First there was Regina Spektor. Then came Lady Sovereign. A few months later Lily Allen emerged, and eventually Amy Winehouse burst onto the American music scene. Girls across the nation stopped drooling over Fall Out Boy and started getting dreamy-eyed over the style of these leading ladies. I prefer to call these female artists “girl crushes.”
To be clear, to have a girl crush is to be infatuated with female artists, not in the love sense, but in the I-want-to-be-like-her sense. These female musicians are successful among other female listeners, not because the female audience members are looking to hook up with them after the show, but because the audience members get to spend an hour just staring at the performers in amazement of their chic style and persona.
This is the precise reason why these four ladies have sold out shows across the country; Winehouse and Allen even teased us, like crushes often do, by canceling their sold-out tours! They all have top-selling albums, and nobody can stop talking about them. Spektor, Sovereign, Allen and Winehouse are all our metaphorical musical crushes. And now, our hearts are about to go pitter-patter again for the latest act in this wave of girl crushes, Kate Nash.
She is cute, she dresses well, she has an accent and she is already sick of the comparisons to our other girl crushes. Unlike rebels Sovereign and Winehouse, Nash is a good girl, and it’s impossible for her to avoid the predictable comparisons when her sound is so similar to that of Spektor and Allen, the other good girls. Nash’s sound is the voice-child of Spektor and Allen. She sings in an English accent, like Allen, and also puts choppy accents on certain words, like Spektor. Allen wrote “Big Brother,” a song about getting back at an ex-boyfriend by telling the whole world he is not well-endowed; Kate Nash has “Dickhead,” a song whose lyrics are mostly composed of the lines “why you being a dickhead for/stop being a dickhead.” Spektor wrote “Fidelity,” which is full of “ah” sounds. Kate Nash wrote “Merry Happy,” which is full of “do” and “da” sounds. In fact, on a search on www.amazon.com for Kate Nash, Allen’s album is the third item that comes up in the search queue. Nash may not like hearing that she sounds like our past crushes, but these are artists she should be more than proud to be compared to, since they are the crushes we just cannot seem to get over.
In the U.K., Nash’s home country, the female music artist has already topped the charts at number one. Rolling Stone has named her a “hit” in its “Hit vs. Hype” feature. (The Pipettes, an all-girl group who are not quite girl crush material, fell under “hype.”) And American hipsters are already online talking her up. This triple threat should be plenty to get American girls crushing on her soon enough.
On September 4th, Nash’s four-song EP titled Foundations, hit American digital music sale outlets. The EP, titled after her debut single, is likely the first we will be hearing of Nash. I imagine if Geffen, Nash’s record label, likes how her sales go in the U.S., her full album, Made of Bricks , which was released in early August overseas, will hit American store shelves soon thereafter.
So far, in America, Spektor has sold 440,000 copies of her debut Begin to Hope , and Lily Allen has sold 390,000 copies of her debut Alright . Still. if these good girls’ record sales are any indication of what is to come for Nash in the states, then it is safe to say that within a year, 400,000 copies of Made of Bricks could be in circulation.
Most bands are here one day and gone the next, but these independent women have been holding onto the spotlight for just under two years now. Nineteen-year-old Nash looks like she is not going anywhere soon.
Whether they will admit it or not, Spektor, Sovereign, Allen, Winehouse and now Nash all have some similarities, and these similarities are why we just cannot get enough of them.
Whether it is their stunning voices, instrumental talents or plain old girly appeal, this musical surge of estrogen is causing anything but PMS.