Dear Evelyn:
I hear your central point, and share the hope of your last paragraph. But this many years on, I’m feeling less idealistic. I’m pessimistic that the systems are in place for there to be a “music” that doesn’t just mean “male music,” or “male rock”–and I feel this way despite the giddily brilliant work of the artists we’re discussing. I have to admit that there’s a side of me that wants women artists to come in and fight. We forget that the artists who created the rock paradigms we still operate under didn’t have a blueprint. They worked on instinct in an unfamiliar world. No one understood what it meant to be Bob Dylan, or the Rolling Stones, at the time. So on one level I very much want to see the theory, the battle, and the result, despite how hard it might be on individual people–or how impossible. Johnny Rotten was impossible, too.
Why do we talk about female rockers? To some extent, I would argue, there are legitimate and novel demands in the genre that make it worth singling out. “Black rock” has its prism, too–and there, I think, we’ve seen an example of the scenario I’m talking about. To me, Public Enemy–with that “undeniable artistic and attitudinal authority” I talked about yesterday–was a good hip-hop group but a great rock band, the first one, I would argue, you could direct a disinterested observer to say, “Look, there, a group as powerful as the Sex Pistols: The members are all black, and they don’t even have a fucking drummer.” P.E. was important because they burst the peculiar bonds that had previously limited the black role in pop music. Women, like blacks, have traditionally occupied delineated roles in the music. One of these is female song interpreter, like Linda Ronstadt or, better, Linda Thompson. There is no real male parallel for this; since the rockist imperative of the singer-songwriter was created, with the exception of oddities like Luther Vandross and this or that songwriting star who had a parallel career as a song interpreter (Rod Stewart, Bryan Ferry), there have been no major male rock figures whom we revere simply for their voices. Sometimes, male song interpreters become subsumed in bands with another member who writes the songs. But that’s just an example of how men can be forced to deal with the constraints of rockism as well.
To me, the political offensiveness of talking about the genre of “female rockers” is less problematic that its effects on the lives of the actual artists involved. Unquestionably, an artist should be able to perform, record, have a career, and, most important, make money without being forced to even discuss her gender, much less be taunted about whether she’s going to be the female Mick Jagger. As a critic, that’s what I try to remember. The distinction I try to make is whether the artist involved seems to care at all to have her work viewed on a heroic level. That’s why the word ambition occurred so many times in my first note to you. Of the people we’re talking about, I think Lucinda Williams is the most profoundly ambivalent, both about fame and about her place in a pantheonic firmament. If any of the acts we’re talking about deserves to be let alone on this count, she does.
Yet I also recall that controversial profile of her in the New York Times Magazine a few years ago. Its been a while since I read it, but I recall it as a perhaps too-harshly written portrait of a control freak whose obsessiveness was setting her much-anticipated new record back by years. Now, it’s true that Williams’ male counterpart, of course, would be hailed for his perfectionism and dedication to craft–if, indeed, the process is even commented upon, the years-long slough of self-indulgence being the recording procedure of choice for most male rock bands these days. That said, it’s hard to feel sorry for Williams. Think of the millions of singers who’d love to have a New York Times article whose thesis was “Where the heck is your next record?” Artists have to take the good with the bad. Great ones are sometimes the embodiment of certain hopes and dreams of the members of their audience, and society will take an interest in them, even if it makes them uncomfortable.
If they don’t like it, they should stay in the garage. And it shouldn’t take more than a year or so to make a damn country record.
Let me address a few of the points you make. I don’t think Lauryn Hill at the Grammys is indicative of anything. The Grammys, while not corrupt, are a conservative, backward-looking affair. Hill should be wary about what approbation from that quarter means.
Please don’t think I was discounting Chrissie Hynde; I was going out of my way to point to her as the incontrovertible avatar of the sort of star I was talking about. She did play it tough; she grew up in Ohio and went to England, hung out with the loutish group that would become the Sex Pistols, and reinvented herself as a rock star. She did confront the music on its own terms.
Now, I tried to choose my words carefully when defining what it meant to be Mick Jagger. I don’t even like Mick Jagger. To me he’s the epitome of the flaccid, corrupt star. But at one time he was “an undeniable star with undeniable artistic and attitudinal authority, confronting the moral complexities of the day and of [his] position.” An “undeniable star” is just that. Joni Mitchell is an amazing person, but she’s not larger than life, and she never consistently plugged into the coalescing pop roar of her time. You can say, I guess, that, Well, the arenas where the dark rituals of the Stones 1972 tour took place are by definition male–and thereby define the band out of its canon-busting, genre-defining role. But then does that mean Mitchell’s smattering of top 40 hits and affirming, overly solemn concerts are female? I don’t think so. Sure Jagger was canny, but I don’t think anyone would argue that the Stones weren’t fundamentally at the head of a cultural change at the time. I think that Jagger has a male presence, and the Stones helped define the masculine, rockist imperative, but you don’t have to be masculine to tap into the pop psyche and change the world. Much of Mitchell’s ‘70s work is persuasive to this day, but she left much fainter footsteps. Franklin I think is pretty unquestionably the preeminent female rock artist, this despite the fact that she didn’t write songs. But that does make it difficult to attribute “undeniable artistic and attitudinal authority” to her. And Hynde is a formidable figure but, again, somehow not larger than life. And two pretty good albums and a handful of interesting singles is not a pantheonic career. The Rolling Stones, the Beatles, and Bob Dylan each put out two pretty good albums and a handful of great singles a year for a significant chunk of the 1960s.
Now, as I understand what you wrote, because I don’t think Chrissie Hynde is as important a rock star as Bob Dylan I’m just a “bad boy who wants to sing about fucking black women.” I thought at first this was offensive, but now I think it’s just incoherent. What you call “totemization” is just critical assessment. What’s wrong with that? It has nothing to do with gender.
Indeed, your citations of the lyrics from Hill and Jagger just prove my point. Surely you’d agree that “I can’t get no satisfaction” is one of the most hallucinatory, exhilarating moments of great pop art in the 20th century, possibly the greatest. (What might compete? “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!”? “She loves you, yeah yeah yeah”? “I saw the best minds of my generation … “?) Who had said anything like that in that context before? Who else could have delivered the line–and the rest of the song–with such a combination of need, defiance, arrogance, insolence, and mischievousness? And one more thing: Mick Jagger didn’t care what you thought of him, his song, or what he was saying.
The bit of doggerel from Hill you quoted, by contrast, is clichéd, self-righteous, unoriginal, politically confused, and an insult to her audience’s intelligence. She actually makes interesting and sophisticated points on her records. Her complex take on stardom and betrayal and jealously in “Lost Ones,” for example, avoids sounding unkind or arrogant through a classic rockist move–delaying the (killer) chorus for a good two minutes. When it finally hits, and the built-up melodic tension of the song is released, she at once silences and proves her point. But on too much of the rest of the record Hill is mouthing platitudes, too many of them with religious overtones. You’re giving her points for being nice, for saying something we can all presumably rally behind. I suppose I’m not taking points away from Jagger for not being nice.
And finally, no, let’s do talk about rock. Rock is what its audience says it is. How can Lucinda Williams not be rock when 500 rock critics just voted (in the Village Voice) that she’d just put out the best record of the year?
As for Sleater-Kinney, I don’t think their new album is the breakthrough I was looking for. What do you think of it?
Bill
