Winamp Wednesday is our continuing feature spotlighting Napster favorites from the wild-west days of the early internet. This summer we’re covering the best of 1999: the B-Sides, live shows, off-air recordings, classics, and today’s track…
Mandy Moore, “Candy”
Not to be a full contrarian here, but the answer to Britney Vs. Christina was always Mandy.
All pop music is manufactured to a degree, but something about Mandy Moore seemed more authentic in the moment. Part of that must have been age proximity: a year or two can be a widening gulf when you’re that age, and Mandy Moore is firmly a 1984 baby like me and my classmates. If “Candy” was a craven attempt to latch onto current trends then I couldn’t track it, or at least didn’t want to. It was easy to conceive of her as one of us, which gave her some sort of status in the Teen Dream Sweepstakes.
“Candy” is fine. It checks all the boxes one expects with occasional flair. You have to love any single past 1958 that attempts a speaking section, especially when the lyrics are tailored to the original singer. “Love always, Mandy” is a shot right at besotted young listeners unknowingly drawn into Baby’s First Parasocial Relationship, and those listeners most likely worked backwards from there to justify their enjoyment of “Candy”. Scrambling sophomores who had written off boy bands and the horde of also-rans in the wake of “…Baby One More Time” would admit under even slight duress that they didn’t hate this song. There was a Pitchfork article around this time that declared Cher’s “Believe” to be “kind of interesting”; I always interpreted that phrase as a music snob could use to simultaneously dismiss a song while admitting that they’d sing its praises if it wasn’t social suicide to do so.
“Candy” is kind of interesting.
It was also kind of a hit, barely missing the Top 40 and becoming a minor blip on TRL‘s countdown. We’re not talking “Genie in a Bottle” numbers here, but for an also-ran in the waning hours of 1999 that’s not too bad. She broke into the Top 30 the next year with “I Wanna Be With You”, a ballad that I’m not sure I’ve ever heard outside of the confines of 2000’s ballet-a-clef Center Stage. But these tunes all feel like the work of a different artist than the one who would emerge a few years later. Just like how Hanson took a few years off to become a more-serious incarnation of The Blues Brothers, Mandy Moore dipped from the party and returned with a version of “Senses Working Overtime” that was nothing to sneeze at. Her all-covers second (or possibly third) record Coverage is maybe the weirdest next album from anyone in Moore’s pop contemporary, and it proudly states that if you can’t be the competition–and nobody else was Britney or Christina, sorry–then you gotta do something so oddball that you can no longer be compared to them.
What can you really say about someone who scores a few modest hits, delves into filmmaking for a while, and then comes back years later with a commanding love of Joan Armatrading? “Drop the Pilot” could be the best pop song ever written and she acquits herself well on an overproduced early-2000s version of it. Honestly I could probably sit here and write several thousand words on just the song choices on Coverage–John Hiatt? The Waterboys, of all pulls?–but it’s worth it to track down the record and hear for yourself. It’s a tremendously interesting stepping stone away from the pop everyone else was recording towards an artist’s own voice.
The Class of 1999 seemed to get bored with their fame pretty quickly, or else made moves to stay exactly that level of famous with more desperate song and style choices. We remember Britney’s “Toxic” but how long have you gone without hearing Christina’s “Dirrty” in its entirety again? Jessica Simpson was willing to make herself look like an utter buffoon with a can of tuna fish just so that you would continue to talk about her. In retrospect, the best move any of these pop starlets made worldwide was when Billie Piper decided to join Doctor Who. Farting aliens and an effects budget of three shillings were small obstacles to overcome to claim the mantle of 2008’s most annoying ‘ship.
Mandy Moore’s stock in trade became playing demi-villains who you recognized from real life; for many of us there may have been no more relatable moment in film than that scene in Saved! where she uses the Bible as a literal projectile, screaming “I AM FILLED WITH CHRIST’S LOVE!” at those suspected of sin. It’s a shockingly funny moment in a great film, and it could have only come from a woman who had been adding extra vibrato syllables to the world’s most innocent lyrics just a few years prior. There was more there there. Soon enough Moore would be writing albums along with brilliant minds like Deb Talan and Mike Viola and that one guy from Dawes. Every artist makes an attempt to race towards what they’re truly good at, but Mandy Moore seemed to find it faster than her contemporaries.
My bet would be that there are tons of fans of Tangled or This is Us who have very little concept that Mandy Moore started as an also-Britney. Going back to 1999 you probably wouldn’t have guessed that particular career path for any particular singer, let alone for Mandy Moore. You never know where the next great sound is going to come from. But the clues are always there, the latent waiting to break out. No matter what, this was Always Mandy.
NEXT TIME: The Wisdom of Solomon and the Strength of Hercules…