I almost fear addressing this issue, and as I examine my own reluctance, I realize that, while I consider this absolutely crucial, I retain the absolutely assinine concern of (for lack of a better term) alienating boys. As I write this, the imaginary blogger scandal dominates the discourse of the Sunday morning news shows, proving that, as Thers notes, only certain people are allowed to get angry, even in the face of complete fucking lies. (He has a more complicated point: that civility is invoked as a form of censorship, but you can toddle over to metacomments to get that.) In any case, I probably worry more than I should about offending: one of the benefits of having a pop blog with a--uh--selective readership (in the Spinal Tap sense) should be that I don't worry about such things. (I also don't get trolls, though I did have one once--followed me over from Eschaton--who wanted me to listen to Miles Davis. Heh. I guess that *is* how you'd troll a blog like this, though.)
But in truth, I do have issues with pop, mostly surrounding the issue of gender. Lyrically, much of the music I love obsesses over personal relationships, and because of the preponderance of male artists in this form, presents a certain view of them. I have no problem with that, except insofar as the bulk of the catalog turns into some rant by Saint Jerome--and that does happen sometimes. The peculiarity of pop, it seems to me, is that the melodic structure is so often fiercely at odds with the lyrical venom. Form and message functional oppositionally, like an Aryan Nations puppet show, or those old racist Bugs Bunny cartoons. It sounds great, but the pleasure conceals a damaging message: too frequently, the message is male rage at women, the rage of the powerful over the disempowered, which ought to leave a bad taste in anyone's mouth.
Of course women have rage, too. When women do music, I think, they tend toward harder genres: punk or metal, for example, which focus their anger differently. The venom--the power, maybe better--works on both levels, aurally and ideologically. There are examples of female anger in pop--Sam Phillips's "Baby, I Can't Please You" springs to mind--but generally one has to wander into the realm of the riot grrrls to get a real taste of it. (Mary Prankster's "The World Is Full of Bastards (And I've Dated Every One)" tells you all you need to know, really.)
The defense, which I've heard from some surprising quarters, is the persona. In other words, songwriting is not a wholly autobiographical process. Some percentage of what comes out is intended as a witty, ironic commentary on the state of gender relations in the world from a position not the writer's own: "Look at this outrageous position! Please join me in recognizing its fundamental absurdity." (Though, you know, not quite in those words.) Everybody wants to be Jonathan Swift.
It's not that I disbelieve the persona argument, necessarily. I do believe it some portion of the time. But I also recognize its function as an ex post facto defense. Women's anger at injustice is often declawed by this method. "Jeez! Didn't you get it? It was a joke!" (Once, and I swear I am not making this up, levelled at me by a colleague whose hand was still on my ass at the time I was supposed to be laughing at his witty deconstruction of the forms of sexual harrassment.) Some portion of my male readership, assuming they're still reading, is almost certainly rolling their eyes at this argument and muttering some long-toothed old saw about "political correctness" or how feminists have no sense humor. Perhaps I am proving their point. But it's worth noting that they are also proving mine.
I'll bet we can do better. Can't we?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
When I was a lot younger, I wrote songs of startling inventiveness and poetic beauty. Or I thought I did, until one day when I was about eighteen, and realized that I'd actually been saying exactly the same stuff AC/DC was...I'd just been using turgid, pretentious, obscurantist language instead of stating unequivocally that "she wanted it hard, she wanted it fast, she liked it done medium rare."
It bothered me a lot...so much so that I pretty much stopped being willing to write anything about "romance." And I started noticing similar stuff in friends' bands...I noticed that women fell into a few basic types, and that the more "intense" people often tried to earn aesthetic points by killing off these sock-puppet women for dramatic effect (very desperate stuff, I assure you).
So I made a conscious effort not to mythologize women in that way, not so much as an expression of post-feminist sensitivity as in hopes of avoiding cliches. Nonetheless, I did end up writing something that seemed to express violent urges towards women, in some people's eyes. That was disturbing enough in itself, since I'd intended nothing of the sort. But what made it worse is that a lot of people seemed not to care...or worst of all, praised my "honesty." Women included. Hell, women especially.
I have huge, huge problems with this response to negative imagery. I think part of it is the tendency people have to believe that a worst-case scenario, expressed artistically, is more "true" - and therefore more admirable - than a best-case scenario. You win brownie points for brutality...and if you can set it to a catchy tune, so much the better, 'cause now you're also being subversive (and subversion, as we know, is always good...you can't possibly have too much of it).
But this is how people are, no matter how much I dislike it. And I think it does mandate responsible behavior when it comes to how one portrays gender-related stuff in songs or art or what have you...which is not self-censorship, by any means. It's more along the lines of cleaning the goddamn cobwebs out of one's head and coming up with actual ideas, instead of repeating the same old garbage.
The question of female rock musicians is one I don't even want to touch...except to say that men and women who aren't trying to be stars tend to have way more in common than women who are and women who aren't. There's so much exploitation, and self-exploitation, of men and women...it's like some horrible hall of mirrors trying to figure out who's nuts, who's pretending, whose pretense is turning into the real thing, who's being exploited, who's exploiting being exploited...it's baffling.
I think the problem is "show biz" takes messed-up, not necessarily rational people, and makes them even more unstable. So pop music often boils down to social pathology with a beat, or at least it reflects certain forms of flawed thinking at their starkest. Because let's face it, truly sane and enlightened people tend not to want to prance around with guitars in front of a paying audience.
You win brownie points for brutality...and if you can set it to a catchy tune, so much the better, 'cause now you're also being subversive (and subversion, as we know, is always good...you can't possibly have too much of it). THAT's what it's about, Phila! Thank you!
The debate here at Chez Thersites has centered around rap/hip-hop, which he sees as far guiltier in this regard than pop. He may be right, but like punk and metal (I believe speed metal was among your chosen genres, no?) the form in some way courts, or at least complements, the content. That's just not true with pop, at least as I hear it. But identifying the whole process as subversive makes perfect sense to me. It also tacitly endorses the persona argument.
I have a friend, a musician, who has tried to write a feminist pop song from a male perspective. Does it work? Well, to some extent, I guess. At least he cheerfully announces that he is a feminist in it, which has to count for something. And it's a good song, though not quite your flavor, Phila. More compelling is his retake on Paradise Lost, which really trashes the Eve-as-evil-bitch assumptions upon which so much misogyny is fundmentally based, whether its practioners realize it or not (and I'll bet most don't).
In terms of pop as social pathology..... that I don't know, having never actually played any instrument with any kind of success (or, admittedly, failure). Though I did fail Music Theory. Twice. It just didn't mean that much to me. And it's not shyness on my part: I teach, which is performative, and no one with any sense of dignity would keep a blog as fundamentally shallow as this--yours is much smarter (trust me, folks, or go to www.bouphonia.blogspot.com). And I have performed onstage, on and off, just never in a band.
My concern has more to do with the reception of these structures than the production of them, though obviously there's an intimate interrelation between these forces. I'm fascinated that you were praised for your "honesty" in these nasty moments, delighted that you didn't take the approbation and run with it. But then I knew that about you anyway. What the fuck kind of system creates women who cheer for their own abuse?
My teaching persona is pretty goofy, as you can well imagine, but I frequently use those "teachable moments" to slide in things which might actually help improve my students' lives. One of these, a lesson connected to Jane Eyre, (yes, D, I remain a JE person, despite your impassioned arguments to the contrary) talks about Edward Rochester, at which point I ask the male members of the class to cover their ears. I tell my female students: "We love this guy. He's great fun. Hang out with him. But do not marry him. DO NOT MARRY HIM. Trust me." Another lesson, more free-floating, warns my female students that if they ever find themselves in a relationship where The Supremes sound good and make sense, it's time to get out.
Stupid? Yes. But serious, too. Especially at the community college, if I could get my female students to stop lapping up shit and asking for more, they'd be better, stronger human beings. Though I have also seen my best and brightest take literal beatings from men. Horrifying. I had a student attend the March for Women's Lives last year in a wheelchair into which her boyfriend put her, and utterly fail to see the irony.
Obviously, it's a much bigger issue. But every piece of the puzzle is important. This is just one.
Well, you may have noticed that I have "issues" about the world of music, and the relationship between performer and audience; they definitely affect my take on this stuff. Obviously rap and speed metal are examples of commerce where explicit misogyny pays off (I was in a speed metal band at one point, BTW, but it was a somewhat hostile parody of the genre, so the misogyny angle wasn't an issue, thank heavens). But as in my AC/DC example, it's kind of a continuum...it seems as though women have a few basic roles in popular music; the way those roles are described in songs simply gets more oblique and "polite" as you move towards the pop end of the spectrum, but the underlying attitude doesn't necessarily change.
I don't know...I played music with women for most of my adult life, and I'm just as confused now as I was when I started. I guess as far as men go, what it boils down to is that you can get laid singing sensitive post-feminist ballads, and you can also get laid by singing about tying women up and sodomizing them. I'm not convinced that honesty is a factor in art, but either way, the right to have one's intentions understood is the first thing you give up when you start playing music for people. People will simply believe anything they want about you, and about where you're coming from. If people like your music, you'll generally get a pass via the "persona" excuse no matter how big a prick you are; if they don't, they'll read the worst motives into everything you do. The end result is that it's hard even to judge where gender relations fit into the picture; everything's distorted, like in a funhouse mirror. Self-proclaimed feminists let themselves be degraded..."sensitive" men exploit women by acting sensitive...and then each writes a song about it that can be seen as honest or pandering or what have you, according to whether or not people like the musician's "brand." (Or, if you're a Kierkegaard fan, depending on whether they're in the aesthetic or the moral stage of life; the ability to appreciate brutality or misogyny as "art" belongs to the former, obviously.)
What I'm trying to say - despite being exhausted and scatterbrained - is that the relations between musicians and their audience are so completely twisted and artificial that you almost have to address that before addressing anything else. It's not real communication, IMO, and that exacerbates the problems with sorting out gender issues (as well as with everything else).
Now, about that Miles Davis...
...would you consider starting with some Keith Jarrett? Start with the Koln Concert, work your way up to the Vienna Concert?
Or may Thelonious Monk? Ornette Coleman and Pat Metheney's "Song X" album?
Or George Duke's "I love the blues, she heard my cry"?(used to play with Zappa, IIRC)
No? Not that kind of blog?
Well, I'm not that kind of troll, either.....and I'll keep my hands to myself.....
Post a Comment