My Fey Article!
When I was a teenager I was kind of shocked that people could actually like things that fall into category of things made for adolescents. I could not believe anyone liked Britney Spears, N*SYNC etc. all in a non-ironic way. So I am kind of shocked that I now like someone who was making teen music in Latin America when I was in my early teens. While I am generally a much easier critic on things that are in Spanish than in English, and I would not love it so much if she never grew up. (Nor if in her mid career she did not do a tribute album to a band that she loved as a teen and proves that she always loved the dark side of pop.) But I am getting ahead of myself.

Maria Fernanda Blasquez Gil, professionally known as Fey burst onto the pop scene with the single Media Naranja. The song is typical teen true love. If I was not for the fact that I learned that “Orange half” in Spanish is idiomatic of true love I would be less impressed. If the no budget video was not so brilliant I would not want to return to it. Sure it is dated, the dancing is goofy, but now many songs about fantasy teen romance actually present their subjects as a fantasy? The follow up videos did not have that kind of subversive, but because it was sincere. It is okay. The most successful of these was Azucar Amargo, a signature song, that continues to be requested whenever she performs. I now know that the arm movement part is continued in this day. It is a break up song that does let the guy who has been slowly breaking her hart off. Yet it is not bitter (despite the title which translates to “bitter sugar”). It is healthy coming from a place of pain, Fey jokes around about how she has this natural love filled persona and her most famous song is about realizing that her boyfriend is bad for her. It is easy to over look that she is unique. She did the clean cut teen thing in a way that was neither teasing sex kitten nor sexless. And yet it is pop- who else does that.

All this healthy well adjusted stuff would not be so interesting if she did not grow up. Her third album was pressured by the record company while she was exhausted. It tries to be all things to all people, and Fey has said she no longer relates to it. Some of the songs like Diselo con flores are pure cheese, trying to say something sweet and just coming up empty. However the opening single was a cover of the Laura Flores’s song Ni tu ni nadie (not to be confused with the Alaska y Dinarama song of the same name) which both improves the original and shows the darkness that Azucar Amargo kept at bay. Nothing you or anyone else does or says can get this painful thought out of my head.

After this she finally got some time off and it was unclear whether she would return. There tabloid speculation that she was encouraged to take two years off her age to appeal to the teen scene. She also may have been secretly married to her produce, Mauri Stern (whether the marriage was official or not they were a couple) and there were rumors that they adopted a child. By the time she returned to the scene with Vertigo her marriage was ending and her image had changed completely.

Commercially Vertigo was a failure. Many reporters covering her subsequent albums forget that it came out at all. It also developed a cultish following that makes it the high water mark of her career . Also if you try to buy it off of amazon you get very inflated prices which is surprising as it is only seven years old. Fey intended it as a potential crossover and recorded everything in Spanish and English. It was also the first album that had songs she wrote on it. I have a vague feeling that I heard the first (and only) single from that album, On the other side / Sé lo que vendrá. Even if I never did, I love the song, and video. It is like a more humanistic version of The Matrix (I wonder what that plot would be like). It is about change, accepting it despite the anxiety it brings.

As this should indicate the album is pretty dark. I bet the record company freak out when the singer made famous by a pop song about perfect teen love wrote “Romeo, Juliet muertos estan bien” (literally Romeo and Juliet are good dead, though the English version is “Romeo, Juliet should have never met.”) There are some fan videos of this out there; one is definitely cutters’ porn. I cannot watch it, though I love that it has this kind of afterlife. Unfortunately this afterlife coincided with the spread of easily pirated music so it was not something anyone made a lot of money off of.

Fey got dropped by her first record label after this. She shopped around and got picked up by another, and strangely enough put out a tribute album to the band that got all fan girly as a teen. Anyone who missed Vertigo would be surprised by this. While Mecano was very pop they did a lot of songs about drugs, partying until excess, getting bored in committed relationships. They also did the first pop song in Spanish about homosexuality. It is called “Mujer contra Mujer” and I am reluctant to complement them on it as the band had a female singer (Ana Torroja) who always sung in a high voice and had many songs about picking up girls. I suspect the songwriting hermanos Cano have a thing about thinking of two women going at it. Well they admit the political angle of it. I love this album in a way that is not worth rationalizing as I do not really like Mecano. (Maybe I am too late for their arrangements to be appropriate to me. I like Ana Torroja’s voice better after it got damaged and moved to a solo career.)

This was a pretty provocative and risky move. It got some attention had some hit singles, help redefine her image, but it seemed like a stunt and did nothing to promote her using her own material. I don’t know what the circumstances of recording the follow up album, Faltan Lunas were like, but the release was not happy. Not only was her second marriage ending, there were some strange miscommunications between artist and management about the release date and what was actually going to be on the album. No real promotion can go on while this happens, which is a shame as the album is pretty good. Lots of slow electronic based song. Interestingly several of the songs had been recorded in different languages prior to her recording and some fans have made a compilation of them. “Como un angel” has previously been recorded in Finnish, Polish, and two sets of lyrics in English.

Over the next few years Fey took time off. Her mother died, and there were other complications in her personal life. She decided to come back and changed management and signed to an independent label with distribution through a major one. The announced project would be very electronic based retro future. Late last year single “Cicatrices” got released from her web site. It was a surprising, has an interesting structure. The album Dulce Tentacion, like Vertigo has an English language versionSweet Temptation and the title comes from the actual first single, Lentamente / Let Me Show You.

I have not gotten this album yet. To be honest the tracks thus far feel hit or miss. It might change when I am more familiar with it. But I love that she is back. I love that she is changing, and not necessarily in the Madonna-constantly-needing-a-new-persona kind of way, but an actual growing up. She is private without being cryptic, gets that dance music is sad. I feel glad by her existence and want to follow her further.