Feminist Music Geek

Album cover to the Clueless soundtrack

Recently, I got in a fight with my partner over a minor bit of dialogue from Amy Heckerling’s 1995 movie Clueless. Please don’t question who was right on this. I was a pre-teen girl in 1995. At one point, I could recite the entire thing. I’m sure, if given a cue here and there, I could do it again at 25.

Not suggesting, of course, that if you were a pre-teen girl in 1995, you have to hold Clueless close to your heart. As a matter of fact, I resisted seeing it until it was out on video for almost a year. We had cable at home when the movie came out, and MTV advertised it all the time. I also remember reading Seventeen and other teen magazines, and it ran stuff on it a lot (though I seem to remember Seventeen actually giving a less-than-laudatory review, criticizing its unrealistic use of hyperbolic slang and schoolgirl chic).

Adding to this, when I originally saw promotional stuff for Clueless, I didn’t see me in it. Cher and Dionne were ultra-feminine and super-rich (if also good-intentioned). Several of the popular girls in my seventh grade class would emulate their look and attitude (some, perhaps instinctively, bringing in a bit of Heathers-style bitchiness). I remember this one girl actually tried to give my friend Jerusha, a Pentecostal who had to wear ankle-length dresses and skirts, a makeover because she had “total Tai potential.” Ugh. I just checked out.

BTW, my seventh grade style was Tai pre-makeover. Minus the drugs, of course. One time a girl in P.E. offered to snort Lucas Limon with me and I ran away in fear.

For readers of the blog, perhaps you can guess my entrance into the movie. Yes, you got it. The soundtrack (which, for those who are curious, was released on Capitol — the movie was a Paramount picture). I couldn’t find a lot of scenes online, but for a sense of sound and image, check out this fan-made video, underscored by The Muffs’ cover of Kim Wilde’s “Kids in America,” which opens the movie.

I actually never owned the soundtrack. My friend Brandi had it, so I borrowed it from her. The closest I got was my VHS copy of the movie, which contained the music video for Supergrass’s “Alright.”

Maybe I can snag a copy at Cheapo Discs. Because man oh man, is the soundtrack ever a treasure trove of the era. With plenty of alternative musical artists — Radiohead, The Beastie Boys, Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Coolio, General Public, Smoking Popes — it’s at once a document to a small period just after Cobain left us and virtually anything could get a pass on MTV or mainstream radio (Beck, for example), as well as evidence for just how important a soundtrack is in selling a movie. Remember how Cher doesn’t want Tai to burn the cassette to Coolio’s “Rollin’ With My Homies” — I always read this as sly product placement.

And lest we forget, the soundtrack is teeming with female artists. Jill Sobule, Salt-N-Pepa, Luscious Jackson, The Cranberries, The Muffs, and a just-about-to-break No Doubt (with a song about girlhood oppression from a woman who does not consider herself to be a feminist). They’re all here.

That the movie is underscored by music by female artists who are, if not all feminist, certainly embrace a pro-woman agenda should not be overlooked, especially in popular music’s larger sociohistorical context. Riot grrrl broke, the kinderwhore look had been made runway-ready, and The Spice Girls happened the following year. But Jill Sobule was singing about kissing girls and MTV played the single’s very post-modern, post-structural, super-campy music video all the time. Beavis and Butthead were also completely dumb about it (intentionally? as a commentary?).

Of course, working within the mainstream is tricky. Just look at the music video for Luscious Jackson’s “Here,” made specifically for the movie. It’s an exercise in compromise. On the one hand, we’ve got a tough group of Noo Yawk broads (one of whom is a lesbian) playing their gig in the middle of a skating rink during a roller derby meet. On the other hand, the derby girls are super-femme and the rink projects images from the movie. Sigh. Perhaps it begs the question “alternative to what?”

The inclusion of artists like No Doubt lead singer Gwen Stefani may suggest a post-feminist agenda, and the Luscious Jackson music video may hint at age-old tensions between underground and mainstream. However, I think that, in the context of the movie, a song like Jill Sobule’s “Supermodel” being used during Tai’s make-over scene (which I wish I could pull up, but can’t — cue the movie!) is winking at the performative and learned aspects of becoming feminine, which I think at least suggests that the movie’s politics may lean toward its writer-director and actually align with more of a third-wave feminist perspective on gender politics.

Unfortunately, despite the movie’s success, it hasn’t always been easy for Amy Heckerling. Sadly, 2007′s I Could Never Be Your Woman, a May-December romance starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Paul Rudd that some argued was more explicitly feminist, went straight to DVD. In the “Whatever!” DVD edition of Clueless, Heckerling even discusses how hard it was to get the movie greenlit because there were three female leads and no leading male character. It wasn’t until producer Scott Rudin became interested in the picture that the studios got into a bidding war and Paramount picked it up (after having originally turned it down).

It makes cultural moments like Clueless, as compromised as some may think it to be, a proud declaration of girl. With its soundtrack, it at least suggests the possibility of turning “girl” into “grrrl.”