“I’m not a Cher fan”: why Cher desperately wanted to be like the Eagles
It must be frustrating as an artist that the song assigned as your calling card is relatively out of your control. Would Cher, an artist who blazed socially conscious trails with her music in the 1970s and 1980s, have chosen ‘Believe’ as the song that most contemporary fans associate her with?
Compared to a band like the Eagles who, for all of the turbulence their career brought amidst mediocre song releases and inter-band fighting, are still indelibly connected to their seven-minute epic ‘Hotel California’.
But beneath her rise to iconic diva status and proud representation of celebrity opulence lies an artist with an interesting and nuanced sense of artistic vision. After all, Cher is a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee and has remained creatively interesting throughout the ever-changing tide of artistic decades.
And so beneath that lies the heart of a true artist some people quite often overlook. While David Bowie became the figurehead of a movement that celebrated androgyny and the blurring of gender normative lines, Cher was quietly testing the looseness of the boundaries. In her major hit, ‘I Got You Babe’ with partner Sonny Bono, she plays around with the tonal range of her voice, showcasing the contralto pitch she would use to signature effect in her solo career.
Three decades later, Cher is still pioneering vocal experimentation. Perhaps her most recognisable track, ‘Believe,’ is an unbridled flirtation with the world of autotune. Highlighting autotune as a means of sonic experimentation, as opposed to a vocal tip-ex used to hide performance blemishes, Cher widened the goalposts for contemporary artists like Kid Cudi, who would later toy with autotune to exciting effect.
It’s the sort of artistic innovation that is more often appreciated retrospectively instead of instantly. So while Cher’s use of autotune on ‘Believe’ turns heads in shock, Don Felder’s two-minute solo on ‘Hotel California’ turns heads in instant gratification, for fans in 1976 were accustomed to lengthy solos and were, in turn, salivating for the next big facemelter.
And it’s a cultural perception of artistic innovation that has bled into Cher’s own analysis of herself. During a 2017 interview with Billboard, she proclaimed, “I’m not a Cher fan.” She added, “I just don’t think my aesthetic taste lies in her direction.”
She later added that of all her songs, the more structurally conventional pop ballad ‘If I Could Turn Back Time’ gave her the most comfort. “That was OK”, she said, before claiming, “by that time, I figured out I wasn’t going to ever be the Eagles.”
It was a song that gave her credence to don a leather jacket, plug in an axe-shaped guitar and let it rip. But what seemed lost on Cher was that, to everyone else, it was OK she wasn’t the Eagles. In fact, no one wanted her to be the Eagles. Right from 1965 with ‘I Got You Babe’ until 1998 with ‘Believe’, she was an artist at her enigmatic best when sprinkling the unexpected into conventional pop.
