- "Her music is polarized to match the lyrics: either sparsely rhythmic tracks where she chants as much as she sings, or pop songs that aim for choruses as catchy as Madonna's 1980's chart busters. The sound itself stays shallow too; except for Ms. Stefani's voice, nearly every note on the album is synthetic or sampled." [
NY Times]
- "Stefani is now a 37-year-old mom...with increasingly distant but nonetheless genuine roots in punk. Yet instead of exploring either of these legitimate identities in her lyrics, which would be both more honest and more interesting, she persists in playing the role of pre-teen mall-rat Lolita so ubiquitous during the late '90s bubblegum-pop boom." [
Chicago Sun-Times]
- "Ultimately, Stefani isn't convincing as a dissatisfied diva. She laments a dying affair on the majestic power ballad 'Early Winter,'' but her Orange County-girl voice doesn't seem genuinely sad. And unable to suppress her party-starting nature (or her ambition for big hits) for long, she teams with heavyweights like the Neptunes for half a dozen hip-hop jams. The fuzzed-out ''Breakin' Up'' uses a bad cell-phone connection as a metaphor for a troubled relationship, and it's as gratingly repetitious as those Verizon ads...B-" {
Entertainment Weekly]
Idolator
Gwen Stefani is the linchpin in a $300 million ad campaign for Hewlett-Packard, in which the pop star's image and clothes stylings will be used to lure people into "better use the web to custom-produce everything from invitations and greeting cards to concert souvenir books"—and print out those items on their HP printers. One piece of the campaign: Users can make paper-doll versions of themselves and their "entourages," presumably so they can act out "Hollaback Girl" in the privacy of their own bedrooms. (The paper-doll version of me—which, I should point out, looks nothing like me except for maybe the "sorry for existing" knock-kneedness—is at left. Sadly I couldn't make one for Jess, since HP's paper world is a girls-only realm (plus, he doesn't really look good in miniskirts).)
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Complaints from Malaysian college students have forced Gwen Stefani to hide her shame during an upcoming tour, as the Muslim young folks have demanded that she "not jump with/or hug and kiss members of the audience" or wear anything "offensive." I'm assuming that "not wearing anything offensive" also includes not parading young Asian girls around like they were hip accessories. [
