what is different about selena gomez revival album

Given the shared lineage, it’s tempting to talk about Gomez and Lovato’s new releases in terms of what they have in common, which is a lot. The irony is that such declarations of independence signal that they’re moving from one system of corporate control into another one: From Disney (or Nickelodeon) to what John Seabrook’s new book title has coined as The Song Machine, a network of major-label handlers, producers, and writers who collaborate on chart-beating double entendres about sex. It’s common knowledge that for all such figures-past and present, Miley Cyrus and Ariana Grande included-eventually comes a moment where they loudly announce that they’re in charge of their careers and occasionally make visits to the family-planning section of CVS. Are they two friends indulging a shared love for g-funk? Are they and their teams simply raiding the same source of clichés, perhaps without even thinking about what that source is? Or is someone in their writers’ room playing a joke about the derivativeness of pop, like the graffiti designers who subverted the Homeland set they’d been hired to decorate?īoth Lovato and Gomez have recently emerged from a young-entertainer pipeline even sleeker than the one that spat out the first class of new-millennium teen idols (Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera). As kids, Lovato and Gomez starred in Barney & Friends together they ruled the Disney channel at roughly the same time they have now released albums, co-written and produced by some of the same hit-makers, seven days apart.

“Gin and Juice” references are way common across popular music, but it still feels remarkable to have these two particular stars mining this same particular source material. “Got my mind on your body and your body on my mind,” Lovato coos on her queer-coded single “Cool for the Summer,” swapping corpuses in for Snoop’s cash as producers Max Martin and Ali Payami tack big-budget studio roar onto a piano hook that sounds lifted from The OC’s theme song. It may or may not be coincidence that echoes of Snoop Dogg’s 1994 hit about the joys of a highball also show up on Demi Lovato’s Confident, another proclamation of grown-and-sexiness from another former child star, released one week after Gomez’s. The Tragedy of Kanye West Spencer Kornhaber

What is different about selena gomez revival album