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Wife had a '90s mix playing in the house and Jewel popped into the rotation. Jewel is a cultural artifact of a nation we can't go back to, which is an implicitly white nation with a well oiled, content creating machine
MTV changed music due to visuals in the '80s, but it took a decade to figure it out perfectly. By '88 they had this down, but Milli Vanilli killed the fakery. They had to wait for autotune and the Scandinavian song teams to get that train hooked up again. Visuals still mattered
Jewel was a 20yo nobody plucked by the music industry and rolled out as the grunge, alternative and proto-SWPL crowd was ascending. She sang pop folk songs. Why such a hit? When MTV started rotating in "Save Your Soul" as a video at 6am, men noticed.
"No it's not Joan Osborne, it's this hot girl named Jewel." Osborne's "One of Us" song went big months earlier. Jewel's album was released before Osborne's but the industry was figuring out what product would work best for the non-Lilith Fair crowd. Had to have broader appeal.
Jewel was so hot American men didn't even notice she missed the start of the track for her Super Bowl appearance
What was her story? She was "San Diego's own" or lived in her car or homeless or well, it changed over time. The industry wanted people to see a 22yo blonde with the body of a Greek statue but think her folksy music was due to street living. Authenticity! She isn't a product!
They gave her a power publisher book deal for a poetry book which had laugh out loud entries like "Junkie" - "momma always said I'd grow up to be one". I'm going from memory, but that's the poem.
Her bio? Growing up in rural Alaska with a musical family explained everything. It was true + quite the authentic experience. The problem is our media cultural gatekeepers do not consider that valid, authentic or cool. Living in your car is cool. That's what they wanted to sell.
The industry could not do this now. Jewel as is would be a Nashville product. New Jewel would be mixed race or non-white. Looks wouldn't matter. LGBT. Her childhood wouldn't matter, but if they did concoct a story as fluid as the original Jewel tale, it would fall apart quickly.
The New Jewel story to sell would be the story of her non-white, LGBT lived experience. It would provide shielding when the inevitable background check would show they have been carefully developed by the industry with all songs created in Scandinavia
