Let's go girls!
Three words are enough to throw you back to the leopard print nineties when Shania Twain's country pop feminism was the hottest thing on Tellus.
Shania Twain
was both sexier and cockier than a female country artist was allowed to be and was called cheap and a sellout.
But Shania Twain got it right.
Today, she is
one of the world's best-selling artists, sharing the stage with Harry Styles at the trendy Coachella festival.
Billy Ray Cyrus does country rap with Snoop Dogg and Lil Nas X and country pop artists like Kacey Musgraves, Carrie Underwood and Taylor Swift have Twain to thank for their careers.
On the cover of the
new album "Queen of me", Shania Twain rides a beautiful black horse, the cowboy hat sits nicely on her head.
The opening track "Giddy Up" is a severely annoying western sing-a-long, but otherwise "Queen of me" is a more or less pure pop product.
Every single song is radio hit material: entertaining, mostly uptempo, modern production and strong choruses.
The classic Twain recipe remains – half love songs and half girl power songs.
What
is new, however, is her voice.
After a Lyme infection that settled on her vocal cords and subsequent throat surgery, she sounds both darker and raspier, in a good way.
In fact, one becomes curious as to how she would sound in a really slow, distinctive country song where she could have really used the new dimensions of her voice.
But it
might not have been Shania Twain.
"Queen of me" is precisely that: Very much Shania.
She does exactly that which was so fresh and groundbreaking at the end of the last millennium.
But it is hardly fresh or groundbreaking today.
On the contrary, there is not a single song on "Queen of me" that is innovative or even current, except possibly a post-covid song.
Taylor Swift would
n't sound the way she does today if Shania Twain hadn't paved the way.
But today it's rather Shania Twain who sounds like Taylor Swift.