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Originally Posted by mitzo
Agreed, I have always seen her as a self absorbed ditz with borderline personality, it is even in the song lyrics. The giant ego and the ultimate firing of Buckingham actually are no surprise to me.
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Some people saw those qualities all along. Was it Stephen Holden or another Rolling Stone critic who, back in 1981 reviewing
Bella Donna, asked, "How can somebody so hip also be so incredibly silly?"? And Robert Hilburn, reviewing the Mac's spectacularly good concert in Irvine CA in 1982 for the L.A. Times, said of Stevie: "She has even shed some (though far from all) of the narcissistic aura that has made her something of a caricature in rock." My mind fills in with all these characterizations of Stevie—remember John Swenson's Rolling Stone review of the band's Madison Square Garden stop in 1977? Something about Stevie's stage business being literary in a bad way, but adding that "she gets away with her devices more often than not" because she "has undeniable charisma."
And then there's her singing voice—she picked up bits and pieces of style from Tom Petty, Brenda Lee, Jackie Wilson, and maybe even Ray Charles, but most of it is really and truly her own and sounds like no one else. That's her genius, in my opinion, that and her onstage (and offstage) character with its otherworldly traits, a combination of a Greek nymph or demiurge and a decadent nineteenth-century writer. But that appeal has always been elusive and youth-bound; it got sillier and more awkward as she grew older. For several years now, it's felt desperate. That's why newspaper writers have many of them likened her to Norma Desmond or Miss Havisham or even Sylvia Browne or some other drifting psychic mess. She's being feted these days solely because she's quaint and she has longevity. All these younger musicians who adore her never mention a recent song. None of her recent songs have had any impression on people or on the culture (although that's nothing to blame her for because it's true of millions of old stars like her).