Tuesday, July 08, 2008

Duffy not 'Boyo's girl

Duffy has, for some reason, felt the need to clarify that she's not Tom Jones' daughter, as some Americans have apparently started thinking there's a connection.

(In other words, hearing she's Welsh, they've assumed she's related to the only other Welsh person they can think of.)

Oddly, Duffy has yet to react in any way to the equally fallacious belief that she's in some way a spiritual heir of Dusty Springfield.


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Duffy is - as I've often mentioned - to Dusty what Oasis were/are to the Beatles: what happens when only the style of the 60s is remembered and the spirit is forgotten. The best British music has always been made by those who combine an awareness of what's happening in black American music in their moment with a knowledge of and feeling for their own cultural history - an awareness of one or the other can still make good music (if not the very best), but an awareness of neither - c.f. Britpop, subsequent post-indie and the heritage-soul gang, among others - can only ever produce shite (I won't even mention her staggeringly patronising comments directed at the currently slightly less mediocre Estelle - they condemn themselves).

At least when Tom Jones was lifting the exact same black American vocal stylings they were still current, or at least very recent: "It's Not Unusual" made Billboard's R&B chart in 1965 because the radio stations it surveyed didn't know who he was and assumed that only a black American could sing like that. No doubt making the same chart would be the highlight of Duffy's life. But, just like Winehouse and Stone, she won't get that far: she'll do well in other sectors of the US which are now riddled with nostalgia for the very same aspects of black culture and music which they denounced while they were actually happening (it's significant that white British heritage-soul is far more popular in the US than white British heritage-rock last decade - the Blairites' preparing-for-government music as heritage-soul is for the Cameronites - ever was), but black America has no time for heritage. And this is the main thing the British heritage-soul gang cannot see, and that is the reason why they are ultimately irrelevant.

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