2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Calgary Herald
Still the One: Shania Twain arrives in Calgary while in midst of a career reinvention
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In Andrea Warner's essay Shania Twain: Bad Feelings, Bare Midriffs and Breaking Ground, the music critic writes about the strong feelings she had about Twain when she was a teenage music buff and budding feminist.
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Strong and strongly negative.
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'As a teenager, I couldn't stand Twain,' Warner writes in her book of essays, We Outta Know: How Celine, Shania, Alanis and Sarah Ruled the '90s and Changed Music.
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'I vehemently objected to her brand of coy, sexy country-pop that I felt pushed women's equality back ten or fifteen years. I wrote her off as a construct of male fantasy: A girl who could ride a horse while showing off a perfectly sculpted bare midriff by day and slip into some sort of cleavage-baring cocktail dress at night, the emphasis always on her sex appeal first, relatability second, and talent third.'
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Warner updated her book in 2024, but it first came out in 2015. That was 22 years after Twain first 'hit the country music industry like a grenade' and became one of the most successful musicians in the cosmos.
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Now an associate producer with CBC Music, her updated essay on Twain celebrates the artist as a feminist force whose wild success gave value to women, female artists and forever changed the industry. She also offers a detailed appraisal of Twain's music and suggests that even her earliest work had merit, showcasing her significant chops as a songwriter.
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'As a teenager, I had embarrassingly negative feelings,' says Warner, in an interview from her home in Vancouver. 'I was . . . coming into my own understanding of feminism and I had this idea that I couldn't love Alanis Morissette and Sarah McLachlan and also have any space at all and good feelings or goodwill towards Shania Twain and Celine Dion.
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'It's super embarrassing now, in hindsight, but it came from an honest place when I was a teenager. It was very difficult for me to wrap my brain around the songs she was singing and the things that I was taking lyrically from her music, which seemed to me to be all about love, all about getting a man. All of these different things that I thought were antithetical to me as a very young 16-year-old feminist.'
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It doesn't take long into the essay for Warner to admit she was off base. She now sees Twain as an artist who used 'skillful manipulation of the surface to push her subversive, secret agenda — an agenda that would change country music, for a little while at least, and give rise to a new generation of women writing their own material.'
