Estelle: opinion is divided about American Boy's merits
If you don't remember much about Estelle Swaray's first crack at the charts, you're not alone. It was 2004, and she had been talked up as the British MC "most likely to challenge the mainstream", as Music Week put it at the time. But despite a promising start (top 40 album, a top 20 hit with the luscious 1980 and plenty of press attention), her mix of cocky rapping and scrappy R&B didn't challenge the mainstream quite profitably enough. The semi-hits dried up, and by 2006, her star had descended to the point where Jamie Foxx failed to recognise her at one of his gigs. (Result: stuttering embarrassment for her, shrug of a manly shoulder for him.)
At which point, if things had gone as they usually do, Estelle should have got a job and spent the rest of her life bitterly recounting her treatment at the hands of the music business. Instead, she got the break that's eluded nearly every UK urban artist from Monie Love to Lady Sovereign - she got chummy with the right people (Kanye West and John Legend), moved to New York and, like magic, her new single, American Boy, sailed to number one this week. (And in an interview in today's Film&Music, she attacks the blindness to black talent in the British media and music industry, singling out Adele and Duffy, who she knocked off the number one spot at the weekend.)
Opinion is divided about American Boy's merits. I love it, but others have condemned it as "so insipid it makes Just Jack sound like NWA". What it indubitably is, though, is catchy. Insanely so - even without West's guest rap (his line about "dressing like a London bloke" bridges the Anglo-American gap about as effectively as Snoop Dogg's one about watching tennis at "the Wimbledon Arena") , it sticks like frothy pink glue. And the rest of her new album, Shine, is equally prettied up and Americanised. It should be - some of the US's biggest urban-pop names (West, Legend, Will.I.Am, Cee-Lo) have lent their platinum-selling skills to make it that way. It doesn't sound like the Estelle of 1980, but it will probably sell like the Estelle of 1980 didn't.
There's an unpleasant recent precedent involving another young English singer who was musically reinvented by US producers - she returned an affected, American-accented ninny, and her career stalled. Luckily, Estelle still seems a Londoner at heart, to go by the dropped aitches in a recent radio interview. But her transformation still provokes bemusement and the feeling that she has lost something of herself.
Given the way things work, the Americanisation of Estelle will prompt a mini-migration westward of other aspiring young Britishers. And, come Mobo awards time, her success will be a talking point in the usual debate about the Mobo's failure to establish itself as an A-list event (which is blamed on the UK's inability to cultivate superstars capable of competing with America's). But is the way forward to send artists to America to have their Britishness surgically removed?
