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vonnemiste's review
2.0
While the thesis of Marcic's book is interesting, I feel she makes a big error when she argues that because a song was a Top 40 hit it is therefore culturally significant. Some songs that she spends a lot of time on are not very well known and not impactful today, especially compared to artists like Joni Mitchell, Heart, Stevie Nicks, Carole King, all of "riot girl" and punk, much of hip-hop etc., artists who have had a much larger cultural impact than their chart status may indicate. As such, we lose a lot of how female artists were able to grow and gain greater autonomy over their art, their sexuality, their family lives, etc., because Marcic focuses solely on the worst of the Top 40 pop pablum. She also often treats as insignificant whether or not a song was written by a man or a woman and rarely reads into the songs' structure. Is the song coming from the perspective of the singer herself or is this a character she is playing? Is the song saying something descriptive (this is what happens) or prescriptive (this is what should happen) when it comes to issues of gender and sexuality?
Marcia clearly has an interest in music created by and for women, but she lacks the pop cultural knowledge, textual criticism skills, and writerly finesse to pull off this book. That being said, I love the "Reminiscence" and "Contemplation" sections because they allow us to see what listeners (both men and women from a variety of backgrounds) think about the songs in the book. This is the sort of cultural sociology that makes a book like this meaningful. However, Marcic, in not trying to figure out how the songs impacted their listeners, in a broader sociocultural sense, fails to articulate why a certain song having a certain message (women should be subservient, women want to be independent, etc.) means anything at all. Popular music is bound up in the relationship between the artists (and their songs) and the people who listen to them (cf. Frith, "Performing Rites").
If you want to read a really great book focused on popular music and gender, I recommend "Girls Like Us" by Sheila Weller, "Out of the Vinyl Deeps" by Ellen Willis, "We Gotta Get Out of This Place" by Gerri Hirshey, or anything by Ann Powers and Jessica Hopper. There are a lot of important issues and ideas to be talked about here and, unfortunately, Marcic does not treat them with the nuance, detail, and critical knowledge they deserve.
Marcia clearly has an interest in music created by and for women, but she lacks the pop cultural knowledge, textual criticism skills, and writerly finesse to pull off this book. That being said, I love the "Reminiscence" and "Contemplation" sections because they allow us to see what listeners (both men and women from a variety of backgrounds) think about the songs in the book. This is the sort of cultural sociology that makes a book like this meaningful. However, Marcic, in not trying to figure out how the songs impacted their listeners, in a broader sociocultural sense, fails to articulate why a certain song having a certain message (women should be subservient, women want to be independent, etc.) means anything at all. Popular music is bound up in the relationship between the artists (and their songs) and the people who listen to them (cf. Frith, "Performing Rites").
If you want to read a really great book focused on popular music and gender, I recommend "Girls Like Us" by Sheila Weller, "Out of the Vinyl Deeps" by Ellen Willis, "We Gotta Get Out of This Place" by Gerri Hirshey, or anything by Ann Powers and Jessica Hopper. There are a lot of important issues and ideas to be talked about here and, unfortunately, Marcic does not treat them with the nuance, detail, and critical knowledge they deserve.
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