Kelly Clarkson Fans Fight Clive Davis With Rudimentary Understanding Of Editing Software

kater | February 19, 2008 2:00 am
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In light of what they see as Clive Davis’s neglect toward the promotion of Kelly Clarkson’s My December, the Kelly Clarkson Express–a group that sounds like it should serve as a dual-purpose fan club for the first American Idol and trains–has put together a video for the song “How I Feel,” which its members think should be the next single. This is but one facet of the How I Feel Project, a campaign to get the song played on the radio, or maybe very quietly in the background of an MTV show. While strong fan support is essential when you’re a pop star being ignored by one of the world’s most powerful music bigwigs, that devotion can come with a price–and in this case, that price is a well-intentioned but sadly incompetent tribute video.

Videos consisting solely of live performance and publicity clips are on thin ice to begin with, as they basically have only editing to save them from total banality. And unfortunately, it seems that nobody at KC Express HQ read the Windows Media Maker help guide. There are a few meek dissolves toward the beginning of the video, but other than that the clip is an uninspired series of nondescript clips (Kelly posing for a photo shoot, doing a touchdown dance, etc.), most of which are inexplicably in black and white. Not even the classic tribute video sepia treatment! It’s disheartening, to say the least.

All that being said, this is not by any means an assault on the Kelly Clarkson Express, who obviously have their hearts in the right place, but simply lack the resources to edit together a decent video. The real culprit in this tragedy is Clive Davis and his refusal to promote a song with as much potential as “How I Feel.” While My December may not have been the hit machine that Davis was hoping for, he could have, at the very least, given this song a try on the radio. It’s not stop-you-dead-in-your-tracks pop gold like “Since U Been Gone”–so few things are, really–but it’s a better-than-decent song, and it’s got something that so many other songs of its ilk lack: lyrics.

Obviously, most pop songs have articulations that form words, but “How I Feel” is like a good old-fashioned song where the singer actually says something of personal importance to him or her. I like that grating Colbie Caillat song as much as the next sucker, but the lyrics–despite their ostensibly very personal nature–are still high-sheen and empty. Not that Kelly Clarkson is all of a sudden Joni Mitchell these days, but there’s certainly a heftier element to “How I Feel,” and that comes in part from its less conventional, more specific lyrics. It’s a solid pop song with just the slightest hint of integrity, and it’s a real shame that its marketing has been left to enthusiastic but ultimately powerless fan clubs.

Maybe the solution here is a call to the tribute-video community, who tend to be unfailingly strange, yet occasionally successful in their music video adventures. After all, look what they did for “Breakaway.”