Remembering Chris Gaines
Tarpley Hitt, writing for The Daily Beast, has a fun story taking you back to the crazy days of 1999 when the best-selling solo artist of all time tried to, I think, take a page from David Bowie and turn into someone completely different.
It didn’t work.
…twenty years out, the project seems anything but pretentious. It’s a snapshot that lays bare the painstaking lengths celebrities go to craft public personas, and the messy, sublimely idiotic insides of industry marketing. In some ways, it is a fitting project for our millennium: a systemic critique born entirely in the system, packed with fauxstalgia so absurd it verges on farce-but one no one quite gets.
I actually own the CD somewhere with the rest of my CDs. I remember actually liking “Unsigned Letter.”