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Archive for June, 2009
30
Jun
09
See and hear Björk’s “Voltaic”
Björk
One of the gifts that keeps on giving is Music Mondays at the Alamo Drafthouse. It is one of my favorite things about Austin. Seriously – affordable prices for classic and often rare, out-of-print, or staff-made movies and documentaries about all kinds of music? Can’t beat it.
And have they ever got a treat for you on July 20 (a treat for me as well, as it’s a week before my birthday). That is when they will be showing Björk’s Voltaïc: The Volta Tour Live in Reykjavic and Paris. Tix haven’t gone on sale yet, but keep your eye on it. This one will probably sell out pretty quick. If you don’t live in ATX, here’s a list of places it is playing. You can also suggest a venue if your city isn’t on the itinerary.
And to get yourself amped for the screening, you can also listen to the CD here.
From left; John Cusack as Rob and Iben Hjejle as Laura
I kinda got wound down with some respiratory thing late Saturday night (after an awesome GRCA showcase, during a friend’s at-home screening of another John Cusack movie, The Thin Red Line). I slept a bit yesterday, but still felt wobbly. So I figured what better day than today to trundle out Stephen Frears’s 2000 movie High Fidelity, one of my favorites. And forgive me, but I haven’t had time to revisit Nick Horby’s book yet, so my recollections of the book are a bit foggy.
Back in college when I was developing friend groups in accordance with my feminist beliefs, I would make a mental note of what dudes thought about the end of the movie High Fidelity. If they thought Rob’s girlfriend Laura was a bitch and were sad that they got back together at the story’s end, then I knew we could never really be cool. We could maybe have casual conversation at parties, but that would be the extent of our familiarity. To me, not getting Laura meant that they didn’t understand the purpose of the story (man-child learns how to be good enough for his girlfriend) and didn’t get me. They’d also probably be the kind of dudes who’d get sidelined by women like Laura in ten years time.
That is to say, then, that I don’t think of High Fidelity as a guy’s movie. For one, I don’t really believe in gendering any kind of cultural text, genre, or mode in such broad terms — seems as sure a way to uphold gender binaries and essentialized notions of masculinity and femininity as ever. For another, while I know that it is a movie about guys — music nerds and their fetishes, phobias, class anxieties, sexual insecurities, and the lives they try to live both within and outside these markers — I’ve always related to Rob and his fellow shop-keeps Dick and Barry (played expertly by Todd Louiso and Jack Black, in his break-out role). As Rob says about his customers, I’d feel bad about the male characters in the movie if I wasn’t, you know, kind of one of them.
I’m definitely one of them, and my ability to relate to Rob has only strengthened as I’ve gotten older. I’m definitely neurotic and worried about the future (sometimes to the point of paralysis, though I think much more temporarily than Rob). I compare myself to others. I have big class anxieties that seem to deepen as I age, the more aware I become of some of my peers’ classed origins, and the more I worry about my financial modesty in comparison to some of my friends with “careers” (or at least nicer jobs that afford them time and resources for creative projects). I also think about and discuss records. A lot. Sometimes turning them in to labor-intensive mix CDs or compartmentalizing my thoughts in list form, as this blog evinces.
Rob does have a one-up on me. He owns a record store, something he often takes for granted (even forgetting to include it in a list of dream jobs that Laura is quick to amend). I could totally live in Championship Vinyl. I’d totally have a record store if I had the scratch (if in Chicago, so much the better). My go-to name is “Discourses” and I’d imagine also having a small bookstore, self-defense workshop classes, local benefit showcases, and after-hours, female-only “drop the needle” sessions where ladies could listen to Can’s Tago Mago without having some dude drone on to them about why it’s important and how they couldn’t believe they haven’t heard the album before.
And yet. There are of course limits to my empathy for Rob and Co. For one, in an attempt at closure from his break-up with Laura, Rob decides to catch up with the women in his top-five break-up list, in effect reducing women to items on a chart (a pop chart, if we throw in the Boss as his inspiration).
Also, while I’ve always felt most comfortable gabbing about records, and a lot of times that means gabbing about records with guys, I’ve long been aware of how the conversations can point at the limitations of male-female interactions. I’m a feminist first, so whatever I may know about music will always be filtered through that lens. That can make me a buzzkill to some and a bore to others. Also, I’ve noticed that sometimes guys fear offending me, and sometimes seem to censor their opinions. And sometimes, guys just seem to talk more openly without a woman present. Lots of times, despite my shared interests and peered level of fluency, I’ve been ignored or cut out of conversations for some unknown reason, but I can’t help but wonder if being female is part of it, despite intention. This isn’t a common occurence, but it does happen and I’m sure you know how it makes me feel. I’m sure you know how it’s shaped my politics.
Also, I think Rob cannot buy the rare singles collection off the bitter, wronged divorcée of a record collector (played by Beverly D’Angelo) for gendered reasons. I totally could. I wish this scene had stayed in the movie. It’s one of my favorite parts of the book.
And sometimes, I just reach an impasse. What’s the fucking point about talking about records for hours? Where does it get us? How does it evolve us? Where do we move from it? Do we create? Do we open up another six-pack? What are we doing?
And that’s why I think I love Laura the most. Not necessarily because of who I am, but of who I’d like to be.
Laura, to be blunt, has her shit together. She’s a lawyer, so she’s established her career. I hope to do this one day as an academic. She’s also comfortable with who she is. As Rob himself notes, it’s in “how she walks around — it’s like, she doesn’t care how she looks or what she projects and it’s not that she doesn’t care it’s that she’s not affected, I guess. And that gives her grace.” She also has little interest in upholding traditional norms. While she’s not opposed to being a mother, she doesn’t have any interest in marriage. This provides me with comfort. And while she wants Rob to challenge himself (she pushes him into organizing a CD release party at the end of the story), she won’t wait forever for him to grow up.
Laura’s ultra-supportive friend Liz, played by the inimitable Joan Cusack, also provides me comfort. Liz lets Rob have it when she finds out that Rob cheated on Laura, his infidelity contributed to Laura terminating their unborn child, owes her money, and admits to Laura that he was ready to move on from her. While Rob has his side, I like that Liz doesn’t abide by his immaturity and lets him have it. My dear friend Jamie is cut from similar cloth. This also provides me comfort.
Importantly, as both characterization and the main drive of the narrative, while she has her shit together, she’s not particularly interested in waiting on someone who doesn’t. And I think this professional drive and lack of sentimentality is why some people (including an ex-boyfriend) have cast Laura as a bitch. I, of course, think that this speaks to the potential threat that a smart, capable, ambitious woman may have over some men, particularly men who know (perhaps however much they may deny) that they don’t deserve women like Laura. I think the smart men are the men who get why Rob can’t shake Laura and have to figure out a way to let her in (or accept her back into their lives, as Laura asks Rob to get back together with her).
Curiously, many of the dudes I’ve known who don’t like Laura love themselves some Caroline, the cute, bubbly rock journalist who loves Stereolab and stokes Rob’s ego with an interview for her newspaper column, prompting him to make another mix tape before wondering when he’s going to stop moving on from woman to woman, tape to tape, and commit to the person he really loves.
Now, it’s really easy to pit them against one another, if you’re so inclined to put women in competition (which, ugh, please stop). I, for one, harbor no ill will toward Caroline. I kinda feel like Caroline is on the same track as Laura (professional, if funky, adult lady who’s finding her own place in the world). I even think the movie is making this argument when they are placed in the same shot during the final scene, with Caroline in front of Laura, and Laura in front of Rob. It may be easy to read the composition as evidence that Laura “won,” but I’m more inclined to think of the two women as peers, in continuum with one another. I don’t seem to recall them talking to one another in the book, but I always hope that they got a chance to meet and talk with each other.
Caroline Fortis, played by Natasha Gregson Wagner
There are other women in Rob’s life. There’s Marie de Salle (played by Lisa Bonet), the elusive singer-songwriter with whom Rob has a one-night stand and who totally has his number (she also apparently has a song called “Eartha Kitt x 2″ about her and her ex dividing up her record collection that I wish were real). There’s Penny Hardwick (played by Joelle Carter), the movie critic Rob dated in high school who reveals some upsetting information when reminding him about who rejected who. There are also less nuanced ex-girlfriend characters — the cruel Charlie Nichols (played by Catherine Zeta Jones) and the needy Sarah Kendrew (played by Lili Taylor). And there are frequenters of the record store that I wish we knew better — like Sara Gilbert’s Annaugh Moss or the Asian American woman who asks Rob where the “Soul” section is in the store. And of course there’s Liz, Laura’s best friend, who’s willing to tell off Rob on her lunch break before striding back to the office.
But most importantly, there’s always Laura.
Since I often write about how music and music culture are used in movies, I thought it would also be fun to look at some music videos that pay homage to movies. If you’ve got some suggestions, please share!
Madonna
“Material Girl” (references Gentlemen Prefer Blondes)
Like a Virgin
Directed by Mary Lambert
Lady Sovereign
“I Got You Dancing” (references The Warriors)
Jigsaw
Directed by Dandi Wind
Cover to Soundtrack Available; image courtesy of t.douban.com
I knew the trip from Austin to Traverse City would be lengthy, so I packed this 2001 anthology, edited by Pamela Robertson Wojcik and Arthur Knight. Vanguard film music scholar Claudia Gorbman called it ”muscular, theoretically informed, historically textured, and full of exciting discoveries for all interested in the confluence of pop music, film, and identity.” Strong words.
And true statement. This is a great book that covers so much ground. It was also a very heartening read, because identity politics, industry practices, sociohistoric context, and the myriad of ways soundtracks inform and impact movies are at the fore of this anthology, mirroring my own scholastic aspirations. And the forward (or “overture”) to this book stresses the importance of popular music to media studies, and challenges how this emphasis is lacking in the field. I only wish I had gotten to this book sooner, but it definitely gave me a sense of who to look for when I choose to reapply for PhD programs, as well as how to go about framing my interests in a statement of purpose.
Also, as a bonus, PhD students’ work is nestled alongside big names like Rick Altman. Seriously, I think I’d die if something I wrote was in an anthology with his work in it.
I had a pre-existing relationship to this book prior to flying in and out of O’Hare and road-tripping I-90. And, for my work, the two pieces that most interest feminist music geekery are chapters I’ve already read. But I never blogged about them before, so let’s pretend they’re new to all of us.
The first piece is Kelley Conway’s “Flower of the Asphalt: Chanteuse Réaliste in 1930s French Cinema,” which focuses on the working class singer in French film, whose cultural popularity reached a peak between the two World Wars and during France’s period of considerable urban restructuring and economic poverty. I first chanced upon it when doing some research on Conway (who is currently at Madison). As a big Edith Piaf fan, I was kinda irritated with myself for not knowing that the chanteuse réaliste was an important character in French cinema. In addition, Piaf wasn’t the only woman associated with the singing style and film subgenre. Conway pays more attention to lesser-known figures, like Damia and particularly the proudly full-bodied Fréhel (who you may have heard if you’re a fan of Amélie; her song “Si tu n’étais pas là” is on the soundtrack).
Fréhel, chanteuse réaliste; image courtesy of pierre-michel.fr
A key component to the chanteuse réaliste was authenticity. She had to be as hard-scrabble in life as she was on screen and in song. Often, these women played prostitutes and drug addicts — Fréhel was both. They also had to be aligned with the working class. Indeed, some of these films (particularly Coeur des Lilas), made great efforts to create a symbiotic relationship between the chanteuse and the street.
Most importantly, these women were often marked by excess, sexual agency, and delight toward transgression. Coeur des Lilas contains a musical number called “La môme caoutchouc” (French for “The Rubber Kid”) where Fréhel delights in her flexibility, sexual prowess, and ample bosom.
There are, of course, downsides to the chanteuse réaliste that Conway is quick to point out. For one, she is rarely the leading lady, usually a supporting character. And while she is decidedly working class and tends to be sexually voracious, she usually has no social mobility. She also tends to be a tragic figure; alone, unloved, and sometimes met with an untimely demise.
The other piece that I had previously read was Wojcik’s “The Girl and the Phonograph: or The Vamp and the Machine.” I drew from this piece for a recent conference paper I delivered on female deejays in horror film. Wojcik looks at the marginal but noteworthy presence phonographic technology has for girls and young women in contemporary cinema (ex: Little Voice, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Pulp Fiction, Truffaut’s La mariée était en noir), as well as teen magazines from the 1950s and 1960s. Her statement “the phonograph was something of a free-floating signifier: it is, alternately, a toy, a decorative item, a serious technology, a party machine, and a key to access a world of music” was too wonderful to ignore.
To the left; one of Holly Golightly's few pieces of furniture in her apartment was her record player
It also reminded me that I need to see Little Voice, a British film about LV, a shy girl who inherits her dead father’s record collection (which Wojcik notes that, through his fandom of Judy Garland and Shirley Bassey, alludes to his possible homosexuality). LV begins poring over them out of grief and as a means to distance herself from her sexually liberated, Tom Jones-loving mother. Through studying these records, she starts a musical act as Little Voice where she emulates these singers perfectly.
An unfortunate narrative commonality of the trope of the girl and the phonograph is that, often, in order to obtain emotional or mental maturity, they must give up phonographic technology. Also, as Wojcik notes in Diner, sometimes females’ clear interest in phonographic technology gets overshadowed while enforcing how inept and careless they are alongside traditionally defined male traits of indexical prowess.
In addition, the following are some chapters that, while not directly applicable to feminist music geekery, I found interesting and potentially useful.
Jeff Smith’s “Popular Songs and Comic Allusion in Contemporary Cinema” – This one focuses on using popular music for pun and reference, advocates fluency in song selection as an interpretive strategy to further bolster scholastic and cultural understanding of a text, and suggests the authorial power of the music supervisor. I could easily see this being useful in my work, as I always advocate further understanding of how song selection informs a movie (I don’t know how you can read Sofia Coppola’s Marie-Antoinette without interrogating the Marxist values of post-punk and the pre-Revolutionary fixations of the New Romantics whose songs make up the soundtrack). However, I’d configure music supervisors as collaborative authors rather than sole authors, but I try to challenge monolithic authorship wherever possible.
It also validated my reading of the music in The Hangover. Music supervisors George Drakoulias and Randall Poster, both of whom have worked with Noah Baumbach and the latter of which is the on-call music supervisor for the indie smart wave, use the biggest, glitziest, most bombastic current and recent Top 40 hits as a means of setting up a spectacle (four white brosephs let loose in Vegas) that is never shown to the audience (pointedly, the top 40 hits basically disappear from the movie the next morning). Some more concrete examples include: Zach Galifianakis’s character asking his co-hort if they’re ready to let the dogs out in deadpan, followed by quick cuts of the group strutting down a hotel hallway to the Baja Boys’ “Who Let the Dogs Out” (this got big laughs during the screening I attended). Also, their drive to Las Vegas is underscored by Kanye West’s “Can’t Tell Me Nothin’” and if anyone has seen this music video, then they were probably hoping to see Galifiankis lip-sync to the camera, if only for a moment. I know I was.
There might be something going on with Mike Tyson’s love of Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight” too, but I’m not sure what. However, when be-credded musicians like Panda Bear praise a seemingly un-cool Collins, I can’t help but wonder if some kind of ironic appropriation is going on. Or maybe Tyson just likes the drums. They are pretty sweet.
In addition:
Paul B. Ramaeker’s “‘You Think They Call Us Plastic Now‘: The Monkees and Head.” Great interrogation of the teen idols’ arthouse flop, as well as how it fits into their star persona and the stylistic motivations of the show.
Neepa Majumdar’s “The Embodied Voice: Song Sequences and Stardom in Popular Hindi Cinema.” Great piece on the role of playback artists (singers and voice actors) in Bollywood. Particular focus on Lata Mangeshkar. Made me keep thinking about the voice and disembodiedment, which I hope to extend further into a discussion of representational politics and animation at some point.
Barbara Ching’s “Sounding the American Heart: Cultural Politics, Country Music, and Contemporary American Film.” Interesting piece about how country music and its politics have been framed in contemporary film (Nashville, Coal Miner’s Daughter, Tender Mercies, and Pure Country). Any piece that makes me think critically about Nashville, one of my all-time favorite movies, gets a nod.
Nabeel Zuberi’s “Documented/Documentary Asians: Gurinder Chadha’s I’m British But . . . and the Musical Mediation of Sonic and Visual Identities.” Great piece that ties the use of music to frame developing South Asian populations in Great Britain in the 1989 documentary I’m British But . . . to the marginal but emergent presence of British musicians of South Asian descent in the late 90s (ex: Cornershop). Pays particular attention to how these musicians were influenced by hip hop, soul, funk, and other musical genres associated with African Americans. Zuberi only gets to the late 1990s, but I am obviously interested in extending this discussion to people like M.I.A., who I love and have researched previously for a conference paper.
Krin Gabbard’s “Borrowing Black Masculinity: The Role of Johnny Hartman in The Bridges of Madison County. A look at how the jazz singer keeps Eastwood’s character Robert Kincaid from being emasculated in the movie. Also looks at the use of jazz music in the broader context of Eastwood’s acting and directorial work.
So yeah, read this book. I hugged it when I finished it, just like I did with Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. And if you’re at UT, pick it up from the Fine Arts Library.
26
Jun
09
Mindy Kaling and Merge Records
Mindy Kaling; image courtesy of Forbes.com
First off, R.I.P. MJ. Something tells me that Mindy Kaling and Kelly Kapoor would want me to pay tribute.
So, my friend Christina, who works at Merge Records, posted this news item on Facebook yesterday and I thought I’d share. Mindy Kaling, writer, producer, and star of The Office, likes her indie rock. She, along with folks like Zach Galifianakis, Amy Poehler, and artists Miranda July and Kara Walker, is compiling a playlist of her favorite songs from the label’s catalog for their 20th anniversary box set! As a bonus, the proceeds from her contribution are going to Doctors Without Borders.
Kaling’s presence on the American Office is one of my favorite aspects of the series (Bitch feels similarly). To quote my friend Liz, Kelly Kapoor’s “hyper-femininity is fascinatingly funny and a window into the absurdity of what pop culture thinks women are and/or like.” Kaling is also responsible for writing some of my favorite episodes of The Office, in large part because they tend to be the most critical of male buffoonery (ex: she penned “Night Out”). She’s also developing her own show for NBC — perhaps a female buddy comedy. YAY!
In addition to which, I love that she’s into indie rock. In my limited contact with Merge personnel, they have struck me as some of the nicest, most down-to-earth people in the music industry. And it goes without saying that I’m excited that a woman of color is aligned with this Merge retrospective, as indie rock can tend to be a white man’s game.
Yay, Mindy and Merge! The box set is already sold out, so place your orders now!
Cover, The Importance of Music to Girls
Last week, I was bestowed with a treasure. My friend Curran made me a two-volume mix CD, one of my favorite things to give and receive. I especially love Internal/External’s “Stepping Up to the Mic,” Yoko Ono and Cat Power’s “Revelations,” and Takaka Minekawa’s “Fantastic Cat,” which he selected specifically for my cat, Kozy. And he also reminded me that I should have been listening to Crass this whole time.
His mix came with a 20-page set of liner notes with lyrics, observations, and personal meanings for each song. Curran is a very thorough, thoughtful person who values homemade things and resistive, non-normative modes of expression. I had a dream that he wrote a 30-page essay on Shonen Knife for this blog’s “Records That Made Me a Feminist” section and have no doubt that he might. You should read it.
The week before that, I was bestowed with another treasure. My neighbor-friend Rosa-María left a clipping from Entertainment Weekly in my door, with the blurb for Lavinia Greenlaw’s The Importance of Music to Girls circled. So I picked up a copy (actually, Kristen got me a copy from the UT Library, as I hadn’t replaced my UT student ID yet). I had never heard of the author before and know very little about who she is as an author or what she means to her native England (I guess she’s a writer and teaches writing classes at the university level; thanks, Wikipedia). I wasn’t even sure what era this book was going to cover (luckily for me, she comes of age during the 1970s, a very interesting time for England and to me). Just as you do with a mix CD, you take your friend’s recommendations on faith and dive in.
Let me share with you now one of the best quotes I’ve ever read on the power of making mixes for people. Greenlaw’s words:
The greatest act of love was to make a tape for someone. It was the only way we could share music and it was also a way of advertising yourself. Selection, order, the lettering you used for the track list, how much technical detail you went into, whether or not you added artwork and no tracklist at all, these choices were as codified as a Victorian bouquet.
Yes, exactly. This quote has new resonance for me after making mix CDs for 50 GRCA campers. I hope they take the blank, one-color paper sleeves and make something completely their own out of them.
Now, the task of writing a review for the book poses a challenge. Its use-value is a little hard to determine. It’s a memoir. So, if you know about Greenlaw and care about her artfully written recollections of coming of age, then this is a good book. But if you don’t know Greenlaw, or have much invested in the place and time in which she comes of age, you might feel like you’re grasping for straws.
But I appreciated Greenlaw’s willingness to recollect events, political movements, personal activities, rituals, and practices as means of identification. She erects collages clipped and ripped and taped and pasted from magazines that constantly shift and mutate her bedroom’s landscape. She laquers her flipped hair and eyelids and straps on platform shoes to go to discos with girlfriends. She recounts the Queen’s Silver Jubilee and the Sex Pistols antics from the safe distance of her neighborhood and television. She starts listening to “hippie” records (ex: Santana, Genesis) because of a boy, who later accidentally leaves a crate of records for her on the tube when they meet up again as adults (with her partner and child in tow). She goes to concerts with friends. She visits a friend in the hospital after a suicide attempt. She makes and unmakes girl friendships. She renounces punk for new wave because she thinks the subgenre mirrors her affinity for Russian literature and Gauloises. She loves reading and writing, but hates school. She roadtrips to Ohio because she loves Devo. She thinks about Thatcherism and the National Front alongside the Pop Group’s second album, For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder?, though didn’t put them together at the time (which, seriously, a book that reminds me to throw that record on is a good book by my definition). She cuts her girlfriend’s hair at a party. She constantly dyes and cuts and grows out and re-dyes her own hair.
In short, she constantly changes and renegotiates who she is, configuring herself always in a state of becoming, even after she’s transitioned out of her teenage years.
Putting all of this into a broader context, she’s very easily the type of girl British cultural theorists like Angela McRobbie were later devoting books and articles to, helping to build girls studies programs in the process. McRobbie’s girls tended to be bookish, middle-class in an increasingly impoverished country, rebellious but well-behaved, mercurial and fidgety and looking for their place in music culture and their piece of the street. But this girl, Lavinia, wasn’t theoretical. She was real, and, as an adult, created a document as filled with history and reference and memory and meaning as any good homemade mix. Her book is worth a look and a listen.
24
Jun
09
Things I learned at GRCA
One reason it’s really exciting to teach history is to let people know that it’s evolving and ongoing. One reason I was excited to teach music history to the campers at GRCA today is because it’s important to let girls know that, as musicians, (or fans or critics or label executives or deejays or producers or . . .) they are a continuation, a contribution to a female presence in popular music and, more broadly, public life.
And it’s nice to teach the class with a close girlfriend, so that you can show girls that it’s possible for women to work with one another and collaborate. That’s good too. Especially since the closest I’ve come to teaching pre-/pubescent girls was conducting sight-reading clinics for my mom’s junior high choirs. I was definitely out of my comfort zone teaching two music history classes (one ages 9-11, another 11-13).
But, as with education more broadly, it’s not really about the teachers. It’s about the students and it’s about creating a space to dialogue and learn from one another. So here now are the things I learned at GRCA today.
1. Don’t instinctively apologize. Women and girls say they’re sorry all the time, usually for things that are not their fault. Instead, say “you rock” or “I rock.”
2. Don’t compliment a student on their hair/dress/gear. It could be a class marker and not every girl is born of privilege. Not every girl can afford a mint-condition vintage Clash t-shirt and not every girl can afford a new Gibson guitar. Plus, we shouldn’t use things as markers of our societal worth anyway.
3. Ask what they think, what they know, what they like. Don’t lecture to them. Don’t make it feel like school. But some girls like lectures, as long as they can participate, so they can handle some science being dropped.
4. The older girls love Siouxsie Sioux.
5. Some of the younger girls like country. Some don’t. All opinions are valid. Let’s try and bring both sides together.
6. Some of the older girls didn’t know who Cibo Matto were, but wanted to know more.
7. Many of these girls remember and have a fan relationship with Selena.
8. Many girls want the Reactable shown in Björk’s performance “Declare Independence” on Jools Holland. It shows them that you can use any instrument to make the sound you want.
9. Some of the girls didn’t know who Marnie Stern was, but were excited to hear her name associated with “shredding.”
10. The older girls totes know about riot grrrl.
11. Everyone loves Beth Ditto and M.I.A.
12. Despite the ubiquity of mp3 players, everyone loves a mix CD. A pleasant surprise.
13. Girls wanna talk. It helps them learn. Thank you young ladies for letting me listen.
Readers, if you’re wondering why I’ve been a little sporadic with posting this week, there are two totally logical reasons. 1) I was out of town for a wedding in Michigan this weekend and couldn’t get Internet connection from my hotel room (but did have a personal jacuzzi, so it’s all good). 2) More importantly, I’ve been getting ready for the first session of Girls Rock Camp Austin (GRCA), which kicks off today. I’m teaching a history workshop with my girl Kristen and, as someone who feels strongly about grassroots organizations dedicated to helping girls rock, I think you should definitely go to Saturday’s showcase. Here’s a little bit of info on GRCA:
GRCA is a non-profit organization that heads two summer sessions, each a week long, in which 50 girls from ages 9 – 16 learn to play instruments, write songs, form bands, and perform in front of an audience.
Each camp session culminates in a showcase at which bands perform original material they wrote and practiced throughout the week. The showcase is open to the public – and I would love to see friends from work come out and cheer on the girls.
Here are the details:
The showcase is on Saturday June 27th at The Parish.
Doors open at 1 p.m. and the performances begin a little before 2 p.m.
There is suggested donation of $5 at the door.
On top of hearing some great music and supporting girls’ artistic endeavors, the showcase will display some of the girls’ other creative work, including zines, posters, and buttons, as well as camp T-shirts, handbooks, and more. There will also be a silent auction for autographed rock items both classic and contemporary (from Spoon to Loretta Lynn), gift certificates from local merchants, SXSW wristbands, and much more.
You don’t need to sign up or do anything in advance – just come to the show.
Also as added incentive, Best Buy was gracious enough to lend us some equipment for the summer sessions this year. Thanks to this GRCA was able to fund more scholarships, allowing a greater number of underprivileged girls to attend camp. Our contact at Best Buy is advocating for the company to actually donate the gear and equipment, but so far he has encountered some resistance from the top. Apparently some of the top people from Best Buy will be at the showcase, and we hope to convince them to donate it all. Therefore, we want to pack The Parish as much as possible. All the more reason to come and support Girls Rock Camp!
And if you aren’t in Austin but wanna get involved, here is a list of affiliates in other parts of the United States, as well as Canada, England, and Sweden.
Summer is a party-time kind of season. It’s also a road-trip kind of season. Recently, I lent an item for both a party and a road trip to some friends that will be the subject of this post. It’s Rhino Records’ girl group anthology One Kiss Can Lead to Another. 120 classic and obscure girl group tracks from the 1960s. These songs are timeless and go with everything. Not a morning person? Throw this on for your morning commute. Having a party? This is sure to please. Doing chores around the house and want to wink knowingly at your own domestication? Here’s your soundtrack.
Image of One Kiss Can Lead to Another
Yes, this collection has been around for a long time (summer 2005). It’s even been around my house for a long time — my partner got it for me Christmas 2007. It’s a little pricey — retail value is around $70 — but in my estimation, it’s worth it. It is at once a fun party favor guaranteed to get people dancing, a site of feminist discourse, an incredibly well-preserved piece of musical history, and a tasty pop culture artifact. And for all you commodity fetishists who like your semiology, I have to point out that the collection comes in a hat box, each volume is packaged to look like a compact mirror with a reflective panel inside, and each disc is designed to look like a powder puff. You even get a diary that goes with it that contains multiple critical essays and key information on each song.
I admit that when I originally received this collection, I was a little disheartened by what I originally perceived as a very limited notion of gender in popular music. Ironically enough, I was cooking when I listened to the first disc and was like “all these songs are about girls being subservient to men.” Later, when Vivian Girls appropriated the girl group sound to make garage rock and shoegaze’s indebtedness to the Spector Sound more pronounced (and I had a good two years of post-structuralist theory under my belt), I revisited this collection and was pleasantly surprised at just how much was going on.
The first thing that immediately hit me about the collection is how good it sounded. The folks at Rhino took great pains to make sure these songs, some of which were all but lost because the last few out-of-print copies and master tapes were damaged, destroyed, or missing, sound brand new. These songs were originally recorded, arranged, produced, and mastered with the car stereo in mind, and damn if they don’t sound as shiny and clean as the lines on a 1961 mint-condition Corvette.
The other thing that struck me about the collection is how the term “girl group” is less a catch-all term for female pop and pop-informed R&B acts primarily active during the first half of the 1960s and actually a pretty diverse, borderless signifier. All kinds of interesting influences and sounds are in this collection — songs informed by pop, R&B, country, blues, rockabilly, folk, bossa nova, jazz and songs that would help to inform dub, reggae, hip hop, and electronic music.
While I have yet only confirmed that two pieces on this collection were actually sampled in other songs (Daedelus lifted the vocal, hand clap, and drum tracks of The Pin-Ups’ “Lookin’ for Boys” for “Fair-Weather Friends,” Saint Etienne borrowed from Dusty Springfield’s “I Can’t Wait to See My Baby’s Face” for “Nothing Can Stop Us Now”), I am also struck by how sample-friendly a lot of these songs are. The Flirtations’ “Nothing But a Heartache” and The Jewels’ “Opportunity,” among many others, could easily be incorporated into any hip hop track (specifically one that 9th Wonder is producing).
Which also lets you in on how weird and ground-breaking a lot of these songs are. Listen to the reverb-laden a capella opener for The Chiffons’ “Nobody Knows What’s Goin’ On (In My Mind But Me)” and you get a sense for how ESG and Luscious Jackson came to their sound. Keep your ears open for the eerie theramin arrangement in Julie Driscoll’s stately break-up anthem “I Know You Love Me Not.” A song like The Bitter Sweets’ “What a Lonely Way to Start the Summertime” has a hollowed-out, haunted psychedelic sound that may have left quite an impression on Broadcast. Songs like “Nightmare” by The Whyte Boots easily draw a line from girl groups to L7. Some dance songs, like The Goodies’ “Sophisticated Boom Boom” and Marsha Gee’s “Peanut Duck” have an effortless quirky cool to them that no hipster can fake. And that doesn’t even get into The Tammys admittedly un-PC rave-up “Egyptian Shumba” that The Black Kids covered, but couldn’t match the original’s manic glee.
In addition to obscure songs by minor recording artists once left to dust in storage vaults, you get little-heard songs by bigger names. Behold the woozy drum syncopation with Cher’s deep alto in “Dream Baby.” Behold the sugary urgency of Dolly Parton’s “Don’t Drop Out.” Behold the cinematic majesty of The Shangri-Las’ “The Train to Kansas City.” Listen for The Supremes’ “When the Lovelight Starts Shining Through His Eyes” and The Ronettes’ “He Did It” (one of the few early cuts Rhino could get a hold of without having to involve producer Phil Spector). Get dirty with Wanda Jackson’s “Funnel of Love” and Lulu’s “I’ll Come Running” (which features future Zeppelin ax-man Jimmy Page on guitar). Even folks like mod it-girl Twiggy got a shot at the pop charts with the proper little ditty “When I Think of You.”
There are also songs that were obscure and later became popular when other people (perhaps unsurprisingly, primarily white artists) covered them. P.P. Arnold got to Cat Stevens’s “The First Cut is the Deepest” first. Former Cookies member Earl-Jean scored a minor hit with Gerry Goffin and Carole King’s “I’m Into Somethin’ Good” a year before Herman’s Hermits rode it the top of the pop charts in 1965. Dee Dee Warwick made minimal commotion with “You’re No Good” before Betty Everett and Linda Ronstadt got ahold of it.
Also, not all of these songs are about boys who treat girls bad. Yes, that’s a component and the folks at Rhino would be ignoring a huge lyrical motif and its pre-second wave context by omitting the tracks about fellas who “lie sly, slick, and shy,” as The Velvelettes sing in “Needle in a Haystack.” And by putting these songs in a larger context, lyrics like “I know he’s cheating on me, but I don’t care” in The Angels’ “I Adore Him” play both dated and baldly disturbing.
I also think by acknowledging the racial aspects of girl group may also help confront the fact that many of these groups were comprised of African American girls, many of whom had to deal with the ingrained lack of social or economic value placed on the romantic love and family units built by people of color in white society. A song like The Fabulettes’ “Try the Worrying Way,” which is about how a heavy-set woman becomes skinny as a result of her partner’s infidelity, cannot be read without this context and becomes profoundly sad with it.
The raced component, alongside issues of age, is crucial to understanding what girl groups contributed — a space for young women and young women of color, many of whom were working class and had minimal opportunities in the job market, to be a part of the work force. This isn’t to absent that many of these groups were designed, produced, and controlled by men. But some were not, or found ways out of it.
But there’s much more going on in these songs than waiting for boys to shape up. For one, there are a lot of break-up anthems. There are elegant songs like “Walking In Different Circles” from Goldie and the Gingerbreads. There are poignant odes to post-break-up autonomy like Reparata and the Delrons’ “I’m Nobody’s Baby Now.” There are also almost-love songs like Sandie Shaw’s “Girl Don’t Come” (which was written and arranged by Burt Bacharach). There are maternal warnings of men’s true nature in Cathy Saint’s “Big Bad World.” There are humorous rejections in The Hollywood Jills’ “He Makes Me So Mad.” And, importantly, there are sneering kiss-offs and odes to female bonding like Donna Lynn’s “I’d Much Rather Be With the Girls” (originally written by and for The Rolling Stones).
For me, it’s not hard to read all of these break-up songs and anthems to being single and out with girlfriends as having a queer element to them. The renouncement of stupid boys, or heterosexual courtship altogether, is heightened by girls singing to, for, and most importantly, with one another. In close proximity. In intimate spaces. In matching outfits.
You also get lots of songs about death, many, like The Goodees’ “Condition Red,” that recount dark, grisly tales of parental disapproval, juvenile delinquency, and racing accidents gone horribly wrong. This was the era where boys beefed it on motorcycles, after all. Indeed, this teen angst bullshit has a body count.
You even get critiques about the fleetingness of youth, the plastic lies of feminine consumerism, and the urgency of action in songs like Toni Basil’s anthem “I’m 28,” which I fully intend to sing drunk at my birthday party in two years.
Oddly enough, she was 23 when she recorded it. She’s 65 now and still working. I think she did okay for herself.
But there are also celebratory songs about love (many explicitly heterosexual, some more ambiguous). These songs are important too, particularly because most of these songs were sung (and, in some cases, written) by unmarried teenagers. Though marriage was the stated goal in many of these songs, it hadn’t happened yet. Thus, it was pretty easy to dismiss these songs, performed by teenage girls, as frivilous. But they aren’t. The feelings, regardless of how artfully or artlessly worded, are real and amplified by mammoth orchestration and pop-song immediacy. Take a song like The Girlfriends’ “My One and Only Jimmy Boy.” A giddy, up-tempo ode to love on the surface, its hook, soaring vocals, and wall-of-sound production takes teen love to “Hulk smash” levels of power and might.
And, of course, a lot of these songs were written by women. Carole King, in addition to singing two songs included in the anthology, wrote many of these hits, along with fellow Brill Building dwellers Ellie Greenwich and Cynthia Weil and many other independent female songwriters.
Thus, this collection has the best that any feminist music geek could hope for — sites of discourse that have, to borrow from American Bandstand, “a good beat and you can dance to it.”
