Jewel Joy: A Holiday Collection (Atlantic)

Jewel

Joy: A Holiday Collection (Atlantic)

Pro Jewel: She tries really really hard.

Con Jewel: She's not as good a singer as apparently a whole lot of people think.

Pro Jewel: She's a woman very successful in the music industry.

Con Jewel: It's easy to imagine Jewel as a poor naif surrounded by "yes" men record company creeps who've convinced her that she's the natural heir to the crown of brilliant revolutionary women like Joni Mitchell, when in reality, no one has the guts to tell her that she'd look so much more natural on the throne in Joey Heatherton's bathroom.

Pro Jewel: Despite cashing in on some very valid "cute," she doesn't slut it up as much as many pop women.

Con Jewel: So what? It's 1999. Women her age grew up with feminism and sometimes find very comfortable pop culture ways of dealing with important politics.

Pro Jewel: People who don't quite "get" Sarah McLachlan but require more sophistication than Britney Spears might find Jewel a happy compromise.

Con Jewel: She's a cross between Sarah McLachlan and Britney Spears.

Pro Jewel: She's the biggest selling poet of all time.

Con Jewel: She's the biggest selling poet of all time.

Pro Jewel: Was Phoebe's folksinging character in Friends a spoof on Jewel, or was it the other way around?

Con Jewel: She's recorded a "Holiday Collection." If that's not con enough for you, she massacres "I Wonder as I Wander" and credits it as "Traditional." She doesn't have the pipes for "Ave Maria" (where's Ann Wilson when you need her?), and the last song, a criminal Jewel original, "Hands (Christmas Version)" has the potential to make the most devout seriously consider killing themselves.

Pro Jewel: The Jewel con.

(Negative One Star)