So I got this press release today about this band from the early 1970s. It seems that Platinum Weird was destined to be huge until the mysterious and alluring female singer � the "songwriting partner, muse and soul mate" of Dave Stewart � flipped out and disappeared, leaving Dave curled up in a ball until Annie Lennox came along. The debut album was shelved... until now.
It's not entirely improbable � think Vashti Bunyan � but what smelled fishy was the link to the video clip from a forthcoming VH1 special that said, "Click below to see what Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Christina Aguilera, and Kelly Clarkson have to say about Platinum Weird."
Paris? Lindsay? Christina? Kelly? These are not the first people you think of in connection to some Fleetwood Manqu�. But what they do have in common is that they've all had songs written for them by Kara DioGuardi. Despite an attempt to cover their tracks with a bunch of fake fan sites, a little Googling reveals that Platinum Weird is a new project from Stewart and DioGuardi. The ambitious artifice trumps even Huckapoo's.
I'm trying to figure out what bugs me more than other people about this. After all, the music isn't bad, I'm obviously all for artifice in pop music, and there's a respectable history of this kind of fakery in the rock biz: Green Day went undercover as the Network; XTC as Dukes of the Stratosphear; The Alarm as the Poppy Fields; INXS as Dogs in Space; Sum 41 as Pain for Pleasure; and of course Garth Brooks as Chris Gaines.
I think it's mostly that it's done too well. There's so much money and corporate clout behind the facade that it violates the spirit that's usually behind such projects, the DIY attempt to recapture anonymity or break out of a comfort zone.
And as Francis points out, there's also the fact that "Dave Stewart is not pretending to be someone else entirely, but is rather pretending to be a younger version of himself. It's not creating fiction, it's self-mythologizing, which is always a
bit unseemly." And that brings up the fact that while "young" Dave and "Erin Grace" look cute together in those faux 70s photos, a pic of actual Dave and Kara together drives home the fact that his "soul mate," having not aged since 1974, is a girl some 20 years younger than him.
