This review contains mentions of rape and sexual assault.
Demi Lovato – then Disney’s most important lady for her star – attended the 2008 American Music Awards Rock camp– smiling when a reporter on the red carpet asked about the inspiration behind his pop-punk solo music. “Believe it or not, at 16, I went through a lot,” she replied with a dignified chuckle. “Come on, how much pain can you have at 16?” the man insisted. “Oh, a lot,” Lovato replied at once.
For the next few years, as she diligently played the role of a chaste pop star – though fascinated by metallic music – Lovato struggled under immense pressure from the press and music industries (child stars, we often forget, are hard workers). . Behind the scenes, Lovato struggled with an eating disorder, self-harm and substance abuse. She recently revealed that she was raped at the age of 15; although she reported adult aggression, the perpetrator continued to work with her. After entering a treatment center for the first time at the age of 18, Lovato was transparent about her struggles with addiction and recovery.
In the summer of 2018, after six years of sobriety, Lovato relapsed. On July 24, he overdosed on opioids, causing three strokes, a heart attack, multiple organ failure, pneumonia, permanent brain damage and lasting vision problems. As she explains in the recent documentary Dancing with the Devil, the drug dealer who supplied her with Lovato that night sexually assaulted her and left her dead. It’s a miracle he survived.
Arriving with the documentary and a flash of confessional interviews, Lovato’s seventh album, Dancing with the Devil … The art of starting over takes control of the narrative. Over 19 songs, the 28-year-old bends over in her personal struggles; the pop star who once confessed her desire to be “free from all demons” apparently accepted the reality that she must live with them. On the ballad of power “Anyone”, Lovato tries to find solace in her art, but comes short. “A hundred million stories / And a hundred million songs / I feel bad when I sing / Nobody listens to me,” she belts. Written before her relapse, it is a cry for help from a place of loneliness and despair. Slinky “Dancing with the Devil” outlines the precipitous slope that led to overdose: “A little red wine” became “a little white line” and then “a little glass tube.” “ICU (Madison’s Lullabye)” relives the moment when Lovato woke up in the hospital, legally blind and unable to recognize his younger sister.
After this black prologue with three songs, Dancing with the Devil expands to reveal the person Lovato is – or wants to be – today; there is a lot of shed skin, rewritten endings and references to reaching the sky. While Lovato’s previous record, 2017 Tell me you Love Me, enjoyable in R&B and electropop at the party, here she explores a range of influences from “The Art of Begin Over” software to an haunting cover of Gary Jules ’haunting cover of Tears for Fears’ “Crazy World”. “Lonely People” proposes a lonely stadium with a chorus that will escape Romeo and Juliet, undermining the positive vibrations with the strongest thoughts of closure – “The truth is that we all die alone / So you better love yourself before you leave ”.
In almost an hour, the album tries to cover a vast amount of ground, spreading years of trauma and reconfiguring Lovato’s public identity. She offers a state of union about her recovery – she is “California Sober” – and about her sexuality. In “The Kind of Lover I Am”, a kind of continuation of the bi-curious anthem from 2015 “Cool for the Summer”, Lovato fully embraces his strangeness and overflowing heart. “I don’t care if you have a dick / I don’t care if you have a WAP / I just want to love / You know what I’m saying,” she says to outro. “I want to share my life with someone at some point.”
Lovato is certainly not the first pop star to talk about perpetuating sexual and emotional abuse in the music industry; like Kesha, her gut-wrenching revelations refuse to be pushed under the rug for fear of bad publicity or the isolation of a fan base. But even when Lovato sets an optimistic or upbeat tone, it’s hard to look beyond tragedy at the center of the album. The “Melon Cake” synthesis takes its name from the birthday dessert that the Lovato team served him in the years before his overdose: a cylinder of matte watermelon, frozen in fat-free cream and covered with sprinkles and candles. Even though Lovato confidently declares that melon cakes are a thing of the past, the image is so depressing that it’s hard to focus on anything else, especially what is meant to be a fun song. But don’t so many of us do that to survive? We try to reformulate our traumas as lessons learned; we use humor as a defense mechanism; we go further because living in guilt or shame increases the destructive spiral.
One of the rare times when Dancing with the Devil goes beyond a 1: 1 recreation of Lovato’s life is “Met Him Last Night”, a slinky duet with Ariana Grande. Both artists experienced a horrible tragedy and responded with elegance and empathy, writing songs about their experiences both for themselves and for anyone who might see their own trauma reflected. But “I met him last night” is not about catharsis, at least not explicitly. Instead, the two speak blasphemously about the innocence and deception lost in the shadow of “him,” apparently Satan. It’s the closest thing to escape on an album focused entirely on harsh reality.
At the other end of the spectrum is the music video for “Dancing With the Devil”, which recreates the night of Lovato’s overdose and the subsequent battle for her life in the ICU, in amazing detail. There is the car that cleaned her blood through a vein in her throat, the duffle bag probably full of drugs and the sponge bath that slowly follows the tattoo of the “survivor” on her neck. Even though Lovato co-directed the video, saying that sharing her experiences is part of her healing process, the visual feels almost unnecessarily voyeuristic: an artist recreating his worst moment on the assumption that he is speaking for himself.
Dancing with the Devil asks you to trust that what Demi Lovato went through is enough. The music will no doubt reach the listeners who struggle with their own burdens and look at Lovato as a model, as they have done since she was a teenager on the red carpet, forced to justify the depths of her experience. This moment of take-off brings us closer to it than ever: the documentary release in four parts, the multiple editions of the albums, the unrestricted press tour. But the diaristic nature of the music and the forceful force with which it is delivered, presents the person Demi Lovato and removes the artist Demi Lovato. It’s an unenviable position: to have a story so awful that the emotional catharsis we feel in real life overshadows what she wanted to create on the album.
Buy: hard trade
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