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Up in armpits >> Paula Cole: hirsute hippy chick, post-feminist songstress and the future of hip hop? by CHRIS YURKIW
Even before Cole's filled-out follicles had become "an issue," she tore off a terse letter to Entertainment Weekly questioning why the magazine had airbrushed her 'pit hair out of a photograph that accompanied a feature on her and her seven Grammy nominations. Really, now! In 1998, just what is folks' trouble with tribbles? "I was surprised. I was shocked," says Cole over the phone from her home in New York, in a thin voice that you'd never recognize from her ultra-clear singing. "The only thing I don't understand is the negativity, and that seems to come more from women. Men don't care as much, because it's natural [to them]." And this is where Paula Cole gets complicated. She seemed easy enough to read back in 1994, upon the release of her debut album Harbinger . It was a solid singer/songwriter's record made even sturdier by a voice that could push down to Three-Tenor range and up to Kate Bush's if it wanted. But it was a classic first album too, filled with lyrics that read like the diary of an awkward schoolgirl and songs with titles like "I Am So Ordinary." It was "introspective, dark and adolescent" in Cole's own words. But Harbinger wasn't exactly a sign of things to come. These days, the 29-year-old Cole is riding high on her breakthrough second album, This Fire, propelled by its first single, the semi-controversial "Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?" If you take it straight up, "Cowboys" appears to be sung from the point of view of some Reaganite romantic who longs for the days when men were men, women were kitchen-bound, and John Wayne was loved by both. Cole doesn't like to discuss the meaning of her songs, but the clichéd gender roles in "Cowboys" are just too over-the-top from someone who says that they're "letting women know they have a choice" when it comes to shave or not to shave. The point is that "Cowboys" is indicative of the more sly, wry material on This Fire, although Cole says that she wrote the song during a lonely sojourn in San Francisco back when she composed most of the material for Harbinger. Whatever the chronology, Cole's music seems to be catching up with her voice, and it might soon go beyond. She's currently working on a remix of the neo-R&B number from This Fire, "Feelin' Love," with rapper Missy "Misdemeanour" Elliott--perhaps the first real fruit of Cole's much-professed love of black culture, something that hasn't been evident in her pop-rock to date. "I find hip hop to be the societally relevant music of today and it moves me," says Cole. "I have some ideas for my next album and, yeah, I think it could be an influence. "I don't want to see barriers. I know that I've received inspiration from very different musical sources, from Dolly Parton to Miles Davis. And I don't want to see the differences. I want to see the similarities." With Lindy at the Spectrum this Friday, April 17, 8pm, $22.50+ taxes
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Call it the Great Armpit Kerfuffle. Or the Fluffy Armpit Grate. Or the Pithy 'Pit-hair Debate of 1998. Any way you slice it--or any way Paula Cole doesn't slice it--the singer's armpit hair was the second most-talked-about tidbit following last month's Grammy Awards, after the Bob Dylan/Soy Bomb belly dancer (who, by the way, appeared to have waxed his chest).