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Cat Power: A Good Woman Review
As pointed out in reviews below, there's not much new here to people who've already dug up all the other articles ever written about Chan other than more information about her Cabbagetown era and early NYC days and an appalling confirmation of why exactly Chan's father kicked her out at age 16 to make her own way in life (i.e., to make room for a new main squeeze, not because Chan was flunking high school). The fact "divulged" in the book that Chan has outright lied about many things is not surprising to anybody who has read her various interviews and realized that what Chan said in one interview contradicts what she said in a previous interview. Chan appears to have a pathological desire to please her interviewers by telling them whatever she thinks they want to hear, whether it's true or not, probably a defensive mechanism from growing up with a crazy mother where the goal is to tell crazy mom whatever will keep her from going off into crazy abusive behavior. The lie about moving to NYC to escape drugs is typical (she moved to a drug-riddled part of NYC where drugs were everywhere) -- most of her early band members from Atlanta are either alive or died in ways that did not involve drugs (such as auto accidents). The truth was probably that she was bored, would always have been "that cute girl at the pizza parlor" if she'd stayed in Atlanta, and the opportunity arose when her Cabbagetown room-mate died in an auto accident and a friend who had moved to NYC said "I have room here, why not come to NYC?" and she jumped on the opportunity as a way to re-invent herself. Nothing unusual there. But the drug thing was more exciting, a detail that would please interviewers, and Chan loves to please interviewers. Same deal with her supposed meeting with Steve Shelley and Tim Foljahn at the Liz Phair concert. According to the book neither Steve nor Tim remember it that way, rather, they remember that they'd heard of that strange girl who worked at the copy shop who had some really interesting tunes and went searching her out, not that they saw her accidentally at the Liz Phair concert. Neither even remembers being at the Liz Phair concert. But the Liz Phair story makes a great story for interviewers, they love it, they eat it up, so Chan gives them what they want.
Going beyond the "warts" Ms. Goodman finds, the psychological speculation in the book is interesting but ignores one of the most obvious theories (other than the crazy-mom one) about Chan's sometimes-awkward behavior - i.e., that she is undiagnosed ADHD. She certainly seems ADHD in every video interview I've ever seen of her, she has more twitches than a tweaker and skips from subject to subject like her brain is working at a million miles per hour, but she doesn't have the ravaged skin-and-bones body of a tweaker. ADHD also would explain Chan's academic difficulties in her school days despite her obvious intelligence (let's face it, you don't maintain a career in music for 15 years and write a ton of music that has critics jumping all over themselves to praise it if you're an idiot).
Other than that it's a standard rock star hagiography by a Chan fan, relatively inoffensive and certainly not worthy of the vitriol slathered upon it by some of the other reviewers. Insofar as this book corrects the record it's an interesting read, if incomplete (who, exactly, was the father of the baby that Chan supposedly aborted when she was 20 years old? We never learn the answer to that, any more than we learn about the diamond mine and the child laborer there who supposedly inspired "Cross Bone Style" during Chan's visit to Africa). If you're a fan, you'll be fascinated if maybe not agreeing with Ms. Goodman's conclusions and a bit unsatisfied that it doesn't resolve more of the mysteries of Chan's life. But that is a limitation which the book itself admits. Ms. Goodman says that for someone who has made so many horrifying things public about her personal life, other things (such as the father of the aborted child) seem quite off-limits and Chan seems to be using her selective revelations as a defensive mechanism to distract interviewers.
Still, there isn't anything better out there, so (shrug) if you're a Chan fan, buy it. If you're not a Chan fan, don't bother, you'll read it and be disgusted by Ms. Goodman's obvious girl crush on Chan, a girl crush that seems curiously unhindered by the difficulties she had in getting information for the book and the things she found out. Or, more properly, Ms. Goodman's girl crush on *young* Chan, the one who dressed like a boy and had short hair and wrote strange and mysterious almost anti-songs that went in circles and whose stage presence was nervous breakdown as performance art. Ms. Goodman seems rather ambivalent about current Chan, the accomplished singer-songwriter and stylish model who seems quite comfortable, if a bit awkward, up on stage. So it goes.
Cat Power: A Good Woman Overview
How Chan Marshall, aka Cat Power, Survived Herself–and Became the Indie Rock Queen.Chan Marshall's stark lyrics, minimal arrangements,and wounded, smoky vocals, were an instant indie hit in the nineties–but her mental instability nearly derailed her career. How this sensitive but headstrong Georgian daughter of an unstable mother and a relatively unknown musician father–managed to make it big, burn out, and rise up again to become not only the darling of the indie music scene but also a fashion and Hollywood icon is the fabric of this irresistible story.Covering her musical beginnings in the south and her booze-soaked rise to fame in New York City to her eventual breakdown and subsequent reclamation of herself and her music, Cat Power delves into the soul of this fragile but ferociously gifted young talent. With seven albums behind her, the hottest designers clamoring to dress her, and perpetually sold-out venues, Marshall is at the height of her career–a perfect vantage point from which to look at her notorious and intriguing history. From interviews with her family, musicians such as Thurston Moore, Nick Cave, Dave Grohl, and Jack White, past loves like Bill Callahan and Vincent Gallo, and current friends such as Karl Lagerfeld and Wong Kar-Wai, Elizabeth Goodman gives us the real Chan Marshall–the little girl, the woman, the artist.
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