No Doubt - The Orange of the Californian Steppe

In 1995, there's very little the people can do with rock; or very little rock can do with the people. Jesus Lizard and Fugazi aren't for the people; or they aren't rock.

What Jesus Lizard and Fugazi do is meaningful post-rock or post-grunge; what 99% of post-'91 pop-rock bands do is, at best and being generous, standard-issue rock freshened up with some story to tell or some particular mood to convey.

What No Doubt did amounts to nothing more and nothing less than an example or application of what's been said above. Anthropologically speaking, once the physical structure of homo sapiens sapiens has been established, the various individuals of that species who follow and uphold the standard reached are nothing but variations on the theme. What follows is the exposition of that variation - not remotely theoretical, yet sentimentally touching - that is No Doubt.

This little band should be understood as the bard or conjurer of that state of afternoon heat, drifting with adolescent longing and fleeting snacks, so dear to certain American countrysides, especially those of Southern California. The word "rock" is both too big and too small at once to render certain dynamics; in any case, and historically the first to be so, it's inadequate; it should be shelved and replaced with "pretty words" which, however useless or beside the point they may be, are only exactly as useless as the phenomenon they describe is beside the point relative to rock; a phenomenon which they thus end up conveying in the best possible way.

Afternoons and childhood adventures, then; everything undefined and all dreamy hope; innocence and sensitivity: the American continent above all, with its countryside, its farmers and their trucks, amid fruit, vegetables and jams; white wooden garages steeped in shadow. A few mosquitoes and cicadas in the summer night and we're almost there - so they say, not me, but No Doubt. Finally, to be fully and properly there, given that the age in question, however much it looks back and lingers on other hours, is nonetheless condemned to life after adolescence, the whole thing needs to be framed by a nostalgic/moving state that reflects on, and for the sole cathartic purpose recalls to itself, those moments forever sealed off and bid farewell by becoming, to some extent, adults, becoming weighed down by the realization of earthly ugliness and the collapse of once-cherished illusions and beliefs. A rush of sweetness, small things, delicate and naively childish states of love, a rush shaded (at times terrified) by civic necessity which, if it doesn't entirely disfigure them, ultimately clouds them, saddens them, brings the games to an end; but precisely because of this makes them all the more dear and fascinating. The sensitivity at play is then overwhelmingly feminine, with a spirit of first love forever hovering in this air that is, quite literally, all honeymoon.

The masterpiece referred to above saw the light of day in October 1995. It was titled Tragic Kingdom. Slowly and almost magically it infected several million people the world over, wedging itself into the gaps left vacant by the record market. It presented itself to those millions as one of the first mass-market products stamped "Made in America" after the grunge outburst.

The way the above found its expression could only be a mixture of ska-punk (Red Hot Chili Peppers, Operation Ivy), folk (Violent Femmes), club/dance-punk (Blondie, Cars), college-pop-rock (B'52s, Fleetwood Mac, Cavedogs, Cud, Joe Jackson), soul-pop (Carole Bayer Sager, Belinda Carlisle, Sam & Dave), grunge-pop (Blind Melon, Sugar Ray) - proof, if any were needed, that the music is the last thing that matters. The childlike dimension comes straight out of indie; the more surf and rock'n'roll side draws on 1950s-early '60s Southern America (Bill Haley, Platters, Buddy Holly, Beach Boys), reinterpreted - without ever coming close to those lofty heights - with a certain early-80s post-punk/new wave existentialism, the kind marked by an eccentric and intelligent rock'n'roll revival (Magazine, Pretenders, Gang of Four, Cheap Trick).

On vocals, a female voice, Gwen Stefani, nimble enough to move from soul to punk without ever losing that blend of tough girl and sensitive soul that makes her unique (inherited, via Siouxsie Sioux, from fellow countrywomen and mentors such as Cervenka of X, Kat Arthur of Legal Weapon, and the patron saint of them all: Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane), backed by a bass-keys-guitar-drums ensemble that's technically solid despite its total dynamism: bass (her long-time boyfriend, the Asian-Indian Tony Kanal), keyboards (her own brother Eric Stefani), guitar (Tom Dumont), drums (Adrian Young).

Fourteen tracks, 60 minutes. And that spirit already described, it must be said, remarkably almost never lets up across this admittedly overlong record. "Spiderwebs" is a kind of danceable reggae-metal (thanks to the punk drumming) in the vein of Sugar Ray: Stefani, now Madonna's "Erotica", now punk girl, grabs you immediately and proves once and for all that she's worth (like Dolores O'Riordan and many others) far more than what she's actually singing.

"Excuse Me Mr." picks up the pace, now constantly reckless; the band behind Stefani sounds less like a rock outfit than a cabaret orchestra, recalling, with due proportion, the performances of Jerry Lee Lewis. Still, it's just a device that, on a casual listen, can easily be set aside in favor of the "existentialist" content, a (tragic) variant of what we've already discussed.

"Just A Girl", alternating slow passages with (never any less than) ska-punk accelerations, keeps heading toward emotion: that of death (or love) seen through the wide-eyed gaze of a little girl. The "tragic" of the title is amply and subtly justified. The subtlety, moreover, is entirely down to the innocently childlike setting and point of view.

"Happy Now?" shows another hour of the same story dressed in different (and pleasant) rhythmic clothes. As if it were calling together every bright midday hour of every girl in the world (because this is exquisitely feminine music, if not, in a positive sense, feminist) for a shared daydream, all the more precious for being tinged with unease: the smile sweeter for the tears behind it, one might say, except that here the bitterness ultimately wins out into a lingering sourness. A finale that's a great one precisely because it's unexpected (thanks to the shift in rhythm and melody), answering the title's question with "better not: still, even if you haven't touched happiness, at least you've seen it." "Different People", while not unpleasant, passes by fairly unnoticed.

"Hey You" returns to garage sounds, though with syncopated rhythms not typical of rock, which end up, despite the volume, reducing it to a Police-derived pop-reggae. "The Climb", with its full 6 minutes, is worthy of the heights (and vertigo) of the opening tracks, pushed here to a truly extreme, tragic tenderness that never turns brutal, forever afflicted by a pale, queasy unease that demands compassion and empathy (for all its simplicity and naivety, which nonetheless gracefully manages to escape grandiosity). These songs need to stay on this album and in this order; together they form an unrepeatable, unsummarizable story of moods peculiar to American farmland, farming villages and fast-food joints. Unchaining them from that sequence inevitably strips them of meaning and oxygen (given the artistic shortfall already noted).

"Sixteen", high volumes, keyboards holding a reggae beat, then dance-music shouts over punk drumming; a lone trumpet evoking (amid blues as dazzling as the yellows of the sun) the heat (faintly Mexican) of California's city blocks at noon. Live, on songs like this, Stefani sweats buckets, thrashing about every which way: amid the ska, the punk, the dance, everyone's dancing and everyone is (if only briefly) in agreement. That state of night-and-day, sweaty-and-dry, grace-and-damnation runs through every moment of this track's performance, as it does through all the others.

"Sunday Morning" wants back the crown held by "The Climb" and the opening tracks; we're deep in saga-of-the-saga territory; the girl gives heart and soul to tell her state of mind. One must admire such sensitivity, especially given that, let's repeat, it turns the music into mere backdrop, much like the vocal groups of the 60s (and that's exactly what people like, and that's pop; hence the immediacy, and the non-music understood as an end in itself). The ending calls for another well-judged tempo shift, slightly rap-metal in flavor.

"Don't Speak" was the era's big single (for the record: it came out as the album's third single, and the video on MTV struck a chord, filming nothing less than that "homestead" America I've tried to describe). Like every track on the album, it comes as a surprise, each song following the last yet belonging, within the ongoing blend, to a different genre. Here we're in folk/post-grunge existentialist, nihilistic ballad territory. It might recall "Don't Cry", but that's fine.

"You Can Do It" echoes 70s dance music, once again catching the listener off guard (without ever boring them). Given the recklessness of this genre-hopping, it would have been too much to also render the feelings that define the rest of the album; so if one instinctively ascribes less character and value to this track, that's the only reason - which is simply a restatement of what's already been said: strip away the story of souls and friendship, and all that's left of this music is music for its own sake (prepackaged, standard-issue noise).

"World Go' Round", caught between Jamaica and the Western, finds No Doubt thematically fully themselves again; and we find ourselves on a rodeo fence on an ordinary weekday. That is, in the everyday life of these four guys and this girl, banded together with the aim of leaning on one another in a maternal sort of way, buoyed by the wonder of their own thoroughly contextualized world. Thoroughly contextualized: does the widening out to Russia or Greece mean that these places are somehow a bit America too, or vice versa, or that they just enjoy feeling estranged, or what?

"End It On This" sounds as though No Doubt wrote it mostly for themselves, rather than (generously?) for any listener who might share similar feelings. A delicate ramble through the give-and-take of hearts and relationships among the five of them. "Tragic Kingdom" is the darkest, most apocalyptic song on the record. As the closing track, it feels like a hymn to the eve of the end of the world; that fragile, tiny world, uncontaminated except from within (by choice, then). The rhythm stirs anxiety, fear; Stefani hits highs she's never pushed this hard before. A metal guitar solo straight out of Iron Maiden.

No Doubt have a band history as long as a lifelong friendship. Formed in 1987 by ska-punk singer John Spence, the grief running through their existentialism doesn't, biographically speaking, stem from his suicide, but from something even deeper and more innate, like the landscape that filled their eyes as children. It filled them because, starting from their first album (No Doubt, 1992), they went on to arrive (Return Of Saturn, 2000; Rock Steady, 2001) at a world-music sound that, mixing rap, techno and reggae, tastes of nothing at all, having disowned (Stefani is now the partner of Bush's singer; the band a corporate entity like any other) everything that Tragic Kingdom stood for; having shut the door on the basement, left behind the cornfields and the dirt roads, the small feelings meant for no one grand. "All the children of the world are beautiful." The grown-ups, few. At most, No Doubt will have left (in their own neighborhoods) room for other children. And it's better this way - at least, in their own backyard, they haven't ruined anything, and in ours (Europe) they never really took hold.

In 2004 Gwen Stefani released Love, Music, Angel, Baby, followed two years later by The Sweet Escape.

Almost six years have passed since then: Gwen Stefani has devoted herself to family life, stayed as far as possible from the jet-set, and presumably given some thought to what escamotage she could use to step back into the spotlight without facing the inevitable pressure every popstar encounters when making a much-anticipated comeback. And what better idea than to put her old band back together, saving her old friends from obscurity and her own multimillion-dollar market value in case of failure, all in one move? One thing must be said in her favour, though: despite this slightly cowardly, unexpected move, Push And Shove really is the new album by all four members of No Doubt, with very little new to say and all their usual flaws, rather than a disguised Stefani solo record. And who knows, maybe this really is the role she feels most comfortable in.

Avoided like the plague, then, is any concession to disco rhythms or trendy r'n'b; instead we're back to the electrified, adolescent little rock sound of days gone by, well produced but with a saccharine, slightly awkward high-school-reunion vibe hanging over several tracks (especially "Gravity" and "Heaven"). The ska brashness of their early days is watered down, leaving just a little room for pseudo-reggae flavours (in the rather subdued first single "Settle Down", and in the soft "Sparkle"), territory already well explored in the past and which, only on the title track, the four try to clumsily color in, despite the help of a heavyweight behind the decks like Diplo, with splashes of dubstep (a touch that by now seems almost obligatory in recent mainstream productions). The little party manages to stay lively thanks to "Looking Hot" and "Undercover", two charming slices of propulsive pop that would have worked decently well on the B-side of "L.A.M.B." too, but it becomes spectacularly dull on the slower tracks (it's no longer the time for making out on the sofa). If your band is called No Doubt, you only get to make a "Don't Speak" (as manipulative as you like, but undeniably effective) once in a career, and indeed tracks like the hefty "One More Summer" and "Undone", steeped in that predictable Californian power-ballad rhetoric, don't even come close to its radio-friendly lightness. "Easy", had it been stripped down a bit more, could almost have passed for a Kylie Minogue ballad — and it would have been better for it.

A popstar who gives up her solo status to reform her old band: something halfway between the plot of a saccharine afternoon tv-movie and a vague snub to the pre-packaged record industry. Given the current results (not exactly memorable) and the past ones, though, one is left wondering, with some surprise, whether Gwen Stefani might not have done better, this time too, to follow her wallet rather than her heart.

Contributions by Stefano Fiori ("Push And Shove").

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