One of the things I really wanted to do in my playlist was to stress that you can put a critical eye on anything. Sometimes the most seemingly frivolous things - like pop music - have the most to say about our culture and what we really think about gender.
The first two songs in my playlist definitely function in a set, and illustrate perfectly the point that bell hooks makes in Being a Boy. Even though the Cobra Starship cover of I Kissed A Girl uses the same backing track and the same lyrical inspiration, somehow a song about sexual discovery and transgression becomes a song about violence and aggression. The undercurrent of sexual potentiality is there, but it's been reformatted, "gettin' all the honeys in the club excited", has reimagined male homoeroticism as yet another ploy to win female affection. Both performers have primarily heterosexual histories and self identities, but even if we did not know that it would have been implicit in the songs- Both of them are not about being comfortable with one's sexual identity, but rather center around the anxieties and dangers of transgressing on well established borders.
The second set of songs, Panic at the Disco's Lying is the most fun a Girl can have without taking her clothes off (a quotation from a book, but definitely not without significant meaning) and Paramore's Misery Business, are less focused on transgression, but place just as much emphasis on adolescent sexuality. I find it very odd that in both songs the antagonist is female, despite the fact that Hayley Williams of Paramore is not only a female vocalist, but also writes the lyrics for her band. It puts the focus on something that Pipher brings up in Reviving Ophelia, this troubling inability for teenaged girls (Hayley Williams was 17 when the album was written) to find stability within themselves, and as an extension, to empathize with others. It also shows clearly how women, when functioning inside the patriarchy, can be just as brutally effective as men in enforcing the so-called "women's role".
The reason I include Mindless Self Indulgence's Get It Up have less to do with the actual song itself (although it is one of my favourites by them) but rather to use it and its production as a starting point to talk about the band itself and the music industry as a whole. MSI is composed of 4 people, and unlike most bands where the "token girl" is in a relatively unimportant role, the girls in MSI (Lyn-Z on bass and Kitty on drums) compose the entire rhythm section, which in a band that produces primarily dance music is very important. And what's more, in this particular song the guest vocals are rendered by Jimmy (the lead singer)'s wife, Chantal Claret, who is herself the lead singer of a band called Morningwood. There is no presumption that a woman is "only" going to show up to deliver guest vox, or is going to be the "cute one" who stands in front of a bunch of guys who know how to play their instruments and sing. Not that those aren't completely legitimate art forms, and any female involvement in the music industry is honestly a move in the right direction, given how traditionally male-dominated music in general and the rock scene in specific have been. But it's really heartening to see a band that functions on an egalitarian basis, for whom the girls are necessary, vital members, and a husband and wife can sing a rollicking good dance song about his inability to get it up.
Personally, I think it's a step in the right direction.
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