The Music Club

Mick Is the Female Mick

Dear Bill,

There are genres of books, film, and even a whole television channel (Lifetime) that are widely accepted as “women’s”: Usually they’re romances, or dramas about family issues, made for, about, but not necessarily by women. But the whole concept of women’s music is much more trouble- and cumbersome. There is womyn’s or wimmin’s music: the folky, soft-pop, world-music-tinged stuff that dominates the main stages at female-only festivals, a virtually ignored, two-decades-old fringe/ghetto phenomenon until the Lilith Fair turned it into a pop commodity–minus the overt lesbianism and other political isms. None of the artists we’re talking about play that at all, thank whatever.

I think it’s so much more dangerous to turn gender into a genre with music because it’s meant to be a universal language. You’re implicitly cutting out half the audience when you call someone a female artist; we never limit men that way; no one ever writes articles about male guitarists. That’s why even Celine Dion finds a political bone in her bony body when asked about the tired refrain of “women in pop.”

And yet I do have a particular interest in female musicians–and writers, and painters, etc. That’s largely because I’m a female, but I certainly know many men who share my enthusiasm. And I do think that despite a decade of hype about the subject, we’re at an epochal moment, when women are dominating music in such a myriad fashion, as artists and consumers, that it’s impossible to lump them together in any way except as a major market force–hallelujah! After much cynicism about the matter, despite the way many artists have incorporated sexism and looks-ism to get over, despite a continuing raft of injustices and power imbalances, I no longer feel as if we’re moving one step forward and two steps back–not after Lauryn Hill at the Grammys, not with a new Sleater-Kinney record in my hands, not with Missy Elliott living large all over my radio. After suffering through the backlash ‘80s, after watching riot grrrls and Queen Latifah and Babes in Toyland get shafted in the early ‘90s, it would be churlish of me not to acknowledge that there’s been a major breakthrough when a country singer can dress and rock it like Nine Inch Nails on the Grammys, when Blondie’s back, when Lucinda Williams tops critics’ polls (even when Lauryn should have). Perhaps because it was suppressed so long, and therefore has such pent-up power that it’s knocked men off the block, music by women is probably at the highest commercial and artistic peak it’s ever been at. And in two years, or five years, or ten years, this could become such a status quo position that it will no longer seem remarkable–worth remarking on. And then maybe people will start writing about male guitarists.

But we’re not there yet, as some of the things you say, Bill, make clear. For one, I won’t even accept the terms of the argument regarding a “female Mick Jagger.” First of all, Mick is the female Mick Jagger. Second of all, he was the male Tina Turner (she taught him his moves on a European tour they shared), just as Elvis was the male Big Mama Thornton, and Robert Plant was the male Billie Holiday. Critics refuse to grant women genre-defining, canon-making power for reasons that I can only understand as chauvinism, and having robbed them of it, then say they never can or will have it. Men dominate rock because men define rock as male. When a woman rocks, she is discounted as male-identified, tomboy, maybe even, god forbid, gay; you discount Chrissie Hynde as mimicking men, ignoring her eyeliner, her songs about breasts and motherhood, like saying it’s unladylike to climb trees. I certainly don’t see how you can call Jagger, Dylan, Cobain, etc., “an undeniable star with undeniable artistic and attitudinal authority, confronting the moral complexities of the day and of [his] position,” and say Joni Mitchell, Aretha Franklin, and Chrissie Hynde aren’t. That’s not based on the music; it’s not even reflective of their sales and abiding audience appeal; the only thing it’s based on is totemization by male critics who want to be bad boys and sing about fucking black women, and thus live vicariously through Mick, but can’t identify with the black woman herself. Bill, for a longer take on this issue, you should read Barbara O’Dair’s essay in Stars Don’t Stand Still in the Sky: Music and Myth. I’ll have the publisher send you a copy if you don’t have it.

I mean, I don’t understand how in one byte you can criticize an artist who wrote “Get yours in this capitalistic system / So many caught or got bought you can’t list them / How you gonna idolize the missing? / To survive is to stay alive in the face of opposition / Even when they comin’ gunnin’ / I stand position / L’s known the mission since conception / Let’s free the people from deception / If you looking for the answers / Then you gotta ask the questions / And when I let go, my voice echoes through the ghetto / Sick of men trying to pull strings like Geppetto / Why black people always be the ones to settle / March through these streets like Soweto” for her lack of lyrical sophisitication and then sing the praises of the author of “I can’t get no satisfaction, hey hey hey, that’s what I say.” Lauryn Hill sings about love, parenting, artistic integrity, hometown roots–women’s issues, yes, only because women are part of the universe. What, is singing about being a stalker, rapist, and misogynist the only way to be an undeniable star?

Bill, you identify your myopia correctly as rockism–male rockism, to be precise. That’s why I think we should remove the term and rubric of rock from the debate–it really doesn’t fit Lauryn and Lucinda anyway. Let’s be postrock, and talk about music–not “women’s music,” but the ways in which a growing number of diverse artists are using music to express themselves, maybe in ways women have never been able to express themselves before.

Which leads me to Sleater-Kinney, next time.

P.S. I love your take on Car Wheels on a Gravel Road.