Lady Gaga Does Drag at VMAs

I would be remiss if I didn't write at least something about Lady Gaga's -- I mean Jo Calderone's -- performance at the VMA's Sunday. Granted, I am not MTV's target audience, and haven't been in some time, but I did catch Gaga qua Jo Calderone opening the show, and since I fairly recently wrote a post about drag kings, it was inevitable that'd I'd, at least, mention Lady Gaga's performance. 

First off, let me say that I love that she plays it "ugly," Most of the time, female drag, especially done by pop stars, means sexy woman in a suit. Not that there's anything inherently wrong with that, but it isn't particularly subversive either. I mean, part of pop stars job description is to be sexy. Gaga's vaguely brutish, slouching, scratching, spitting male alter-go, Jo, is downright unattractive, grotesque even. Original? Er, no. Nuanced? Not really. In fact, relying on a working-class, greaser trope was pretty grating (and frankly, this was a little weird ), but I have to hand it to her for messing with gender roles on prime time TV.

Related:
Gaga Queers Up MTV VMAs with Drag Performance Art (Autostraddle)
Joe Calderone: VMA's Savior Or A Tired Old Trope? (Queerty)
Did Lady Gaga Jump The Shark? (Gawker)

Rewind: Sugar - Copper Blue

Though I rarely listen to Copper Blue anymore, the image of Bob Mould filliping polaroids at the end of Sugar's video for "If I Can't Change Your Mind" -- the album de facto "hit singe" -- remains permanently etched in my brain. I played the other day, trying to force a Proustian moment that never really came, but overall, it's held up surprisingly well (despite the characteristic flaw of a lot of early 90s albums having the vocals buried deep in the mix). It was a pure pop record that the punk kids liked, but despite his hardcore Husker Du days, Mould was a popster at heart. A few years after Copper Blue's releases, Bob Mould was officially outed -- or outed himself -- in a Spin article written by writer and Husker Du superfan, Dennis Copper. Looking back, it's easy to forget how few performers and songwriters were openly gay, especially in the hyper-masculine would of punk and indie. Mould talks about it in his recently published memoir:

I knew what was about to happen. This was to be the "Bob is gay" story, and I could do this the easy way or the hard way. I wasn't thrilled about it for a number of reasons, beyond personal ones. My first concerns were that this news would make it tough for my family and that my fans and peers would recontextualize everything I had done with my work. I also knew that the press was always going to write whatever the were going to write. I could try to steer the story the way I wanted it to read, but ultimately editorial always wins out. It's the business.

I like that he says that one of his biggest concerns was that his fans and peers would now have to "recontextualize" his body of work. It's no secret that indie and punk rock is a huge boy's club -- nay, a huge straight boy's club -- and one not immune homophobia (though Mould himself maintains that the hardcore scene was no more homophobic than any other), some of it overt, like the lyrics to a few Descendents songs, and a lot the harder-to-prove covert kind.

On Derailing, Calling-Out, and Other Obstacles in Modern Communication

I really enjoyed, and largely agree with, Kristen's post on gratitude, but what went on in the comments section is a perfect example of why I tend to cling to the margins of the feminist/SJ blogosphere and rarely participate.

I suppose it's hypocritical to take my aggressions out on my own blog, rather than comment on the original post, which has nothing to do with me, but I find it's much easier to craft a response with the breathing space my own site offers me -- rather than dashing off something I'll probably regret later -- and remain far from the fray. I'm willing to take that chance.

What I object to is the argument that this shouldn't have been Kristen's post to write. Being in a place of relative power and privilege, she should have checked herself before using someone else's experience to illustrate her point, which in theory, this is completely valid. But I think the problem comes with trying to apply it in life, as nothing happens in a bubble. She ran it by the person in question, who has no interest in blogging, and was given permission to use her experience in her post. No one was silenced. It's unfortunate that happened, because what could have been a great discussion about gratitude and whether it's "owed" or not, was momentarily steered off track.

I hate singling Feministe out, because it is one of the few big sites I feel comfortable commenting, but I see this frequently on blogs with a large and varied commentariat. I think what happens is people get the theory without the real world application. Real life is thornier than a blog's comments, but it makes trying to have a conversation frustrating as hell, and sometimes -- nay, most of the time -- the only place where a lot of us can talk about issues of race, gender and class is online.

Earworm of the Day: Lucinda Williams - Copenhagen

I wasn't entirely fair when I reviewed Blessed when it was released back in the spring. It's low-key charm actually does reveal itself through multiple listens, which sounds like a complete rock writer cliche, but it happens to be true this time. "Copenhagen," Lu's first official video, a tribute to her long-time manager who died unexpectedly in 2007, as directed by Dave Willis, co-creator of Cartoon Network's Squidbillies:

"We had that night off so we were getting ready to go out and get some dinner and we walked down from the hotel to this little place and the snow was coming down," she says. "It was all very literal of the song. It’s the combination of the news of his death and being so far away over there." (source)

What if I don't want to reclaim my sluthood?

I've more than thirty years old, and I still don't know what that really means.

A few months back, someone left a message on my Tumblr dash that read, "Every women should own 'slut clothes' and wear them once and a while."

I thought long and hard about what that meant. The hyper-sexual, hyper-feminized image of a 'slut attire' -- short skirt, heels, lots of make-up -- I'm assuming this is what she meant, and I certainly don't own anything resembling slut clothes. I've already written once about my reluctance to embrace the whole "reclaiming slut" meme, but it goes a little deeper than that.  I never thought of myself as that "sexy" girl, even when I was young. I was too busy being "cool," which presents its own set of problems, but slut is too loaded a word for some women, and just not an option for others. (Unless you plan on expanding the definition of slut to include women who don't express themselves in stereotypically feminine ways -- and frankly, I don't see anyone doing that.)

I know at the core the whole idea of slutwalks is that women shouldn't be shamed, blamed, or victimized for their sexuality, but it seems to only extend to a very cis, hetero, and mostly middle-class demographic who can largely choose to identify in ways other than their sexuality, or in addition to their sexuality. In my world, slut is synonymous with uneducated and lazy -- not smart enough to "better her situation." Believe me, it's easier to call yourself a "slut" when you also have an MBA.

Going back to the slut clothes comment, I tried to come up with my own definition of that, and I couldn't. Maybe my own prejudice is getting in my way, but I don't see many "alternative sluts" or "slut alternatives: when I was young I fashioned myself as some sort of amalgam of Barry from High Fidelity and Janeane Garofalo's character in Reality Bites -- with maybe a soupcon of Dieter from "Sprockets" (really -- in the 90s, I owned more black turtlenecks than Andy Warhol and Steve Jobs combined). Not all that sexy. But that wasn't the point. And to a large extent, being the weirdo saved me, taking me out of the environment where I had to choose between being a good girl and being a slut. I may have lost a few things forging my identity, but it kind of stuck -- and like a warm, snuggley security blanket, I don't want to give it up.

So while I support my slut sisters, I'll be waving from the sidelines -- in nerd glasses and a mockneck.

Links & Bits 8/26/11

Alyx from Feminist Music Geek talks about singer Aaliyah on the 10th anniversary of her death.

The Singles Jukebox discusses Taylor Swift's "Sparks Fly."

While Autostraddle tackles Kanye's and Jay-Z Watch the Throne.

The Year Punk Came to DVD

Technically, punk never broke in 1991. Yeah, that makes me sound like some sort of rockist snob like Jack Black's character in High Fidelity, but I've always found the title of the documentary, 1991: The Year Punk Broke, curious. Looking back at the early 90s -- which is something I'm loathe, but compelled to do -- they weren't very punk unless you had access to a network of zines, mom-and-pop record stores, or college radio. For most of us, the underground was just that -- underground. I was well into my twenties before I'd heard of Sonic Youth, the subject of this doc which will finally be released on DVD in the next few weeks. Lots of 90s alt-rock stars abound, including Nirvana (who was "breaking" at the time), Babes in Toyland, and Dinosaur Jr.

I was only on the periphery of the 90s punk scene, grabbing little snippets on the lone, low-powered community radio station before the big RAWK! one picked up Nirvana and Pearl Jam (the latter I have no doubt would have fit with their playlist had grunge never happened), or weirdly enough, though the pages of fashion magazines peddling flannel and ennui as a fashion statement. It's easy to forget in the days before youtube, Facebook, and multi-tiered cable how hard it was to find music that fell outside the top forty, a term that's now become obsolete -- and meaningless.

Gwen Sharp Explains "Missing White Girl Syndrome"

I found this video via Sociological Images, and wanted to repost it here, as something like this recently played out in my state when a young girl went missing (and was eventually found dead), yet the media was, if not silent, then not as panicked or outraged had she been white.

Rewind: Joan Armatrading - S/T

Joan Armatrading has one of those rare voices that's hard to describe without fawning and falling into rock critic cliches: soulful, resonant, rich, honeyed...  She's released several unheralded and largely unheard records since the release of this eponymous  one more than thirty years ago, but it's the one I always go back to. Joan Armatrading is a songwriter's songwriter, and a singer's singer. It's no secret I'm a huge fan of singers with big, deep voices, and hers is what hooked me in.

A Few Thoughts On Weight And Class

(Reposted from Tumblr)

I think that we see that manifested in a lot of the FA/HAES movement. I did grow up in a rural, poor community, and the issues facing men and women there are not the result of a fat shaming society. there is, weirdly, more pressure there to eat poorly and not exercise than there is pressure to conform to mainstream standards of beauty, if that makes sense: men and women generally accept that it’s no big deal if you become obese, and that those things are generally beyond your control. (i often run and walk when i go home and people go crazy because they think it’s so weird. people stop their cars and ask if i need a ride. The response is often, too, “you weren’t athletic in high school!” in other words, active is something you are or aren’t, and it’s not something you can urge yourself to be.) that community suffers the opposite problem of upper-middle class America, and I think the FA/HAES community doesn’t see themselves as coming from a privileged place in this regard. -- quadmoniker from PostBourgie

I’m almost hesitant to quote this given that the author of this quote is the same person who penned the “Fat and Health” post at Feministe last year which resulted in a shitstorm of epic proportions, but there’s a lot here that really resonates with me. I also grew up in an environment where there was a lot of disdain toward “healthy” food. Too often, it’s argued that not everyone has access to fresh fruits and vegetables, which is true, and that poor or working-class people just don’t know how to choose the right foods; ergo, we must teach them. Which is false. We know very well that broccoli is a “better choice” than a piece of candy — and yeah, I’m using scare quotes because there actually are times when calorie-laden, full-fat foods are the better choice, like, when you don’t have enough food. That these are presented as the only obstacles that prevent people from making better food choices bugs the hell out of me. The latter is unbelievably patronizing, and why should what I eat be of any concern to you in the first place? 

I never got the message from my family that I needed to be thin. If anything, I got the opposite message that I was “too skinny” (I wasn’t), and needed to eat more. I have a somewhat unusual situation that one side of my family recently immigrated to the US and the other rural, poor Midwesterners. I’m not saying this to paint myself as a special snowflake, but I never feel like my experience fits the narrative, so I usually keep my mouth shut. Food was something you had the money for, or didn’t. 

Truth is, I practice sort of a HAES-like program. I don’t own a scale (I’m a tallish, sturdy person, and that number on the scale would never be “small” anyway), I try to focus on how I feel and I don’t label foods bad or good, but I feel like any criticism of HAES is anathema to being a good ally.

Gloria: In Her Own Words (And Ours)

tumblr 

HBO's documentary on feminist icon Gloria Steinem, Gloria: In Her Own Words , is a fine "primer," so to speak, of the activist and the movement she has become the face of, but leaves out the very important issues of race, class, and sexuality that plagued second-wave feminism, and continue today. Andrea Plaid from Racialicious:

The reason why I called this doc “precise” is because I didn’t expect it to be nothing more and nothing less than a reflection of the mainstream Second Wave feminist movement…which was, in reality, notoriously short on analysis of race and racism as it functioned within it. When it was addressed, the rhetoric talked about white men and their race vis-à-vis “male privilege.” Some of the white women within that movement may have deeply empathized with and felt themselves in solidarity with the struggles of people of color—Steinem presents herself as such a person—but, as cravenly cynical as it seems, those struggles were also a media-friendly “hook” so people could grasp why women were fighting for, say, equal pay and the right to safe abortion. And, as critiqued again and again, loaded with white female privilege.

Maybe I'm being unusually optimistic, but I had hoped the second-wave's lack of women of color, working-class women, and sometimes outright disdain for queer women would have been addressed, but befitting a mainstream documentary, it was only briefly given lip service. It's too bad, because those problems still plague feminism today. Granted, this was more a personal look at Steinem herself, and in that, the film excelled, but being that her identity is intrinsically tied to the second-wave feminist movement, I expected more.

Links and Bits: 8/19/11

Patti Smith is turning her memoir, Just Kids, into a film.

The 2012 Presidential Candidates and Where They Stand on LGBT Issues

The Crunk Feminist Collectives discusses "The Help"

Sarah talks about the stealthily feminist R&B of 80s and 90s.

Emily from Popdust lists ten pop culture connections in Lady Gaga's new video, You and I.

Earworm of the Day: Robyn - Call Your Girlfriend

Years ago, when I was deep into being a "serious music fan" who had no time for simple pop music,  I had dismissed Robyn as another teen singer -- fun, but a lot of fluff, though smarter and savvier than the Britneys and Christinas. I regret that (though I was right about the latter). Body Talk was one of my favorite records of 2010, and the latest video doesn't disappoint.

Fifteen years, but where are the ladies?

I hate making Pitchfork the scapegoat for everything wrong with music writing, particularly, music blogging, but considering that their list of best music writing was roundly criticized for having few female-penned books, it's incredibly disappointing that their 15 Writers/15 Songs feature contains exactly one song from a female artist. Katherine St. Asaph  wrote this on her Tumblr, and it got me thinking about the ways we as fans use music:

It’s still much rarer than it should be to spot more than zero or one woman on people’s lists of favorite musicians (or authors, filmmakers, etc.), and — unfounded speculation starts now — I wonder if it’s because people are more receptive to seeing female musicians’ work as good but not so much personally meaningful. There’s focus on musicians’ technical prowess, songwriting skill, etc., but it doesn’t seem to translate to repeat listens or to connecting with the music beyond simply admiring its construction as much as it could. The solution’s obviously for more people who do to write about it and write about it well, but then you crash into the writer gender ratio again. Ugh.

Had you posited before I started writing about music, before I began really paying attention to the lack of parity in the rock blogosphere, that fans find more person meaning in dude rock, but aren't averse to acknowledging a female musician's technical prowess, I would have probably said, "Don't you have that backwards?" I mean, when I read personal accounts of "records that changed my life," Exile in Guyville comes up, as well records from Le Tigre, Sleater-Kinney, Hole, Queen Laifiah, and hell, even the Spice Girls, but that's only because I rarely leave the (relative) safety of a few ladyblogs. I think there's definitely a lot of truth there, but it says more about the insular world of indie rock in which Pitchfork came to prominence.

Rewind: The Replacements - Tim

He had me at "down on all fives... Lemme crawwwwwl!"

There aren't many records that from the first listen caused me to have a bona fide visceral reaction. I wish I could say the album that made me a music fan was Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville, or Tori Amos or anything else that seemed to resonate with a lot of women born in the 70s and 80s. The Replacements' Tim is, for better or worse, my "it" record though, the kind of record that Sleater-Kinney's Carrie Brownstein said :will stop you dead in your tracks beacuse now, whatever path you were on no longer exists." I actually kind of recoiled when I first played it. This band can't play, I thought, and he surely can't sing, but it was so perfect. They were smart without being painfully intellectual, raw and nervy, but still fun. I wanted to break stuff and dance. Until then I'd been somewhat of a punk rock dilettante: The Ramones were goofy, and the Clash was smart and irreverent, but I was only a casual fan. And they were relics of another generation. I didn't yet know there was a crop of younger bands in garages and basements across America, pounding out their own version of rock 'n' roll. If it wasn't handed down from the gods at MTV or coming from the speakers on my shitty $40 boombox, it didn't exist in my world. Tim was the record I'd been looking for my whole life, and I didn't even know it.

Long before the internet became the great equalizer, the only way I'd hear about bands that didn't get much airplay was through the pages of magazines like Musician, Creem, or Spin. I had been reading about this mythic beast known as the Replacements for years. They were four working class kids from Minneapolis who had a taste of success with "I'll Be You," a song from their second to last album, Don't Tell a Soul. I'd heard the song on a local AOR station, probably sandwiched between Warrant and Lynyrd Skynrd. I wasn't that impressed.

I let a few more years pass. I was in my twenties then, out of college, and looking to expand my record collection. I was thumbing through the used cd bin at a used record store when I spotted what was probably one of the ugliest album covers ever: all purples and grays with a picture of a long corridor or tunnel on the front and the title, Tim, written in yellow cursive in the upper right corner underneath what I think were rough pencil sketches of each band member. I'd read enough reviews to know that it was part of the "holy trinity" of Replacements albums. (1984's Let It Be, brazenly named after the Beatles album, and Pleased To Meet Me, which came out in 1987, were the other two.) I had five dollars burning a hole in my pocket, the exact price.

I didn't play that it right away. When I got home I set it down on my messy desk where it stared at me for a few days. I don't really know when it hit me that this was going to be the turning point in my musical education, but I had to get past my idea of what good music is. I was raised on top forty pap, and this was anything but. There was nothing polished about it. It sounded like the type of music my guy friends in ad-hoc garage bands made. Because it kind of was.

I rarely listen to Tim anymore --  to be honest, it hasn't aged well, though I blame the production more than anything -- but I definitely consider it my gateway drug to more ambitious records.

Hey Lloyd, We're Ready to be Heartbroken

I guess I should be handing over my "child of the 80s" card: I've never seen Say Anything, at least all the way through. Sure, I've watched a few minutes here or their, piecemeal, but for whatever reason I've never made it through the entire movie.

I have no idea why this movie never really appealed to me, outside its better-than-average soundtrack. (Fun trivia: the song in the boombox scene was originally supposed to be the Replacements' "Within Your Reach," which is used elsewhere in the movie.) Something about the whole Lloyd Dobler mystique bothers me, but I can't put my finger on why. In his book, Sex Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, Chuck Klosterman talked at length (and with uncomfortable amounts of gender essentialism) about the cult surrounding Say Anything's lead character and its effect on women of my generation desperately trying to find their own "Lloyd Dobler." I dunno. The "sensitive guy" trope is all too familiar to those of us who came of age in the 80s and 90s, and yet, Lloyd was a pretty nuanced character. (Or, quite possible, a male "manic pixie dream girl.") A few years ago, C.L. Minou for Tiger Beatdown  wrote:

Say Anything proves to be most effective as a meditation on what it means to be a “good man.” Not to take anything away from the marvelous Ione Skye’s Diane Cort — wonder of wonders, a woman in a studio movie who is smart, without being unattractive, unpopular, or unpleasant — the movie is centered mostly on the various modes of contemporary masculinity. What makes Say Anything different from just about every movie about masculinity today (and to be fair, a large chunk of movies from the ’80s) is that it sides against the Path of Greatest Jerkiness.

Should we be rewarding "non-jerkiness?" I mean, not being a jerk should be the default.

A Cornucopia of Bad 90s Style

You know it had to happen: Fuck Yeah Ugly 90s Clothes . (Thanks Autostraddle for the heads-up.)

courtesy of Fuck Yeah Ugly 90s Clothes 

I spent most of the 90s in my early twenties, so I missed a lot of the really bad, teen fashion, but I think I can say with complete confidence that 90s clothes were far uglier than anything we wore in the 80s. And that's saying a lot.

Yes, I know that compared to the tight, high-heeled, super-femme look pushed on women today is far worse than the grunge, combat boot, baby doll dress combo that supposedly defines the 90s, but the truth is few women actually dressed like that. At least in my part of the country.

I did sport several homemade "chokers" that were really remnants of fabric bough on the cheap at a crafts store. That trend was beyond silly.

Girls and Metal

Jani Lane, the former lead singer for the band Warrant was found dead in his hotel room earlier this week. As far as rock stars deaths go, it's a fairly cliched and unremarkable one, but I still felt a twinge of grief when I read the news. Warrant was one of those bands that I was never really a fan of, but was part of the aural wallpaper of my teenage years. The late 80s was a culturally vapid era marked by acid wash, spandex, and the poofy metal bands that dominated radio and MTV.  It definitely felt like we were biding our time until something better came along, but if you were a teenage girl in during that time with no access to whatever was bubbling up from the underground, hair bands were unavoidable.

It's easy to see why hair metal has become one of the most reviled sub-genres of popular music. It was easy-access, radio-friendly rock that was unchallenging and relied heavily on its image. It was "hard" music made non-threatening. Side-stepping the obvious misogyny for a moment (which is another post altogether), it was also largely marketed to girls. In a sense, the Poisons, Bon Jovis, Wingers and Poisons were our "boy bands." (Grab and old issue of Metal Edge and you'll see what I mean.) And of course anything with a mostly female audience automatically loses credibility.

Another thing that's easily overlooked is hair metal's class issues. Hard rock, and metal in general,  working people's music, and not in the Bruce Springsteen, "tramps like us, baby we were born to run," kind of way. Turn on any college radio station in 1989, and there was a huge chasm between what was viable, critic approved "art," and crap tossed off for the masses. Nirvana and its ilk knocked metal off the charts with one ragged gasp, co-opting hard rock's sound, but gaining tons of credibility. And plenty of girls liked it too.

I feel sorry for guys like Jani Lane, who will be forever known as "the cherry pie guy." Judging from this video, it's was more of a curse than a blessing:

Links & Bits: 8/12/11

Shakesville discusses the UK riots

Autostraddle on Tide's "Tomboy" commercial 

Tami from What Tami Said asks, "What makes a good comments section?"

Women's History talks about the Jewish Diaspora in China

Female Artists and Authenticity

I've been reading a fascinating book, Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music by Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor, and there's a pretty meaty chapter on autobiographical songwriting. The authors, using Hank Williams as an example, state that as a confessional songwriter he had a way of "taking his own experiences and making them universal; the autobiographer, however, makes them particular."

Ignoring my usual issue with labeling anything "universal," I think this is a good way to differentiate between confessional songwriters, and autobiographical ones -- though it makes sense that the two overlap. Though a lot of songwriters today fall into the "confessional" camp, very few truly write autobiographical songs, the primary reason -- according to the book -- is autobiography's limited commercial appeal:

Simply revealing oneself in song, a goal that we now all rake for granted, is a rather recent and comparatively artificial development in the history of popular music. We now think of an autobiographical song as a natural form of expression but that anyone who has ever tried can attest, writing a song based on one's life with a verse and chorus structure, that will appeal to a mass-market audience is no simple matter. It is far easier to sing about almost anything else.

Most of the examples cited in the book were blues and country, notably Loretta Lynn's "Coal Miner's Daughter," but when I think of truly autobiographical songs, Tori Amos's "Me and a Gun" was the first one that sprang to mind:


Another more contemporary example (and yes, I realize my definition of contemporary stopped somewhere around 1998) is Lauryn Hill's songs about her song, "To Zion:"


I think both these songs easily fit the "autobiographical" template. Both are intensely personal, yet but not "universal" in the way that a standard break-up song -- even the intensely personal ones -- aren't: one is an account of a rape, and another about the birth of the songwriter's son. Also, both are generally thought to be women's experiences. I realize this is problematic in that rape doesn't happen to women exclusively happen to women, though it's often treated as a "women's issue," and both songwriters are cisgendered, hetero women. (Hence my problem with the word "universal" to describe, usually, cis, hetero experiences.) 

Although the book focuses on a lot of old blues and country, I wonder what that says that my sole examples were two contemporary female songwriters. Is confession or autobiography expected more from women than from men?

Now For Something That Will Make You Feel Very Old

The baby dancing around in this video...

 

grew into the stunning young woman in this series of photographs by Hedi Silmane. She looks a lot like her father. Especially in the profile shots.

Rewind: Cyndi Lauper - She's So Unusual

When I was a ten, I thought the world was divided into Cyndi girls. and Madonna girls. If you were a Cyndi girl ,you could never, ever, be a Madonna girl, no matter how many pairs of fingerless lace gloves you owned.

Cyndi Lauper, on the other hand, was the patron saint of all the doodling, daydreaming, strange little girls who didn't necessarily want to be superstars. Cyndi girls eventually found their way to punk rock, art class, or even school paper (or, more commonly, all three). Or somewhere else where like-minded freaks gathered, away from the popular kids who weren't all that interesting in the first place.

We Are All Stars

It's tempting to think that your audience is essentially... you. Or, I mean, about the same age as you, therefore, no need to adjust your cultural references for relevancy. ('Cause you know somebody out there also bought that Reef CD, right?) Sometime during the half-decade or so, I officially became an "old," meaning there are scads of other people writing about music and pop culture, and many of them are young enough to be, well, my much younger siblings.

Particularly with music, I sense a big generational divide. Not necessarily the bands or artists being blogged, but the way the topic of what's "good," or even what's "cool" is approached. This comment on GenerationXpert  (note: the original post veers dangerously close to slut-shaming, and some of the other comments are downright homophobic), I think, sums up the difference between X and Y when it comes to music:

In music, for example, I thought X'ers's formative experiences covered a wide spectrum, from the hair metal days (which I seem to recall you being a fan of, and which certainly used sex to sell) to the more "authentic" grunge revolution, which didn't. In the Eighties, pop icons could use sex and be "outrageous" (Madonna, Prince), or not use it at all (R.E.M, Springsteen).

I think you could take that further and say during the 80s and 90s, the chasm between commercial music and indie was wider, and if you were someone who preferred the latter, you'd rather have root work done than listen to radio music. Even more importantly, there was no great equalizer like YouTube. Rebecca Black wouldn't have existed in 1987, or if she did, she wouldn't have been that season's Tiffany or Debbie Gibson (that would be Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift, respectively), she could have been playing in a punk band or penning a zine. She wouldn't have been famous, or "internet famous," because her kind of fame didn't really exist.

I don't think this is truly a bad thing. If it weren't for this internet thing, I wouldn't be blogging, or probably writing at all. I'm just as much a part of the problem, though I'm not sure I consider it a problem. But I do find it a little disheartening that everyone seems to want fame, even a small part of it.

Drag King Dreams

courtesy of last.fm 

I'm a big fan of RuPaul's Drag Race -- a competition for drag queens that's equal parts America's Next Top Model, Project Runway (at least during seasons one and two where the queens designed a lot of their wardrobe themselves), and maybe a soupcon of Bad Girls Club. Reality shows are a dime a dozen (almost literally -- one of the reasons reality shows proliferate tv todays is that they cost almost nothing to produce), but Drag Race has a level of self-awareness and cheeky humor not usually seen n television. Oh yeah, and the queens themselves. Drag subculture is rarely, if ever, featured on television. So needless to say I was excited when I first got wind of RuPaul's Drag U, which is now in its second season. Except when I heard that veteran queens from the original Drag Race would be putting cis women in drag (note: the show uses the word "bio woman" which I think is a tad insensitive) I mistakenly thought they'd be making women into drag kings. Instead, Drag U  is a standard makeover show -- albeit one with the same tongue-in-cheek fun as Drag Race and drag queens taking the place of New York stylists -- glamming up haggard housewives and renewing their confidence. Color me disappointed.

Is there something about women dressed as men that's inherently more dangerous -- less palatable to the tv audience -- than the inverse? Aside from Murray Hill, I can't name a "famous" drag king. Oh, Lady Gaga's drag alter-ego, Jo Calderone, brought male drag into the spotlight for about five minutes, but when usually what comes to mind is a kind of hyper-femininity parodied by male drag performers.

In popular media, women in drag is usually limited to women adopting a male identity for some sort of gain. On his blog recently, Michael Musto asked his audience to name the greatest drag king in movies . His favorites, and the responses given by his readers didn't deviate much from the trope, and said a lot about the paucity of examples of women in drag in movies,  listing Barbara Streisand in Yentl , and 80s cult movie, Just One of the Guys .

So what do you think? Could a Drag U with actual drag kings be as much of a runaway hit as the original?

Should a feminist listen to this?

This runs through my mind every time I write about an artist or band who seems unaware of the existence of feminism -- which basically means everyone except maybe Le Tigre. Or, as Renee from Womanist Musings wrote about her love for a Justin Timberlake/Jimmy Fallon "history of rap " video : "If I were to discard anything that perpetuated an ism or appropriated from a culture of colour, I could never read a book, listen to music, watch a movie or television. No form of entertainment is pure, because we live in a society that continually others and disciplines."

It can be incredibly frustrating, because I feel as though I'm being a hypocrite -- not measuring up to the narrative I've provided by authoring a blog that's (mostly) about pop culture that's supposed to be informed by feminism. Should a feminist listen to (or, for that matter, read or watch) that?

The answer, of course, is yes. A feminist can listen to anything she damn well pleases. Hopefully, she gleaned some awareness of the myriad ways women are under or poorly-represented in pop culture. But still, presenting such things uncritically is pretty disingenuous. I mean, that's what we're here for.

In the Guardian  this week, Zoe Williams praised Beyonce for her place in history as the first female artist to headline Glastonbury  -- a pretty big deal in the festival's forty-year existence -- but says her lyrics belie her achievements:

She sings a song about how, if you wanted to go out with her, moron, you should have pursued that desire with a proposal of marriage. "Put a ring on it," she sings, waving her hands about like an Andrews Sister on amphetamines. "Put a ring on it", mouth the girls in the audience, dead-eyed with the madness of crowds. As if the past 50 years had never happened, as if one's own sexual destiny were a meaningless bauble, to be hung off the first john with a bank account who shows an interest. It's distressing. And yet would you prefer it to have been Coldplay again?

This comes on the heels of what Emily Hauser wrote for Feministe last month:

Seriously? Beyonce, what you’re saying here is: “You shouldn’t have tried to keep the cow for free once you’d had the milk.” I kind of thought we’d gotten past that.

Full disclosure: I'm not enough of a Beyonce fan to provide any sort of in-depth analysis of her lyrics, but as much as I think we need to critically look at the media we're consuming, I'm not about to vilify Beyonce for being... well, unfeminist. Or if I did, I'd have a long list in front of me and "Single Ladies" wouldn't even make the top ten. (The comments to that Feminist post provide better insight that the OP, in my opinion.) Chloe for Feministing writes about consuming better media -- music, books, magazines and tv -- that doesn't reinforce restrictive gender stereotypes. I think this is hugely important, and, frankly, impetus for starting this blog in the first place. The problem with that is -- and I say this as a recovering music snob who, at one time, would sooner ram crochet hooks into her eardrums than listen to top forty pap -- it's not an easy job. The "good" media we're supposed to seek out isn't as readily available as the "bad."The Taylor Swift, Katy Perrys, Beyonces, and Lady Gagas are ubiquitous enough to reach the girl in a small or medium-sized town with no independent book or music stores (which, yes, are growing increasingly irrelevant as books and movies become available online), or theaters that show movies not starring Seth Rogen.

In short, I have no real clear-cut answers either. Isn't that great how that works out? What I have noticed since starting this blog, I'm less likely to consume media that's harmful to women than I ever was before. There are several things I've cut out of my life, that at one time I enjoyed, after gaining more of an understanding why they're harmful (Bill Maher's sexism, even when it's against women whose political ideology runs counter to my own; the aforementioned Seth Rogen movies). This, I think, is what we're all aiming for.

Links & Bits: 8/5/11

Read Latoya's post on Nirvana, riot grrrl and race for Racialcious. She explores a lot of what I think is wrong with the current deluge of 90s nostalgia.

Chloe from Feministing  says if you want better media, start consuming better media.

Lawsonry's Elizabeth Sturgeon talks about feminism and atheism, and what the two can learn from each other.

Kreayshawn has "white girl problems."

Jay Smooth on Lauryn Hill and having an artist "owe" you:

In Case of a Shitstorm, Grab an Umbrella

Every time there's some sort of blow-up at any of the blogs I regularly read, I'm there. Not as a participant, but as a rapt audience member. I vacillate between thinking this is somehow disingenuous of me, and I should participate, and silently standing by with a mixture of awe and revulsion. Mostly, though, I try to learn.

I'm not a big fan of call-out culture, not because I think it's unnecessarily "mean," or unwarranted. On the contrary, I think it's very necessary, but when calling out becomes piling up, as so often happens in the social justice blogosphere, it rarely leads to a change in behavior. Also, I think a little bit of self-protection is okay. I think it's easy to forget that while a lot of us have carved out our little niches online, but most of us don't have the backup provided by a large audience. I'm less likely to call out someone who for the most part is really trying, and does understand that her place in the world is, to a large degree, predetermined by race, class, sexual orientation or other circumstances out of her control, than I am the more overt forms of bigotry perpetrated by mainstream bloggers whose influence is wide-reaching.

I've thought about this a lot lately, especially now as I've made the feminist blogosphere kind of a "read-only" zone for now. I don't really feel empowered by it anymore, and frankly, one shitstorm after another is just exhausting. I have my own ground rules for staying rational when things online get heated. Granted, a lot of bloggers have made lists like these, and by no means do I consider my rules "universal," but this is what keeps my head on straight:

1. Know you'll make mistakes. No one is without privilege somewhere. Challenging various privileges isn't easy work, it's not fun, and you will fuck up.

2. That being said, apologize when you do fuck up. Don't fight it. The thing about privilege is it's invisible. If someone calls you on yours, apologize and learn from it. Also, apologizing doesn't guarantee that all will be right with the world.

3.  Sometimes the best thing -- nay, the only thing -- to do is walk away from the computer for a while.

4. Remember that everyone comes with their own, individual set of experiences. They may be vastly different from yours. Know that not everyone in your community isn't "you."

Rewind: Jonathan Richman - Jonathan Goes Country

Recently made available for download, Jonathan Goes Country is less "country" and more "Jonathan." I love Jonathan Richman, but if you were looking for an album of classic country covers, it's not to be found here. Oh sure, he does justice to old favorites like "Your Good Girl's Gonna Go Bad," and "Satisfied Mind," but overall, it's chockablock of the quirkiness he's known for. And that can only be a good thing.

“I went country on this record because I thought “ some of my songs would make good country records, because I “ thought I could do justice to some other people’s songs and “ because I could record it with my friends who are great musicians “ down in Springfield, Missouri.” -- Jonathan Richman (source)

Huffington Post Launches Huffington Post Women

Despite the recent accusations of too much aggravating, too little writing , and Ms. Magazine calling it "The New Maxim ," I had high hopes for the Huffington Post's new site, Huffington Post Women. The feminist blogosphere is still under-read by the public at large, and the kind of pull a mainstream site like HuffPo has can really put feminist issues in the spotlight. Unfortunately, it's the same basic stuff you can get from any "woman's" magazine that does its best to present issues relevant to women's lives without alienating advertisers.

A sample of the articles festooning the front page as I'm writing this: runaway brides, shagging coworkers, how to be a good houseguest, how to cancel your wedding (hmmm... I sense a trend), and sugar daddies paying off college loans. It's a little titillating, a lot heteronormative, and not much I've haven't read elsewhere. There were some interesting pieces on women and healthcare, etiquette at gay weddings (The Gays! They're just like us and would rather you not get plastered and puke at the reception!), and Tim Gunn's unfortunate comments about Hillary Clinton's sense of style (which made the rounds of the blogosphere about a week ago), but I think I'll stick to the more unheralded ladyblogs.

Crap Email from a Male Chauvinist*

Twisty from I Blame the Patriarchy said this on her blog yesterday:

When women write me, they never, ever tell me that I am “a very good writer” and to “keep up the good work” because there isn’t enough decent writing on the Internet. Women say things like “that post on consent changed my life,” or “Now I know I’m not alone/crazy/hysterical.”

Dudes, on the other hand, always feel compelled to inform me that they disagree with me (this is a non-negotiable component of dude fan mail), but that they are nevertheless are willing to be entertained by me.

I don't really get fan mail, however, I've been in and out of forums before most of today's big name bloggers could pronounce "Usenet," and yeah, that's sadly accurate.

Granted a short but sweet "keep up the good work" isn't, by far, the worst thing someone's said to me online, but the subtext, coming from someone who just went out of his way to tell you how glaring wrong you are, is just a wee bit too close to "You know, you're pretty smart for a girl (but I still think you're wrong."

Here's the thing guys -- and yes, I risk making grand, sweeping generalizations here, but it is usually guys invalidating the experiences of women. I suggest checking out The Male Privilege Checklist courtesy of Alas, a Blog . Most of what I've experienced online is the more covert, harder-to-prove, kind of sexism that comes with a lot of unrecognized privilege. It doesn't make it any better, but knowing my experience essentially mirrors that of other women is comforting.

*Inspired by Jezebel's "crap email from a dude" series.