Earlier tonight, I caught a screening of Radical Harmonies, Dee Mosbacher’s 2002 documentary on lesbian folk artists and women’s festivals. Inspiring stuff about a topic I know very little about. But I need time to unpack what I saw. Plus, I taped my neighbor’s drum practice in exchange for guitar lessons, which start next Tuesday. What is more, I’m still reeling over some very exciting professional news. Starting in April, I will do an eight-week stint as a guest blogger for Bitch. I’ll be doing a series on the intersections of television and music culture, in keeping with some of the entries I’ve posted here. So I made a nice dinner and had a little happy happy joy joy time.
It’d be easier to celebrate if Germans would leave female artsts alone and stop using copyright infringement as a front, as some have been doing recently. For one, a Munich court banned Beyoncé’s hella-problematic “Video Phone” clip because of a supposed intellectual property violation against underwear manufacturer Triumph, who own the rights to the Iskren Lozanov-designed, Pablo Picasso-inspired skivvies she’s wearing. Also, a bunch of German folks who own the rights to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s hack . . . er . . . rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar are refusing to let Peaches stage the musical as a one-woman show.
Peaches Christ Superstar; image courtesy of ew.com
I’m not particularly concerned with the fate of “Video Phone” (or Rihanna’s new clip, “Rude Boy,” which recycles much of the same racist, sexualized imagery by way of dancehall and M.I.A.’s “Boyz“). I think that claiming panties as a legal battle ground is silly, but it also speaks to the fashion industry’s need to be economically viable during a recession while serving consumers who are increasingly drawn to ready-to-wear retail collections and renting couture. But I think Peaches not being allowed to perform Jesus Christ Superstar is ridiculous for two reasons.
1. Really, it’s not like she can do any damage to what is already awful source material. Her involvement only improves it in my mind. At least she’d bring a different, campier lack of subtlety to what is . . . well, obvious. If you haven’t seen the musical, you should do something fun with those two hours that would have been wasted on it. All you need to know is that Jesus was the original rock star.
Well, Peaches is a rock star too. And a smart, hairy, queer, Jewish, gender-bending, politically subversive, sexually autonomous feminist rock star at that. A rock star who, unlike Webber’s Jesus, doesn’t need guitars to melt faces and underwear. The boys wanna be the persona Merrill Nisker embodies, but some of them are totally scared of her.
2. Legalese aside, I think the real issue here is the threat to patriarchal order that motivates fearful types to dictate the terms of “fair use.” I’m sure there would be no problem with, say, Michael Crawford doing a one-man show of Jesus Christ Superstar (though he’d probably do a Vegas revue). But a queer Jewish feminist drawing on source material she loved growing up so she can play Jesus and Mary Magdelene. No no no. “Blasphemy.” And that’s absurd.
I hope Peaches gets to do the show somewhere. She’s welcome to convince me of the musical’s worth by performing the stage show in my garage.
Today’s entry focuses on author Maria Raha’s book Cinderella’s Big Score which focuses on female contributions to American and British punk, alternative, and independent music from the mid-1970s to, at its 2005 release, the present. It is to be the first title read by the rock n’ roll book club some Girls Rock Camp Austin peeps have put together. As we haven’t yet met to discuss the book, I’m using my blog to formulate my thoughts on it.
Cover of Maria Raha's "Cinderella's Big Score" (Seal Press, 2005); image courtesy of flickr.com
I picked up Raha’s book back in early 2006 (local business plug: I bought it at MonkeyWrench Books). I read it in between getting my wisdom teeth pulled and taking time off work to engage in a battle with my sinuses. In short, I devoured it while bed-ridden and pissy. This didn’t bode well for the reading process, as I did not like the book. But I wanted to give it another chance, so this was an opportunity to re-read it.
At the time, my problems were two-fold.
1. The scope is too broad. 30-plus years of rock history, broken down into tiny chapters about 38 different female artists? Yikes! It felt like I was reading overviews with little more insight than All Music Guide entries. Either narrow it down or write a bigger book! And I already knew most of these artists before I picked up the book, so I didn’t feel like I was getting any new information.
2. Raha is very much of the “indie rock, good; pop, bad” persuasion and does little to challenge her biases or problematize the book’s subjects. As many of the rock artists she holds in high esteem are white women and many of the pop artists she dislikes are women of color, this creates an unintentional yet unfortunate gendered racial tension.
I think about this a lot. When I co-teach music history workshops with Kristen at Act Your Age, we notice that the reception of certain musical subgenres is divided along racial lines. Participants of color tend to get excited about hip hop, R&B, and pop and check out during discussions of punk and riot grrrl. It might be that riot grrrl means a great deal to white girls and white women, but doesn’t speak to many girls and women of color.
(Note: This isn’t to say girls and women of color can’t relate to or be inspired by riot grrrl; I just wonder how many do.)
In addition to the dicey racial implications of the “indie rock, good; pop, bad” binary, I found — and still find — Raha’s reading of pop music to be shallow and essentializing. While I too find The Spice Girls’ (soda) watered-down brand of girl power feminism troubling, along with the advent of millennial teen-pop jailbait like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, I think there’s much more going on here than Raha does. For one, there’s no discussion of fans’ complex relationships with their teen idols (for a closer reading on the subject, I’d recommend scholar Dafna Lemish’s article “Spice Girls’ talk: A case study in the development of gendered identity”). There’s also scant consideration of how image-making is a complex process for female stars — save for Madonna, a person Raha seems to approve of save for her headline grabbing VMA kiss with Spears — and how this is true for both underground and mainstream female artists.
As people forget that Aguilera was in on “the kiss” or that her vocals were live, Raha puts little value in mainstream vocalists’ singing ability, which can involve considerable musical technique and craft. This also absents girl groups like En Vogue and Destiny’s Child or solo artists like Beyoncé from discussion. I also find it insulting that she assumes all of these women are pop dollies Svengalied by men.
This doesn’t even get into how hip hop, both mainstream and independent, is all but ignored in this book.
Oh, and please don’t hate on Janet Jackson.
It may be easy to configure her as a dancer who let Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis create her career for her, or crack wise about plastic surgery, weight fluctuations, and wardrobe malfunctions. But let’s not forget that her songs tackle complex issues like racial injustice, AIDS, homophobia, domestic violence, masturbation, sexual agency, and female autonomy. She’s the woman behind “The Pleasure Principle,” “Nasty,” “Control,” “Together Again,” “What About?,” “Free Zone,” “What Have You Done For Me Lately?,” “Rhythm Nation,” and the black feminist anthem “New Agenda.” She may be the artist responsible for many fans’ entrance into feminism.
These feelings still spike up, though I liked this book more the second time. I took for granted that Raha contextualizes each section of her book with an overview of what was going on in popular music at the time. I do bristle at her open, unchecked animosity for pop’s artificiality (as if indie rock is an exemplar of authenticity; it’s a myth that still gets perpetuated and results in many backlashes against bands like Vampire Weekend, a band I’d be happy to argue on behalf of elsewhere). But I also appreciate how Raha takes hardcore, grunge, nu metal, and the male output of much punk and indie rock to task for practicing misogyny and abiding by patriarchy. And I like that she does champion some female pop stars, particularly Cyndi Lauper and Tina Turner. I also like her efforts to discuss female musicians like Talking Heads’ Tina Weymouth and Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon in mixed-gender bands, and bring up issues women had working with one another.
Bassist Tina Weymouth; image courtesy of washingtoncitypaper.com
Raha also discusses bands and artists I didn’t know much about. Thanks for shining a light on Lunachicks, Crass’ Joy De Vivre and Eve Libertine, Avengers’ Penelope Houston, Fastbacks’ Lulu Gargiulo and Kim Warnick. Thanks for bringing Germs’ manager Nicole Panter, Tsunami’s Jenny Toomey and queercore legends Tribe 8 and Team Dretsch into the discussion, as they often get overlooked.
There are of course some artists I wish were discussed, but know Raha had limited space to cover the artists she did, which was already a considerable aggregate. Because this is my blog, I’ll list some ladies, most of whom I’ve discussed here: Delta 5, Au Pairs, Bush Tetras, Y Pants, Pylon, Cibo Matto, Jean Grae, Joanna Newsom, Ponytail, Explode Into Colors, M.I.A., Karen O, Santigold, Yo Majesty, St. Vincent, Thao and the Get Down Stay Down, Bat for Lashes, Fever Ray, Finally Punk, and Follow That Bird. As some of the artists she discusses are or were on major labels, I will also include Kate Bush, Björk, Liz Phair, Tori Amos, and Erykah Badu.
As Raha’s book came out just as indie and mainstream were melding in ways similar yet far more pervasive than the alternative rock boom of a pre-bust American music industry, I wonder what she makes of Solange covering Dirty Projectors or joining Of Montreal on stage. What does she make of M.I.A. or Santigold, two indie artists who court mainstream success? She wrote her book just as download culture forever altered listeners’ exposure to music and their resulting consumer habits.
Isn't Santigold a pop star too?; image courtesy of brooklynvegan.com
When I first read this book, I questioned the usefulness of it. A noble effort, to be sure. But how valuable is an overview on obscure or underground female artists when the majority of its potential readers can probably follow blogs and download tracks? While I know the book is geared toward younger women — and I certainly would have valued the book at this age — most of the girls I’ve met or worked with at Girls Rock Camp Austin already knew just about everyone mentioned here.
That said, I do think the book is a good primer for young girls and women just starting to navigate the indie rock’s craggy terrain. But if you’re gifting it, make sure to include a mix CD and a set of discussion questions. Maybe it’ll start a book club.
I recently linked an essay Jennifer Fuller wrote for Flow about Flavor of Love wherein she discussed twin contestants who she believed represented a rare mediated image of black girlishness.
I feel like we should be thinking about black girlishness (note: I’m not talking about black girlhood here, though I believe we should be thinking about that too. Rather, I’m referring to the idea that adult black female femininity can encompass admittedly normative girlish qualities). I think it’s necessary to consider black femininity beyond the racist presuppositions that perpetuate ideas of black hypersexuality (or if we turn to Judith Halberstam’s chapter on drag kings in Female Masculinity, the racial and performative dimensions of African American masculinity). Furthermore, both girlishness and girlhood often get associated with white femininity.
That said, I’m not sure if I’m the one who should be doing this. I want to engage out of my comfort zone (in this case, priviledging issues of gender), but I’m white. After Kristen at Act Your Age forwarded a piece from Racialicious on Lady Gaga and whiteness and a repost of AlienatiOn‘s essay “What If Black Women Were White Women?” I’m feeling oogier than usual about my racial identity and how it informs my feminist beliefs. Who am I to suggest that we should think about black girlishness? And might black girlishness be infantilizing to black women, perhaps taking away their agency out of a cultural fear around the sexual prowess racist people assume they have? You see where this gets complicated. Let’s get uncomfortable.
I don’t think black girlishness has to ignore sexuality. Instead, sexuality can be but one aspect of a particular black woman’s performative girlishness. So I’ll offer up Ella Fitzgerald, an iconic jazz singer I love whose music I was listening to in my car last Sunday.
Ella always brought it; image courtesy of vervemusicgroup.com
Her voice makes me happy, but I started listening closely to her song “Chewing Gum” again and it gave me pause. Then I listened to “A-Tisket A-Tasket” and started to sense a pattern. What’s up with a grown black woman singing as if she were a child?
The above clip is a scene from 1942′s Ride ‘Em Cowboy, an Abbott and Costello vehicle. “A-Tisket A-Tasket” is a nursery rhyme that became one of Fitzgerald’s standards in the late 1930s. Please note that the original song is told from a man about a woman he loves. Fitzgerald’s version comes from a young girl’s perspective, and she’s singing about her mother and a mean girl who stole her basket. Not sure how I feel about this song anymore.
Now, I haven’t seen the movie beyond this clip so I don’t know it depicts race relations, if it addresses them at all. I do think it’s interesting that Fitzgerald’s character Ruby, an entertainer who works on a ranch, appears to be integrated. But perhaps “integrated” is the wrong word, as she seems to be the only black person in this scene and maybe even in the entire cast.
Also, she’s clearly performing for white people. I feel real weird about this too. There’s something about their demeanor around Fitzgerald that’s a bit too “we don’t mind black people when they are amusing us.”
Yet, I wonder how Fitzgerald, who was perhaps best-known for scatting, might open up girlishness to include pre-verbal or automatic language. While I know the dimensions are different between her and, say, Ponytail’s Molly Siegel, I do think there’s a connection. Also, Fitzgerald’s singing here, wherein she basically turns herself into an instrument, is pretty virtuosic.
But then Fitzgerald conjures up girlishness in her marvelous version of “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered” from the Rodgers and Hart musical Pal Joey and I have to retrace my steps.
Of course, girlishness is brought up in the lyrics. At the same time, the lyrics suggest a more mature understanding and ownership of sexuality. Fitzgerald’s rendition supports this reading. This isn’t to say that girls don’t possess a complex sexual maturity. But so do black women, regardless of what age to which they’re relating.
I’m very excited and proud to tell you all that my I have two friends named Kristen who have blogs you should be reading. The one whose last name starts with an “L” runs Act Your Age and it focuses on girl actors and issues of casting. The one whose last name starts with a “W” runs Dear Black Woman, which looks at contemporary issues regarding race and gender in media culture. Both are super-smart and awesome. Happy reading!
Gabourey Sidibe as Precious; image courtesy of moviedearest.blogspot.com
Before going into my thoughts on a movie that I already feel I’ll need to qualify and back into when composing my analysis, let me stress a few things.
1. I haven’t read Sapphire’s Push, which is the movie’s source material. Thus I can’t say how faithful an adaptation Precious is. I intend to read it, and welcome anyone who has a copy they’d be willing to lend to expedite the process. As you can imagine, it’s hard to find a copy at any of the local libraries right now.
Cover to "Push"; image courtesy of speaksista.com
2. I am a middle-class white lady, so I know I have some biases and blind spots. They may affect my analysis of the story about an abused, illiterate, fat, dark-skinned, HIV-positive black girl named Claireece Precious Jones living in 1987 Harlem during the height of the AIDS and crack epidemics who is placed into an alternative school called Each One Teach One after being impregnated by her father with their second child.
3. Regardless of the criticisms I’ll detail later in the post, I think you should see this movie. Yes, you. Especially those of you who are scared that its content will be too overwhelming, exploitative, or another cinematic example of poverty porn. If you care about the tenuous presence of African Americans in media culture, you should see this movie. If you care about the plight of marginalized groups, you should see this movie. If you are willing to back up these concerns with volunteerism, monetary contributions, or your industry, you should see this movie. And if you think that these kinds of personal and systemic hardships don’t actually happen to young people, you should definitely see this movie. While I agree with Teresa Wiltz and thus don’t abide by Oprah’s line that “everyone is Precious,” I’ve had too many friends and family members recount traumatic personal and professional experiences weathered by themselves, loved ones, peers, neighbors, and students to think otherwise.
I always like to enumerate the positives first.
1. Gabourey Sidibe is an awesome find as the lead. And I know it belabors a perhaps insulting point that actors are not their characters, especially in a role author Sapphire intimated to Katie Couric would have been near impossible for any survivor to play, but I find it comforting that Sidibe is happy, proudly fat, and confident. It’s evident in her talk show appearances on Conan O’Brien that she’s got the approachable star power of an A-list celebrity.
Here’s hoping that Sidibe’s performance will lead to further opportunities. I’d be so sad if she won an Oscar for this role, only to be sidelined by tokenistic casting practices. I already saw Academy Award winner Jennifer Hudson light up the screen in Dreamgirls, only to play Carrie Bradshaw’s personal assistant (and imaginary friend?) in the Sex in the City movie.
Hudson's Louise never mingles with Carrie's established friend group; image courtesy of nypost.com
2. Mo’Nique deserves the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance as Precious’s mother Mary, who neglects, emotionally bullies, and physically abuses her daughter.
In addition to also allowing her partner (who we never fully see on-screen) to sexually abuse and twice impregnate their daughter, she also forces her daughter to engage in sexual activity with her, largely out of punishment for a gross, patriarchal misinterpretation of what consensual partnership is and should be. It’s a challenging, potentially damaging role that many actresses shied away from out of an inability to plumb terrifying emotional depths or out of an uneasy feeling that taking on this part could be misconstrued as promoting the idea that black women are sub-human.
To me, Mo’Nique does a superlative job negotiating how this woman is considerably flawed, morally compromised, and victimized by a system that encourages women of oppressed racial and economic groups to stay marginalized by over-relying on men, competing with other women and girls to keep undeserving men, keeping them bracketed off from educational and professional advancement, and convincing them that they don’t deserve better and neither do their children. While many people may gesture toward Mary’s knockdown fights with her daughter or her transparently fake show of domestic stability for visiting social workers as evidence of Mo’Nique’s powerful performance, I’d offer up scenes where Mary sits comatose for hours in front of the television or gives her profound confession about her daughter’s home life to social worker Ms. Weiss (played by Mariah Carey) at the end of the movie. These moments are informed by a series of photographs kept in a scrapbook that show Mary as a happy young woman in high school, with her partner, and her baby girl, and later distant and resentful of her, suggesting how mother and daughter came to their destructive relationship. In these moments, whether conveyed with glazed eyes, frozen in damning snapshot, or through a bewildered face made paler by make-up, we see a woman depressed and trapped. It becomes suggested that she is perhaps haunted by the same cycle of domestic abuse her daughter has lived through and at times as much victim as victimizer.
Screen shot from Mary's final scene; image courtesy of accesshollywood.com
3. As this was a concern for many skittish filmgoers of my acquaintance, I’ll say that from my perspective, I didn’t find this movie to be exploitative. Though I had issues with how director Lee Daniels would abruptly shift aesthetics and cinematic style, I appreciated that this movie wasn’t, say, all Dogme all the time. For one, surrealist flights of fancy is part of Precious’s coping strategy. For another, I think a movie that dwelt so much of the horror of the protagonist’s situation and environment would have veered the movie into exploitation, and may have also suggested that an authentic poor, black experience (whatever that is) necessitates aesthetic ugliness over compositional beauty. I found the unsettling moments to be handled sparingly, oftentimes providing a necessary jolt while also suggesting that Precious isn’t only her pain. The most effective moment for me was when Precious is given a reading tutorial by her teacher and, in a her embarrassment and frustration, returns to a particularly explicit memory of her father attacking her. Another noteworthy moment occurs when Precious is getting ready for school and sees a slim, blonde white girl staring back at her in the mirror — a chilling example of how girls of color may internalize normative standards of feminine beauty.
4. Man, did I ache for Ruby, Precious’s young, inquisitive neighbor who is clearly another abused child and is seeking comfort and friendship with a girl who is too damaged to see a kindred spirit. Some people laughed at Ruby in the screening I attended, especially in one scene when Precious is running away from Mary with her newborn in hand and knocks the girl over. Fuck you, I say. My only hope is that somewhere, later, off the page and reel, Precious and Ruby reconnect.
5. I’m assuming this is lifted from the book, but I was struck by how Precious is a proud and protective mother to children who, due to incest, are also technically her siblings. Watching her hold her mentally disabled daughter or breast-feed her infant son, I found myself confronted by how my own feelings about reproductive rights are informed by racial and class privilege and how the notion of “choice” is subjective. While I might personally be horrified at the thought of giving birth to children formed from prolonged familial abuse and would thus potentially remove our relationship, Precious views these children as her own. Mercifully, the movie does not judge her for feeling this way, and forced at least one (middle-class, white, female) spectator to think more critically about her politics.
6. As this is a music blog, I found the incorporation of music culture to be applied to interesting effect here. For one, there’s Daniels’s decision to cast successful recording artists like Mariah Carey and Lenny Kravitz, drawing out believable and unassuming performances that belie their celebrity and attendant glamor.
Mariah Carey un-glams it up for Ms. Weiss; image courtesy of createdintheattic.files.wordpress.com
For another, there’s the soundtrack’s song selection, which emphasizes contributions from jazz, soul, and R&B artists, many of whom are women of color, perhaps a reflection on the majority of the movie’s cast (thanks for the link, Kristen!). Some of the songs listed here are not period-appropriate and thus not heard in the movie, perhaps serving as inspiration and putting the movie and its source material in dialogue with generations of female artists. However, Mary J. Blige’s stirring “I Can See In Color” serves as the movie’s theme and is even featured in the scene when Precious finally flees her mother’s apartment. I hope she wins an Oscar too.
Then there was stuff that made me itchy in a bad way.
1. The opening credits are written in Precious’s semi-literate hand, then clarified through parenthetical notation. I don’t know if it was the result of studio meddling, but I found this borderline insulting. For one, it seems to imply that potential audience members can’t do basic decoding. For another, it undermines the protagonist’s particular system of written language, suggesting that it is improper, inscrutable, and in need of intervention from more literate, unseen sources.
2. As suggested earlier, this movie is visually beautiful, but stylistically uneven. At times, this is a blessing. Other times, Daniels’ heightened visuals were annoying, making me think more about how the director executed a shot than what the protagonist was going through in the moment. While I’d have to read the book to determine whether this is true to the source material, I found the most distracting moment to be when Mary visits Precious in a half-way house after leaving home and reveals that her daughter’s father has AIDS. This news and its personal implications hit Precious instantly, but the movie detours into another fantasy sequence where the lead imagines herself at a glitzy premiere. While this may be true to how Precious processes this in the book, the scene in the movie seems to suggest more about the director’s power over the camera than the protagonist’s complex emotional responses to trauma. I would have preferred to stay with Precious in that moment, but maybe some feelings are off-limits to the viewer. It just registered to me as an icky moment of authorial control.
3. As others have noted, the variance of African American skin tones and how certain shades align with class positioning is a source of contention here. As Precious is a dark-skinned black girl, it would stand to reason that her family would match her skin tone. This potentially sets up a binary wherein all dark-skinned characters are poor and uneducated. While this is challenged by the presence of Precious’s classmates, who vary in terms of racial and ethnic categories, the binary is evident with the social workers, who are educated, middle-class, light-skinned (often-multiracial) African Americans.
While Precious speculates about Mrs. Weiss’s background, the movie portrays her writing teacher, Blue Rain (played by Paula Patton), as a light-skinned, gay but somewhat desexualized, savior. If this isn’t clear within the narrative, the movie’s compositional elements make it explicit. How better to frame a middle-class, college-educated, light-skinned black woman teaching systemically disadvantaged girls than to cast a saintly glow around her through back-lighting? In this way, as well as how Precious navigates intersectional identity politics, A.O. Scott makes a case for how the movie is similar to The Blind Side, the Michael Oher biopic starring Sandra Bullock as his affluent and plucky adoptive mother, Leigh Anne Tuohy.
Patton's Blue Rain is Precious's light-skinned savior; image courtesy of nickelforathought.files.wordpress.com
3A. I felt like Precious’s Each One Teach One classmates could have been better developed. Perhaps this is a limitation of the format, as feature films don’t have the time to flesh out characters the way that television can. The Wire devoted an entire season to four pre-teen boys navigating the Baltimore public school system, following them until the end of the series’ run. If only more time and resources were given in movies and television to create complex, multidimensional characters who are girls of color.
Precious with classmates Rhonda (Chyna Layne), Consuelo (Angelic Zambrana), and Rita (Stephanie Andujar); image courtesy of thankgodimfamous.com
3B. I’m curious as to how viewers might interpret the dearth of male characters. I know that Ralph Wiley voiced his concern about with the lack of sympathetic men in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple in “Purple With a Purpose,” an essay from Why Black People Tend To Shout: Cold Facts and Wry Views From a Black Man’s World. I wonder if similar criticisms can be made here. We only see Precious’s dad during traumatic flashbacks, and even then he’s almost entirely obscured by shadows (something I’m sure Richard Dyer would take issue with). Other than that, we have a nurse named John McFadden, played by Lenny Kravitz, who came across to me as kind of a jerk who thinks he can fix any problem with a serving of organic fruit or a greeting card filled with money.
Kravitz's McFadden is well-meaning, if not a bit aloof; image courtesy of tapeworthy.blogspot.com
4. There’s also some characters who are left unexplained. One is a classmate of Precious’s in the Each One Teach One who breaks down for Precious the difference between the word “insect” and “incest,” supposedly for comic effect. That she’s one of a few white characters and coded as queer should be given more context.
Of greater concern to me is Precious’s grandmother, who takes care of her firstborn, Mongo, who has Down Syndrome. At no point is it made clear how she feels or what she knows about her granddaughter’s home life or even what side of the family she’s on. I really wanted to know more about her and the relationships she’s cultivated within this extended family.
5. Finally, the movie suggests that Precious’s final scene is triumphant, again suggesting further similarity with The Blind Side. But it’s also a bit of a lie. The odds are still very much against her, as they would be for most semi-literate, economically disadvantaged, HIV-positive, teenage single mothers. Not impossible odds, and certainly better odds if her love of math was further nurtured, but long-shot odds that don’t often reflect statistically-supported realities.
Taking all of this into account, I’m heartened that movies like Precious are being made and hope that more media texts grapple with such subject matter and fund more projects with African American directors, actors, producers, and other personnel across racial and ethnic categories. The movie apparently broke $30 million domestically at the box office, which is no small thing for a $10 million indie covering such sensitive subject matter with or without Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry’s producer credits. While movie-going can hardly rectify systemic oppression, it can get us thinking about it and maybe (hopefully) work together toward fixing it.
Joan Jett, Cyndi Lauper, and Debbie Harry as dolls; image courtesy of southern4life.blogspot.com
Attention holiday shoppers, ’80s nostalgists, and feminist music geeks! Debbie Harry, Joan Jett, and Cyndi Lauper went Barbie for Mattel’s Ladies of the ’80s collection. Apparently this was announced late last month, but I didn’t hear about it until checking Caryn Rose‘s Twitter feed last night.
So, as with most things, I’m a bit ambivalent about this collection. For one, it’s hard for me to imagine pre-pubescent playing with these dolls. Furthermore, with the collection’s bent toward ’80s nostalgia, there’s a good chance that girls today don’t know who these rockin’ ladies are (though I hope today’s parents are exposing their children to this music — I know many of the campers at GRCA this summer knew who Debbie, Joan, and Cyndi were when I taught the music history workshops with my friend Kristen).
I also take issue with how the women’s features have been homogenized to look more like Barbie. While this seems appropriate for Harry, as she has delicate features and was very slender during her days with Blondie, I’d appreciate it if Lauper was curvier and maintained her multi-colored mane. Jett’s costuming is fine, but I’d like her mullet to be more pronounced. Also, get the lady a leather jacket, please. And maybe the rest of The Runaways to reunite with her.
There’s also the issue of price. After a quick glance at Barbie’s Web site, it looks as though the average price for a doll is around $20. While hardly inexpensive for some folks, the retail value of the Ladies of the ’80s collection is $35 a rocker chick. Imagine how the price would go up if they decided to create and market ’80s-era girl bands, like The Go-Gos.
Let’s not overlook race either. It looks as though Mattel only considered white women when selecting the female pop stars that best defined the era. Where’s Janet Jackson or Tina Turner, to name but two examples? Also, I’d like an expansion of the collection to include male musical artists. How about starting with Michael Jackson and Prince?
And finally, there’s the issue of turning these women into dolls at all. Now, I was never much of a doll enthusiast as a girl. I understand that feminist and doll collector are not mutually exclusive identity markers (after all, “Lisa Vs. Malibu Stacy“ is my favorite Simpsons episode). Still, it’s hard for me to see the collection and not think of how this group of punk-y women and their individual contributions to popular music challenged how women could look and sound in media culture are being normalized and exploited for corporate gains.
But, as Erica Rand points out in her wonderful book, Barbie’s Queer Accessories, the cultural limitations of the doll are defined by the collector, not the corporation.
Here’s hoping that some collectors use their imaginations to maximize these doll’s progressive or even transgressive potential. With any luck, the dolls will have formed a band, cured cancer, come out, gone bald, or dyed green in some homes by the end of the holiday season.
Cover to Girl Groups, Girl Culture (Routledge, 2007); image courtesy of routledgemusic.com
For financial reasons, I was only able to swing one day of Fun Fun Fun Fest so I’m blogging while many in this fair city are catching some good music in Waterloo Park. Although, admittedly, if you’re gonna do one day of the festival, I think yesterday was the way to go. I got to check several bands I’ve never seen before off my list: No Age (who I’ve missed by a marrow margin at least three times), Jesus Lizard, Pharcyde, Les Savy Fav, and Death.
But if you have the scratch, please make sure everyone sees one of Mika Miko’s last shows ever on the black stage at 2:55. I might try to get down there later just to hear it from the other side of the fence.
Mika Miko’s exceptional presence on this year’s bill seems as good a place as any to remember that, as Melissa at GRCA astutely pointed out in her recent post, this year boasts a very dudecentric line-up. So I’ll review Jacqueline Warwick’s book Girl Groups, Girl Culture: Popular Music and Identity in the 1960s book in the hopes that at least one historically significant girl group or all-female band will reunite for next year’s FFFF like Death did this year. And like the Shangri-Las did at CBGB’s in 1977.
As much as I hate comparing women’s work so as to pit them in opposition, Warwick’s book is a tremendous example of how effective it can be to narrow the scope of the cultural moment being covered, something I wish Charlotte Greig would have considered when penning her book on girl groups. While Greig truncates the history of the girl group era in order to broaden the definition of what a girl group is, Warwick focuses primarily on this brief but important moment in history (roughly between 1958 and 1965), considering its ongoing influence as an epilogue.
By taking this approach, Warwick considers the girl group era and its participants from several different, often surprising, areas of inquiry. As a result, she proves the cultural signficance of a popular form dismissed by many as superficial, polished, and phony who instead tend to favor rock music’s supposed transcendent raw authenticity, and argues strongly that this binary construction is inherently gendered. Duh, and amen.
Warwick posits that one of the most important things about the girl group era was its insistence on putting girls and young women in the spotlight, introducing a complex, celebratoryn and at times contradictory performance of what the author calls “girlness”. Often, these ladies were working class, and of African American or mixed racial and ethnic heritage. They had few options for financial mobility and minimal career prospects being marriage, motherhood, clerical jobs, and day labor. Forming vocal groups together and cutting records gave them access to other opportuntities toward professional advancement and personal growth, expanding the idea of girlhood as an identity across race and class lines.
Sometimes these groupings resulted in the cultivation of considerable, devoted fan bases that, in The Supremes and The Ronnettes’ cases, were comparable to Beatlemania. Some of those fans were even other male-only rock bands, like The Beach Boys, The Beatles, and later, The Ramones. Take that, pop-rock, girl-boy binaries!
In other words, I’m telling you to read this book.
One thing I appreciate about Warwick’s book from the outset is the celebration of the female voice. As I’ve long believed and argued extensively in this blog, we cannot give short-shrift to singers. While they can assuredly be tokenized and objectified, but they can also be empowered, embodied, and forge their own agency. Heartenly, she finds much going on with the voice, a distinct instrument no matter how it may have been manipulated or homogenized by label owners like Motown’s Barry Gordy and producers like Phil Spector and his overwhelming wall of sound. She hears the genteel precision of Diana Ross’s soprano, the urgent purr of Ronnie Spector’s husky alto, the untrained wavering of Shirelle Shirley Owens’s pitch, the gutteral inflections on Supreme Florence Ballard’s tone, the put-on nasal affectations of Broadway-trained groups like The Angels, the racial dimensions of Dusty Springfield’s blue-eyed soul, and the teenaged monotone of Shangri-La Mary Weiss.
She also hears these girls singing to one another, often in their own forms of feminine dialect and for the purposes of providing support and advice. On record, acts like The Dixie Cups, The Crystals, Betty Everett, and The Velvelettes would pepper their songs with seemingly nonsensical words and phrases like “iko iko,” “da doo ron ron,” “shoop,” and “doo lang doo lang,” often provided by backing vocalists as a means of support for the lead vocalist, who might be intimating her feelings about burgeoning romance or her conflicted feelings in the aftermath of a break-up.
Often, these girls were providing one another moral support and providing advice as well. While Warwick notes that advice songs tended to be the domain of girl groups with African American members like The Velvelettes, The Shirelles, The Chiffons, and The Marvelettes, they often imparted wisdom to their audiences that they learned from their mothers or their sisters, as well as sharing what they’ve learned from their own experiences. In doing so, these songs provided a counterargument to the assertion that girl groups only sang about boys and also expanded female discourse in popular music by including the words and experiences of generations of women into then present-day pop songs by girls.
It cannot be ignored that while many girl group songs were written by men, not all of them were. As mentioned elsewhere, Brill Building stalwarts like Cynthia Weil, Ellie Greenwich, and Carole King were of paramount importance to the era. Many of these women, like Greenwich, wrote about seemingly teenage issues like young love and treated it as legitimate, at times giving it life-and-death importance, as she did on The Shangri-Las’ “Leader of the Pack.”
King is a particularly interesting case as well. Before striking out on her own as a solo artist, she wrote many important songs for girl groups. Some songs, like The Crystals’ “He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss)” address the troubling and dangerous aspects of patriarchy and oppression, and have been covered to harrowing effect by bands like Hole and Grizzly Bear.
Other songs King penned gesture toward the era’s prescience regarding shifting cultural attitudes toward feminism, female agency, and sexual autonomy, as on The Shirelles’ anthemic “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?”
Girl groups were also clearly singing with one another, as girl groups often were comprised of siblings and relatives who wore matching outfits and performed intricate choreography to suggest that these girls were a unit, despite at times having clearly defined lead singers and stars who (especially in Diana Ross’s case) were thin and had a more conventional look and sound.
It was this image coordination that made The Ronnettes able to ingratiate night clubs when they were underaged, gave them the confidence to perform at those night clubs, and provided them with a sense of belonging that made them tough enough to brave any New York City street. It also makes this sense of actual or engineered sisterhood and camderadie seem especially fragile when success encroaches on it, as the tragic dimensions of Estelle Bennett and Florence Ballard‘s post-girl group lives remind.
Warwick shies from making any explicitly queer connections to girl groups beyond passing references to Springfield and Lesley Gore’s orientations and their relationships with the closet. I would have liked a bit more discussion of the queer dynamics of the groups’ homosocial bonding both on- and off-record. A brief appraisal of queer fandom (seemingly most pronounced among certain circles of gay men, though not exclusively) would also have been appreciated.
That said, I do appreciate Warwick reminding her readers of girl groups’ continued impact. As this is the section of the book that gets less focus, it would be worthwhile to read Warwick’s and Greig’s books together to get a larger sense of how punk, hip hop, and contemporary pop music were influenced by girl groups.
I would hasten to add country music to the list of genres that were shaped by this era. Given last night’s Saturday Night Live, which featured crossover star Taylor Swift as both host and musical guest (a rare opportunity for most pop stars, unless they are Justin or Britney). Watching her play a brace-faced teenager in a skit about parents who are worse drivers than their kids and her performance of “You Belong To Me” complete with careful, song-appropriate gestures, it was clear to me that the girl group era continues. As Mika Miko performs one of their last shows later today, I’ll wonder where it’ll permeate next.
Cover to 3 single (Jive, 2009); image courtesy of thehollywoodgossip.com
Maybe Britney Spears doesn’t seem like someone I’d cover here. In truth, if we have to do the bullshit either/or, good/bad preference thing, I’m totally Christina Aguilera over Britney Spears. Except for that time when “Dirrty” first came out and I was bummed out that Xtina decided to celebrate sluttiness. Then I recanted and celebrated the sluttiness too, though with weird feelings about how Aguilera selectively channeled her Ecuadorian roots by playing up the spicy Latina, only to later highlight her whiteness in subsequent reinventions.
But the music video for Britney’s new single “3″ from her second greatest hits compilation recently debuted on the Internet. Also, I have to say that I actually like Spears’s music. “Toxic” was a neat little jam. Blackout was a pretty fun, dark pop record despite and because of its context (you might remember that Britney was in the tabloids a bit in 2007). And I haven’t really listened to Circus, but the hits have been fun. The older she gets, the edgier and less kid-friendly she becomes. Sure, the producers have a hand in all of this, and perhaps there’s some unfortunate credence to Tom Ewing’s analogy between Spears and Twin Peaks hardened, debased, tragic beauty Laura Palmer. But I still like Britney. And maybe like Rihanna, another beauty with a cyborg’s voice who seems to look and sound even more edgier after her own travails, I root for her.
Rihanna and the Met Ball (May, 2009); image courtesy of gofugyourself.com
Like the South Park dudes, I have sympathy for Britney Jean. 1) She was raised to be a pop star, 2) she became a pop star when she was really young and probably didn’t get to grow up in a normal environment, 3) suddenly people started making fun of her for not seeming very cultured or politically aware because she spent all of her life becoming a pop star, 4) she had a headline-making break-up with some boy who later told everyone that he took her virginity, 5) she is perceived as damaged goods while his star continues to rise, 6) she makes a lot of bad personal decisions, 7) she gives birth to two boys in quick succession, 8) she suffered through post-partum depression and perhaps bipolar disorder in public, 9) people made fun of her supposedly chubby post-pregnancy body, 10) then her handlers make her over for real and magically all is well again.
I really hope that’s true. She’s 27, a cursed age for rock and pop idols. I hope she makes it to 28. And, like Carrie Brownstein, I hope she gets to make friends with fellow Southern girl Beth Ditto, who has packaged herself as a proudly fat and queer sex symbol and vocal powerhouse. It also makes me glad that I know almost fuck-all about Lady Gaga’s personal life. I’ve pro’ed and con’ed her, but I like that I know very little about her off-stage persona. I’m assuming she took a note from Britney. I’m also hoping Britney took a note from Beyoncé.
But let’s get to “3″ and its video. It’s dirty. It’s all about threesomes. And, unlike earlier Britney singles, this one doesn’t hide behind a lot of innuendo. Stuff I like about it.
1. Um, is this song already a hit at gay bars across the world? It’s about to be.
2. I kinda love how unclear (and thus potentially queerable?) the groupings are in this song. The reference to “Peter, Paul, and Mary” seems to suggest some boy-boy-girl action. In addition to loving that the stiff, pious folk trio are name-checked here, I hope that the two boys in the trio tend to each other’s needs as well as Britney’s. Based on the video, the trio could also be three ladies. While the video is totally vulnerable to the heterosexual male gaze, there is no tired two girls for every boy situation explicitly being offered up here.
2A. I hope Britney’s queer fanbase comes up with all manner of pairings and positions when they bring this song to life.
3. While I hate the slowed-down, ballad-y bridge where Britney suggests (once again) that “what we do is innocent,” nothing is meant by it, and this could just be a twosome, I like that she slyly sneaks in that it might also be fun to turn the duet into a trio or even a quartet. Britney’s grin really sells it.
4. I’ve always liked Britney’s Southern accent and her military dance moves.
Stuff that’s icky.
1. Britney’s white leotard when she’s next to the chorus line of female dancers. Her white blondeness is exacerbated by the women’s black outfits, which racialize and subordinate them alongside the pop star. I hated Ciara and Justin Timberlake’s similar music video for “Love Sex Magic,” but at least I felt like Ciara was dancing with the chorus line rather than having them orbit her.
2. Product placement. Duh, she’s a brand. But does she really have to apply her Fantasy perfume at the beginning of the video? Or, for that matter, does she have to spritz on some Curious at the beginning of the “Circus” music video? Oh, she does? It’s probably in her contract? Gross.
3. While I like that her trimmer figure hasn’t sacrificed her curves, I never really thought she had any weight to lose.
4. The “livin’ like this is the new thing” lyric is problematic because it kinda sounds like a sales pitch. Ugh. I guess a queer poly love jingle isn’t the worst thing, but still. Queer love, polyamory, and threesomes are totally not the new thing. They’ve been identities and expressions of desire probably since the beginning of time.
5. Since configuration of the threesome is deliberately ambiguous in the Diane Martel-directed clip, I wish the star played with male drag. Didn’t she seem to have butch potential when she shaved her head? Doesn’t it seem like part of her career makeover is to make her normatively feminine and sexy again? But that’s so boring. I’ve long thought that Britney’s thick neck and broad shoulders could make her a potentially good looking drag king, perhaps convincing as Mariah or her ex-boyfriend. She could at least oscillate within the butch-femme binary like Ciara did in “Like a Boy.”
So, I recently revisited Björk’s Vespertine because, as followers of the blog can probably guess, it made me a feminist and I will be posting about the hows and whys of it at length in the not-too-distant future.
But one thing I forgot about the album that really impacted what I listen for in other people’s music is non-traditional instrumentation. Of course Björk would extend these musical explorations further with her follow-up, Medúlla, which was largely an a cappella record that explicitly configured the voice as an instrument, and often a percussive one at that (hopefully the feminist possibilities of using the voice –both explicitly female and degendered through digital manipulation – as such an integral part of song construction are obvious). But with Vespertine, she and production team Matmos often constructed beats out of surprising, often small, seemingly non-musical objects often associated with leisure pursuits or the domestic, like a deck of cards or cutlery.
Listening to the album again reinvigorated my interest in hearing weird objects be used as instruments. Today, I offer up toys as possible instruments and present bands Y Pants and CocoRosie as evidence. Representing New York at two very different times (early 80s and present-day, respectively), these two bands have members who employ rudimentary electronic toy pianos, noisemakers, and other gadgets that seem swiped from a long-abandoned bargin bin.
Y Pants; image courtesy of waylonhatchet.com
CocoRosie; image courtesy of nymag.com
For Y Pants’ Gail Vachon and Virginia Piersol, the toy piano and drums became an interesting way to reconfigure the sound of dub and reggae, two key interrelated musical movements for both punk and post-punk that had probably become too predictable as white-appropriated touchstones by 1979. As Y Pants were associated with no wave, with ukelele player Barbara Ess once a member of Theoretical Girls, another seminal band of the period formed by guitar visionary/cranky drunk grandpa Glenn Branca, there’s an excellent chance the band was rebelling against post-punk’s intellectualist posturing and angular guitar lines. What better way to piss off the scene than making messy music about the joys of eating with factory-produced shiny plastic toys?
(Note: Apologies, but I cannot find a live performance for Y Pants. As with much no wave, which was reviled by pretty much anyone with ears at the time and only recently became cool, despite the Brian Eno-produced No New York compilation, there’s not a lot of recorded evidence of the band in concert. The only thing I’ve seen that really documents the scene is Downtown ’81, but Y Pants were just about to break up by then. Which is too bad, because apparently they were all about unconventional performance spaces. So if you have any leads on where to track down a clip, let me know. In the meantime, check outY Pants, a repressing that combines their self-titled EP with their only album, Beat It Down.)
With CocoRosie, the instrumentation conveys something a little more transparently disturbing. Sierra Casady’s sweet, at once jazzy and operatic vocals contrast with wheezy, out-of-time bleeps and bloops from sister Bianca’s various toy instruments, which foreground songs that tend to focus on death, drugs, doomed love, incest, AIDS, abuse, and co-dependency. The toys, which may one day expire or be discarded, then become a symbol of betrayed innocence, the cold assurance that childhood — girlhood — is going to end in loss. At least you have your sister, who may also be your lover.
As an aside, I can’t bring up CocoRosie without pointing out that they’re really problematic in terms of race. They’ve dabbled with cholo fashion, perhaps in acknowledgement to the multifaceted dimensions of their Native American heritage, which they have also hailed in their attire and music.
Racially dicey sister-lovers; image courtesy of beastnation.com
In addition, they’ve made me a bit queasy in their appropriations of blackness. They consciously try on the voices of African American jazz singers like Billie Holiday. In addition, on ”Jesus Loves Me,” a track off their first album, La maison de mon rêve, the girls uses a certain racial slur when singing that God’s only son loves them, but not their wives, or their black friends. And Bianca has long been a fixture at Kill Whitey parties in Brooklyn.
That said, to borrow a phrase from Seth Watter’s Dusted review of Y Pants, both bands’ use of toys help build minor manifestos that sound like “a small explosion in the bedroom.” In his essay “The ‘Feminization’ of Rock,” Tony Grajeda argues that the bedroom is a domestic, queerable, intimate space where most lo-fi music is written, rehearsed, and recorded. While he was thinking about primarily-male indie rock acts like Pavement, the bedroom is clearly where Y Pants and CocoRosie belong as well. Just don’t pretend there isn’t anything subversive about what these ladies do in there.
Tracy + the Plastics; image courtesy of criticalmiami.com
My friend Morgan is taking a grad seminar on divas through UT’s Theatre and Dance department. Kinda amazing, right? Makes you wish you were in school, talking about Mariah Carey and getting college credit, doesn’t it? Me too. I always remember this when someone posts a horror story on Facebook about admission cutbacks, hiring freezes, and when you’re supposed to make babies.
A class on divas fascinates me. If I were taking this class, I’d have so many questions. Who is a diva? What makes a diva? Does a diva have to be glamourous? Does a diva have to be campy? Is performance inherrent to being a diva and, if so, can anti-performance fit into this construction? Does being a diva mean vocal virtuosity? Is being a diva about turning spectacle into art, or deriving art out of spectacle? How do the interstices of identity play into the construction of a diva’s persona(e) and fan base? Can a diva be male, despite diva Beyoncé’s assertion that a diva is a female version of a hustler?
I think that last one is totally rhetorical. Guys can totally be divas. And as I support being flexible with language to include female contributions, I also endorse that we not masculinize originally female-gendered terminology when applying it to boys and men. I’ll not stand for this “divo” business — Kanye is a diva. A diva can also clearly be trans or intersex.
I think we can also agree on performance being intrinsic to the diva. But is there a specific way that performance has to be packaged? Does a diva have to make a scene at the Grammys or can s/he do it in some rundown cabaret or house party?
These questions lead me toward an issue I’m not so sure about, and am going to take this blog as a forum to play with. Does a diva require or need to project a lavish lifestyle, and thus tied to capital? I have a few ladies in mind to complicate the classed notions of the diva. Admittedly, they’re kinda art-fuck suggestions meant to subvert the normative positionings of this cultural figure. They’re also adult, white, and biologically female, perhaps causing them to abide by aforementioned norms. So if you’re like “what about _______?,” feel free to share.
For my first post on divas, I offer up the now-defunct solo project Tracy + the Plastics for consideration. Does Wynne Greenwood’s use of elliptical song structures, graphically candid confessionals, antiquated electronic instruments, and video installations to play with identity, gender, sexuality, and performance make her a diva? Why or why not?
