Come On Over, Joe

Back in grade school, they did this thing in gym class (which happened once a week) where a different kid would be captain each week to pick dodgeball (or whatever) teams, with the general rule that you needed to pick a girl first, and then a boy, and then a girl, and so on. So I knew for months that eventually I'd be dodgeball captain and that I'd have to pick a girl for my team right at the start of gym class. When the day finally arrived, I suicidally decided to use that pick to choose the girl I had a crush on at the time. I was painfully, shamefully obvious in my intentions; I'll never forget the laughter of my classmates, and I'll never forget the inflamed, mortally embarrassed look on my crush's face, as she joined my dodgeball team while refusing to look me in the eye.

Listening to "You're Still the One" brought this long-buried memory back to the surface. I'm not even sure if the timelines match up—Shania Twain peaked at #2 on the Billboard Hot 100 with this song on May 2, 1998, and there's no way I was blowing up some poor girl's spot in gym class before like 2000 at the earliest—but still, it was probably just lumped in with every other grade school slow dance anthem, along with K-Ci and JoJo's "All My Life," songs onto which my tiny underdeveloped brain projected all sorts of age-inappropriate romance fantasies.

So it goes with those rare Record Club weeks like this: a blockbuster hit album, popular in our youth, long since becoming fodder for '90s-kids-type reminisces; ubiquitous enough that there's no way anyone is listening to this album with a blank slate, but peaking long enough ago that maybe the Record Club listener is coming to the table with limited knowledge anyway, having lacked access to Shania Twain's Wikipedia page when we were ages nine to twelve-ish. I knew "You're Still the One" (and "Man! I Feel like a Woman!" and "That Don't Impress Me Much" and "From This Moment On"), but only because they were on the radio in the minivan constantly as we drove to the swim club—I didn't know them. Had you asked me last week, before Sara picked Come On Over as this week's album, who sang the song "Don't Impress Me Much," I would've had no fucking clue. (Reba McEntire would've been my guess, by the way, and I would've only been 85% joking.)

And then there comes the jumping into various Wikipedia rabbit holes—okay, produced by Mutt Lange, I recognize that name; oh wow, he was Shania Twain's husband at the time; oh wow, he produced a ton of rock albums, including Back in Black on one end of the spectrum, and Nickelback's 2008 album Dark Horse on the other; sure, of course the music industry is going to accuse Twain of being a puppet to Lange's "genius," because the music industry has always been pretty sexist (okay, now I'm going down the rabbit hole to see if Shania Twain ever smashed her guitar on SNL); oh wow, Twain and Lange divorced in 2010, because Lange cheated on her with her best friend, and then six months later Twain married the former husband of that former best friend; oh wow, that now-husband is a Nestlé exec, don't they profit off child slavery?; I wonder if my former dodgeball crush married a child-slavery-endorsing Swiss millionaire too?; oh wow, Shania Twain is from Canada; seems like she had a pretty rough childhood; seems like the country music establishment never really too her seriously, deriding her as "too pop," and they seemed pretty determined to out her as a "fraud," for instance by sponsoring an exposé about the fact that her father was not her biological father, and so she had been "lying" about her heritage or whatever; searching for the Wikipedia page "sexism in country music" didn't lead to any rabbit holes—and so on.

But all that ends up being pretty tangential to the task at hand here in Record Club—reviewing the album. Out of all that bullshit in the preceding paragraph, probably the most relevant is the idea that Come On Over "isn't country enough" for a certain subset of the music-listening population, and "too pop" for another subset. I'm pretty glad, in retrospect, that it took me almost 25 years to give this album a legit listening, because I fear that seventeen-year-old Joe (still awful at dealing with crushes, but too snobby to allow K-Ci and JoJo to comfort me any longer) might have fallen into the latter category. 

Categorizing Shania Twain's musical genre is completely unnecessary baggage—it's country stompers, it's pop bangers, it's soupy soulful ballads, it's a lot of different things, and most of it works really well when you're not taking it too seriously. Putting aside the world-conquering hits—which, sure, might live or die for you depending on how you felt about your own elementary school gym class—there are a ton of deep cuts here that are really fun ("deep cut" being a relative term, since apparently twelve of these album cuts were officially released as singles). 

 

In particular, those three songs at the beginning of the album between "Man!" and "From This Moment On," are three little slices of country pop perfection. E.g. "I'm Holding On to Love (to Save My Life)" is like the perfect balance of pop guitar hooks and country-music folkiness. Or, like, later on, the title track surprises with its Nawlins'-style accordion—not necessarily country, not necessarily pop, plenty catchy to satisfy audiences from both.

 

And sure, maybe this album is a little too long, but that might my 2021 short attention span speaking. But like, when we get to "Rock This Country!"—which is a good song, granted—it's like, okay, we get it, you did what you had to do, and there's a value in leaving them wanting more.

Actually, that song, "Rock This Country!," is a good reason to talk about what I loved most about this album—being a pre-9/11 album, there is a wonderful lack of patriotic pandering on Come On Over. This is not something I've ever thought about, since I grew up in a post-9/11 world, pretty much—country music wasn't always an industry wrapped in an American flag and adorned with a crucifix. It could, in 1997, exist on its own, for the sole purpose of letting the people listening have some goddamn fun. (Like: there's a reason there are so many exclamation points on this album's tracklist.) "Rock This Country!" would've been a lot different if it was released five years later.

But maybe even that is taking things way too seriously, I dunno. Like I said, so it goes with these Record Club albums that were already monumental before we decided to cover them. It's not enough to say something like "This is a really fun album full of surprises" because that would be doing this incredibly popular and important album sort of a disservice, even if the sentiment is ultimately true too. So I'm left with grasping at straws—cringeworthy prepubescent flashbacks, unnecessary asides about child slavery, eye-rolling references to September 11th—and then just slapping a good grade on the rambling and calling it a day.

GRADE: 3.5 pukes out of 5