Believe

About

When Cher’s label, Warner UK, urged her to record a dance record to connect with her gay audience in early 1998, the 52-year-old icon initially balked. But the underwhelming sales of her previous album, 1995’s rock-leaning <i>It’s a Man’s World</i>, plus the January 1998 death of her ex-husband, Sonny Bono, had left pop’s reigning queen of reinvention at a crossroads. Besides, a Junior Vasquez remix of her single “One by One” had been blowing up on the NYC club circuit, and Madonna had just released <i>Ray of Light</i>, her groundbreaking pivot to electronica. In short, the stars had aligned. Recorded in London in the summer of 1998 and released later that fall, <i>Believe</i>’s Eurodisco anthems on freedom and resilience stumped critics at the time, many of whom considered its thumping club rhythms and unfamiliar vocal effects to be the height of schlock. But the numbers said otherwise: Though initially it was slow to climb the charts, it remains Cher’s best-selling album in the US, bolstered by singles like the crying-in-the-club jam “All or Nothing” and the triumphant “Strong Enough,” Cher’s own “I Will Survive.” But ultimately, the crux of <i>Believe</i> is in the title track—a song that not only altered the course of Cher’s career, but changed pop music as we know it. “Believe” was the first commercial release to feature Auto-Tune, a brand-new pitch-correction software released in fall 1997, not as a corrective but as a creative tool. The post-human vocal effect proved to be revolutionary, and what was then known as “the Cher effect” would go on to become the most divisive, influential music trend of the ensuing decades, inspiring mavericks like T-Pain, Kanye West, and Daft Punk in the 2000s, then reinventing what it meant to be a rapper in the 2010s. “Believe” would earn Cher her first and only Grammy (for Best Dance Recording) and remains not only her biggest single but one of the best-selling singles of all time. But besides its paradigm-shifting sound, its message of independence still resonates today, its unforgettable chorus posing a question that’s worth answering sincerely: “Do you believe in life after love?” Cher answers it herself on “We All Sleep Alone,” <i>Believe</i>’s poignant final track: “You got to be strong when you’re out on your own/’Cause sooner or later, we all sleep alone.”

via Apple Music

The Clerk says

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