Some Only Semi-coherent Thoughts on Old Pop Music

not much posting these days; working on this 'homemade' women in media textbook seems to be taking up my writing energy--especially now when i'm working on the subject i know least about and don't like--women in pop music--which really means women in rock. i do this course and my tv in american life class historically, but since pop music has been around forever, i'm starting with the 1950s, when the roots of the stuff they listen to today began.  it's funny with that; when i was a kid i hated rock.  well, as an aging woman, i still do--but the rock i hated in the 50s is stuff i like now, at least in small doses. the girl groups, but also jerry lee lewis....roy orbson... orbson still feels, to my prejudiced ear, like a brilliant voice in a banal medium. felt the same, maybe even more, about patsy cline.  can't take c&w seriously, but her, i certainly can.

 in the 60s i liked rock, except motown.  i never liked shrieking sounds.  but i did come to like the beatles, at least through the sergeant pepper album, and even the early stones, though their contempt for women was already pretty clear, and mick jagger always looked like a humorless don knots.  the mamas and the poppas, donova;, blood, sweat and tears. never joplin, though i was sad for her death; never, still, aretha franklin.

  i liked the folk stuff more. i don't think any '60s leftie could fail to love phil ochs.  dylan i've always preferred when someone else was singing his songs.  but what songs!  until he decided to be a c&w singer, or what i called the gene autry album.  lay lady lay indeed!  joni mitchell, always a category of her own.  still think of 'last time i saw richard' when i'm feeling sad and sorry for myself--those dark cafe days....baez, even after her ghastly ''girls say yes to boys who say no to the draft'' speech--when i heard it, the women's movement hadn't started, and my objection wasn't the insult to women so much as a familiarity with the anti-war movement, and a gut feeling that while i would proudly support any draft dodger, i knew enough of them who were simply unattractive, and i had no intention of becoming a peacenik camp follower.  listening to her now, i can hear the quality of the voice, and also its limits.  a thin voice, but she chose music suited to it.  and i loved her pre-feminist politics.  anyway, we all had to learn the implications of the new word but old phenomenon, sexism.  odetta--amazing, deep, like a contralto, and carrying in it every emotion the song spoke to  when she sang the old spirituals that had been updated with the civil rights movement, you heard all sorrow and anger of the past and present simultaneously,  shaking the illusion that the past no longer existed.   and the older songs--'if i had a ribbon bow',  and the sometimes bluesy stuff.  powerful, with no loss of beauty in the voice. buffy saint marie--''now that the buffalo's gone,' 'codine,'  but also the bouncy 'cripple creek.'

nice to be revisiting some of those singers now.  and at least when i read and write about joplin and franklin, i only have to think about them--not listen to them. i still like when pbs does one of its endless  rock retrospectives, to watch tina turner with the mute button pushed.  an incredible presence: when you watched her, the powerful and stunning body moving with such defiant confidence, you thought if a bulldozer ran into her the bulldozer would break and she wouldn't miss a move.

well, there it is--i'm almost done with the first draft of the '70s.  and then only 3 decades to go...