MOD VANILLA by ARIANA GRANDE (2022)

At Changi airport there were lots of glossies on the racks near the gates for free: Vogue (an ‘exuberant’ edition featuring the triumphant return of the very pout-torturedly frozen and afraid -looking supermodels Christy, Naomi, Linda and Cindy – I would have taken a better photograph); all the financial and real estate and news publications; the pretentious but visually enjoyable Wallpaper; and Tatler, one of the world’s most ridiculous magazines detailing the goings on of the horsey British upper classes at drinks parties and charity events, with surprise cover star Rita Ora, who has become some kind of Primrose Hill lady of the manner, with a lovely list of celebrity friends, and who now has out a brand new album, You & I.

Rita Who? I have heard the name, but I am afraid that she has never risen up in my conscious. I am obviously very behind the times – she apparently has a ‘billion streams’, but one thing with being an expatriate for so long (my god, I have honestly just realized that today is the day I came to Japan twenty seven years ago (how can this be?!!…….just let me let that sink in a moment……)

…is that you realize is that while most of the global trending moments filter through to you on the internet, not all of them do – particularly in the charts, where despite the huge influence on UK listening tastes from America, the popularity of songs does often diverge quite significantly. Rita, popular in Britain apparently, has just never made it to me through my airwaves.

It cannot be denied that some singers just don’t do it for you. You can’t help it. You either entwine with them, or you don’t (like lovers’ voices). I quite like Dua Lipa’s style, and she looks quite good in the ridiculous recent YSL Libre campaigns – although that clog-pored shimmering luxury on yachts and white-decked promontories was never my personal idea of ‘freedom’ – I just don’t especially like her voice. And voices – a hugely subjective preference – are everything in pop music. While ol’ Adele, with her cockney barmaid charms and salt of the earth realness, certainly has full throttle vocal brilliance, it is of the foghorn on full pelt variety I cannot personally tolerate (put almost everyone on Pop Idol, The Voice etc, in the same bracket, the moment when the heretoforth shy mother of two from the sticks roars out a note that has the brainwashed audience of highlighted haired dotards rise to their feet in unison wiping emotional tears because the sheer volume of the note has pierced through some kind of grey carpeted coma); singers such as Whitney Houston, Christina Aguilera, Pink, Alicia Keys, Celine Dion – a cross between a shrieking swan and a broken oboe detoured through loudspeakers, all have my sensitivities battered within a couple of minutes – I can do strident, in the right doses – hello Barbra Streisand – but get virtually no pleasure from Aretha Franklin for example- it can feel like having your ears screamed out.

Why am I focusing, so far, exclusively on female singers here? Because, in music terms, women do seem to rule the world. The Lewis Capaldi/ Ed Sheeran kind of simplistic emotionalism is my kind of hell – and I just don’t like their voices, though I adored Harry Styles’ plaintive As It Was, and that song by Kid Laroi; through pop history I have tended to like softer, more dulcet mellow male singers than the griney or whiney (so no Beatles or Rolling Stones; give me Simon & Garfunkel or The Zombies’ Colin Bluntstone any day instead, give me Boy George). I can do high and strangulated (Johnny Rotten, Simon Le Bon), but not the equivalent of a dog farm (aural torture for me would be listening to Nickelback. And I know this will be heresy for some reading this, Tom Waits and Bob Dylan too. ‘Foofighters’…..sheer hell! ) I know. I am sorry. But we are all different. The voices either speak to you, or they don’t.

During this bristling, post-pandemic summer of Emancipated Barbie and mass tourism, I was of course delighted to read that both Beyonce and Taylor Swift now have enough cultural clout and mass following to actually change inflation, the GDP and economic outlook of some countries (Sweden had a big spike in economic output when B opened her Renaissance tour in Stockholm; T has apparently generated the same amount of money as the entire Beijing Olympics around her Eras tour; just one woman); it’s exhilarating to see these artists taking the full reins, when in the past they would probably have been controlled and micromanaged, even swindled and bankrupted quite frequently by all the bad actors – something that came through very vividly in Baz Luhrmann’s ‘Elvis’, which I enjoyed more than I expected last year – poor guy (on the subject I don’t mind Presley’s voice, in measured doses- I thought the scene in the film where he sang ‘Trouble’ was almost intolerably exciting although D always asks me to take the Blue Christmas album off the record player before it gets to the end because he can’t take a whole album). I would never be able to get through a whole LP of Beyonce’s either (I just don’t like her voice – although I would like an instrumental version of Renaissance because I love ballroom house music); and a whole 78 minutes, or however long Taylor Swift’s albums are with all their ‘secret extra tracks’ and whatnot would have me bald by the end of the listening because her nasal grind would have me tearing my hair out from the roots by about a quarter of the way through. I respect them both, but with the exception of certain songs, cannot listen.

So, who do I like?

Although Billie Eilish can sometimes err on the side of the current style of Netflix intro singing which sounds like someone has a pilchard melting and semi-ululating on their tonsils – you surely know what I mean; that contemporary trend for singing ,extraordinarily mannered and stylized; glottal and gobbled at the back of the throat as though you were choking on a plum, then letting the notes slide out of the goblet shining with mucus and film – a style that has D and I racing to press stop whenever we discover a new vocalist on Youtube – an extraordinarily instinctive reaction against a certain sound that seems to represent something unplaceable we both detest beyond language – I basically love her; I thought her recent, breathy, existential song for the Barbie film – What Was I Made For? – a heartbreaking masterpiece. And having watched Painkiller – the drama based on the opioid crisis and the disgrace of the Sackler family – last week, I think I finally need to own Happier Than Ever on vinyl at the very least just to have Oxycontin. I might go and buy it this week. I don’t know. I think I tend to like voices that don’t sound too forced; Roberta Flack, Donna Summer, Dusty Springfield, Aaliyah – although I realize they can still be a little ‘self aware’ and mannered – in that regard I can do breathless Britney and Burning Bush does a mean and tear-inducing rendition of Everytime, but it should sound as if the singers are singing straight from the body, from the soul, not through some vulgar colour by numbers factory-like Kids From Fame-ish School For The Performing Arts in Essex, where everyone comes churned out sounding like Adele or Sam Smith or Amy Winehouse (brilliant, obviously, but hardly relaxing). My true muses would be the 100% eccentric geniuses whose talent just came out of nowhere; Kate Bush, Tori Amos (Duncan’s nemesis), Joni Mitchell. Erykah Badu. Bjork is a very acquired taste I know, but I love her, and think she should be World President. Then, there is Lana Del Rey (oh my god Lana Del Rey how we swoon to that woman’s albums you have no idea; self conscious as fuck and self-mythologizing but utterly poetic and brilliant). I contradict myself entirely here I suppose by admitting a love of Chaka Khan, and wonder how Stevie Wonder, whose Journey Through The Secret Life Of Plants album I used as pre-stage music for my Language Of Flowers talk in Hawaii, fits into all of this), but his melodies in the golden period are so unpredictable and baroque and he just touches me. Another soul singer from that era is Minnie Riperton, so gentle, like a voice drifting up from behind nectarous flowers somewhere in Eden; gentle and mellifluous and then supersonically high (witness the extravagant and rapturous ‘Les Fleur’ with Rotary Connection, so high that probably only bats can detect the notes – inhuman – a quality I have only come across in a few singers – the exquisitely ethereal Canadian singer Grimes – mother of a few of Elon Musk’s many children, who we once saw at Club Quattro in Shibuya and whose albums we have also played to death; I love her; the incomparable Elizabeth Fraser of the Cocteau Twins, whose music is so sacrosanctly beautiful and in the realm of the otherwordly arcane I almost can’t bear to write about it; and then, ahem, Mariah Carey – why do I consider her a guilty pleasure? – whose initial appearance in the culture I thought was specifically designed as personal gollum for me- those heinous powerballads – I would leave the room – until I discovered her hidden album tracks and more importantly, the separate dance remixes she would do with Dave Morales of her chart hits with entirely different melodies and vocals, and which constitute some of the most spine shiveringly exciting moments of my life: when I first heard the Fantasy full length Def Mix at a club in London it was as if a cherubim were whispering in my ear, my lord it was ecstatic and we still listen to it to this day; only Ms Ariana Grande, to my knowledge, has inherited this beauteous angelic melisma, that inherent effortlessness; but purer, sweeter, more delectable.

Ok, I admit I am a fan. And I know how annoying she can be in her samey little lip pursed videos with her cutesy pink side eye and girliness – her one pose, winking eyeliner swinging pony tail; it can all get a bit too kittenish and ‘saucy’ and repetitive. But somehow, nonetheless, I love her. Partly it is her unique voice; which goes straight to the straight and gay side of me; possibly also just my thing for brunette gone blonde Italian Americans with beautiful eyes- Madonna, Lady Gaga, Gwen Stefani – all of whose celebrity perfumes I have bought, incidentally, now we are finally on the subject + there is something special, in a geeky fanhood kind of way, about owning a totem somehow connected to your pop idols, I get how it works (I shall now confess I once also bought the solid perfume of Britney Spear’s Fantasy in its hideous pink and green fake crystal compact); you can see why these products sell: if such pop star -linked perfumes had existed in my childhood and pubescence/adolescence it would have been an absolute disaster, forcing me into juvenile crime to support my collecting necessities. Not only would I have needed all the albums and 12’s, but I would have been resorting to petty crime, robbing old ladies in the dark to procure my edt vaporisateurs of Too Shy, Hungry Like The Wolf, Karma Chameleon, Let’s Go Crazy and the like. That extrait de parfum of Papa Don’t Preach? Yes, I’ll take it, madame. (Actually though, this is what is happening now. If you are an Ariana Grande fan, like myself, having literally scratched the Sweetener and Thank UNext albums to death requiring new copies I have played them so many times on hot summer nights on the tropical balcony, I imagine if you are an actual superfan, which I am not, I would imagine you would need all of the perfumes as well. It is a lot of expense. Obviously I am not a teenage girl, though I probably sound like one in this piece, but I know that had I been that age I would have not only wanted, but 100% needed these liquids that purport to be what the singers have created and made for themselves; Helen’s daughter Esther – a rabidly obsessed Eilish fan last year at one delightful moment proffered up the delicious vanilla smelling eponymous first Billie fragrance for a brief moment for her perusal at her grandmother’s house, where I spent a lot of my teenage years lounging around listening to music and smelling perfumes, and I felt as though I were being let into a profoundly important moment of almost religious import; the fusion of music and perfume in a person’s mind such as myself, and of Esther- particularly at that tender age – could have made me even more bananas than I obviously already am.)

But to the perfumes already.

I was in England. It is always a weird experience to be back in the town I grew up in, Solihull, West Midlands, ten minutes by train from Birmingham town centre, having lived so long in Japan – belonging to both, and yet neither, something indistinct and untenable in between (all I know is that I belong, perfectly, in the house in Kamakura in which I am writing this ). Anyone who is familiar with the experience of living ‘away’ for so long will know about this. Everything is so obviously familiar in the town you are ‘from’ – the physical topography of it, the buildings – though the shops change; how could Marks & Spencer have closed down? – but not so much does; not really. I lackadaisically flicked through the expensive vinyl in HMV but couldn’t bring myself to pay 40 pounds for the two Lana Del Rey albums I am yet to own, Chemtrails Over The Country Club and Ultraviolence, but somehow found myself drifting towards Boots The Chemist to semi-listlessly check out some of the commercial perfumes even if, in truth, to be honest with you, even as a perfume writer, I am sick to death of most of it all now – Duty Free smells worse each time you are polluted with it at any airport; I do think perfume is now generally vile, but all that can remain for another post, if you don’t mind plunging with me into an abyss of honest negativity on the topic (my cousin came round wearing a super cloying sweet fruity vanilla thing by Paco Rabanne; sorry, ‘Rabanne’, Phantom, I think, though it is not really any different from the new one, Fame, and even she didn’t like it, but it was what she had picked up at the airport in Portugal after a brief sniffing; things in Perfumeland are dire, people); at least, on the whole, Ariana’s perfumes smell uncomplicated; easygoing; fun.

I stood in front of the locked glass cabinet of her perfumes and experienced a slight increase in pulse. My concentration suddenly more focused (am I really this much of a fan? I have only played the last album, Positions, which I bought in Honolulu this year at a fashion megastore on Waikiki, two or three times, although I admit some parts did take me off into Minnie Riperton-esque paradise; no one in pop music right now sounds lighter but there I go again). God Is A Woman intrigued me; I quite like this one when I smelled it last year back in England as well – one of those one-noted ‘frozen fresh pear accords’ that I could probably get away with for work (such scents are quite popular with Japanese men here, even a couple of my scent-conscious male colleagues who smell quite lovely on a regular basis – it is a pleasure when they walk by, rather than the fake oud bases I kept smelling in London which made me physically angry). Several of the Grande fragrances had sold out; I smelled R.E.M and Moonlight though the pink fruit sugaryness was getting a little similar (I think I smelled those two ; was I embarrassed having asked the very polite staff in the security-heavy shop to open up Ariana for me and smell each perfume one by one? It is quite possible, though if they thought I was an eerie middle-ager they didn’t show it). And though I am tired, ish, of vanilla (you know I will always love it), there was something curious about the new Mod Vanilla that just prickled my fancy. I had it sprayed on a card, walked around the store floor for about twenty seconds, and then came back to buy it (“the gentleman would like to purchase Mod Vanilla” said the false eyelashes to the security guard, and I went up the cashier and paid for it. What was it about it I (sort of) liked? Was I just buying something for the sake of buying something? Yes. It was my first day back in Solihull and I wanted a souvenir. Sometimes you just want to hand over some crisply minted pound notes after getting them from the currency exchange. Shopping for the sake of shopping. And it was only 33 or so – not Superdrug cheap, but hardly a Xerjoff, either. And though it smelled of chlorine, and salt, and vanilla, and something very odd, there was also something quite addictive and fascinating about this perfume as well. What was it? I knew there was something lingering underneath that was familiar. And of course that something turned out to be FK 540 Baccarat Rouge, which some of you have warned me about from its overproliferation in American and European cities, with its slightly sickening saffron burnt sugar accord which is now turning up in almost everything (there is much debate online about whether Grande’s Cloud is a rip off of the Kurkdijian and if so, ‘she’ has certainly surreptiously slipped in that over-ubiquitous accord in here…that smouldering aroma that was ingeniously created by FK and still smells very current is certainly what constitutes the main body of Mod Vanilla). Official notes are allegedly orris, freesia, praline, cacao butter, vanilla, and musk, this is certainly one musky number – but it is essentially all about that plastic burnt caramel. And the unmentioned synthetic saffron. On me it smells almost suffocating, though I wouldn’t rule out wearing it in tiny doses; some brushed off on the head of our cat and she smelled like a delicious marshmallow. Perhaps if I try hard enough I can achieve a similar effect? And though the inexplicable hermetic flacon looks something like a cross between a hearing aid and a modernistic dildo, or else an evil egg from Ridley Scott’s Alien (“in vanilla no one can hear you scream”) the perfume has already found the perfect nook in my writing study, perched happily among much pricier and ‘respectable’ fare. You may ask: how much of this is the music, and how much the perfume? I don’t know, and I don’t particularly care. Music and perfume are two of the three main pillars of my life – the other being cinema – and when these mindaltering media fuse, particularly if you have an innate pop or visual or small brain like my own – just see me come alive as a six year old in the back of the car as though being turned on for the first time when Donna Summer’s I Feel Love came on over the radio – I was electrified – the combined effect, sealed in an instant smell memory, can be highly enjoyable.