i use to bump that Jane Child Tape all the time and she could play and had her image thing. Teddy Riley gave her a cold remix to "I don't wanna fall in love" and she seemed ready to roar but she never reached those heights again.

now I see Gaga and in truth they have some things in common so i wonder why Childs didn't get where gaga got? what was missing to you?

Why?


Because Prince was a bum....

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>
>Why?
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>Because Prince was a bum....

Just realized this was a feud-continuation comment...

On the dock of that bay serving a life sentence,even if I’m going to hell I’m gonna make an entrance

I dug her voice and she definetly had some decent songs...In fact I saw a fairly recent video of hers....pretty cool too.

that being said, I do like the Jane Child cuts & remixes better than anything Gaga has ever done.

but if you think about it, none of those type of quirky 'pre-alternative' female pop stars really got looks after their first big album in that 89/90 era: Jane Child, Neneh Cherry, Lisa Stansfield, even Tracy Chapman in a way never really approached the level of their first albums when everybody jocked them as the hot new thing.

Thing is almost all of them had joints on their follow-ups as well but they weren't 'fresh' anymore to the mainstream public.

This was 1989. NKOTB, Milli Vanilli, and Paula Abdul. When "Don't
Wanna Fall In Love" was hot, almost all the focus the press gave her
was on her fashion sense. Every single article and interview on her
included (and probably began with) a quizzical description of what she
was wearing and of course, that damned nose-chain. When KEYBOARD
magazine did a cover profile of her, the magazine's obnoxious readership
(and I say this as a keyboard player - we can be insufferable) wrote
letters mocking her appearance.

4 or 5 years later, in the dark grunge-industrial pierced-and-tattooed
alterna-90's, she wouldn't have looked out of place at all.

Unfortunately, her label didn't seem to know what to do with the album
she released in '93, HERE NOT THERE, which was way better than her debut,
in my book. That album highlighted another problem of hers: half of it was
gothic alterna-rockish-pop,

"Mona Lisa Smiles"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9rCpV71Tyk

...and the other half was catchy new-jack-swing-ish pop with IN-YOUR-FACE
hooks:

"Perfect Love"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oz6BQUPsQJ8

"Calling"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zk_EU5efnQ

An extremely scizophrenic album. The video for "Do Whatcha Do"
manifested the problem: the fans who would respond to her looks and
the gothy imagery of the video wouldn't like the song, and her R&B
fans who would like the song (and they WOULD like the song) wouldn't
care for the video:

"Do Whatcha Do"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1G829RrNLfs

Definitely one of my ahead-of-their-time, should've-been-a-MUCH-bigger-
star artists.

...if you follow the stereotype, if you're a woman, you're meant to be sexy and beautiful. She was that, but people saw her nose ring and chain and could never get that out of their heads. It was as if she was nothing more than the funky white woman with a chain.

I do remember that she was called "the female Prince", because she played a wide range of instruments, did a lot of her own vocal tracks, wrote her material, even had a hand in production. But how does one become "the female Prince" when you're also on the same record label as Prince?

In a lot of ways, what Jane Child did with her music either:
1) did not fix expectations for her
2) was too much

The industry was, and still is, very much about sticking you in a box and keeping you there. Everyone wanted multiple versions of Paula Abdul. When Soul II Soul had hits, everyone wanted to have a bit of British soul. Child's perceived "freaky" factor was not what she wanted to push, this was just her. That ended up hurting her, and her second album was a flop. Since she was self-contained, she could have been pushed towards the "alternative" side, but "alternative" back then represented Bjork, Pixies, and every other college radio favorite. Child was soulful, but didn't "look" the part. She put together pop craftsmanship, but she didn't "look" like someone who deserved pop accolades. She was edgy, but not as edgy as someone with "indie cred".

To be honest, Warner Bros. did not know how to handle an artist like her. She had two hits from that album, and "Welcome To The Real World" was and still is a great song. Someone like her with that album could have easily had four to five hits. Jane Child was very much a part of her own rhythm nation, but a nation that involved her own talent, and no one was ready to hear something so moving by someone who actually wrote it. If you wrote and played your own material, you're supposed to look like Tracy Chapman. The ears do wonders, but they were pushing what you should be looking at, and unfortunately it was Warner Bros. who failed, not her.





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