Liam Sanagan went to the same elementary and high schools as me, and is a few years younger than me, and we sang in the same children’s choir together and now he’s all grown up and is making some pretty impressive music under the moniker LUM.  You should go listen to him! He sort of reminds me of the Postal Service, except that the Postal Service are irritating and twee (I have a very low twee-tolerance threshold) and he is not.  And he did a really lovely acoustic set at Summerfolk last weekend.  And you can download his neat little EP for free, or for a donation of some of your Earth dollars.

So, Radiohead released a new single a few days ago. This post is not really about the Radiohead single per se, because I’m not actually a Radiohead fan (which I know probably makes me a shitty excuse for a pop music historian, in the eyes of Some People, but I feel that there are enough Radiohead fans in the world, so I am spreading my love to areas that I feel are tragically starved for attention. Currently my area of choice is Martha and the Vandellas). Anyhow, what’s interesting about the Radiohead single, is that Radiohead is apparently not going to release any more albums in the forseeable future, and is instead opting for a single-only format.

So, I heard about this on CBC while in the car on the way to a cabin with no internet, so I am sort of late to the party on this one, because I was in this cabin, with no internet, see, so I couldn’t exactly blog about it. But the CBC piece was funny, because the commentator (it was somebody filling in for Jian Ghomeshi on Q) seemed really put out about the whole “no more albums” thing. And I thought that was funny. Are people that uptight about albums being the format of choice? Are albums even relevant anymore?

So then, this afternoon, I was watching What Not to Wear, but I was switching to Much Music during the commercial breaks, because I have this scholarly interest in What the Kids Are Listening to These Days, and there was a really interesting interview with Jay-Z. And he acknowledged that albums are kind of irrelevant, because, he said, people are just making their own albums by making playlists of what they like. But he still uses an album format to envision his projects; to create some sense of greater cohesion by using what he referred to as a more “classic” recording format.

It’s interesting that he referred to albums as a more “classic” format, because the desirability of albums is kind of anomalous. In the 1950s and 1960s, teenagers in particular were buying singles, not albums. The point was the song, not its part in a larger work, and often not even its relation to an artist (witness the frequent occurence, during that period, of several bands releasing recordings of the same hit song to capitalize on its success, something that would never happen today). There’s an interesting chapter in Elijah Wald’s How the Beatles Destroyed Rock and Roll about how LPs were specifically marketed to an adult (not teen) audience during the 1950s. The LP was a new technology then, and this was the first time albums, as we think of them, could exist. Other scholars have argued that it wasn’t really until the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper that the album, as a recording format, really hit the mainstream. (And Thom Yorke knows this.)

So, I don’t know.  Is the album still relevant?  I feel like a lot of albums these days are singles plus filler, but there are artists who still work make the album relevant, and use the format to great effect (I think Neko Case is really good for this).  In terms of my own listening habits, though, I’ll listen to an album all the way through a few times, but it’s never long before I’ve picked my favorite tracks and just skip ahead to those.  I think there is a lot at stake, though, when a band like Radiohead, who drip with indie hipster cred, announce that they won’t be making albums anymore.  I think the idea of the single is sort of stigmatized because it’s a format that’s designed to sell (and often is designed to sell pop music in its most commercial, teeny-bopper, easily dismissed because little girls like it sense), whereas with an album you often get the ideology of the cohesive, overarching concept, caplital-A Artwork.  So it’s not just a question of the economics of popular music; there is ideology at play here, so I’m very curious to see what Radiohead’s next move will be.

We went to see Baby It’s You, a jukebox musical about the Shirelles (well, supposedly about the Shirelles, but more on that later) at the Coast Playhouse, a tiny theatre in West Hollywood, not too far from where I live.  I was excited because, well, girl groups excite me, let’s face it.  And the show was really fun.  There was really good singing (kudos to a cast with solid sets of pipes) and really good early 1960s vintage clothing.  But there were a lot of problems with this show, and the more I think about them the more unsettling they become.

So, this play was billed as a musical about the Shirelles, and it wasn’t.  It was a musical about Florence Greenberg, the woman who discovered the Shirelles and went on to found Scepter records.  The way the play set up the relationship between the (white, middle-class, Jewish) Greenberg and the (black) Shirelles was extremely troubling.  It would have been somewhat less egregious if the play was subtilted “The Florence Greenberg Story” or “The Scepter Records Story”  instead of “a new musical about The Shirelles.”  It would have been less offensive if the show’s writers hadn’t said, in their statement in the program, that they wrote teh show because they wanted to tell the story of the musicians they used to hear on the radio as teenagers.  Because this play that was supposedly about the Shirelles was not about the Shirelles at all.  The Shirelles were barely characters.  They had no personalities, they barely even had names other than “Shirelle” and their function was basically to narrate the story of this white woman, to glorify her story, to (quite literally) appear in the background (almost creepily, like human set pieces), and not to tell their own story.

And this makes me mad.  Yes, I think it’s important to talk about Florence Greenberg, who clearly had to beat a lot of odds to become a success in a male-dominated industry.  But I’m pretty sure that story could have been told in a way  that at least acknowledged the issues of race-based power and privilege that were at play, and the problem of exploitation, instead of furthering the process of exploitation.  Because that’s what this particular version of the story did.

And it’s a problem because the music that the Shirelles were singing was music that girls listened to.  And the Shirelles were the kinds of figures that young black girls could identify with, which was, and is, really fucking important because girls are really fucking important and their stories and perspectives need to be understood as valid parts of historical and cultural narrative.  By erasing the Shirelles from their own story, the stories of the girls who listened to them are stripped of legitimacy.

The show ended with a weirdly familial montage about how Greenberg left her company to her kids; we didn’t really find out what happened to the Shirelles.  Here’s what did happen:  The group broke up in the early 1970s, and splintered into two different touring factions.  Shirley Owens, the lead singer, took a shot at a solo career, but never really had the success that she experienced with the Shirelles; Doris Jackson and Micki Harris both continued performing until their deaths in 2000 and 1982, respectively.  Beverly Lee still tours with a new lineup of Shirelles.  They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996, and they were even on postage stamps!  The Shirelles were the first group to really bring the girl group sound to mainstream audiences (anybody who is anybody has covered Shirelles songs), and it is so, so important that we acknowledge how important they were in shaping the sound of pop music, instead of telling another story about how a white woman gets ahead because of some nameless black girls.  Also, you should go and listen to how awesome they are:

DINOSAURS! (Also, The Burning Hell are fabulous and Canadian.)

I work on Beth Ditto and the intersection of race and fatness in her music, so I’ve been really excited at the recent maelstrom of activity, both from mainstream media sources and the music, fashion, and fat acceptance blogospheres.  Here are a few good pieces:

Marianne, at The Rotund, is always good.  This post is old, but great – I’ve quoted it in my own work and it’s totally worth a read.

Plumcake at Manolo for the Big Girl hilariously takes on Beth’s gold spandex toreador outfit.

The lovely Charlotte at Obesity Timebomb, whom I had the pleasure of meeting at the Fat Studies conference in New Orleans back in April, writes about how Beth Ditto has become the fashion industry’s magical fatty, and gives a report from the launch party of Ditto’s new fashion line, making us all extremely jealous of her celebrity hob-nobbing ways!  (Mostly I am just in awe of how she says “and we hung out with Gina and Ana and Shirley from The Raincoats” as though it is nothing because the Raincoats are one of my most favourite bands, like, ever!)

Carrie Brownstein writes a great post on how nobody’s talking about Ditto’s music because they’re too busy talking about her body.

A few good posts at Jezebel:  here, here (on Ditto and plus-sized fashion), and here.

Here’s Kate Harding over at Salon.

The Daily Beast has a good story about the fact that (gasp!) fat women like fashion! Dear god!  What I really like about this article is the accompanying photo gallery, because it’s not just a gallery of semi-famous plus sized models (who generally top off at about size 16), but has real people in it, some of whom are on the fatter side of fat, (think sizes 24 and above), and those are people who frequently aren’t represented.

Anyhow, if you’ve read anything good recently about Beth Ditto, please share, I’ll add to the list.

And now, I have some thoughts.

1.  I really like the Carrie Brownstein piece.  I would add to what she says and point out that when we DO hear about Beth Ditto’s music, the language that is used to talk about her voice is tellingly similar to the language that is used to talk about her body.  Her body is just completely inescapable.

2.  Is it bad to talk about Ditto’s body?  Ditto talks about her body.  I talk about her body in my work, and also about how other people talk about her body. We need change the discourse about fat bodies in order to change how bodies are understood and disciplined.  Does it take away from how Ditto is understood as a musician and performer?  I don’t know.  She makes her body an integral part of her performance.  Part of the reason it is inescapable is because she confronts us with it.  It is part of her musical performance.

3.  A lot of recent Beth Ditto coverage is about her position as a fashion icon.  So a lot of the talk about her body goes hand in hand with talk about clothes.  When we call for people to talk about her music instead, are we marginalizing fashion, which still doesn’t have the same status that music does as an “art form”?  And probably has that abject status because fashion is associated with women?  I don’t really have an opinion one way or another, but this is an interesting argument that struck me as I was reading what people have been saying.  I am pretty disillusioned with Ditto as fashion’s “magical fatty,” as Charlotte puts it.  She’s definitely treated as a token.  But at the same time, it’s pretty important to have that first token, to create opportunities for more fashion-conscious fat girls.

Anyhow, those are just a few disparate thoughts.

And speaking of fat girls and music.  Ok, so you know Dana International?  She’s not a fat girl in music, I know, I know, but follow me here.  Dana International is a (really awesome) transwoman who won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1998 (I am secretly fascinated by Eurovision, not gonna lie).  And I just want to point out her fat girl backup singer in this clip:

You may not have noticed her at first, because they make her stand in the corner alone.  Which I think is kind of hilarious in a “wtf is up with that?” sort of way.  Is it cause those skinny girls might catch teh fat from her?  Is it to create a nice, symmetrical stage setup, because she is about the size of those other girls combined?  Discuss, please.

So, a few weeks ago, in an attempt to be a Real Musicologist (ie:  the kind who spends time engaged in that much lauded practice known as Archival Research), I trekked down to the LA Central Library to do a little archival research of my own.  Since my work focuses on popular music, post-World War II, there really aren’t that many archives for me to research in.  But the archival stuff that there is for me to do is super fabulous.

I’ve been working on this neato Shangri-Las project.  If you’ve ever spent more than, say, five minutes around me, you’ve probably noticed that I really love the Shangri-Las a whole lot.  They’re kind of the sassiest of girl groups, and they really stand out as extraordinarily different from some of the other girl groups of the era, particularly Motown groups like Martha and the Vandellas, or Phil Spector acts like the Ronnettes.  I actually think the Ronnettes comparison is the most compelling.  See, the Shangri-Las were white girls from Brooklyn, and their image is all about being totally badass.  Like, they wore pants.  They supposedly hung out in the streets with bad boys.  Which was bad news.  The Ronnettes, meanwhile, were also bad girls, but they made a big deal out of trying to perform a sort of hyperfeminine ideal, adopting tropes of glamorous, high-class femininity (gowns, towering hair, etc.), possibly in an attempt to distance themselves from the bad girl trope.  But it always comes across as pretty artificial (not that the Shangri-Las aren’t artificial, it’s just a different breed of artifice), and despite such attempts, they can’t shed the bad girl image, no doubt because they are not only not white, but mixed race, from Harlem, and got their start as, essentially, go go dancers (that may be an anachronistic term, here, because go go dancers were invented in LA at the Whisky a Go Go, slightly later in the 60s, so they probably wouldn’t have called themselves that).  ANYHOW, the point being, it is really telling what kinds of gender performance are enabled/prohibited by factors like race, class, and ethnicity, and really points towards the importance of addressing this kind of intersectionality in music scholarship.

I’m interested in the Shangri-Las death songs, of which there are a lot.  And they are pretty weird, and no doubt contributed in large part to their image.  I’m talking about songs like “Leader of the Pack,” where girl meets boy, then someone dies.  It seems so ridiculous now, but back in 1964, these songs were seen as really vulgar and inappropriate, to the point that they were banned in the UK.

Here they are, with fabulous hair, and with Robert Fucking Goulet (wtf!!!)  as Jimmy:

And here’s “Long Live Our Love,” which is about WAR!!!  And, actually this is a rare appearance of all four Shangri-Las – the band was two sents of sisters, Mary and Betty Weiss, and Marge and Mary Ann Ganser.  Betty Weiss apparently hated appearing in public, so you don’t often see her in TV appearances or publicity shots

So.  For my Shangri-Las project, I headed to the Central Library downtown, because the Central Library has all of the back issues of Seventeen magazine from 1962 onwards!  (Note:  Seventeen actually started in 1944, which is kind of remarkable, because that was before the “teenager” as demographic really existed – that wasn’t really a thing until the 50s.)  I assumed that a magazine for teenage girls would probably have coverage of the kind of music that teenage girls were listening to at the time, maybe some fan letters, that kind of thing.  Well.  It turns out that I was somewhat remiss in this assumption.  The Seventeen magazine of 1963-1967 (which were the years that I slogged through, because those were the years the Shangri-Las were active) is less about girl culture than it is about training girls to be grown-up ladies.  There’s a music column, all right, but there is virtually no mention of girl groups during those four years.  Instead, they offer a monthly run-down of recommended releases.  Hilariously, a lot of the music they cover seems like it would be TOTALLY IRRELEVANT to teenage girls, and when they cover music that seems like it would appeal, it’s always by dudes.  Allow me to self-indulgently quote from my own seminar paper:

Written by one Edwin Miller, the magazine’s entertainment editor, the column regularly lists classical music recordings by composers including Franz Schubert, Ludwig Von Beethoven, and Charles Ives; soundtrack albums from films including Funny Girl, My Fair Lady, and Mary Poppins; and albums of popular standards by singers such as Barbara Streisand, Liza Minelli, and Burl Ives.  The rock acts mentioned are usually male and always white (notables include The Who, The Beach Boys, and, frequently, The Beatles), although later in the 1960s, Miller began to cover jazz artists, and, in one issue, includes a strangely out of place profile of Nina Simone.

So, that’s pretty weird.  Edwin Miller seems like a fascinating character, though.  But, like, why was this dude the entertainment editor of Seventeen?  A quick google search reveals that he was married to Lydia Joel, who was editor of Dance Magazine for years, and seems to have been a pretty important figure in the New York dance scene.  As for Miller, I’ve gotta say, some of his musical choices (see:  Schubert, Streisand, etc.) lead me to speculate about his heterosexuality, but, you know, whatever.  What is really kind of unbelievable, is that he was Seventeen’s entertainment editor from 1944 until 1988.  Like, forty-four years.  I just really love imagining a funny old man covering, say, Madonna.  Or, like, Tiffany.  In 1988.  It’s amazing.

But anyhow, going back to the 1960s, it’s really telling how the magazine’s musical choices speak to the kind of femininity the magazine was encouraging.  Again, it’s not about girlhood, it’s about preparing girls to be a certain kind of middle-class, upwardly mobile adult.   All was not for naught, however, because I found two completely priceless mentions of the Shangri-Las, which I will leave you with.  These examples are fascinating, because they show how the Shangri-Las, who now seem pretty innocuous, were actually seen as really threatening, in no small part because of how they enacted femininity and class.

In a guest column published in January, 1966, seventeen-year-old Susan Lipinski writes that “good music stands the trial of time and changing fads and still comes out sounding as wonderful as the day it was recorded.  For example, I expect the Johnny Mathis version of ‘Wonderful, Wonderful” to live considerably longer than the Shangri-Las’ gory ditties about motorcycling or hot-rodding death scenes.”  In another guest column, this one from January 1965, none other than an eighteen-year-old Lesley Gore doesn’t talk about the Shangri-Las specifically, but she does decry the kind of imagery present in Shangri-Las songs like “Leader of the Pack,” which tend to involve violent death (usually car or motorcycle accidents), agonizing heartbreak, and melancholic loss as prominent plot points.  She writes,

Today’s love song writing trend is extremely negative.  Love songs of yesteryear . . . showed a positive outlook.  Today, love songs cry out the pain of unrequited love; we hear tales of two young lovers dying, of girls cast aside, and so on.  Centuries ago, the songs of wandering minstrels told stories of great loves and adventures; they were a means of reporting incidents and those songs have historical value.  If future historians were to survey our pop market today, they would think our world was filled with despair . . . Our music reflects our tastes.  I have learned never to stoop to someone else’s musical level.  Music is too important to be profaned.

So, that’s some pretty intense sentiment from Ms. Gore.  Music is too important to be profaned!  Ok, ok!  And I’ll say it again, I was really surprised that this is the kind of reception  the Shangri-Las were getting, but it’s kind of fantastic and unbelievable.

In sum, we need to pay closer attention to Seventeen, because, damn, it’s full of great fodder for us cultural analysis types, but it also tells us a lot about the very real pressures placed on girls.

“There are no citations because it’s some French stylistic thing.”  I have heard this phrase uttered many a time when works by French authors have been under consideration.

And then I found this, from the Translator’s Note to Helene Cixous and Catherine Clement‘s The Newly Born Woman, which I am reading because I enjoy self-punishment I’ve decided that French feminist writing could potentially have a lot to say about The Slits (but more on that later), and we laughed and laughed and laughed:

“The notes and bibliographical references are faithful to the style of the French text.  Clement and Cixous consistently take what they need from a body of knowledge which they refuse to recognize as anyone else’ “property” and make it serve their own purposes.”

Oh, honestly.  Catherine and Helene, I love you both dearly, but why don’t you just fess up and admit that you misplaced your copy of the MLA style guide, ok?  And Julia, I suspect that goes for you, too.  If you were undergrads, we’d send you to the dean.

My headphones are broken. But they are broken in a weird way – it sounds like only one audio track is coming through, and the vocals sound weirdly distant, and also like they’ve been passed through an echo chamber that is approximately a thousand miles away. So, the result is that I’m hearing weird arrangements of everything, in which the vocals are in the background and strange parts of the instrumentation are brought forward. So, like, I was listening to a Sarah Harmer song, and lo and behold, there was this funny banjo line I’d never noticed. I should probably just go get some new headphones, but this weird phenomenon is walking a very fine line between irritating and fascinating, erring on the side of fascinating. It’s funny how a sudden change in amplification can resulting in a wildly different listening experience, that, for me, has actually accentuated sonic elements that I didn’t know were there. Like, for example, I’ve been listening to a lot of Weezer lately because, well, you know, sometimes you just have to listen to a lot of Weezer, right? It happens. And on my headphones, pretty much all I can hear is the rhythm guitar, but listening to the rhythm guitar, I can hear a weird connection to the B-52s – like, there’s the same kind of what I can only describe as tightness that you get in Keith Strickland’s guitar. I’ve been describing Strickland’s post-punky, new wavey tight playing as really musically tense, and this pared-down Weezer sounds almost exactly like that. (And more obviously – something you don’t need broken headphones to notice – the opening riff of Hash Pipe is almost exactly the same as the opening riff of Planet Claire). Now, admittedly, I think a lot about the B-52s these days so it’s entirely likely I’m inventing shit. But still. I think it’s an interesting connection to make. In another life, I’ll write a paper about Weezer, but not today.

So, in case you haven’t noticed, employment isn’t doing so well these days.  I consider myself extraordinarily lucky to be in a very stable position at present – really, there’s no better time to be in school.  However, because a penchant for irrational worry is nothing if not my trademark, I’ve been doing a lot of worrying lately about what is going to happen when I’m done, Ph.D. in hand, and tenure-track jobs are few and far between.  Luckily, my roommate assures me that he will be happy to start a bed and breakfast with me, so all is not totally lost.

But news of the strike at York University back home in the frozen north couldn’t have hit at a worse time.  In case you missed it, CUPE 3903, the union representing Teaching Assistants, Research Assistants, Graduate Assistants and Contract Faculty at York were on strike for three months.  They were asking for job security and a wage increase to bring them up to the poverty line, and the university’s administration refused to bargain, waiting things out until the Ontario government imposed back-to-work legislation.  It’s fairly clear to me who’s at fault in this scenario – a university administration that does not respect the integrity or rights of their employees, playing into an increasingly shitty system whereby most of the work done at universities is done by faculty and staff who still do not have the benefits or job security that should come with being a full-time employee.

So, one TA/grad student has withdrawn from the university, and bless his heart, he’s a musicologist, cause we’re all a bunch of pinko commies, right?  You can read Sean Hully’s story here.  What’s really upsetting, though, is the comment thread on that article – most of the commentary is incredibly ignorant – ignorant of what caused the strike, ignorant of huge contribution TAs and contract faculty do, and just generally uninformed on all counts.  It’s surprising to me that, given the value Canadians supposedly place on education, nobody seems willing to invest in education, and instead teachers are seem to be viewed as unnecessary.  Am I wrong in suggesting that a country that invests in education is investing in its citizens, and in a vital future?  And I can’t speak for all TAs, and I know I’m not totally burnt out and embittered by years of being overworked and underpaid yet, but I really like teaching and I know many of my colleagues feel the same way.  And I find it extremely disheartening for the work that we do to be summarily dismissed by calls for us to “get real jobs,” when many of us put in long hours and extreme effort into what we do.

But then again, this is the interwebs, where anyone can say anything and does, so I probably shouldn’t have expected much.

Oh, what a time it has been since I wrote here.  I have lots of ideas for things to write here, and every time I get one I start a blog post with the idea as the title and then save it as a draft with the ideal being that I will go back and write it “on the weekend,” except that who has weekends these days anymore?  Not me, that’s for sure.  I also get really psyched out by the fact that I seem to have convinced myself that this is my Important Voice Blog on which I must write about Important Things.  But no more.  This is supposed to be my year of being a good blogger and maybe even getting some readers so I have decided to commit myself to blogging every idea I have for a blog post about music and/or fashion.

At any rate, here is my backlog of ideas that I will probably never get around to.  But you should know I’m thinking about them:

1.  Bringing musicology into conversation with the work on bodies that is happening in fat studies

2.  How the Timbaland song (“Come Around”) on that M.I.A. album (Kala) isn’t exactly bad but is somehow less good than the rest of the album (which is mostly really brilliant), to the extent that when I listen to it, I feel vaguely embarrassed for the parties involved but for reasons that I can’t quite place, the result being that I listen to it over and over and over again trying to figure out what the deal is.

3. How Isabella Blow is totally my fashion icon.

4.  How strategic use of typography could be the next big thing in academic writing, if you ask me.

Anyhow.  On an unrelated note – a note that’s supposedly not even related to the mandate of this blog, but whatever – I’ve been reading Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road, after seeing and adoring the movie.  It’s the story of April and Frank Wheeler, a couple in the 1950s whose lives fall apart as a result of suburban ennui and gender expectation.  What’s interesting to me is how the movie redeems April Wheeler.  The novel is predominantly the story of Frank – April appears to the reader through his eyes.  In the film, April is somehow more fully realized and is more human, and is more passionate and more human.  I’m only about halfway through the novel, but I’m looking forward to seeing how the end of the novel compares to the film (but I won’t give away the ending), and how much of April’s story is told.