Cheryl Cole is talentless but honest
To promote the release of Calvin Harris’ new single “Call My Name”, Cheryl Cole sat down with Popjustice for an in-depth interview. Some of what she said made me shake my head and lose faith in all humanity, and some other things kind of made me like her.
Let’s start with the bad first.
When you first heard ["Call My Name], apart from thinking ‘this is quite good’, did you also think, ‘this sounds a bit like Rihanna’?
I didn’t. And I don’t think it does
Don’t you?
(Having none of it) No!
Not in a bad way necessarily. Like a brother or a sister, perhaps…
Well that’s going to be natural because it’s Calvin. They’re both Calvin-produced songs. So naturally you’re going to think that. But if you play them side by side they don’t sound the same. Although you might naturally think that, because it’s the same producer. It’s not a bad thing. The thing is, dance music and dance sounds are the new pop. Pop these days isn’t how S Club 7 used to sound. It’s now dance beats. DJs of the world – David Guetta, Calvin Harris, will.i.am – that’s all pop.
It gets worse.
So with the album did you want to fit in with pop as it currently is? So not causing a nuisance but just fitting in with pop in terms of what’s already there? Or…
Well I like to cause a little bit of a nuisance. I’ve got a lot of dub on there. Which some people consider as noise! Some people don’t like dub at all! But (looks conspiratorial) I like those bits…
Some of it is a racket though. But chuck it in the middle of a pop song and it’s fine.
Yes!
But still, some dubstep is a racket.
I like it! I wanted to make a feel good record though. The fans have been waiting a long time for it, so…
‘Dub’ is actually a subgenre of reggae, but Cheryl appears to be talking about ‘dubSTEP’ (although her love of ‘dub’ would explain why she tried to sing like Rihanna on this hot mess).
Only Cheryl Cole could be so musically inept that she’d consider dubstep to be some wild new thing, wouldn’t be able to notice similarities between her own song and Rihanna’s, and would school the man behind Popjustice on what constitutes for pop music these days. I’m sure he got that memo about three years ago, unlike Cheryl, who only appears to have gotten it last week.
On the positive side, Cheryl spent the rest of the interview being completely honest about what a talentless puppet she is, which was very refreshing. And I don’t mean that as shade, I promise! The British beauty gave credit to her producers, managers, and record label for making most of her creative decisions, advised new artists to do whatever their label says, delivered a lecture on why pop stars don’t need to write their own music, and admitted that she has no idea what the lyrics to “Call My Name” mean (before conceding “it’s a pop song”).
I like that. Cheryl is a manufactured pop tart with a pretty face and not much else, but so is half the commercial music industry. At least people like Cheryl and Britney admit this shit and don’t give two fucks either way. If I have to hear Beyonce rambling one more time about how many songs she wrote and produced, how many DVDs she personally edited, how many clothing lines she designed, and how many albums she A&R’d… Gurl.
