Since she came to America's attention at the leader of a little ska act called No Doubt, Gwen Stefani's career slowly crept toward one final destination: Make her into a real-life, music-biz Barbie doll, a flesh-and-blood totem representing style over substance. With The Sweet Escape, 19 years of groundwork pay off.
She's a raging success as a phony.
Stefani's success didn't come without its cost. She had to lead her band, No Doubt, away from the punk underground and into the hollow, plastic halls of made-for-commercials alt-rock, and, eventually, in a move from the strangely prophetic "Don't Speak" video, dismissed them altogether.
With The Sweet Escape, Stefani's back in business as the world's biggest Gwennabe, a shallow imitation of everything she could have been.
Stefani joins up with a slew of producers on The Sweet Escape, snaring Pharrell from her debut effort as well as The Neptunes, Swizz Beats and No Doubt bassist Tony Kanal to help breath some life into a collection of songs that should never have been given the green light to begin with. And how that crew of producers try.
And try. And try some more. All Stefani and her high-caliber knob-twiddlers can do is layer on the glam, slather gimmicks and polished production to cover up the fact: The Sweet Escape is about as real and lifelike as the made-up, air-brushed photo of the singer on its cover.
But Stefani's always slung fantasy, whether it was fantasy for adolescent punk boys who beat off thinking of her coy grin and exposed tummy in the ska days or fantasy for a new breed of teenagers reared on the hyper-suggestive, yet strangely plastic sexuality of modern pop booty-shakers. The Sweet Escape is fluff and nonsense wrapped in pure fantasy.
That makes it pretty tough to take seriously, especially when Stefani seems all but hell-bent on making it impossible to swallow her songs.
"Wind Up" bites off a dose of Rogers/Hammerstein, integrating a ridiculous Sound of Music goatherder's yodel into motor-league pop condensed from Arular. "Don't Get It Twisted" continues to ride MIA's banging beats, only ups the bad-idea ante as Stefani builds off of "Enter the Gladiators" -- that whimsical pipe-organ clown theme we all know from the circus. Swizz Beats makes "Now That You Got It" push toward Top 40 radio, with tame dance-pop holding together one of Stefani's most dismissible performances.
"Yummy" attempts to turn up the heat with a brazenly sexual -- for Stefani, at least -- plying that same plastic-doll, porn-star sexuality as a dozen or so other chart hopefuls. The lone quality track, the piano ballad "Early Winter," gives the singer a chance to take her bearings in and play to her strength, namely a delivery that's more emotive and sensitive than rambunctious and wired.
The Sweet Escape isn't just bad.
Stefani never sounds comfortable, honest or anything more than a cardboard cut-out -- the perfect Barbie girl singing for her Barbie world. If she can't convince herself that her glamour-doll life is the real deal, how can she ever hope listeners will take the bait?
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