camera into the flies and put Stefani in the center of a Berkeley-esque kaleidoscope effect with her choristers. No, I had never wanted to see what Holiday Inn would have looked like if Busby Berkeley had directed it, and the sheer overwhelming tastelessness of this last number put a damper on the program as a whole and really took the edge off Stefani’s performance of “Christmas Eve.” Gwen Stefani’s You Make Me Feel Like Christmas special was the sort of bad program that could have been great if Stefani had just sung her heart out on holiday material (both her own and the traditional Christmas songbook — judging from the effect she made on the gospel-tinged original “Christmas Eve,” hearing her sing some of the traditional sacred Christmas songs might have been quite compelling!) and trusted her songs and her voice to make an effect without all the horrible “production” and those God-awful “comedy” bits. Still, the show was good enough to make me want to buy the album, which after all was the whole point.