Women and Popular Music

Sexuality, Identity and Subjectivity

Sheila Whiteley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135121808
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Women and Popular Music explores the changing role of women musicians and the ways in which their songs resonate in popular culture. Sheila Whiteley begins by examining the counter-culture's reactionary attitudes to women through the lyrics of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. She explores the ways in which artists like Joplin and Joni Mitchell confronted issues of sexuality and freedom, redefining women's participation in the industry, and assesses the personal cost of their achievements. She considers how stars such as Annie Lennox, Madonna and k.d. lang have confronted issues of gender stereotyping and sexuality, through pop videos for 'Justify My Love' and 'Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)', and looks at the enduring importance of the singer-songwriter through artists such as Tracey Chapman. Lastly, she assesses the contribution of contemporary artists including Tori Amos, P.J. Harvey and Courtney Love, and asks whether the Spice Girls are just a 'cartoon feminist pop group' or if they provide positive role models for teenage girls.

1

WONDERFUL WORLD, BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE

The 1960s’ counter culture and its ideological relationship to women

Historical accounts of the 1960s’ counter culture generally point to ‘an intense internationalism, which was based on shared dreams, strategies, styles, moods and vocabularies’.¹ Its origins lay in the beats (beatnik) movement of the 1950s which had developed in the student area of the Left Bank of Paris. Influenced by French bohemian artists and intelligentsia, and centred around the existentialist values of Jean-Paul Sartre (which espoused the primacy of experiences, subjectivity and individuality in social and interpersonal life), the beats were popularised in America by such writers as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Initially, the movement was centred on Greenwich Village, New York. Characterised by a romantic anarchism, an interest in Eastern mysticism, poetry, jazz and drugs (most specifically marijuana), the movement spread across America in the early 1960s and exercised a particular influence on the values of the 1960s’ counter culture.

The counter culture can be defined as a generic label for a somewhat loose grouping of young people, a generational unit, who challenged the traditional concepts of career, family, education and morality and whose lifestyle was loosely organised around the notion of personal freedom. Although it was particularly evident in North American anti-conformist lifestyles (not least that exemplified by the hippies of the Haight Ashbury district of San Francisco), it quickly assumed an international dimension. While it is recognised that there were divisions between the British underground, which tended towards cultural upheaval, and New Left politics (e.g. the US-based Students for a Democratic Society) which focused on political protest, these groupings were also perceived as broadly consistent in their challenge to the dominant culture. The opposition to the war in Vietnam, for example, is generally identified as the one great unifier of the counter culture in that it demonstrated a concern for the developing world and, in particular, the racial and economic exploitation of other races. While confrontation was particularly acute in the United States, where there was both an increasing rejection of parental values and a lack of commitment by draftee servicemen, European students identified the war as symptomatic of the corruptions of advanced capitalism. As such, the focal activity directed against war was associated with wider social and moral issues. In particular, there was a growing recognition that a political system which perpetuated inequality and a general lack of freedom was untenable, and its institutions (parliament, national assembly, universities, business, the media and leisure itself) corrupt and therefore in need of radical change.

The second half of the 1960s, in particular, produced an escalation in student protest and rebellion in most of the industrially developed countries, including Japan. These revolutionary phenomena possessed somewhat similar features which came to a head in the years 1968–9. The wave of protest swept from the United States across the Atlantic to Germany, France, Italy and Britain. In Russia, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, students and intellectuals also demanded very precise freedoms to study and to discuss, without the formal constraints of communist doctrine. In comparison, the students of the capitalist countries, who were influenced by the ideas of Marx, Lenin, Guevara and Marcuse, aimed to bring about the destruction of capitalism to make a world free from war, poverty and exploitation. There were also local grievances such as impersonal teaching and overcrowding, pedantic academicism and bureaucratic administrations, but these were only the outward manifestations of a demand for deeper social and political changes.

The role of music in establishing a sense of ‘nationhood’² is clearly not unique to the counter culture,³ and while there was no single song which summed up its crucial values,⁴ there was a shared belief that rock (and, in particular, progressive rock) could articulate its concerns. The hippy's preference for psychedelic rock, for example, reflected the drug orientation of the movement, while the US Civil Rights Movement and the anti-Vietnam marches identified more with folk rock. ‘Give Peace a Chance’ (John Lennon), for example, assumed the role of a contemporary pacifist anthem in the US during the late 1960s. Music, then, had an evangelical purpose which tied it to the values of the group, expressing its attitudes, providing a particular location for self-identity, and establishing common cultural and political bonds.

The counter culture's marginalisation of women in rock is therefore particularly disturbing. Apart from biting social and political commentaries from such performers as Joan Baez, Buffy St Marie and Peter, Paul and Mary, and the success of such frontline performers as Mama Cass (The Mamas and the Papas), Grace Slick (Jefferson Airplane) and Janis Joplin (albeit at a cost, with Joplin dying in 1970 and Cass Elliott in 1974), both the lifestyle and the musical ethos of the period undermined the role of women, positioning them as either romanticised fantasy figures, subservient earth mothers or easy lays. It is not too surprising, then, that Elliott's size could only be accommodated by the pop world by giving her a ‘Mama Cass’ image – large and lovely. It was something she constantly fought against, not least because co-singer Michelle Gilliam was not afforded the same prefix, being described by the press as the sexy sylph-like member of the group. Similar problems emerged in the UK. For many people, Dusty Springfield's image (with her beehive hairdo and heavily mascara'd eyes) defined the face of the 1960s, yet she struggled to establish herself as a strong soulful singer. In a musical environment that preferred their women performers to subscribe to the ethos of light, romantic, dollybird pop, Springfield's championing of Motown and R&B and her dislike of the confines of mainstream initially proved frustrating. Hoping to achieve international status she refused to compromise her image by performing cover versions or inferior material, and gradually achieved useful working relationships with such prestigious songwriters as Burt Bacharach and Carole King. Her backing singers – former American gospel soul singers Madelaine Bell, Doris Troy and P.P. Arnold – were equally important in establishing her powerful soul sound and during the 1960s she produced nine top ten hits including ‘Son of a Preacher Man’, ‘I Only Want to Be with You’ (the first song ever performed on Top of the Pops), ’ You Don't Have to Say You Love Me’, ‘Twenty Four Hours from Tulsa’ and ‘Anyone Who Had a Heart’. Her identification with Motown also led to her being the first white soul singer to perform in Harlem, sharing the stage with the Supremes and the Temptations, and her classic soul album Dusty in Memphis (1968). Despite her success, however, the 1960s’ preoccupation with image and youth became increasingly oppressive and by 1968 Dusty was refusing to be photographed from the left (her bad profile) and worrying about laughter lines round her mouth. The press had also become increasingly curious about her private life, alluding to affairs with both men and women. It was a problem that was to remain throughout her life, with recent obituaries (she died on 2 March 1999, six weeks before her 60th birthday) failing to acknowledge that her escape to Los Angeles in 1972 was largely due to British attitudes towards her bisexu-ality. Thus, while she achieved an iconic status among the gay community – openly supporting gay issues and giving a lengthy interview to Gay News in the early 1980s, recording the hit song ‘What Have I Done to Deserve This’ in 1987 and ‘Nothing Has Been Proved’, the theme song to the film Scandal– her sense of alienation remained.

Dusty Springfield was not unique in her insecurity, sharing with Janis Joplin a sense of isolation that resulted in bouts of heavy drinking, narcotic use and sexual promiscuity. More specifically, both artists died without understanding how good they really were. Marianne Faithfull also suffered the problems associated with star status. Having achieved a hit in 1964 with ‘As Tears Go By’, she abandoned her career to become Mick Jagger's girl-friend and subsequently became more famous for her sexual image and non-conformist reputation – a situation that was remedied in 1979 with the release of her punk-influenced album Broken English. Her example provides a particular insight into the problems confronting women singers in the 1960s. Far from being accorded the status and freedom of their male counterparts they were castigated for being different and increasingly projected into the roles ascribed them by the more powerful male groups of the day.

As Theodore Roszak points out, the struggle for liberation was seen mainly

as the province of men who must prove themselves by ‘laying their balls on the line.’ Too often this suggests that the female of the species must content herself with keeping the home fires burning for her battle-scarred champion or joining the struggle as a camp follower. In either case, the community is saved for her, not by her as well.⁵

Musically, this is reflected by two broad divisions: the ‘love’ school being represented generally by such groups as the Beatles⁶ and Donovan, and the ‘sex’ school by, for example, the Rolling Stones, the Doors and Jimi Hendrix. In both cases, the woman is positioned as subservient to the man. While it could be argued that the love/sex division can be attributed to the different stylistic backgrounds of the groups themselves, it is arguably the case that these distinctions can be correlated to the difference in motivating philosophies within the counter culture itself. The concept of communality, the negation of bourgeois materialism (including the redefinition of marriage and bonding) may have been fundamental to all branches of the counter culture, but there was a marked difference between the transcendent spirituality promised to the followers of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and the revolutionary liberation of Jerry Rubins and his symbolic call for patricide.

These seemingly opposing philosophies are reflected also in the ethos of rock itself.⁷ If its function is to celebrate the present and provide insights into the politics of consciousness – ‘love, loneliness, depersonalisation, the search for the truth of the person, the attempt to set up an alternative life style’⁸ – then the urge to establish a community based on love, however repressive in its attitude towards women, might seem a logical development. If, however, chaos and uncertainty are recognised as legitimate and necessary to life, and if these concerns are hinged upon notions of repressed sexuality, the conjunction with sensuality and death also appears logical – as was evidenced in the cult established by satanist Charles Manson. The relationship between particular forms of music and adopted philosophies is significant, then, in establishing referential points for group identification. The Beatles could project the dilemmas of contemporary society, the paranoia, the social distress, and set up a framework of ‘Love, Love, Love’ as the way to reconstituting a sense of community. For others, the cult of the ‘beautiful’ was no less a sham than the romantic notions of love extolled in much of the pop music of the pre-rock era.

The confrontational style of such groups as the Rolling Stones, for example, equated with sexual freedom, promiscuity and hedonism, [simultaneously identifying, describing and characterising the macho style of performance which was to be coined ‘cock rock’.⁹ Adjectives such as ‘brutal’, menacing’, ‘erectile’, ‘tough’, ‘obscene’ and ‘outrageous’ can equally be pinned to the Doors, MC5 and Alice Cooper. Here, communal freedom had its darker side, and although the Stones had only a limited commitment to the counter culture, the fact that other groups and performers also communicated an aggressive sexuality is significant when analysing the relationship between performer/audience and their interpretation of the musical text. I would reference here – as an extreme example – Charles Manson's identification with the Beatles’ single, ‘Helter Skelter’.

It is therefore important to determine how music communicates meaning. As Lawrence Grossberg points out, ‘culture communicates only in particular contexts in which a range of texts, practices and languages are brought together’. This may include ‘musical texts and practices, economic and race relations, images of performers and fans, social relations (for instance, of gender, of friendship), aesthetic conventions, styles of language, movement, appearance and dance, media practices, ideological commitments’.¹⁰ My own research into the counter culture certainly suggests a relationship between hallucinogenic experience and music which made it an inspiration for group consciousness and practice.¹¹ Dick Hebdige¹² also indicates that subcultures evolve and choose cultural styles that can be made to resonate with central concerns and experiences, that there can be a certain homology between musical characteristics and lifestyle. However, a major problem emerges when critically evaluating the extent to which music may be said to have meaning.

As John Shepherd observes ‘music is not an informationally closed mode of symbolism relevant only to emotive, vital, sentient experiences’ or ‘inherent psychological laws or “rightness”’.¹³ Thus, while the lyrics and song title might suggest a preferred reading, the musical text allows for a mapping of individual experience and meaning that provides a sense of fluidity of engagement. As such, if there is any assigned significance to music, this significance is generally located within the commonly agreed meanings of the group or society from which the music originates and to which it is addressed.¹⁴ Philip Tagg's seminal analyses of the Kojak signature tune (1979) and the Abba hit ‘Fernando’ (1981) are also significant in providing a socially grounded theory of musical semiotics which stresses the way in which meanings arise in the encounter between text–listener, or artist–audience. In particular, his technique of ‘hypothetical substitution’ and ‘intersubjective comparison’ allows for a methodological approach to the interpretation of musical meaning through an analysis of musemes (a minimal unit of signification e.g. a riff) and museme compounds. Hence, for any museme, Tagg examines a range of similar usages drawn from comparable, influential, source and adjacent genres and styles.¹⁵ However, while this comparative approach provides useful insights into secondary signification, there are problems – as Richard Middleton points out – in an over-dependence on extramusical aspects of the message and, for example, the playing down of historical specificity which puts in question whether all music tends towards combinations of ‘effects’ rather than synthesised wholes.¹⁶

While it is accepted that any analysis of musical signification presents problems, there is little doubt that music communicates. What is significant here is what Middleton defines as ‘the variability of pertinence … i.e. what is pertinent (that is, in the text); and, to what, for whom and in what way is it pertinent (the contexts, needs and place of the listening subject).¹⁷ While such an analysis depends upon a sensitivity to structural inter-relationships (rather than the over-simple, internally validating systems of classical semiology), Middleton's identification of the interplay of musical and cultural characteristics provides some useful insights into the values and lifestyles of the counter culture, its subjective experience and t...