A friend told her about what was then just a novelty singing show. Drained of hope, she returned to Texas and took a day job distributing Red Bull samples. Then, in the ultimate stroke of misfortune, her apartment burned down in a fire-right after she had earned enough money to afford a bigger place. Other producers dismissed her as too heavy, “ too Black”-sounding, too whatever. Carole King’s longtime songwriting partner, Gerry Goffin, was maybe interested in using her as a backup singer, but it didn’t pan out. with a woman she met performing at Six Flags. After high school, she recorded a demo, eventually saving enough money through odd jobs to move to L.A. Raised by a schoolteacher and a contractor in Burleson, Texas, Clarkson was a devout Christian who performed in the choir, played sports, and starred in theater productions. Pushing against the sanctimony, Clarkson told a reporter, “I love Britney Spears… People always say, ‘Oh, I’m sick because it’s not about voices, it’s about body and everything.’ Well, that’s what people are buying.” Still, by 2004, Clarkson had charted a very different path for women in pop. Like Avril Lavigne, Clarkson was seen as a corrective to the “midriff-baring aristocracy”-because of her wholesomeness and relatability, not any mutinous attitude. The result was boy bands like the Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC, bubbly ingenues trained in Disney’s sunshine factory. A few years earlier, teen pop had replaced grunge in the monoculture: “It’s as if a legion of music fans and bizzers, stunned by the grim finality of Cobain’s act, collectively decided… give us artifice and showbiz,” an Entertainment Weekly writer remarked. In other words, she was not Britney or Christina-stars whose promiscuous image and mass-market gloss in the public’s perception had made them the subject of a ceaseless media swarm in the early 2000s. She still very earnestly said “cool beans.” She went to Chili’s, not wild bashes thrown by Justin Timberlake. “It is hard to spend time with Clarkson without wondering if she even realizes she has moved to Los Angeles,” a writer remarked in a 2005 profile of the singer, quipping that the only place you’d spot her in US Weekly was in a “Got Milk?” ad. She was the quintessential girl-next-door, “ warm-as-a-popover” and “safe-as-milk.” Sure, she had a protean, phenomenal voice-one that made you happy she covered Aretha or Whitney, instead of feeling mortified that she had tried-but she was not overtly sexy, ostentatious, or hip. Even as she became the inaugural winner of American Idol and released Breakaway-one of the best-selling albums of the 21st century-journalists regularly marveled at the unpretentiousness of the former cocktail waitress from Texas. After a bunch of rather blah mainstream pop albums, including a glut of half-baked AmIdol projects, this is a nice, low-key relief.The most interesting thing about Kelly Clarkson seemed to be that she was not interesting at all. Clarkson may be a fine ballad singer, but what gives Breakaway its spine are the driving, anthemic pop tunes like "Since U Been Gone," "Walk Away," and "You Found Me." These are the numbers that sound simultaneously mainstream and youthful, which is a hard trick to pull off, and they are the tracks that illustrate that Kelly Clarkson is a rare thing in the 2000s: a pop singer who's neither hip nor square, just solidly and enjoyably in the mainstream. While there may be one too many ballads here, they often are very good and sometimes are excellent, like the light, layered, yearning title tune. Since Clarkson is a better singer than Simpson - not only does she possess more chops, but she has more on-record charisma - she can sell the material even when the slow tempos in the middle of record drag its momentum she prevents the songs from sounding too samey. This time around, the dance-pop elements have been almost entirely stripped away, and the record instead is a rock-influenced, MOR pop affair, not entirely dissimilar to Ashlee Simpson's Autobiography, only a little bit smoother and not as heavy on guitars. Happily, Breakaway delivers on that promise. So, her second album, Breakaway, released late in 2004, was a pivotal moment for her, a chance to prove that she was not a one-hit wonder, a chance to prove that she could have a real, vibrant career. While the dance-pop and adult contemporary ballads on that record were fresher than the music on AmIdol, Clarkson still hadn't escaped the show's shadow entirely: since it was a hit so close to her time on TV, it was easy to pigeonhole her as simply a creation of television, not a popular singer in her own right. Kelly Clarkson was the first American Idol winner and the first vocalist to achieve success, but her 2003 debut, Thankful, didn't completely define her outside of the parameters of the show.
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