Live Reviews

Delusions of grandeur

Cheyenne at Axis, August 21, 2006

By AUDREY GRAYSON | August 24, 2006

Cheyenne

Cheyenne’s platinum blonde hair takes on a fluorescent green hue in the stage lights, and after a boom-chicka-boom strut upstage, she immediately breaks into the first song from her latest album, I Want To. Her vocals are strong and loud, and as she strums her barely-audible guitar she puts on an over-dramatic expression of exertion that looks as rehearsed as her dance moves. You can almost picture her practicing both the pained expression — eyes closed, mouth pursed, head tilted back — and the pole-dance moves in front of her bedroom mirror before she goes to sleep at night. She’s put together, that’s for sure, but it’s going to take more than her own constant reassurances that she’s more than a flash-in-the-pan pop star to make the medicine go down.

“My goal is to sound as close to the record as possible,” Cheyenne says three songs into her set at Axis, with the same pained look on her face and a voice that sounds half like a defendant taking the stand and half like a 16-year-old girl whining to her parents for more money to spend at the mall.

Special attention must be paid to the irony of such a statement from this adorable, blonde, MTV-groomed 16-year-old pop star — one who’s consistently voicing her aversion to “miscategorization” as yet another, well, MTV-groomed pop star. Here’s Cheyenne denying her position as another pop-princess and defending her music as “the real deal” based on the over-rehearsed coherence of her live performance.

Indeed, her banter in between songs was less friendly audience-interaction, and more defensive reminders to the crowd that she wrote at least some her own songs and never, ever lip synchs during her performances. But take into account that Cheyenne is preaching to a choir of adoring middle-school-aged fans whose musical tastes might not be developed enough to fault her for being a studio-manufactured pop-princess, and her constant reminders that she herself wrote songs such as “Full Circle” in response to traumatic real-life experiences which actually occurred at some point during the course of her young life seem at first pathetic, and then, shortly after, hysterical.

It’s difficult to pin-point what was most disconcerting about Cheyenne’s self-proclaimed “rock show.” Was it her runway strut? Fingers rarely straying beyond the first three frets necessary for producing the basic major and minor chords on her electric/acoustic guitar, all the while maintaining a straight face as she exalts herself as a legitimate “rocker?” Or the fact that her mother and co-manager, Shannon Kimball —who has vehemently denied that the promise of money and fame motivated her to quit her job as an ad-executive in order to manage Cheyenne’s career — took the time to snap numerous photos with young Cheyenne fans during the sets of the fellow Texas-based indie-rock opening band, Carousel Shy, and singer-songwriter Kevin Eskowitz. This should be the point where fans stop pointing to the fact that Cheyenne actually wrote and co-wrote some of the 12 songs on her latest album as evidence of her raw rock talent, and start admitting that this — whatever this is — can only be approximated to stadium-rock at best, and, at worst, pop-dross that doesn’t require back-up dancers when performed live and in-concert.

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