DO YOU BELIEVE IN LIFE AFTER CHER?
Pull up a Cher while I tell you a story. Working with friends is exactly as one would expect: comfy, natural, and heart-expanding. After many years of being each other’s cheerleaders, my friend Lior Phillips and I decided to work on a project surrounding the release of her upcoming book; the first book ever devoted to the making of Cher’s 1998 anthem and studio album Believe for the critically acclaimed Bloomsbury Publishing’s 33 ⅓ series of short books about popular music. (You can pre-order a copy HERE or HERE!). Lior and I started a friendship that was solidified in a love for music, peaking while watching Skunk Anansie in our 20s. With a shared love of pop culture, this was the perfect project to connect.
As hard as it is to succinctly describe Cher's impact on popular culture, it was even harder to choose which image of her to immortalise in thread. We landed on a music video still from the book’s namesake. Full of fire, cutting edge choices, and a strong advocacy for one's self, Believe was her giant musical middle finger to all assumptions about Cher. This song and album confirmed her place as a pop icon, a queer icon, a feminist icon, and reminds us that everyone should believe they can be strong enough.
Cher has always shoved a foot in the door that was attempting to close. She’s been a girl group backing vocalist, half of a beloved pop music romance, a nightclub staple, a variety TV star, an Academy Award winner, a Mermaid, a fashion icon, a pop inspiration, a master of social media. Cher has worn many hats and in the mid-90s, those hats were in need of a reshaping. Pop has always been a young person's game, especially for women, and a new dawn of that obsessive youth was in full swing in the late '90s. But Cher's return to inescapability at 52 years old-making her the oldest woman to reach the top of the Billboard Hot 100-was a refusal to accept that model.
A LITTLE WORD ON LIOR!
Phillips artfully examines the longevity of Cher’s career and influence on pop music and pop culture in general. Here, Believe becomes a manifestation of pop music’s dual reliance on innovation and lineage, motherhood and creativity, age and gender, and the profound impact women have had on the industry. Drawing inspiration from her own experiences as a woman in music and a mother of two, Phillips’ investigation presents a compelling portrait of an artist and an album that was a major turning point for contemporary pop music.
