Stefani’s tendency to appropriate musical styles has long defined her pop profile, and even when it’s been ham-handed to the point of disrespectful or worse, it’s facilitated a seductive tension. She has seemingly never been afraid to sound nonnative to her music—if anything, it’s bolstered her image as a bad-ass disruptor. That vocal tension does crop up occasionally, like on the first single, “Purple Irises,” a duet with Shelton. To contrast with his robust but straight take, Stefani slightly upturns her voice at the end of their shared lines in the chorus—a kind of squeak or squeal that asserts her as a player in Shelton’s field. Otherwise, Stefani assimilates into all-mayo-no-salt whiteness, and her drift toward country is far less convincing than recent moves by the likes of Beyoncé and Post Malone. At least there’s some spunk in opener “Somebody Else’s,” a “Queen of Hearts”-esque kissoff to an ex that lands some scathing burns (“Now that you’re dead to me/I feel so alive”).
Almost all of Bouquet’s songs contain allusions to flowers or botany (something Shelton probably noticed when he suggested the album’s title). Stefani compares herself to an empty vase, fulfilled by Shelton’s flowers. In addition to purple irises, she picks dahlias, sunflowers, and roses. Gardens grow, she blossoms, life is a bouquet. In one song’s climax, Stefani yelps, “Flowers! Flowers!” The album dies a little every time she finds a new prosaic floral thing to compare to her life. The flowers also suggest a certain traditionalism—this is a record that is in love with heteronormativity and its trinkets. Stefani describes herself as sparkling like a diamond ring in “Pretty,” and concludes the second verse of “Empty Vase” with this mic drop: “I know you’ll raise my sons right.”
All of this bland pop parochialism is aided by Stefani’s invocation of some traditionalist tropes. “I got the faith and you got the patience/I drive you crazy, you drive the truck,” she sings in the title track, effectively an answer to Shelton’s 2017 song “I’ll Name the Dogs” (“You’ll find the spot and I’ll find the money/You’ll be the pretty and I’ll be the funny”). In “Pretty,” Stefani claims, “I never felt pretty until you loved me.” Thirty years ago, the young woman of “Just a Girl” came off as the type to scarf down the singer of “Pretty” without a second thought. This isn’t to accuse her of hypocrisy—everything in both songs can be true, people grow and ideas change—but the choice to position her fealty to her husband at the forefront of every song is at best dull or at worst like ideological regression.
All of it is fine—it’s her right to make her choices and to sing about them. There’s nothing wrong with love, right? Memoir has long been a facet of Stefani’s output (early into her tenure as a pop star, she illustrated how all the attention was affecting her relationship with her No Doubt bandmates in the “Don’t Speak” video) and she’s been reliably upfront about her love of love. You can see how making an album like this made sense to her. But Bouquet plays out a scenario where happiness—or the projection of it—saps one’s creative vitality, leaving the artist with very little to say. Every relationship has its challenges, and one would hope that those details could make for stories worth sharing. Instead, Stefani wants us to believe that she’s found the simple kind of life that she sang so longingly about. Bouquet is as odd as boring gets—an album inspired by her real life that nonetheless comes off as lifeless.
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