{"id":1230,"date":"2014-07-22T22:24:21","date_gmt":"2014-07-23T02:24:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/?p=1230"},"modified":"2014-07-23T15:58:21","modified_gmt":"2014-07-23T19:58:21","slug":"the-greatest-reinventions-of-pop-music-careers-50-41","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/2014\/07\/22\/the-greatest-reinventions-of-pop-music-careers-50-41\/","title":{"rendered":"the greatest reinventions in pop-music careers, #50-41"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today I take up a question of pop-culture history: which performers made the most unexpected left turns with their careers?\u00a0 I farmed this question out awhile back<\/a> to readers of this blog, and today I start filing the results based on my own subjective assessment.\u00a0 Debate and criticisms are welcome in the comment section (or, better yet, on your own blog).<\/p>\n

First, a word about the underlying concept of career reinvention <\/i>and subsequent criteria for nomination.\u00a0 The history of pop culture is punctuated with episodes of artists or bands embracing a radical change of approach \u2014 an unpredictable dynamic that destabilizes the conservative, mass-production trajectory that the music industry typically prefers.\u00a0 In the era of the pop group<\/i>, the most common way this happens is that bands break up so that members can pursue solo careers or (less often) form new groups.\u00a0\u00a0 Sometimes this pays off big time, but more often it doesn’t, with the worst outcome being the diminishing of the original group’s commercial momentum to something approaching one-hit wonder status.<\/p>\n

Performers with solo careers to begin with typically have a higher road to climb: their commercial legacies are intertwined with their personal names, which audiences and industry alike come to associate with particular styles or sounds.\u00a0 Thus, a solo artist’s career reinvention makes for exciting moments of pop-music drama, as artistic or commercial success requires creative vision and strength of character.\u00a0 A group’s reinvention under the same group name is maybe even more difficult to pull off, since it further requires coordinating multiple egos \u2014 a task often achieved by sacking members or taking on outside collaborators.<\/p>\n

Of course, by now radical reinvention is something of a (post)modern norm in pop music, thanks to such visible examples as Bob Dylan, David Bowie, and Madonna.\u00a0 While these episodes seem to illustrate radical reinvention in the short term \u2014 recall the mass hysteria that accompanied the “death” of Ziggy Stardust \u2014 over the longer haul subsequent reinventions paint a different picture: the artist as restless explorer or (more pejoratively) stylistic chameleon.\u00a0 That this view of creativity has become something of a clich\u00e9 is its own significant achievement, but for the successful artist or group it no longer constitutes the career cleavage I have in mind here \u2014 continual left-turns making for something like a straight line after awhile.<\/p>\n

Thus, the criteria for “career reinvention” and eligibility for inclusion here are:<\/p>\n