Nelly Furtado :: Interviu pentru revista COSMOpolitan [Amerik]

Trimis: 20/05/2007 20:44

Cosmo Girl
She reads serious feminist literature, decries television as a “farce” and feels “connected to the proletariat.” Is funky pop sensation Nelly Furtado secretly . . . angry?

By Clark Collis

Blender, Oct/Nov 2001

Growing up in Victoria, British Columbia, Nelly Furtado knew she had two aces up her sleeve when the time came to fulfill her pop-stardom dreams.

The first was her talent. Music runs in the Furtado family. Her grandfather was an orchestra conductor; her mom sang in the local church choir. And, true to genetic form, by her teenage years, Nelly had mastered not only the trombone but the equally irritating-to-hear-being-practiced ukulele. (“I know,” she says. “Maybe I should have taken up the bagpipes as well.”)

The second ace was her name.

“My whole life I was like, ‘Oh, great, nobody’s used Nelly yet,’ ” explains the singer over lunch in an East London photographer’s studio. “But I knew, in the back of my mind, ‘There’s a Nelly that’s going to come out of nowhere.’ ” She pauses. “And then the other Nelly came out!”

Ah, the best-laid plans of mice, men and Portuguese-Canadian singer-songwriters. The “other Nelly,” of course, is the multiplatinum St. Louis rapper. Not that there’s much danger of any inter-Nelly warfare breaking out. “Oh, no!” she laughs. “I’ve met him twice, and he was so nice. He and his whole crew. He said we gotta hook up and do some music together. It would be ‘Nelly featuring Nelly.’ We thought about dating, actually. He was checking out my ass. I didn’t mind. He was cute.”

Even beyond the mutual macking, it’s hardly a surprise that the encounters between Nelly and Nelly resulted in a meeting of minds. Both artists are steeped in urban pop music, and their own tunes are aimed squarely, and ambitiously, at the charts. St. Louis Nelly struck first, with the instant black bubblegum classic “Country Grammar”; Furtado followed with the instant Portuguese-Canadian bubblegum classic “I’m Like a Bird,” a song from her platinum debut that has seemingly conquered more countries than there are countries.

“It felt so cool having this international hit,” she says, picking at a piece of fish. “Walking down some street in Paris and having three groups of schoolgirls from three different countries all wanting your autograph — all because of this one song. When you’ve written a song that’s made it into the karaoke bars . . . that’s a good feeling!”

Right — when drunks are singing your stuff, that’s when you’ve made it.

“Yeah! Ha ha ha! That’s when you know you can quit!”

Of course, Furtado has no intention of quitting. In fact, the 22-year-old has just flown in from her home in Toronto for a month’s worth of European gigs and promotional duties to support her second single, “Turn Off the Light.” It’s a grueling schedule, but one expected of an artist who shares at least part of her fan base with the Britneys and ’N Syncs of the world. Just this morning, Blender watched the supposedly “groggy” star perform the song on the British teen-pop show CD:UK with slinky aplomb before politely fielding an array of surreal, asinine questions (“I heard that U2 asked you to support them at their upcoming shows. Did Bono get on his knees?”).

Although Furtado is an expert at the remember-to-mention-the-name-of-the-single-and-its-release-date marketing game — and in the flesh certainly lives up to her reputation for looking like Courteney Cox Arquette’s foxy younger sibling — she’s far from just another cute-as-a-button pop princess. During an interview, for example, she is happy to dispense with her cabal of minders, and, dressed in simple faux-hippie wear, she resembles the Furtado who spent two months backpacking around Europe a few years ago.

The singer has determinedly and successfully courted an older audience for whom acne is merely an unpleasant memory rather than an ongoing hell. Furtado’s first shows in 1999 after signing with DreamWorks weren’t at shopping malls but at Lilith Fair, and this summer she played the ambitious Area:One tour, performing her own set and dueting with both Moby (Furtado sang Gwen Stefani’s part on “SouthSide”) and the Roots (Erykah Badu’s part on “You Got Me”). Moreover, despite its doofy title, her debut album, Whoa, Nelly!, is an intriguing, cosmopolitan affair, ranging from the hip-hop funk of “Turn Off the Light” to the acoustic ballad “Scared of You.”

Finally, Furtado isn’t afraid of acknowledging a world beyond music and celebrity, beyond herself, even. Certainly, few of her peers would inform an interviewer that they feel “really connected to the proletariat” or simultaneously be reading Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, feminist writer Mary Daly’s Pure Lust: Elemental Feminist Philosophy and a book on Portuguese immigration to Canada. No wonder Furtado’s been dubbed “the thinking person’s Christina Aguilera.”

“Isn’t that funny?” she giggles. “I thought that was quite good. Because pop music can be intelligent. Why not? It’s very challenging to be pop and intelligent, but that’s why I love it.”

Indeed, Furtado really loves pop, wherever it’s from. “Where I grew up, I had so many multicultural friends,” she recalls. “You could be bhangra dancing one weekend, and then the next it was, ‘Hey, let’s go to the Latin merengue dance.’ We never looked at each other and went, ‘Oh, you’re my Vietnamese friend’ or ‘You’re my Indian friend.’ ”

She has no trace of a Portuguese accent, but Furtado counts herself “a flag-waver. I wear my nationality on my sleeve. Half of what drove me to do music was the fact that I’d come home and turn the TV on, and I wouldn’t see any Portuguese people. I didn’t see my culture represented in Hollywood, and that bugged me. I can’t poză what it would be like to be an Asian person or an East Indian person and never see somebody from your culture on television. It’s a farce.”

If British Columbia was a melting pot, Toronto, where Furtado moved when she was 17, was an industrial-size concrete mixer. Having already discovered rap through radio, and rock by listening to her brother’s record collection, teenage Nelly became a committed, if “drug-free,” raver.

“Was I tempted?” she muses. “Not really. Maybe to do Ecstasy or something. But that’d pass in about two seconds.”

By then, Furtado had wisely exchanged the trombone for the guitar and, after a spell as half of an experimental trip-hop duo, began writing material more chart-friendly yet still influenced by a broad range of artists, from Tim Buckley to Portishead. In 1999, she signed with DreamWorks and started work with producers Track and Field on the material that became Whoa, Nelly! The album was released last year to a mixed commercial reception.

“It came out at the worst time ever,” she says. “It was the climax of pop. There was loads of skepticism. It was either ‘Is your album another Britney Spears album?’ or ‘We can’t play your stuff because we’re only playing artists with one name. Pink. Or Blue. Whatever.’ ”

Then DreamWorks released “I’m Like a Bird,” a track that almost didn’t make the album (“the guys were a little hesitant”) but would become a bona fide pop smash. As a result, Furtado ended up performing the song more times than she can recall.

“Well, if you include all my live gigs and all the TV performances . . . oh, my God. At least 200. That’s 10 hours of singing one song! It’s embarrassing, because I don’t think I’ve gotten any better at singing it.”

In truth, Furtado appears somewhat ambivalent about “Bird,” confessing that she’s most pleased that it has established her name as a songwriter. She hopes soon to be spending as much time writing and producing other people’s material as her own — like her current inspiration, Missy Elliott, for whom Furtado recently busted an eye-opening cameo on a “Get Ur Freak On” remix.

Right now, though, Furtado is still in the business of selling Nelly Furtado, which leaves little time for extracurricular work. Or play.

“I’m just kind of, like, floating along in this pop-star life,” she says. “It’s almost like another reality. For the first time, I’m thoroughly enjoying being single. I had a pretty intense relationship a year ago, and it took me a while to get over it. Male fans are weird, though, because they get really nervous and sweaty around me. That’s cute.”

For a moment, Furtado sounds like any other young hit machine. But only for a moment.

“You know, I have trouble doing the dumb thing,” she sighs. “I don’t want to talk about politics too much, because you end up sounding like a flake. And people don’t want to hear about culture. They just want to hear about ham and cheese. Macaroni. Apple pie. But I think someone in the spotlight does have a certain sense of responsibility. You can just sit there and look pretty, but is that really going to fulfill you? There’s got to be more to life.”