The first time I can remember hearing that Cher was too old was in the late 1980s. At the disgusting, decrepit age of 43 — a woman’s 43, at that — Cher had the audacity to look really sexy and imply she was going to bone a boatful of sailors in the music video for “If I Could Turn Back Time.” That was the year after she accepted her Best Actress Oscar for Moonstruck. The song was a hit, of course, and the video added another glimmering facet to Cher’s iconography: There she is, wearing not much more than a fishnet body stocking, cheerfully straddling a battleship gun.
Cher is an icon, but she has never seemed like a gilded, two-dimensional saint. Cher is too dynamic, too fluid, too vocal in her loves and hates. Late-’80s Cher is “my” Cher, the one who pops into my head the moment I read her name. Perhaps the secret Cher of your heart is a younger woman with sleek black hair, yukking it up on television with her then-husband Sonny Bono. Maybe the Cher you think of is just a kid, really — after all, she was only 19 when “I Got You Babe” made her a star.
Now Cher is 72 years old and traveling the world on her latest tour, Here We Go Again. Thanks to the 2018 film Mamma Mia 2: This One Has Cher!, our gal is back on the road singing the purest disco hits imaginable — the songs of ABBA — because God is good. What should you expect at a Cher concert that includes disco? Wigs, legs, tits, ass — everything she was told to pack up and put away three decades ago.
“Authenticity” is the byword of the age, and of all creative arts, music is held to its absolute highest standard. What is authenticity? Easy! Authenticity is “real.” But the problem with centering this definition of “authentic” in the realm of musical creativity is that it completely forgets that entertainers exist. The Authentic Songwriter is like a laser or spotlight, directing your attention to whatever point they are trying to make. The Authentic Entertainer is an explosion, usually of glitter. Artifice is the point. And Cher is as authentic an entertainer as has ever graced the stage.
Disco, rock, folk, pop, cover songs galore, adult contemporary, club hits — Cher’s gonna sing it all on Thursday. Well, not all. “Dark Lady,” “Gypsys, Tramps & Thieves” and “Half-Breed” will not be performed during the North American leg of this tour. All three of these (good!) songs were massive international hits, but unless you’re Tim McGraw, it is no longer the done thing to sing a song from the first-person point of view of a Native American if you’re not Native American yourself.
That’s how good Cher is: She won’t sing three of her biggest hits on this tour, and she doesn’t have to. And besides, her actual biggest hit came in 1998, a full decade after I heard the message that Cher was way too old to be doing stuff. After her late-’80s peak, there was a downslide: She got sick, did infomercials, became a punchline, disappeared from the mainstream — and then there was “Believe.” Not many American women hit their 50s and then, like, profit.
Scroll down to the comments section on any story about Cher, and read the words of citizens who are disgusted by how she has chosen to age as a woman in the entertainment industry. There is nothing less authentic than plastic surgery. (Unless you’re from Southern California, like Cher. Is there anything more authentically SoCal than plastic surgery?) Probably the only thing more artificial than plastic surgery is AutoTune, which happens to be the axis upon which “Believe” spins. The sheer audacity, to this day!
It’s hard to imagine what Cher’s life might be like if she had never met Sonny Bono. It’s unlikely, had Cher lived the life of an average woman, that she’d spend her septuagenarian years dressing up like a showgirl and spreading the gospel of ABBA. But what makes Cher authentic — what makes her seem “real” even under the tersest definition — is the impression that, no matter what direction her life took, she was always going to tell those who had it coming to go fuck themselves.
She told Sonny Bono to go fuck himself! That’s pretty cool. As a 40-something woman, she was met with incredibly harsh and misogynic criticism. Cher reflected, and seemed to decide that criticism can go fuck itself. She has been an LGBT icon for decades, and no small part of that work involves telling all manner of bigots to go fuck themselves.
Basically, Cher has taken ever-more-insistent demands for authenticity and reflected them back in her own bedazzled, witty and wry image (not unlike her peer Dolly Parton). Making this contradiction work is how an icon stays an icon, and Cher has had a lot of practice.
