So, I just got back from a Drafthouse screening of Björk’s Voltaïc (where I saw my girl Morgan from GRCA). I’m riding on a bit of a high. I’ll write up a review tomorrow. For now, I thought I’d get us in the spirit by showcasing the complete collection of music videos she’s done with Michel Gondry. Both artist and director helped launch each other to a higher level in their career and tried out musical and filmic ideas with one another. They also share an investment in childhood, nature, repetition, domesticity, and alternative parenting.
Shameless plug: If you want to read more on their work together, feel free to check out my master’s thesis. You can borrow it from UT.
Ellen Page getting in the derby spirit; image taken from sherizampelli.com
So, I posted earlier on Whip It! and how I’m excited about it coming out. Well, the trailer is up and to borrow from WNYX owner Jimmy James from NewsRadio, I am pleased, I am pleased as Christmas punch. My friend Annie was good enough to share Lainey Gossip’s post on it, and I will pay it forward.
In my estimation, there’s a lot to be excited about with Whip It! (current release date: October 9, 2009). Eve (the rapper) playing a derby girl, sportin’ some rad tattoos, and suggesting that women of color can be involved with derby alongside alterna white ladies. Kristen Wiig telling Ellen Page to be her own hero while emphasizing that women and girls can be allies and friends. Alia Shawkat playing her best friend and potentially showing some good girl solidarity and homosocial bonding. Blue hair and beauty pageants. Page saying she’s in love with derby. Sold.
Also, there seems to be an effort to make Central Texas (re: Austin) look cool and fun and not backwoods and boring — or at least have a cool, fun subculture outside of the world of beauty pageants. As a native Texan who is cool and fun and not backwoods and boring, I appreciate this.
I notice a few issues. I’m a little “eh, seriously?” about the hetero romance Page seems to have with some boy. For one, why? For another, this seems like a way to distance Page from the gay rumors (hard for me not to read in conjunction with the troubled production history of Jack and Diane, a lesbian teen werewolf movie she was going to star in with Juno co-star Olivia Thirlby). Also, as one of my co-workers used to be in derby, I anticipate a laundry list of things the movie got wrong.
However, it looks funny, well-made, and focuses on a “real” girl finding herself, making friends, and learning to kick a little ass as a feminist in the process. Made by a first-time female director no less — kudos to you, Drew Barrymore. In what is sadly a banner year for female directors — seven films directed by women are currently in theaters — I’m excited for Barrymore and hopeful for her new movie (this also seems as good a time to urge you all to go see Kathryn Bigelow‘s The Hurt Locker).
So lace up those skates and see you at the multiplex this October!
One thing I hope no one thinks about feminists is that we don’t like beer. This feminist loves beer. If I ever throw a party and you’re invited and you don’t know what to bring, the answer is always “Shiner.”
One person who I hope shares my viewing on funny ladies and beer is Neko Case (we do share Katt Williams’s opinion that a man getting eaten by a caged tiger at the zoo is right and just).
And while I’m not sure if she’s a feminist, I do know that she’s funny. Just listen to her rants, asides, and outbursts in a recent episode of Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me!. I could listen to her go off on neko wafers and Ken Burns’s The Civil War til last call.
So, I’m learning a lot by maintaining this blog. One thing I’ve noticed is that I focus a lot on solo artists, singers, and protagonists. I didn’t really expect this going in, particularly since I don’t necessarily privilege individuals so much in my broader experiences with music culture.
Thus, two things have occured to me. 1) A clear limit or point of contention in collaborative authorship, a term I throw around a lot on here, is when one of the (female) authors is a solo artist. 2) Perhaps I’m unintentionally gendering music culture participants — i.e., bands and groups = male, solo artists and individuals = female. This isn’t an apology — often, with my work, I’m forced to look at individuals because women and girls tend to be isolated from one another. But this is no excuse and I definitely plan on bringing in more instances of grouped collaboration (be it homo- or heterosocial). Suggestions are welcome.
Oh, another issue is whiteness. Don’t a lot of these people seem super-white to you? Again, scarcity of resources explains it and a continued dedication to finding more counterexamples drives me.
For now, I thought I’d rectify at least one issue by emphasizing two band performance clip music videos — one that is all-female, another that is almost-all-female.
Vivian Girls
“Moped Girls” Moped Girls 7″
Directed by Brady Hall
Mika Miko
“I Got a Lot (New New New)” We Be Xuxa
Directed by Lana Kim and Randy Randall
Beyoncé presents Michael Jackson with a humanitarian award at the 2003 Radio Music Awards; image taken from ChronicleLive
Today in The Root, Dayo Olopade posited that the pop star set to inherit Michael Jackson’s mantle as the King of Pop is Beyoncé Knowles. And my girl Kristen (who of course pointed me to the article in the first place) asked for people’s thoughts on this assertion. Here now is my effort.
Obviously, no opinion can be reached without mention of how important Michael Jackson was to people. While I can be snide and agree with others that he hadn’t made a good album since 1987′s Bad, I also won’t pretend to know how deep an impact he made on generations of African Americans and what it was like to see a young black man launch into that kind of mythology. Even if you’re Chuck D and you made the point that having MTV air the music video for “Billie Jean” in 1983 nearly 20 years after Jackson broke into the mainstream as part of The Jackson 5 was an achievement for white America (a point Chuck makes in The History of Rock and Roll) I don’t know if you can qualify how particularly and specifically important Michael Jackson is to generations of African Americans. And Beyoncé was born in 1981. Indeed, she didn’t exist before Michael. So I definitely think his impact on her — along with several other African American pop stars – is monumental and different from their white counterparts. Thus, I’m absolutely fine with Cord Jefferson’s assertion that Justin Timberlake cannot inherit Jackson’s legacy. Let Beyoncé wear the damn military jacket.
Rock that jacket, B!
Yet, while I feel that the Beyoncé as successor story is really compelling in theory, I wonder if it works. As many people have argued, including Olopade, we may have witnessed, with the death of Michael Jackson, the end of superstardom. And while others might disagree, I think this is a good thing, as I feel that a life lived in quotes, italics, and all caps only ends up ruining the body and mind living the persona(e). It may be captivating, or even aspirational to the general public, but it also seems hollow, empty, lonely, and unfulling to the person. It also seems too taxing to keep up. Listen to Jackson’s songs, as his lyrics became increasingly paranoid. Look at Neverland. Look at the increasingly desperate music videos that could never replicate the magic of “Thriller.” Witness the body in a constant state of mutation, decay, whitening, and plasticity. As Michael aged, the man in the mirror must have become more alien to himself. Absenting a larger discussion about looming rumors of child molestation and a confirmed history of child abuse and exhausting work conditions administered by his father, Joe, I cannot help but view what happened to Michael as a perilous lesson at how cruel and unfulfilling that level of fame is. The high price is assuredly the self.
To me, if we want to go with a model for how Michael’s fame warped any semblance of a personal life and informed his music, the more accurate analog is Britney Spears, a young woman formed into a hologram for our society’s distorted desires, started rebelling and making commentary on her fame, who we watched collapse, villified and mocked for making poor decisions, took offense to the havoc the stress of fame and vanity wreaked on her body, and whose untimely death will assuredly be met by a dumbfounded mass. She may live past 27, but I’m not sure that her attempts at normalcy and privacy won’t be as ill-informed and unfortunate as Jackson’s were.
Beyoncé, on the other hand, seems to carve out an autonomous private life for herself as best she can. To that end, I actually think she has more in common with Michael’s sister, Janet, Miss Jackson if you’re nasty. While both have suffered speculation and public battles with body image and weight fluctuation, I also think they were aware of their popularity, reticent to embrace it as a result of their shyness and self-possession, and made an effort to keep some of themselves to themselves. Beyoncé may collaborate with her husband Jay-Z, but they rarely disclose any personal information beyond the occasional outing to a Knicks’ or a Nets’ game or reference to their relationship in song (I seem to remember the mid-2000s being a hard time for the power couple to balance love with work — they seem to have made it to the other side without us knowing too much about their private goings-on).
Likewise, Jackson has taken privacy to perhaps necessary extremes, hiding her entire marriage to René Elizondo from the public until she announced their divorce in 1999. She’s since been in a long-term relationship with rapper-mogul Jermaine Dupri which may or may not culminate in marriage. I kind of like that I don’t know. Maybe it’s the Protestant in me, but I’m not as interested in their personal lives as I am with their work. Of course, how one informs the other is tremendously useful and important to me. But I like that both women have given themselves the space not to have the factoids of their love lives be common knowledge.
These women’s effort to separate the public from private life is reflected in their music. While Olopade states that Beyoncé asserts the confidence that Michael lacked, I don’t think you have to look any further than Janet to find similarities. Thus, I think that while Michael’s influence as a pop star is not to be ignored, neither can his sister’s. As assuredly as Michael’s innovative music, kinetic movements, and larger-than-life persona inspired Beyoncé, I get the feeling that Janet’s no-nonsense, pro-woman, and at times politically charged anthems left quite an impression as well.
Another point I’d like to challenge is the idea that Michael Jackson was born a monolithic pop star and was the first of his kind. He evolved into a pop star over time. To that end, he also modeled himself on other pop stars, icons, and musicians. As Madonna did with Mae West and Marilyn Monroe, as Tina Turner did with Mick Jagger, and as many after them will continue to do, Michael modeled himself after pop stars of his time. Obviously, Motown, the birthplace of his career, left quite an impression on him. Diana Ross, specifically, became his mentor and model for how to be a pop star. While some catty folks may argue that Michael took the admiration too far, in effect trying to turn himself into her, “whitening” his features and taking on her soft voice, I don’t think we can discuss how assimilable Michael Jackson or Diana Ross (or Motown in the 1960s) was without getting into a larger discussion about the control predominantly white people in positions of power in the culture industries have in enforcing what supposedly white perceptions of what popular music should look and sound like.
Michael Jackson with Diana Ross; image from PopCrunch.com
Beyoncé has had to face similar instances of institutional racism and assimiliation. She often bleaches and straightens her hair, has witnessed multiple magazines Photoshop inches off her curves, and has shed pounds for movie roles. Beyoncé is also clearly inspired by Ross. Her first group, Destiny’s Child, were clear heiresses to The Supremes’ girl-group legacy. Similar to Ross, Beyoncé broke out on her own, becoming a definitive diva for her era. And adding another layer, Beyoncé played Ross’s avatar in Dreamgirls (for which she lost a considerable amount of weight).
We could then argue, via the Jackson-inspired dance break in the music video for Destiny’s Child’s “Bootylious,” that Beyoncé is placing herself in a continuum between Michael Jackson and Diana Ross.
Like Michael and Ross, Beyoncé has worked in movies. And while some people may want to scoff at her film career, I think the range and variety of Beyoncé’s filmography is interesting and helps open up what a pop star can do. She’s been in summer blockbusters like Austin Powers in Goldmember. She’s been in campy, racially charged suspense thrillers like Obsessed (which I haven’t seen, but dear God I hope she cuts that white girl). She’s also been in Dreamgirls and Cadillac Records, playing either fictionalized or real female musicians. (Note: She got to put on weight when she played Etta James in Cadillac Records, a movie I’m sorry to have missed in the theaters but expect a later post about it — gotta support African American female directors like Darnell Martin). But she isn’t only playing the singer.
But while it might suggest a commonality with Madonna (one of the few pop stars to rival Michael Jackson’s stardom in the 1980s), I think Beyoncé’s campiness is singular. Principally, she channels her camp through humor. She’s really funny. Not a lot of pop stars get to be (or allow themselves to be) truly funny. A song like “Irreplaceble” stings with so much camp wit, and there are many others (the woman has her own vocabulary and phraseology). And, ever the shrewd businesswoman, she can use any song to its full synergistic potential. The guy in “Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)” is holding her tighter than her Deréon jeans, after all.
House of Deréon advertisement; Beyoncé with her mother and business partner, Tina Knowles
So, while it’s important to think about Michael Jackson and Beyoncé, I see their cultural relationship less as an issue of successorship than as an instance of continuum and evolution. Because while I’m stoked that Beyoncé is on par with Michael Jackson and am excited about watching her career evolve, I think of it as her career. In time, I hope that we think of this shy Houstonian playing the brazen pop goddess for all the world not as the next anything. Rather, I think of her in dialogue with the past, looking to pop history as a means of defining Beyoncé.
This post is really two posts. The first section preoccupies itself with why album covers matter culturally, so as to set up a discussion of a particularly interesting album cover, in this case Kate Bush’s 1982 release, The Dreaming, which I focus on in the second section. I intend to discuss more album covers throughout the duration of this blog’s livelihood. If you would like to throw out suggestions or contribute a piece, feel free. Contact me at feministmusicgeek@gmail.com.
One thing that I fear is leaving our popular consciousness in the digital age is the album cover. I don’t consider myself a technophobe and hardly think music videos (once on TV, now on the Web) contributed to the downfall of album packaging (I actually think that’s the fault of record labels who keep raising their retail prices). Yet I do worry what we’ll lose if we stop caring about album covers. Growing up, Madonna had some of the most interesting album covers ever. So imagine how bummed I was when I saw her slapped-together, clumsily Photoshopped cover for Hard Candy. Sigh.
Cover for Hard Candy; released in 2008 on Warners Bros.
Now I know that avering my love for album covers may cast me as a bit of a commodity fetishist (which I kinda am, despite how problematic it is). And I get why album covers don’t take priority. For one, market imperative — covers cost money and the more elaborate they are, the more expensive they can become (just ask the folks at Factory Records; for every sold copy of New Order’s “Blue Monday” — lavishly designed by Peter Saville to look like a floppy disc — the label lost money, though was more concerned in releasing a well-made, lovingly-crafted piece of popular art than in turning a profit). Also, the reliance of plastic for packaging can be less than environmentally friendly (though kudos to many musical acts, artists, and record labels for realizing this and phasing it out with more paper printing).
Cover for An Invitation by Inara George; released in 2008 on Everloving with paper cover
But album covers reveal so much — who the artist is, what the music is going to sound like, what the theme or concept behind the album might be, who made the cover art, the evolution of print technology, the history of album packaging, indeed how valuable packaging may have been to the people and companies responsible for release. And obviously, in terms of representational politics, album covers can tell stories, share folklore, provide commentary, project alternate realities, or rebel. Bottom line: they’re texts and we shouldn’t overlook them or what they may reveal about the artists, the markets, and the fan bases. If interested, I highly recommend Steve Jones and Martin Sorger’s essay “Covering Music: A Brief History and Analysis of Album Cover Design.”
Treatise endeth. New treatise begineth.
One such album cover I’d like to look at is Kate Bush’s The Dreaming. Now, I’m a bit new to her, but not exactly. I have kind of a greatest hits awareness of her. As a girl, I made up dance routines in my room to “Rubberband Girl” and “Running Up That Hill” when they (rarely) got played on the radio. I know she was discovered by Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour at an early age and recorded her first album, The Kick Inside, as a teenager. I know that she produces her own material. I know that she’s a trained interpretive dancer and worked with Lindsay Kemp, David Bowie’s choreographer. I know that she directed and starred in a short film called The Line, the Cross, & the Curve co-starring Miranda Richardson based on songs from her 1993 album The Red Shoes. I know she’s done some bugged-out music videos. For example:
And then I know what other people think of her. I know a lot of negative things. Characters in books like Bret Easton Ellis’s The Rules of Attraction and Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity hate on her music. Likewise, people like to throw around rumors that, due to her perfectionism in the studio and her penchance for writing songs about female suffering and neuroses, mythological women, and the paranormal, she is crazy. It’s all crazy sexist. On that tip, I was friends with a girl who said of Bush, “Ugh, Lilith Fair.”
And then the positives. I know that a lot of people mention her when they talk about Tori Amos (and now, St. Vincent and Bat for Lashes). I’ve read some academic work (specifically Debi Withers’s piece on queer subjectivity in her second album, 1978′s Lionheart, and Holly Kruse’s “In Praise of Kate Bush,” which considers Bush’s authorial status, from the anthology On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word). I know that Ann Powers, a rock journalist I idolized growing up, is writing a 33 1/3 book on The Dreaming (expect a future post upon its release next year — I’m way stoked).
And then I know male artists who have sited her as an influence. There’s L.A. outsider art rocker Ariel Pink, who borrows her treble-heavy, lo-fi, avant pop production sensibilities and clearly positions himself as a fan.
Hmmm. Guess I knew more than I thought. Yet, I’d never actually listened to an entire Kate Bush album. So, I thought I’d start with The Dreaming, which is really great. It’s kinda crazy how influential and varied and timeless this music is — I haven’t had a listening experience with so many “aha” and “so this is where ______ came from” moments since I first heard The Velvet Underground’s debut album the summer before college. But that was all happy accident. I picked it because a) it’s widely regarded by music critics as a masterpiece, b) indeed, Powers is writing about it, c) it marks a transition for Bush as producer as well as singer and instrumentalist, and d) the cover.
Cover for The Dreaming; released on EMI in 1982
This cover (made by Kindlight) knocks me out. I’ve stared at so much in the past few weeks — after several years of looking at it in various record stores — and only recently figured out that it’s supposed to be Houdini and his wife (indeed, there is a song called “Houdini” on the album, told from his wife’s perspective). The shackles around him are to be broken using the key, which Bush (as Bess Houdini) has in her mouth. But I always thought she had a wedding ring in her mouth and was internally debating whether or not to put it on (and perhaps be shackled) or swallow it and flee.
I suppose it could work either way. It’s also possible that Bush and Bess Houdini have suddenly become self-conscious about the inherent performativeness of their careers (musicians, like magicians, trade in trickery). There’s also the possibility that the key takes on some sort of sexual, Freudian design as a symbol and that the juxtaposition of the key, the shackles, her tongue, and her lusty proximity to Houdini may be at odds with her Victorian dress, coinciding at once with Houdini’s era, Bush’s origins as a Brit, and Bush’s lyrical preoccupations. All readings are valid, as they peak curiosity and dialogue with the music. Indeed, they are part of the music. Part of this woman’s work.
As many people noted late last month, Spike Lee’s seminal Do The Right Thing celebrated its 20th anniversary. The Root did an exceptional job weaving together the various discourses surrounding the movie, its release, its historical relevance, its cultural significance, its politics, its views and influence on race-relations in contemporary America, the identificatory practices of aligning the Obamas with this movie (during election season, much was made of the now First Couple seeing it on their first date) as well as the assimilationist practices at work in distancing President and First Lady Obama from it once he was elected President, and its limitations in terms of representational politics (particularly gender). I do wish there was more discussion of its controversial Oscar nomination shut-out for Best Picture, but perhaps this is something my Hollywood industrial analysis smartie friends can re-coup.
One thing that was particularly heartening for me in The Root’s coverage of the movie’s 20th anniversary was Mark Anthony Neal’s piece on how important music is to Lee’s movies and the cultivation of racial discourse, particularly in his early work. He even went into an analysis of the cultural significance of Rosie Perez’s dance in the opening credits of the movie and how she is ”alternately adorned in boxing garb and Lycra bodysuits, performing a visual archive of black dance. Moving against the backdrop of Brooklyn brownstones, Perez’s performance—jagged, angular, forceful, masculine and sexy—mapped contradictions of a new generation.”
I’ll tip my hand. As a scholar, I’ve been thinking about Lee’s use of music and dance for some time. I put together a similar analysis to Neal’s in graduate school and am still working through with what to do with it. For me, in his first three movies especially (She’s Gotta Have It, School Daze, Do The Right Thing) dance serves as a site of multiple discourses. It is at once as a marker of authorship, a means of challenging traditional storytelling, an iteration of African American identity, a challenge to the notion of a singular racial identity for African Americans (and other racial and ethnic minorities, most notably Puerto Rican Americans), a critique against the supposed “naturalness” of dance for the African American body, and an indictment of race relations in contemporary society and film history.
These discursive practices are further enforced through Lee’s conscious lack of adherence to one particular dance genre, opting instead for heterogeneity, in effect breaking up the ways in which a black director can use dance and the ways in which primarily black dancers can use their bodies, as well as circulating the idea that black culture aligns with various kinds of music (many of which were self-created, thus becoming a process of reclamation). Thus, through dance, Lee creates a definitively black presence in contemporary film, but at the same time avers that there’s no such thing as a definitively black presence.
Tricky stuff. Problematic for sure (perhaps especially being theorized by a white lady like me), and I don’t think I’ve pieced it altogether, but I feel that the use of dance in Lee’s movies is not to be overlooked. If we are to celebrate Lee’s Do The Right Thing, we should do so with an acknowledgement of its larger context. I feel like dance is key to mapping that context.
And, with that, some clips. Now, seeing the movies they exist in is crucial. For brevity, I’ll simply list the movie, the dance genre, and the dance’s narrative function.
She’s Gotta Have It
Dance genre: Concert jazz
Narrative function: Fantasy and narrative rupture. This is the only scene shot in color in this movie and cuts jarringly from a scene where protagonist Nola Darling is given a present by Jamie Overstreet, one of her three boyfriends.
School Daze (Note: The clip has since been taken off YouTube)
Dance genre: Musical dance
Narrative function: Integrated musical. Uses traditional modes of musical spectacle — a film genre plagued with white exnomination and racism during – to critique race relations between light- and dark-skinned African Americans.
Note: Last year, the music video came out for Alicia Keys’s “Teenage Love Affair” which recreates much of the narrative of School Daze. However, in the process, the music video amalgates many of the female characters into one being, and recasts the movie’s then-timely preoccupation with Apartheid with a small bit encouraing AIDS outreach and prevention in Africa — one of Keys’s primary humanitarian efforts. Conveniently, and significantly, it removes the movie’s troubling gender relations, particularly a key scene in which the female lead is raped by a college fraternity pledge, played by Lee in the movie.
Do The Right Thing
Dance genre: Hip hop dance
Narrative function: Non-narrative introduction of the film. The dance serves at once as an advocation of female presence in hip hop and public life, reclaims the role women and girls had in the formation of hip hop dance, aligns Perez’s physical participation with Public Enemy’s sonic participation via their song “Fight the Power” – which I think challenge the notion of Lee’s monolithic authorial presence, and acknowledges the allied relationship African Americans and Puerto Rican Americans have developed.
So, Beth Ditto is a style icon. No two ways about it. If you know this, then you probably also know that Beth Ditto just launched a clothing line for Evans in the UK. You may have already read SparkleBliss’s rad, insightful post about it on her blog (which, if you haven’t, you should — go here). And, if you follow SparkleBliss on Twitter, you may already know that she just bought herself a cute outfit from the collection.
Selected items from Beth Ditto's collection for Evans; image courtesy of blog-lilirosaly.com
Now, women in music dabbling in fashion is nothing new. Indeed, women in popular culture writ large dabbling in fashion is almost de rigueur — another way to circulate your brand, add more hyphenates after your name, and give your fan base more tactile, tangible access to “you”. Everyone seems to be have at least attempted at designing a clothing line (Gwen Stefani, Victoria Beckham, Jessica Simpson, Jennifer Lopez, Eve, Kate Moss, Rachel Bilson, Sarah Jessica Parker, Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, Chloë Sevigny, an assortment of women on The Hills . . .) or work as a spokesmodel (M.I.A. for Marc Jacobs most immediately comes to mind).
But you’ll notice that a lot of the women I mentioned are presumably straight and all of them slender. Thus, the majority of female celebrity clothing lines align with normative identities of what women and girls should be. This indeed makes Ditto’s entrance into the world of fashion and retail (which she intimated in Bust as “dancing with the devil”) “a queer, fat cultural moment” as Charlotte Cooper at Obesity Timebomb purports it to be (and that SparkleBliss reprinted and linked in her post — seriously, go read it). It’s too bad that Margaret Cho’s High Class Cho line didn’t take off (complete with non-numerical sizes named for bombshells like Jayne Mansfield and Marilyn Monroe) — if so, we could add “woman of color” to the list of signifiers.
Also, looking at Ditto’s body and orientation is important when contextualizing her within pop music’s landscape. Slender pop stars like Katy Perry and Lady Gaga are also interested in fashion and with putting together their own clothing lines, but while Perry and Gaga flirt with queerness, Ditto is out. And while Perry’s look most clearly aligns with vintage, pin-up Hollywood glamor (albeit to a heightened, campy degree) and Gaga’s look is definitely severe couture (perhaps even a bit fascistic in ways reminiscent of Siouxsie Sioux, but let’s give this issue its own entry), Ditto’s collection is at once hip, wearable, distinctively Ditto, and specifically for plus-sized women and girls, perhaps more closely aligning Ditto with her fan base than Perry or Gaga could.
Katy Perry, covered in sushi; image courtesy of thegurglingcod.typepad.com
But we’d be doing a disservice to sing the praises of Ditto’s collection without (as SparkleBliss and Obesity Timebomb point out) a) acknowledging the inherent adherence to capitalism and b) being conscious of the (often cheap, exploitative) modes of production and labor responsible for putting this collection out into the market along with potential class issues and limitations among various consumer groups. Even the ways in which the unnatural, weird, non-human look of the mannequins wearing her clothes suggest we have a ways to go as a culture before a large female body becomes a natural body.
Weird mannequin, right?; image courtesy of sugarscape.com
Alongside this, we can’t extol the virtues of Ditto’s collection without acknowledging that Ditto launched her line in the UK, where she is actually popular, instead of in the United States, where she’s slightly less than obscure.
I still feel like there’s something really important in having a space in the market for full-figured women and girls to have a cool clothing made explicitly for them, just like I thought it was rad for there to be Tracy Turnblad dolls to coincide with the release of the remake of Hairspray. Of course, I can’t exalt these instances without acknowledging the ickiness of capital, using niche groups supposedly under the guise of serving them while in actuality creating greater gains for the corporations and retail chains that create and disseminate the brand, and clogging our homes with stuff . . .
Yet, I do think these cultural moments are not to be overlooked, even if these moments are dependent on consumerism. It’s important for women and girls to have access to clothes that include them in the world of fashion that look good and make them feel good. Likewise, it is important that queer women and girls (perhaps more pointedly femme women and girls) have a spokeswoman creating an inclusive space for them in popular culture. Because there’s a lot of joy to be had in finding an item that was made for you.
Hey, everybody! Make sure you check out this post my friend Brea put up on her blog about ways to make your life better (inspired by David Kadavy’s Eight Life Hacks). Some good advice from rad female bloggers, including yours truly. Thanks for letting me play, Brea!
Just as I think it’s important to recognize female music video directors, I think it’s necessary to acknowledge female musicians who pick up the camera and direct videos for other female artists. Tonight, I’ll focus on M.I.A., who got her start as a visual artist (she made the cover art and directed some music videos for Elastica in the late 90s). Specifically, I want to plug her music video for Baltimorean rapper Rye Rye’s “Bang” (which she also guests on). You can view it here.
M.I.A. and Rye Rye
A whole lot to love. Dancing. Lo-fi. Vocal loops. Bright colors. Two female MCs helping each other out. Female artists establishing a collaborative relationship that doesn’t strictly adhere to the mentor-protégé binary. Women of color not relying on a man to put them on. You know.
