Because Cher's recordings were never relevant to the times she was living in - I Got You was released the same year the Rolling Stones cut Satisfaction, Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves came out around the time David Bowie was recording Ziggy Stardust - it made no difference that Believe was a throwback to the disco era. Bono (Sonny, not Vox), who married four times, certainly believed this, as do Prince Charles and Elizabeth Taylor. Unlike Madonna, a functional singer and dancer, but an actress whose cataleptic gesticulations are tragic enough to make hardened policemen weep, Cher is a far better actress than a singer, though her Hollywood career does seem to have petered about the time she released Believe.īelieve, recorded shortly after Sonny Bono's death, targets that enormous segment of the world's population who truly believe that there is life after love. Though she had continued to make records throughout the Eighties and Nineties, most of her energies in that period seemed to be devoted to her acting career. That is, not to emit lyrics in a lusty, throaty, assertive fashion, but sing.Ĭhanteuse, dancer, Academy Award-winning actress, variety-show hostess, humanitarian, skin-care-products shill and bride of two music industry legends who were never serious threats to unravel Fermat's Last Theorem, Cher had been around for what seemed like forever when she went into the studio to record Believe in 1998. And those singers all started out with the inside track on Cher, because all of them possessed the ability to actually sing. Based on record sales, Cher has been a more commercially successful than Billie Holiday, Janis Joplin, Dinah Washington, Sarah Vaughan, Kiri Te Kanawa, Edith Piaf and many other female vocalists whose records you can put on the CD player during dinner without arousing your guests' suspicions that you want them to leave. The span between her 1965 hit I Got You, Babe (with future US congressman Sonny Bono) and her comeback hit Believe in 1998 is a thing of wonder, singling her out as the oldest female singer in pop music history to hit number one. Never taken seriously by music critics - who would be after songs like Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves? - and viewed in some quarters as a joke who succeeded because everyone knew she was in on the joke, Cher nevertheless is one of the most successful recording artists in history. Like these unforeseeable developments, whose capacity to astonish us has not diminished with the passage of time, Cher's career cannot be explained by conventional methods. Another is Cher.Ĭher's career ranks with tiny Macedonia's fourth-century BC conquest of the Persian Empire and Arthur Ashe's 1975 Wimbledon triumph over Jimmy Connors as the most shockingly unexpected events in all of human history. The genius is the person who does what he wants exactly the way he wants to do it, ignoring the barbs of the critics and the catcalls of the aesthetes, eschewing the standard guidelines mapping out the road to success - and somehow manages to get away with it. The credo of the genius is that the rules that apply to everyone else - though they are very good rules indeed - do not apply to me. In many instances, genius is defined as the ability to sell the public a product it does not really need, and to keep selling it long after such cultural retailing is no longer plausible, much less seemly. The term "genius" does not automatically signify the presence of beauty, transcendent worth or even quality Benito Mussolini was a genius at what he did, but mankind would have been a lot better off without him. Much the same can be said about God Himself whatever we may think about his handiwork, no one can deny that the Lord is an authentic original. To qualify as a genius, it helps to do something first, which is why Michael Jackson's breakthrough dance steps define genius, while his little sister Janet's derivative hoofing does not. Genius is very different from talent, which is the ability to do something amazingly well, but not necessarily in a unique fashion. Obvious examples include Titian, Beethoven, Jane Austen and Napoleon Bonaparte. Genius is defined, in at least one context, as the ability to do something that no one else can do in quite the same way.
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