Good Or Shit: Reinventing An Image

So, why would Mia Dyson have to become (a) BOY, have to express androgyny, to avoid being another of the “mediocre, auto-tuned female singers dancing around in trashy videos”? She's not mediocre, she's not auto-tuned, and she doesn't strike me as the kind of woman who wants to get her bits out for the cameras. Why can't she just be Mia Dyson with a killer voice who looks a little bit androgynous at times, and makes great blues and roots music? Is the name Mia Dyson not strong enough? Not evocative enough? Does 'Boy' say 'raspy blues singer' to you? Why did, what looked to be a big break for Dyson in the States, require that she reinvent herself?

We're so damn easily manipulated - I can see how a lot of people might find Boy more compelling. Like, you know man, they might really dig the way she refuses to buy into societal constructions of gender.

I see it now - Boy takes off. She goes multi-platinum. Her clothes become increasingly odd. She grows a moustache AND has a boob-job. She's the biggest titted boy you've ever seen. A blues and roots revival ensues. Jay-Z starts talking about producing an album. Reporters are banging down Boy's door, they're digging up dirt, they discover she used to be Mia Dyson from a little coastal town in Australia and man are they pissed that she lied to them. She dedicates loads of time giving interviews and fitting long explanations into short tweets about how she never lied, she just didn't think it was anyone's business what she did before she met her manager (and now best friend) Dave Stewart (of Eurythmics-and-so-many-other-things-fame) and discovered she was this particular kind of package for the people.

No wonder Sia does her own thing. It must be so tedious having to be packaged. And it's so hard to win. Lana Del Rey - reinvention - massive criticism. Lady Gaga - reinvention - massive love. Snoop Lion - reinvention - massive amounts of laughter.

Don't take this the wrong way, I support an artist's right to reinvent themselves. It doesn't bother me in the slightest whether Lana Del Ray changed her name, her look, her sound. Clearly the first attempt was crap. And while I don't get into Gaga's music at all, Stephanie Germanotta was not just crap, she was totally uninteresting. Then we have artists who have been around for decades - if they do the same thing over and over again we say “yeah it was nice, but it's a lot like their last effort”. And if they do something completely new we go “oh God, isn't it time for Madonna to give up.”

The thing is, is that they should change, evolve, develop, in music and persona, because that's what we do in real life. We reinvent as the times change and we reinvent as we change. But, we don't do it if it's not natural.

It was a package that Dave Stewart was essentially describing. But rather than being of the mediocre, auto-tuned, lots-of-flesh kind, he wanted to market the edgy, quirky, (tortured? I'd say he would have been looking for a bit of that) gender-blurring kind. Now, if Dyson had created this persona, as a stage persona, separate to the one she might use at home, that would be a valid choice for a musician; If she had reinvented herself entirely because she felt that she had reached a point in her life where this persona was now more representative of the woman she had become, that's evolution. But if she is sacrificing who she is for a package that she is being told will sell better - that's just manipulation.