Just as the five young women in Fifth Harmony skillfully blend the popular sounds of the day—pop, R&B, rap and EDM stylings swirling among them—so they also serve up a soufflé of secular society’s often paradoxically mixed messages about where a woman should seek to ground her identity.
One minute that means taking charge and working hard. The next it means trying to please a man who compares her to a stripper. If only the genuinely positive messages here could be easily, completely sifted from the damaging ones. Alas, separating the uplifting themes from the demeaning ones on 7/27 is as impossible as trying to separate the five beautiful voices that comprise Fifth Harmony itself