RAMBLE ON: "Dark Side" by Kelly Clarkson

Kelly Clarkson is divorced, y’all. I saw her in Vegas, right at the start of my vacation, and she may be one of the most divorced women I’ve ever seen. Not in an unpleasant or bitter way or anything, the night was a blast. But she was promoting her long-awaited divorce album, so the topic was naturally gonna come up, and yes, there was many a potshot taken at her ex. I have some divorced aunts in my family, and let’s just say that if Kelly had had a glass of wine in her hand, it would have been a familiar experience, Southern accent included.

It's interesting that Kelly Clarkson has largely taken over the role that Ellen DeGeneres once had as the queen of daytime TV. Ellen’s career was of course destroyed by a workplace bullying scandal, which you wouldn’t think ranks super-high on the list of cancellable offenses except for the fact that it went completely at odds with her image as the nicest person in media. Oprah would have survived that scandal. Kelly might also; her show has already had a toxic work environment scandal that largely didn’t involve her, but also her image and Ellen’s are not the same. Kelly Clarkson may be the new Queen of Daytime but she’s never tried to be the Queen of Nice. Where Ellen’s image was beginning to strike as phony long before she got exposed, Kelly Clarkson has always expressed a more human range of emotions. Her image (as a reality show contestant and then pop star and then talk show host) has always been bright and bubbly, and yet she’s been publicly angry plenty of times; at her exes, at her parents, at her collaborators, at her various bosses who’ve held sway over her career. Her defining hit, “Since U Been Gone,” was an angry one, and just like she did that night I saw her, she was able to turn her anger into something entertaining and relatable.

There were a couple songs that Kelly did not perform that night. She didn’t perform “Piece by Piece” (the love song she wrote to her now-ex-husband) for obvious reasons. She didn’t perform anything from My December, the career-derailing album where her anger became unrelatable and off-putting (though I’m sure more than a few fans would have lit up for it). She also didn’t perform “Dark Side,” an underperforming and now-forgotten single from 2012. Shame though; I at least would have cheered for it.

“Dark Side” was the follow-up to the #1 hit “Stronger (What Doesn’t Kill You),” and definitely did not reach the smash heights of its predecessor. The only commentary I saw on it were comments on her sudden weight loss in the video (gauche to notice, I realize, but she looks like a completely different person between “Stronger” and this). In hindsight, the Stronger album’s rollout feels very much like an attempt to recreate her biggest success, Breakaway. The first single (“Breakaway”/“Mr. Know It All”) finds Kelly at peace with herself despite everything that’s befallen her, the second (“Since U Been Gone”/“Stronger”) finds her blasting past the ex who wronged her, and the third (“Behind These Hazel Eyes/“Dark Side”) shows a vulnerable side. Most of these songs – a large portion of her catalog, in fact – are from a woman scorned. “Dark Side” is not. Partly for that reason, it holds a unique spot in Kelly’s catalogue; though it met with negligible success, it’s always stuck with me.

Kelly’s best early single, “Beautiful Disaster,” was about trying to love a troubled person; she herself is the beautiful disaster in “Dark Side.” “Everybody’s got a dark side/Do you love me?/Can you love mine?” She never says what her dark side actually is, or how it manifests; I guess you could call that dishonest, but I think it fits the song, whose overriding emotion is fear. She assures the listener that no one’s perfect, but we’re worth it, but she doesn’t seem to believe it, or at least doesn’t believe that she’s convincing. Kelly has been vulnerable many times, but she’s never had a song this self-critical. She’s been hurt, but this is the first (only?) single where she exhibits doubt and fear – fear of being abandoned, of being unlovable. Kelly’s generational peer and sometimes collaborator Pink has pulled this trick many times – we’ve seen so much of Pink behind her hardass exterior that it’s almost easy to forget that she has that exterior at all. Kelly is much more guarded, especially since the failure of My December, where she co-wrote all the songs. Since then, her singles have been rarely written by her (including “Dark Side”). There’s almost a meta element to the song; she did show her dark side on My December, and the public did run away. The record flopped, and she had to cancel her tour, even though she was the hottest pop star in America just two years earlier.

I find it compelling as a portrait of Kelly Clarkson but it also hits home for me in a way that most of her singles don’t. I don’t really consider myself an angry person. I love “Since U Been Gone” and “Because of You” as much as anyone, but I’ve never quite related to them. “Dark Side” is a song I relate to a lot more – who hasn’t ever felt fundamentally unlovable? The fact that the song itself didn’t really go anywhere almost feels like it adds to the pathos.

The reason it failed, I think, can be mostly attributed to the fact is that it’s nothing particularly special production-wise (a problem for Kelly throughout her late career). I like it mostly for the themes but I wouldn’t say that lyrically it’s anything special. I haven’t particularly listened to it in the ten years since it came out, and I haven’t thought about it much until I noticed its absence from Kelly’s set list a month ago.  Revisiting it now, it feels like Kelly’s oversinging the chorus in a way that doesn’t fit the vulnerability of the song – too triumphant, too secure that love will survive the dark side. The parts that hit happen during the softer moments, with the The original version of “Beautiful Disaster,” too, was a little buried under the minivan-rock trappings; it made a reappearance on Breakaway in a revelatory acoustic version, one that absolutely broke my heart and convinced me that Kelly was a generational pop star, which didn’t really turn out to be the case. Instead, she’s now a talk show host, and she’s made clear this job is not exactly all she ever wanted; she called the concert her “real job” when I saw her. I’ve always felt bad that the public rejected her dark side, but the new album, like My December, it’s an angry breakup album, and like My December, all the songs were co-written by her, and she seemed quite happy with how the new record was selling, even when she had nowhere to promote it because of the strike. Her fans that night in Vegas seemed as devoted as ever. Maybe people had room for her dark side after all.