"They Don't Know About Us": Popular
Music and Feminist Criticism
Vance Briceland
1. "It's a plank in me eye"
--Kate Bush, "Suspended in Gaffa"
Because of a number of strong debut albums from female singer-songwriters as diverse as Tracy Chapman, Julia Fordham, Michelle Shocked, and Sinead O'Connor, the commercial press dubbed 1988 as "the year of the woman" in the music industry. Rolling Stone magazine, popular music's most visible mouthpiece, gushes in a typical manner about this seeming advance in its year-in-review issue: "No one could have anticipated the ensuing explosion of strong women artists--each with a distinct, tough voice" ("Leading Ladies" 60). Yet the magazine provides them no sustained coverage; their pictures and perfunctory biographies are relegated to two of 220 pages, sandwiched between advertisements for male fashions and alcohol. While attention to these musicians should be welcomed, recognition for women's continued contributions during the last three decades of pop or rock's history is long overdue. Female artists still remain stereotypically categorized and displayed as the well-groomed backup singers, the identically-matched girl groups, the brooding loners, and the token girls who wiggle and bang a tambourine on their hips for all-male bands.
Only one of over two hundred professional music reviewers complained about this state of affairs in The Village Voice's 1988 annual Pazz & Jop Critic's Poll, a survey designed to gather a broad range of responses and predict future paths the music industry may take. Marianne Meyer admits while "Yes, it was a great year for women performers," that "the fact that it still makes cover headlines when a few 'chicks' release hot records is the point, isn't it? Will next year be 'the year of the men'? . . . Most of rock's sound and style is related to appeasing the male muscle" (Christgau 25). The fact that women tend to be treated as exceptions within a male-dominated industry mirrors the message of the Rolling Stone physical layout; female artists are banished to the ghettos of popular music's glittering cities.
The study of this genre of music is itself currently in a precarious position, thus relegating women singer-songwriters further to the margins of an already marginal field of criticism. While students of popular culture have validated film studies and investigations into pulp fiction, few serious or theoretically comprehensive approaches to music exist. Prejudices against the subject have of course been rooted in conservative academic philosophy; if Allen Bloom can receive support for his assertion that rock is nothing more than "nonstop, commercially pre-packaged masturbational fantasy" (Bloom 75), then how can those who think lyrics and music a vital field of critical examination expect a serious hearing?
Those attempting to analyze popular music would appear to be working in a void. Rock is still traditionally associated with adolescence and thus retains a taint of childish frivolity, though its dominance over the airplay and sales charts over the past thirty years ensure its audience extends well past the teen years.1 Its secondary function as dance music--an accompaniment to largely unnecessary physical activity--further marginalizes its status. In this light detractors see pop as a distraction, a non-cerebral pastime that serves merely to kill those moments not spent studying more canonical texts. Equally bad, however, are the attitudes of popular music's defenders; ranging from the defiantly banal to the pedantically obtuse, they offer no model for the inquiring scholar.
Fanzines such as Rolling Stone or Spin focus primarily upon the personalities of musicians, as reflected by their choice of currently successful and recognizable artists for their covers, and thus rarely address their works with any sustained thought. Who among their readers, for example, would care to read a detailed analysis of Madonna's songs when the dark story of her travails with Sean Penn can sell more issues? Even the music reviews these and other similar magazines provide are usually unsatisfactory, as they prefer merely to outline each song's subject and offer a holistic impression of the album, rather than use any systematic approach to the works. Similarly, popular music reference books (many written by the staff of these magazines) tend to be written in a dictionary or encyclopedic style, and their assessments of artists' creations are secondary to the star's biographies and personalities.
These shortcomings may seem obvious and even expected to the thoughtful observer, given these publications' commercial orientation, yet many self styled "academic" treatises fall into the same traps of prejudice and generalization. Robert Pattison's The Triumph of Vulgarity, a recent attempt to reconcile theory with the genre, posits the idea that rock musicians have inherited the poetic mantle of British Romanticism. While it might be tempting to imagine Mick Jagger as a modern-day Byron, this conceit conceals Pattison's repressive and narrow agenda. He lauds the Rolling Stones and the Beatles as examples of pop at its finest, but rejects most music of the last two decades by implying rock's initial impulse died after the 1960s. Further, women and minority artists receive little praise in his work, as they remain outside what he considers popular music's mainstream, which is defined by its loudest and most visible male figures. Pattison summarily dismisses the widely differing efforts of Laurie Anderson, Donna Summer, and Deborah Harry as either pretentious or banal, always failing to recognize that popular music is a broad and varied a category--as critic Katrina Irving points out, "Given the variety of rock's manifestations, any attempt to apply a particular theory to the exclusion of others is fruitless" (Irving 152). Unfortunately, Pattison's star-chasing separates him from the glossy-photo adulation of the popular press only by his larger vocabulary; though a Rolling Stone writer recently dismissed the work as "insufferable academic rock think," the two are closer in spirit than would at first seem apparent (Loder 59).2
The crisis of current music criticism rests on the genre's perceived instability. Unlike the accumulative and rigidly canonized body of classical music, a rock oriented single or album's popularity is expected to be transient and thus forgettable. While dozens of musicologists might write well-received monographs on Parsifal or even The Pirates of Penzance, popular music fans would not find more than a passing reference to The Brides of Funkenstein or Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band. Nor would they expect to; those particular bands ceased recording a decade ago, and thus in the skewed logic of pop, listeners are relieved of the burden of having to remember them.
For theories of popular music to gain acceptance, both fans and the academy must reach a compromise, rejecting prejudices that only certain eras, styles, or artists are worthy of investigation. Further, they must reclaim the minorities and women that line its margins, not as stereoptypic novelties or foils to major white male-dominated groups, but as full-fledged participants of a cultural context. Within this investigation I propose to utilize feminist criticisms as tools to explore the field of popular music in the belief that the union of theory and example will serve as "rescue work" in a field endangered by the ideal of disposability; by expanding the appeal of pop music beyond immediate aural pleasure, such an approach would broaden interest in a body of works well beyond their life on the charts. While almost any comprehensive method would suffice in this effort, feminist theory--and especially the ideas of French theorists Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous- offers a rich range of choices in handling the neglected body of female-sung and written works.
One critic's investigation of a Prince song displays the brand of thoughtfulness I describe, Nancy Holland's "Purple Passion: Images of Female Desire in 'When Doves Cry.'" In her feminist analysis of both lyrics and music, Holland outlines what she considers a typical song structure based on male-dominated sexual economy, that is, a dynamic in rock
that reproduces the 'normal' male pattern of sexual arousal and release.. . . The success of such songs in arousing desire in a female audience through an appeal to the patterns of male sexual response might be explained by the fact that women in our culture are taught to respond sexually in a way that mirrors male sexuality. Indeed, rock music is arguably one way in which they are taught this. (Holland 93)
A song with a male sexual dynamic, then, has a clear and undisturbed progression to a single climax and is followed a quick conclusion. Taken further, Holland's argument can be expanded to include the instrumental arrangement and sound mix as well. Such a tune would be firmly grounded by a heavy bass line and rhythm section punctuated by electric guitar and occasionally keyboards; most easily discerned, however, is the lead voice, amplified and further distanced from the music by an echo effect. If vocal harmony is employed, one strain is clearly discernable as the primary melody. Moreover, within the lyrical structure rests a clear distinction between verse and chorus.
Holland sees "When Doves Cry" as unusual in form and content, its lyrics playing out an oedipal drama over an underlying psychosexual representation of female desire. Prince's music is remarkable here for its flat dynamics--the song has no bass line and perfunctory percussion, and a simple melody doubles as both verse and chorus. But most remarkably, "When Doves Cry" has no climax, only a "continuous ebbing and flowing of pleasure." In this song at least, Prince presents "the images and sounds of female pleasure, presented across a static beat that appears both to forestall the usual pattern of male pleasure and to magnify female pleasure precisely because it does so" (Holland 96-7).
The interplay between musical structure and lyric developed in Holland's study provides a model for further investigation, as it suggests that an examination of other songs could reveal similar unexpected effects not discernable solely by a reading of lyrics. A search for such subversion, however, requires the student of popular music carefully to examine the sources from which it can spring; while some bands or artists may appear attractive in their seemingly revolutionary stances or images, a closer examination can reveal their deep-rooted ties to phallocentric thought and language.2. "I'll be your bestest friend"
--Susan "Oo She She Wa Wa"
The recent controversy over singer George Michael's single, "I Want Your Sex," obscured from public memory the fact that only a few years previously songs infinitely more spicy than Michael's relatively staid production filled the airwaves. "I Want Your Sex," it was claimed, would encourage the youth of our culture to couple at random, and thus was banned from many radio stations and played on MTV only with a disclaimer beforehand. Yet between 1981-4 songs such as Berlin's "Sex (I'm A. . . .)," Vanity 6's "Nasty Girl," Apollonia 6's "Sex Shooter," Prince's "Darling Nikki," "Little Red Corvette,"and "Lady Cab Driver," and the B-52's "Dirty Back Roads" jostled with each other in the record stores and airwaves. All were far more salacious in their explorations of sexual game playing, prostitution, casual pickups, and anal sex, and yet aroused little or no controversy.
On the contrary, the group Vanity 6 (formed under the guidance of Prince, later reconstituted as Apollonia 6) was hailed by many feminists as a bold step in the representation of female sexuality within popular culture. Dressed in a wardrobe of lacy camisoles, fishnet stockings, and spiked shoes, Vanity/Apollonia, Brenda, and Susan, women of motley ages and racial backgrounds, preached a text of female sexual license. Yet the problem of how genuinely anti-patriarchal the band might have been remains. It would appear that rather than genuinely embodying and acting out female pleasure, the group's obsessive and recurrent themes only emphasize their entrapment in a rigidly-structured male sexual economy.
Vanity 6's most popular hit, the dance-oriented "Nasty Girl," narratively concerns a woman on the prowl for sex--she's "looking for a man who will do it anywhere/Even on a limousine floor." This is not a reprehensible goal in itself, and when tied into the narrator's repeated questioning in the lyrics' chorus, it reflects a desire to push the boundaries of normal behavior:
Tonight
Living in a fantasy
My own little nasty world;
Tonight
Don't you want to come with me?
Do you think I'm a nasty girl?
What is normally forbidden in male-dominated culture here has become the object of the quest.
But desire in this song takes no form beyond that of a solipsism, and it extends no further than the narrator's own little nasty fantasy world; even more disturbing is the song's obsessional coupling of female desire with phallocentric imagery. Vanity's command, "If you can still take it out/I'll take it like a real live nasty girl should," is shortly followed by a half-grunted paean to the phallus:
That's right--I can't control it
I need seven inches or more.
Tonight I can no longer hold it
Get it up, get it up!
I can't wait anymore.
Subtlety was never the band's strongest virtue--from this point the song climaxes with Brenda and Susan exhorting, "Dance, nasty girls, dance," as Vanity repeatedly shrieks "Are you gonna come? Are you gonna come?" in an increasing frenzy. A musical lassitude immediately follows as the heavy bass and drums drop away, and Vanity utters what must be the most restrained line of the song, noting in obvious disappointment, "Is that it? Mm! Wake me when you're done--guess you'll be the only one having fun." Defenders of the song claim that this size-baiting indicates a level of feminist play, but this point of view fails to recognize that the narrator's focus is still turgidly phallocentric; the preceding musical/sexual climax is the solipsistic product of a mind whipped into a false state of ecstasy at the thought of a phallus "seven inches or more," and when the partner's actual size proves something less than expected, the narrator's reply propagates the fallacy that female satisfaction depends on a bigger and better phallus.
Though prostitution is never directly named on the Vanity/Apollonia 6 albums, the connection seems quite obvious. As singer Brenda Bennett makes clear in Vanity 6's rap tune, "If A Girl Answers (Don't Hang Up)," a man's power to buy a woman remains a primary concern: "There's two things we can't stand/One's a jive-talk man/The other's a jive-talk man with no money. Can you dig it?" More explicitly, in the Apollonia 6 song "Happy Birthday, Mr. Christian" women are shown as mere objects of economic exchange.
Apollonia's narrator purports to have traded her body to her high school principal, whose name reeks of patriarchal connotations, for a diploma with honors. She is chosen explicitly for her feminine attributes ("Compared to the size of my chest then/All the other girls looked sick") and valued for her previous experience--she gives Mr. Christian "lessons" rather than the reverse. The narrator's situation is similar to that which Luce Irigaray, in her essay "Women on the Market," outlines: "Prostitution amounts to usage that is exchanged. . . . The woman's body is valuable because it has already been used. In the extreme case, the more it has served, the more it is worth" (186). As a medium of exchange in what Irigaray calls a male-centered or "hom(m)o-sexual" market, the female figure becomes "no more than a vehicle of relations between men." To further restrict any danger she poses to this societal structure, Apollonia's character makes a transition to motherhood, presenting Mr. Christian with a son on (ironically) her graduation day. As a mother she reproduces the very order that uses her body for exchange; she gives birth to Baby Christian and is herself taken out of circulation by virtue of her new position as mother.
If the mother and prostitute figures are two of the most valuable in the hom(m)o-sexual marketplace, the virginal woman in Irigaray's concept equals "pure exchange value" and forms the final role which women are allowed to play: "She is nothing but the possibility, the place, the sign of relations among men. In and of herself, she does not exist. . . . Once deflowered, woman is relegated to the status of use value, to her entrapment in private property; she is removed from exchange among men" (186). Within the band Vanity/Apollonia 6, the virgin is embodied in the curious figure of Susan, who though mouthing the same sexual come-ons as Brenda and Vanity/Apollonia, supposedly remains "pure." Certainly not picked to join the group for her vocal prowess--apparently tone-deaf, she chants her few songs in an adenoidal monotone--promoters instead chose to focus upon Susan's age as a point of interest. Nearly every press release surrounding the band contains the fact that she was only 16 at the height of the group's career.
Consequently, Susan's uniform of unspoiled white lingerie contrasted with Brenda and Vanity/Apollonia's "nastier" pink and black costumes, a difference accentuated by Susan's prop of a fuzzy teddy bear, perennially dragged across stage and video by one arm through all the band's performances (even receiving a special thank-you in the album credits). While Susan might wear the same peek-a-boo camisoles as her bandmates, the message clearly remains that she is not to be touched; she is a tease yet a virgin, jailbait in the making, and on the Apollonia 6 album insert she clutches the teddy bear as might a molested child, a single tear welling from one eye. The lyrics of her song "Oo She She Wa Wa" further play out the contradictory messages of her unsullied prostitute image:
I get a fever when you touch my lingerie in public
Take my temperature to your place while I'm still hot
I've gotta be home by ten
But I'll be your bestest friend
Oo She She Wa Wa
I'm the one that you--oo!
I'm the one that you want.
The sexual invitations are juxtaposed with equally unsubtle reminders of youth ("I've gotta be home by ten") and naive vocabulary ("bestest"). Susan does not exist as a singer, but only as a symbol of exchange; when she follows a cat-in-heat "Meow" with the assertion "I'll make you happy/If you give me candy," she is begging to become use value in a hom(m)o-sexual economy, instead of expressing desire in her own right.
Prostitute, virgin, mother--the three "social roles imposed on women" as defined by Irigaray (186). Whether embodying one or more of the roles, the members of Vanity/Apollonia 6 and similar bands synthesize the characteristics of women in the marketplace to such an extreme that they cannot be said to represent independent female sexuality. Passively accepting "men's 'activity'" (to the extreme in "Nasty Girl" of Vanity's slumber during sex), these women respond by honing their seductive skills to compete in a male-dominated economy, never experiencing actual pleasure of their own in the process.
Much room remains for further investigation into this particular type of sexually-oriented music. For example, Sheena Easton's "Sugar Walls," with lyrics by Prince, has been lauded as a more than generally explicit representation of female sexual desire--and immediately grabbed a top spot in the conservative Parent's Resource Music Commission's "Most Dangerous" list for the same reason. But while critics such as Nancy Holland are correct in noting that "Sugar Walls" contains startling vaginal imagery ("Blood races to private spots/That lets me know there's a fire. . . . Temperatures rise inside my sugar walls"), sexual experience is still defined in phallocentric terms. The singer addresses a male audience which is repeatedly instructed to "take advantage" so they'll find "Heaven on earth inside my sugar walls," yet little mention is made of female pleasure. In the logic of the Prince-Easton effort, a woman's sugar walls have the ability to sate male appetite, but prove to be unsatisfying to their very host.
Similar work remains to be done in this rich area of song literature--dance floor teen artists such as the Cover Girls or Tiffany, most of the disco divas of the 1970s, or almost any of the women in Prince's extensive stable carry the same banners as Apollonia/Vanity 6. Because they do not necessarily represent positive feminist values does not mean they should be summarily dismissed; a feminist critical approach to their ideas reveals the ways in which a male-defined sexual economy forces their messages to conform to the dominant cultural ideology. Still, one can find more encouraging results in the works of other female artists that incorporate and respond to the challenge of feminism by subverting in their lyrics and music the male sexual dynamic.3. "We're coming fast"
--Deborah Harry "The Hardest Part"
One of the ways women can avoid falling into the traps of a male-dominated discourse is to develop their own. Hélène Cixous, in the section "Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays" of the book The Newly Born Woman (written with Catherine Clément), offers this distinction between phallocentric writing and a style for which women might reach:
Her rising: is not erection. But diffusion. Not the shaft. The vessel. Let her write! And her text knows in seeking itself that it is more than flesh and blood, dough kneading itself, rising, uprising openly with resounding, perfumed ingredients, a turbulent compound of flying colors, leafy spaces, and rivers flowing to the sea we feed. (88)
The ideal of diffusion--the avoidance of straight-forward, goal-oriented progression--seethes through the work of several female musicians of the last decade. Rather than relying on narrative or musical structures with a clear beginning, climax, and end, these songs typically break from logical continuity in unexpected ways. As Cixous says,She, exasperating, immoderate, and contradictory, destroys laws, the "natural" order. She lifts the bar separating the present from the future, breaking the rigid law of individuation. . . . And with the same traversing, dispersing gesture with which she becomes a feminine other, a masculine other, she breaks with explanation, interpretations, and all the authorities pinpointing localization. She forgets. She proceeds by lapse and bounds. She flies/steals.
To fly/steal is woman's gesture, to steal into language to make it fly. (96)
Within the first half of the 1980s came a mini-trend of female-vocalized songs of larceny, all of them appropriating language and musical structure in a way atypical of the male sexual dynamic; it is as if Cixous' metaphor of burglary were incorporated by these artists into thematic and aural form. Songs of larceny are of course not uniquely female. Paul Hardcastle's "Just for Money," for example, utilizes the voices of actors Laurence Olivier and Bob Hoskins in a straight-forward narrative of the great English train robbery, Hoskins repeatedly egging on the protagonists with the phrase "Do it for the money." The female-sung tunes, however, refuse to emphasize the actual wealth involved in the crime, preferring to highlight the joy of criminality itself, a thrill elaborated by Cixous as an inherently feminine trait:
What woman has not stolen? Who has not dreamed, savored, or done the thing that jams sociality? Who has not dropped a few red herrings, mocked her way around the separating bar, inscribed what makes a different with her body, punched holes in the system of couples and positions, and with a transgression screwed up whatever is successive, chain-linked, the fence of circumfusion? (96-7)
Blondie's "The Hardest Part" from its 1979 album Eat to the Beat is an early example of this trend. With lyrics and vocals by Deborah Harry and music by her husband Chris Stein, "The Hardest Part" narratively focuses upon the efforts of a burglar to overtake and rob an armored car. At its most basic level, the car is obviously a phallic symbol of patriarchy--"25 tons of hardened steel" guarded by "two big armed guards" (the "hardest part" of the song's title)--a challenge to be stormed and conquered. But the exact means to victory is uncertain, as Harry elaborates more ways than are necessary to overcome the obstacles: not only will she force the armored car from the road, but she has brought nitroglycerin, acetylene, a time bomb, and a 12-gauge shotgun, and further prepares to indulge in hand-to-hand combat. This number of weapons seems overkill, and exactly which she finally employs remains uncertain.
Moreover, Harry avoids a goal-oriented narrative. Proceeding by Cixous' "lapse and bounds," the story circles around the confrontation between the thief and the guards, never allowing listeners chronological certainty or even knowledge of the crime's resolution. And indeed, the outcome is unimportant. Harry's character is not "doing it for the money" as in Hardcastle's song, but seeks to overturn the laws that constrict her, as if putting into action Cixous' assertion that "Without gold or black dollars, our naphtha will spread values over the world, un-quoted values that will change the rules of the old game" (Cixous 97). Musically and lyrically, the single begins where it ends. While "The Hardest Part" employs a hard-rock background of heavy bass, drums, and guitar (typical of many bands, but unusual for Blondie's pan-musical tastes), its structure as a whole avoids the male sexual dynamic. There is no climax to the work, only a constant circular pattern of back-and-forth flow between musical motifs, none of which can be readily identified as chorus or verse. Harry's opening words, "25 tons of hardened steel/Rolls on no ordinary wheels," also close the piece; the heroine is joyously suspended in the excitement of planning and executing the crime, taking pleasure in disrupting listener's expectations of a discernable and predictable story line or song form.
Unlike Hardcastle's song or Glenn Frey's similarly thievery-oriented "Smuggler's Blues," in which the protagonists either question their own motives or suffer guilt, Harry offers no glib rationalizations or explanations for her character's actions and never makes an apology. The same is true of the B-52s' "Legal Tender," from their 1983 Whammy! The only work on the album sung solely by the band's two women vocalists, Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson, the song elaborates the efforts of female counterfeiters. Tunes by the group are typically not so much melodies as Gregorian chants; "Legal Tender" is sung mostly on three proximal notes. Added to this flattened range is a song structure similar to that of "The Hardest Part." There is no distinction between verse or chorus within the minimalistic lyrics and correspondingly no clear climax, as Pierson and Wilson repeatedly move back and forth in time and action, avoiding chronological ordering in favor of a diffuse narrative.
The women's venture into crime is comical in its arbitrariness. Though they assert, "Livin' simple and trying to get by/But honey, prices have shot through the sky," the listener knows the excuse means nothing--the basement stockpile of "10-20-30 millions dollars" in jelly jars is at best an overreaction to inflation. As in Harry's lyrics, the women here forge money not for spending power but for the thrill of defying authority (represented in the song by "those gangster presidents" on the face of the bills shut up in air tight jars). As with Cixous' joyous feminine criminality, these women not only dream of jamming the social/economic order from which they are excluded, but they do so with glee.
When in the course of the lyrics they enter a bank to "try to pass that trash," they are spotted by a horrified teller who recognizes the bills are "fresh as grass." But rather than a resolution of punishment and repentance (as in Frey's "Smuggler's Blues"), the heroines merely beat a leisurely retreat without a second thought, leaving behind the turmoil they have caused to return to their basement quarters and try again. Theirs is a narrative of repeated and unapologetic transgression against law and order, a theme echoed in the song's circular structure. These women never become master plate engravers, since by the end of "Legal Tender" they claim to still be "learning to print"; their pleasure comes from the never-ending process of criminality itself.
Kate Bush's song of burglary, "There Goes a Tenner," shares many of the characteristics of the previous two, yet utilizes a unique interplay between lyrical structure and musical form to reflect the physical body. Though the narrative of "There Goes a Tenner" is clearer than either "Legal Tender" or "The Hardest Part," it too transcends a strictly goal-oriented telling; three burglars, led by Bush's character, arrive to rob a safe, using plastic explosives to blow it open. In the course of the crime the explosion gets out of hand and destroys the entire building. Bush's character is left sitting in the remains to watch the crowd snatch the bank notes fluttering from the sky.
Oddly, however, Bush neglects strict story-telling for a more internal rendering of the events. The climax of the story--the explosion--is never described, only elided by a hiatus of time and memory: "You blow the safe up/Then all I know is I wake up/Covered in rubble." The first half of "There Goes a Tenner" describes the joyous "sense of adventure" that preludes the crime while the second explores the aftermath, yet the song's chronology is diffused, organized by emotional memory rather than by time. Although eight lines into the lyrics she claims, "I go in/The crime begins," she abruptly yanks herself back to a period before the entrance in which she is giving instructions to her accomplices: "The look-out has parked the car,/But kept the engine running/Three beeps means trouble's coming." Bush's continual commands to herself and to her partners to "remember" indicate the importance of privileging the excitement of the crime itself over the monetary goal.
"There Goes a Tenner" begins with sixty beats a minute, one beat per second, with Bush 's character's giving instructions to her mates: "We have just allowed/Half an hour/To get in, do it, and get out." This pattern is repeated throughout the song in all those narrative parts taking place in "real time," that is, when Bush turns attention to external events. During moments of introspection, however, the metronomic pulse increases almost imperceptibly to approximately eighty per minute--the rate of the normal heartbeat. The song thus alternates between the seconds of external time and the internal clock of the body, the latter ultimately dominating the song. In the narrative the heroine has been caught, and she apparently sits in a jail cell: "I've been here all day/A star in strange ways." But as with the heroines of other burglary songs, she remains unrepentant; though captured, the interplay between body (represented by the increased tempo) and memory allow her to evade complete domination under the patriarchal system of law and to escape to a time previous, with the song ending by returning to the scene of the crime:
Apart from a photograph
They'll get nothing from me
Not until they let me see
My solicitor
Ooh I remember
That rich windy weather
When you would carry me
Pockets floating in the breeze
There goes a tenner
Hey look, there's a fiver
There's a ten shilling note
Remember them?
Watching the bank notes flutter around her, the music resounding to a heart like beat and echoing with chimes, Bush's song resembles Cixous' ideal of "flying colors" and "leafy spaces" that works against an ordered patriarchal narrative in favor of an internal, bodily-determined structuring.
"There Goes a Tenner" is from Kate Bush's 1982 The Dreaming, an album remarkable for its consistent feminist approach. Only one cut, "Suspended in Gaffa," addresses the issue directly in terms of a struggle for equality: "We're not ones for busting through walls/But they've told us unless we can prove/That we're doing it/We can't have it all," the singer mourns. The song "Get Out of My House," like "There Goes a Tenner," is another attempt to inscribe the body in lyrics and music, a seeming response to Cixous' call, "Write yourself. Your body must make itself heard" (Cixous 97).
The image of the house in Cixous corresponds to the woman's body:
She has not been able to live in her "own" house, her very body. She can be incarcerated, slowed down appallingly and tricked into apartheid for too long a time--but still only for a time. . . . We have internalized this fear of the dark. Women haven't had eyes for themselves. They haven't gone exploring in their house. (68)
"Get Out of My House" has no easily definable narrative storyline. Bush's lyrics begin at a moment of a call to arms, a defense of her house, and they continue to outline the steps she takes to prevent male intrusion. Where before she has been captured, at the expulsion of the internalized male dynamic she quickly rallies to keep her house as her own: "Won't letcha in for love nor money./My home, my joy/ I'm barred and bolted and I/Won't letcha in." The house/body is a source of "joy" previously kept in check by fear.
Bush's house clearly is an inscription of her body, as she admits that "This house is old as I am/This house knows all I have done," and she races to make it completely her own. Scarred and darkened by the previous patriarchal presence, her initial impulse is to cleanse the house and let in light:
Get out of my house
No strangers feet
Will enter me
I wash the panes
I clean the stains away.
Guarded and strengthened, the house/body becomes a vigilant fortress ready to fight off future intrusions.
Musically, "Get Out of My House" sounds more violent than the typical pop song. Bush employs a variety of vocal styles that range from the low croon that dominates the piece to a number of banshee-like screeches that punctuate the lyrics with the repeated demands "lock it up," and "get out of my house." An extreme echo effect placed on the drums and clashing, dissonant piano and-guitar chords gives the impression of empty rooms and distant hallways. But most remarkable is the song's mixing. Where in the typical pop tune vocals preside over a distinct rhythm section backed by guitar or keyboards, Bush here and throughout The Dreaming avoids this musical male dynamic. If "When Doves Cry," as Nancy Holland suggests, subverts the dynamic by having no climax, "Get Out of My House" subverts it by remaining all climax without respite. Bush mixes drums, guitars, bass, piano, and vocals at all roughly the same level to produce a battery of sound, an enraged aural attack.
Nowhere in the song is this more clear than in its concluding section, in which the voice of patriarchy (provided by Bush's brother, Paddy) attempts to wheedle itself back into the woman's house/body. First it pleads to let him "bring in the Devil Dreams," only to be met by a firm negative: "I will not let you in/Don't you bring back the reveries/I turn into a bird/Carry further than the word is heard." This triggers a fantastic series of physical mutations in which the male voice attempts to subsume the female; after the woman becomes a bird, the male turns himself into a wind strong enough to control her flight. In response, the woman transforms herself into a stubborn mammal and digs in her heels against his attempted invasion:
Woman, let me in
I turn into the wind
I blow you a cold kiss
Stronger than the song's hitI will not let you in
I face towards the wind,
I change into the Mule.
"Hee-Haw"
During this strange scene the sounds of the two battling voices can barely be distinguished above the clamoring instruments. After she becoming a mule, the song continues with Bush literally braying for close to a minute--an animal obstinacy that speaks through emotional rage and conviction not found in music following the male sexual dynamic.
Throughout The Dreaming Bush continues in her transformational role playing; there is no narrative voice on the album that can be identified as "Kate Bush." "Sat In Your Lap," a song that follows the same assault-and battery musical approach of "Get Out of My House" (an effect accented by the atypical instructions "This album was made to be played loud" in the liner notes), embodies feminine frustration in the face of male-defined mastery; "Pull Out the Pin" tells of the war in Vietnam from the point of a Vietnamese soldier; Bush approaches the Australian routing of the native Aborigines in "The Dreaming"; a smuggler's lover pleads with him not to undertake a mission, and dreams of her own escape in "Night of the Swallow"; and "Houdini" is the narrative of Harry Houdini's wife, daily tortured by watching him risk death and finding comfort only after his eventual demise through a spirit medium. Bush does not feel the need to construct what critic Teresa L. Ebert identifies as patriarchal ideology's obsession "for a coherent, unified sense of self," but rather employs usually unheard voices within the dominant culture--both male and female--to explore a realm outside patriarchy's grasp (Ebert 38). By unifying non traditional voices with lyrical and musical styles that ignore the usual male sexual dynamic, Kate Bush adopts many of the same ideals admired by Cixous to produce a uniquely feminist album. While the music's violence and frequent rage may sound like the aural equivalent of hell, on its own terms the album's title is most apt--to the Australian aborigines, "the dreaming" translates as heaven, a space in which one has freedom of expression.
While Cixous' prescriptions present fertile avenues of exploration for both artists and critics, the work of Irigaray again offers another approach to cultivating an appreciation of some of popular music's trends. Irigaray posits the idea of "mimicry," a tactical strategy left open to the feminine: "One must assume the feminine role deliberately. Which means already to convert a form of subordination into an affirmation, and thus to begin to thwart it" (Irigaray 76). By assuming this traditional role and carrying it through to its logical extreme, she claims, a woman can "uncover the mechanisms by which it exploits her" (220). Where Cixous recommends a woman breaking the boundaries typically assigned to her by male discourse, Irigaray here speaks of appropriating those same limits and through "playful repetition" (76) show she is not absorbed or defined by it. Two examples offer a promising entry into the study of the element of play that mimicry encourages, Berlin's "Sex (I'm A . . . ) and a more sustained effort, Tracey Ullman's 1983 album, You Broke My Heart in 17 Places.
Released in 1982, the same year Vanity 6 began their bump-and-grind act, Berlin's "Sex (I'm A . . . )" became a popular radio and dance-floor hit thanks to its then cutting-edge Euro-disco sound and inclusion of a climax carried to its logical extreme--the singers simulate orgasm seconds before the song fades out. These attractions are nothing, however, compared to the novelty of Terri Nunn and John Crawford's lyrics. Though throughout much of the duet Nunn and Crawford moan mutual enticements such as "Wrap your legs around me and ride me tonight," the pair split into sharply-defined sexual stereotypes during the song's choruses, in which Nunn's character offers to play whatever role necessary to satisfy male sexual desire:
(I'm a man)
I'm a goddess
(I'm a man)
Well I'm a virgin
(I'm a man)
I'm a blue movie
(I'm a man)
I'm a bitch
(I'm a man)
I'm a geisha
(I'm a man)
I'm a little girl
[Together] When we make love together.
In the succeeding choruses Nunn promises to be a boy, his mother, a one night stand, a bi, a slave, a little girl, a teaser, a drug, a dream divine, a hooker, a slut, and his babe--all in addition to repetitions of the above. With each role Nunn adopts a new vocal tone, taking on a Mae West insouciance, for example, in declaring she's a hooker, or Asian demureness when playing a geisha.
The song's irony comes from the contrast between male and female roles. As Nunn trots out nearly every female sexual stereotype and exploits them as far as possible in the short time available, Crawford's male voice can only repeat again and again in an unchanging monotone, "I'm a man." There are no options for him; male discourse allows him no other role. Unlike the women of Vanity/Apollonia 6, Berlin's Terri Nunn does not find herself up for exchange in the hom(m)o-sexual marketplace because her dazzling repertoire of fantasy woman-constructs exposes the flaws inherent in the system. Because she is such a talented mimic she reveals, as Irigaray says, "what was supposed to remain invisible"--the facts that these labels are interchangeable and thus meaningless, and that female sexuality lies outside that which the male dynamic defines.
Tracey Ullman's You Broke My Heart in 17 Places similarly exercises a sense of play as she dusts off old musical and sexual female stereotypes. Ullman, more popularly known as a talented comic though several of her songs made the top 40 in both America and Britain, records no original material for the album. Instead, she chooses to remake eleven songs from the '50s, '60s, and '70s in a manner unusually faithful to the originals. Her plan of attack is apparent from the album jacket, in which photographs of several types of women (all modelled by Ullman) are superimposed over the photo of a working-class kitchen circa 1960. We see the glamorous popster dressed in a sequined gown, the bee-hived girl group member, the Lulu-like mod bird with two-inch false eyelashes and a mohair jacket, the dumb blonde in a string bikini who squeezes her breast provocatively so her halter won't pop off, and smallest of all, the housecoat-wearing teen bride with an early Mary Tyler Moore haircut. All are distinct stereotypes that anyone can recognize instantly, as Ullman is emphasizing they were the only types available to women wanting to work in the era's music industry.
Similarly, with only one exception the songs center relentlessly on love, whether celebrating it ("They Don't Know", "Oh, What a Night", "Move Over Darling", "Long Live Love"), mourning its loss ("Shattered", "You Broke My Heart in 17 Places"), or hoping for it ("Bobby's Girl", "I Close My Eyes and Count to Ten"). This near obsession in theme reminds listeners that no woman could have written a "Get Out of My House" as recently as twenty five years ago in the male-dominated industry that rarely allowed women a voice of their own. But Ullman's song-characters reflect both the realities of that era and of ours, for the differences aren't as extreme as we may wish.3
In "Bobby's Girl," for example, Ullman adopts a perky singing voice as she sings,
When people ask of me
What would you like to be
Now that you're not a kid anymore?
I know just what to say
I answer right away
"There's just one thing I've been wishing for . . . "
I want to be--Bobby's girl!
Most of the song, in fact, is taken up by the lyrics "I want to be Bobby's girl/I want to be Bobby's girl/That's the most important thing to be"; in an age tempered somewhat by advances by the women's rights movements we tend to cringe at such single-mindedness, especially when as here it revolves around the fallacy that female happiness depends upon acceptance by male society. But the buoyant tune and the snappy tempo push the song along at so manic a pace that the repeated desire to be Bobby's girl ultimately becomes preposterous; this woman is not someone to be imitated, but derided or pitied for her proscribed and limited desires.
Ullman treats Dusty Springfield's "I Close My Eyes and Count to Ten" in a similar manner. In the song, a young woman finds it hard to accept that a particular man is interested in her, and thus she plays the game of peek-a-boo suggested in the song's title in order to discover if he might not be a dream. While we can safely classify this stock situation as somewhat trivial, Ullman approaches the drama with a seeming seriousness more appropriate to the Cuban missile crisis than a three-minute pop song. Strains of classical piano open the work, joined shortly thereafter by the chimes of church bell tower; when Ullman begins singing in breathy wonderment, she is underscored by a massive string orchestra that all but drowns out the traditional rhythm section. As if this excess weren't enough, during the chorus ("I close my eyes and count to ten/And when I open them you're still here/I close my eyes and count again/I can't believe it, but you're still here") a lone cello begins a mournful dirge only to be overtaken by the frantic arpeggios of the string section as the singer's doubt rises to new heights.
Through the contrast of the heightened drama of the music against the banality of the lyrics, Ullman manages to destroy this limited vision of a woman's place in the popular music dialogue by revealing its utter ludicrousness. The song's heroine is at the end of the tune trapped in an unending repetition of opening and closing her eyes to check her own disbelief--here, if male discourse reduces women to doubting, dependent puppets, ultimately they will do nothing else but blink vapidly.
Although entirely faithful to the original versions, in the context of today's songs, "Bobby's Girl" and "I Close My Eyes and Count to Ten" seem ridiculously out of place. Or do they? How much difference lies between adolescent Susan of Vanity/Apollonia 6, yowling for a man to take her while she's hot, and the single-minded woman yearning to be Bobby's girl? Or between Vanity, caught in her solipsistic nasty fantasy world, and the nameless woman so uncertain of the difference between the real and the imaginary that she can only open and close her eyes at the man sitting across from her? Ullman recognizes that the gulf between the two is fairly narrow. Though most of the album's remaining cuts utilize mimicry in a similar way to show the exploitative means by which these feminine postures operate, Ullman's opening and closing songs offer a more sober commentary on the lack of change in thirty years of pop.
"Breakaway," although ostensibly a can't-get-you-outta-my-life love song, can also be read as Ullman's chosen reply to rock's female roles. The reproach, "Even though you treat me bad/Many cruel words are spoken/You have got a spell on me that/Just can't be broken--no, no!" works equally well when one imagines the audience to be the female icons displayed on Ullman's album cover as with a reprobate lover, for example. Though the singer's impulse is to cut off relations with the oppressive force, it has too strong a hold:
I can't break-away
Though you make me cry
I can't break-away
No, I can't say goodbye
No I'll never ever
Break-away from you
No, no, no-no, no, no, no.
It is not from choice that the speaker decides to stay--all her impulses push her away--but from a sheer inability to find an option out. "(Life Is A Rock) But the Radio Rolled Me," a patter song in an updated tradition of the British music hall ditty, continues this grim story as the album's final cut. As the singer, without a breath on a single note, rattles off dozens of names of the bands that shaped the 1960s and early '70s, we realize that all the women among them fall into the categories Ullman has satirized on her album--the well-groomed backup singers, the identically-matched girl groups, and the token girls who wiggle and bang a tambourine on their hips for all-male bands. The song's conclusion, "At the end of my rainbow/Lies a golden oldie," sounds on the surface like a promise of hope, but in the context of what is presented before, instead clearly constitutes a threat. Behind that promised rainbow, Ullman warns, lurk the same male constructs of femininity that have always dominated popular music.
It is a fact that more promising artists (in feminist terms) such as Deborah Harry, Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson, Kate Bush, Terri Nunn, and the many others not represented in this paper, are the exceptions to the pervading male dynamic in the genre. While all still continue to produce their disruptive brand of music4, their varying voices are far outsung by continued limitations. Robert Palmer's legions of identical women gyrate behind him in videos and commercials, pretending to play the instruments they sometimes hold; heavy-metal singers litter their videos with California-tan nymphets present only for decoration; Sheena Easton's sugar walls have been erected in a new array of Prince-selected women; Susan's lingerie-clad virginity has been exchanged for the newer, fresher Debbie Gibson and Tiffany.
While critical approaches of these trends will not erase their more negative aspects, at the least it might bury the notion that the sudden emergence of four or five strong female singers with "tough" voices calls for a celebration of "the year of the woman" in the music industry. Female artists have contributed to rock's history from its conception. Further consideration of the roles they have been encouraged to play and that they make for themselves might, in the long run however, rescue the margins of pop from the used record bins and garage sales where they now languish, and strengthen the credibility of popular music as a field of study.
Notes
Works Cited
Bloom, Allen. The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987.
Bush, Kate. The Dreaming. EMI ST-17084, 1982.
Christgau, Robert. "Dancing on a Logjam." The Village Voice Pazz & Jop Music Supplement 3 (1989), 3-27.
Cixous, Hélène, and Catherine Clément. The Newly Born Woman. Trans. Betsy Wing. Theory and History of Literature 24. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.
Ebert, Teresa L. "The Romance of Patriarchy: Ideology, Subjectivity, and Postmodern Feminist Cultural Theory." Cultural Critique 10 (1988): 19-57.
Hardcastle, Paul. "Just for Money." Paul Hardcastle. Chrysalis BVT-41517, 1985.
Harry, Deborah, and Chris Stein. "The Hardest Part." Eat to the Beat. Blondie. Chrysalis CHE-1225, 1979.
Holland, Nancy J. "Purple Passion: Images of Female Desire in 'When Doves Cry.'"Cultural Critique 10 (1988): 89-98.
Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985.
Irving, Katrina. "Rock Music and the State: Dissonance or Counterpoint?" Cultural Critique 10, (1988): 151-170.
Kaplan, E. Ann. Rocking Around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism, and Consumer Culture. New York: Methuen, 1987.
Kotero, Apollonia. "Happy Birthday, Mr. Christian." Apollonia 6. Warner Bros. 25108-1, 1984.
"Leading Ladies." Rolling Stone 541/542 (1988): 60-1.
Loder, Kurt. "Face the Music." Rolling Stone 551 (1989): 57-9, 98.
Nunn, Terri, and John Crawford. "Sex (I'm A. . . .)" Best Of Berlin 1979-1988. Berlin. Geffen M2G-24187, 1988.
Pattison, Robert. The Triumph of Vulgarity: Rock Music in the Mirror of Romanticism. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.
Prince. "Sugar Walls." A Private Heaven. Sheena Easton. EMI 4XT-17132, 1984.
Susan. "Oo She She Wa Wa." Apollonia 6.
Ullman, Tracey. You Broke My Heart in 17 Places. MCA MCA-5471, 1983.
Vanity, and Terry Lewis. "If a Girl Answers, Don't Hang Up." Vanity 6. Warner Bros. 23716-1, 1982.
Vanity. "Nasty Girl." Vanity 6.
Waldrop, Robert. "Legal Tender." Whammy! The B-52's. Warner Bros. 23819-1, 1983.
1 Witness, for example, the recent inclusion of a popular music column in the pages of The New Yorker, never a magazine renowned for its substantial juvenile audience.
2 See also E. Ann Kaplan's Rocking Around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism, and Consumer Culture (New York: Methuen, 1987) for another theoretical approach to popular music. Kaplan focuses more upon the images presented by the MTV videos and welcomes female artists, yet the work is riddled with inaccuracies that sometimes damage her credibility as a re/viewer.
3 Interestingly, both Tracey Ullman and Deborah Harry of Blondie (on the 1978 Parallel Lines) chose to record the Gary Valentine composition, "(I'm Always Touched by Your) Presence Dear," a tune dealing with love between psychics.
4 Deborah Harry, for example, continues on an irregular basis to confound classification with her output; Kate Bush's 1986 Hounds of Love/The Ninth Wave provides a startling revision of male-female relationships, and Terri Nunn of Berlin, having adopting the sex kitten image for only the song "Sex (I'm A . . . )," leads the band in a more militant musical style.
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