Eight years in pop music is an eternity. In 2016, when Sia publishes This Is Acting, already has six albums under his belt. It is the powerful voice of Titanium by David Guetta. She is the singer of perhaps the most sung (no: shouted) refrain of recent years, that of Chandelier, a hit that will establish her on the US record market and make her known throughout the world (thanks, also, to the videos and performances of her alter ego dancer Maddie Ziegler). Sia is her camp blonde bob that almost completely covers her face (she wears it, she will say in an op-ed, to avoid her fame, “which is like having a petulant mother-in-law by your side every day”) .
Sia is, above all, the Mogol of world pop music. A Lyricist-King Midas who turns everything she discards into hits. You write for Rihanna, Katy Perry, Beyoncé, Adele, Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears (a profitable business which, as you will tell Interview, she favors: “I can sit with the dogs on the couch, record a track, send it out and, if I’m lucky, make a million dollars”; if this is not the talent). Here is a short list of songs written by Sia and brought to success by her colleagues: Diamonds by Rihanna, Pretty Hurts by Beyoncé, Chained to the Rhythm by Katy Perry, Flashlight by Jessie J. To name just a few.
Sia is, one would say today, a well-established successful format: the very recognizable and, in some ways, banal metaphors of its lyrics; the songs with the formula, coined by the same, victim-to-victory (that is, a track that starts in a minor key but finds strength in the ending; the “hero’s journey”, in short, in three minutes of song); there sky-high voice which seems to hover in the air. Sometimes it breaks, overwhelmed by the bombastic, dramatic sounds, which draw on tropical pop, hip-hop, house and electronica; but then takes flight again to glide over safe, reverberated terrain. Sia is Sia and no one is like her. And this, today more than ever, is enough to remain memorable in the contemporary musical blender.
Eight years later, Reasonable Woman he is there to reiterate all this. She neither adds nor subtracts, each track confirms the vocal power of her interpreter, capable of injecting vitality even into the most insipid pieces, without experimenting too much or going further. We understand this already at the beginning with LittleWing, which is immediately a track of Sia in purity. Indeed, it almost seems like we are listening to his Unstoppable. Two feats follow, Immortal Queen with Chaka Khan, who in the pairing had the makings of becoming a gay anthem from the dance floor, ends up being a soundtrack for a TV commercial (good, however, for alip-sync for your life”); And Dance Alonewhich instead, with Kylie Minogue alongside, is a hymn to independence with a catchy rhythm that stays in your head for a while, but which is not destined to last over time.
The pace slows down with I Had a Hearta mid-tempo ballad with a theatrical feel à la Broadway. Sia’s singing is soft, smoky, as the song builds, closing with symphonic strings over a pop beat. Rosalía is among the authors of the piece, but we don’t realize it. In Gimme Love the Sia format of the beginning re-emerges, which also remains in Nowhere to Be (a track that could very well be recorded by Mr. Rain) and Towards the Sun, two songs that sound like scraps used to fill the album: they remain anonymous even after repeated listening. With Incredible And ChampionSia joins first with Labrinth, whose crazy voice (to appreciate it, I recommend her cover of Frozen) echoes and mixes with synthesized, distorted, cadenced sounds, and then with the trio Tierra Whack, Kaliii and Jimmy Jolliff, in a piece that vaguely recalls the marked and “solemn” atmospheres of Countdown by Beyoncé. A joyful march that maintains the festive atmosphere inaugurated by the previous track.
On I Forgive You Sia is pining and sincerely so are we (and reminds us that the voice remains a powerful instrument that she handles with mastery), and this could be the highest moment of the album, if it weren’t for the fact that the intro of One Night takes us back to 2002, when the radio was playing Mundian To Bach Ke by Panjabi MC and our jeans were ripped and low rise. At the end, Reasonable Woman gives us the talked about feat. with Paris Hilton, whose result, although not exciting, is not disappointing either (and it is also thanks to Paris). Maybe we would have spared ourselves the uplifting message (which lingers throughout the album), but these are the times we live in. We have to adapt. The last two tracks, Go On And Rock and Balloonthey seem to have come out of Bionics by Christina Aguilera and fly away like Sia’s voice, but without remaining memorable.
Reasonable Woman it is, all things considered, an album where lyrics and melodies marry perfectly, but end up getting stuck in a marriage that survives thanks to habit. And it leaves us with some questions: what will happen to the “Sia format” in the near future? Will it survive a few more years until it fossilizes into a greatest hits (which, presumably, will arrive within a few years) and a series of collaborations that we will easily forget? Will she land in Las Vegas for a lucrative residency and, like Miley Cyrus, will she apologize to fans for not being tough enough to handle the stress of touring? Will she perhaps choose to perform with a hologram of her or will it only be her wig that travels the world? Will she sit as a judge on some talent show, assuming they survive too, or will she continue to bill as pop’s latest lyricist?
Despite his controversial and controversial debut with the film Music of 2021, Sia also calls herself a filmmaker. Perhaps you are already working to make a documentary on the weight of fame and the risks of notoriety. On what it means to be Sia. With the current times, it would certainly be a success. I can already suggest the Italian title: What do you want it to be?
