Being productive

There’s a line in Ondi Timoner’s Dig!, a documentary about the professional rivalries between alt-rock groups the Brian Jonestown Massacre and the Dandy Warhols during the late 90s and early 2000s, that I keep turning over in my mind. In an early scene in the film, the Dandys are absolving themselves of influencing the BJM to relocate from San Francisco to Portland to initiate some sort of musical revolution. Demonstrating their corporate allegiances, the Dandys defer to their partnership with Capitol Records and the need to deliver on their contract by producing an album. In their minds, the revolution must be delayed until after they become successful in capitalist terms. Here, the Dandys cast themselves as ambitious, efficient, and functional. This is in opposition to the BJM, who are framed as undisciplined, excessive, and (self-)destructive. According to corporate logic, only one group can be successful. After that success is confirmed, then you can usher in the revolution and get your friends to squat in Capitol Records. Dandys keyboardist Zia McCabe delivers the definitive line. “We were being productive,” she surmises, thus suggesting that the BJM, who were unsigned and filtering out hordes of side players due to persistent, drug-fueled interpersonal problems, were unproductive.

I return to this line for a few reasons.  For one, I’m still not sure how either band would define “the revolution.” I have a clearer take that for the BJM it doesn’t involve cowing to the music industry. Even then, however, BJM mastermind Anton Newcombe promises to make the employees at TVT a “shitload of money” when they briefly sign to the major indie. The Dandys take cues from their namesake, Andy Warhol, and flatten pop culture in order to shade it in with camp and irony. They certainly nail the first part, creating time-shifting pop music that sounds somewhat akin to what buying a CBGB’s shirt off the rack at Urban Outfitters feels like.

BJM SimpsonsDandy Warhols in vintage tees

The film is invested in playing up the two groups’ differences. The filmmakers deliberately chose to film the BJM in Super 8, giving their narrative a lo-fi, retro feel that bears the grain of authenticity and blurs around the margins. The Dandys were filmed in 16mm, lending their story a crisper image quality that jibes with the group’s pop aspirations. But I’ve never been convinced that Dig! is a study in opposites. For one, I’m not sure that the class distinctions between the two groups break down as neatly as we can assume. Newcombe is represented as a product of a broken family, raised by a single mother in Orange County while his father medicated mental problems with alcohol. The Dandys are represented as “the most well-adjusted band in America,” the products of nuclear families with parents who invested in Intel.  However, the BJM were managed by Dave Deresinski, whose father was an AIDS researcher at Stanford. By others’ accounts, McCabe grew up working-class.

Importantly, both frontmen are chasing a mode of 60s-era Romantic rock artistry that is dead, and may never have actually existed. As a result, both Newcombe and Dandys frontman Courtney Taylor-Taylor have never seemed authentic to me. Newcombe’s propensity to riot, dress in white, and put on a faux British accent in his singing scans as slightly “realer” than Taylor-Taylor wearing cowboy hats, toting skateboards, and digging on vegan food. It comes to bear on their music. The BJM produce droning guitar hymns brimming with melody but bloated by hippie pablum about bad trips and wicked women. The Dandys produce an approximation of whatever might be selling—Britpop, psychedelia, 80s-revivalist glam—and slap some pun-driven lyrics about the counterculture or sex on top like bumper stickers on a VW Bug. And if Newcombe isn’t for sale, as he claims The Beatles and Taylor-Taylor were, then what decisions led to licensing “Straight Up and Down” for Boardwalk Empire? Appeals might be made to legitimation—the pedigree of the project, the artful use of musical anachronism, the belief that HBO isn’t television anyway—but is this fundamentally different than the Dandys’ licensing of “Bohemian Like You” to Vodafone? I’m not entirely convinced. Legitimation seems like an excuse, not an opposition.

I also return to this line because I wonder what it means for a woman, the only woman in the Dandy Warhols, to claim that the band was being productive. What does it mean for a woman to say that we were being productive? Both the Dandys and the BJM played with women. This creates an aura of progressivism through inclusion. It is meaningful for bands to be mixed-gender. It is powerful to see men and women play together and it creates the potential for shifting gender dynamics in the music industry. Men and women need to learn how to share space. Rehearsal space. Stage space. Recording space. Tour bus space. Meeting space. Promotional space. Publishers’ credit space. I see some evidence of that in both bands. In the film and in the commentary tracks, McCabe and former BJM member Miranda Lee Richards own their contributions to their bands. So I wonder what we do with Taylor-Taylor essentially casting McCabe for the Dandys upon seeing her working at a coffee shop. She had no musical experience at the time. Was he casting her because she looked so much like the archetypical alt-rock pin-up, the kind of girl whose features would take to piercings and hair dye? Does this then inform McCabe’s reception, as she was infamous in early Dandys live performances for playing topless? The same questions could be asked of former BJM guest player Sophie Guenan, initially cast as a Nico-type presence in the band due to her foreign-ness and willingness to play the cello. And of course we can’t overlook that the film was made by a woman working with two men who run their own production company and won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2004. The film itself makes no explicit comment on gender, but we could.

Based on the documentary and the commentary, gender seems most operative in the BJM when it calls the group’s hippie machismo into question. Percussionist Joel Gion is most often deployed for these purposes. Outfitted in oversize sunglasses and a DIY mod hairdo, Gion mugs and vogues through most of Dig! He delivers wry commentary and wordless asides throughout the film. When guitarist/bassist Matt Hollywood concludes a tour anecdote about being accosted by Southern homophobes with “Say what you want, redneck. I’m heading over to your girlfriend’s house,” Gion counters with “The embarrassing thing was, we were sucking each other’s dicks at the time.” Yet even he cannot escape such macho posturing, claiming in a deleted scene that there’s nothing wrong with going to a meeting with a female label executive smelling like another woman’s pussy. The Dandys fare better. McCabe is able to perform, record, and tour alongside guitarist and ex-boyfriend Pete Holmström without comment. Yet Taylor-Taylor still wonders excitedly if McCabe is going to flash Matt Pinfield for a taping at MTV.

Newcombe and GionZia topless

Finally, I return to this line because I would like a clearer sense of what being productive means. Does it have to do with making products? Does it have to do with feeling as though you are effectively managing your professional time? Does it mean that you feel good about your work? Does feeling good about your work mean that you’ve made a commitment to not self-exploit? I wonder what it means to the Dandys and the BJM. I wonder what it means to Matt Stahl, whose chapter on Dig! in Unfree Masters prompted me to revisit the documentary. I wonder for my pre-liminary exams, which I take at the end of the summer (I have made my reading list available through my profile on Academia.edu and I’m also updating my progress on Twitter). I wonder for my dissertation, which will focus on the identity politics of music-based intermediary labor in the post-network era. As I saw Annie Petersen do with her blog the summer she took her exams, I plan on using this blog as a space to work through some big ideas for this larger project. One of those big ideas, reignited by McCabe’s line in Dig!, is puzzling through being productive in relation to positing distinctions between labor and work.

In Bodies That Matter Judith Butler uses the concept of the heterosexual matrix to aver that materiality is a product of discourse. This supports her intervening argument that sex is a product of gender. This inverts the perceived biological paradigm that gender is the product of sex. Butler claims instead that gender enacts the processes by which we understand sex as such (Butler 1993; if you’re lost, here’s a link that explains this argument with cats). With Butler’s identity-based furniture rearrangement project in mind, I maintain that the material conditions that allow for deskilling and affect to serve as products of labor are the result of gender, which leads to the ongoing historical practices of invisibility and inaudibility. My intervention will be to theorize the relationship between invisibility and inaudibility through considering the labor roles and relations of supervisors, licensors, booking agents, and promoters. By holding visual and sonic metaphors in tension, I hope to advocate for their industrial and textual audibility through considering their contributions as labor.

It is my belief that better scholarly attention is required to understand the shaping of music-based intermediary labor in relation to an intersectional approach to understanding gender—one that is operative with race, sexuality, class, and age—at this particular historical moment. In order to successfully prepare a pre-liminary response and dissertation on this topic, I also need to historicize these changes in labor practices alongside post-network convergence and post-feminist ideology and their influence on the shaping and contextualization of media texts, intertextual relations, and definitions of power and identity. Greater emphasis is placed on branding in order to differentiate between a host of competing networks, channels, user technologies, and reception practices. Much of this is also reflected in the cultural move toward post-feminism following the feminist backlash of the 1980s. Greater emphasis began to be placed on some tenets of feminism—particularly autonomy, agency, and choice—while trading away the movement’s collaborative, anti-capitalist inclinations in order to emphasize material wealth and individual achievement.

To offer an example, I am currently working on a research project on the multiple functions of music licensing—the use of permitted copyrighted music—on RuPaul’s Drag Race, a competition-based reality show on Logo devoted to finding the next drag superstar. Music licensing has always been a part of reality programming, though only in recent years has it become integrated into the packaging and marketing beyond providing extradiegetic atmosphere for the purposes of narration and characterization. Drag Race has become a tent-pole program for the cable channel, which focuses its programming and brand on LGBT-themed content. In the project, I combine textual and discourse analysis to map out particularly illustrative instances of music licensing during the program’s run to make larger claims about the show’s use of music for the purposes of (often normative, though negotiated) queer identification and interpellation.

I am using the program to analyze the term “licensing” from two different angles. First, I will look at how host RuPaul serves as a licensor of her own music, a role facilitated as much by her role as producer as well as through her distribution deals with iTunes and Amazon. I am also interested in how RuPaul’s Drag Race serves as a licensee, particularly for its lip sync contests. Notably, the increasingly contemporary (and expensive) song selections and the cross-promotion of guest judges licensing their own music for these challenges serve to make the work of licensing audible, suggest the program’s increased wealth and success, and make legible the work of cross-promotion and interpellation. In analyzing the role of the licensor and licensee on this program, I consider the political of power built into giving license on a competition-based reality program for an identity-based niche cable channel, as well as music licensing’s possible queer potential for Logo and Drag Race’s intended audience.

Lip sync

Roughly defined, work seems to be the product that comes out of labor, which then can be understood as the myriad processes that shape the ultimate creation of work. Labor is then extracted from the worker that can produce exchange value. Thus it seems as though the two concepts might be differentiated between each other through temporality. Labor is the seemingly present conditions around which work is understood as a product that has been created. I believe that making such a distinction is important. But throughout the semester, it has been difficult to pin down a clear definition because a number of scholars use labor and work interchangeably, particular when applying such concepts to studies in popular culture.

In Being Rita Hayworth, Adrienne McLean claims to intervene on the field of star studies with a feminist investment in the construction of celebrity as labor. Yet much of her analysis focuses on work, or the final product of Hayworth’s labor—films, interviews, press, and fan discourse (McLean 2004). This speaks to a methodological issue. Obviously, McLean relied upon such primary sources because she had limited access to Hayworth’s labor. She could not visit film sets or conduct interviews. She could not enact ethnographic or participant action research to get a fuller picture of how each interpersonal professional exchange or utterance of personal obligation was pieced together to create the processural context for Hayworth’s labor. This is certainly a temporal issue. Yet it is also a concern that continues to vex production studies: the matter of access. In this regard, Joshua Gamson seems to offer a fuller picture of celebrity and image construction as labor (Gamson 1994). But Gamson had access to celebrities, publicists, agents, marketers, and journalists to help in his construction. McLean “only” had access to textual products, which took the form of archival material, as well as trade discourse and fan zines. I worry that a privileging of the always already present-ness afforded by certain methodologies (and industry connections) might place scholarship in a hierarchy based on perceptual differences around defining and re-enforcing such a rigid distinction between work and labor.

Thus there are some stakes to properly applying these terms or using them interchangeability. What is lost? What is the intellectual crime when we use labor instead of work and vice versa? What are we not capturing? What can we not capture? Do we presume a difference, particularly when many authors use them as if there is no difference or might have to reframe their work differently in ways that create hierarchal privileges of industry access? Importantly for my purposes, why is this distinction important to understand work in relation to gender and labor in terms of gender? Arguably, by conflating the two terms, we may not fully recognize what is being extracted from the body and the mind. If work is the action that we do and labor is what is taken or pulled out of the action, then we have to somehow access the people who are doing this. Can bodies be seen as labor and commodity, if commodity is produced solely for its exchange value? Such a question particularly seems important when talking about gender, femininity, and identity, as women and girls tend to be (de)valued socially and professionally in those terms. Does gender then function as an axis along which to articulate labor? Once we start talking about gender as work, can we then see labor as operative? If work as limited and reducible, then labor has to be about the sociocultural processes that make work possible.

I wonder about labor’s relationship to gender. While women are the subjects of these books, the authors are talking about gender in multiple ways that leave the concept of gender open and not bound by essentialist notions that equate gender to women. Instead of reducing “woman” to an essentialist category, it is important to think through the ways in which “femininity” can be theorized as discursive in relation to gender. However, we must also be conscious of how sex is a material product of gender through the ways in which gender and sex are marked on the body, how they are operative in the ways in which labor is organized and laborers engage in interpersonal professional relations at their jobs, and through the work they are responsible for performing and how that work is discursively defined. In other words, Zia McCabe’s breasts matter.

This makes me reflect on Julie D’Acci’s Defining Women: The Case of Cagney and Lacey, one of the seminal works in the field of cultural studies. Many might unintentionally dismiss Defining Women as an extended case study about Cagney and Lacey. But the program seems better understood as a critical lens through which D’Acci interprets the ways that gender and feminism were defined through dialectic practices at a particular historical moment between the television industry, the critical and trade press, and the show’s audience(s). What seems particularly useful to feminist media scholars invested in a production studies approach to popular culture is D’Acci’s differentiation between femininity, woman, and women in her introduction. Applying Teresa de Laurentis’ definition of femininity as a “technology of gender” allows D’Acci to consider how institutions construct a subject of femininity, which provides space to consider how using “femininity” as a descriptor can become a site of struggle over what “woman” means (D’Acci, 7). She consider “woman” as the construction of that subjectivity, particularly defined as an essentialist category and perceived as a stabilized identity that the labor of production and consumption surrounding Cagney and Lacey allows her to problematize. Women, for D’Acci, seem to refer to people and their textual representations (D’Acci, 8-9).

Cagney and Lacey

Yet Defining Women differs from much of the media studies scholarship we have read on gender and labor because it is using a historical moment in television and media to map out a historical moment in feminism. Thus if Cagney and Lacey is used as a case study, it is mobilizing the program as a lens to say something broader about the negotiation of feminism at the level of textual representation, industry construction, and the discursive reception practices that gave it meaning as a result of advancements in liberal feminism in the second half of the 1970s and the resultant conservative backlash against feminism in the 1980s.

But it might be difficult to extrapolate labor from Defining Women. In my efforts to extend her definitions of femininity, woman, and women in relation to her application of Richard A. Peterson’s circuit of production model (production/text/reception/context), a series of questions emerge. Does “female” refer to the program’s production context? Does “feminine” refer to Cagney and Lacey as a text? Does “feminist” refer to the program’s intended audience? Can any of these terms be applied to the circuit of production model or would doing so essentialize these terms?

Part of the reason for the book’s difficulty might be its deceptive simplicity. D’Acci sets up a lot of the analytical work to be done by the reader. I perceive this as an opportunity. While she does not discuss labor directly, she does leave openings for possibilities for other scholars to talk about labor. For one, she offers her notes within the book as a possible model for doing similar research, as well as evidence that the book itself is a product of labor as a process. She also offers a number of examples that could be interpreted as labor. One of the central tensions in the book is executive Barney Rosenzweig’s turn toward developing this show. As D’Acci makes clear in her mobilization of meeting notes and interviews, Rosenzweig was clearly motivated by Cagney and Lacey’s commercially exploitable possibilities in an ephemeral cultural moment when liberal feminism was part of the zeitgeist.

However, this moment of inception and the commercial impulses undergirding the production have direct bearing over the productive negotiations that kept the show on the air during its run that are represented as labor through the work of letters and industry discourse left behind. The show was always under threat of cancellation and relied upon an active, vocal assemblage of fans who fought for its preservation while simultaneously challenging the show’s representation of working women and homosocial bonding within the constraints of both liberal feminism and prime-time broadcast television. We can see this through actress Tyne Daly’s continued resistance toward certain production and promotional decisions. Daly was vocal in wanting Cagney and Lacey to be more of an explicitly feminist show that caused her to feud constantly with Rosenzweig. However, because of Daly’s commitment to feminism, she was often at various promotional and political events that served to animate the show’s implicit feminist values through associating the program and its stars with people like Gloria Steinem, organizations like the National Organization of Women, and causes like reproductive choice. This identification with feminism became built into Daly’s labor. Such identity-based responsibilities recur in Candace Moore’s discussion of L Word cast members’ appearances at lesbian bars for screening nights hosted by Showtime and the Human Rights Council (Moore 2008). This is demonstrated by actresses Kate Moennig and Leisha Hailey advocating for fans to support commercially appealing political causes like equal marriage while also mobilizing and interacting with their fan base in order to lobby for the show’s continued existence.

The L Word

Finally, I continue to return to an archetype that D’Acci invokes numerous times in Cagney and Lacey (D’Acci 1994). What do we do with the “go-getter”? This is a feminine archetype that D’Acci attributes to emerge out of advertising during the turn from the late 1960s to the early 1970s. Go-getters were defined as being productive, efficient, normatively feminine, and compliant with the ideological directives of capitalism in order to guarantee their own professional ascendancy and advancements. For D’Acci, the “go-getter” becomes an important model upon which liberal feminist narratives were built, including how programs like Cagney and Lacey represented professional women. For me, I wonder how the “go-getter” remains a model for how female industry professionals are expected to comport themselves in a post-feminist climate. This is particularly concerning because to my mind, the go-getter is a figure of accommodation. In this case, “getting” seems to imply fetching or acquiring something for someone else. Climbing up the corporate ladder suggests that what is being reached for is someone else’s approval and that mentorship and successorship conform to heteromasculine, patriarchal definitions of achievement. So is it a more feminist act to play the game or do we try to change the system by advocating for production practices and representations that do not reinforce patriarchal machinations?

Extending the go-getter archetype even further, how is interest created in a show like this? In the case of Cagney and Lacey, much of the promotion of the show centered on controversies mobilized by identity politics. Feminism and feminist viewership(s) were interpellated by a consistent focus on and representation of hot-button liberal feminist issues like partner abuse, incest, rape, and the glass ceiling. Rosenzweig appears to be stirring the pot in order to get people to pay attention in the first place. Is this exploitatively political or a legitimate feminist strategy? And what does it mean to center such concerns on liberal feminist ideology, embodied by archetypes like the go-getter, which seems to be more concerned with accommodating patriarchal definitions of professional success and social justice than other more resistive, radical models? As someone who studies how labor informs the popular music that is brought to television, negotiations with liberal feminism and post-feminism seem likely to extend beyond the visual realm of representation as well. For a start, such negotiations might help us to understand how and when gender is operative in Dig! both for the subjects in front of the camera and for the female documentarian behind it.

Ondi TimonerOndi Timoner 2

Women at work

Back in late January, I revisited “Making Plans for Nigel.” In a blog post on the best musical moments of 2012, a post-doc in my program compared Santigold’s “Disparate Youth” to the XTC single. Point taken. The riff and the hook are strikingly similar. But knowing that the final semester of course work was fast approaching, and especially knowing that I was putting together an independent study on gender and labor, I kept reflecting on the lyrics.

As a kid, I liked this song. But it wasn’t until I was fresh out of undergrad, editing training courses at an e-learning company, that I began to think of this song as a possible critique on labor (or parenting, but often biological and corporate parentage uphold and recirculate the same ideals). Eight hours under fluorescent lights can do that to you. The song is told (with tongue in cheek) from the perspective of Nigel’s masters, who believe that selfless diligence and deference to management will guarantee their charge’s happiness. Yet as I was preparing for the semester–pulling books from the library, writing reading notes, drafting pre-lims reading lists, revising writing and teaching materials–I kept returning to the line “Nigel is happy in his work.”

Nigel’s masters are speaking for him. They’re assuming he’s happy in his work. But what if he is actually happy in his work? Happy the way Peggy Olson is happy when she’s stumbling out of her office after 6 p.m. to stretch and steal a cigarette from the typing pool. Happy the way I am happy when I’m writing and completely lose track of time. Sure, happiness is a moving target when it comes to labor. Those of us who tend to overwork ourselves must advocate equitable treatment and insist against self-exploitation, especially if we are women and there are gendered expectations that we’ll overextend ourselves. Self-care is real, y’all. As a feminist media scholar who studies gender and labor–mainly because I think the ways in which women’s labor is valued in the media industries needs to be studied, but also to some extent because I’m a woman who is never not working–I keep thinking through the negotiation between loving your work and making a commitment to learning to love yourself.

In many ways, I’ve been thinking about this well before I went back to grad school. Those who have followed this blog from the beginning (i.e., April 2009) know that I came into the MCS PhD program with a very clear idea of what dissertation I wanted to write. Because I was writing it into this blog. While maintaining this space, I reflected quite a bit on my memories of my experiences in college radio. I worked for four years at UT’s station, 91.7 KVRX. During this time, I was simultaneously developing my feminist politics. It was through my involvement with Alliance for a Feminist Option, a campus feminist sorority, that I read Gloria Anzaldúa and Patricia Hill Collins and became friends with brilliant women who were thinking through a lot of the same stuff I was processing. Working at KVRX allowed me to apply my feminist education. Because while I eventually thought of the station as home, I also saw a lot of sexist bullshit go down.

I was one of many of the women on staff could (and did) trade cautionary tales about listener harassment. The most common offense female deejays confronted was the unidentified, disembodied male voice who would call in to inform us—often accompanied by grunting and/or contemptuous laughter—that we sounded sexy. Speaking for myself, I went on the air because I had records to play. I was trying to share knowledge. The amount of research that went into my shows was comparable to the research I do as an academic. Many of the songs I played were from records that were out of print, released on labels that no longer existed, and were recorded by artists—many of whom were women, many of whom identified as queer—relegated to the footnotes of history, if they were even granted such a citation. To reduce my work to the assumed seductive properties of my voice was insulting, and it was an insult waged upon many female deejays. This resulted in me taking down my email address. I stopped giving out the station phone number as frequently during my broadcasts. And I got good at hanging up on rude callers. But each time I did, I wondered if I lost an opportunity to chat with a female listener. Rarely did women call in during my show (at least not women who were not my AFO grrrlfriends). When they did, they usually wanted to talk about who I was playing.

These were not problems my male contemporaries (including my partner, who hosted the blues program and served as music director) seemed to have to deal with. We certainly had allies. But male deejays did not seem to need to engage in the same tactical maneuvers as their female counterparts. It was common for women to serve as co-hosts and/or bring friends and partners to the station for protection. It was less common for women to agree to do a radio show alone and/or in the late evening and early morning when public transportation was unreliable and the streets were empty. Yet amid all that nonsense, I still lived for programming a radio show. I still lived for reviewing albums and going to shows. And I wasn’t alone. So on the one hand, there’s a negotiation for self-worth and equitable treatment. On the other hand, there’s the distinct pleasure of being happy in one’s work, despite (and sometimes because of) this sexist bullshit.

My blog changed with time. I used to update every day, chasing various news items and writing 300-word posts about videos I liked. I don’t do that anymore. I prioritize my time differently. As a grad student, I have to. More to the point, as a grad student I feel like I have to do research and piece together as much context as I can before I attempt to write anything. But I’m also trying to learn to listen to what I need, particularly because grad school provides a lot of opportunities for labor and leaves you with the task of determining whether that labor is beneficial to you. Grad school requires you to make time for things. But it doesn’t give you much time. It assumes that you’ll make these choices for yourself. This can be difficult, particularly if you internalize the ways in which labor expectations privilege masculinized norms of self-sacrifice and individual achievement.

So as this blog developed, I became interested in labor as a subject of study. Maintaining a blog to break up a work day can do that to you. In December 2009, I wrote a short post on music supervisor Alexandra Patsavas. It would ultimately lead me to my dissertation topic. I am a feminist media scholar who studies the intersections of gender, labor, and music culture in a post-network era. I have come to these intersecting subjects of study through my own experiences, questions of identity (or, because intersectionality matters, identities) always come first for me. One reckless habit I have cultivated as a graduate student is not worrying about whether other research projects bear similarities to mine, thus occluding me from committing myself further to particular subjects and lines of inquiry. In point of fact, a number of people have already written on similar topics. I am preparing to write a dissertation about women’s intermediary labor between the music, television, and new media industries. Taking Vicki Mayer’s organizational schema from her book Below the Line, I will pay particular attention to positions such as booking, promotion, licensing, and music supervision.

The last area has already cultivated a sizable body of knowledge within media and film studies (see: Aslinger, 2008; Klein, 2009; Barnett, 2010; Lewanowski, 2010; Anderson, 2011). However, there is still more to explore. We can think through how this field of labor is intertextual and relies upon laborers’ accumulation of cultural capital, fluency in copyright law and business practices, negotiated knowledge of several industries and their distinct needs, and the sensitivity they must demonstrate to the ways in which certain musicians and affiliated genres are deployed to hail particular audiences. Furthermore, supervisors’ labor relies on and has been shaped by the industrial practices of licensing, promotion, and booking. Finally, greater attention must be paid to how labor identities and gendered assumptions about labor shapes this work.

Women contributed a largely ignored history of work in these areas that has only recently cultivated a (compromised) visibility. Women’s work seems to have been delegitimized in these fields for a few reasons. For one, these labor positions are historically perceived as catalysts for struggle to penetrate various barriers to entry. If industrially or culturally sanctioned “auteurs” like film director Wes Anderson and Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner want to place a Beatles’ song in one of their projects and the music supervisor or licensor cannot negotiate a licensing fee that fits within the budget (Beatles’ songs are notoriously expensive to license), the burden of responsibility (or blame) tends to fall on the laborer who cannot ink the deal.

There is also an assumption that labor that relies upon technical skill and is organized by craft unions and guilds is not as valuable because it is perceived as dependent upon and subservient to “creative” labor like writing, directing, producing, and acting, thus “justifying” and reinforcing the industrial hierarchies of above- and below-the-line labor. Booking, supervision, licensing, and promotion all qualify as below-the-line labor and thus tend to be delegitimized. The line between work and fandom is often blurred for these particular laborers, which can cause further perceptual delegitimation within the media industries. Finally, pervasive sexist and misogynistic assumptions remain on what it means for women to enact these labor roles. Much of this work takes place in meetings with artists, label representatives, legal teams, and publishers. Many of these exchanges take place through electronic communication channels, in offices, or in conference rooms. There are gendered assumptions in place even in these exchanges.

However, a good bit of this work still takes place at industry festivals like SXSW or backstage at concerts. As scholars like Sara Cohen have noted, such cultural spaces are historically off-limits or available in a restricted capacity to women because of minimal concerns for individual safety to, from, and at a gig, which is usually booked after-hours in poorly-lit metropolitan areas with limited public transportation and parking accommodations that many of their male counterparts rarely had to consider (Cohen, 1997). Hence why a number of artists associated with the riot grrrl movement repurposed second-wave segregationist practices by holding female-only shows or insisting that male audience members stand in the back. Hence why more shows were all-ages events in repurposed performance spaces that took place earlier in the evening.

Because there remain pernicious assumptions that women and girls simply entering into a venue space must have heteronormative sex-based ulterior motives for contact, as the idea of women and girls who turn their music fandom into a livelihood (coupled with the cultural degradation of groupies’ labor and the sexist assumption that women and girls at a concert must be groupies) is unconscionably foreign to many people. What is more, there is an assumption that all people go to a concert to hear live music. As I’ve written (and will continue to write) since January 1, 2012, there are consequences for this not always being the case.

What does this mean for my scholarship? By extension, what does this mean for this blog? Or what some of you might really be asking: where’s your post on Beyoncé? Good questions all. I’ve thought a lot about Beyoncé as a site for understanding race, gender, and labor. Beyoncé has always been known for fancy footwork. This is really just an extension of how closely she controls her own image. A friend asked why Beyoncé ”let” Michelle Williams take the lead on their new single. My catty reply: “Beynevolence. That’s what her fifth album will be called” (I say this as a fan, B’Day 4 life). I keep thinking about the intense coordination of the Destiny’s Child reunion, the Super Bowl half-time show, the GQ cover story, the HBO documentary, and the announcement of her world tour. A lot of interesting discourse came out of this confluence of brand positioning. I thought Leah Carroll’s comparison of Life Is But a Dream and Jennie Livingston’s Paris is Burning was especially interesting in terms of their particular evocations of “realness.” I also thought about Beyoncé advantageously comparing herself to an athlete in her GQ cover story (a connection photographer Terry Richardson extended because his dick has no imagination).

I like Beyoncé. A major part of what I like about her–aside from her voice, songs, performances, and music videos–is her insistence of control. However, some may argue that such a need for control keeps Life Is But a Dream, which she directed, from functioning as a proper documentary. It often shuts down moments where we might learn something about the subject. Beyoncé won’t offer much detail on her relationship with her father and the decisions she made to be her own manager. More to the point, for all of her insistence on female solidarity, professional agency, and sexual fulfillment, Beyoncé does not seem to have much of a relationship with anyone. We barely see her with Jay. We see her with her nephew, but not her sister Solange. We see footage of her singing “Lovefool” with Kelly and Michelle from their Destiny’s Child days, but then they’re clapping for her from a distance at an awards show. We see a few moments where she asserts her authority backstage, but many of those are dropped in with little context and quickly backed away from. These are ruptures that demand questions the documentary can’t or won’t answer.

As I was watching, I kept thinking about bell hooks’ critique of Madonna: Truth or Dare and the ways in which the Material Girl pathologizes her back-up dancers in terms of race and sexuality and elects herself as their white savior (hooks, 1999). No such intervention from Beyoncé. However, as someone who is especially excited about her all-female band, I was sad to see little connection between Beyoncé and the Sugar Mamas. Furthermore, I was flummoxed by the scene where choreographer Frank Gatson orders Beyoncé’s dancers to sew their hats into their hair. A friend noted that one of the women he yells at is Ashley Everett, one of the pop star’s choreographers and dance captains. This scene gave me pause for a few reasons. For one, it’s a rare scene where another woman’s labor is acknowledged. For another, it’s a tense scene between members of the touring company and the interplay of race and gender frames the tension. Furthermore, Beyoncé is not in this scene. This distances herself from the labor that also helps create “Beyoncé.” Yet at the same time, this scene was included in the film by either Beyoncé or her editing team. Thus there is an acknowledgement of the dancers’ labor, yet Beyoncé’s connection to that labor is unclear. Being able to make those connections would help us better understand the star’s labor, as well as the surrounding labor that makes her stardom possible. But speaking to those absences and ruptures is a start.

I’m taking an independent study on gender and labor for my pre-lims and dissertation. I haven’t come up with my pre-lims question, but I’m noticing many themes. Some include: the processes of deskilling through technological changes and historical materialism, the assumption that women’s wages are supplemental for a family income, the identity-based connections between production and consumption, the struggle to articulate worth, the contingent visibility and shaping of race and gender by work environment and industrial definitions, paternalistic labor practices and educational opportunities, unions’ sexist obstructions toward female laborer participation, women entering into identity-based competitions with other women, the expectations of motherhood, and the contingent coalitions female laborers form and continue to form despite various oppositional forces. I’m also noticing that not a lot of media studies scholarship deals directly with gender and labor, though this is changing.  I’m putting together a mix CD for the indie study. The act of curating a mix is useful to me, and I might be able to pull out a question by thinking about gender and music as sites of labor. I’m struggling to find songs that don’t treat these subjects as inevitably vulnerable to exploitation and subjugation. I’m looking for music that gets at the nuances of negotiating a love for labor with an insistence not to self-exploit. Here are some songs I’ve chosen so far. I welcome other suggestions.

On Being Scared and Being Brave

In a recent interview with Jessica Hopper, Claire Boucher (alias Grimes) revealed that the song “Oblivion” addressed the constant sense of dread women deal with as they embark on a “masculine world associated with sexual assault.” Boucher was writing from her own experiences as a survivor. This was highlighted in Mark Richardson’s write-up on Pitchfork’s 2012 Top 100 Tracks list, on which “Oblivion” was named song of the year. On Slate’s Music Club 2012, Lindsay Zoladz put “Oblivion” in conversation with Angel Haze’s “Cleaning Out My Closet,” a harrowing song about the rapper’s personal history with child abuse.

Much like Zoladz, upon reading Boucher’s response, I heard “Oblivion” with new ears. Or rather, it confirmed my suspicions. Stripped of its robotic sheen, Boucher reminds me of Roy Orbison, an alien with an arrow in his heart, particularly with lyrics like “when you’re running by yourself it’s hard to find someone to hold your hand” and Boucher’s phrasing on the line “I will wait forever.” But I could never take these words at face value. The menacing, queer-masculine Casio chorus that overwhelms the song’s second half wouldn’t let me. Nor would the lyrics that bookend the song. Boucher begins with the admission “I never walk about/after dark/It’s my point of view/that someone could break your neck/Coming up behind you always coming and you’d never have a clue” and concludes with the foreboding promise to “see you on a dark night.” Nor would the video, with Boucher in a football stadium and a locker room amid a gaggle of sweaty, undressed young men. When I read Boucher’s interview and processed her intimation, I didn’t say “aha.” I nodded silently to myself. “That makes sense,” I thought. “I knew it.”

Misogynists might hear an erotic thrill in “Oblivion” and surmise that women like being caught. What’s powerful about this song–indeed, why I kept returning to it–is the unsettling juxtaposition of romantic longing and looming endangerment. But the presence of both elements doesn’t mean Grimes is compromising her need for consent. Rather, she’s expressing the constant negotiation and reconciliation women and girls have to do as sexual beings who are treated as objects and marked as easy targets by people who wish to do them harm simply for existing. “Oblivion” is about what it means to desire–often an ongoing internal debate–while keeping your guard up because of what your gender or sexuality represents to others–often a forced external battle. In Molly Lambert’s excellent review of Mad Men‘s “Mystery Date,” which uses the Speck murders as a thematic linchpin, she questions one character’s rape-fantasy pitch by suggesting that the woman in this scenario “wonders exactly what terrible, violent, and life-altering things would happen if she stopped looking out.”

Lambert identifies with Sally Draper, linking the character’s fear with her own recollections of the Polly Klaas abduction. Though she doesn’t address this in the piece directly, Lambert has probably felt the evil of assault in her adult life. I know I have. And I need to be careful with my language, because these aren’t my stories. I also need to be careful that my words don’t reinforce the myth of strangers lurking in the shadows, because statistically people are more likely to be hurt by friends and acquaintances. But I’ve had friends who were harassed on the street. I have friends who don’t feel safe on their own university campuses. A roommate cryptically implied an attack over a solemn brunch at Denny’s after a night out turned into a nightmare.

Of course, I have my own stories. I’m a survivor too. And as an adult, I’ve had multiple experiences of men barking at me (often from the safe distance of the passenger seat) while I walked to the grocery store, went out for a jog, or headed to a show. I remember yelling “don’t touch my fucking hair” at a stranger while I was outside of a bar with some friends in New Orleans. I remember being proud that I had the instinct to articulate my rage. Likewise, I remember being grateful that I had people around me while I did it. I also remember being furious that my guy friends who were chatting inside about Eastbound and Down had the luxury of walking to their hotel after 2 a.m. with minimal threat of harassment. What I remember in all those incidents–especially as I get older, the stories pile up, and I clutch my coat tighter–is that I was lucky.

In fall 2006, two family members were assaulted. The effects of this trauma were catastrophic and far-reaching. During the early stages of the aftermath, my partner’s mother gave me Gavin de Becker’s The Gift of Fear. I didn’t read it. At 23, I thought I was immune to pop psychology. As I get older, I keep thinking about the relationship between fear and bravery. I used to think bravery meant fearlessness. Last year was the first time I lost a friend in an assault. Esme’s murder was the defining moment of 2012 for me, and most likely one of the most significant events in my adult life. It’s hard to articulate the influence of Esme’s passing. I struggled with coming up with ways to express my grief. There weren’t words for it. I couldn’t write about it. Any attempt to turn it into something else felt shallow and opportunistic. As a feminist, I know that intersectionality is both an essential yet volatile framework. Esme’s murder brings up unresolved issues with gender, race, and mental health. I didn’t know what to do with people calling the African American male suspects “monsters.” I didn’t know what to do with the identified assailant killing himself. I didn’t know what to do with knowing that my friend would most likely be alive if she weren’t a small, attractive young woman. I didn’t know what to do with believing that Esme was brave for walking home from a show in her neighborhood instead of entitled to such freedom. But Esme was brave in so many ways, perhaps especially in her kindness.

A piece by artist Mark Aguhar, a question I continue to turn over in my mind.

A piece by artist Mark Aguhar, a question I continue to turn over in my mind.

Last fall, I read Circuits of Visibility, an anthology edited by Radha S. Hegde about gender’s relationship to transnational media flows. Hegde contributes a piece about Indian Hewlett-Packard call center employee Pratibha Srikantamurthy, who was raped and murdered by a cab driver on her way to work in Bangalore. As I read this piece, I understood why a feminist academic like Hegde felt it necessary to write about it (and why it’s still relevant). I feel the feminist impulses of lending visibility and articulating rage in my bones. But I felt like any effort to use my work as a platform or outlet for my confusion, anger, and sadness over Esme would be self-serving and almost as hollow as the UT’s American Society of Mechanical Engineers’ awful co-opting of Charlie Chauvin’s Esme logo. It wouldn’t bring her back. The act of writing a proper conclusion was especially vexing. I didn’t want to paper over the reality of her death by focusing on her bright, young life, nor did I want to dwell on the brutal facts of her murder. Furthermore, the case was open at the time. But drafting a conclusion felt like lying. Even if the Austin Police Department closed the case–which they did in late December–it couldn’t make some of my friends feel safe to walk alone at night. It never could. The damage was done. Words were useless.

That last sentence is only a half-truth. As a writer, I recognize that the right words, persistently shaped by thoughtful research and personal insight, have tremendous healing properties. Summer Anne Burton’s “The Year Without Esme” found the words I could not and, importantly, shifted the grief outward to focus on how other people mourn and remember this miracle of a person.

Last year, I had trouble finding an outlet to express my feelings and turn them into something else. I fell out of the habit of writing. Well, this isn’t exactly true. I wrote. I completed revisions on an anthology chapter. I contributed reviews for Bitch Magazine and The Moving Image. I wrote four posts for Antenna and a post for In Media Res. Last week, I submitted an article for review. Next month, I’m due to submit another one. And then there’s all of the writing I didn’t share–term papers, weekly responses, notes, presentations, student feedback, marginalia. I channeled my creative energies elsewhere. But I questioned the validity and utility of my words in ways that I hadn’t before. In the past, I always savored conjuring sentences from my laptop like a sorceress manipulates the sky. But now, it feels like a luxury. Now I recognize the immanent critique’s connection not only to self-indulgence but to writer’s block.

Hopefully, such questioning leads to personal growth. Last year, other people’s words resonated where mine could not. I was struck by Angel Haze’s bracing candor, Fiona Apple’s poetic violence, THEESatisfaction’s off-hand introspection, Lower Dens’ muttering, Marisa Paternoster’s bellowing, Nicki Minaj’s blatant disregard, Santigold’s pop genius, Georgia Anne Muldrow’s incantations, Cat Power’s maturation, Grimes’ relentless shapeshifting, Icona Pop’s maniacal glee, Signif’s real talk, Yoko Ono’s couples therapy, Crystal Castles’ icy protest songs, Purity Ring’s heartfelt odes to abjection, and Julia Holter’s celestial hymns. I was particularly taken with the music and words that forced me not to look away, even when it scared me.

What I learned last year is that fear and bravery are usually connected. Fear is the manifestation of uncertainty over unknown entities or prospects. Bravery is the resolve not to be thwarted or to harm out of fear. It doesn’t mean we lose the fear. It just means we don’t let the fear consume us. It’s a difficult commitment and it never resolves itself. As Ann Friedman points out, we can’t guarantee social progress with premature proclamations that we’re moving forward. But let’s try to be brave this year. And let’s be good to each other so that we don’t have to be afraid.

Creating Space

Earlier this week, I launched my personal Web site through UW-Madison’s Comm Arts Department. I built the site as an assignment for my Digital Production class. I intended to use the assignment as a means to update my blog and integrate it into a larger, ongoing project of media-making that I believe is foundational to my scholarly interests in gender, labor, and music culture as a feminist media scholar.

I’ll start by saying a bit about the initial process of building a blog. At first, it was infuriating. It was especially frustrating because my ambition exceeded my reach. I drew out a detailed, multi-page layout. I have a very clear vision for how I want my site to look and what I want it to do. Ultimately, I want my Web site to have curated collections for previous and ongoing research. I also want it to have the capacity to stream my mixes and deejay setlists. But I needed to know how to create a style sheet first.

As a class, we used Dreamweaver to build our sites. This is software in which I once claimed proficiency based on watching friends use it to build their Web sites, but I never really played with it before. My experience as a blogger and freelancer allowed me to treat the Internet like a Word document, because someone else built the frame onto which my words, images, clips, and links appeared. We also read Jon Duckett’s HTML and CSS: Design and Build Websites as a reference guide. Because of the accelerated nature of most graduate courses at R1 institutions, this involved reading 50 to 100 pages of the book at a time and (hopefully) absorbing the material as you went. Like many people essentially acquiring foreign language skills, I’m learning through error. I learned how to do something by spending hours figuring out what I did wrong, combing the book and other online resources, texting friends for advice, and toggling between HTML and CSS and doing minor tweaking that would either change nothing on the page or radically change the layout and design elements, depending on my commands.

When you’re also balancing the expectations of coursework, a TA assignment, and other administrative duties, it’s easy to freak out. I freaked out at least once. After a particularly unproductive day in the lab that culminated in me putting a picture on top of the header, I felt myself reverting to that day in freshmen geometry when everyone seemed to get proofs but me. I wanted to cry. Unfortunately, I share an office with five other teaching assistants and had an hour before facilitating four consecutive discussion sections. So I took several deep breaths, let a friend hug me, tabled it, and taught undergraduates about the political underpinnings of television’s transnational practices of importation, formatting, and co-production. Then I had dinner with a friend. Then I talked to a couple of people in my class who were having trouble or experiencing anxiety about the project. Then I went back to my layout design and attempted to break up the assignment into small, discrete chunks. First I’d create the “About” page. This involved building a header in Photoshop. I took a picture of myself reaching for a copy of The Gossip’s Arkansas Heat (originally used as the header for this blog), cropped and resized the image, added a layer of text with my name, positioned it in a place where it would be clearly visible, and saved it for the Web. Once I had the layout the way I wanted it, I could easily transfer it to the CV page, the Research page, and the Playlists page. Then, I poked around WordPress and found a layout that more or less matched my Web site’s layout and design (960 grid! Helvetica!). I originally conceived of redesigning the blog to match the site layout, but this was an easier solution. As I worked, I developed a better understanding of HTML, CSS, and Photoshop. I started to love working on my site. I started to realize that, like my blog, this space would undergo an unending process of construction. I built myself a home. Two days after I turned in the assignment, I built the site’s splash page.

This assignment made me remember why I’m taking this Digital Production class, which I forgot during the constant negotiation of coursework expectations, lesson plans, grading, and deadlines for future projects. I’m invested in university production programs doing right by their female undergraduates. I want more women to be media literate and I want more women to be media-makers. I don’t presume an additive approach will “fix” the television and film industries. More women working in television and film won’t inherently make those industries commit to more progressive hiring and retention practices. It won’t end sexism, racism, colorism, homophobia, transphobia, sizeism, ableism, and ageism. But education is never a loss. Educating women should always be a priority. And educating men and women to work together in an equitable manner will enact positive social change. As someone who teaches a studies course about post-network era television to undergraduates who want to work in the television or film industry, I want them to acquire the vocabulary and critical thinking skills in order to interrogate the processes by which television is created, distributed, and consumed. As a feminist media scholar who studies women’s below-the-line intermediary labor in the music, television, and film industries, I’m invested in helping close the gender gap. I’m invested in eventually teaching production classes so I can help create a space where students acquire skills that allow them to rethink what’s possible and to destabilize potential assumptions of who gets to enact that work. And as an instructor, I’m committed to the ongoing process of learning through teaching students how to think and work together.

Just as I’ve made peace with the fact that I can’t control how my words are interpreted by others, I’ve embraced that this Web site is a public work in progress. I designed it on a Mac. It currently looks weird in Internet Explorer, though it appears to be compatible with Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. It looks okay on my phone. I still have a lot of work to do. I need to add anchors to my CV in HTML. I need to include a contact page. I need to add credits for Girls Rock Camp Rhode Island and Scratched Vinyl editor Chi Chi Thalken for their images that I used in the Home and About pages. While I wanted it to be clean and uncluttered, it might be a bit too minimalist. I might be oppressing you with Helvetica. Finally, how do I maintain a Web site without giving in to the governing logics of branding that I believe to be antithetical to the larger political project of cultural studies?

For my final project, I’m working on further developing the Research and Playlist pages. Currently, my Research page consists of three images that link to my PowerPoint presentations of a Girls Rock Camp workshop, a guest lecture, and a conference presentation. Pretty lo-fi. Taking a cue from Miriam Posner, what I’d ultimately like to do is curate an interactive collection for each workshop, lecture, and presentation that incorporates text, images, AV material, and secondary research. I won’t be able to do this for every conference presentation and guest lecture I’ve done by the end of the semester. So I’ll start by curating a collection on the Girls Rock Camp curriculum I designed with my friend Kristen. I’ll bring in the images and videos we collected for our workshop and integrate songs from the supplemental mix CD we made for our workshop into this collection.

I want all of my deejay setlists to be available through SoundCloud, so I will make one playlist streamable. I want to stream my setlists through my site for a few reasons. One, I want listeners to have access to my research. I use the word “research” purposefully, because I discovered that Cathy Dennis’ “Touch Me” references Wish & Fonda Rae’s “Touch Me (All Night Long)” through doing the same kind of digging that I have done through scholarly and trade publications to write a term paper. I think of my Queens deejay sets as aural histories of women’s contributions to soul, hip-hop, and R&B. But as a feminist, I’m conscious of who my deejay nights exclude. There are geographical barriers. My sets certainly aren’t available to people who live outside of Madison. My sets may also be inaccessible to people who live with physical disabilities or social anxieties. Going to the Alchemy requires transportation. It also requires feeling comfortable in loud public spaces. It may also presume that you’re a social drinker, which prohibits potential listeners who are sober or in recovery. It may also be unfeasible to attend if you can’t frequent local establishments due to a limited budget or particular familial responsibilities. Finally, I’m especially aware of how holding a deejay night on a Friday or Saturday evening might prohibit people who don’t feel safe going out alone or in small groups late at night. Let me be clear: I want people to see me spin in person. But I also want to give listeners options, because being complicit with exclusivity means perpetuating inequality.

In addition to building a database, converting vinyl to a digital format, and creating streamable mixes, I want my Playlist page to enact another function. Around Halloween, I had a conversation with a friend about how to celebrate while using it as a platform for creating awareness and challenging social practice. My friend was especially upset about a local ad that showed a woman being dragged inside a haunted house. It was hard for her to separate the image from a recent news story about a woman who was murdered in her own home. It was hard for either of us not to think of how we lost Esme and how her murder continues to influence how we carry ourselves at night. Thinking about this in relation to my upcoming deejay gig, I thought about how it might be nice to link a seemingly fun event to larger social issues. So I’m planning on picking one song from a setlist and relating it to one regional non-profit that is seeking to end violence against women and children. For example, how might we put Millie Jackson‘s “It’s All Over But the Shouting” in conversation with the Settlement Home for Children in Austin?

These are big ideas that I’m trying to take on a little bit at a time in the ongoing development of my site. I welcome any and all ideas people may have regarding both design and content. Let the great (ongoing) experiment begin.

Being Your Mountain: Trailing Tim and Jeff Buckley

A few weeks back, the trailer surfaced for Greetings From Tim Buckley, the first of reportedly two Jeff Buckley biopics in the works. The one that is currently in production attempts to take on the singer-songwriter’s brief career in its entirety, all the better to showcase its acquired rights to his original material. It boasts a cast of name actors. It also promises to make a star out of Reeve Carney, the British singer-actor who bears more than a passing resemblance to the alt-rocker. For some people, this is kind of a big deal. As a long-time Buckley fan who has followed trade discourse on a number of potential and aborted biopic projects since the late 90s when early cheerleader Brad Pitt trumpeted his interest, I’ve been concerned about who would tell the story and what such a film would focus on. I’ve been particularly interested in casting rumors and maintain that 2006-era James Franco would have been the way to go.

The other film, which made its debut at the Toronto International Film Festival to some acclaim, appears to be a different animal. Penn Badgley—best known as Gossip Girl’s Dan Humphrey and also received attention for his work in Easy A and Margin Call—plays Jeff. However, rather than attempt to take on the young singer’s career, the film centers on his promising debut at a tribute concert for his late father, folk singer Tim Buckley, the man from whom he inherited an otherworldly voice but otherwise never knew.

Bracketing off the remainder of Jeff’s career is a smart move. For one, this story is arguably the most compelling portion of David Browne’s Dream Brother, a biography that dialogues father and son’s personal lives, professional trajectories, and untimely deaths. Focusing on a time before the son wrote his own material is perhaps a clever way to hide that the production didn’t receive permission from Jeff’s mother, Mary Guibert, who oversees his estate.

Situating Greetings within the music biopic’s governing conventions, the decision to build a film around one minor but important legend is also a way to potentially distance itself from the genre’s limitations. Stated broadly, music biopics are boring. They essentially tell the same story. A musician—usually male—cannot handle the pressures of fame. He indulges, he betrays trusts, he self-medicates, and he overcomes his vices—either through posthumous legacy or with a second wife. This makes it ripe for parody, whether we’re talking about Walk Hard or Behind the Music.

These are a set of conventions that are hard to rework or overcome. Arguably–and I say this as a fan–not even post-modern, self-aware music biopics like 24-Hour Party People completely pull it off. For all of Tony Wilson’s winking at the film’s construction of his record label’s mythology, all the conventions are in place. Ian Curtis commits suicide. Shawn Ryder succumbs to decadence and hurts the label in the process. Martin Hannett substitutes one addiction with another and dies. Factory Records loses its money through a series of poor business decisions and has to shutter the label and its night club, where Wilson gets to dance with his ghosts one last time. Given the film’s proclivity for postmodern asides, it misses an opportunity to not better integrate female artists who had minor or tangential relationships with the label and its scene. Linder Sterling made fliers for the Buzzcocks and fronted Ludus. ESG performed at the Haçienda’s opening night and recorded with Hannett. Happy Mondays’ backup singer Rowetta Satchell reportedly survived an abusive relationship with Ryder.

One possible reason why this film genre retraces the same narrative conventions is that the life of a touring musician is potentially a boring subject for a feature film. A concert can be a magical experience, a site of interpersonal conflict, or just another show. Otherwise, a tour is often a series of interchangeable cities, hotels, interviews, stage setups, vehicle breakdowns, and fast food restaurants anchored by a bus and limited wardrobe that adopts a stench which blooms and stagnates the longer you’re away from home. It’s tough to make this glamorous or narratively compelling for a feature film, which may explain why musicians’ lives and performances have arguably been better served by documentaries and concert films. David Byrne unveiling the oversized suit in Stop Making Sense is exciting. The countless moments where he and the rest of the Talking Heads engage in passive-aggressive sparring or ignore each other is not.

So where does this leave Greetings? Based on the trailer, Badgley does a capable job mimicking Jeff’s voice, mannerisms, and odd charisma. However, I worry that the film (or the studio) doesn’t trust its audience enough to recognize Badgley’s effort. The scenes selected for the trailer bluntly underline how much he looks and sounds like his father and that his performance at St. Ann’s Church was transcendent. Importantly, they use other people’s reactions to illustrate Buckley’s otherworldly star presence and artistry rather than trusting that filmgoers might be caught up enough in Badgley’s performance to make that leap for themselves. It’s especially intrusive at the end of the trailer when Jeff covers “Once I Was.” The camera lingers on reaction shots—particularly his lover’s tear-streaked face—instead of his performance.

I would imagine the primary motivation behind relying on other characters to tell the audience just how engaging Tim and Jeff Buckley were as performers is so the film to get around the potential liability of its subjects’ relative obscurity. Many people, if they know Jeff at all, are only familiar with his cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” which scored several 9/11 montages and Seth Cohen’s summer retreat and was performed by a few American Idol contestants. Critical estimation of Grace, his only album, grew after his death. It certainly influenced a number of vocalists—Thom Yorke, PJ Harvey, Maxwell, Duncan Sheik, Chris Cornell, Chris Martin, John Mayer, Rufus Wainwright—most of whom were more commercially successful. Tim’s work was well regarded by critics and peer musicians, particularly his early output, which sought to broaden the scope of folk music by folding in the textures and improvisatory impulses of free jazz. But he never had a proper hit record.

This makes the film’s title potentially confusing for people who are not familiar with either musician. Greetings takes its name from the tribute concert that helped establish Jeff’s presence in New York’s underground music scene and piqued the curiosity of major label A&R representatives. The title assumes that you know who these men are and their (non-)relationship to each other while the trailer hedges its bets by having virtually every character remind Jeff of his connection to Tim and his own artistic potential. The title is also potentially insulting to Jeff, who in some sense is once again overshadowed by his father’s legacy.

But I’m actually more concerned with what Greetings does to Rebecca Moore, Jeff’s former girlfriend. Moore did not give this or any other production permission to use her name and likeness in the film. I respect her decision. For one, she was with this man a long time ago and was the subject of many of his songs (most notably “Lover You Should Have Come Over”). More importantly, she’s always had her own thing going on. She is the daughter of Peter and Barbara Moore, an artist and historian associated with the Fluxus art movement. She is a fixture in New York’s avant-garde theater and music scene who received attention for protesting Lower East Side redevelopment initiatives. She is also a multi-instrumental independent recording artist. When she met Buckley, she was already an established presence in this scene. In the trailer, despite Imogen Poots’ best efforts, she’s reduced to a starry-eyed intern named Allie with a crush on her boyfriend’s father.

Another noteworthy figure in Jeff’s romantic life was Joan Wasser, who was in a relationship with the singer at the time of his death. Like Moore, Wasser is an accomplished veteran of New York’s independent music scene. It’s my understanding that she also did not grant permission for the use of her name and likeness in any related film project. One of my favorite parts of Dream Brother is Wasser’s recollections of the first night she spent with Jeff while their bands embarked on a tour together. Though Jeff had a reputation for being a player, many of his friends and romantic partners were creative women who had little to no interest in being part of the same industry with which he made his bed. I recognize that these productions must avoid reproducing too close a likeness to these women for legal reasons. But by parroting conventional representations of women in music biopics as blindly supportive and caught up in their lovers’ mystique, Greetings‘ filmmakers potentially do a disservice to their subject, a young man who had a bit more going on than his father’s voice and cheekbones, and the people who were part of his life.