Week 12 slides

1. #med332
Women and pop

7. Popular music = primarily a male experience
“The women who have been successful in rock
history … have tended to masquerade
masculinity”

8. Alabama Shakes – ‘Hold On’ (2012)

9. Histories of popular music
rendered women invisible
Role as singers but marginalized
as instrumentalists

11. Beyonce – ‘Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)’ (2008)

12. Madonna – ‘Justify My Love’ (1990)

13. ‘women in popular music have twisted the
voyeuristic masculine gaze into the pleasure
and power of being watched. Such a strategy is
often temporary, a frozen moment when an
empowered woman and popular music align’
- Brabazon, 2012: 212

14. ‘for women to be heard, they must temporarily
assume the expert position normally held by men
in the formation. That is, they must talk like a man,
or more accurately, as if they were men’
- Norma Coates in Swiss et al, 1998: 83

15. Rock and feminism: an uphill struggle
Golden age of rock (1960s) <-> Second wave feminism
Women in music playing ‘catch up’

16. Otis Redding
1965
Aretha Franklin
1967

17. ‘gender is central to the ways in which popular
music is used and tastes are organized’
- Christenson and Peterson, 1988: 282

18. ‘The pictures which adorn bedroom walls
invite […] girls to look, even stare at
length, at male images (many of which
emphasise the whole masculine physique,
especially the crotch). These pin-ups offer
one of the few opportunities to stare at
boys and to get to know what they look
like. While boys can quite legitimately
look at girls on the street and in school, it
is not acceptable for girls to do the same
back. Hence the attraction of the long
uninterrupted gaze at the life-size ‘Donny
Osmond Special’
- McRobbie, 1991 p. 23

19. 1967
#62 pop chart
1968
#12 pop chart
Masculinity rebuked

20. Salt N Pepa
‘Push It’ (1986) ‘Ain't Nuthin' But A She Thing’ (1994)

21. TLC – ‘No Scrubs’ (1999)

22. ‘there were very few “ways into” the music
scene for a woman, and being a girlfriend was
still the easiest’
- Cohen, 1991: 210

23. Music as an authentic popular voice, as a
means for argument, as a way to combine
verbal and emotional elements are discussed
... Music can function effectively as an
authentic voice for women as a marginalized
group
- Sellnow, 1999: 66

24. Girl groups
The Chantels – ‘Maybe’ (1958)
The Shirelles – ‘Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow’ (1960)
dense harmonies
expansive orchestra
pensive and evocative lead vocal
Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound
-The Ronettes
-The Crystals
Motown
-The Supremes
-Martha and the Vandellas

25. Pop/girl group:
often a derogatory term
The Andrews Sisters
The Ronettes
The Supremes
The Pointer Sisters
Destiny’s Child
The Spice Girls
Girls Aloud
The Pussycat Dolls
Little Mix

26. Girls groups = transitory
‘Girl groups bounce into popular culture, look
beautiful, sing well and dance smoothly. They
gain an audience of tween and teen young
women and often thirty-something gay men.
Then the groups break up, caused by either a
decline in sales or the individual success of
one of the performers’
- Brabazon, 2012: 214

28. Girls groups = finite
‘They rarely provide a foundation or basis for
extended fame and fortune. For every
Beyonce Knowles, there are hundreds of
wannabes who have neither the talent nor
the trajectory for a musical career. This
affirmation of girliness, rather than
womanhood, is contradictory to many
contemporary goals of feminism. Girl groups
are an attempt to stop the biological,
ideological and chronological clocks. In
affirming adolescence, without any desire for
womanhood, this is a way to keep femininity
in a subordinate role’
- Brabazon, 2012: 214

31. ‘most of us scream ourselves silly at a concert at least once,
although many refuse to admit it later, because like a lot of
female experience, our teen infatuations have been trivialized,
dismissed and so silenced’
- Garratt, 1984: 140

34. There’s a “truth” of pop music to be found in
the wet seats at Beatles or Stones concerts – as
much as in the pantheon of Lennon’s
songwriting or the vicissitudes of the counter
culture’
- Reynold, 1990: 45

35. "I find it kind of insulting that I can't have
any ideas on my own because I'm a
female, or that people from undeveloped
countries can't have ideas of their own
unless it's backed up by someone who's
blond-haired and blue-eyed.”
- M.I.A, Pitchfork, 2007

36. ‘We need to stop buying into
the myth about gender
equality … It isn’t a reality yet.
Today, women make up half of
the U.S. workforce, but the
average working woman earns
only 77 percent of what the
average working man makes’
- Beyonce, 2014

37. ‘It wasn’t just one journalist
getting it wrong, everybody was
getting it wrong. I’ve done music
for, what, 30 years? I’ve been in
the studio since I was 11; [Arca]
had never done an album when I
worked with him. He wanted to
put something on his own Twitter,
just to say it’s co-produced. I said,
“No, we’re never going to win this
battle. Let’s just leave it.” But he
insisted’
Bjork in Pitchfork, 2015