Feminist Music Geek

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.