Stars Dance 21 year old Gomez s first solo album (she recorded three with her old band the Scene) may only deepen her identity crisis in the long run but for now it s the pop cultural motherlode the gift you never knew you wanted songs about Justin Bieber sung by someone imitating Rihanna.
It s the best of a recent fleet of albums mixtapes and singles that feast on Rihanna s scraps with varying levels of obviousness. Gomez herself has described it as a baby dubstep offering influenced by Skrillex and Britney Spears which is a discouraging way to describe an album that s actually quite good. An exercise in just the right combination of Twitter baiting sad songs homogenized screw it let s dance dubstep and stiff upper lip breakup anthems it gets almost all of the surface aspects right.
The dance songs (including the Rihanna in Bollywood first single Come Get It and the mindlessly infectious B.E.A.T. ) are irresistible. To anyone currently scouring the lyrics of the sad songs for real life Bieber ian subtext Don t feel bad. That s why these songs exist. The most blatant offender Love Will Remember once began with a voicemail message from someone who sounds a whole lot like Bieber extravagantly praising Gomez who apparently isn t above a little triumphalism. The voicemail segment was cut from the album version reducing the song to a generic weepie ( We lit the whole world up/Before we blew it up ) the Didn t We Almost Have It All of songs about surly Canadian monkey abandoners.
Stars Dance opens with Birthday a stomping musical pep rally that pays homage to Gwen Stefani s Hollaback Girl. It s great idiosyncratic and ultimately depressing because the rest of Stars Dance sounds nothing like it. The farther away from Rihanna isms Stars Dance stays the better it fares. Its worst track the tepid dancehall banger Like a Champion in which Gomez sings about diamonds in the sky in a faux island accent reaches new levels of awful.
Gomez isn t the worst of Rihanna s many imitators though she is the most overt. And she seems unaware that the traits she borrows from Rihanna aren t the ones worth imitating. So instead of RiRi s breezy confidence merciless cool and unapologetically acquisitive sexuality Gomez offers flat affect stuttery syllable swallowing and emotional vacancy the things that don t even work when Rihanna does them.
Halfway through the season 2013 is already shaping up as the Summer Of The Rihannabes. Even Miley Cyrus s molasses slow We Can t Stop was like Gomez s Come Get It reportedly intended for and rejected by Rihanna. Most of the Rihannabes are less famous than Cyrus and Gomez midlevel RB princesses who have been nibbling at the margins for a while now flirting with various personas while looking for a suitable host personality.
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