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Twisted sister
Kelly Osbourne does her old man proud
BY CARLY CARIOLI

Isn’t Kelly Osbourne just fabulous? Doesn’t she make you want to scream? Chunky-cute verging on Raphaelite-sexy, armed with beauty-school-dropout dye jobs and an ’80s thrift-shop-meets-haute-couture wardrobe, foul-mouthed and somehow blissfully naive, she looks as if she’d just stepped out of a John Waters retrospective. If the master had made Hairspray in ’02, Kelly, who comes to Axis this Saturday, would have been a natural for Tracy Turnbladd, maybe cast against Avril Lavigne’s Amber Von Tussle in a dance-off for the title of mall-punk prom queen of the 21st century. Rich and tragic, famous and blameless, spoiled and, uh, missundaztood — if Pink hadn’t used the title already, it would have been a natural for Kelly’s own coming-out party, Shut Up (Epic). After all, off-screen sis Aimee is the one who wanted a singing career so bad she moved out of the house. This Osbourne just wants to have fun.

Has there been a snottier throwaway hook on the radio this millennium than " Blah blah, blah-blah blah-blah-blah-blah, blah-blah " ? And is it just me or was she singing those blahs to the tune of Avril’s " Complicated " ? It’s a shame Kelly’s been talking so much trash about Pink and Avril lately ( " That’s not fucking rock, " she opined of the two to NME). There are far too few artists making pop-rock albums the old-fashioned way — hired guns, professional hitmakers, discernible " looks " (see Mike Chapman’s productions for Pat Benatar, Blondie, Toni Basil, the Knack, and Suzi Quatro) — for them all to be at one another’s throats. " The best anger money can buy, " the Village Voice’s Robert Christgau opined of Kelly’s album. But like Avril’s Let Go and Pink’s Missundaztood, Shut Up would be easier to dismiss if anyone else were making better rock-and-roll albums, and I’m not so sure anyone is. There must be an album somewhere that synthesizes the pillow-fight appeal of ’90s emo and ’80s jailbait girl-group rock as joyously as Shut Up, but I can’t seem to find my copy. I’ve put Kelly’s disc up against such recent faves as the Donnas’ Spend the Night and Sahara Hotnights’ Jennie Bomb, but neither seems quite as bright or as generous, or even as fresh.

To these ears, the Matrix are the best thing to happen to the radio since Aerosmith traded Dr. Feelgood for song doctors, and Powerpack — the team of session dudes and songwriters assembled by producer Ric Wake to construct Shut Up’s amalgam of pop metal, new wave, and garage punk — is sort of an ad hoc East Coast version of the hot LA studio team who did Avril’s hits. (Kelly recorded with the Matrix but didn’t like the results; and the label shelved her song with indie-geek-turned-faux-R&B-loverboy Har Mar Superstar because it was " too dirty. " ) Wake has often recruited metal guys — and often from his pal Dee Snider’s bands — when cutting sessions on divas from Taylor Dayne on up to Celine Dion. He once managed to sneak a Dee Snider song onto Celine’s diamond-selling Christmas album, so it isn’t much of a stretch to see him reversing the flow of talent from pop back to rock. Of the Powerpack crew, songwriter Kara Dioguardi is an old Wake hand from Celine and Kylie Minogue sessions; guitarist Chris Goercke had teamed up with Wake on an Anastacia disc; and bassist Marc Russell, whose father was a tour manager on the early-’80s Blizzard of Ozz treks, played in Dee’s post–Twisted Sister outfit Widowmaker.

I’d like to be able to say that this isn’t your father’s idea of a rock-and-roll album, but it probably is. " Papa Don’t Preach, " after all, is exactly as old as Kelly; so’s the Cyndi Lauper video that seems to have inspired her she’s-so-unusual wardrobe. The Gidgety, garage-rocking " Coolhead " sounds less like the Hives than like the plastic-fantastic beach parties of Beauty and the Beat–era Go-Go’s. In one of the neatest homages on an album that’s full of them, " Right Here " borrows the opening from friend-of-the-family Lita Ford’s " Kiss Me Deadly. " (Why is it everyone remembers " Kiss Me Deadly " better than the Lita & Ozzy duet " Close My Eyes Forever, " from the same album, which actually charted higher and became the first Top 10 hit for both of them?)

To call Kelly a mediocre singer would be perhaps too big a compliment, not to mention speculative: her voice on Shut Up has a harmonized sheen that suggests it’s been run through some serious pitch-correction software. But that’s no worse than you can say for Courtney Love, who made no bones about opting for the same surgical enhancements on Hole’s gorgeous swan song, Celebrity Skin — another coulda-shoulda-been title for Kelly’s disc (Kelly wanted Buy Me; the label said no), and an album that Shut Up resembles now and again. " On the Run " starts out with the riff from Nirvana’s " Territorial Pissings " played swaggering and cocky, the way Turbonegro might’ve done it, but the chorus blossoms into multi-tracked silicone harmonies that are every bit as escapist and transcendent as Courtney’s angelic beach-grunge chorus on " Malibu. "

You wonder where the hell these people were when Ozzy was making Down to Earth. " Everything’s Alright " could be tinker–Toys in the Attic Aerosmith — it even rips off the same run-on lyrics trick as the Kimya Dawson song of the same name. (They both stole the idea from R.E.M.’s " It’s the End of the World As We Know It " ; I bet Kimya loves Kelly O.) " Too Much of You " — the only song for which Kelly claims not to have written the lyrics — is the kind of bouncy pop-punk song about masturbation that could have been written only by people who last week were preparing material for Jessica Simpson and suddenly found themselves petitioned to submit ideas for the next wave of Sum-41 knockoffs. Call me crazy, but isn’t that what they mean by getting the best of both worlds?

IF YOU’VE GIVEN EVEN A CURSORY glance to The Osbournes, or seen any of Ozzy’s tours over the past decade, you may have noticed that the family franchise is desperately in need of a new product line. The third and final season of The Osbournes begins airing in June, right about the time that the last edition of the vastly successful OzzFest metal tour takes to the road. (Almost every Ozzy tour since 1991 has been billed as his last; let’s root for Kelly if only so that Sharon Osbourne will finally let the old man retire.) If nothing else, Shut Up reaffirms that Sharon can still mobilize the troops in producing the kind of commercially savvy crossover hard-rock albums she marshaled for Ozzy in the ’80s. Her reach and ruthlessness in these matters are legendary, and they were on display again in one of the more painful episodes of The Osbournes. Sharon fires one of Kelly’s best friends, a girl Kelly met at the mall who’d been hired as a touring drummer despite her inability to keep even the shadow of a beat. You knew Sharon wouldn’t stand for an amateur, and the $10,000 severance check she doled out made the situation seem only uglier.

But the most impressive scene came afterward, when Sharon decided Kelly needed a drummer who is young, attractive, female, highly talented, and completely unknown. Personnel of that sort don’t exactly grow on trees, but within minutes an assistant produces an entire file folder full of them, complete with photographs, as if her staff had been monitoring high-school garage bands for years just in case something like this ever came up. (If Sharon carries through with plans to host a talk show this fall, her talents will be wasted: someone needs to get this woman Tom Ridge’s job.)

On the other side, you find yourself wondering what appeal a music career could hold for a 17-year-old who already had a bottomless bank account, instantaneous name recognition, paparazzi up the wazoo, a permanent backstage pass, no curfew, her own television show, and a thoroughly deromanticized view of the rock life. It’s easier to see the Kelly-pop idea appealing to her mother. Faced with a high-school-dropout of a daughter prone to staying out all night drinking and about to reach the age of self-determination, Sharon did what any worrying mom would do. She put the girl to work somewhere she could keep an eye on her. And as the paterfamilias would probably confirm, in the Osbournes’ business plan, " performer " is the grunt-work task of the operation.

Perhaps that’s why Kelly, in a refreshing twist, appears to regard her rock career as a job, not a calling. " My feeling is, don’t write what you know, " she told NME. As far as I can tell, she stuck to her word. There’s exactly one poignant lyric on Shut Up, from " Come Dig Me Out, " a song as heartrending in its own way as Sleater-Kinney’s " Dig Me Out " or Ryan Adams’s " Come Pick Me Up. " " They wanted me to be the dream, " she sings, " but my mood went south and I’m stuck on the couch in bad jeans. "

It’s worth noting that there are very few good songs in the rock-and-roll canon about being a disappointment to your parents (the only other one I can think of is, well, " Papa Don’t Preach " ). The one time on Shut Up that you feel anything’s at stake is the part of " Come Dig Me Out " where she sings, " I’m screaming for attention. " For this is the central drama of the Osbourne children’s lives, at least in the version that makes it to the screen: an attempt to distract their parents’ gaze from the adulation of millions. Most kids Kelly’s age would be embarrassed to admit they’re screaming for attention — they’d rather believe they’re screaming in alienation or something.

Which is the reason I almost sorta believe her when she says her father’s opinion is the only one that means anything to her. My favorite scene from The Osbournes thus far is the one where Kelly arrives back home from the studio with the first few completed tracks from Shut Up on CD-Rs. Doddering like a geriatric hunchback, Ozzy handles the discs like the lost scrolls, shoves them into the entertainment center he’s struggled with for two seasons, and sits down with the rapt, weary glaze that seems to settle over his face whenever the world is about to deal him another disappointment, which is almost always. The song that’s playing is " Disconnected " ; there’s a shot of Kelly, stonefaced. And then we cut to Ozzy doing something he rarely does: he smiles a big, genuine, loopy grin — not a cackling grotesque with his hands up like the Wolfman (the photographic tableau he’s struck every time the cameras have shown up for the past 20 years), but the grin of a proud papa whose daughter has given him the great good gift of following in his footsteps. It’s the craziest thing: Ozzy’s little girl is a rock star.

Kelly Osbourne headlines Axis this Saturday, March 29. Call (617) 931-2000.

Issue Date: March 27 - April 3, 2003
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