Believe in Her or Not, Cher Has Always Believed in Herself
Decades before the likes of Kim Kardashian, the iconic singer-actress born Cherilyn Sarkisian invented “famous just because.” But in 1999, she took her career to heights that were virtually beyond belief. And she hasn’t budged since.Believe in Her or Not, Cher Has Always Believed in Herself
Decades before the likes of Kim Kardashian, the iconic singer-actress born Cherilyn Sarkisian invented “famous just because.” But in 1999, she took her career to heights that were virtually beyond belief. And she hasn’t budged since.
Welcome to 1999 Music Week, a celebration of one of the most interesting, vivid, varied music years ever. Join us as we count down the best singles and albums of the year, remember the days of scrubs and the girls who wear Abercrombie & Fitch, and argue about which albums stood above the rest.
About three years ago, unexpectedly, a two-decade-old Dateline clip went viral. “Cher interviewed by Jane Pauley on a prime-time NBC news magazine” is not the likeliest BuzzFeed fodder, but when the website posted the video the headline could not contain its millennial enthusiasm: “This Cher Interview From 1996 Is Going Viral Because It’s Perfect AF.” In the video, which first took off in September 2016 after a user posted it to Facebook, Pauley asks Cher to clarify a previous comment that “a man is not a necessity, a man is a luxury.” Cher is more than happy to elaborate. “My mom said to me, ‘You know, sweetheart, one day you should settle down and marry a rich man,’” Cher recalls. “I said, ‘Mom, I am a rich man.’”
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The clip had defiantly pinged back from obscurity even though no one could quite explain why—just like Cher had herself, time and time again over the last half-century. “Her career goes up and down like the waves of the ocean,” her Tea With Mussolini director, Franco Zeffirelli, once said. Or, translated into Cher-speak, as she did when asked in 1999 to explain the cycles of her popularity, “When the moon is full and my ass is in Jupiter—I don’t know.”
Like the Beatles or the birth control pill, Cher’s fame has now been a fact of modern life for close to six decades. She has transgressed the laws of celebrity and hung around long enough to be forgiven; she has been overexposed only to return to the public eye at the precise moment she was most greatly missed. “I never think of the word comeback as a slap in the face,” she said in 2013. “It’s a challenge.”
In just the past few years, though, she has ascended to an even more rarefied level of the celebrity stratosphere; unlike the president, who is the most common target of ridicule on her popular Twitter account, Cher’s approval rating seems to be at an all-time high. Last December, in Washington, D.C., she was awarded a prestigious Kennedy Center Honor alongside such cultural luminaries as Philip Glass, Reba McEntire, and Lin-Manuel Miranda. That summer she made a long-awaited return to the big screen in the hit Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, a movie that was really just an hour-and-a-half lead-up to her extended third-act cameo. (In the sold-out theater where I saw it, the entire audience cheered when Cher appeared onscreen.) Last September she released an inspired album of ABBA covers—which debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard album charts and had the highest-ever first-week sales of any Cher album released in the U.S.—and then mounted a successful tour to promote it. She is tantalizingly close to an EGOT, missing only the last letter, though earlier this year she pretty much got it on a technicality, given that Stephanie J. Block won the 2019 Best Actress in a Musical Tony for playing—who else?—Cher.
Cher’s achievements are staggering, singular. She is the only artist in recording history to have a no. 1 single on a Billboard chart in six consecutive decades, from the 1960s to the 2010s. In 1999, when she was 52 years old and “Believe” topped the charts, she became the oldest female artist ever to have the no. 1 song on the Billboard chart, a distinction she still holds 20 years later. She has, according to her longtime costume designer, Bob Mackie—who should know—“the most beautiful armpits in the world.”
I never think of the word comeback as a slap in the face. It’s a challenge.Cher
I would like to add another distinction to this list. I believe that Cher, though born in 1946, was the first millennial.
Part of the reason I think Cher is so beloved right now—especially for people whose lived memory of Cher begins just 20 years ago, with “Believe”—is that even her past makes sense through a modern cultural lens. She was famous for being famous decades before anybody knew what a Kardashian was. She has fluidly toyed with gender norms and sexual mores until they’ve looked stiflingly passé, and she has always been brazen about her hustle. She is very good at using emoji. And above all things, she evinces an odd combination of over-the-top artifice and gritty authenticity. Of course she’s had work done. But, as she so characteristically put it in an interview montage that aired right before her Kennedy Center Honor, “If I wanna put my tits on my back, that’s nobody’s business but my own.”
Cherilyn Sarkisian was born in 1946, about 10 miles from the Mexican border, in the modest Southern California town of El Centro. Her parents divorced when she was less than a year old, and she doesn’t recall meeting her father, an Armenian American truck driver, until she was 11. Her mother, an aspiring actress who had taken the name Georgia Holt, briefly placed Cherilyn in a Catholic orphanage to save up money to take care of her, since affordable day care for working mothers was then even rarer than it is now. “She was completely on her own and went to work in this all-night diner for a dollar a night plus tips,” Cher has said. “She made this arrangement for the nuns to take care of me.”
A few years later, reunited with Cher, Holt remarried and gave birth to a girl named Georganne. Like her mother, Georganne had blond hair and light eyes. While everyone else in her family looked like Sandra Dee, Cher recalls that she “was always the dark one. Dark hair, dark eyes, dark skin.” In her 1998 memoir The First Time, she recalls that her looks were a source of insecurity amid the squeaky-clean, whitewashed stereotypes of the 1950s. “It wasn’t just that the blondes were the pretty ones,” she wrote. “They were also the good ones. Women with black hair like mine were either evil queens or witches in all the Disney movies. In the real films they were always the ones who lost the man and got their just desserts in the end.” This was Cher’s first understanding of herself as an outsider, an identity she’d never quite shake, but one she’d eventually turn into a unique strength.
She was a dreamy, somewhat eccentric kid, at turns exuberant and then brooding. In some ways, she was a tomboy: Her invisible friends “Sam and Pete” were, like her absent father, gruff truck drivers (an inspired chapter title in her autobiography: “Cher, Why Do Your Little Playmates Have Stubble?”). Still, she says, her family “rewarded that kind of independent behavior. They loved an individualist.” Little did they know.
Welcome to 1999 Music Week
Join us as we travel back 20 years to explore a fascinating time in pop music
In fourth grade, it was “Sharing Day” at Cher’s school. “I was going to share something nice,” she writes in The First Time, “but as one kid after another got up and told some boring-ass story, it got to be too much for me. I couldn’t bear all the Leave It to Beaver crap. When I got up to the room to share, this is what I shared: ‘You guys are stupid, this school is stupid, and this sharing bullshit is stupid, so I’m going home.’ And I walked home, in the middle of the school day.”
She liked singing well enough, but—ever ahead of her time—Cherilyn really just wanted to be a celebrity. “I decided that I just wanted to be famous—maybe not with a specific talent, like Judy Garland or Dorothy McGuire, but as a personality,” she writes. “Like Merv Griffin or Dinah Shore. Television seemed like a place where you could be famous just by being friendly.” Little did she know.
The first time Cher saw Sonny Bono, in Aldo’s Coffee Shop in Los Angeles, she thought, “That’s the strangest man I’ve ever seen in my life.” She meant it as a compliment. At 16, Cher was even more sick of everybody else’s “Leave It to Beaver crap.” She craved the strange. “It wasn’t quite a crush yet,” she writes of the aspiring songwriter with a Caesar-meets-the-Beatles haircut and a uniform of buckskin pants. “It was more like hero worship.” They started hanging out, platonically at first. Eventually, Cher became her version of enamored: “I thought the sun rose and fell on his ass.”
There are parts of Sonny and Cher’s relationship that, viewed through a modern lens, might scan as “troubling.” She was a 16-year-old high school dropout when they met, while Sonny was 27 and separated though not yet divorced from his first wife, with whom he had a 4-year-old daughter. Sonny didn’t like it when Cher swore, and he was always trying to stifle her impulses to defy authority—even when the authority was someone who had it coming to him, like Sonny’s recording studio boss Phil Spector. (“When he’d start teasing, I’d come right back at him,” Cher writes of her first meetings with Spector. “Who was this skinny runt to get smart with me? I didn’t work for him; I didn’t give a shit what he thought about me!”)
But Sonny also awakened something in her. He pushed her to conquer the fears that had been inhibiting her—her fear of flying, her fear of singing backup for Spector’s recordings (her voice is somewhere in the mix of such pop landmarks as “Be My Baby” and “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling”), and—gradually, eventually—her stage fright. “If you look at any of the footage of our early gigs,” she writes, “you’ll see me looking at Son—almost never the audience. I would sing to the people through him.”
In early May 2019—about 57 years after she first met Sonny Bono—I caught the Brooklyn stop on Cher’s Here We Go Again Tour, at the Barclays Center. I took my friend James, who has made multiple pilgrimages to the Moonstruck house in Brooklyn Heights and who, when I asked him at the last minute if he would like to accompany me to a Cher concert the following night, sent me a GIF of Loretta Castorini crying at the opera as a way of saying yes. Several days later, when the ever-in-demand Cher surprise-performed a shorter version of the same show at the camp-inspired 2019 Met Gala, I texted James, “It’s almost like we were at the Met Gala.”
Cher’s set was broken into different eras, complete with their own costumes, sets, and wigs. There was a firework-studded ABBA segment, an ’80s-rocker segment aboard a replica of the astoundingly phallic boat from the “If I Could Turn Back Time” video, and a vaguely Eastern-spiritual segment during which a spangly, veiled Cher rode out on an animatronic elephant that prompted James to lean over and say to me, “I can’t tell if this is supposed to be all of the cultures or none of the cultures.”
But the most emotional part of the night arrived when the opening strains of “I Got You Babe” echoed throughout the arena, and Cher—in a hot-pink fur jacket and glittery bell-bottoms—sang a duet with her late sparring partner, whose face appeared on a large screen next to her on the stage. Like the final time they’d performed the song together, on David Letterman’s show in 1987, it was uncharacteristically sentimental and unexpectedly moving. Though Sonny and Cher often traded barbs in the press after their 1975 divorce, Cher’s memory of her ex-husband has, understandably, softened since his tragic 1998 death in a skiing accident. Almost a year before “Believe” was released, Cher gave a tender, memorable eulogy at Sonny’s nationally televised funeral. There were people who criticized her, of course, and accused her of making it all about herself (according to Cher biographer Mark Bego, Bono’s widow Mary seemed fine with everything until Cher told People magazine “that she had made peace with Sonny [posthumously] via famed psychic James Van Praagh”). But Cher never played by anyone else’s rules—why would anything be different in the way she grieved?
At Barclays, the somber mood was fleeting. Cher disappeared for another costume change, while the Jumbotrons treated us to a montage of some of her most memorable movie lines—along with footage of her performing in a leather jacket, black pompadour wig, and a curled lip sneer. As the opening strains of “Heartbreak Hotel” rang out, several large signs behind her announced the arrival of her latest alter ego: “CHELVIS.”
In fifth grade, back in those childhood days before her self-consciousness had fully developed, Cher “almost single-handedly” put on a grade-school production of Oklahoma! Her voice was already low, so she sang the Gordon MacRae songs and the Shirley Jones songs. Mostly because the fifth-grade boys wouldn’t. “I got four or five girls together, but I did the direction and the choreography, and I played all the boys’ parts,” she explained. “In grammar school you just can’t get the boys to do anything that’s the least bit risky.”
Many years later, in a part of that Jane Pauley interview that didn’t go viral, Cher would espouse a similar philosophy about adult men. “I like men,” she said. “I feel badly for them in some ways. Well, I can wear pants and a dress. And it goes all the way in. Men have a harder time jumping from soft side to hard side.” Whether dressed as Cleopatra or “Chelvis,” Cher has always presented androgyny as a source of power. It’s part of the reason she’s always had such a devoted queer following. (She was also one of the earliest mainstream proponents of drag culture. In 1980, when she performed at Caesars Palace, she incorporated in her act two drag queens who were impersonating Diana Ross and Bette Midler. “People weren’t used to drag queens in those days, and they actually thought they were seeing Diana Ross, Bette Midler, and Cher on stage together,” she writes. Miraculously, there is footage.) Across her recording career, in both her public image and the unique timbre of her voice, Cher would time and again wield this kind of gender fluidity as a superpower.
Not at first, though, and especially not in Phil Spector’s studio, where boys would be boys and girls would be girls to a stifling degree. “I didn’t know where I fit in, even as I was doing backup,” she later wrote. “The girls sang too high, and the boys sang too low, and I was just screwed somewhere in the middle.” Legend has it that Cher’s first solo single—the Beatlemania novelty ditty “Ringo, I Love You”—flopped because radio programmers thought she was a man singing a gay love song. But it was also a trifle, thrown together by Spector and released under the almost parodically American moniker “Bonnie Jo Mason,” because Spector thought Cherilyn’s given name was uncommercially exotic. (Decades later, Cher would use the name “Bonnie Jo Mason” once again, when she was credited for her surprise appearance on the Wu-Tang Clan’s mysterious 2014 album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin. To my knowledge, Cher is the only recording artist whose career spans from the Wall of Sound up to the 36 Chambers.)
When she formed a duo with Sonny, though, she began to ease into herself. They briefly tried to make a go of it as “Caesar & Cleo” (they had the hair for it, respectively) but everything clicked once they dropped the schtick and just became “Sonny & Cher.” At least to the establishment, they cut an odd pair: They both dressed alike, and Cher was taller and more physically imposing than her husband. Her voice, too, was lower, huskier (and, frequently, more in tune) than his. Still, the kids loved them. Says Cher, “We got famous in about a minute and a half.”
Even her early solo singles had the feel of duets, as if she were staging a conversation between different parts of herself. Cher’s first solo hit was a 1965 cover of Bob Dylan’s “All I Really Want to Do” (which, on the charts, ended up competing with, and beating, the Byrds’ contemporaneous version). When it came out, Cher recalls, “no one believed it was just me, because I did both the high part and the low part at the beginning of each verse.” I love Cher’s Dylan interpretation, all swaggering and nasal. While the song was a hit, she ran into Dylan when he was coming out of a freight elevator. He told Cher he liked what she’d done with his song. In that moment she thought she might float away.
The big success of that year, of course, was “I Got You Babe,” a plucky, oddly stirring duet for the ages. Again, Cher went low while Sonny went high, but in a larger sense they both ascended together. In the U.K., “I Got You Babe” knocked the Beatles’ “Help!” out of the no. 1 spot. Sorry, Ringo.
And then, just as quickly, the beat went on without them. Sonny and Cher weren’t edgy enough to keep up with the counterculture once it really became the counterculture. (Their rise coincided with “the heavy-foreplay period of the sexual revolution,” as the writer Stephanie Brush has put it.) For all their wacky, androgynous clothing, they were still a happily married couple preaching monogamy in the time of free love—and it didn’t exactly help their image when, in 1968, Sonny filmed a half-hour anti-marijauna PSA that warned of the dangers of becoming a “nonfunctioning weedhead.” Cher, on the other hand, may have walked out of an early Velvet Underground gig in disgust (“It will replace nothing,” she told a reporter of their set, “except maybe suicide”), but she was on the whole more open to the emerging current of mind-expanding rock music than her husband was. “I loved the new sound of Led Zeppelin, Eric Clapton, the electric-guitar oriented bands,” she writes in The First Time. “Left to myself, I would have changed with the times because the music really turned me on. But Son didn’t like it—and that was that.”
It’s not a terribly long fall from there down to a subsequent chapter in the memoir titled, “Son, How Much Do We Owe the IRS?” By 1970 Sonny and Cher were new parents who had made the classic overnight-superstar mistake of not paying enough taxes. And so they went to make a quick buck on the nightclub circuit, doubling down so completely on their uncoolness that they even spent a month in Vegas opening for Pat Boone. (For Cher, it would be just the first of many shameless shills, from Equal sweetener to exercise videos to those infamous infomercials.)
As she does, Cher got bored in such a repetitive routine. “So instead of just singing our songs,” she recalls, “and Son talking about how glad we were to be there (which I thought was such bullshit) we began joking around with each other.” Cher was usually the one with the dry one-liner, often at Sonny’s expense. She was a natural, and the cultivation of her onstage bite was an early sign of liberation from Sonny. “This kind of banter was perfect for me,” she writes. “I did it all the time before Son and I started living together because Son hated what he said was my ‘smart mouth.’ He thought it was disrespectful, so I’d kept it dormant for six years.” But of course, coarse language was always a part of her expressive imagination; she was still, after all these years, the little girl who talked to invisible truck drivers.
During one such hotel-ballroom gig, a CBS executive happened to be in the audience. By the summer of 1971, Sonny and Cher had taken their lounge act to a bigger and even more lucrative stage: national TV. The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour was a monocultural phenomenon, pulling in the kinds of ratings that network television is likely never to see again. Thirty million people tuned in each week during its initial four-season run to see them sing, bicker, and ham it up in wacky variety show skits. The Comedy Hour was how Cher finally got over her stage fright and developed her chops as a character actress. Laverne, her leopard-print-clad housewife, is nothing if not a proto–Kristen Wiig character.
The initial run of the Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour came to an end in March 1974, shortly after Cher filed for divorce. Cher briefly struck out on her own to host a solo variety show, but she immediately found the network censors to be more watchful than they were when she was married to Sonny. “It was the strangest thing,” she writes. “When I was married and doing the Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour, I could get away with all kinds of double entendre stuff, and nobody took it seriously. But after my divorce, all that changed.” When she was single or casually dating, Cher always seemed to pose more of a threat to the status quo than she did when she was Sonny’s wife. Especially after the end of her brief marriage to Gregg Allman in 1975, the tabloids obsessed over her romantic life and her pattern of dating younger men, like Val Kilmer, Richie Sambora, or Rob Camilletti, a onetime bagel baker who was 18 years younger than Cher and who earned the enduring tabloid nickname “Bagel Boy.”
The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour, though, was Cher’s introduction to the man who’s been in her life the longest: costume designer Bob Mackie. They were kindred spirits. He shared her sense of the flamboyantly absurd, but he also understood Cher’s ambitions to transcend such mortal concerns as trends, good taste, and classical femininity. “When we design costumes for her,” Mackie once said, “it has nothing to do with fashion. It has nothing to do with anything but the fact that we are attempting to present to the world this … creature in her own right.”
At no point did that creature turn more heads than when Mackie dressed her for the 1985 Oscars.
A bit of context is needed here, to fully appreciate what I like to think of as Cher’s fuck-you dress.
She had spent the first part of the ’80s trying to be taken seriously as an actress. In the wake of her vampy variety show, her brief and disastrous marriage to Allman, and her stint as a scantily clad disco goddess, this was a steep mountain to scale. Robert Altman was the first director to take a chance, when he cast her in the Broadway and then the movie version of Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. That film remains an underrated gem in the Altman canon, and Cher shows impressive range as a scrappy but vulnerable breast cancer survivor. But Jimmy Dean wasn’t seen by nearly enough people to rebrand Cher as a movie star.
When the trailer for her first high-profile movie, Mike Nichols’s 1983 drama Silkwood, ran before a Tom Cruise flick, the audience in one Westwood theater laughed when her name came up in the credits. Little did they know that Cher was in the back, with her sister Georganne and her manager. Georganne cried. The manager cried. Cher “bit the inside of [her] cheek” and “detached myself from the laughter.” On the inside, she says, she “cracked and broke into a million pieces,” but she wasn’t about to show it. She still had work to do.
Silkwood shut the critics up and garnered Cher her first Academy Award nomination, for Best Supporting Actress. In the movie she plays Dolly Pelliker, a nuclear plant worker turned activist, just like her roommate Karen Silkwood, played by Meryl Streep. On the strength of it, she was cast in Mask, Peter Bogdanovich’s 1985 movie about Rocky Dennis, a teen boy with craniodiaphyseal dysplasia, a rare disease that distorted his face. Cher played Rusty, Rocky’s biker-chick, drug-addicted single mom, with a lived-in grit and pathos. Bogdanovich and Cher had already butted heads a decade earlier, when he’d written a Time magazine cover story on her that Cher found unflattering. But their disagreements on the set of Mask were so vicious that Bogdanovich seems freshly out of shape about them to this day. In March, in a lengthy interview with Vulture, Bogdanovich named Cher as the most difficult actor he’d ever worked with. “Well, she didn’t trust anybody, particularly men,” he said. “She doesn’t like men. That’s why she’s named Cher: She dropped her father’s name. Sarkisian, it is. She can’t act. She won Best Actress at Cannes because I shot her very well.”
He went on, for some reason: “I didn’t like her. She was always looking like someone was cheating her. I came to the set one day; I said, ‘You depress me, you’re always so down and acting like somebody’s stealing from you or something.’ But finally, after about seven weeks of this, we started getting to like each other. … And we did end up liking each other and then when I sued the studio, she sided with the studio, of course. That was that.”
She did win Best Actress at Cannes and—despite what Bogdanovich claims—her performance garnered enough critical acclaim that she seemed to be a shoo-in for a second consecutive Oscar nomination. But then, when the nominations came out, Cher was snubbed. “The reasons people gave [in the press] had nothing to do with my acting,” she writes in The First Time. “They said I wasn’t ‘serious’ enough, or I didn’t have a last name or that I dated young men and I didn’t dress like ‘a serious actress.’”
In retrospect, though, it’s possible that Bogdanovich might have thwarted the hopes of his own film. During postproduction, Universal Pictures made two changes to the movie that greatly displeased the director: Two scenes totaling eight minutes were cut from the theatrical release, and, because of a dispute with CBS Records, the Bruce Springsteen songs that had been used in the film were replaced with Bob Seger tracks. Bogdanovich was so outraged that he tried to take his name off the film, and he encouraged the cast to join him in his mutiny. Cher wasn’t buying it; she was proud of her performance. “When a director says his movie is not as good as it should have been, people may not be as interested in seeing it,” she explained, never one to cower in the face of a powerful man with whom she happened to disagree. And although the film received critical acclaim and did modestly well at the box office, it received only one Oscar nomination—for Best Makeup. Cher biographer Mark Bego suggests that the Academy may have boycotted Mask “because Peter Bogdanovich threw such a fuss over Universal’s editing of the movie.”
Whatever the reason, Cher was disappointed by the snub, and even when she was offered to present on the Oscar telecast she considered not going at all. Then she reasoned with herself, “I’m going to go, but I’ll go my way. And I want [my outfit] to be so outrageous and so over-the-top that no one will mistake what I am doing it for.”
“As you can see I did receive my Academy booklet on How to Dress Like a Serious Actress,” she said.
She was only slightly more tastefully dressed when, two years later, she received her Best Actress Oscar for Moonstruck.
To understand the miracle of “Believe,” you have to know how far Cher had fallen in the decade between Moonstruck and Auto-Tune. After a frantically busy 1987, during which she starred in three different movies and released her hit self-titled album, the pace of her output halted. She contracted Epstein-Barr virus, which drained her energy and forced her to turn down potential roles in movies like Thelma and Louise and The War of the Roses. (What if!) She didn’t return to the screen until three years after Moonstruck, garnering mixed reviews in the eccentric coming-of-age flick Mermaids (in which she played the mother of a young Winona Ryder and an even younger Christina Ricci). Save for a few cameos in a pair of Robert Altman movies, Cher’s next absence from the movie screen would be even longer.
And then there were the infomercials. Today, they’re amusing, YouTube-deep-dive kitsch. In the early ’90s, they appeared to be career suicide. Cher’s hairdresser friend Lori Davis had called upon her most famous pal to help her advertise a new line of hair products, and the resulting 30-minute spots were absurd (observes one YouTube commenter, “Cher’s wearing a WIG in an ad about hair products”) and corny to an extent almost beyond parody. Almost beyond parody. Because In Living Color took a stab, as did Saturday Night Live, with Chris Farley playing Lori Davis.
Again, in the self-aware shrug of Cher speak: “There’s nothing like an infomercial to slam-dunk your ass. … I had really fucked up!”
But this is where I think the boomer idea and the millennial idea of Cher most sharply diverge. “A lot of people despised Cher in the mid-70’s because she had refused to follow the accepted rule and die in flames before the age of 30,” Stephanie Brush wrote in a 1988 New York Times piece. “We had made a pact with our mythic celebs of the 60’s: perish tragically, or we’ll bury you anyway. We despised Cher for insisting on remaining famous, but we couldn’t make her go away through ridicule, because she had become far too good at ridiculing herself.”
Maybe my cohort has a rosier view of Cher because we didn’t witness the moments when the public opinion of her was lowest. And maybe some of those things—like selling out, or living single, or going under the tattoo gun—aren’t quite the cultural sins they once were. To put it more simply: Cher’s ass tattoo used to be a late-night TV punch line. Today, “Cher’s Tattooed Ass” has its own Facebook fan page.
Mark Taylor was terrified that Cher wouldn’t like what he’d done to her vocals. “It was a bit radical,” the British record producer later recalled. “Basically, it was the destruction of her voice, so I was really nervous about playing it to her!” But as soon as the then-52-year-old pop icon heard what Taylor had done to their “Believe” demo, she was ecstatic. She even asked Taylor to push it further into the realm of the uncanny, suggesting that he add a “telephoney” distortion to her vocals on the song’s verses, like an effect she’d heard and liked on a song by the British band Roachford. When the president of Cher’s record company first heard a mix of “Believe,” he told Cher and her producers that he “thought they had gotten carried away with the robotic sound.” Cher wouldn’t have it. “You can change that part of it, over my dead body!” she replied. To Taylor, she added, “Don’t let anyone touch this track, or I’m going to rip your throat out.”
“Believe” was the product of many cowriters and producers, yes. But crucial to the alchemy was also Cher’s dogged instinct to go with her gut—and a take-no-bullshit manner she’d been cultivating for decades and had sharpened into a powerful bargaining weapon. (She never minced words when it came to record companies, either. As she once remarked of a different, previous record label, “If I’d been fucked by my husband as much as I’d been fucked by Warner Brothers, I’d still be married.”)
Taylor and his coproducer Brian Rawling soon got used to the question they’d be asked for the rest of their lives: How did you make Cher’s voice sound like that? Like chefs reluctant to give out the recipe of their secret sauce, their first instinct was to fib. In February 1999, Taylor gave an interview to the trade magazine Sound on Sound in which he credited a rather antiquated piece of technology, a Korg VC10, “a very rare, very groovy-looking analogue vocoder from the ’70s,” not unlike the one that had made a few appearances on Cher’s 1979 disco record Take Me Home. Taylor then, allegedly, tried a more recent invention, a Digitech Talker, a guitar pedal that approximates a vocoder-like effect. But Taylor would later admit what some astute gearheads had come to suspect: That the reason Cher’s voice sounded like tha-a-a-at was a recently released technology called Antares Auto-Tune.
“The pitch-correction technology Auto-Tune had been on the market for about a year before ‘Believe’ hit the charts,” Simon Reynolds wrote last year in a lively history of Auto-Tune for Pitchfork, “but its previous appearances had been discreet, as its makers, Antares Audio Technologies, intended. ‘Believe’ was the first record where the effect drew attention to itself: The glow-and-flutter of Cher’s voice at key points in the song announced its own technological artifice—a blend of posthuman perfection and angelic transcendence ideal for the vague religiosity of the chorus.”
Throughout most of the ’90s, Cher’s music was still synonymous with the power ballads and stadium rockers she’d come to be associated with the decade prior. Although she’d made one disco album, and had long been an icon in the queer community, Cher wasn’t exactly synonymous with the club. “The hard part was trying to make [a dance song] that wouldn’t alienate Cher’s existing fans,” Taylor has recalled. “We couldn’t afford to have anyone say, ‘I hate this because it’s dance’—then we would have turned off loads of people who are used to hearing Cher do rock ballads and MOR songs. I think we can safely say we succeeded in maintaining the balance, because kids on their own will buy a certain type of record, and adults on their own will buy another. The only way you can achieve sales of [the song’s scope] is to appeal to both camps.”
Reynolds notes that, with Auto-Tune, Cher and her producers had found an almost scientific way to streamline and thus universalize the specific cultural experience of being moved by a piece of music: “As sound studies scholar Owen Marshall has observed, for the manufacturers of Auto-Tune, bad singing interfered with the clear transmission of feeling. The device was designed to bring voices up to code, as it were—to communicate fluently within a supposedly universal Esperanto of emotion.” This could be part of the reason “Believe” broke so many language and cultural barriers, topping the charts in 23 different countries.
Twenty years later, Auto-Tune and other forms of vocal processing have become so normalized that our ears can detect their absence more easily than their presence. This is a mixed blessing, and there are plenty who blame “Believe” for all sorts of musical scourges. (No one has done so as vehemently as legendary engineer and producer Steve Albini.)
But “Believe” also feels like a distinctly 21st-century synthesis of Cher’s visual and aural selves. “In the video for ‘Believe,’” Reynolds writes, “Cher actually looks how Auto-Tune sounds.” She’d become something else, bigger than life, sturdier than human, more over-the-top than even the ’85 Oscar dress. She’d become, well, Cher.
“Sit down,” Cher told us from the Barclays Center stage. “This is going to take a while.”
She then proceeded to talk to us in a long, entertaining bit of banter that landed somewhere between a Kanye rant, an episode of VH1 Storytellers, and a stand-up set (“let me tell you about the two nights it took me to turn 40”). She mentioned Madonna, and Jack Nicholson, and “Nicky” Cage. As usual, she cursed with flair; she kept calling a large hat “this bitch,” for its inability to stay put on her head. She occasionally took a swig of some kind of liquid and explained to the delighted crowd, “Dr Pepper. I’m a cheap date.” She said she wanted us to know the details about when she turned 40 because, all the artifice aside, she never lies about her age. “I’m 73,” she said. A “goddamnit” was silent, but implied. The crowd roared, and briefly disobeyed Cher by jumping to its feet.
The kind of universal, elder-stateswoman appreciation that Cher is now enjoying feels a little paradoxical: Isn’t the essence of Cher’s persona the outsider, the comeback queen, the triumphantly glittery underdog? If the public opinion of her can no longer fall low enough for her to have to fight her way back to the top, is she still Cher? On stage, at least, she still had ample fight in her. This time her sparring partner wasn’t Sonny, Peter Bogdonavich, or a nonbelieving record executive, but mortality itself—and Cher seemed to have it in a headlock. At one point, she asked the crowd, “What’s your granny doing tonight?”
As she closed with “Believe,” because of course she did, I wondered what, exactly, we had come there that night to see. The woman? The myth? Maybe just the thoroughly modern spectacle of a person who’d figured out before anybody else how to seamlessly fuse the two.