Shania Twain likes to sing
with young girls she brings out of the audience. Singing and
skipping around the perimeter of the boat-shaped stage plunked
in the middle of the arena, she stopped to scribble autographs
-- without missing a beat -- and trade high fives with the fans
respectfully crowding the stage Sunday at HP Pavilion in San
Jose.
She took Polaroids with the
people she brought onstage, scrawled her name on the prints and
escorted them back to the lip of the stage, always the cordial
hostess. A pair of brave teenagers screeched their way through
"From This Moment On,'' the star pitching in but letting the
kids do the heavy lifting. "Gee, that was wonderful,'' she said.
Twain doesn't tour much -- the
current "Up!'' tour follows its predecessor by four years --
but, thanks to the 1999 mega-seller "Come On Over,'' she is the
biggest-selling female artist in history, a considerable
accomplishment in a relatively short career. Her triumph is
routinely credited to shrewd marketing strategy and the cool,
calculating hand of her Svengali producer-husband, Robert
"Mutt'' Lange. But don't try to tell that to the cheering throng
that packed the San Jose ice rink to the rafters (where the
populist Twain sold a fair amount of cheapo $20 tickets in the
arena's far reaches).
As beautiful as she is, Twain is
not selling sex. She spent the first half of the concert wearing
a baggy San Jose Sharks jersey about as attractive as a sack.
Her songs aren't sexy. She isn't sexy -- she is peppy.
Twain exudes the kind of
relentlessly cheery verve that makes college football
cheerleaders in ridiculously short skirts somehow appear
wholesome. In Twain's case, this has the advantage of rendering
her wholly non-threatening to her many female fans because she
isn't competing with them for their men. She's spunky, vaguely
defiant on occasion, sometimes a taste saucy, but she's not
coming on to anyone.
With fireworks exploding and
nine zany musicians prancing around the stage in punk-rock
outfits they must have bought at the mall, Twain danced atop a
raised platform in the middle of the giant stage. She is a small
person, about the size of a jockey, with a slender frame that
spindles down to elegantly tiny wrists. She hid her wireless
microphone transmitter under a fabulous mane of chestnut hair,
not in her back pocket, where there wasn't any room anyway.
Even with the Sharks jersey off
and the pink spaghetti strap T-shirt showing a not immodest
stretch of her admirable abdomen, she still came off more
athletic than sensual, as if she were on her way to work out in
the silly zipper-and-chains vinyl pants and rhinestone choker
and bracelets.
What she is selling is perky pop
to the country music audience, G-rated fare for the whole
family. No barrooms, no cheating hearts, no honky-tonk grief --
just sunny, major key, midtempo melodies wrapped in Beach Boys'
harmonies. The band stitches together a perfect backdrop for
these Better Homes and Gardens country songs, just the right
amount of twang, burbling guitars and sawing fiddles, not too
many solos, but a bright, tidy ensemble sound. Shania's
crystalline voice, like herself a small sculpted instrument, was
as often as not lost in the huge wash.
With the repeated guitar riffs
and interlacing hooks dripping from every bar, the music
actually sounds, more than anything else, like '80s new wave
rock, pumped up and buffed, without the cheesy synth sounds (at
least, not glaringly obvious ones). But, then, that can hardly
be surprising coming from Mutt Lange, who is inevitably
identified as a hard-rock producer who hit it big with AC/DC,
Def Leppard and Foreigner. His work with the Cars, Graham Parker
and the Rumour and XTC might be more relevant here, but the best
reference point is really his composition "Do You Believe in
Love,'' ingratiating piffle that was the breakthrough hit for
Huey Lewis and the News.
As she waltzed around the silly
stage in her beauty contest smile, Shania Twain sometimes wasn't
all that far from the young girl who sang disco in show bands
deep in the Canadian provinces about that same time in the '80s,
a time from which a lot of lapses in taste have long since been
excused.
