Week 4: Wonderful World, Beautiful People

Despite the heavily romanticised, almost mourning-like nostalgia which surrounds much of the contemporary attitudes towards the counter-cultural 1960s, Whiteley argues how the time was still a stagnant time for feminism, especially in terms of popular music. Female musicians, despite many challenging and illustrious figures such as Mama Cass, Janis Joplin, Joan Baez and our very own Buffy St. Marie, still remained below their male counterparts (23). While the musical scene continued to be dominated by men, the songs and music that represented the sixties—rock and progressive rock in particular—also sang of women in limited roles, closely tied to the constraining Madonna/whore dichotomy.

Women were positioned within the music, as well as in the counter-cultural lifestyle, as “romanticised fantasy figures, subservient earth mothers or easy lays” (23). Male musicians who sang about love, such as the Beatles and Donavan, would position women as committed lovers and earth mothers, while cock rock performers such as the Rolling Tones or Jimi Hendrix would sing about sexually promiscuous women with many partners (25). While female musicians such as UK singer Dusty Springfield made great strides within the 1960s, with Springfield becoming “the first white soul singer to perform in Harlem” (24), Whiteley points out the pressures of female musicians to conform to limited forms of femininity. Springfield eventually left Britain, due to negative attitudes towards her bisexuality (24). Even sexual promiscuity, though liberating for women, was limiting in its reliance on a “romanticized construct of the young, single woman” (29). Whiteley ultimately questions the 1960s as a progressive moment for women and women in popular music: Was the women’s movement really able to “find a place even within a progressive counter culture” (29)?

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I have often wished to go back to a time like the 60s, when radical events such as student uprisings against the post-secondary school system were taking place. Since reading Whiteley though, who takes a feminist approach to the music of the 1960s, I've begun to reconsider. I'm beginning to realize just how much of the music I've grown up around has been made by and for men. This probably has a lot to do with how I've grown up listening to my father's records from the 1960s and 70s.

It was interesting to learn that it was during the 1960s and 70s, Japan was opened up for touring American musicians, and American rock music in general. My father was born in the 70s, and spent much of his young adult life after high school collecting records of musicians such as Jimi Hendrix, The Allman Brothers Band and The Grateful Dead. He initially wanted to move to America, disillusioned with the strict confines of Japanese society. He did the next best thing, which was to move his small, budding family, to Canada in 1987. I was barely a year old.

My father's large record collection and his massive and still growing CD collection, have influenced my identity greatly. Taking long car rides with my father was where I'd have the most exposure to his music. Although I enjoyed some of the songs, I could never really connect to my father's music. I still feel the music is part of his realm, and maybe even part of a male world I feel an outsider to.

I complained to him about the lack of female musicians within his piles of CD's recently, and he pulled out Diana Krall CD for me to listen to. I haven't had a chance to hear the music yet, but I wonder if I will feel more aligned with the female jazz musician. I hope to dig out more female musicians from my dad's collection, and continue exploring the realm of women in music.