anger management
Last week, Jude Rogers asked, “What happened to angry female music stars?”. It’s a question I’ve also been asking for a while now. My teenage years were soundtracked by singer-songwriters such as Tori Amos, PJ Harvey and Courtney Love, but looking around for their successors in 2010 - in terms of both aesthetic spirit and cultural position - I find myself feeling a bit like an old-skool hip-hop head complaining about how soft the genre’s become.
Slightly confusingly, the headline for Jude’s piece refers to “female music stars”, but she makes clear in her opening paragraph that she’s talking about women in rock particularly. At no point has female anger left pop music altogether; Jude mentions Rihanna and Lady Gaga, and here are various excellent examples from the past decade or so from outside of rock:
Miranda Lambert - “Gunpowder And Lead”
Teairra Mari - “No Daddy”
Kelly Clarkson - “Never Again”
No Lay - “Unorthadox Daughter”
Lady Saw ft. Ce’Cile - “Loser”
Ashlee Simpson - “I Am Me”
Pink Dollaz - “Don’t Need No”
Lady Chann - “Your Eye Too Fast”
Kelis - “Get Even”
Beyoncé - “Ring The Alarm”
You’ll notice that most of those examples come from formalist genres with strong traditions of anger - R&B, country, hip-hop - and their continued presence isn’t really part of the argument. The type of figure that seems to have died out is a more liminal one: the likes of Amos, Harvey and O’Connor didn’t really seem to exist within any genre or scene. There were a number of reasons for this, all of varying degrees of importance depending on the artist: the logical correlation between catharsis and individualism, the sonic restlessness and penchants for theatricality which saw Harvey and Amos in particular reinvent their sonic strategies from album to album, the way that an emphasis on deeply personal songwriting inevitably led to a cult of personality that meant the artist transcended mere categories. Loosely, these performers - and their audiences - were essentially “alternative” - and, contra R&B and country and hip-hop, it’s the alt/indie sphere in which the cathartic spirit seems to be most lacking in 2010, and I suspect it’s this particular arena that Jude was most concerned with in her piece.
This is why I think Lucy O’Brien’s argument that the Spice Girls were to blame is unsatisfactory - bubblegum girl groups had always coexisted with cathartic female rockers. But there was another, more effective sense in which mainstream pop co-opted cathartic rock - and ironically it was due to the angry woman crossing over to huge mainstream success, rather than just existing on the fringes of it. Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill proved that this was a formula that would sell, and by the early 00s a new generation of pop stars were taking the loud guitars + pissed-off female template and wrapping it in a mainstream pop package - Avril Lavigne and Pink in particular. (Pink should really be the answer here - she’s spent most of her career yellin’ and bellowin’ away angrily - but she’s so heavy-handed that I can’t take her seriously.) This has progressed quietly and gradually to the point where we have teenage Disney stars making music like Demi Lovato’s “Got Dynamite”; it’s hard to imagine her ’90s equivalent releasing anything that heavy-sounding and uncompromising.
In a way, though, “angry” is a bit of a red herring. In response to Jude on Twitter, Kate St. Claire made the point that tagging someone as an “angry woman” is often a way of dismissing them - of reducing them to one easily-mocked aspect of their art, of ignoring their craftsmanship and innovative tendencies, of erasing their ability to cover the whole spectrum of emotions. That was, and continues to be, the case for each of Amos, Love and Harvey (and even more so for, e.g., Sinéad O’Connor and Ani DiFranco) - despite their champions, the critical consensus as I remember it was essentially “crazy bitches” - somewhere between dismissal and derision, stereotyped as hysterical menstruation-obsessed women. And that’s before you even get to the way their fans were mocked (but then, the teenage girl fan has always been a source of fear to the middle-aged male music hack).*
In a way though, that fear is a good litmus test. Amos, Love and Harvey had the power to scare audiences - and that’s a testament to the power of their music and image. Their aesthetic was all blood, guts and passion: emotions dredged up and put on the line without compromise. Perhaps a better way of characterising it, rather than “anger”, would be “catharsis”. And the political edge to this catharsis was important, too: these women tackled body image, rape and abuse - and sung from experience. So what’s missing now isn’t so much anger, but a specific kind of anger; one which discomfits audiences, which pisses people off or makes them uneasy - or which inspires a cult-like devotion). And let’s not forget the importance of chops, the kind of immense technical ability to craft catharsis into something more than just flailing emotion.
Rather than looking at mainstream culture, I think alt/indie culture is what needs to be examined here. I’m no expert on it, but from my perspective there seems to have been a sort of Juno-fication of indie over the past decade; sincerity has fallen out of fashion in favour of detached irony, which leaves little room for any intensity in self-expression bar either faux-quirky twee bullshit or pretty-but-completely-harmless ethereality. (You know who they are.)
This isn’t really a post about answers; it’s more about eliminating some red herrings, refining the questions and hopefully raising some new ones. I’ll finish by saying that this week, I finally watched the infamous Sinéad O’Connor SNL appearance for the first time, in the wake of the latest round of Catholic Church scandals. And then I remembered Lauryn Hill using a concert at the Vatican in 2003 or thereabouts to denounce the Catholic Church’s cover-up of child abuse. A few days after her SNL stand, O’Connor was jeered off stage by a bunch of Bob Dylan fans (and that, too, is worth watching, for her astonishing, angry bravery in the face of it). The price of their righteous anger was that both O’Connor and Hill were mocked and derided as crazy women - the image that both are still saddled with to this day. Maybe, having witnessed this treatment, it’s unsurprising that fewer women are prepared to pay that price now.
BTW, Jude will be posting fuller transcripts from her various interviews here soon - am looking forward to seeing what else was said…
