Ageing and Contemporary Female Musicians

Abigail Gardner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138048065
• eBook ISBN: 9781351691833
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Études relatives au genre

Ageing and Contemporary Female Musicians focuses on ageing within contemporary popular music. It argues that context, genres, memoirs, racial politics and place all contribute to how women are 'aged' in popular music.

Framing contemporary female musicians as canonical grandmothers, Rude Girls, neo-Afrofuturist and memoirists settling accounts, the book gives us some respite from a decline or denial narrative and introduces a dynamism into ageing. Female rock memoirs are age-appropriate survival stories that reframe the histories of punk and independent rock music. Old age has a functional and canonical 'place' in the work of Shirley Collins and Calypso Rose.

Janelle Monáe, Christine and the Queens and Anohni perform 'queer' age, specifically a kind of 'going beyond' both corporeal and temporal borders. Genres age, and the book introduces the idea of the time-crunch; an encounter between an embodied, represented age and a genre-age, which is, itself, produced through historicity and aesthetics. Lastly the book goes behind the scenes to draw on interviews and questionnaires with 19 women involved in the contemporary British and American popular music industry; DIY and ex-musicians, producers, music publishers, music journalists and audio engineers.

Ageing and Contemporary Female Musicians is a vital intergenerational feminist viewpoint for researchers and students in gender studies, popular music, popular culture, media studies, cultural studies and ageing studies.

1 More than music

Female rock memoirs

Girlhood and growing up, clothes and sex, boys and music, being in a band: these are the standout themes from the titles of ten memoirs published between 2010 and 2017. Some of these include:

‘Girl in a Band: A Memoir’ (Gordon, 2015), ‘Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl: A Memoir’ (Brownstein, 2015), ‘Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys’ (Albertine, 2014), ‘Just Kids’ (Smith, 2010) and ‘M Train’ (Smith, 2015), ‘Bedsit Disco Queen: How I Grew Up and Tried to Be a Pop Star’ (Thorn, 2013) and ‘Naked at the Albert Hall’ (Thorn, 2015), ‘The Rise, the Fall, the Rise’ (Smith-Start, 2016), ‘Art, Sex, Music’ (Fanni Tutti, 2017), ‘Rat Girl’ (Hersh, 2010).

They are written by eight American and English rock women musicians who, at the time of writing, were in their 40s and older: Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, Patti Smith, Viv Albertine of The Slits, Tracey Thorn, Carrie Brownstein of Sleater-Kinney, Kristin Hersh of Throwing Muses, Brix Smith of The Fall and Cosey Fanni Tutti of Throbbing Gristle. Singers, bass players, guitarists, front women and backline: they are the recollections of some of the key figures on the Anglo-American punk, post-punk, grunge and ‘independent’ music scenes from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. These titles speak of belonging and appearances, and most importantly for this book, they view youth and girlhood from the vantage point of older age.

The second decade of the twenty-first century has witnessed a mini ‘boom’ in publications like this, and I am interested in why this might be and what they add to an understanding of the interplay between the punk pasts they narrate and the ageing presents from which they are narrated from. The female rock memoir is an age-appropriate survival story which reframes the histories of punk and independent rock music. They shed light on experiences and narratives of creativity, whose dominant themes centre on the matrices of domesticity, sexuality, trauma and musical creativity.

These memoirs narrate tales of trauma and belonging, family and sex and flesh out the histories of punk and independent rock. These survivor stories involve the documenting of the emotional journeys undertaken by the authors, as they flesh out the interior lives in retrospect. They feed into a neo-liberal conception of the individual that maps onto myths of ‘rock ‘n’ roll’ and underplays structural or systematic sexism and misogyny. They also build into a Romantic discourse of the individual creative auteur and continue a discursive (and problematic) trajectory of the ‘confessional’ singer-songwriter (Williams and Williams, 2016), whereby we expect the musician/author to divulge their inner lives through their art. And this is what we get in these memoirs, which though they are sold as ‘rock memoirs’ do not have music as the central theme. Rather, there is a focus on the intimate and on the domestic (McRobbie, 1991). They narrate mental anguish (Hersh), health traumas (Albertine, Tutti) and sexual confusion (Brownstein) as they seek to work out what music meant to them. They function as a kind of retrospective ‘settling of accounts’ (McRobbie, 1991) because they insert distinctive (traumatic, visceral, private) female experiences into the popular myths of recent popular music history.

This ageing female literary voice is part of a popular cultural nostalgia for the youthful ‘age’ of punk and post-punk that is mirrored by contemporary cultural reflections on the era from the world of art and media. This is, in part, due to an alliance between the contemporary cultural gatekeepers, the curators, publishers and journalists, who share similar life courses to the authors, but it is also about a need to reflect on times that are recalled as rebellious and to consider how memoir works to augment this historicising process. These rock memoirs not only focus on different versions of recent cultural history but feed into the mythologies of punk, grunge and indie in complex ways, both mythologising and canonising the periods of the late 1970s and early 1980s in punk and post-punk, whilst adding into it rich textural detail of the worlds behind the band and off stage. They write gendered subjectivities into that history, spotlighting the relationships, motives, fears and achievements of their times as musicians (see Edgar et al., 2019). Might it be too that there is an acceptability of the ageing female authorial voice when it is couched within a literary, rather than a musical tradition? These tales of trauma, sexual confusion, loss and illness emerge from the pens of older women, most of whom are still performing and recording. And so there is something here to consider around ageing pens writing youthful traumas and desires, and hitherto unvoiced youthful lives being folded into the widening histories of punk and independent Rock music.

Rocking memories

Rock memoirs are an established literary genre that functions as part of a broader ecosystem of popular music. They extend the reach of the musician and make them a cultural player in a broader cultural landscape. With an already identified audience, they make up part of a metatext of music, images and words that are the cultural configuration of that artist. They function as one element in the star making economy which popular music has, like the film industry, been reliant on. These tales of stardom are usually characterised by early struggles (with musical ability, with drugs, alcohol, and family), rejections (both by the industry and in relationships) and ultimate survival. There is, in them, a degree of familiarity as we know their stories already, but the memoir offers us the inside perspective. They take us off stage, behind the scenes and function in a similar fashion to the pseudo-documentary music video that Railton and Watson (2011) described. They allow us, the fan, an interested audience, a glimpse into the off-stage stories and offer an ‘access-all-areas’ account. They offer, like the documentary video, an authenticity that shores up ideas of the star and memories of performances; they are an authenticating narrative. The story of the struggling artist is a Romantic trope that has endured into the rock memoir, and tales of dissolution (Motley Crüe’s 2002, The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band) and drug addiction (Nick Kent’s 2010, Apathy for the Devil: A Seventies Memoir) only serve to perpetuate such a narrative. There is, in these narratives, an aura of the confessional tale, one that audiences perhaps knew already but are laid out on the pages for us to read. The memoirs of the women in this chapter share something of the confessional, in so far as all is laid bare, we are witness to events that were being enacted off stage. But they are more than this, and Radstone’s analysis of the distinction between the two forms offers a platform from which to gauge how far these memoirs are not only individual confessional tales from the female rock star but that they are a rewriting of history. They feed into the mythology of the radical creative outsider (Negus and Pickering, 2002), and so might be understood as individual accounts of women in punk and post-punk, but we might also see them, as memoirs, as carving out, in retrospect, a history of women in rock that includes trauma, the body, sex and relationships: the matrix of their creative life.

These memoirs fit into a popular music industry that is part of a broader retromanic (Reynolds, 2011) culture which is defined by the urge to repackage, reunite and revive acts from its past (Driessen, 2015). The return of musicians from the 1970s and 1980s not only on stage, but in museums and exhibitions across Europe, the UK and the USA, and as part of interactive exhibitions (Gardner and Jennings, 2019) illustrates the veracity for such repeated encounters across different platforms. How then might we read the ‘return’ of younger women through the written memoirs of their older selves?

Catherine Strong, who has written on grunge and memory, writes in 2011 that ‘Women are generally written out of historical accounts of music in order to reinscribe the creative dominance of men in this field’ (Strong, 2011b, p. 398). These women are writing themselves back in. There are key themes that run through these selected female rock memoirs published between 2010 and 2017 that speak to an ongoing reluctance to claim young women as creative controllers with respect to popular music. All of the memoirs position music as part of a complex interwoven landscape across which personal relationships – emotional, sexual, parental, familial – are core. The women all sit at the centre of this network of relationships, and for rock memoirs, across many of them, music – how it is made, recorded, produced and performed – is not pre-eminent. It figures, yes, but tangentially. Albertine, Brownstein, Thorn and Gordon describe how they learnt to play bass. In each of their cases, it was an exercise in unlearning traditional methodologies and aiming to carve out new sonic spaces. Tutti describes her early fascination with sound and later, when with Throbbing Gristle, how loops and pedals were used in the studio. Thorn notably describes her reluctance to sing in public. But these accounts remain somehow lesser to the narrative of self-discovery and survival. If ‘memory can be central to the reproduction or alteration of power relations in society’ (Strong, 2011, p. 5), then the memoirs examined here do much to flesh out the lives of the musicians and artists who wrote them, documenting tales of family and friendship that position these women musicians very much in a place where perhaps their pre-performance and extra-performance lives were unexamined but are now documented as integral to their musical identities. What they do is tell us the off-stage stories and so retrospectively settle some subcultural accounts. They disrupt the sanctity of the subcultural boy’s club and allow us to see what else was happening behind these musical scenes and within these musical subcultures and they fulfil what Halberstam argues for in her assessment of the historicising of punk:

Why are these other histories of punk so important? Because without them, punk becomes a rebellion without a cause, a boy’s club of heroic art school drop outs and another master narrative within which white guys play all the parts.

(2013, p. 129)

Being seen and looking back: subculture and memoir

Being seen was very much part of the raison d’être of belonging to a subculture, where style and posing in public were integral to youth rebellion. Well it was if you subscribe to Dick Hebdige’s seminal 1979 book on subcultures and style. His work, coming out of a sociological tradition which sought to deconstruct surveillance and street culture, positioned punks, mods and rockers as players in a narrative predicated on a feedback loop of surveillance and deviance that was premised on appearance. Style talked: what you wore was what you were. These rebellious youth were ‘posing’ and ‘making a pretty picture of themselves’ (Hebdige, 2007, p. 294) in the streets of Britain from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s, and for ‘youth’, read ‘young men’. In 1980, Angela McRobbie wrote a critique of Hebdige called ‘Settling Accounts with Subcultures: a Feminist Critique’. In it, she laments his writing out of young women through an emphasis on ‘homages to masculinity’ (1991, p. 25) claiming that that young women’s experiences were being marginalised. She explains it thus: ‘in the literary sensibility of urban romanticism that resonated across most youth cultural discourse, girls are allowed little more than the back seat on a draughty motor bike’ (McRobbie, 1991, p. 20). She argued that women were not at the centre of subcultural theorists’ concerns, that their participation in punk especially was unmarked and that this, given the extent of involvement of young women in performance, production and yes, in posing, was an oversight that she sought to address. To some extent, these memoirs of that time, of punk and post-punk, can be viewed as a retrospective reckoning and settling. They fill in the gaps that McRobbie suggests were absent from the sociological and post-structuralist accounts of the era. Writing specifically as a feminist, McRobbie noted how decried the private and domestic sphere was for both the male subculturalists and their sociologically driven researchers. This was characteristic of an ongoing ‘silence’ around young women that feminism, in its 1980s’ guise, was seeking to speak out about. McRobbie writes of how the ‘absence of the self and the invalidating of personal experience in the name of more objective social sciences’ (1991, p. 19) only served to silence young women, particularly young working-class women’s experiences. Almost 40 years later, these personal experiences are coming to the fore as memoir fiction, and tales of menstruation, sexual failure, ill-health and sexual confusion are wrapped into narratives of subcultural belonging and the pivotal role of music in women’s lives. These memoirs speak of the life behind the subcultural ‘style’, of the emotional, sexual and artistic hinterlands not captured in the academic work of the late 1970s and early 1980s whose central concern was (media) surveillance and (male) display. They allow the reader to hear what those women thought, what they felt. And it is worth remembering that Hebdige’s reading of punk subculture was a theoretical reading based on post-structuralist ideas of image and meaning. As writers since have remarked (Bennett, 2006; Bennett and Hodkinson, 2012), he did not seek to incorporate any ‘real’ punk voices into his reading, although that was not his remit. The memoir, on the other hand, offers the reader that tangled subjectivity.

Between confession and memoir?

The memoir is a subjective account of the self in the past written by the contemporary author, and as such, floats between the autobiographical and the fictitious, indeed, Susannah Radstone (2007), who has looked at the differences between memoir and confession, uses the term ‘memoir fiction’. This format is recognised as a type of literary memory work aimed at inserting the self into a specific history. It is, by this token, selective and subjective: a story of the past self that is told in the present. In a book that considers sexual difference and time, Radstone quotes Hart on the crucial differences between memoir and what it is often associated or confused with, confession. For her, and others, the difference is predicated on temporality and ontology: ‘“Memoir” is personal history that seeks to articulate or repossess the historicity of the self…. “Memoir” places the self relative to time, history, cultural pattern and change. Confession is ontological…. memoir is historical or cultural’ (Hart, 1970, p. 491 in Radstone, 2007, p. 17). Confession is reliant on a subject who is willing to change, to be altered by the confessional process. Its roots lie in Christian theological tradition; indeed, in the Catholic Church, it is one of the five important sacraments and is referred to as the Sacrament for Penance and Reconciliation. It is a two-way process wherein wrongdoing (Radstone, 2007, p. 56) is confessed to an audience (the priest) in a specific space (the confession box), with the hope of absolution and re-entry (reconciliation) into the wider religious community and to God. In the Catholic Church, this ‘wrongdoing’ might be anything that goes against Catholic teaching and could range from any one deviation from the Ten Commandments. Crucial to the confessional is its confidentiality. It also follows a specific processual trajectory and might be understood as a ritual of apology and acceptance or, as Foucault (1978, p. 194) articulated in ‘The History of Sexuality: An Introduction’, a ritual for the production of ‘truth’. The confessional is used to reposition the confessor on the path to an acquiescence to this ‘truth’ or prevailing dogma.

Confession is also positioned as a therapeutic healing process and relies on a reading of the individual subject as open to change and transformation. It involves more than one person and is co-temporal, both in its religious manifestation and in its media equivalents. You can talk the evil, hurt or misdemeanour out. Confessional television follows the same trajectory of deviation, confession and rehabilitation, and has its own confessional space (the TV sofa) and confessors (the TV host, live TV audience) (Wilson, 2003). The confessions in these mediated scenarios tend to dwell on sexual misdemeanours and misconduct with the reconciliation being with affronted partners or friends rather than ‘the Church’. Viewers from a Judaeo-Christian or Western culture that has the confessional as its core ritual of reconciliation will know what to expect.

Where confession is ritualised acceptance of wrongdoing and rehabilitation in the co-temporal presence of a confessor, be it a priest or TV host and audience, memoir is a life story told retrospectively and selectively that might include a confessional moment. It is also about the temporalised self or ‘selves’ (Radstone, 2007, p. 193) rather than the damaged self. Radstone notes that there is a separation between the present self that is doing the writing and those that inhabited the past. The memoir is therefore inextricably temporal; it is about reflecting on past times, about subjectivity and time and about staking out some ownership to that particular time. And although there is a clear distinction between the two modes of expression in terms of their ontology, it is clear that confessional narratives can be part of a memoir. At first glance it might appear as if there were something of a tension within the memoir mode as used by women musicians, specifically when it is considered as a continuation of the trope of the confessional singer-songwriter. The eight women were making music in the punk, post-punk and grunge traditions, some of them experimenting outside of the 12 bar blues mode (Albertine, Tutti) and none of them could really be aligned to the singer-songwriter category, which, as Williams and Williams’ (2016) book suggests, is a historical and generic contingency. There is a potential pull between seeing these narratives as a retrospective settling, as I set out in relation to the silencing of women’s subcultural experiences, and as a corralling of the rebellious creative female musician back into a well-worn narrative of self-disclosure. So to a degree, the tension is around what constitutes ‘settling’ and in what format. Shumway’s analysis of the ‘emergence of the singer-songwriter’ offers a platform from which to see the confessional mode typified by the singer-songwriter, as constitutive of space from which to speak of topics that were personal, but not apolitical. He argues that it was 1968 when...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 More than music: female rock memoirs
• 2 Shirley Collins and Calypso Rose: grand maternal queens
• 3 ‘Tilted’: the queer ages and sideways spaces of Janelle Monáe, Christine and the Queens and Anohni
• 4 Ageing with alt-rock and folk
• 5 Rude Girls: ageing, race and place
• 6 ‘They’re not going to give me Stormzy’: ageing matters behind the scenes
• Afterword: age stages, a reflection
• Bibliography
• Index