MUSIC
An exhaustive study of nonconformist masterpieces - their content, impact and inspirations, scoping the breadth of university subjects and the occasional, curious inquiry, into the substance, or lack thereof, of their foil.
Intersectionality In the Myths, Discourses and Practices that Rationalize Rape As Considered In Bikini Kill’s “White Boy” and X-Ray Spex’s “Oh Bondage! Up Yours!”
Marianne Elliott-Said, a lower-class, mixed-race British woman wrote “Oh Bondage! Up Yours!” for her band the X-Ray Spex, and inspired by Elliott-Said’s lyrics, Kathleen Hanna, a white, working-class American woman, wrote “White Boy” for her feminist band Bikini Kill. I will argue that Hanna and Said represent rape as an act of violence to cease a survivor’s threatening white heteropatriarchal capitalism and the perpetrator’s benefitting from it – differing from Hanna’s, Said’s perpetrator tries to “destroy (Benedict 14)” not her transgression, her will. Hanna examines the discourses of behaviours which transgress ideal womanhood and the violent and non-violent practices reaffirming those discourses, but not how race affects them, while Elliot-Said examines the relationship between race and class, and systemic/structural violences and discourses/practices of the criminal justice system and hegemonic institutions to subordinate particular populations to lowest-waged labour.
“Oh Bondage!” and “White Boy” disprove the hegemonic belief that rape is sex, arguing how rape is an act of violence to “dominate, humiliate, [and] destroy” a survivor, as a form of the survivor’s subordination (Benedict 14). With respectively, “I will…scream in pain…nicer next time, (0:51-0:56)” and, “Thrash me, crash me / Beat me 'til I fall, (1:24-1:26)” Hanna and Elliott-Said articulate how rape is a causation of physical and psychological pain and trauma to punish a survivor for being of a particular marginal identity – not, an act caused by the perpetrator’s lust of the survivor.
Hanna’s lyric examines how her deviation from ideal (white) womanhood, gentleness, docility, obedience and chasteness, by speaking out against kinds of women’s subordination, is punished by individuals wanting to keep society’s structure – including structural violences and the myths, discourses and practices that rationalize the structuring. Myths are constructed models of particular bodies, discourses are hegemonic beliefs and moral judgements about societal roles, social identities and behaviours, and practices affirm the truth of myths and reinforce discourses (Kessel 138). Ideal womanhood was constructed for and taught to white girls of the ruling class to preserve the reproduction and proper rearing of members of the white ruling class to maintain the allocation of societal power to that class. This occurred in opposition to construction of discourses of enslaved black women as hypersexual, of great physical strength and inferior intelligence, to rationalize the rapes, physical violence and labour they were subjected to. Tied to biopower, ideal womanhood is only achievable for white women, and its societal benefits, including the discourses of fragility, innocence and moral purity, and practices of being believed and trusted, police protection, and greatest prosecution and sentencing of their perpetrators, are naturally given to white women that align with the ideal. Hanna writes, “I’m so sorry that I think! (1:43-1:46);” yet, while her class and the myth of the promiscuous, advantage-seeking working-class white woman hinders her believability, the white female body’s innocence and moral purity, and trust and belief in her intellect afforded by her whiteness, grants her the ability to achieve believability and articulate to police and in a legal trial, how her behaviours did not cause her rape.
Intersectionality examines how systemic/structural violences disenfranchising, subordinating and/or imperiling a marginalized social identity intersect in the lives of individuals that possess more than one such marginalized identity, to compound and create additional vulnerabilities. Practices one marginalized identity is subject to combine and react to create practices an individual possessing two or more marginalized identities is subject to, and discourses on individuals whose identities are composed of more than one marginalized identity rely on/interact with the discourses on each (Crenshaw 1266). Elliott-Said’s aforementioned lyric proposes that rape/sexual violence is one kind of physical and psychological violence that ceases lower-class, black women from acting according to their own will – causing them to do great amounts of low-waged, physically-incapacitating labour and to obey the societal expectations of lower-class black women, in the attempt to prevent an act of sexual violence from (re)occurring. This latter expectation is an obeying of ideal womanhood, without the potential to be read as an ideal (white) woman nor receive its benefits, and the unchallenging and acceptance of the injustices that one is subject. Systemic/structural violences and rape/sexual violence alike force lower-class black women to become controlled in movement, and selfhood. Like intersecting systemic and structural violences, rape and sexual assault of lower-class black individuals by white capitalist heteropatriarchy’s beneficiaries, are to deny the improvement of the former’s lives, so as to not threaten the white ruling class’s power, control and increasing resources.
In, “Chain-gang,…I don't think at all, (0:48-0:50)” Elliott-Said reflects on the adaptation of practices to create/reaffirm discourses that support the myths of black men as immoral, violent criminals and black women as animalistic “whores (Kessel 137),” that evidences the rationalization of structural, and enables the employment of physical, violences. The former include the scarcity and inadequacy of public housing and food service programs, low-wages, scarcity and racist hiring policies of achievable jobs, and lack of funding to public schools and educational barriers; cost of post-secondary education, and substandard educational material afforded by the aforementioned public schools; to middle-class jobs in lower-class black neighbourhoods. The intersection of these structural violences force a choice between several low-wage, physically-imperiling jobs or producing and selling drugs, illegal/legal sex work, or other non-violent crime which provide decent wages. A criminal code which disproportionately criminalizes lower-class issues, police’s greater (even false) charging and judges’ greater sentencing of lower-class black men, constructs discourses of them as violent, immoral, and requiring correctional punishment. Such practices, in relation to the historical discourses of enslaved black women, and of sex work as moral weakness, and certain lower-class black women’s inability to acquire increased jobs, constructs discourses of lower-class black women as hypersexual, lazy/seeking material advancement, and non-believable. The moral authority of police, government and government institution workers, and institution and charity officials; affirmed by their denial of resources to and charging of lower-class black populations; in opposition to discourses associated with lower-class black women and men gives the former freedom to sexually violate the latter. Furthermore, the latter cannot file police reports of rape, due to their non-believability, and the fear that they themselves may be investigated and charged – thus, allowing, the sexual violence. Along with the systemic violence of (sometimes false) incarceration – forcing free labour – sexual violence is a sanctioned violence enforcing lower-class black women/men to not deviate from only the successful completion of low-wage-earning jobs (including of the former, the aforementioned behavioural expectation, and the latter, such's equivalency with ideal manhood replacing womanhood).
In “White Boy” Hanna writes, “White boy /..Don’t cry / Just die, (0:58-1:04),” suggesting survivors take radical justice against their perpetrators – a suggestion which trusts and reaffirms that the police are protective; they defend and help survivors; and moral; they believe a survivor was motivated to act. Hanna takes for granted the police will not charge a survivor for their act(s); an improbability for lower-class black women. Her reaffirmation of police as moral empowers their practices of excessive force, unfounded arrests, and disbelieving/not filing particular survivors’ reports, and the truth of the myths such practices rely on that provide the rationality for the structural violences Elliott-Said names. Hanna’s suggestion of radical justice trusts/reaffirms that criminal courts are just (if a survivor is charged, they will be understood as a survivor, not a criminal). This supports the justness of a jury’s citing the discourses of lower-class black women/girls’ hypersexuality and non-believability and their myths involving such attributes, a jury’s belief a woman caused her rape, and greater sentences for black, and lesser sentences for white, defendants, and the respective discourses affirmed about black and white individuals.
Hanna and Elliot-Said argue rape/sexual violence is an act to terminate a survivor’s threatening of white heteropatriarchal capitalism with their behaviours and bodies, that is able to occur and which perpetrators are not appropriately charged/sentenced for, because of discourses of particular behaviours and bodies. Hanna does not understand how race factors into the criminal justice system’s practices, while Elliott-Said analyses how rape/sexual violence, physical violence, intersecting systemic/structural violences, and such’s reaffirmation of discourses of lower-class black women and men and perpetrators benefitting from white heteropatriarchal capitalism, operate together to subordinate the former to lowest-waged labour. Deconstruction of systemic/structural violences and racist and classist (two, of a number of discriminatory) discourses – and the discourses produced from their intersecting – that enable the operation of white heteropatriarchal capitalism, must occur to stop rape and sexual violence.
Bibliography
Benedict, Helen. “Rape Myths, Language and the Portrayal of Women in the Media.” Virgin or
Vamp: How the Press Covers Sex Crimes, edited by Helen Benedict, Oxford University
Press, 1982, pp. 13-24.
Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence
against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review, vol. 43, no. 6, 1991, pp. 1241-1299.
JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1229039.
Elliot-Said, Marianne, vocalist. “Oh Bondage Up Yours!” Oh Bondage Up Yours / I Am A Cliché,
by X-Ray Spex. Virgin Records, 1977, vinyl record.
Hanna, Kathleen, vocalist. “White Boy.” The C.D. Version of the First Two Records, by Bikini
Kill. Kill Rock Stars, 1994, compact disc.
Kessel, Alisa. “Rethinking Rape Culture: Revelations of Intersectional Analysis.” American
Political Science Review, vol. 116, no. 1, 2022, pp. 131-143. Cambridge Core,
“Betty, I won’t make assumptions about why you switched your homeroom / But I think it’s cause of me”: The Triad of Hero’s Journeys that Unfold Across the “Teenage Love Triangle” In Taylor Swift’s folklore (2020)
Singer and songwriter Taylor Swift’s folklore is an accoladed feat of musical storytelling (“Taylor Swift Wins Album Of The Year For 'Folklore' | 2021 GRAMMY Awards Show” 2021). Three of folklore’s songs tell one interconnected story from three different perspectives; those songs are “cardigan” (the album’s second track), “august” (folklore’s eight track), and “betty” (folklore’s fourteenth track). Such a trio comprise the album’s “Teenage Love Triangle Storyline” – a narrative which covers “James” and “Betty’s” high-school love-story, the affair that James has with another woman, and the fallout of James’ affair (Huff, 2020). In the chapter, “The Hero and the God,” from his The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell proposes a list of historical approaches to folkloric hero stories. The author predominantly focuses on two structures of a hero story: that exemplified by Buddhism’s myth of Siddhartha Gautama, and the Old Testament’s telling of the legend of Moses.
In this paper, I set out to plot the characters of Swift’s folklore’s “Teenage Love Triangle” according to Campbell’s structure of the hero’s journey. My subject of analysis, the “Teenage Love Triangle,” can be examined in three separate discourses: it can be studied as a piece of music, as a piece of poetry, and as a novel (or as a “story”). As the objective of this paper pertains to the story that Swift and her co-writers, two of her producers, Aaron Dessner and Jack Antonoff, and Swift’s then-boyfriend, Joe Alwyn, credited under the pseudonym of “William Bowery,” have aimed to communicate through the three songs’ lyrics, I will be conducting a literary analysis of “cardigan,” “august,” and “betty”. The arena, so to speak, that the “Teenage Love Triangle’s” characters – Betty, James, and the woman that James has cheated on Betty with – inhabit, is the arena of romance, of sex, of love, and of marital union. Therefore, Campbell’s ultimate boon (23) will be an illumination of a previously unknowable aspect of romantic and intimate relationships between men (folklore’s James) and women (folklore’s Betty, and the other woman). “cardigan” details the reasons why Betty loves James; “august” discloses the other woman’s desires for a committed relationship with James; and “betty” is James’ apologetic confession for fooling around on Betty. Joseph Campbell outlines the universal and ahistorical structure of the hero’s journey to heroism as the traversal from home, to the underworld, to back into the world of the living and to the place that the hero calls home (23-24). The hero’s hometown is Point X, where they venture to in the underworld is Point Y, and to whence they decide to plant themselves after they have returned from the underworld is Point Z (23). According to Campbell, by the time the hero has made themselves a home for themselves, they possess an ultimate boon that they are compelled to share with humanity (23-26).
At the end of his chapter, “The Hero and the God,” Campbell juxtaposes two mythical figures: the hero who sets out to gain something and who, in the process of this quest for some treasure, learns of an ultimate boon but does not share it with humanity, and the god, who begins as a hero on a quest for something but that does not know what that thing is, and who, upon gaining his ultimate boon, shares it with as many people as he can (29-31). Campbell illustrates this binarization of the two figure types by explaining how Gautama Buddha is an exemplar of the latter type, and Moses is an exemplar of the former type. While Campbell goes on to further deconstruct the hero’s journey into the identifiable stages contained within the broader stages of “separation,” (from Point X to Point Y) “initiation,” (from Point Y to Point Z) and “return” (from Point Z to Point X or to somewhere that is the hero’s new home), I will be measuring the “Teenage Love Triangle” in relation to this original outlining. Joseph Campbell first lays out the mythical structure of how Gautama Buddha came to the state of nirvana.
The prince, Siddhartha Gautama, stole away from his palace and surrendered up all of which he had had in his life as a prince. He became a beggar, and transcended the, “…eight stages of medication. (24)” Thinking his body is on the brink of death, Gautama secludes himself in a hermitage, yet his life force is regained, and he enters into a lifestyle of, “ascetic wander[ing]. (24)” While in contemplation under a tree, he consumes milk-rice given to him by the girl, “Sujata,” and upon tossing his emptied bowl into a nearby river, the utensil floats upstream: a sign that his attainment of nirvana was incoming (25). As he travels – using instinct alone – towards the “Tree of Enlightenment,” the local flora and fauna become enlivened (26). The thousand-handed god of both love and death, “Kama-Mara,” launches at Gautama with the god’s massive army upon the to-be religious figure’s submission to the “Bo Tree’s” knowledge (26). Kamara-Mara (or “the Antagonist”) threw, “Whirlwind, rocks, thunder and flame, smoking weapons with keen edges, burning coals, hot ashes, boiling mud, blistering sands and fourfold darkness, (26)” but such were turned into, “flowers and ointments (26),” by Gautama’s powerful mind (26). The Antagonist attempted to lure Gautama to the female flesh of his daughters, “Desire, Pining, and Lust,” (26) but failed. Gautama petted the earth when the Antagonist threw his divine discus at the religious figure, and this act of selflessness and trust drew out, “…the goddess Earth [who let out] hundred[s of] thousand[s of] roars, (26)” and the Antagonist was defeated (26). The man, Siddhartha Gautama, then came to three realizations: “…the first [being] his pre-vious existences,…the second [being] the divine eye of omniscient vision, and…the last [being] the understanding of the chain of causation. (26)” As spurred on by Brahma, the now-Buddha, traveled across the world and taught the realizations he had come to, to as many men as he could (26-27).
“Betty” would be Campbell’s figure of the first Buddha. “cardigan” opens up the “Teenage Love Triangle”: over its course, Betty establishes the kind of relationship that she and her seventeen-year-old boyfriend, James, share. The refrain of the song’s verses, “When you are young, they assume you know nothing, (0:14-0:17)” is dialogic with the refrain of its choruses, “And when I felt like I was an old cardigan / Under someone’s bed / You put me on and said I was your favourite (0:51-1:01). Because of James’ ability to heal Betty from past scars – whatever in her personal history had made her feel like an “old cardigan” – she feels like he is the one partner that she is meant to be with; regardless of if outside voices express that she is too young to know such a thing, Betty is confident in her and James’ perfection as a romantic pairing. Taylor Swift and Aaron Dessner (the songwriters on “cardigan”) communicate this theme of Betty feeling as though she has been healed by James with a later and more straightforward line: “You drew stars around my scars (2:10-2:13).” This last line is followed by the lyric, “But now I’m bleedin’, (2:14-2:17)” to make a couplet. This couplet from 2:10-2:17 in the song, is connected to the song’s second verse: “A friend to all is a friend to none / Chase two girls, lose the one / When you are young, they assume you know nothing (1:06-1:18).” Despite James ghosting Betty in an attempt to hide firstly, his dissatisfaction with their relationship and secondly, his affair, and despite her young-age, Betty has put together both of these pieces of information.
Where Betty is writing “cardigan” from resembles Siddhartha Gautama’s state of emptiness and absolution. Rather than speaking to James, she writes this song (according to the diegesis of the “Teenage Love Triangle” narrative) (Huff, 2020). The couplet, “You drew stars around my scars / But now I’m bleedin’, (2:10-2:17)” encapsulates this same emotional beat that is found at the top of the Buddha’s story – a saddened, despondent, and hopeless beat. Rather than consuming an outside resource for one’s health, and learning about the future vis-à-vis that resource (in the way that Gautama’s upstream-floating bowl is the aftermath of the milk-rice that he eats), Betty feeds her own hope that James will come back to her. The final verse to “cardigan” opens with the tercet, “‘Cause I knew you / Steppin’ on the last train / Marked me like a bloodstain, (2:19-2:26).” This tercet makes two linguistic turns: the first, is how “‘Cause I knew you” connects to “Steppin’ on the last train,” and the second, how the tercet’s first line connects to “Marked me like a bloodstain”. Betty knows that James is the kind of person who will come home at the end of his extra-domestic ventures (the first linguistic turn). Betty also knows that James has, “Marked [her] like a bloodstain, (2:26)” (the second linguistic turn). The version of Betty that is writing “cardigan,” hopes that James will come back from where he is currently – both physically, and emotionally –, that she is not. Betty’s doubt is her own “Kamara-Mara” figure.
Betty’s usage of the metaphor device, illustrates that she feels herself, like a bloodstain left by James. As I have already discussed, James has the ability to make Betty feel the emotions at both ends of the emotional spectrum – worthy of his love, and undeserving of love altogether. Thus, James himself can also be read as a figure of both love and death; Swift and Dessner’s usage of the “bloodstain” symbol (“cardigan” 2:26) tethers those two ideas together. The rest of “cardigan’s” chorus, its final verse, and its final refrain, resemble Gautama’s battle with “Kamara-Mara”. In the chorus’ lines, “Tried to change the ending / Peter losing Wendy, (2:29-2:33)” that same emotional beat found within the Buddha story’s concept of, “Whirlwind[s of dangerous elements of nature and]…weapons with…edges…[transforming into]…flowers and ointments (26),” is hit upon. Betty is hoping that by writing “cardigan,” and then showing it to James (whom the words are addressed to in the “Teenage Love Triangle”), she can move him to come back to her. By taking all of her pain (such that feels like, “Whirlwind, rocks, thunder and flame, smoking weapons with keen edges, burning coals, hot ashes, boiling mud, blistering sands and fourfold darkness, (Campbell, 26)”) and making a love-song from it, she hopes that James will be moved. The septet that closes the final verse of “cardigan,” resembles the Buddha’s petting of the Earth. The septet reads, “Chasin’ shadows in the grocery line / I knew you’d miss me once the thrill expired / And you’d be standin’ in my front porch light / And I knew you’d come back to me / You’d come back to me / And you’d come back to me / You’d come back to me, (3:05-3:30)”. Betty wants James back, but she will settle for chasing his shadow. Like Siddhartha Gautama trusts that the Earth will protect him against Kamara-Mara, Betty trusts that James will return home, and that the Betty-James pairing will put itself back together again, as the lines, “I knew you’d miss me once the thrill expired / And you’d be standin’ in my front porch light, (3:08-3:14)” state.
In contrast with this story of a hero’s journey, Campbell presents the following story of another hero’s journey; the latter’s structure making the man into just a “hero” according to Campbell, and the former’s structure, making him into a “universal hero,” or a god-like figure (30). In the Old Testament, God calls to Moses from Mount Sinai and the leader of the Israelites goes up to meet with God. God, “…ben[ds] the heavens, move[s] the earth, and sh[akes] the bounds of the world, so that the depths trembled, and the heavens [became] frightened (27).” Eventually Moses gains access to the heavens and Mount Sinai rises off of the ground (27). Myriads of angels bestow a “crown of fire” to each of the Israelites because like the Levites, they worshipped God and not the “Golden Calf,” but unlike the Levites, the Israelites were God’s chosen tribe (27). God appears to Moses, and the latter narrates the Ten Commandments to the Israelites. “James,” falls into Campbell’s model for Moses. James is dissatisfied with the stability of his life with Betty – a life that is constituted of both, a peaceful home-life (as is expressed in the lyrics, “I knew you / Hand under my sweater / Baby, kiss it better, (“cardigan” 0:45-0:49)” and, “You drew stars around my scars, (2:10-2:18)”), and a relationship that Betty attempts to keep sufficiently lively (“Dancin’ in your Levi’s / Drunk under a streetlight, (0:38-0:40)” and, “To kiss in cars and downtown bars / Was all we needed (2:03-2:09)”). James is called, like the biblical Moses, to cheat on Betty with the woman who narrates “august”.
Swift and her collaborator Jack Antonoff write the narrator of “august” in opposition to Betty; if the latter is defined by the refrain of the song that she narrates, “And when I felt like I was an old cardigan / Under someone’s bed / You put me on and said I was your favorite, (1:35-1:45)” the opposite is true for the “august” narrator as well, “August slipped away into a moment in time / Cause it was never mine / And I can see us twisted in bedsheets / August slipped away like a bottle of wine / Cause you were never mine (0:29-0:47).” Betty-James is characterized by its domestication, familiarity and comfort, where the James-other woman relationship is characterized by its ephemerality, intoxication and physicality. Like Moses with access to God’s word, James thinks that he has heretofore been lacking this second set of qualities. In the “Teenage Love Triangle” narrative, James has left Betty by the beginning of “cardigan” because he believes that he will be bestowed some prize (like the crown of fire, or the Ten Commandments) if he, “twist[s] in bedsheets,” with the “august” narrator. In “betty,” James apologizes for this lapse in judgment: “I was walking home… / Just thinking of you when she pulled up like / A figment of my worst intentions / She said ‘James, get in, let’s drive’ / Those days turned into nights / Slept next to her, but / I dreamt of you all summer long (2:36-2:57)”. Where Moses perceives his boon as a gift that has been gained, according to the aforementioned song-bridge, James does not regard the lesson that he has learned from spending his summer driving in the other woman’s car, and sharing the same woman’s bed, as something positive. Rather, he comes away from the events of “august,” with the realization that even when he was physically with the “august” narrator, his heart (“I dreamt of you all summer long” (“betty” 2:54-2:57) and his thoughts (“I was walking home on broken cobblestones / Just thinking of you” (2:36-241)) were with Betty. Moreover, what Moses regards in the biblical Moses story as listening to the voice of God, James regards as his, “worst intentions” (2:44-2:46).
In the “Teenage Love Triangle” narrative, listening to outside voices that tempt away from what is “home” is framed as a test, rather than as a heeding of a divine order. James’ extra-monogamous seasonal migratory activities (his and the other woman’s travelling by car) and non-monogamy (his simply, “Sle[eping] next to” the other woman, as he recounts it to the listener, and to Betty, who the song is addressed to in the diegesis of the “Teenage Love Triangle,” or alternatively, their more sexual-sounding, “twist[ing] in bedsheets,” as in the “august” narrator’s recounting), are what differentiate him, from Betty. Though “cardigan” is full of intense sadness, the listener is lead along a path of different beats of sadness over the course of the song, rather than the song itself containing lyrics that voice how sad Betty is truly feeling. In other words, the listener can feel how much Betty misses James, without her explicitly telling the listener about her unfavourable romantic-situation. Betty is being the bigger person, by refraining from ordering James around: based on the type of song that she writes (a bittersweet love-song that nonetheless expresses her acute sadness), her “universal god” status is displayed. The listener does not hear from James until the affair is over, after he has gone and cheated on Betty, and he is asking Betty for forgiveness after-the-fact. That he is unwilling to even talk to Betty about what he feels is lacking from their relationship, and that Betty has to put the pieces together herself about what is going on behind her back, is revealing of his comparative status as simply Campbell’s figure of the “hero”. James has to become a “universal god”.
Campbell reproaches the hero that, “…dart[s] to his goal (by violence, quick device, or luck) and pluck[s] the boon for the world,” that he initially desired (29). The author states that as a rule of nature, depending on the acute selfishness with which this heroic figure uses the boon he has collected through morally-imperfect strategies (or that he has been given because of chance or luck), “…the [supernatural] powers that he has unbalanced,” will react in a manner which punishes this model of a hero (29). Campbell gives the example of Prometheus, who stole the power of fire from the Olympians, and was cursed with his liver regrowing and being partly eaten by an eagle every day, for all of eternity (29). James’ selfishness is acute: in spite of how stable his relationship with Betty is, in the face of how safe and secure he has thus far made Betty feel, not just about their relationship, but about her place in the world that the characters live in, and at the risk of not just Betty-James breaking apart as a pairing, but Betty possibly falling apart from losing faith in someone that she views as a saviour-figure, he goes with the “august” narrator. If James’ boon is the lesson that Betty was the one who was his perfect match before he had cheated on her, then it would be correct to say that he did come to such a realization through chance. As the “betty” lines, “I was walking home on broken cobblestones / Just thinking of you when she pulled up like / A figment… / [and] said ‘James, get in, let’s drive, (2:36-2:47),” describe, James and the “august” narrator’s meeting was a chance encounter. While the authors of the “Teenage Love Triangle,” Taylor Swift, Jack Antonoff,, Joe Alwyn and Aaron Dessner, do not subject James to as fatal a punishment as Prometheus, in the time between the beginning of “august” and the final lines of “betty,” he has been moved to a self-reflection of his affair, and the acute selfishness that compelled him to act on the other woman’s, “‘James, get in, let’s drive,’ (2:47-2:49).”
“betty” opens with the lyrics, “Betty, I won’t make assumptions about why you switched your homeroom / But I think it’s cause of me (0:12-0:18).” In “cardigan”, which is addressed to James, Betty confesses how he had put her back together after feeling like someone else had reduced her to feeling useless (“And when I felt like I was an old cardigan / Under someone’s bed / You put me on and said I was your favourite (0:51-1:01)”); “betty’s” first two lines are dialogic with this sentiment that Betty expresses at the beginning of Swift’s “Teenage Love Triangle”. James has power over Betty – he has the power to make her feel both, shiny and beautiful, (as the chorus to “cardigan” affirms and reaffirms) and unwanted and undesirable (so significantly, that she switches homerooms to put what she believes is a sufficient distance of space between them). To make things right with Betty (Swift and Alwyn’s equivalent to Campbell’s re-balancing of the “powers that [the hero] has unbalanced” (29)), James performs – within the diegesis of the narrative – “betty” to his former-girlfriend. Rather than an external punishment like that which Prometheus is condemned to, James undergoes an internal conflict. The first quatrain of “betty’s” choruses is: “But if I just showed up at your party / Would you have me? Would you want me? / Would you tell me to go fuck myself / Or lead me to the garden? (0:52-1:02).” Up until the final verse, this quatrain is preceded by the lyrics, “The worst thing that I ever did / Was what I did to you, (0:41-0:50).” This second couplet is dialogic with a line from “cardigan” that I have already briefly discussed – “Chase two girls, lose the one, (1:09-1:13).” James is besought by internal conflictions regarding whether he can have back the life that he stepped out on as the lines, “Would you have me? / Would you want me? (0:55-1:00),” in particular express.
(Most of) the final verse of “betty” reads as follows, “Yeah, I showed up at your party / Will you have me? Will you love me? / Will you kiss me on the porch / In front of all your stupid friends / If you kiss me,… / Will it patch your broken wings? (4:05-4:21).” Where James is a saviour-figure to Betty, James has come to see Betty – at the end of the “Teenage Love Triangle” – as an angel-figure: “Will [this apology] patch your broken wings? (4:19-4:21).” The name of Swift, Dessner, Antonoff, and Alywn’s narrative is the final puzzle piece to its story: because the narrative is a triangle, Betty will forgive James. Three of the final lines in the “Teenage Love Triangle,” “But I know I miss you / Standing in your cardigan / Kissin’ in my car again, (“betty” 4:25-4:37)” provide the summation of James’ feelings regarding the situation that has taken place over Swift, Dessner, Antonoff, and Alwyn’s folklore narrative. If the “Teenage Love Triangle” was mapped, “cardigan” would be its apex, “august,” its first acute angle, and “betty,” its second acute angle. In the topos of folklore, the album, “cardigan” is at the top of the album (its second song), “august” falls in its middle (as its eighth song), and “betty” is in its third act (as its fourteenth song). As a triadic narrative, the end of “betty,” is the beginning of “cardigan.”
Campbell presents the Old Testament’s story of the “Deluge” as an alternative model for thinking about the mythical structure of a hero story (29). In Campbell’s words, flood stories are found in a variety of ancient civilizations and global cultures (27-28). According to the Deluge structure, “…the hero [does] not go…to[wards] power, but [it is] the power that rises against the hero, and again subsides (29).” The triangularity of folklore’s “Teenage Love Triangle” ultimately follows the Deluge’s model of a “hero story”. James’ desire is tempted (he leaves “home,” or Campbell’s “Point X”), he cheats on Betty (Point Y), and he returns to Betty with the boon that he has learned (Point Z) (Campbell, 23). Throughout the “Teenage Love Triangle” Betty has satisfied Campbell’s “universal hero”: all she desires is the life that she had with James before his affair, and that the title of the narrative suggests that they will have again. Betty resembles Campbell’s universal hero before the “Teenage Love Triangle” has even begun: as can be extrapolated from the chorus of “cardigan,” Betty is on a quest to be healed from what in her past had made her feel unloved and undeserving of being the love of someone’s life. Her boon that she has found, that enables her to feel good about herself again, is James (someone that is able to heal her scars). Furthermore, her patience to let James have an affair with the “august” narrator, and her faith in the hope that he would find his way back to her, is additional evidence that she is the Triangle’s first universal hero: she is willing to share her boon, with whomever (the “august” narrator) that requires him. folklore’s James is on a similar quest to his on-and-off-again girlfriend Betty – he is likewise searching to find his one true match. Unlike Betty, however, James sees love as one prize, in the game that is life.
Where Betty is looking for salvation from somewhere and happens to be healed by James, James has set out to find the ultimate romantic partner that will enhance his life. When he is tempted by the “august” narrator, he jumps ship because he is a selfish character: even though he has a beautiful life with Betty, he would rather find what Betty has been unable to thusly give to him, with the first woman he sees that he thinks could fulfill that lack. While lyrics in “cardigan” point to Betty trying to provide James with the excitement and sensuality that he desires (and that which is not in her nature to desire herself) – such as, “Drunk under a streetlight, (0:39-0:40)” and, “To kiss in cars and downtown bars, (2:03-2:06)” – James chooses to spend his summer in the car, and in bed, with another woman. As “betty” reveals, however, James has learnt that there is no replacing Betty. His boon, is therefore: infidelity is one method of determining how wholly perfect a relationship is, or can be, but that infidelity greatly hurts the person that is being cheated on (as “cardigan” vocalizes), and can threaten to destroy a relationship (as James expresses worry about on “betty”). “august” is the outcome of James teaching this boon to the woman that he has fooled around on Betty with. While James passes on his boon to “Betty” through the words of “betty,” the seventeen-year-old teaches this lesson to the “august” narrator either off-the-page (in the time between “august” and “betty”), or sometime during the affair.
“august’s” first verse, “Salt air, and the rust on your door / I never needed anything more / Whispers of ‘Are you sure?’ / ‘Never have I ever before’, (0:07-0:26)” suggests that Betty and the song’s narrator are in comparable situations, when it comes to their romantic-lives. The verse’s second couplet lends itself to the interpretation that the other woman, like James, is betraying her own romantic partner. James and the narrator are hesitant to fool around on their partners as the dialectic lines, “‘Are you sure?’” and “‘Never have I ever before’,” point to. However, as the song’s choruses reaffirm, “August slipped away like a bottle of wine / ‘Cause you were never mine, (0:40-0:47)” the “august” narrator learns that she is not meant for James. It is possible to conjecture that her partner is the one that is a better fit for her than James is, in a comparable way to the boon that Betty is more suitable for James than she is. The other woman therefore, could be said to have collected her own boon: that splitting up couples is an action that will disturb the supernatural balance that Campbell speaks of (26). While she did not necessarily ask, “James, get in, let’s drive, (“betty” 2:45-2:48)” while knowing that he was in a committed relationship with Betty, who is to say that she has the same chances of mending her and her partner’s relationship, as the chances that James has with Betty?
Bibliography:
Alwyn, Joe, and Taylor Swift. “Taylor Swift – betty (Official Lyric Video).” YouTube, 24 Jul. 2020, www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TAPqXkZW_I&list=PLmU8B4gZ41icKdheg4d2KZBgDR1wSWfbH&index=14.
Antonoff, Jack, and Taylor Swift. “Taylor Swift – august (Official Lyric Video).” YouTube, 24 Jul. 2020, www.youtube.com/watch?v=nn_0zPAfyo8&list=PLmU8B4gZ41icKdheg4d2KZBgDR1wSWfbH&index=8.
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero With A Thousand Faces. Pantheon Books, 1949.
Dessner, Aaron, and Taylor Swift. “Taylor Swift - cardigan (Official Lyric Video).” YouTube, 24 Jul. 2020, www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLSUp53y-HQ.
Huff, Lauren. “Taylor Swift's teenage love triangle songs on Folklore explained.” Entertainment Weekly, 29 July 2020, ew.com/music/taylor-swifts-teenage-love-triangle-songs-folklore-explained/. Accessed 23 Mar. 2023.
Yglesias, Ana Monroy. “Taylor Swift Wins Album Of The Year For 'Folklore' | 2021 GRAMMY Awards Show.” Recording Academy Grammy Awards, 15 Mar. 2021, www.grammy.com/news/taylor-swift-wins-album-year-folklore-2021-grammys. Accessed 14 Mar. 2023.
“Did you ever stop to think that the slobs who fuck you guys, probably fuck every other band who comes through town?...Yeah!...we’re like pussy brothers with the whole scene.”: How Netflix’s The Dirt Pornotropes “Groupies”
At the turn of the 21st century, Nikki Sixx, the bassist of the Los-Angeles-based, heavy metal band, Motley Crue (stylized as, Mötley Crüe), released his autobiography, The Dirt: Confessions of the World's Most Notorious Rock Band. At the turn of the 2020s, the digital streaming platform, Netflix, adapted Sixx’s autobiographical novel into a film, starring Douglas Booth as Sixx, Colson Baker (as the band’s drummer, Tommy Lee), Daniel Webber (as the band’s lead singer, Vince Neil), and Iwan Rheon (as the band’s guitarist, Mick Mars). Alexander Weheliye’s filmic model of the pornotrope, (90) provides a valuable model for conducting a sex-positive, feminist reading of Netflix’s The Dirt’s portrayal of “groupies” – teenage girls and young women, that offer their provision of famous men’s sexual gratification, in exchange for the relationality that is formed between the “groupie,” and the male celebrity, on the basis of that sexual interaction. Hortense Spillers’ concepts of the, “hieroglyphics of the flesh,” (67) and her deconstruction of the language of relationality between a female (black) slave, and a white master, (74-77) provide a vocabulary for understanding how the gender-ideology of The Dirt rationalizes how Sixx, Neil, and Lee, play their role in the transaction between “groupie” and band member.
Spillers states that through the colonial processes which transformed Africans enslaved in West Africa and for-sale in regional slave markets, into black slaves “planted” on plantations in the Americas, (68) un-gendered, and then re-gendered, the social gender of the biologically female slave (73-80). The author writes that because all slaves were perceived as property, not unlike a domestic object that a white family stores and uses in their homestead, there is no reference to female slaves’ gender in the historical accounts which record African slave markets, the Middle Passage, and/or the deliverance of slaves to their American owners (72-73). Spillers then examines Frederick Douglass’ recorded account of his time as a slave to the Covey family, (74-76) and also Linda Brent’s transcribed account of her time as a slave to the Flint family (75-78). Spillers’ writes on the gendering of biologically female flesh in Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave: because female slaves were subjected to both internal (ex. penile-vaginal rape) (73-75) and external forms of punishment (ex. knife-slashing, and skin-whipping and -burning) (67-68), when the former was associated by masters with feminizing, and the latter, with masculinizing, their bodies were gendered to be both female and male (77-80). Using Lydia Maria Child’s written account of Linda Brent’s experience as a slave, Spillers’ argues that the ability for a slave’s rights-less body to be vulnerable to masculinizing and feminizing modes of violent operant-conditioning, also left the slave’s female body vulnerable to sexual predation from both male and female masters (75-77).
One of Spillers’ key points, is that a female slave’s body could be, and was, raped without impunity by her white master, and that any child that she birthed, would one, not be allowed to form a familial relationship with her, (73-75) and two, that any of the master’s children that she did birth, would not be entitled to any of the same rights, that a female master’s child would inherit upon their birth (75-77). Weheliye’s pornotrope is a cinematic style, (Weheliye, 89) that is built on top of Hortense Spillers’ “grammar” (65) of how race is spoken about in the United States. Spillers writes that the dominant American approach to discussing the subject of race, is to re-traumatize black bodies (Weheliye, 90-93). Viscerally violent language is employed to re-humiliate the fictional slave’s body, before the reader’s gaze (93-95). Weheliye examines the prose used to illustrate two different scenes in Frederick Douglass,’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: a scene of Aunt Hester being punished for one of her masters’ perception that she was autonomously engaging in a flirtation, and the iconic scene after which Douglass feels he has been made into a, “man (Weheliye, 95).”
According to Weheliye, pornotropic language in the discursive field of linguistics (in Hortense Spillers “grammar”), renders the black body as an object defined by its fleshiness (106-112); Douglass,’ “…after rolling up his sleeves, he commenced to lay on the heavy cowskin, and soon the warm, red blood (amid heart-rending shrieks from her, and horrid oaths from him) came dripping to the floor, (93)” and, “…I seized Covey hard by the throat;…He held on to me, and I to him, (95)” demonstrate this linguistic phenomenon. The interlocking of slave body, and the idea of fleshiness, functions to bind the mind-body of the black slave, to the physical form in which that mind-body system has been placed into – this grammatical rule, reinforces the notion that the slave is separate from a political selfhood (a habeus corpus), and is only entitled to possessing its own flesh (a habeus viscus) (109-112). Pornotropic grammar also interlaces the description of violent acts, and the literary style of the literary genre, erotica (91-95). Sentences like, “Before he commenced whipping Aunt Hester, he took her into the kitchen, and stripped her from neck to waist, leaving her neck, shoulders, and back entirely naked, (92)” and, “Mr. Covey entered the stable with a long rope;…he caught hold of my legs, and was about tying me…I gave a sudden spring, and as I did so, he holding to my legs, I was brought sprawling on the stable floor, (94)” illustrate such a libidinal-violent entanglement.
The pornotrope (in film) is constituent of four concatenated aspects: the (slave’s) body is presented as a place of irresistible yet destructive – for both the master’s status, and the slave’s physical condition – libidinousness; (90) it presents the body as a, “thing…for [its] captor, (90)”; the body, as a thing marked by both its own desires and the master’s desires, becomes a physical embodiment of “Otherness”; (90) the body’s “Otherness” communicates physical powerlessness, that points to the body’s status as zóé, and also its absolute dependence on the master (90). Two of The Dirt’s scenes embody Weheliye’s pornotrope: the first, (45:10-45:37) involving Nikki Sixx and Tommy Lee’s fiancée, Roxie (whose engagement to Lee, is a product of her being a “groupie,” (45:32-47:02) and participating in sex acts with Lee), and the second, involving possibly, Vince Neil, Tommy Lee, and Sixx, and an unnamed “groupie” (30:48-32:41). In a majority of the first scene, Roxie is positioned on her elbows and knees, in the prostrate positioning of the body, (45:20-45:36) and in all but three shots (31:15, 31:17, and 31:25-31:43) of the second scene, the “groupie” is underneath the table that Motley Crue are sitting at – out of sight of the spectator’s gaze (30:48-31:15, 31:44-32:41). Roxie has bypassed the fact that she is engaged to Lee, (45:50-47:00) in order to have sexual intercourse with Sixx, (45:10-45:37) and the second “groupie,” credited in the film as, “Excited Partygoer,” is offering her capabilities of satisfying the three different members of the band, with her ability to perform oral sex (30:48-32:41). As in Hegel’s abstract concept of the slave and the master, the dynamics of power at play, in the women’s willingness to give consent, are skewed; (Lacan, 79-80) while a Marxist would regard the “groupie’s” bodies as an object invested with acute commercial value, an anti-sex work feminist (an in particular, one that champions the Nordic Model) would place the onus on the members of Motley Crue not to take advantage of that unequal balance of power.
Weheliye states that the master’s desire to participate in a pornotropic sex act, is his desire to take the place of the slave in society (109-112). The author writes that, because (black) slaves had no access to self-chosen sex acts, being the master’s sex object offered their psyches a sense of satisfaction, which in turn, gave the slave a sense of gratitude for the master having selected them for the act of sex (108-112). As the master desires the slave’s freedom from society (or rather, the slave’s not being a governable subject), Weheliye writes that the slave desires to take the master’s place in society (109-112). Michael Weheliye follows that last point with the concept that, in being the bringer of the master’s sexual gratification – the very essence of his capacity to create life – the slave understands the pornotropic sex act to be, in one sense, the attribution of what makes their male master, a Man (109-110). Roxie and the Excited Partygoer feel, for whatever reason, that if they are to participate in sex acts, than they have the greatest desire to engage in whatever sex acts, with famous men, and in particular, popular rock musicians. The pornotrope’s conflation of the master’s and the slave’s libidinous desires are apparent in both of the scenes I am focusing on as key representations of The Dirt’s portrayal of “groupies”.
In terms of the desires of Nikki Sixx’s and Roxie’s flesh, the former snorts and licks cocaine off of the latter’s arched buttocks, (45:17-45:30) and the former tears into the skin of the latter’s neck (45:09-45:14). Roxie consents to being ravished by Sixx, (45:14- 45:32) in exchange for the clout of not just bedding the Motley Crue bassist, but accomplishing such, after having done the same with the band’s drummer, and receiving an engagement ring in the aftermath of her and Lee’s intercourse. The Excited Partygoer is eager to perform fellatio on any member of Motley Crue; on any man who sits down at the table beneath which she is concealed, she confesses to the spectator (31:15-32:41); and appreciates the opportunity to be the woman who performs such a task on them without asking them for anything more than their phalluses. The Dirt uses the pornotrope to communicate an ideological point that the band members, (ex. 38:01-38:51, and 1:30-1:52) and that some of their eventual wives, and baby mamas, (ex. 27:54-29:54) express regarding “groupies”: the former does not respect, but appreciates the latter, and also view the latter, as an essential aspect of the successful production of the rock music cultural industry.
“How many chicks have you fucked so far?...Three…No, not today, on the tour…I lost count after that gang bang in Salt Lake City…Did you ever stop to think that the slobs who fuck you guys, probably fuck every other band who comes through town? (38:10-39:42)” is a conversation that takes place amongst Motley Crue’s members. In his conclusion to his chapter, “Depravation: Pornotropes,” Weheliye writes that as a form of bare life, the only access a slave had to sex acts, the cultivation of their desires (on American soil, and in the ecosystem of the plantation), and their gendering as female vis-à-vis being the sex object of a male master, was sexual violation (108-112). The Dirt’s Roxie and the Excited Partygoer, derive psychological as well as libidinal gratification, by performing sex acts with the men that hold power in the society that they have chosen to – or, rather, that they feel that they have been taken to, to borrow Spillers’ and Weheliye’s concept of the slave – inhabit. This idea is communicated through pornotropic filmic language. Hortense Spillers writes, that while there is no empirical difference between light skin and dark skin outside of a gradation in pigment, blackness in the ideological-language of dominant America, contemporarily is marked with the scars of physical violence that has been wrought upon African slaves, and African-American slaves’, bodies, from one generation of American history to the next (65-68). Spillers queries whether there has been, by now, a rupture in the chain of black skin’s national-grammatical, negative meaning; (68-69) in a post #MeToo Western world, perhaps a seismic disturbance in the normality of deeming “groupies” to be an inferior classification of female, is on the horizon.
Bibliography:
Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits: The First Complete Edition In English. Translated by Bruce Fink, Heloise Fink and Russell Grigg, W. W. Norton & Company, 2006.
Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics, vol. 17, no. 2, 1987, pp. 64-81.
The Dirt. Directed by Jeff Tremaine, performances by Jordan Lane Price, Erin Ownbey, Douglas Booth, Daniel Webber and Colson Baker, 10th Street Entertainment and LBI Entertainment, 2019.
Weheliye, Alexander G. “Depravation: Pornotropes.” Habeus Viscus, edited by Alexander G. Weheliye, Duke University Press, 2014, pp. 89-173.
Groupie Theory.
In her 1999 book When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost Joan Morgan outlines her theory of a “hip hop feminism”. Morgan opens the book by narrating her experiences of wanting to be desired by heterosexual men she finds sexually attractive and enjoying beautifying rituals like putting on revealing clothing and make-up. The pleasure she derives from male attention and from dressing up for a heterosexual male gaze is disturbed every time by the thought that these desires and behaviours are irreconcilable with feminism.
When she is writing, the contemporary feminist movement is concerned with coalition building across marginalized groups and deconstructing gender as a social construct rather than a biological imperative; in relation to these collectivist and relativist goals, Morgan feels like there would be no space for her in contemporary feminism. But Morgan argues that her sexual wants and her political ideology are two separate discourses: what she likes in the consensual and fantasy space of the bedroom is not necessarily identical to how she would like to be treated as a political or social subject in public.
Carrying on my analysis of “Brown Sugar” by the Rolling Stones, might an African American woman find Jagger and Richards’ fetishizing and sexualizing her sexy? Morgans might suggest that that could be true, and that would not make her a traitor to her race nor a bad feminist (Morgan, 1999: 22-24). In no way I am comparing a cultural, multiracial group to a racial group. The historical and racial specificities which shape Morgan as well as, Alexander Weheliye’s “pornotrope’s” theories are an essential part of their concepts. However, I think that the lenses of a culturally specific feminism and the pornotroping media practice (Weheliye, Habeus Viscus, 2014: 89-173) are applicable to the treatment of females, queer males and other queer identities in rock music.
Suggested Reading
Morgan, Joan. When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost. Simon & Schuster, 1999.
Weheliye, Alexander G. “Depravation: Pornotropes.” Habeus Viscus, edited by Alexander G. Weheliye, Duke University Press, 2014, pp. 89-173.
re: "Brown Sugar" by the Rolling Stones
The third line of Hortense J. Spillers’ “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book” sticks out to me. ““Peaches” and “Brown Sugar,” “Sapphire” and “Earth Mother,” “Aunty,” “Granny,” God’s “Holy Fool,” a “Miss Ebony First,” or “Black Woman at the Podium”: I describe a locus of confounded identities, a meeting ground of investments and privations in the national treasury of rhetorical wealth,” it reads. The second identity label Hortense lists is in part dialectic with the Rolling Stones song “Brown Sugar” off of 1971’s Sticky Fingers. Two of intersectional feminism’s issues that are present across the Rolling Stones’ discography from 1969’s Let It Bleed to at least 1981’s Tattoo You interlock in “Brown Sugar”: the performance of black culture and the representation of women as sex objects.
The British Invasion of the 1960s is regarded by most pop culture historians as the moment rock and roll music became raced white. The Rolling Stones were able to play the music that they played on their early records because they listened to the records of black artists from the southern states of the U.S. In early British Invasion music, namely the Beatles’ and the Rolling Stones’, women and teenage girls are spoken about as if the writers’ occupy a higher social position than their subjects (which they did). In early British Invasion records the relationships depicted in the groups’ music are, at least as they are lyrically depicted, sexless. If the subject of sex is considered, it is translated into metaphor. As sex became less of a taboo subject in the Western world, the Rolling Stones’ lyrics became gradually more explicit.
The chorus of “Brown Sugar” is, “Brown sugar, how come you taste so good?/ Brown sugar, just like a young girl should, uh huh”. Marsha Hunt, the woman who inspired Rolling Stones’ songwriters Mick Jagger and Keith Richards to write “Brown Sugar”, is infantilized and reduced to her genitalia. “Brown Sugar’s” first verse offers a romantic, (implicitly) pro-slavery and “pornotropi[c]” (Weheliye, 2014: 2) account of an African woman’s Atlantic passage and “seasoning” on a Louisiana plantation. Jagger and Richards contrast this imagined biography of Hunt’s ancestor with an autobiographical characterization of themselves as innocent and unknowing British boys – creating a comparison that fetishizes historical violence against black women.
Works Cited
Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics, vol. 17, no. 2, 1987, pp. 64-81.
Weheliye, Alexander G. “Depravation: Pornotropes.” Habeus Viscus, edited by Alexander G. Weheliye, Duke University Press, 2014, pp. 89-173.
“Brown Sugar (2009 Remaster).” YouTube, uploaded by Rolling Stones, 24 July 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9hcAA93N8c.
“inside the heart, mind & bedroom of a teen dream” / “i’m not that innocent”: the “pornographic” manipulation, “erotic” liberation, and threat to the u.s.’ exploitation of the “little girl”, of britney spears
In 2017’s Girlhood on Disney Channel Blue examines one, how the entertainment idustry heavyweight demands of its teen girl celebrities the maintained performance in both their public and private lives, an asexual yet sexually attractive sexual subjectivity (Blue, 2017: 2-5). Two, how the American popular press and its informed hegemonic national spectators react(ed) to Disney girl celebrities autonomously breaking from their Disney-girl personas (6-12). Three, the popularized course(s) such celebrities take to accomplish such breaking (12).
Almost six months after the release of Britney Spears’ debut single “...Baby One More Time” (1998), in the wake of her meteoric rise in the pop celebrity field as a result of the song and its accompanying MTV music video’s eruptions of national discourses, the newly eighteen-year-old girl celebrity was photographed for the April 1999 edition of Rolling Stone. Spears’ introduction as a pop star commanding recognition – vis-à-vis a foregrounding by the contemporary dominant music journalistic voice – attributed the latter to the (heterosexual male) erotic fantasy of the teen, formerly Disney, performer. Contrary to the controversial yet conclusively positive popular reception of her innocently erotic teen girl pop star subjectivity, the agentically liberated young female “adult” (Berlant, 1995: 381) subjectivity the trailblazing performer then articulated across her second and third albums, Oops!... I Did It Again (2000) and Britney (2001), endured popular pathologizing, implication and punishment.
Lorde’s theorization of the “erotic” (Uses of the Erotic, 4) versus the “pornographic” (4) provides a valuable methodology for mapping firstly, the violence done to the popstar, to girl celebrities and to the teenage girl demographic by her visual representation in Rolling Stone. Secondly, Britney Spears’ carving out a public sexual subjectivity for herself, and then defense of such subjectivity (a heated object of discourse threatened by industry and public scrutiny) across the Oops!... I Did It Again and Britney album cycles, as liberatory.
Lorde’s conception of the “erotic” (3) exists on top of a horizontal and vertical axis. A horizontal range of different dimensions of pleasure, increasing in physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual proximity of the one-feeling-pleasure to the one-responsible-for the-pleasure, (4-9) and a vertical increase of the intensity of the pleasure “release[ed]” (8). How the pop star grasped and embodied this source of power (2) will be examined in relation to two specific concepts the scholar ascribes as faces of the “erotic” (10). First, “the fullness of…depth of feeling and (the) recogni(tion of) its power, in honor and self-respect” (4) and second, “the life-force of women…creative energy empowered, (its) knowledge and use…reclaimed in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives,” (6). Contrasting the complicated (7-10) resource of the “erotic”, (3) the “pornographic” (4) can be captured in two definitions – “the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation” (4) and “using another’s feelings as (one) would use a Kleenex… And use without consent of the used is abuse” (9).
Fig. 1. Britney Spears holding a Teletubby and a pink telephone. [Online image of Britney Spears holding a Teletubby and a pink telephone on the April 1999 Rolling Stone cover]. (2008). Rolling Stone. www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/britney-spears-the-rolling-stone-covers-207308/
In Figures 1, 2 and 3 Spears’ body is organized in front of the camera to connote the naturalness, approachability and harmlessness of ideal girl-next-door-hood. Yet, the stillness and tenseness of these poses, paired with the absence of facial affect beyond coquettish docility/sensuality and the heavy application of cosmetics for her to appear naturally flawless, belie the objective of that ideal’s artifice. Thus, rendering the teenage girl before the eye, a mannequin, a “plasticized” (Lorde, 2021: 4) object.
Fig. 2. Britney Spears in her bedroom surrounded by dolls and stuffed animals. [Online image of Britney Spears in her bedroom surrounded by dolls and stuffed animals in her April 1999 Rolling Stone feature]. (2013). ONE WEEK // ONE BAND. oneweekoneband.tumblr.com/post/70792509009/spears-and-lachapelle-both-say-they-knew-the-photo
The displays of naked skin and the spaces in which the eighteen-year-old’s body is identified with empathically expand the taboo dimensionalities of the “pornographic” (4) politics of the photographs. Clothing pieces typical for young females to wear; significantly, most comfortably in the private places of the home and/or bedroom; are styled to objectify Spears’ sexualized body parts. Locations and objects (stuffed toys, dolls, a little girl’s bicycle, etc.) signifying a child’s bedroom and a childhood home too contribute to the illusion of the girl-next-door heterosexual male fantasy and in the process, introduce or reaffirm the sexualization of (hegemonic national) girlhood culture to the publication’s readership. Therefore, reproducing the endangerment of girls participant in such practices of girlhood culture.
In “Live Sex Acts (Parental Advisory: Explicit Material)” Berlant situates the imagined – or mythologized (382-389) – figure of the “little girl” (381); a figure symbolic of both the female body’s and the state’s futurity; as the primary and most consequential site of exerted control over sexuality, sexual subjectivity, sexual practices and the potentiality of the future of sex in the United States (382-390). “Little girl” (381) ideology is a dominant subject of discourse in the national political, social, moral as well as legal fields that states, reasons and reaffirms through multiple discursive fields, that “minor” (390) girls and the “adult” (388) terrain of sex acts and sexual subjectivity, must on the grounds of girls’ safety (/protection of innocence, purity, or lack of sexual knowledge or consciousness) be separated (381-390). Berlant’s polemic raises a violent, patriarchal contradiction governing female sexuality, girls’ (bodily) autonomy and “minor” (390) girls’ sexualization in the national social order, culture and state identity. At the same time teenage girls must internalize they ought not to “see nor hear…nor know” (390) any display of sex, this need for protection which rallies heterosexual fathers, grandfathers and brothers to reproduce the scholar’s issued ideology, is sexualized as erotic – if taboo.
Fig. 4. Britney Spears – as an extra-terrestrial girl – chiding her astronaut admirer for risking his life to retrieve a present for “her”. [Online image of Britney Spears – as an extra-terrestrial girl – chiding her astronaut admirer for risking his life to retrieve a present for “her” in the “Oops!...I Did It Again” music video]. (2009). YouTube. www.youtube.com/watch?v=CduA0TULnow
In April 2000, to foreshadow the fantasy-shattering themes of female independence, personal sexual desires and empowerment in her body and by her own sexual subjectivity to be introduced by her second album, Oops!... I Did It Again, Spears performs the character of a privately agentically sexual space-girl idealized by human boys and men for her purity of beauty and heart, in the MTV music video for the album’s eponymous debut single. She rejects the grandiose affections a boy astronaut bestows upon the idealized image of her, (“Britney Spears - Oops!...I Did It Again (Official HD Video),” 2:53-3:07) choosing to dance with her mixed-gender group of extraterrestrial friends (3:11-4:08) in a space of her own, safeguarded from the boy’s gaze.
Fig. 5. Britney Spears (right), overseeing, in distress, the character of “Lucky” (left) – a representation of her Disney girl celebrity self. [Online image of Britney Spears (right), overseeing, in distress, the character of “Lucky” (left) – a representation of her Disney girl celebrity self, in the “Lucky” music video]. (2009). YouTube. www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vvBAONkYwI
In July 2000, in the video for her sophomore album’s second single, “Lucky”, the private, autonomous Britney Spears becoming in touch with her “erotic”, (Lorde, 1978: 7) learning how she can reclaim its potentiality and power, is physically dichotomized from this “plasticized”, (4) “pornographic” (4) ideal. The “adult” (Berlant, 1995: 381) pop star foregrounds, (“Britney Spears - Lucky (Official HD Video),” 0:02-0:37) interrogates, (0:38-3:00) and de-mythologizes (3:20-3:52), “the very [artifice]…of [“Britney Spears” as] interstitial fantasy space – where one can…touch a fresh-faced child-angel with the body of a busty red leather-clad dominatrix…[who] glide[s] down and in between poles of ethereality and reality,…naivete and naughtiness, adolescence and maturity (Fisher, 2011: 314).”
Fig. 6. Britney Spears dancing with a snake in her debut performance of “I’m a Slave 4 U”, introducing the “adult” (Berlant, 1995: 381) theme of her Britney album at the 2001 MTV Video Music Awards from Sony Music Entertainment; “Britney Spears live I’m A Slave 4 U - MTV VMAs 2001 (4K)”; Santa Spears; YouTube, 27 Sept. 2022, www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-dnQKJprQU.
In the music video for “I’m a Slave 4 U”, the lead single off of her third album, Britney, the pop star is in control of her movements and in charge of her sexualization as she dances by herself, (“Britney Spears - I'm A Slave 4 U (Official HD Video),” 0:35-0:39) with a male partner(s), (1:01-1:17) and in a group of both sexes, (1:20-1:52) in fulfillment of her own needs and desires.
Fig. 7. Britney Spears leading an “erotically” (Lorde, 1978: 7) sexualized dance routine in a revealing yet practical and empowering costume. [Online image of Britney Spears leading an “erotically” (Lorde, 1978: 7) sexualized dance routine in a revealing yet practical and empowering costume in the “I'm A Slave 4 U” music video]. (2009) YouTube. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mzybwwf2HoQ
Thereby, reaffirming (see fig. 6) her explicitly articulated private and public sexual subjectivity. Spears stands her ground against that Fisher theorizes as the, ““unappeased…violence seek[ing] and always find[ing] a surrogate victim [,]…[whose]…fury is…replaced by another, chosen only because it is vulnerable and close at hand”, (312)”
triggered in “national culture” (Berlant, 1995: 380) when the “sublime virgin/whore, child/woman, goddess/mortal” (Fisher, 2011: 314) comes to light as, “the prostitute imagined as oversexed and yet barely present enough to register her own blasphemous indecency (320).” By lip syncing the reflexive lyric, “All you people look at me like I'm a little girl, (“Britney Spears - I'm A Slave 4 U (Official HD Video),” 0:18-0:21)” Britney Spears, for good, reclaimed as her own, the pop star known as “Britney Spears”.
In her exhibition “Poetry Is Not a Luxury”, Lorde advocates “poetry”, (125) re-defined as “the revelation or distillation of experience”, (126) as a practice of liberation for female persons, particularly critically, in circumstances of conflict, struggle and pain (126-127). The scholar warns her reader of the obstacles historically established and systematically reproduced into the tradition, or industry, of poetry, by the Western, white, masculinist academic hegemon governing such, working to deny her the liberatory possibilities found in creating (126-127). Like reclaiming the “erotic” (Uses of the Erotic, 3) in the face of the “pornographic[’s]” (4) objectification and domination, Lorde impels her reader to come up against, struggle through, and transform such obstacles (“Poetry is Not a Luxury,” 127).
In articulating and asserting her own sexual subjectivity through her music, performance, music videos and style – her “poetry” (125) –, Britney Spears’ struggled against on the one hand, the pop industry authorities controlling her professional decisions and profiting off of the eroticized dichotomy of asexual, virginal, Disney girl / self-sexualizing, latently sexual, post-Disney woman. The second industry of “fathers” (126) antagonizing Britney in her liberation from such a “pornographic” (Lorde, 1978: 4) “Disney” (Blue, 2017: 1)-“little girl” (Berlant, 1995: 381) star image was the national media landscape which held as equally polemical, ““soft”…“feminized”…“degraded”…[news] stories…(entertainment, lifestyle, human interest, celebrity news), (Fisher, 2011: 309)” and, “news…topics…[on] the preserving [of] human life in the face of [fatal] threats to it (politics, economics, crime, war, and disasters), (309)” but the former, as mediated through a lens of misogyny.
Britney Spears pioneered the agentic schism between the “luminous” (Blue, 2017: 2) – pretty and idealized yet sexually attractive and (illusively) accessible (2-3) – teenage girl celebrity persona and a girl’s “adult” (Berlant, 1995: 381) career living/performing as an “adult” (381) subjectivity oppositional to the aforementioned situated in the Disney (or any rivalling “girl audience” (Blue, 2017: 3)-centric media and merchandising corporation’s) brand. As proxy, she introduced at the mouth of the 21st century the trajectory of her figure, as well as her necessarily adversarial national cultural treatment (Fisher, 2011: 313-326).
After deconstructing the relationality of all female bodies whose intersectional identities distinguish them as requiring (are worthy of) protection from the state, and “live” (388); public and defiant of private, domestic, procreative; sex acts, as informed by the laws of morality binding of and reproduced across national culture, (382-383) Berlant suggests the secret ideal of “little girl” (388) ideology is the systemic sexual exploitation of such (to be) victims by their (alleged) protectors (389-390). Therefore, Britney’s charting an independent path through the nation’s “adult” (381) terrain was not just unacceptable of her “Disney girl” (Fisher, 2011: 1) figure, but of all “little girls” (Berlant, 1995: 390).
From the dominant representations of and reactions to pop star Britney Spears as she transformed from the “pornographic” (Lorde, 1978: 4) Disney girl / “little-girl” (Berlant, 1995: 388) fantasy into the “erotic” (Lorde, 1978: 3) “adult” (Berlant, 1995: 381) woman artist, the place of such “girls” (388) in the U.S. is laid bare. What appear on the surface to be two national mythical contradictions (379-390) are illuminated as engineered opportunities for interlocking patriarchal objectives. On the one hand, the sexualization of “minor” (388) girls’ pre-sexual (non-)subjectivity is an (if unspoken) established practice (389-390) in the nation’s private, heterosexual, “dead” (386) spaces. At the same time, as “little girls’” (390) are stripped of any opportunity to agency, the state’s issues are displaced onto such minor, non-“citizen”, (379) powerless bodies in public discourses (379-395).
Bibliography:
Berlant, Lauren. “Live Sex Acts (Parental Advisory: Explicit Material).” Feminist studies, vol. 21, no. 2, 1995, pp. 379-404, www.jstor.org/stable/3178273. Accessed 5 Nov. 2022.
Blue, Morgan Genevieve. Introduction. Girlhood on Disney Channel: Branding, Celebrity, and Femininity, by Blue, Taylor & Francis, 2017, pp. 1-13.
“Britney Spears - I'm A Slave 4 U (Official HD Video).” YouTube, uploaded by Britney Spears, 25 Oct. 2009, www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mzybwwf2HoQ.
“Britney Spears - Lucky (Official HD Video).” YouTube, uploaded by Britney Spears, 25 Oct. 2009, www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vvBAONkYwI.
“Britney Spears - Oops!...I Did It Again (Official HD Video).” YouTube, uploaded by Britney Spears, 25 Oct. 2009, www.youtube.com/watch?v=CduA0TULnow.
Fisher, Anna Watkins. “We Love This Trainwreck! Sacrificing Britney to Save America.” In the Limelight and Under the Microscope: Forms and Functions of Female Celebrity, edited by Su Holmes and Diane Negra, Bloomsbury Academic, 2011, pp. 302-332.
Lorde, Audre. “Poetry is Not a Luxury.” Teaching Black, edited by Ana-Maurine Lara and drea brown, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021, pp. 125-127.
Lorde, Audre. Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power. Out &Out Books, 1978.
[Online image of Britney Spears – as an extra-terrestrial girl – chiding her astronaut admirer for risking his life to retrieve a present for “her” in the “Oops!...I Did It Again” music video]. (2009). YouTube. www.youtube.com/watch?v=CduA0TULnow
[Online image of Britney Spears holding a Teletubby and a pink telephone on the April 1999 Rolling Stone cover]. (2008). Rolling Stone. www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/britney-spears-the-rolling-stone-covers-207308/
[Online image of Britney Spears in her bedroom surrounded by dolls and stuffed animals in her April 1999 Rolling Stone feature]. (2013). ONE WEEK // ONE BAND. oneweekoneband.tumblr.com/post/70792509009/spears-and-lachapelle-both-say-they-knew-the-photo
[Online image of Britney Spears leading an “erotically” (Lorde, 1978: 7) sexualized dance routine in a revealing yet practical and empowering costume in the “I'm A Slave 4 U” music video]. (2009) YouTube. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mzybwwf2HoQ
[Online image of Britney Spears (right), overseeing, in distress, the character of “Lucky” (left) – a representation of her Disney girl celebrity self, in the “Lucky” music video]. (2009). YouTube. www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vvBAONkYwI
[Online image of Britney Spears riding on a child’s bicycle; on the left pocket of her shorts, “baby” is written in rhinestones. As featured in her April 1999 Rolling Stone feature]. (2021). EXHALE. exhale.breatheheavy.com/forums/topic/791079-this-day-in-pop-britney-spears-appears-on-the-cover-of-rolling-stone-magazine-in-1999-april-15/
[ untitled : on a hard day's night and "night changes" ]
Coates deconstructs what impacts the kinds of lines of relationality extending from the collective, and members, of popular young, male music groups to their – as has been the tradition of the genre through its history of adaption – young female (but predominantly girl) fans: “authenticity” (66). She illuminates how the phenomenon of what could be labeled, “boy bands” – not because they necessarily are fashioned or fashion themselves to evoke minor boys, boyhood or boy culture, but due to their categorization by the popular music industry as befitting the label (67-68) – at a key point in their careers, turn away from their “girl” fanbases (69) in a plot to gain respect and critical acclaim. Coates sets out the operation of the “boy band” industry: when the objective of the band or their label is for them to “break”, or to gain recognition as a group, and generate profit, marketing their image and their sound, and advertising products (from singles and albums to concert tickets and video materials to merchandising like clothing and lifestyle goods) towards “girls” (69) is pursued. As the “boy band” reaches a fissure in their career, where the objective of securing fame on behalf of their sound and image has been met and enough profit has been accumulated from their “girl audience” (69), and so the new goal of earning respect from the popular music elite is erected, repudiating their “girl audience” is situated as the band’s works’ priority.
Music videos function as an expansion of the messages communicated by a “boy band’s” music – a medium that can be used on the one hand, to reach out to and build intimate relationality with “boy bands’” (“girl”) fans through tropes like direct address, in-group references and actresses that can stand-in for fans, and on the other hand, to speak to and close the gap between the group and a different kind of imagined spectator. Even as the “music video” takes on a cinematic narrative and formal conventions as it does early on with the creation of the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night, its function, in the matter of relationality, is to integrate the spectator not just into the body of the band’s work, but into the body of the band: for “girl” fans of “boy bands”, their music videos offer a space of imagination and fantasy, where desires for connection and intimacy can be satisfied through the screen. The “music video” medium on the technology of television and through the structure of television contained at-home watchability and re-watchability (according to programs’ and stations’ programming that could be learned), as the “music video” medium on digital technologies and with the possibilities of streaming offers even more personal watching experiences and a limitless number of rewatches. Holdsworth’s frameworks of “ontological security” (3) provided by pieces of media that we watch that speak to and we link with our selves at one time that we then add to our “auto/biographies” (4), our understandings of ourselves and our evolution over time, and of “cyclical time” (8), the ability to repeat and therefore revisit a media and a time like a loop, are relevant.
As Coates and Ehrenreich, Hess and Jacobs theorize male pop stars broadly, but particularly “boy band” members because of often, their calculated stylization and storytelling, offer one, the opportunity for girls’ to know and learn about their own nascent sexuality and desires, and two, to express feelings and ideas that are restricted from all other areas of their lives, and imagine new possibilities for themselves. By the emergence of the “teenage girl” age group and economic demographic in the first half of the 20th century and to make profitable and therefore, extant, the industries created for and marketed towards young females throughout the 1950s, Schrum foregrounds the phenomenon of “girls’” (from minor girls to young women) agentically supporting (and therefore shaping), and creating their identities in relation to, certain cultural products. That disempowering absence of recognition of “girls’” impact on forms of culture becoming “popular culture” and such cultural industries’ male producers’ re-emasculating themselves in opposition to “girls’” through their characterization as passive, vapid and simple to understand Schrum considers in the context of the mid-20th century, Coates’ recognizes as processes contributive to male popular music stars’ star images and the “boy band” industry’s operation.
The music video for “Medley Tell Me Why, If I Fell and I Should Have Known Better” in the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night and for “Night Changes” by One Direction (while one a product of/for television and the other of/for digital streaming) one, invite the girl audience viewer into the video’s diegesis, then two, not just dichotomize the intellectual, commanding, “authentic” musicianship of the “boy band” against the naïve, passive and subordinated girl audience, but make a joke about such, to the “authentic” popular music critics, at the expense of the fans. In the Beatles’ music video, the camera cuts between the applause, screaming and crying of individual or crowds of girls in the audience – narrativized as histrionic, even absurd – and the band on stage contrastingly restrained, at the same time, authoritative over the responses of their girl fans and concerned with but the singular objective of executing a proficient performance. If a girl at home could enter the music video’s diegesis through a girl in the crowd that shared her likeness or whose reaction she herself was making in the televisual work, in One Direction’s made-for-the-internet music video the imagined “girl audience” spectator is herself a character in the work – she is the female lead each member of the band is on a date with. Twisting the “boy band” – to mean bands that do evoke boyhood and boy culture in order to appeal to girls and engage with girlhood and girl culture – model of recreating fulfillment of girl fans’ fantasies of being the romantic partner of the group’s members, the five narrative threads of “Night Changes” track the spectator’s first date with each of the members being disastrous – self-reflexive renunciation of girl fans’ intimate attachments and mockery of the girls themselves.
should i say that i’m with the band?: how the “groupie” transformed from a valuable, celebrated figure to a ‘worthless’, condemned figure in relation to the hippie counterculture’s rise and fall in america
“It’s all happening,” observes Band-Aid Penny Lane in regards to the hippie counterculture’s flourishing in Crowe’s Almost Famous set in 1973, but contradictorily, Schulman protests that as early as 1970, that counterculture’s precipice had passed. "The war is over; they won,” voices a less idealist character in Crowe’s film, dialectic with not the state of the hippie counterculture by the early 1970s, but the state of progress in America from then through the mid-70s as well. In the mid-to-late 1960s national protests of the antiwar, civil rights, women’s rights and environmental movements inspired in a circuit loop the hippie music and alternative lifestyle, but in the early 1970s political losses to and traumatic incidents within the counterculture paired with the militarization of the silent majority into the New Right bodied it, and through the 1970s political crises and social and ideological disillusionment caused members of the counterculture to reposition towards careerism and conservatism. Studying the “groupie” in relation to the history of the hippie counterculture will lead to a greater understanding of her history: the weakening of sexual conservatism and expectational domesticity of the mid-to-late 1960s opened a space for her to operate in and be respected for it, but as the consequentiality of hippie ideology was undermined and withered away in the early 1970s, the value of her role was dismissed, and through to the mid-1970s resultant of economic pressures and the ‘death’ of the hippie ‘dream’, she was thrown aside and disempowered. I will provide the context within which and the reasons why the hippie counterculture developed in the mid-1960s as well as how it changed America until the late 1960s with reference to the “groupie’s” position; I will then examine how national anti-peace and anti-progress tragedies as well as the rise of the New Right demoralized the counterculture in the early 1970s and why the “groupie” came under attack; finally I will present the national turmoil and counterculture’s abandoning of ‘the dream’ in the first half of the 1970s and the “groupie’s” crucifixion even with the women’s rights movement.
Following World War II and through the 1960s, the American economy and expansionism flourished; during the Cold War, nationalism mandated men and women ascribe to and promote conservative gender roles as well as embrace/purchase modernization. The hippie counterculture was born out of the ‘generation gap’: maturing youth born in the postwar period felt disconnected from the America of their childhoods and sought to one, rebel from, and two, transform it. In the 1960s, Baby boomers consulted ideological figures, political and cultural, to educate themselves on political issues and about alternative ideologies, philosophies and ways of living. Global and national wars and injustices including the Vietnam War, the fights for civil and women’s rights and abuse of the environment were taken up as causes and protested through lobbying, marches, be-ins and love-ins. An ideology of “peace and love” functioned as the foundation of the counterculture: practices rooted in humanity, connection and (spiritual) growth such as psychedelic drugs, sexual liberation and community living, countered hegemonic (evil) America. Culture played a prominent role in the counterculture’s ‘fight’ to transform the nation, with music – as well as festivals and gatherings including Monterey International Pop Festival (1967), Summer of Love (1967) and Woodstock Music and Art Fair (1969) – a significant form. Rock and folk music with political, ideological or philosophical messaging was made by members of the counterculture to inform, argue and motivate Americans in dominant culture to recognize global and national injustices as well as to inspire and strengthen the counterculture. “Groupies” played an essential role in this, among other components of the counterculture’s impact and operation. Progressive conceptions of women’s ‘place’ in society were part of the counterculture’s ideology: sexual liberation and a woman’s choice to self-determine (her domesticity/independence) were advocated, and womanhood was understood as spiritual and powerful. “Groupies” were celebrated one, for protesting repressive, hegemonic America; two, for contributing through inspiration or action to the counterculture’s cultural and political protests; and three, for being powerful women, whether mothers, wives, artists, makers, teachers or guides.
By 1970, the hippie counterculture had suffered significant losses to their ‘dream’ of injustices’ eradication from America: Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated, political ally Robert Kennedy had died, Republican Richard Nixon had been elected into presidential office and sustained American involvement in the Vietnam War and the Left was splintering into arguing factions, fracturing the counterculture’s unity. The counterculture’s ideological objectives were being cut down, and two traumatic incidents had irrevocably perverted the counterculture’s understanding of itself and its perception by dominant America: the Tate-LaBianca murders by the Manson Family cult and the killings at the Altamont Free Concert. Though the antiwar, civil and women’s rights and environmental movements would go on and obtain victories – though, transforming significantly themselves – the hippie counterculture dissolved in the early 1970s. The failure of the hippie counterculture could be measured in relation to the ascendancy and establishment of the New Right: dominant Americans that opposed the counterculture’s ‘dream’, the “silent majority”, were empowered by President Nixon, whose 1968 and 1972 campaigns promised to rebuild the America of the postwar period and encouraged the silent majority to militarize into an oppositional, conservative body. From the mid-to-late 1960s to the early 1970s, “groupies” transformed from celebrated contributors to the counterculture to blights on the face of an America in flux. The “groupie’s” celebration was contingent upon the ideology/philosophy of the hippie counterculture; as the lines between counterculture and dominant America slip in 1970, the “groupie” is let into and judged in relation to dominant America’s politics. Mapped atop an ideology including the devaluing of womanhood and women’s contributions, pathologizing and punishment of women’s (transgressive) sexual behaviours and contempt for girls/young women, the “groupie” was deplorable and dangerous. Moreover, as the counterculture fractured, the “groupie” was sacrificed by most breakaway groups to gain political respect: most radical/Left groups ‘threw away’ the “groupie”, indicted her as ‘worthless’ and ‘foolish’, in order to gain recognition as political bands.
Through to the mid-1970s, the economic prosperity and expansionism of the postwar decades ceased: America was in crisis.38 Communist North Vietnam’s victory in the Vietnam War and America’s withdrawal from the war from 1970 to 1975 dealt a significant blow to the nation’s domestic morale and global hegemony. The Pentagon Papers (1971) exposed the government’s undisclosed expansion of military action in Indochina, and the Watergate scandal (1972-1974) found President Nixon covering up through bribery, wiretapping and abuses of power, a burglary of valuable information from the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters. Americans could not trust the government – nor institutions, social programs nor one another. Beginning in 1970, the nation underwent deindustrialization, which greatly contributed to increasing unemployment rates from then to 1975; at the same time, inflation set on goods and services because of the American central bank’s stocking up monetary supply and on oil because of an oil embargo placed on oil from the Middle East (resultant of American support of Israel in the 1973 Arab-Israeli War). Americans could not afford to be apart of a counterculture, and moreover, the hippies’ ‘dream’ America and contemporary America were irreconcilable. Consequently, a majority of former hippie counterculture members radically repositioned towards careerism, and over the years, as their economic prosperity grew – resulting in increased disparity between the upper and lower classes –, conservatism. Through the 1970s, such former hippies would disconnect their progressive counterculture pasts and their hegemonic presents by reframing the hippie counterculture as but generational youth rebellion devoid of transformative political and ideological objectives. Natural to their turning into hegemonic America, they gradually adopted and reaffirmed dominant American ideology: the “groupie” was stripped of any contextual significance, and reworked in the (dominant) history of the hippie counterculture into a figure of but transgressive sexual and bodily practices – not in a positive sense. The “groupie” became established as such an identity; as the women’s rights movement evolved through the 1970s, this identity was not narrativized in progressive countercultural (feminist) communities as progressive, but regressive, representative of a woman’s reduction to a man’s sexual object.
The hippie counterculture developed out and in protest of, postwar economically prosperous and politically conservative America: Baby boomers became educated on national and global injustices in the 1960s, and strategized as a collective, how to eradicate them. Music was a prominent ‘weapon’ used to communicate messages of "peace and love" and against forms of violence; in the creation of countercultural music, “groupies” acted as inspirations and contributors, and were celebrated by the counterculture at large, as transgressive agents and women. The hippies’ ‘dream’ was demoralized by the early 1970s, as significant progressive political figures had been killed and radically conservative politicians were elected into major positions of power,56 and acts of violence had been committed at the hands of self-aligned hippies. At the same time, the “silent majority” became militarized into the New Right and fought to annihilate the hippie counterculture and restore the nation to the America of the late 1940s/1950s. As the counterculture dissolves, the “groupie” bleeds over into dominant America and is consequently read in relation to its patriarchal and repressive ideology – her work is undermined and her transgressive sexual and bodily practices are pathologized and punished, by both dominant Americans and former hippies seeking legitimate political recognition. In the 1970s, America shared little resemblance to the wealthy and nationalist postwar America: unemployment rates ballooned as a consequence of deindustrialization and the American central bank’s collecting more monetary supply than national production led to inflation, with oil being particularly hit due to a concurrent embargo on oil imported from the Middle East. Contemporary America was incompatible with the hippie counterculture’s ‘dream’ for it: the nation was fractured by conspiracy and mistrust because of the government’s legal and ethical transgressions. A majority of former counterculture members reacted to the nation’s state through the first half of the 1970s by pursuing careerism, and over years of their own economic success, repositioned towards conservatism: these individuals, belonging now to hegemonic America, re-narrativized the hippie counterculture to be but youthful rebellion. They reduced the “groupie” to deviant(ly transgressive) sexual and bodily practices; the “groupie” identity would be maligned in progressive countercultural communities by the mid-1970s as the contemporary women’s rights movement labelled it as reduction to a sexual object.
Sources:
Borstelmann, Thomas. The 1970s: A New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic Inequality. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011.
Coates, Norma. “From the Vaults: Teenyboppers, Groupies, and Other Grotesques: Girls and Women and Rock Culture in the 1960s and early 1970s.” Journal of Popular Music Studies 31, no. 3 (2019): 29-48, doi: 10.1525/jpms.2019.313005.
Cottrell, Robert. Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'n' Roll: The Rise of America’s 1960s Counterculture. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2015.
Crowe, Cameron, dir. Almost Famous. 2000; Universal City, CA: DreamWorks Pictures, 2001. DVD.
Ehrenreich, Barbara, Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jacobs. “Beatlemania: Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” In The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, edited by Lisa A. Lewis, 84-106. London: Routledge, 1992.
Grant, Barry K. “Introduction: Movies and the 1960s.” In American Cinema of the 1960s, edited by Barry K. Grant, 1-21. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008.
Karbownik, Karolina. “Speculation Over the Love for Rock Music: Media Constructions of Groupies Between the 1960s and 1970s.” Studia de Cultura 13, no. 2 (2021): 47-56, doi: 10.24917/20837275.13.2.4.
Klinger, Barbara. “The road to dystopia: Landscaping the nation in Easy Rider.” In The Road Movie Book, edited by Ina R. Hark and Steven Cohan, 179-203. London: Routledge, 1997.
Larsen, Gretchen. “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World: Music Groupies and the Othering of Women in the World of Rock.” Organization 24, no. 3 (2017): 397-417, doi: 10.1177/1350508416689095.
Lev, Peter. American Films of the 70s: Conflicting Visions. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2000.
Lynn, Susan. “Gender and Post World War II Progressive Politics: A Bridge to Social Activism in the 1960s U.S.A.” Gender & History 4, no. 2 (1992): 215-239, doi: 10.1111/j.1468-0424.1992.tb00057.x.
Rhodes, Lisa. Electric Ladyland: Women and Rock Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.
Schulman, Bruce J. The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics. New York: Free Press, 2001.
“she’s so soft like silk chiffon”: the representation of women loving women relationships in halsey’s “ghost” (2015), hayley kiyoko (ft. kehlani)’s “what i need” (2018) and muna (ft. phoebe bridgers)’ “silk chiffon” (2021)
In the summer of 2015, I discovered the subculture of women loving women indie artists and it devastated my established, projected plan for how my life was going to work out. It was in the earliest days of my questioning whether I was exclusively attracted to boys, a time of wondering whether I liked my best friend or like liked my best friend and why I sometimes wanted to kiss the female characters more than the male characters in the media I consumed. Halsey, an up-and-coming singer-songwriter who featured heavily in the pastel grunge Tumblr blogs I worshipped, had released her first official music video for a soon-to-be-viral single off of her debut album.
In the glow of neon lighting, Halsey and her female partner stroke one another’s faces, waists, thighs. The camera is intimately close as they move languidly, the speed of the playback, molasses-like. They kiss, play with pillows, gaze into an aquarium, swim in bubbles. Neon signs, shuttering lightbulbs and pastel pink lights cascade across their bodies. The momentum oscillates between saccharine playfulness, eerie hollowness and panicked suffocation. There is tension and anxiety one moment, fullness and dynamism the next, and isolation and emptiness after that. Intimate caresses cut to a getaway car; glittering Tokyo lights bleed into an ice-cold stare; sickly sweet laughs fade to a detached, faraway expression. I was hypnotized. Soon after “Ghost”, this kind of uber-cool aesthetic and approach to storytelling began to dominate the landscape of (queer and non-queer) female indie artist music videos, and as I would soon learn, women loving women artists were naturally the driving force of this movement’s propagation.
Societal attitudes surrounding queerness are dynamic, and over time, the abilities for women loving women, women to be portrayed on-screen in music videos evolved. What can be shown and who is controlling that showing has changed dramatically since the mid-2010s, with the taboos and stigmas around LGBTQ+ identities changing and to a less, but important extent, the proportions of power allotted to queer women in the entertainment industry growing. This paper will examine three music videos from three different women loving women indie artists; each of which serve as the ‘face’ of women loving women indie music of the era they represent; spanning from 2015 to 2021: “Ghost” by Halsey (2015), “What I Need” by Hayley Kiyoko featuring Kehlani (2018) and “Silk Chiffon” by MUNA featuring Phoebe Bridgers (2021). These periods are stagnated, separated by three years from their predecessor/successor, and through the analyses of their content (what is being shown), their form (how is it being shown) and their creation (who is in control of the showing), the relationship of women loving women relationships and (Western) society’s acceptance of women loving women identities can be observed.
In terms of content, the music videos will be studied on, from a spectrum of the erotic to the pornographic where their representations of women loving women are located (Lorde 3-4); of form, if the camera captures the women according to dominant/sexist ideology or to revolutionary/feminist ideology (Johnston 135-140); and of creation, if and how the women loving women artists are able to convey through the music videos, a radical, queer female subjectivity (hooks 20). Audre Lorde defines the erotic as the “measure between the beginnings of our sense of self, and the chaos of our strongest feelings”, and the pornographic as its inverse, “the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling” (4). Claire Johnston states that dominant/sexist ideology re-presents women as “what she represents for man (135)”, while “in order to counter our objectification in the cinema” revolutionary/feminist re-presentations of women should be “our collective fantasies…released: [women] must embody the working through of [women’s] desire[s]” (143). Adapted from bell hooks’ work on black people’s creations of radical black subjectivities, a radical, queer female subjectivity is an “identity that is not informed by…the power of the [heterosexual] hegemonic [ideology]”: “Assimilation, imitation, or assuming the role of rebellious exotic other are not the only available options [for subjectivity construction]” (20).
Glazed in the introduction to this paper, the narrative of Halsey’s “Ghost” is as followed: two female lovers; one played by Halsey in a light blue wig and one played by an uncredited actress in a light pink wig; in a tumultuous relationship, oscillate between sharing intimate moments and being separate from one another in different places. The women loving women relationship presented on-screen is highly physical, we witness the women touch each other’s faces, kiss, kiss each other’s bodies, caress one another’s bodies and cuddle, but lacking in emotional connection. Halsey is emotionally invested in the relationship, but this is not reciprocated; the lover’s lack of emotional investment, shown through her leaving Halsey’s side after they are finished being physically intimate twice, and her only seeking out Halsey’s company for the purpose of physical intimacy, is the conflict of the narrative. There are three main themes of shots in the music video because of such: Halsey and her lover experiencing pleasure (physical, in all except two shots, when it is emotional), her lover in the process of leaving her and her by herself, pining for her lover to return. Of the three, only the first theme displays on-screen a woman engaging in amorous relations with another woman.
All except two shots (where the women are entertaining each other by mimicking fish in an aquarium) of the shots of the first theme, portray an act(s) of physical touch. The physical intimacy presented is on one hand erotic; as Halsey’s physical touches are an expression of her authentic, intense amorous feelings; and on one hand pornographic; as the lover’s physical touches are an expression strictly of physicality, of sensory sensation. The physical pleasure experienced by Halsey, is the result of her bringing her lover into her sense of self, sharing herself with the woman she is touching; the physical pleasure experienced by the lover, is the result of physical intimacy – for her, the physicality is empty of any feeling, anything deeper than sensation. To rule on what this representation of women loving women intimacy is, a principle of the “erotic” can be consulted: consent. Lorde declares, “[the erotic is not when], we use rather than share the feelings of those others who participate in the experience with us…use without consent of the used is abuse. (9)” As the physical intimacy in “Ghost” is the use of Halsey’s feelings – the manipulation of her emotional investment, to achieve the endgame of physical pleasure for her lover –, and not the sharing of the feelings of Halsey and her lover, it cannot ultimately, be ruled as a representation of the erotic.
In regards to how Halsey and her lover are presented to the music video’s viewer; how they are captured by the camera and re-presented on-screen; the gaze of the camera is markedly different between the first theme and the second and third themes of shots. When the lover is in the process of leaving, medium to medium long shots focus on the two women’s faces, or the back of the lover’s head. To display Halsey’s pining for her lover in her absence, there is a balance between close-ups illustrating the nature of Halsey’s stare and long-shots depicting all of her body in a state of lifelessness. Both of these approaches demonstrate an interest in capturing Halsey and her lover as autonomous beings; they are presented as human, as agents that do and feel. Second theme shots observe the unfolding of a collective experience for many queer and non-queer women, and third theme shots emphasize Halsey’s pain, inspiring empathy and in so doing, a working through of our own experiences with severed and/or toxic relationships.
To discuss how first theme shots are re-presented, I must touch on what Johnston is referring to when she admonishes women’s re-presentations as “what she represents for man (135)”. Rather than depict a woman objectively; or depict a woman through the gaze of how another (queer or non-queer) woman would view her, as in revolutionary/feminist cinematography; these re-presentations capture a woman as a heterosexual man would view her. Laura Mulvey summarizes this re-presentation as, “women are…displayed, with their appearances coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. (809)”
Anytime Halsey and her lover are experiencing pleasure, they are filmed from an extreme close up to a medium close up. This approach segments their bodies into parts, detached from a human being. Halsey and her lover are cut up for visual consumption; the audience does not view the women as beings but as parts, as objects. Moreover, the shots focus on particular portions of the women’s bodies: their lips three times, Halsey’s hand twice, the lover’s behind, Halsey’s thigh, Halsey’s open mouth twice, the lover’s waist, the lover’s chest, Halsey and the lover’s shoulders, the lover’s thigh. We perceive these women as their individual, highly sexualized body parts. Therefore, while second and third theme shots are according to revolutionary/feminist ideology, first theme shots accord to dominant/sexist ideology.
Unfortunately, because of how her subjectivity is presented in the first theme of shots, Halsey does not convey through “Ghost” a radical, queer female subjectivity. Halsey’s physical intimacy with another woman is sexualized for the male gaze; her women loving women sexuality is fetishized for the male viewer’s pleasure. Despite a female director, Malia James, being in charge of how her and her lover’s subjectivities were constructed, they adhere to the order of heterosexual male, hegemonic ideology: their identities fall in line with how heterosexual male, hegemonic ideology conceives of women loving women, women. Halsey is the “rebellious exotic other (hooks 20)” – her sexuality is framed as scandalous yet tantalizing; her queer female subjectivity is resemblant of queer female subjectivities in lesbian porn that is made by and for, straight men. Halsey in “Ghost” plays into and thereby reinforces, the perspective that a women loving women identity has assumed that identity for the titillation and gratification of straight men. Her (and her lover’s) subjectivity is a hegemonic, queer female subjectivity.
“What I Need” by Hayley Kiyoko and Kehlani takes as its concept, two best friends who have secret, romantic feelings for one another (played by Kiyoko and Kehlani), escaping their small, non-queer friendly hometown. The music video is an epic: they set out on their journey from Kehlani’s homophobic mother’s house; they drink and dance with each other at a bar; their car suffers mechanical issues after a near crash; they travel on foot until they sneak into the back of an idle pickup truck; the seedy male driver notices them, and becomes aggressive; after passing predatory remarks about Kehlani, he accepts her ask to transport them; Kiyoko begs Kehlani not to go, and the pickup truck leaves her behind; Kiyoko travels on her own, reminiscing on her memories of them from the trip; Kehlani runs back towards Kiyoko, and they kiss. The women loving women platonic, then romantic relationship, presented, is the embodiment of the erotic: the two women share everything, from their senses of self to their most powerful feelings, with each other.
Though like “Ghost” “What I Need” begins in media res, over the course of this story the audience watches as the women loving women (more than platonic) relationship develops, progressively. The “kernel (Lorde 8)” of the erotic within Kiyoko and Kehlani is “released (8)” in every individual interaction they have with one another – from the minute, like sharing glances, lying on each other for support, pinkie-promising and making each other laugh, to the substantial, like worrying about each other’s safety, protecting each other from natural dangers and predatory men, and forgiving each other. They have opened up their and entered into the other’s, sense of self by the time the music video has begun, as shown in their first scene together: Kehlani confides in Kiyoko about her mother’s homophobic abuse because she knows she will listen, and Kiyoko listens, then attempts to make Kehlani laugh with physical comedy, and succeeds. Throughout the trip, they indulge in each other’s great joys, passions, excitements and spontaneities during the high points, and bond over heavy exhaustions, desperations, stresses, fears and regrets during the low points. It is upon each woman’s respective reflection on the accumulation of erotic moments that they have already shared as ‘friends’ over the course of the trip with one another, that they come to realize the other woman’s much more profound than platonic feelings. During the journey, they grow increasingly intertwined in each other’s senses of selves as they make memories and experience traumas as a team, and their sharing of feelings grows to be so natural yet intense and therapeutic, that an explosion of the erotic – their long, passionate kiss and embrace, at the end of the music video – erupts.
In a similar vein to the theatrical structure of the video’s story, “What I Need” is filmed in congruence with the set of conventions of Hollywood filmmaking. Unlike the dominant approach to the representation of women on film in Hollywood; that which sensationalizes their visual and pornographic impact, their sense of “to-be-looked-at-ness (Mulvey 809)”; however, Kiyoko and Kehlani are re-presented as men conventionally are, in Hollywood filmmaking. The women are depicted objectively; how either woman would have performed an action in person, on set, is how that action is captured and presented on-screen. There is no gendered gaze through which the audience views Kiyoko or Kehlani, and in the dominant Hollywood tradition of capturing the genders through the lens, this objectivity is granted solely to men. Mulvey goes over the strategy governing this conventional re-presentation of men, “the film [is structured] around a main controlling figure with whom the spectator can identify. As the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look on to that of his like…so that the power of the male protagonist…coincides with the power of the…look (810)”.
By appropriating the conventional re-presentation of men, complete with the centering of the video around two women, Kiyoko invites the spectator to identify with herself and Kehlani and moreover, she a priori assumed that the spectator of the video would be a woman. In applying this approach to capturing, she encourages the female viewer to project onto the women, to adopt their power and at the same time, experience their loss and their pain. Kiyoko re-presents the music video’s female protagonists just as Johnston’s call for revolutionary/feminist representations of women advocates. She not only situates herself and Kehlani for the female spectator to project onto, but she presents a female experience that reflects/speaks to different collective experiences of different female spectators. For both the queer and non-queer female spectator, there is an element of the experience that Kiyoko represents that is representational of their own, whether it is hiding feelings from a friend, a close female friendship or a problematic relationship with a parent, just to name those most foregrounded.
Kiyoko produces through “What I Need” a radical, queer female subjectivity for her and Kehlani, by adopting for the music video the concept of “political ideas should inform the entertainment cinema (143)”, which Johnston proposes all forms of revolutionary/feminist cinema should. As they are presented in the video, the two women are unapologetic about their women loving women sexuality, but at the same time, the video does not sensationalize the fact that they are women loving women, women. We do not witness any instance of either woman performing heterosexuality (“imitati[on] (hooks 20)”), nor are their moments of expressing their queerness (from the low-key, like their stealing glances at each other or their dancing so close together that they touch, to the explicit, their intimate make-out session) framed so as to be made out as perverse or fetishistic (as “[heterosexual] hegemonic [ideology] (20)” would order). Kiyoko includes in the story the dangers of being queer; shown through Kehlani’s mother’s abuse; and the dangers of being a woman; shown through the pickup truck driver’s objectifying comments; and her and Kehlani succeed in the fight against such real issues threatening radical, queer female subjectivities. We see the two women win the ability to finally have a radical, queer female subjectivity.
MUNA and Phoebe Bridgers’ “Silk Chiffon” is a retelling of Jamie Babbit’s 1999 film, But I’m a Cheerleader. The concept of both the film and the music video, is a lesbian cheerleader, Megan (played in the music video by MUNA lead singer, Katie Gavin), is sent to a program run by ‘former’ homosexuals, that instructs its gay and lesbian pupils how to ‘make disappear’ their sexualities and learn to be heterosexual. The young women and men watch instructional videos about heterosexuality, and the female pupils practice ‘traditionally female’ behaviours (like housework) while the male pupils, ‘traditionally male’ behaviours (like chopping wood). A team of former ‘former’ homosexuals, sneak the pupils out to an LGBTQ+ bar one night, where they, at least for the moment, are allowed to explore their true sexualities in the open, without the fear of punishment. While there are seven women loving women, women (one of which is the camp’s female instructor played by Bridgers) in the music video, my analysis will focus on its representation of the relationship between Megan and Graham (played by an uncredited actress).
The relationship between Megan and Graham can be understood in the very terms of the erotic: the audience watches as they go from sharing their senses of self with one another, to sharing arguably the strongest human feeling we possess, love. Graham touches Megan’s arm and the two steal a glance and a smile then later on, we flash to a secretive meeting between the two in a stairwell, cuddling. From this, we learn Graham communicates her interest in Megan first, and they begin to spend time together, learning about one another. Their intimate moments begin to cut in between clips of the pupils singing ‘straight lessons’ in a circle: the girls jump on Megan’s bed; they lie in the bed, gazing into each other’s eyes and caressing each other; they kiss under the sheets and then again on top of Megan’s pillows. In this set of clips, we observe the girls’ bonding: they grow their emotional connection and express their strong amorous feelings for one another by sneaking moments of physical intimacy. Holding hands, they run into the back of the former ‘former’ homosexuals truck, and on the drive to the LGBTQ+ bar, the two clasp hands on Graham’s knee. Their holding hands connotes their intertwinement, and their touching in front of their fellow pupils, demonstrates how proud of and confident in, their relationship, they both are. At the bar, Megan and Graham slow dance together, their foreheads pressed against one another’s and in a later shot, the two lean into one another, preparing for a kiss. From the way each girl looks at the other, the abundant love they have for one another radiates; their being so close and connected that they form a single silhouette, symbolizes their becoming one entity: a couple in love. The women loving women relationship at the centre of “Silk Chiffon”, is undoubtably a representation of two girls sharing with one another their powers of the erotic.
Though with less fixedness than “What I Need”, “Silk Chiffon” is centred around Megan and Graham; while the focus at certain points shifts – once to all of the male pupils, to Mary Brown (the female instructor), to all of the female pupils and to MUNA the band (as their characters) – it is predominantly located on Megan and Graham. Because of this, the audience is asked to primarily identify with, and project onto, the two girls, and this also means, Ally Pankiw (the director of MUNA and Bridgers’ music video), like Kiyoko, structured the video with a female spectator in mind. Differentiating from the objectivity in which Kiyoko and Kehlani are presented in however, Megan and Graham are re-presented through a subjective perspective: the queer female gaze.
There are three kinds of shots in which the two girls are captured in: medium long shot, medium shot to medium close up and close up to extreme close up. The first kind of shot features all or most of Megan and Graham’s bodies; these shots are mostly used when the girls’ are first getting to know each other and/or when they are out in the open, potentially viewable or discoverable to other people. The second kind of shot ranges from showing from their heads to their waists, to from their heads to their shoulders; these shots often capture their bodies in motion (ex. jumping, slow dancing) or their facial expressions (ex. after Graham touches Megan’s arm for the first time, when they fall back onto Megan’s pillows, the girls’ looking into each others’ eyes as they slowdance, about to kiss). The third kind of shot focuses mostly on a specific body part (ex. their faces the first and second times that they kiss) or entirely on a specific body part (ex. Graham’s hand touching Megan’s arm, the girls’ arms beginning to roam, their hands’ clasped on Graham’s knee). The first and second kinds of shots appear frequently in “What I Need”; they grasp Megan and Graham from a perspective that does not separate the image from the human being; while the third kind of shot appears frequently in “Ghost”; they grasp a particular part of Megan and Graham, which causes a detachment of the image from the human being.
While I criticized Halsey’s music video for capturing this kind of shot, as it was representative there of dominant/sexist ideology, how it appears here, is in fact representative of revolutionary/feminist ideology. To reiterate, Johnston describes the revolutionary/feminist re-presentation of women as, “our collective fantasies…released: [women] must embody the working through of [women’s] desire[s] (143)”. There is a fundamental difference between the collective fantasies and the desires of straight women and those of queer women, which Johnston does not allot any attention to differentiating. What Pankiw captures with these shots, is a re-presentation of Megan and Graham representative of a potential collective fantasy and possible working through of the desires of, women loving women, women. Pankiw is a women loving women, woman; how she re-presents the two girls, is how she would have fantasized about and desired, a women loving women relationship when she was an adolescent, like Megan and Graham. To summarize this point, Dirse writes of the queer female gaze: “The [person in control of the image] is exploring her own sexuality through [the] lens, as she [captures] the women playing to the camera and amongst themselves [. As] the lens explores the dynamics of the scene…[t]he bearer of the look is female [and] the subject is female (27)”.
In terms of whether the women loving women artists whom the video is a visual accompaniment to the song of – MUNA and Phoebe Bridgers – convey through the video a radical, queer female subjectivity, I must expand my analysis to not just the relationship of Megan and Graham. Katie Gavin, who plays Megan, conveys a radical, queer female subjectivity: as Megan, she fights against heterosexual hegemonic ideology (embodied by the organization), to occupy a radical, queer female subjectivity alongside Graham. Naomi McPherson and Josette Maskin (MUNA’s guitarists), play fellow women loving women pupils: we watch them experience the same ‘anti-gay’ teaching strategies as Megan. At the LGBTQ+ bar, there is a shot of them slow-dancing with one another – they too have resisted the organization’s attempts at molding their identities to fit the heterosexual hegemonic ideology, and have embraced a radical, queer female subjectivity. Phoebe Bridgers plays Mary Brown, the organization’s ‘recovered’ lesbian female instructor: she shows the pupils the ‘how-to-be-heterosexual’ instructional videos, she instructs the female pupils to do housework, she leads the pupils in a sing-along about the goodness of being straight. However, while a majority of “Silk Chiffon” is pastiche of But I’m a Cheerleader, Bridgers’ performance is a parody of her character in the original work. She overperforms each of her actions, and she is an exaggerated characterization of the original Mary Brown: she is emphatically phlegmatic, aloof, soulless, even robotic. In being an obvious parody of the internalization of, assimilation into and dissemination of heterosexual hegemonic ideology, Bridgers does convey a radical, queer female subjectivity.
In the years between Halsey’s “Ghost” and MUNA featuring Phoebe Bridgers’ “Silk Chiffon”, significant steps moving (Western) society’s acceptance of LGBTQ+ identities forwards, had been taken. The ability for LGBTQ+ individuals to speak about and practice their sexuality and/or gender identity without the risk of their endangerment and/or their fetishization, in places and spaces that they hadn’t been able to in previously, progressed. By no means, was this movement void of setbacks and obstacles, nor had it been enough to grant all queer identities the same amount of empowerment, freedom and safety.
For women loving women, women, progress was made in our abilities to acknowledge our sexualities around straight women and not face ostracization because of it, and around straight men without being met with inappropriate/outright predatory comments. The obsession with/hyperfocus on the sexual lives of women loving women, women (a dehumanizing infatuation all queer identities are saddled with to some extent) was challenged and problematized; it became no longer acceptable to view us first and foremost, as sexual objects. The community of women loving women, women was able to make increased contributions to mainstream culture: our impact, our presence and our culture began to be observable by the masses, affecting the nature of how and the ways in which they perceived us. The strength of our community as a body, the multidimensionality of our identity we established through our representations of ourselves and the gradual stigmatization of our pigeonholing into an exhausted (and often offensive) stereotype, were each successes.
“Ghost” was largely representative of the fetishistic lens through which women loving women, women as a default, were perceived in the dominant societal context (a context, that was ruled –especially then, before the #MeToo era – by heterosexual men). It is worthy to note, as I did in the anecdote that began this paper, that Halsey’s origins as a musician were on Tumblr – the idiosyncratic, distinctly feminine aesthetic and haptic, artistic form of storytelling of “Ghost” (which, “What I Need” and “Silk Chiffon” borrow as well, in concept) originate from the fibres of that social platform. In order to transition Halsey from the platform’s then (and still) mostly queer female audience, to a mainstream (controlled by straight male) audience; of which the “Ghost” music video was intended to do; the framing of her women loving women in the conventions of straight male made and made for pornography, was tactical.
2018 was a markedly different time for queer representation than 2015. Mainstream society had encountered complex, sensitive representations of queerness across all channels of media and maybe more consequentially, there began to be power in the queer communities that gathered on social media sites. Hayley Kiyoko by that point had large queer female followings on Twitter, Tumblr and YouTube; “What I Need” was made for them, and because of the great amount of support the video got from them, it became impossible for mainstream society to ignore. Queer communities in 2018, had power in numbers and therefore power in influence – what was ‘popular’ amongst them, had a respectable chance of becoming objectively ‘popular’. While Kiyoko had a large queer following, Kehlani had amassed a sizable following from mainstream society. The intertwinement of queer and mainstream audiences was a common occurrence during this time in recent history – their uniting around a cultural moment happened often.
By 2021, the size of the collective queer community had become large enough and possessed enough power, to challenge mainstream society. The number of individuals that belonged to the queer community and the amount of noise that we had made in fighting back against our mistreatment, had forced mainstream society to acknowledge us as important (at the very least, as a demographic). Because they could no longer suppress or silence us without facing formidable consequences, the queer community began to exist parallel to mainstream society. Queer individuals and members of mainstream society would travel back and forth between the two, with some of the latter preferring, to inhabit the queer community (as queer allies). MUNA and Phoebe Bridgers made “Silk Chiffon” solely, for the queer community: it is a revisiting of a camp film about queerness, that in the years since its release has become a cult classic among predominantly, queer audiences. Though the music video was made specifically, for LGBTQ+ individuals, it had found great popularity amongst queer allies as well. While it is still required for mainstream society to take many more steps forwards if we are to achieve our goal of all queer identities being accepted by all of mainstream society, that many of its members were hypnotized with “Silk Chiffon” as I was with “Ghost”, makes me believe that we are making progress and will get there sooner rather than later.
Bibliography:
But I'm a Cheerleader. Directed by Jamie Babbit, Lionsgate Films, 1999.
Dirse, Zoe. “Gender in Cinematography: Female Gaze (Eye) Behind the Camera.” Journal of Research in Gender Studies, vol. 3, no. 1, 2013, pp. 15-29. ProQuest, myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/login?qurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.proquest.com%2Fscholarly-journals%2Fgender-cinematography-female-gaze-eye-behind%2Fdocview%2F1439928160%2Fse-2%3Faccountid%3D14771.
Halsey. “Halsey – Ghost.” YouTube, uploaded by Halsey, 11 June 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=ao4o-XRU_KM.
hooks, bell. “The Politics of Radical Black Subjectivity.” Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, edited by bell hooks, New York: Routledge, 2015, pp. 15-22.
Johnston, Claire. “Women’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema.” Sexual Stratagems: The World of Women in Film, edited by Patricia Erens, Horizon Press, New York: 1979, pp. 133-143.
Kiyoko, Hayley. “Hayley Kiyoko – ‘What I Need’ (feat. Kehlani) [Official Video].” YouTube, uploaded by Hayley Kiyoko, 31 May 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=YynKelHGhNc.
Lorde, Audre. Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, 1st ed., Out & Out Books, 1978. ProQuest, myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/login?qurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.proquest.com%2Fbooks%2Fuses-erotic-as-power%2Fdocview%2F2138587327%2Fse-2%3Faccountid%3D14771.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, Third Edition, edited by Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen, Oxford University Press, 1985, pp. 803-816.
MUNA. “MUNA - Silk Chiffon (feat. Phoebe Bridgers).” YouTube, uploaded by MUNA, 7 Sep. 2021, www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhyk9rchC2c.
“i’m on fire, baby”: the purity, pain and sin of the female body in christina rossetti’s “goblin market” and lana del rey’s ultraviolence
Youth, beauty, sex, trauma, death. Each concept is imbued with individual memories and at the same time enmeshed in a particular cultural skeleton. In Victorian England, youth was innocence, beauty meant purity, trauma became poetry, death was impending and sex, when had by an unwedded woman, was the essence of immorality. “Goblin Market” (1862) by Christina Rossetti is often framed as a retelling of these Victorian conceptions – that childhood must be protected, the loss of chastity is the loss of beauty, pain unfolds elegiacally, death is an ever-looming threat and sex is the cause of a girl’s utter wreckage.
The poem when observed through the eyes of an adolescent girl – like the eyes through which the poem’s world is observed, Laura’s and Lizzie’s – appears as a twisted fairytale, a nightmarish presentation of forbidden pleasures, bodily decay and violent attempts at penetration. Until the story’s ending; when Lizzie prevails through the goblins’ terrorizing her body, provides the fruit juices which heal Laura and the two sisters lead blissful lives with children of their own; the poem is a nearly unbroken chain of tragedies befalling young women. Lana Del Rey’s Ultraviolence (2014) follows a similar structure, but without the redemption of the denouement.
Ultraviolence could be interpreted, identical to “Goblin Market”, as a sinister fairytale which explores the themes of youth, beauty, sex, trauma and death through the presence of pleasure, decay and violence, each of which are experienced by a young woman (the personae Del Rey inhabits in each song). Through the consideration of how the texts form their ‘fairytales’ and an examination of specific representations of youth, beauty, sex, trauma and death, conceptions of the “female body” present in the minds of each author and the cultural framework they wrote within, can be studied in relation to one another.
To juxtapose the established reading of how Rossetti’s text understands the themes at the centre of this analysis, Del Rey’s text conceives of adolescence (late youth) as early adulthood, beauty as glamorous or romantic tragedy, trauma as ordinary, death as desirable and sex as a tool to gain power, opportunity and love. Therefore, the folklore of Ultraviolence is vastly different than the folklore of “Goblin Market”. Rossetti’s work centres two hard-working maidens as the ‘princesses’ of the fairytale and goblin fruit-sellers as the villains, while in Del Rey’s work an alluring vixen is the ‘princess’ and the wealthy older man she is the mistress of is the villain.
In Rossetti’s fairytale one princess (Laura) falls victim to the temptation of the villains’ fruits, and after the overwhelming pleasure she experiences from them begins to grow lifeless. This is until the second princess (Lizzie), after resisting the fruits’ temptation and surviving the goblins’ tries to force the fruits into her, replenishes the first princess’ life force with the juices from the fruits she fought off. In Del Rey’s fairytale; the story formed by the narratives of the songs; the princess (herself, named Lana) is physically and emotionally abused by the aristocratic entertainment executive she is in a sexual relationship with for money and career opportunities. Though there is no resolution to the story, Lana’s using the older man to build an opulent life for herself could be read as its ‘fulfillment’. In each fairytale the princesses are both victims (Laura, Lizzie and Lana) and heroes (Lizzie and Lana), but the representations of youth, beauty, sex, trauma and death, and how these concepts involve and affect the (internal and external) bodies of Laura and Lizzie, and Lana, are dissimilar.
To examine these representations, I will briefly analyze one to two lines of poetry which best demonstrate each author’s conception of the concepts of youth, beauty, sex, trauma and death.
In “Goblin Basket” sex(ual activity) is presented as abnormal and painful, “Fruits which that unknown orchard bore; / She suck’d until her lips were sore (Rossetti)”. Eating the goblin’s fruit functions as a metaphor for engagement in sexual activity, and through the fruits’ foreignness and the physical harm they cause Laura, they are presented as unnatural and harmful. Just prior to her feasting on the fruits, Rossetti writes that “She dropp’d a tear more rare than pearl, (Rossetti)”. With sex presented as dangerous, Laura’s tear could be read as momentary fear. Symbolically, this tear could represent the loss of Laura’s pre-feasted self. The tear thus could represent the fear of innocence (not having feasted, not having known sex) lost too early.
The loss of Laura’s innocence after she eats the goblin’s fruits emphasizes the sacredness of female youthhood, that it should never become un-innocent. This importance of innocence in youth, relates to its importance in beauty. Laura and Lizzie are described as, “Like two blossoms on one stem, / Like two flakes of new-fall’n snow (Rossetti)”. Blossoms are beautiful and they are delicate, newly fallen snowflakes are beautiful and they are untouched; the beauty of these objects could be understood as interrelated with notions of their ‘purity’.
Purity as beauty is a thinking evident in what happens to Laura after she eats from the goblins (once she becomes un-innocent), “She dwindled, as the fair full moon doth turn / To swift decay and burn (Rossetti)”. Laura is no longer a ‘blossom’ or a ‘new-fall’n snow(flake)’, she has become ‘dwindled’. Laura has lost her purity, and the effects of this loss of purity are weighing on her. Because of her feasting she is ‘decay(ing) and ‘burn(ing)’ – her life has become ruinous. This state of life could be compared to experiencing trauma. Rossetti writes this state of life as how the “fair full moon doth turn”, presenting what could be ‘trauma’ as poetical. Death is presented in much the same way, with the death of Jeanie recounted as, “Then fell with the first snow, (Rossetti)”.
Jeanie’s ‘f(a)ll(ing)’ being associated with the ‘first snow’, imbues her death with the romantic connotations of the first snowfall of the year. Further, the connection of her fall to the first snow, connects it to cycles of nature, cycles which cannot be controlled and are ‘inevitable’ in that they cannot be prevented. Jeanie’s death is thus framed as inevitable, as an impending part of a cycle.
Due naturally in part to the approximate 150 years separating “Goblin Market” and Ultraviolence, Del Rey’s conceptions of youth, beauty, sex, trauma and death contrast strongly against Rossetti’s. Del Rey presents the morality of sex as, “I fucked my way up to the top / This is my show (Del Rey, “F****d My Way up to the Top” 1:40-1:45)”. ‘Fuck(ing)’ is not framed as a significant action as ‘eating the fruits’ are in Rosetti’s work; sexual activity is itself, meaningless, what is meaningful are the outcomes which can emerge after it has been done. Like sex is grounded in realism and banality in Ultraviolence, so too is trauma. In Del Ray’s work, existing in a state of pain caused by a traumatic experience is not ‘enough’ (painful enough, debilitating enough) to be remarked upon, let alone elegised. She writes, “He hit me and it felt like a kiss (Del Rey, “Ultraviolence” 0:40-0:45)”. The physical, emotional and psychological trauma of being ‘hit’ is not registered – it appears that Lana has naturalized (to the point of romanticization) being traumatized.
The naturalization of suffering is evident in how Del Rey represents death as well. If Rossetti conceives of death as impending, Del Rey conceives of it as welcomed. Describing the escalating violence of a relationship she writes, “Got your gun, I’ve got my dad / Is this happiness? (Del Rey, “Is This Happiness” 0:42-0:55)”. Though the ‘'Is this happiness?’ is likely a hypophora, that the threat of a gun being used against her by her partner is not framed as alarming, reveals that death is not a cause of concern. Another much greater difference from “Goblin Market”, is that female youthhood is presented in Ultraviolence not as innocence, but as a forbidden sensuality. When Del Rey sings, “I’m a sad girl / I’m a bad girl (Del Rey, “Sad Girl” 1:42-1:46)”, she evokes girlhood not to express notions of innocence but of eroticism. “Girl” is used over “woman”, which Lana is, to present the personae as submissive and delicate, but the context in which the term is introduced into is sexual. The purity of ‘girl’ is twisted to achieve erotic ends, Lana's being a ‘sad girl / bad girl’ is purposed with being seductive.
To complete the comparison of how Lana Del Rey and Christina Rossetti represent the female body's relationship to purity, pain and sin, it must be examined how Del Rey conceives of beauty. When retelling how Lana becomes representative of beauty, Del Rey confesses, “I keep my lips red / To seem like cherries in the spring (Del Rey, “Black Beauty” 2:07-2:15)”. Red lips are a symbol of temptation and danger as they are characteristic of the deadly ‘femme fatale’ from old Hollywood film noirs. In juxtaposition ‘cherries in the spring’ evoke the feeling or essence of freshness, sweetness and sentimentality. Through these two lines it could be argued that Del Rey harmonizes the binary oppositions at the heart of Rossetti’s text, as beauty as she conceives it is the synthesis of ‘cherries in spring’ and ‘red lips’; innocence and sex; youth and death; Laura and Lizzie and the goblins’ fruits.
Bibliography:
Del Rey, Lana. “Black Beauty.” Ultraviolence (Deluxe). Interscope Records, 2014. LP record.
Del Rey, Lana Del. “Is This Happiness.” Ultraviolence (Deluxe). Interscope Records, 2014. LP record.
Del Rey, Lana Del. “F****d My Way up to the Top.” Ultraviolence (Deluxe). Interscope Records, 2014. LP record.
Del Rey, Lana Del. “Sad Girl.” Ultraviolence (Deluxe). Interscope Records, 2014. LP record.
Del Rey, Lana Del. “Ultraviolence.” Ultraviolence (Deluxe). Interscope Records, 2014. LP record.
Rossetti, Christina. “Goblin Market.” 1862. Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44996/goblin-market. Accessed 15 Feb. 2022.
the kids aren't alright - they're outraged and exhausted: punk as a revolution, identity and movement as informed by the cultures of their birthplaces (the u.k. & u.s.)
In the wake of punk’s genesis, rock’ and roll’ had been slaughtered by record executives seeking imminent wealth, and suffocated, by shallow, artificial music formed from opportunistic aspirations; a tragically paradoxical condition, for a sound birthed out of gritty, unfeigned rawness. As the stark antithesis to such superficial inoffensiveness endorsed by the establishment, punk campaigned against the convoluted principles upheld by orthodox society, and championed the discarded concepts and convictions, conventionality disregarded as perverse or immoral.
Punk as a Revolution
In both the U.S. and U.K., punk arose amidst communities of youths entrenched in crippling poverty, who consequently, were systemically prohibited from pursuing an existence imbued, with self-appointed purpose and aspiration fulfillment or achievement. The music was a movement, which enabled the disadvantaged and disenfranchised to strive towards an accomplished yet tangible livelihood, while concomitantly, revolting against and condemning the societal structure which obstructed them from attaining such otherwise, through traditional means. Punk forged an opportunity for the working and lower classes to transcend the economic hierarchy through a profession that functioned equally, as a vessel of catharsis - a phenomenon akin, to the recognition and financial autonomy, viable for the blues’ musicians of the Mississippi Delta to achieve [in the 1950s], through their curation of rock.
In the image of the music’s initial burgeoning, punk returned rock to the people whose existence it was vital in sustaining; rightfully reclaiming the sound, as an empowering form for the pariahs of society - prophetically, those whom the machine exploits then neglects - to express their overwhelming pain, contempt and resentment.
Punk as an Identity
An overarchingly impactful deviation between punk in the U.S. and the U.K., was their individual echelons of influence and notoriety, with the former being concentrated and thus significant, to a certain, receptive demographic, and the latter, nationally recognized and widely renowned, but predominantly, adversely.
In Britain, punk was conceived amidst, and proliferated by, a working class whose plight was orchestrated, immediately, by the British government - the nation’s rampant unemployment, disparate, tumultuous economy, and elitist, hierarchical social structure - and therefore, it was overtly, political and denouncing of ruling authorities. While punk was assuredly, a movement belonging to the working class in the United States as well, the music was chiefly detached from distinctly, political matters - musicians opting instead, to favour themes of apathy, disdain and community, which conveyed implicit and independent, disregards for the reigning powers (and perhaps, a true disassociation from them).
Punk music emanating from the U.S. - overwhelmingly, New York City -, placed a precedence upon artistry and technicality: though the sound was intrinsically, inexpert and rudimentary, the American acts honoured instrumental competency and sonic cohesion, to such a calibre, that those devoid of adequate aptitude, were impeded from achieving success. Contrastingly, the British punk scene foremostly prioritized visual appearances and an unruly, outrageous aesthetic; since Malcom McLaren marshalled the Sex Pistols from patrons whom idolized his counterculture boutique, SEX, and, embodied, the disorderly image he witnessed at CBGBs - fashion and music were fundamentally intertwined in the U.K. (with the latter’s capacity, often underdeveloped).
A fascinating dichotomy between punk in the U.S., and Britain’s adoption of the sociocultural phenomenon, was their juxtaposing relationships with progressive convictions amidst a supposedly, egalitarian subculture, and moral ethicality, in regards to intentionally offensive and destructive (substantially violent) behaviours. U.K. punk was evidently progressive, with abundant bands championing liberalist values like feminism and anti-racism, but equally, palpably offensive, with fashion statements purposely intended to enrage (ie. swastikas featuring prominently); U.S. punk was ubiquitously not the former - as any artist deviating from the straight, white, male identity received inordinate harassment, nor, arguably the latter - as most musicians solely sought to perform their art.
Though physical aggression and volatility prevailed as the core forms of purging prodigious, internal suffering in both nations’ punk communities, youths in Britain primarily exacted this deplorable practice upon symbols of authority, such as police and antagonizing instigators, while in America, punks would subject one another to each’s independent, rage and brutal wrath.
There are a coalition of artists, whose prodigious valour, in establishing a presence, in both the music and movement of punk, amidst an overwhelmingly homogenous and notoriously, exclusive subculture, should have been as commemorated in the culture, as its lauded symbols. The Magic Tramps were a primary pioneer of CBGBs, and portrayed a camp aesthetic reflective of the burgeoning, New York City LGBTQ+ scene (distinctly, of the Theatre of the Ridiculous), while Jayne (then, Wayne) County, a drag queen, transwoman, and trailblazer in the aforementioned, queer scene, founded the enormously influential proto-punk band, Queen Elizabeth. Each either lead by or comprised of, incredibly dauntless young women and, providing the necessary, female and feminist representation within punk: X Ray Spex demonstrated proto-grrrl outrage and aggression; the Slits, shocking, unrestricted self-expression; the Runaways, anthemic, anti-misogynist assertiveness; and Siouxsie and the Banshees, inspirited empowerment for outcasts.
Punk as a Movement
(Overarchingly) punk music’s ineptitude at obtaining an omnipresent following for the revolution, was organically, the consequence of its aberrantly censorious message delivered through derisive prose, as well as its accompanying, abrasive, maladroit sound. Punk radically, was a subculture - its creed, controversial and innately unorthodox, whether lambasting a lionized government or authority, or preaching the merits of a perspective and existence, diametrically deviated from conventional society’s. The movement was connately, rejecting of the norm’s established social order and therefore, its existence was unequivocally, asynchronous to, and in opposition with, mass consumption and support.
Punk and universal popularity and resonance, were immanently antithetical, as the music and its following, encompassed principles and purposes, neglected by, and disenfranchised from, the complacent, societal majority; championing by 'main' society, would have been a precise representation of exactly what punk combatted against. In the occurrence punk had accomplished achieving success and acclaim amongst a broad circumference of society: its representation of the minority’s disaffection with, and abandonment of, such an aforementioned society, would have been inherently, contentious, and arguably, its existence, erroneous.
Resources:
Brown, G., Prettyman, J., & Spheeris, P. (Producers), & Spheeris, P. (Director). (1981). The decline of Western civilization [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.primevideo.com/detail/0R9WKB4BFVB3AYYXADWJS31UV7/ref=atv_wl_hom_c_unkc_1_1
Christley, E. (2019, April 24). The origins and legacy of punk rock. Medium. https://emmaechristley.medium.com/the-origins-and-legacy-of-punk-rock-87bd75b6570d
Dynner, S., & Traina, T. (Producers), & Dynner, S. (Director). (2006). Punk’s not dead [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.primevideo.com/detail/0LCSGDGSAMMYW46MBGM6HQJ8QV/ref=atv_hm_hom_1_c_W9MB60_2_1
Forcade, T., & Kowalski, L. (Producers), & Kowalski, L. (Director). (1980). D.O.A.: a rite of passage [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.primevideo.com/detail/0Q7J6FJMQL2S57IHV080OWXA80/ref=atv_wl_hom_c_unkc_1_7
Hadju, D. and Oberlin, K. (2019, August 12). An essential primer on punk’s feminist history. The Nation. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/vivian-goldman-revenge-of-the-she-punks-book-review/
Johnstone, R., & O’Dell, T. (Producers), & O’Dell, T. (Director). (2011). Punk revolution NYC: The Velvet Underground, the New York Dolls and the CBGBs set [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.primevideo.com/detail/0JTDISFBFCTJAIV4WW9E926YH4/ref=atv_wl_hom_c_unkc_1_6
Lemieux, C. & O’Leary, L. (Hosts). (2020, October 12). Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth remain in love (No. 140) [Audio podcast episode]. In Muses. Pantheon. https://musespod.com/episode-140-chris-frantz-and-tina-weymouth-remain-in-love/
Lemieux, C. & O’Leary, L. (Hosts). (2020, September 17). Debbie Harry (No. 138) [Audio podcast episode]. In Muses. Pantheon. https://musespod.com/episode-138-debbie-harry/
Lemieux, C. & O’Leary, L. (Hosts). (2018, December 13). Poison Ivy and Lux Interior: the story of the Cramps (No. 95) [Audio podcast episode]. In Muses. Pantheon. https://musespod.com/ep-95-poison-ivy-and-lux-interior-the-story-of-the-cramps/
Lemieux, C. & O’Leary, L. (Hosts). (2019, May 2). Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen (No. 105) [Audio podcast episode]. In Muses. Pantheon. https://musespod.com/ep-105-sid-vicious-and-nancy-spungen/
Mörat. (2021, April 26). The story of British punk in 23 songs. Kerrang. https://www.kerrang.com/features/the-story-of-british-punk-in-23-songs/
Steinfeld, D. (2015, February 12). Our hole in the wall: an oral history of the CBGB scene. Medium. https://medium.com/cuepoint/our-hole-in-the-wall-an-oral-history-of-the-cbgb-scene-33dc69a1f7c8
there is no 'right way' to protest an oppressive power: how artists of the 1970s rebelled against the government, and the diversity in music that then emerged
In a sole, succinct summation - the 1970s were a microcosm of extremes. Demystified and detached from the idyllic ignorance of conventionality and subordination from a then-antiquated era, but impatiently unaware of the respected diversity, unchallenged civil autonomy and unprecedented social progression, intrinsic to the modern day; voices were compelled to riot, souls to escape, and minds to ruminate, to foster the semblance of identity necessary, for surviving the ambiguous haze of the new unknown.
The United States, now established as a core character in the global consciousness, became increasingly, inflexibly dichotomized between the morally ethical liberalists protesting against, the excessive national and global violence, and for, the liberation of disenfranchised minorities, and, the consequently birthed, self-righteous, prejudicial conservatives who advocated the former injustices, and opposed, the latter social rights fight. Societal advancement and the rejection of bigoted ideals and complacent compliance had not become as ubiquitous as prophesized by the culmination of the 1960s. Indeed, the Women’s Rights and Environmental movements achieved legal and political rectification, and the conflicts against, the Vietnam War and for, LGBTQ+ rights, received massive vocal support and the people’s endorsement. However, concurrently, a formidable sector of the American populace (the ‘silent majority’), sought representation, in the regressive, traditionalism of the newly instated Richard Nixon, and reprieve, in his dissolution of the effective egalitarian initiatives towards a ‘Great Society’ and nationalism, justifying the U.S.’ purposeless, persistent involvement in Indochina.
The promising idealism of a just and harmonious social structure, proposed and laboured towards by the honorable nonconformists of the Bohemian counterculture, experienced a similarly threatening obstruction in the United Kingdom - the United States’ peacefully riotous European contemporary. Arising in the early 1970s, occurring as a systematic consequence of the Conservative Party (Britain’s chief political traditionalists)’s negligent and classist economic rulings, the nation’s working class; a historically exploited people for the betterment of its bourgeoise; were subject, to deficient remuneration and inadequate union representation: factors, which contributed to their greater suppression. (Largely) as an enraged act of defiance against such, and the prevailing established order of elitism, heavy metal was formed - as pioneered by perspicacious proletariat rebels, Black Sabbath. Though revolting a distinctly different harmful government, and for primarily artistic and theatrical purposes: Alice Cooper’s adaptation of heavy metal’s sound, ethos and philosophy, existed in direct opposition to, and intentionally provoked the often feigned or artificial puritanism of, Nixon and the Republican party’s purported belief system and “values”.
While perhaps reaching an apex in the latter half of the 1960s, political activism endured as a prominent motivation for a plethora of rock music in the burgeoning and proliferation of the 1970s, acting almost, as an underlying interconnection between artists of varying decibels, and diverse approaches and statements. Arguably the most revolutionary, John Lennon immersed himself in the antiwar and antigovernment movements throughout the 1970s with the aid of American and British New Left leaders, and utilized music - amongst numerous, pivotal demonstrations (notably, an intervened; personally, by Nixon; tour, incentivizing liberal youths to vote) - to deliver the philosophies of the uprising. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, conveyed unapologetically objecting criticism of the Republican administration and its incitement of brutalizing police forces; mirroring Lennon with aural intensities encompassing both hard and soft extremes, and, their investment in, and civil contributions to, the counterculture’s fight against the establishment.
Contrasting striking visceral outrage and outright insurrection as the resistance against a remorselessly devastating social order, but an equally impactful form of disobedience: reflective retrospection and thoroughly, scrutinizing criticism leveraged, at denouncing, disparaging and discrediting the corrupt and damaging system, prevailed, in the early 1970s. Through eloquent, painterly prose, Joni Mitchell championed unmitigatedly, environmentalist, anti capitalist and nonconformist principles, while consciously bolstering women's presence and the female voice in political revolution, rock music and broadly, society and literature. Though approaching societal impropriety abstractly, and veiling his discontentment through allegories, metaphors and symbolism: Leonard Cohen constructed unflinchingly poignant commentary, recounting sombrely, the seeming despondency and futility of belonging to the supporters of progressive change during that period in history.
There are innumerable means of exhibiting disillusionment with an omnipotent authoritative body, and not all are inherently involved with forthrightly contesting or criticizing it, though it would appear that such an intrinsic clause, be a necessary aspect in communicating dissension. When confronted with the enduring, calamitous conditions of the oppressive Nixon administration, purely coping was understandably, the primary aspiration of certain musicians and listeners, and thus, soft rock - which is comprised foremostly, of light and optimistic, if bittersweet, material - was prominent. Adopting the calm, comforting sound were predominantly artists who, independent of extensive political grievances, withstood immense sufferings in the private, personal sphere: Carly Simon was afflicted with a traumatic childhood, James Taylor, debilitating depression and anxiety, and Jackson Browne, his wife’s suicide by overdose. Embracing tender, soothing sounds and gentle, careful messages (seldom wholly positive nor uplifting, but, reliably sympathetic and reposeful), offered a solace for the musicians while creating, and the audiences, when absorbing. Temporarily, soft rock alleviated the fears, tragedies and dangers, society and individual human experiences were fraught with.
Delving further into the aforementioned approach to rejecting, and disassociating from, the upsetting and depressing societal environment, orchestrated by the regressive, destructive political powers: escapism emerged, as an enticing alternative to the undesirable bleakness of reality. The vibrant, glimmering realm of glam-rock, provided an entrancingly fantastical reprieve for those who had become disenfranchised by Conservative policies, or alienated from the majority, due to traditionalist opinions and beliefs. The music’s ethos was boundless creative expression, and its philosophy, acceptance. As a community detached from ‘the norms’ of the 1970s, experimentation, and a deviation from expectations, were encouraged, as embodied unequivocally, in the David Bowie character of ‘Ziggy Stardust’. Stardust’s unprecedented, omnisexual, genderqueer identity, and opulent, excessive hedonism and eroticism, intimidated every conceivable prudent principle, and granted an empathetic voice to equality advocates, and marginalized peoples themselves. Glam-rock additionally - à la Bowie and T. Rex - introduced androgyny, feminine gender expression and non-traditional gender roles for both men and women, to a broader, less niche audience in yet another feat, of rock music’s trailblazing journey towards the progressive, nonconformist future.
My sources on the history of the 1970s:
https://www.americanheritage.com/how-seventies-changed-america
https://www.history.com/topics/1970s/1970s-1
on the history of heavy metal:
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17703483
https://journals.openedition.org/rfcb/1662
https://www.loudersound.com/features/metal-has-always-been-political-deal-with-it
on the history of heavy protest music:
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/12/john-lennon-beatles-revolution-peace
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2010/may/06/ohio-neil-young-kent-state-shootings
on the history of soft protest music:
https://www.theringer.com/music/2017/10/16/16476254/joni-mitchell-pop-music-canon
on the history of soft rock:
https://musespod.com/ep-118-carly-simon-boys-in-the-trees-a-memoir/
on the history of glam rock:
https://www.udiscovermusic.com/in-depth-features/how-glam-rock-changed-world/
psychedelic rock - both a natural social evolution and an unprecedented cultural revolution: an analysis of the music's individual identity and its connections to the origins of rock' n' roll
Erupting unapologetically from the midst of the 1960s in the United States and Britain alike, was a perplexing sound whose aural foreignness, mystified the common listener, unconcerned with the devastation of the Vietnam War and selfish capitalist monoliths, and equally unaware, of the excitement of mind-altering drugs and the youthful hippie counterculture. For those more chicly attuned to the idealist, experimental, and anti-establishment atmosphere flourishing across the U.S.’ West Coast and London in the UK, either, as an admiring observer or eager participant; psychedelic rock was the anthem of their politics, dogma of their philosophies, and soundtrack of their elevated mental states.
Massive swathes of curious, indomitable instrumentation, looped crushingly around one another before isolating for halted, hypnotizing periods - the instruments involved, immersed amidst a blanket of disassociating sonic effects like distortion, reverb, and reversed, delayed or shifting phasing, or, often arriving from an unfamiliar, foreign land such as the sitar, tambura or tabla. The empire of psychedelia engulfed and incorporated, a cosmos of unorthodox techniques and unearthed traditions: disjunctive song structures with key and time signature changes and modal melodies; futuristic instruments like the electric organ, harpsichord, Mellotron and synthesizer; uncharted beat (encompassing) and timing (5/4, disrupted) compositions. Musicians from the West, sought and traversed the East’s (primarily India’s) aural customs, forging novel sounds which intertwined the diverse cultural identities of distinct global peoples; a similar though less natural, intrinsic origin, to the rhythm and blues pioneered by black American individuals, which integrated or emerged from, the beats and patterns of traditional music birthed, in regions of Africa.
While perhaps immediately detached from the forms of rock initially curated in the allegorical heart of the United States; psychedelia embraced and optimized, technological advancements that transformed the conventions of its sound, its production and its distribution, akin, to the original rock and roll’s adoption of the progressions of its era. Psychedelic rock centralized the use of feedback and fuzzboxes, as early rock had electricity and amplifiers; maximized electronic and sound effects in the studio, as its prime predecessor did with saturation and echo; employed the album-oriented-rock format, as it did the 33-and-45-rpm-record format; and utilized for communication, new-era FM radio stations as it had, integrated and top-40 radio stations.
Psychedelic rock - dichotomized into the U.S.’ ‘acid rock’, and the U.K.’s ‘British psychedelia’ -, progressed the art of intellectual, poetic prose as lyrics (developed thus far, by folk-rock and traditional folk); founding an abstract, opaque approach to language and one uniquely, unrestrained and free-form to verse and structure. Though equally surreal, whimsical and esoteric to illustrate or stimulate the sensation of a chemically elevated headspace and reality; British psychedelia delved more profoundly into cerebral material - contemplating religion, philosophy, psychology, fine art, fantasy and fiction, through literary and narrative storytelling often, while evoking themes of childhood and nostalgia (as inspired, by Lewis Carroll). Acid rock; sonically vigorous and (comparatively) aggressive; primarily presented a vividly visual, stream-of-consciousness (à la Ken Kesey) form of prose: embodying, contrastingly, both an enchanting - almost spiritual - sense of imaginative idealism (abundant in symbolism), and, a raw, irrepressible demonstration of emotion, equality advocacy and political criticism.
The psychedelic rock concocted midst the United States - particularly, across its West Coast -, was analogous in nature to the primary rock burgeoning, from its’ anatomical core in the Mississippi Delta (and, to the slight south) approximately a decade prior, with musicians reciting events which occurred in their everyday lives, and discussing issues or matters which frequently impacted them - contemporary themes of lucidness, revolution and mysticism, simply replacing romance, heartbreak and labour.
Perhaps the most conspicuous, palpable factor which dissociates psychedelia from its logistically similar compatriot, original rock and roll, is the antitheticality of their respective, sociocultural environments and, societies’ perceptions and associations of ‘rock music’; as epitomized, by the massively contrasting intentions behind the performance, of each of the individual ‘genres’. Rock, as an independent entity, was a wholly incipient phenomenon in the 1950s and early 60s whose existence foremostly, was condemned by the broader society and therefore, to preserve its fledgling existence and sustain the precarious careers of its inaugural forebearers; live enactments of the music were necessitated to be neat, inscrutable and ‘safe’, with musicians appearing on sanitized bandstands and vigilant, organized, multi-billed events. In the era of psychedelic rock’s conception and ascension, a formidable, alternative subdivision of the population had established and eagerly sought curious, novel sounds and musical experiences; thereby, musicians were enabled to develop and refine an unprecedentedly experimental ethos and atmosphere surrounding their visual performances, with their revolutionary adaptations of the practice, precisely attuned, and attuning, to their supporters.
To blatantly profess the perspective explicated thus far; psychedelic rock is definitively a descendant of fundamental rock and roll, regardless, of the expansive diversification and prodigious deviation it undertook, in its transcendent, otherworldly sound, mystifyingly avant-garde meaning, and hypnotizing, unforeseen spectacles. As catalysed by this experimentation, psychedelia serves as the integral, prophetic connection between the time-endured, blues-oriented rock, and, a plethora of its successive advancements most evidently, progressive rock, whose anatomy originates from the Moody Blues, Love, Jethro Tull, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Yes and King Crimson, with the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, largely credited as the genre’s earliest pioneer. The momentous impact of psychedelic rock on the historical trajectory of music, is indispensable, with its dauntlessness, intrepidity and virtuosity, immortalizing the framework upon which initially, psychedelia acts, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, T. Rex and David Bowie, would all individually transform the identity of rock and roll, further away from its seemingly foreign, distant beginnings.
My sources on psychedelic rock:
https://www.britannica.com/art/psychedelic-rock
https://daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/2013/06/the-birth-of-psychedelic-london
https://www.masterclass.com/articles/psychedelic-rock-explained
https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Psychedelic_rock
https://www.udiscovermusic.com/in-depth-features/so-what-is-psychedelic-rock/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychedelic_rock
on the foundations of rock and roll:
https://aaep1600.osu.edu/book/06_Intro.php
https://brianjump.net/2020/07/18/rhythm-and-blues-and-rock-n-roll/
https://www.rollingstone.com/feature/the-50s-a-decade-of-music-that-changed-the-world-229924/