Leona Lewis Wants a Cuddle ... But Not The Way You Want To
Posted Tuesday 05/27/2008 12:00 AM in
Guide
by
Rob Tannenbaum
 Click to see more photos of Leona |
Lewis is hugging a bouquet of roses—pink, her favorite color. She’s in the midst of a visit to Tokyo, and everyone who interviews her brings an offering, ranging from flowers to a package of tofu.
The DJ for “Cosmo Pops Best 10,” a Saturday-afternoon chart show, announces a Madonna song at No. 3, Mariah Carey at No. 2 and then Lewis’s first single, “Bleeding Love,” at No. 1. This is no big deal. If there are countries where “Bleeding Love” isn’t at No. 1 this May afternoon, they are not countries you could find on a map. Like Starbucks, Lewis is everywhere around the globe.
She tells the DJ that her trip to Tokyo has been lovely. Outside a picture window, in the concrete courtyard of a newly constructed shopping pavilion, fans—overwhelmingly female—press six deep to watch her, waving signs. LEONA U ARE BEAUTIFUL. LUV.
Lewis is an ample 23-year-old, taller than most Tokyo women, especially when she’s wearing five-inch heels, which she does often. Her lightened hair is kept at a statuesque volume, tended by a stylist in her traveling party. Her nails are a glossy pink, like the finish on a vintage Cadillac; her bronzer and mascara are generously deployed. She looks like someone who expects, at any moment, to be summoned to a royal palace.
The DJ, switching to English, says, “In Japan, people don’t understand the language, and your song is still getting to No. 1.” Lewis offers humble thanks in awkward Japanese, and the fans outside demonstrate their delight by wriggling. The DJ says to Lewis, “You really look like a fairy to me.”
“A fairy?” Lewis asks warily. “I’m taller than most of your men, I’m a glamorous international superstar, I’ve got an armful of flowers and some tofu back in my hotel room, and I remind you of a bloody fairy? Are you daft?”
Well, not really. What Lewis actually says is, “Ooh, lovely.”
Remember that scene in Titanic where the ship has hit an iceberg and the captain is struggling to right the behemoth, but it’s clearly about to capsize? That’s the music business in 2008.
The executives who launched Leona Lewis’s career likened her to cannon-voiced superstars such as Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey; those comparisons, being reported, gained credence and a self-propelled momentum, leading to headlines like “Leona Lewis: The Next Mariah Carey?” The music business has always relied on a few blockbusters to carry profits against the bulk of records that don’t sell; Houston and Carey each have recorded two albums that sold more than 10 million copies in the U.S. But they debuted in 1985 and 1990, respectively. Leona Lewis is an experiment: If all the right elements align, can a label still turn a nobody into a household name? Can a blockbuster still be constructed in the P2P era? How long before the ship deck dips below water?
Lewis’s likeability is already proven. In 2006, she won season three of The X Factor, the British singing competition cocreated by American Idol judge Simon Cowell. Previously, the show’s mainly female voters had supported hunky male contestants who didn’t amount to much. You likely haven’t heard Chico Slimani’s “It’s Chico Time”—and this is more Chico’s loss than yours. “I started to question how much longer we should be doing The X Factor,” Cowell says, “if we couldn’t find someone who could be a star all over the world.”
On Lewis’s third live appearance on the show he realized “she’s better than good, this girl’s incredible.” And viewers found Lewis plucky and sympathetic, the ideal of modern England: She was the mixed-race daughter of working-class parents, still had an East London accent (for “drama,” hear “drah-murr”) and had been dating the same neighborhood boy since she was 17.
