![]() Once I see her face on a huge sign outside Tower Records, advertising her next album, all glitzed up, she is dead to me. In my fantasy world, Jewel is unable to recuperate herself she can only destroy herself. She doesn’t have complex language to describe it, and no real suggestions for what to do about it, but she is unable to replace one mask with another. Lacking any recognizable political position, her unadulterated rebelliousness senses just what’s wrong with the world, and she points it out. ![]() Jewel, on the other hand, much less sophisticated, is intuitively right on. Jane, so it’s laughably perfect that she ends up in bed with her polar opposite, Eminem, using her music to get out the vote against conservative politicians in the 2008 elections. But at the same time, those recognizable politics were always there, of her own making, to mediate any rebellion she might have sparked Ani DiFranco never ventured into more rebellious territory than that of G.I. She is recognizably political, her feminism is more intelligent, and this many years later she remains committed to the positions that first made her famous. Ani DiFranco makes an interesting contrast. Her place in my heart was taken by Ani DiFranco, and then by musicians I’m not ashamed of. It was obvious to us that this was her dearest feature.īut I soon forgot about Jewel. I remember hearing from my closest friend at the time how Jewel had horribly crooked teeth and she refused to get them straightened, like the record label wanted. Other songs on the album speak out against beauty standards, homophobia, sexism-the song “Little Sister” draws a connection between drug addiction, consumerism, and alienation-but Jewel’s perfect childishness steers her clear of the propagandist pamphleteering and directionless sarcasm that defeated the majority of the punk music of that decade. In a song that criticizes morality, the police, work, leisure, the media, it may not be an exaggeration to interpret the line “Who will save your soul, if you won’t save your own?” as analytically equivalent to the anarchist slogan of a hundred years ago, “The liberation of the workers is the task of the workers themselves.” In a rudimentary but unmistakeable way, Jewel excoriates the world we inhabit for its spiritual poverty, while at the same time rejecting religion (“so afraid that God will take his toll that we forget to begin”). They say they’re better than you and you agreeĪnother tower went up where the homeless had their homes The message is prepolitical, underdeveloped, but clear and undiluted, and that’s exactly what spoke to the part of me that would become, that already was, an anarchist. It is, in fact, the unformed, idealistic, but nonetheless radical rebellious critique that lies at the heart of its better songs. It’s not the musical clarity or the romantic earnestness, though both are necessary accompaniments. Listening to it again, I’m struck to rediscover what made me play this album over and over again my first year of highschool. Pieces of You is the quintessence of its genre, and as perfection would imply, offers absolutely nothing new to the form it renders so well. Lately I’ve recovered an awe of how great the music was in the ’90s, and it’s on this ground that I’ve been able to return to an old guilty love affair of mine, the debut album of the pop star from Alaska with the crooked teeth who would soon become a flash in the pan. It was just a year ago that I was finally forced to admit my appreciation of pop music, and less than eleven months since I finally knowingly listened to a Lady Gaga song. I just finished dancing around my room listening to the 1995 album, Pieces of You, by Jewel, and I feel exhilirated.
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