Lady of the Canyon

Mitchell’s gender positioning is illustrated by the distance between her public persona as produced through promotional campaigns and her efforts to define herself as an artist. Mitchell had the good fortune to have published songs under her own name for a publishing company in which she was an owner prior to signing with Reprise, a record label originally created as a vanity label for Frank Sinatra. Notably, in addition to retaining her publishing rights, she was granted total artistic control, including choice of album artwork and repertoire, from her debut recording.

She evinced little control over her promotional campaigns, however. Mitchell’s image became deeply imbricated within the somewhat clumsy yet effective overlapping of the discursive regimes of the counterculture and marketing departments at record labels; in no small part due to music industry employees often identifying record labels as countercultural in some fashion. An advertisement in Rolling Stone for her third release, Ladies of the Canyon (Reprise 1970), can serve as an example of the intersecting ways in which the music industry and the counterculture framed Mitchell as an authentic ‘hippie chick folkie singer-songwriter’. The ad describes Amy, a twenty-three year old ‘quietly beautiful’ woman, as despondent because her recently departed boyfriend is moving quickly to marry a fellow employee at Jeans West, a well-known denim clothing store at the time. She begins to feel better when a grocery delivery boy, Barry, compliments her collage of Van Morrison images. Offering him a drink of ‘Constant Comment [tea] with orange honey mixed in’, Barry offers Amy, in return, to smoke a joint (marijuana cigarette) with her and, noticing her ‘far out’ stereo system, the opportunity to listen to a recent purchase, which just happens to be Joni Mitchell’s latest recording, Ladies of the Canyon. As they both became ‘quite mellow indeed’, Amy begins to feel better because she hears in Mitchell a sense that ‘there was someone else, even another canyon lady, who really knew’ her situation, easing her sense of painful isolation.¹³

This advertisement articulated the merging of consumerist culture signifiers (Jeans West, Constant Comment, stereo components) with countercultural ones (Van Morrison, marijuana, Joni Mitchell) indicating how, by obscuring the fact that this narrative is actually an advertisement for their new commercial release, Reprise’s publicity department hoped to market Ladies of the Canyon as a recording for young listeners who were similarly inclined to create their own artwork, listen to other countercultural artists (besides Van Morrison, Neil Young plays an important role in the advertisement; not surprisingly, all were Warner Brothers artists at the time), and lead lives wherein ‘alternative consumer culture’ was not an oxymoron or contradiction.

Reprise ran another advertising campaign in the early 1970s, revealing the role gender and sexuality performed in marketing Mitchell at the time by declaring ‘Joni Mitchell Takes Forever’, ‘Joni Mitchell is 90 Per Cent Virgin’, and ‘Joni Mitchell Finally Comes Across’. Recalling her career trajectory, Mitchell revealed that

While Mitchell recognised the roles gender and image played in the popular music market, she rejected feminism: ‘I was never a feminist. I was in argument with them. They were so down on the domestic female, the family, and it was breaking down. And even though my problems were somewhat female, they were of no help to mine’.¹⁵ Reading feminism as anti-men more than pro-women, Mitchell explicitly positioned her musicking as androgynous: ‘For a while it was assumed that I was writing women’s songs. Then men began to notice that they saw themselves in the songs, too. A good piece of art should be androgynous. I’m not a feminist. That’s too divisional for me’.¹⁶ Women artists, she asserts, do not necessarily share aesthetic or musical affinities and therefore music should be evaluated without regard to the gender of its producer(s). Yet, her play for ‘androgynous art’ echoes the liminal space her music occupies – neither female nor male, Mitchell grounds her music in the space spanning genders. In a recent interview, Mitchell responded to a question about her image as ‘hippie folk goddess’ sardonically:

A ‘Hollywood’s Hot 100’ spread in the 3 February 1972 issue of Rolling Stone displayed her name surrounded by lips with arrows connecting her to various male musicians, represented with simple boxes framing their names – no lips, alas, for male musicians. The previous year, the magazine listed her as ‘Old Lady of the Year for her friendships with David Crosby, Steve Stills, Graham Nash, Neil Young, James Taylor, et al.’. In the ‘Hot 100’ graphic (see Figure 18.2), David Crosby, James Taylor, and Graham Nash share images of a halved heart in separate connections to Mitchell’s lips. Mitchell is one of four females listed on the page though the only one with a special graphic image and given an equivalent ‘star billing’ position to the male musicians.¹⁸ Reflecting on it over twenty years later, Mitchell admitted, ‘[Rolling Stone’s chart] was a low blow [and] made me aware that the whore/Madonna thing had not been abolished by that experiment’.¹⁹

Figure 18.2 ‘Hollywood’s Hot 100’ Rolling Stone 3 February, 1972.

Yet, as Mitchell related to Cameron Crowe:

Acknowledging the contradictory pressures and privileges of commercial success, codified within her conflicted triangulation of artistic experimentation, mass popularity, and financial success, Mitchell’s artistic and commercial ‘independence’ is not based on a feminist agenda but on the claims to an art space ‘beyond’ the considerations of gender. Disavowing ‘the lie’ of the feminist movement, she argues that even well-meaning assessments that privilege women musicians’ expressive qualities miss too much, replying with a question of her own:

Mitchell’s claims for artistic authority rest on a ‘gender-blind’ – or, to use the term she prefers, androgynous – aesthetic. It is no compliment to be called a ‘female songwriter’ as it ‘implies limitations [which have] always been true of women in the arts’, who are seen as ‘incapable of really tackling the important issues that men could tackle’.²² Her programme is not to deny her position but ‘in order to create ... a rich character full of human experience [for her songs] ... you have to work with the fodder that you have’.²³ Indeed, songwriting liberated her:

In 1975’s The Hissing of Summer Lawns (Elektra-Asylum, 1975), Mitchell’s supine swimming body appears alongside the albums lyrics and liner notes (see Figure 18.3). By contrast, the liner notes were cryptic: ‘This record is a total work conceived graphically, musically, lyrically and accidentally as a whole. The performances were guided by the given compositional structures and the audibly inspired beauty of every player. The whole unfolded like a mystery. It is not my intention to unravel that mystery for anyone, but rather to offer some additional clues’. Her ambiguity ultimately fails to displace the fundamental ideological role patriarchy plays in ascertaining musical value because it leaves male privilege untouched and, arguably, placing this text above her bikinied body plays into gendered differential power relations. Male privilege is simply obscured but not eliminated in ‘gender-blind’ aesthetic discourse or when masculinity is described as merely another ‘choice’ among gender positionings. Simply judging artistic works against a standard that is embedded within and implicated by patriarchal Western standards immediately compromises those artists who fall outside of those norms – as Mitchell does, despite her intention to produce androgynous art.²⁵

Figure 18.3 The Hissing of Summer Lawns (Elektra-Asylum, 1975).

Art Nouveau

In (re)naming her ‘inner black’ character Art Nouveau, Mitchell referenced an early twentieth century art movement that strove to beautify ordinary, everyday objects. The original Art Nouveau movement sought to aestheticise, in the sense of ‘making beautiful’, the everyday objects of ordinary life as a way to beautify an increasingly industrialised world.²⁶ Driven by a similar impulse, Mitchell meant to transform subalternity through an engagement with art. Thus, Mitchell can be seen ‘making beautiful’ the street hustler, the con, the pimp. Certainly, we can also view it as racist condescension – who is she, to ‘make beautiful’ those whose racialised bodies encounter material conditions she has never had to even consider, let alone face? As Mitchell claims in the first epigraph to this chapter, she thought she ‘was black for about three years ... like there was a black poet trapped inside me’.²⁷ Similar to Norman Mailer’s white Negroes,²⁸ and as Grier has also noted, Mitchell capitalises on her white privilege in accessing black masculinity in order to transcend, in her case, femaleness, generic limitations, and conventional popular music categorisations.

In this context, one of Mitchell’s paintings blatantly signalled her use of black sexuality and, in particular, the black phallus, that play into tropes of black male hypersexuality, pointedly in its symbolic power over white masculinity, which is feminised in its presence, the fount of the white fear of, and desire for, blackness.²⁹ Mitchell met percussionist Don Alias when he was hired for the Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter (Elektra-Asylum 1977) sessions, beginning a nearly four-year relationship. Mitchell had painted a number of her partners and she painted one of Alias in his bathrobe. Alias describes it: ‘It was me, with my bathrobe open with – bang! like this – a hard-on sticking out’.³⁰ While she eventually succumbed to his pleas about the painting, countering that it was a ‘testament to his sexuality’, transforming the penis into a flaccid appendage, she displayed it ‘smack-dab in the middle of the living room of the loft’ they shared in New York. Perhaps Mitchell was so insistent about this painting because it served as a self-portrait of sorts, recording her self-transformation from blonde waif to black stud, from hippie chick to bebop poet.

Mitchell’s black phallic fixation speaks to all the criticisms her recklessness with racialised, sexualised, and gendered performances might deserve but her eagerness to display the picture ‘smack-dab in the middle of the living room’ reveals a typically confrontational stance. Her imperviousness to any criticism of her appropriation of subordinate identities and cultures was brought into literal sharp relief by her artwork for the cover of Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter (see Figure 18.4). Against a bare red and blue backdrop suggesting a desolate red landscape and an equally barren blue sky, Mitchell mounted a number of blue-toned black-and-white photographs, cut-and-pasted from a number of different photography sessions. Art Nouveau, leaning back, sunglasses obscuring his eyes, is physically mimicking what one imagines was the bodily stance of Mitchell’s Halloween admirer, slyly speaking the title, ‘Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter’, to us, unambiguously naming her audacity and hinting at his possible role in her adventures. As Gayle Wald asks in an insightful discussion of another ‘white Negro’, jazz musician Milton ‘Mezz’ Mezzrow, ‘To what degree do individuals exercise volition over racial identity, or how is volition over the terms of identity itself a function of, and a basis for, racial identity and identity-formation … and to what degree is such imagined racial or cultural mobility itself predicated upon a correspondingly rigid and immobile conception of “blackness”?’³¹

Figure 18.4 Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter (Elektra-Asylum, 1977).

Grier answers Wald’s question, noting critically, ‘Mitchell has shown that her transcendence of racial boundaries, at least, depends upon others’ upholding their essential functions ... Wisdom is of the North and the white race; heart comes from the soulful blacks of the south. Clarity is the gift of the East’s intelligent yellow race and introspection from the spiritual red men of the West’,³² locating Mitchell’s racial crossing as another instance of white privilege. Yet while dependent on non-white essentialisms, Mitchell has often complicated this relationship. At an infamous 1970 Isle of Wight Festival performance, she was interrupted by an acquaintance of hers named Yogi Joe, who was subsequently taken off the stage by stage hands – an action which prompted boos and yells of disapproval from the audience. In her emotional response to the crowd, Mitchell explicitly disconnected ethnic or racial background from cultural authenticity in her appeal that the audience calm down and let her perform: ‘Last Sunday I went to a Hopi ceremonial dance in the desert and there were a lot of people there and there were tourists ... and there were tourists who were getting into it like Indians and there were Indians getting into it like tourists, and I think that you’re acting like tourists, man. Give us some respect’.³³ Her delineation between ‘tourists’ and ‘Indians’ as ‘inauthentic’ and ‘authentic’ experiences drain those categories of conventional, even normative, essentialisms and transposes them in a similar way that her blackface persona, Art Nouveau, highlights the constructed-ness of blackness and masculinity.

But it also reveals the fragility of artifice in the service of art. The self-awareness of the artifice involved in Mitchell’s appeal to her audiences is never adequate to the task of ‘saving’ her. Mitchell, describing her aesthetic at the time of Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, positioned herself outside of musical norms:

Mitchell’s sense of ‘non-belonging’ from conventional musical categories can be seen in Ariel Swartley’s review of Mingus for Rolling Stone magazine: ‘It’s been a long time since her songs had much to do with whatever’s current in popular music. (She would prefer we call them art-songs.) But then, she doesn’t so much come on as an outsider, but as a habitual non-expert. She’s the babe in bopperland, the novice at the slot machines, the tourist, the hitcher’.³⁵

Mitchell, however, argues that rather than ‘habitual non-expert’, she is a ‘consistent non-belonger’, declaring:

Conclusion

In an interview at the time of the release of the Mingus recording, Mitchell cited Mingus’ ‘If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There’d Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats’ as an example of her position on this issue:

As a quick perusal through interviews and reviews reveals, she has also been called self-indulgent, opinionated, over-reaching, and pretentious – often by individuals who find her music appealing (at least some of it, most of the time). As Janet Maslin tersely summed up in her review of Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, ‘These days, Mitchell appears bent on repudiating her own flair for popular songwriting, and on staking her claim to the kind of artistry that, when it’s real, doesn’t need to announce itself so stridently’.³⁸

The cover of the live concert recording, Shadows and Light (Elektra-Asylum 1980), provides us with a final arresting visual image (see Figure 18.5). Centred on a black background, a double-exposed photographic image places Mitchell and Alias together within the small frame. Mitchell’s face is slightly obscured as it merges with Alias’ cymbals, his face hidden behind hers. His body is somewhat visible and the result is a jarring image of Mitchell’s profile sitting atop a black male body. Is this yet another case of Mitchell’s racial and gender masking or passing, another fanciful self-portrait? Undermining Maslin’s accusatory dismissal, the image is both revealing and cryptic, unfolding ‘like a mystery [though Mitchell has no] intention to unravel that mystery for anyone’, a figure of shadows and light.³⁹

Figure 18.5 Shadows and Light (Elektra-Asylum, 1980).

Scrutinising Lilith Fair

Festival organisers were quick to respond to criticisms that highlighted the issue of diversity in the 1997 Lilith Fair lineup. Organisers of the festival released this statement on the Lilith Fair 1998 website: ‘In addition to the Main Stage, Lilith Fair will again incorporate Second and Village Stages for both established and emerging artists, with an emphasis being placed on offering an even broader range of musicianship to this year’s audience.’¹⁰ While the 1997 Main Stage included only singer-songwriters, a survey of the women who performed on the Main Stage in 1998 shows that while white female singer-songwriters were still present, so too were rappers Missy Elliott and Queen Latifah, rock band Luscious Jackson, and soul singers Me’shell Ndegeocello, and Erykah Badu.

Notably, eighteen of the twenty-four Main Stage performers in 1998 were white and six were African American.¹¹ This dualism also functioned in Lilith Fair 1999, as twelve of the seventeen Main Stage acts were white, five African American.¹² Although Lilith Fair diversified the music heard on its Main Stage, overall white female singer-songwriters still comprised approximately two-thirds of the lineup, and rock bands were scarce.

Lilith Fair’s predominance of singer-songwriters and relative invisibility of rock musicians is not a situation unique to the festival, but a disparity that exists in popular music generally. The reasons behind this have as much to do with rock’s hegemonic masculinity as they do with the relationship between singer-songwriters and gender. Since the 1950s, rock has been a male-dominated space that typically only makes room for women as the lyrical objects of desire or resentment, or as devoted fans and groupies.¹³ The reasons for this are numerous, and include such issues as performance aesthetics, rock criticism, the electric guitar as phallic symbol, the masculinisation of technology, and gendered barriers to knowledge acquisition and gear. As a result, women tend to be far less visible in rock music than their male counterparts.¹⁴

In contrast, women have prospered and been heard as singer-songwriters. Gillian Mitchell contends the singer-songwriter tradition was the most visible outcome of the folk revival from the 1960s onwards.¹⁵ By the end of the 1960s, many folk revival performers began drifting towards the mainstream, in large part due to a shift in the cultural climate. The eclecticism and optimism that characterised the revival movement chafed against the conflict, protest, and rallies of the 1960s. As revival-style folk music began mingling with the sounds of mainstream popular music, lyrics gravitated towards introspection and personal experience, and women such as Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, and Judy Collins, who were prominent in the folk scene, continued to be at the forefront.

Women’s visibility as singer-songwriters has much to do with the introspection and confession that characterised the music of singer-songwriters during the 1970s. The image of a lone, self-accompanied female musician with an acoustic instrument, stoically delivering confessional lyrics does not challenge traditional representations of femininity informed by white, middle-class respectability. Because of these associations, women are better-represented as singer-songwriters than rock musicians – at least some women are better-represented.¹⁶ The visibility of Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, and Judy Collins during the 1960s and 1970s leads Gillian Mitchell to suggest the folk revival’s ideals of inclusiveness were actively materialised. A closer look at the women Mitchell cites, however, reveals a different picture. Thirteen of the fifteen women she cites as active in the Greenwich Village and Yorkville folk/singer-songwriter scenes in the 1950s and 1960s are white.¹⁷ Lilith Fair clearly demonstrates white women have continued to thrive as singer-songwriters, while women of other ethnicities are less visible as singer-songwriters in the mainstream, commercial market. Ellie Hisama and bell hooks suggest this is in large part due to the pressure many black female singers experience to cultivate an image of sexual availability, a direct consequence of ideologies that situate black sexuality as more free and liberated than white sexuality. As a result, black women do not always figure into either the racially marked women’s music scene or singer-songwriter category, where whiteness and respectability run deep.¹⁸

Lilith Fair did not create a space in which an equitable representation of female musicians in popular music was materialised, but in this respect the festival is not unique. While the women’s music scene was largely comprised of white, lesbian women, the first Ladyfest focused on indie rock, privileging white female musicians.¹⁹ As subsequent Ladyfests were organised internationally, each struggled to create inclusive lineups that acknowledged, ‘the contributions of women of colour as fellow organisers, musicians, and volunteers without rendering them as either token participants or invisible’.²⁰ Arguably, this is where Lilith Fair struggled most. Because the Main Stage remained predominantly white, the majority of women who were not Caucasian were included on the Second and Village Stages.

Lilith Fair concerts were primarily held in amphitheatres, where a single stage was already in place and utilised as the festival’s Main Stage. Seating consisted of rows of seats in front of the Main Stage, grass seating behind them. The secondary stages were necessary because the eleven to twelve acts included on each concert bill performed consecutively. While one musician performed on the Village Stage, another could set up on the Second Stage, minimising the time spent setting up and removing equipment. Typically, the only delay between performances occurred during the evening when the Main Stage acts performed. Although a necessity in terms of production, the way in which these stages were positioned established hierarchies. The Second Stage was commonly situated amongst the grass seating, leaving those in the permanent seating with their backs to the Second Stage performers. The Village Stage was often located in the Village, an area not usually visible from the permanent or grass seating, and which included the distractions of booths and vendors. One might argue the musicians included on the secondary stages were lesser known and did not have a large enough audience to warrant billing on the Main Stage. Such thinking only reiterates the hegemony at play in Lilith Fair, and overlooks the choices made that favoured commercially successful white women.

Lilith Fair, genre, and ‘women’s music’

Lilith Fair’s definition of women musicians was narrow and physically inscribed on the festival’s landscape. Highlighting these issues is imperative in order not to perpetuate the recuperation of white female musicians as all ‘women in music’. To abandon the conversation at this juncture obscures the practices that prompted the founding of Lilith Fair, and implies female singer-songwriters have circumvented resistance in the popular music industry. Male singer-songwriters of the 1970s were intellectually appreciated for their views on politics and cultural events, and artistically revered for sensitive and autobiographical lyrics that ruminated on sex, love, and relationships.²¹ Descriptions of singer-songwriters as confessional and introspective proved thorny for female singer-songwriters. When applied to women, these adjectives become sutured to cultural representations of women as emotional and irrational. Joni Mitchell, Carole King, and Carly Simon produced a wealth of music during the 1970s that reflected a changing social climate. As they contemplated sex, relationships, politics, family, and work, female singer-songwriters questioned traditional ideals and considered new perspectives, particularly as they related to white, middle-class women benefiting from the women’s liberation movement.²²

Socially and politically conscious lyrics did not necessarily ensure a serious reception. Stuart Henderson has examined the critical discourse surrounding Joni Mitchell’s musical output and found over the course of her first three albums, Mitchell was described using language that evoked youthfulness and naïveté. As her work became increasingly biographical and reflected the complexities of relationships and sex, the discourse was condescending and patronising. In 1970, Rolling Stone labelled her the ‘Queen of el-Lay’ and later published a list of her alleged lovers. Her record label Reprise published advertisements such as ‘Joni Mitchell is 90% Virgin’ and ‘Joni Mitchell Takes Forever’.²³ (See also Chapter 18 in this volume) Mitchell’s personal disclosures and reflections were co-opted and used to depoliticise a body of work that clearly reflected the influence of both the sexual revolution and women’s liberation movement.²⁴ Despite this, many female listeners saw themselves in the songs of Mitchell, Simon, and King and became a large market willing to purchase music that spoke to their experiences. By the early 1970s, the percentage of top-selling albums recorded by female artists reached double digits, and in 1974, Time magazine concluded ‘women’s music sells’.²⁵

Twenty years later and these issues persisted. Singer-songwriter Fiona Apple gave voice to her personal story of rape in ‘Sullen Girl’, but a 1997 performance of the song was described as a ‘precocious teen-age girl becoming sure of herself’ by the New York Times.²⁶ Various incarnations of ‘women’s music’ and ‘women in music’ also appeared as headlines during the 1990s, touting the success of such singer-songwriters as Jewel, Alanis Morissette, Tracy Chapman, Sarah McLachlan, Fiona Apple, and Liz Phair.²⁷ In the wake of their commercial success, Warner Elektra Atlantic released five volumes of the compilation album Women & Songs between 1997 and 2000.

These headlines and compilation albums perpetuate the notion that music performed by female singer-songwriters is ‘women’s music’; that music made by female singer-songwriters constitutes a genre simply by virtue of their sex. ‘Women’s music’ is not imbued with musicological meaning, and in fact subsumes musical differences. Female singer-songwriters have been labelled ‘women’s music’ because they are women who write and perform their own music, not because of shared musical characteristics. The assumption that these women constitute a genre on the basis of their sex is what informed the music industry’s practice of not billing multiple women on a single concert tour; such a bill would be too similar. ‘Women’s music’ is also frequently conflated with the women’s music scene of the 1970s, a lesbian feminist project with the goal of transforming the mainstream music industry through women’s music recording and distribution companies, and enacting lesbian feminist politics through women-only events such as the Michigan Womyn’s Festival.²⁸ A distinction between the marginalising label ‘women’s music’ and the women’s music scene is often lost, and therefore ‘women’s music’ invokes intimations of queerness whether they are real or imagined.

Lilith Fair provides an opportunity to further a critical dialogue around the relationship between female singer-songwriters and ‘women’s music’. Norma Coates’ discussion of ‘women in rock’ provides a useful starting point as she argues ‘women in rock’ separates rock and women; women are only related to rock by being allowed in. The label ‘women in music’ functions similarly by positioning women only in relation to music, not as a natural part. Coates proposes that rather than rejecting these gendered labels, ‘women in rock’ may be a politically useful term because it designates rock as contested ground: ‘By latching on to the label, women involved with rock can problematise the very practices and conditions which necessitate the use of that term within popular rock discourse’.²⁹ Whether prohibited from touring with other women or excluded from rock festivals such as Lollapalooza, the need for Lilith Fair was clear. Lilith Fair’s ‘celebration of women in music’ designated music as contested ground and problematised the conditions that prompted the festival by deploying a roster comprised primarily of singer-songwriters to interrupt sexist music industry practices. The favouring of white female singer-songwriters highlighted inequities between female musicians and clearly situated the singer-songwriter tradition as a racially marked category that remains contested ground for those women who are not Caucasian.

The commercial success of Lilith Fair did not simply defy faulty industry logic, but also placed so-called ‘women’s music’ in a highly visible position. From this position, the festival confronted the tendency to depoliticise female singer-songwriters by creating a socially and politically engaged environment. Forming corporate sponsorships with Bioré, Nine West, and Borders Books and Music, Lilith Fair and its sponsors made donations both to local charities and to organisations identified as official Lilith Fair charities, such as RAINN (Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network), Planned Parenthood, and Artists Against Racism.³⁰ These organisations addressed social, political, and economic issues with particular relevance to women, and were represented in the Lilith Fair Village in the form of booths providing information and education for audience members. Many of the topics and issues that were visible in the Lilith Fair Village were also voiced during festival performances. Alongside introspective performances contemplating love, such as in Jewel’s ‘Foolish Games’, Tracy Chapman spoke to cyclical poverty and unemployment in ‘Fast Car’, while Suzanne Vega commented on domestic violence in ‘Luka’.

Foregrounding a range of sounds and musicians would also problematise the tendency to group female singer-songwriters as ‘women’s music’, and those industry practices that rested on the same notion.³¹ In 1997, for instance, Emmylou Harris’ folk, country, rock, and bluegrass-inspired material was featured alongside Yungchen Lhamo’s unaccompanied vocals that drew on traditional and world music influences. Meredith Brooks’ guitar-based, rock-influenced performances also stood in stark contrast to Sarah McLachlan’s adult contemporary, piano-accompanied soprano. Singer-songwriters dominated the landscape of Lilith Fair, but the music they performed was varied and diverse and reflected the myriad of musical influences shaping the output of singer-songwriters. As Lilith Fair toured in subsequent years, female singer-songwriters performed alongside the pop vocals of Christina Aguilera, Cibo Matto’s indie rock and trip hop sounds, the soul, R&B, funk, and hip-hop-inspired repertoire of Me’shell Ndegeocello, the country sounds of the Dixie Chicks, and the rock, trip hop, down-tempo material of Morcheeba, broadening the festival’s definition of ‘women in music’.

At the end of each evening, the performers gathered onstage for an all-artist finale reminiscent of the folk revival’s emphasis on community and participation. The socially and politically conscious lyrics of Joni Mitchell’s ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ and Marvin Gaye’s ‘What’s Going On’ were the preferred choices and provided an audible example of community. Lilith Fair artists assembled informally and shared lead and backing vocal duties. The all-artist finales signalled a collective while defying the traditionally solitary nature of the singer-songwriter and the notion that female musicians should not share concert billing. Both factors have hindered a sense of community and belonging for female musicians in the popular music industry, something Sarah McLachlan hoped Lilith Fair could counter: ‘Lilith Fair was created for many reasons … the desire to create a sense of community that I felt was lacking in our industry’.³²

Community did not refer to a fixed location or group of performers, but was imagined in the sense proposed by Benedict Anderson. As geographical exploration and the evolution of the printing press destabilised religious universalism and exposed the pluralistic nature of the world, people found new ways to define their place in the world, imagining this new place and their relationship to other people. The community Lilith Fair cultivated extended to only a small segment of female musicians working in popular music, but as Hayes argues, the women’s music scene did not change the music industry in the ways the scene had hoped, but it did play a valuable role in ‘buoying women’s spirits in the process of community formation’.³³ Lilith Fair addressed only a handful of issues that some women in popular music face, but it did foster a sense of community that was lacking. Lilith Fair participants shared billing, attended press conferences together, and gathered in spontaneous musical moments backstage. As the festival stopped in various cities across the continent, local female musicians were invited to compete in the Village Stage Talent Search for the opportunity to perform on the Village Stage. Lilith Fair created a space that had not previously existed, even if that space had its limitations.

Conclusion

Lilith Fair’s version of ‘women in music’ was clearly flawed, foregrounding gender and clouding the way in which race, class, and sexuality informs the participation of female musicians in popular music. Lilith Fair signified a cultural moment when some women in popular music were able to openly problematise gendered practices that had existed in the popular music industry for decades. Expanding the conversation beyond Lilith Fair’s shortcomings to include a survey of the women and musics that Lilith Fair featured makes it clear it is necessary to interrogate both who was included and what music was heard. To dismiss the festival for its privileging of white singer-songwriters both obscures the racialised history of the singer-songwriter tradition, and overlooks the problematic ways ‘women’s music’ informs the reception of female singer-songwriters. Female singer-songwriters do not constitute a genre of music. Lilith Fair confronted the tendency to depoliticise and ghettoise female singer-songwriters as ‘women’s music’ by highlighting the range of musical traditions informing the output of singer-songwriters in an environment that emphasised social and political awareness. Lilith Fair’s landscape was far from the paradise Joni Mitchell laments in ‘Big Yellow Taxi’, but it should be considered anew as a space from which to explore the intersection of female singer-songwriters, genre, and ‘women’s music’.

Elton John

Reginald Kenneth Dwight was born in Pinner, Middlesex (UK) on 25 March 1947. He began playing the piano aged three, and was awarded a Junior Scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music aged eleven. In 1962, he began performing in a local pub, playing the piano to accompany himself singing cover versions of contemporary hits as well as his own songs. Two years later he joined his first band, The Corvettes, which later reformed as Bluesology. Dwight took his stage name from the Bluesology saxophonist Elton Dean and their lead singer Long John Baldry, and legally changed his name to Elton Hercules John in 1967.

In 1967, Elton John answered a ‘Talent Wanted’ advert in the New Musical Express. Ray Williams of the NME put him in touch with lyricist Bernie Taupin, and thus began the longstanding songwriting collaboration that persists to this day. (For more biographical detail, and issues of authorship and performance, see Chapter 11.)

The collaboration began remotely, with Taupin sending John completed lyrics to set to music. This can be seen as a modern-day counterpart to the ‘Lied singer-songwriters’ of the nineteenth-century (see Hamilton and Loges in Chapter 2) – although a distinction may be drawn between the latters’ tradition of setting established poetry to music, and John setting lyrics that Taupin had written for the purpose. Despite changing environments – the pair shared bunk beds at John’s mother’s Pinner home in the 1970s and later flat-shared – they have continued working in series to this day (2015).⁶ Due to their longstanding working relationship, the popular persona known as ‘Elton John’ embodies Taupin’s lyrics and John’s musical and performing input. Elton John has continued to record prolifically, and at the time of writing has recorded and released over thirty studio albums and four live albums.

In Britain, centuries of intolerance meant that that, by the 1950s, the official mood towards homosexuality was hostile. In 1952, the commissioner of Scotland Yard Sir John Nott-Bower, began to eliminate suspected homosexuals from the British Government.⁷ (At the same time in the United States, Senator Joseph McCarthy carried out a federally endorsed witch-hunt against Communists and, on a lesser scale, homosexuals.) In the late 1960s, Elton John became engaged to secretary Linda Woodrow (who is mentioned in the song ‘Someone Saved My Life Tonight’), publicly showing his involvement in a relationship that was socially acceptable.⁸

‘Your Song’ (1970)

One of John and Taupin’s best-known collaborations was ‘Your Song’, released on John’s self-titled second album (1970). ‘Your Song’ was released in the United States in October 1970, as the B-side to ‘Take Me to the Pilot’, eventually replacing the latter as the A-side due to its popularity; it reached Number 8 in the US charts, and Number 7 in the UK.

‘Your Song’ has a contrasting verse-chorus structure, where each chorus is preceded by two iterations of a four-line verse with changing text.⁹ The song has an acoustic soundworld that builds throughout. The lyrics of the chorus are self-referential, as John sings about writing the song for his loved one.

The lyrics are gender neutral; the addressee is always referred to in the second person (‘you’, ‘your’). The ambiguity allowed by these terms enables listeners to create their own interpretation: heterosexual listeners will interpret this as a straight relationship, while LGBTQ listeners will hear representations of their own sexual preference. John’s use of unmarked gender terminology leaves room for listener interpretations.¹⁰ However, given the societal and officially encouraged norm of heterosexuality in 1970s Britain, ‘Your Song’ can be assumed to be documenting such a relationship – ambiguously creating Moore’s second-person authenticity by validating the emotions and experience of mainstream culture as understood by the listener. The ongoing resonances of these emotions are reinforced by the song’s popularity, and the numerous cover versions by singers of both sexes over the decades.¹¹

Despite the fact that at this point John’s biography was carefully managed to keep his sexuality ambiguous, the low and expressive vocal quality and unobtrusive recording techniques used in ‘Your Song’ begin to subvert traditional notions of masculinity. In subsequent decades, traditional notions of masculinity as labour were reversed by vocal and recording qualities that suggest directness and intimacy, as Ian Biddle notes.¹²

Homosexual acts between men (two consenting adults, in private) were decriminalised in England and Wales in 1967. In 1976, Elton John publicly came out as bisexual in an article in the music magazine Rolling Stone, claiming that he had not felt the need to acknowledge it openly before.¹³

In the same interview, Elton John explained that his first sexual relationships were with women. He was married to record producer Renate Blauel from 1984–8 – a relationship that could be seen publicly as conforming to the socially accepted heterosexual norm, but privately reinforced his bisexuality. However, by 1992 John informed Rolling Stone that he was ‘comfortable being gay’, explaining that he had settled with a male partner and felt happy and optimistic about the future.¹⁴

In October 1993, John entered a relationship with Canadian/British film producer David Furnish. The couple was one of the first in the UK to form a civil partnership when the Civil Partnership Act came into force on 21 December 2005. They have since adopted two children, Zachary Jackson Furnish-John (b. 25 December 2010) and Elijah Joseph Daniel Furnish-John (b. 11 January 2013). Furnish has since stated their intention to marry, since same-sex marriage was legalised in the UK on 29 March 2014:

A significant change can be seen in societal attitudes towards homosexuality in the forty-eight years since John’s public career began. In the 1970s, he was reticent about his private life, but by 2015, he and Furnish felt able to use their fame to bring general attention to some of the social and civil restrictions faced by same-sex partners.

k. d. lang

Kathryn Dawn Lang was born in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada on 2 November 1961. She started singing at the age of five, and became fascinated with the life and music of country singer Patsy Cline while attending the Red Deer Community College. At the same time, Lang expressed her creativity in a series of performance art shows. She also formed a tribute band (the reclines), and adopted the stage name k. d. lang.

Their debut album, A Truly Western Experience, received positive reviews and national attention on its release in 1984. k. d. lang and the reclines released two further albums in the country style, Absolute Torch and Twang (1987) and Angel with a Lariat (1989). Richard Middleton comments on the rigid conventional gender politics of the country music scene, suggesting that lang’s complex gender identity began with Absolute Torch and Twang:

lang released her first solo album in 1988. As well as overt stylistic traits such as yodelling, steel guitars and the lush strings of the Nashville sound, Shadowland was linked to country and western music through producer Owen Bradley (who had produced Patsy Cline, 1957; Patsy Cline Showcase, 1961; and Sentimentally Yours, 1962). The performing persona that she developed was androgynous and grungy: she favoured short haircuts, and low-maintenance outfits such as jeans, check shirts, and dungarees. Again, lang used the strictures of country music and the associated cowboy scene to develop and nuance her gender identity: as Corey Johnson explains, at that time sartorial decisions based on cowboys were used by the LGBTQ community to satirise aggressive heteronormative masculinity, and to inform drag costumes.¹⁷

In 1990, lang recorded Cole Porter’s ‘So in Love’ for Red Hot & Blue, a compilation album to benefit AIDS research and relief.¹⁸ Themes of non-heteronormative sexualities pervade her cover version: although he married Linda in 1919, Porter is described variously as bisexual and homosexual.¹⁹ In the accompanying music video lang wears androgynous dungarees while doing a woman’s laundry. She buries her face in a negligee, lending weight to the rumours that were circulating of her lesbianism.

Her next solo album, Ingénue, was released in March 1992, and represented a change in musical direction from her previous work. Lang and her musical collaborator Ben Mink drew influences from many styles, including ‘1940s movie musicals, spiritual hymns, Russian folk music, American jazz, Joni Mitchell-like tunings and harmonies, Indian folk music and more’.²⁰

‘Constant Craving’ (1992)

‘Constant Craving’, featured last on Ingénue, is lang’s most famous song. It was the first single released from the album, and charted at number 38 on the Billboard 100 and number 2 on the Adult Contemporary Chart. The following year, k. d. lang won multiple awards with the song, including Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal, and the MTV award for Best Female Video.

The soundworld is established with a gentle rock beat, strummed acoustic guitar and melancholy harmonica, and is later enriched by a vibraphone counter melody. The minimal lyrical content depicts the relentless yearning of the song title. lang sings two verses, alternating with a chorus, with further repetitions of the chorus to finish. Her solo vocal is supported by a backing choir that echos her lyrics.

In contrast to ‘Your Song’, the lyrics of ‘Constant Craving’ do not refer to a loved one. Instead, they document and reflect upon the emotion of yearning. lang’s biographer Victoria Starr states that this ‘tormented splendor’ applies to the whole album, and refers to an unrequited love experience – exhibiting second-person authenticity.²¹ However, as explained below, in combination with lang’s biography, the lyrics create something more akin to first-person authenticity – where the listener believes that the musician is expressing their own lived experiences, in a direct and unmediated format.²²

lang publicly came out as lesbian in a June 1992 issue of LGBTQ magazine The Advocate, and has actively championed gay rights causes since.²³ Taken in combination with her personal life, the gender-neutral pronouns of the songs and the lyrical descriptions of love, yearning, and loss, take on a different meaning.

lang’s plea in the fourth song on the same album, ‘Save Me’, can be understood as an appeal to either gender, as she sings to an unnamed addressee: ‘Save me from you … Pave me/The way to you’. However, a closer reading of the album shows playfulness with gender construction and ambiguity. The song’s video depicts lang in an exaggeratedly feminine manner, surrounded by bright colours and bubbles. This stands in contrast to the persona that lang has chosen to adopt: a brief glance at her album covers, media presence, and performances show that she prefers androgynous hairstyles and clothing. The caricatured account of femininity lang creates on the ‘Save Me’ video perhaps satirises the fact that the English-language Canadian magazine Chatelaine once chose her as its ‘Woman of the Year’.

The following year, lang famously appeared in a cover photo and photo spread in the mainstream magazine Vanity Fair. The cover of the August 1993 issue featured a seated lang being shaved by supermodel Cindy Crawford. In contrast to the singer’s stereotypically masculine pinstripe suit and waistcoat, Crawford is dressed in a revealing swimsuit and high heels. As anthropologist Joyce D. Hammond explains, the photo shoot (conceived by lang, photographed by Herb Ritts, and willingly participated in by Crawford), challenges typical gender constructions by subverting both expected power dynamics in heterosexual relationships and those of lesbian and homosexual couples.²⁴ The photo caricatured the stereotypical lesbian combination of butch and femme, by placing lang (dressed as a man, complete with shaving foam and the masculine stance of a crossed leg balanced on the opposite knee) in the submissive role of being tended to by an overly feminised and hypersexualised female supermodel in a dominant standing position, complete with careful makeup and hair. Although she claims that she came out publicly for personal, rather than political reasons, lang’s public profile, her 1992 article in The Advocate, and her photo shoot for Vanity Fair all contributed to a mainstreaming of lesbianism. Neil Miller concludes: ‘Nineteen ninety-three was the year of the lesbian. The print media discovered lesbians … Television discovered lesbians.’²⁵

A subversion of traditional gender roles can also be seen in lang’s 1997 album Drag. The album is a covers album, with songs (such as ‘Don’t Smoke in Bed’, and ‘My Last Cigarette’, ‘The Old Addiction’, and ‘Love is Like a Cigarette’) supporting the album’s ostensible theme of smoking. However, the term ‘drag’ has been used in British slang since the late 1800s to refer to clothing associated with one gender but worn by the other. The term ‘drag queen’ is used to identify (often homosexual) men in women’s clothing, while ‘drag kings’ refers to women in mens’ garb. The album art for Drag features a close-up portrait of a carefully made-up lang in a mens’ formal black suit, with a white shirt and burgundy cravat, thereby reinforcing the gender ambiguity of the album but reversing the expected gender roles of drag queens.

On 11 November 2009, lang entered into a domestic partnership with Jamie Price, who she had met in 2003. They separated in September 2012, and lang filed for a dissolution of the marriage. Since coming out in 1992, lang has used her position as a famous musician to raise public awareness of lesbians.

Rufus Wainwright

Rufus Wainwright was born on 22 July 1973 in Rhinebeck, New York, to parents Kate McGarrigle and Loudon Wainwright III, both of whom were successful and well-known folk singers. They divorced when he was three, and he spent much of his childhood in Kate’s home town of Montreal, Canada.

Societal tolerance of non-heteronormative sexualities was growing: in June 1969 police raids on the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, New York City had prompted members of the gay community to violent demonstrations, physically showing their dissatisfaction with the status quo; while in the year of Wainwright’s birth, the American Psychological Association removed homosexuality from its diagnostic manual (suggesting it had been considered an illness until that point). This social tolerance was tempered by a fear and lack of knowledge about the growing AIDS epidemic at the time, which public misconception frequently linked to homosexual activity.

Wainwright accepted his own homosexuality early on, stating in a 2009 documentary: ‘I knew when I was very young, when I was about fourteen, that I was gay.’²⁶ As a teen, he spent many of his evenings sneaking out to gay bars, where he was ‘a Lolita-esque character, a fourteen-year-old boy who looked no older than his years, leaning at the bar, craving attention from older men’.²⁷ In the summer of 1988, he engaged in similar behaviour while visiting Loudon in London, and suffered a violent sexual assault while walking in Hyde Park with a man he met at a bar. He subsequently entered a period of reclusivity and sexual abstinence. At around this time, Loudon and Kate sent him to finish his high school education at Millbrook, a private boarding school in upstate New York. Wainwright therefore went through initial experiences of his sexuality without the support of his family and friends, choosing to come out to his parents a few years later.

After beginning and dropping out of a music degree at McGill University in Canada, Wainwright returned to Montreal in 1991 and began building a repertoire of original material, performing frequently on the cabaret and club circuit. Like Elton John, his instrument of choice was the piano – but Wainwright differed in that he wrote the music and lyrics to his songs.²⁸ Wainwright has an enormous vocal range, which he utilised more in performance and recordings as his career progressed. He is able to slide smoothly through a warm tenor, chest alto voice, head voice into falsetto, and a true falsetto, enabling a range of vocalised gendered personas.²⁹ Wainwright has candidly displayed a queerness in his performance and recordings, which is supported by his developing performing person, his lyrical content, and his vocal qualities.³⁰

The second song on Rufus Wainwright, his 1998 debut album, ‘Danny Boy’, describes his infatuation with a straight man named Danny. Apart from the fact that the lyrics are sung by a man, they could refer to a heterosexual relationship. Unlike either John or lang before him, though, Wainwright names his addressee, singing: ‘You broke my heart, Danny Boy/Not your fault, Danny Boy’. Other songs on the album deal with his sexuality more implicitly: ‘Every kind of love, or at least my kind of love/Must be an imaginary love to start with’ (from the closing song ‘Imaginary Love’).

The early 1990s saw a wave of critical and cultural theory that explored queerness as an alternative to binaries apparent in previous society and scholarship. Rufus Wainwright associates his awareness of his homosexuality with discovering opera in his teens, a connection also drawn by influential literary figures such as Wayne Koestenbaum and Sam Abel.³¹ ‘New musicology’ echoed conventions of literary criticism by introducing interdisciplinary approaches, focusing on the cultural study and criticism of music. In Queering the Pitch: The New Lesbian and Gay Musicology (1994), a collection of ‘mostly gay and lesbian scholars’ aimed to challenge binary tactics and positivistic approaches to previous musicological scholarship, claiming that they found it less interesting to ‘out’ composers and musicians (such as Franz Schubert, explained in more detail below and on accompanying website) than to reveal the homophobia present in previous scholarship and readings.³² By the mid-1990s, cultural awareness of LGBTQ music-making and appreciation went outside the media ‘year of the lesbian’ cited by Miller: it had become an academic discipline.

‘Pretty Things’ (2003)

In ‘Pretty Things’, the fifth song on Wainwright’s 2003 album Want One, he subtly expresses his sexuality. The assumed autobiography of his songs means that Moore’s authenticity is reinforced, but rather than validating listeners’ experiences (second-person authenticity), here the listener is encouraged to believe that Wainwright is sharing his own experiences (first-person authenticity).³³ In line with the singer-songwriter idiom, his songs are perceived as more truthful because they appear unmediated. From a compositional/songwriting perspective, the song pays homage to the nineteenth-century Austrian composer Franz Schubert (to whom Wainwright had already paid tribute to with the line ‘Schubert bust my brain’ in the aforementioned ‘Imaginary Love’). Wainwright scored ‘Pretty Things’ for solo piano and voice, and marketed the song as a twenty-first century Lied (piano and vocal song, usually written for pre-existing text in the German vernacular, made famous by Schubert).³⁴

The lines ‘Pretty Things, so what if I like pretty things/Pretty lies, so what if I like pretty lies’ give an insight into the tastes that Wainwright chooses to share. He continues by lamenting his alienation from society and his loved one: ‘From where you are/To where I am now’. It is but a small step to unite the two lyrical features: a man who is attracted to the typically feminine ‘pretty things’ may be ostracised and alienated from society. In his 2010 analysis of ‘Pretty Things’, Kevin C. Schwandt makes a connection between the isolating and ostracising device of Wainwright’s (assumed autobiographical) protagonist’s taste for pretty things (going against the masculine norm), and the standard Western musicological reading of Schubert as Beethoven’s feminine Other. Schwandt suggests that by associating himself and his music with Schubert, Wainwright implicitly aligns himself with these domestic and feminine readings.³⁵ Schwandt implies that Wainwright was aware of the academic controversy that surrounded Maynard Solomon’s ‘outing’ of Schubert in 1989, and the longstanding tradition of homosexual oppression associated with Schubert’s life and music, and deliberately associated himself with it, in order to align himself with historic homosexuals.³⁶ The lyrics are gender neutral, but Wainwright’s male voice and evocation of ‘pretty things’ make his subject position clear.

Wainwright maintained and developed his autobiographical subject matter and flamboyant performing persona, and made his sexuality more explicit in later songs and performances. While touring the Want albums, Wainwright routinely performed the overtly political ‘Gay Messiah’ (Want Two, 2004) dressed in heavenly garb, descending from the sky on a crucifix. The lyrics evoke a Gay Messiah, sent to save homosexuals the world around, and entangle religious stories with themes of salvation and sexual practices.

The song opens with a suggestion that listeners pray for salvation, before announcing that the gay messiah is coming (as in arriving). This final word is transformed at the end of the second stanza, when Wainwright claims to be ‘baptised in cum’ (the lyrics in the Want Two liner booklet use the spelling commonly associated with the male ejaculate). Wainwright continues twisting and conjoining sexual and biblical imagery, referencing the story of John the Baptist by suggesting that ‘someone will demand my head’. Again, he turns it back to a sexual metaphor, with a word play on ‘giving head’, a common expression for oral sex. ‘I will kneel down’, he sings, ‘and give it to them looking down’.

The lyrics to ‘Gay Messiah’ are an extreme example of sexual openness from a member of the LGBTQ community. Lake remarks upon Wainwright’s ‘gleeful’ smile at some of the more sexually explicit lines, when he first performed it on the national talk show Jimmy Kimmel Live in March 2004, and explains how the song also served as an expression of Wainwright’s opposition to the increasingly right-wing, conservative and intolerant government under George W. Bush in the post-9/11 years. By intertwining lyrical references to biblical stories, Wainwright implicitly shows his dissatisfaction with the intolerance shown by fundamentalist Christians.³⁷

In 2007, Wainwright moved to Berlin to work on and record Release the Stars. During this period Rufus Wainwright met Jörn Weisbrodt, who at the time was working as Head of Special Projects at the Berlin Opera. The couple got engaged in late 2010, and Lorca Cohen (daughter of Leonard) gave birth to a daughter fathered by Rufus, in February 2011. Wainwright explains that when he met Weisbrodt, he began openly campaigning for legalised gay marriage in the United States. He explicitly connects this to the social climate in North America in the 2010s:

Until recently, in the United States of America, the legality of marriage regulation was enforced by state legislature. New York legalised same-sex marriage in November 2011, before the 2012 election. On 24 July 2012, Rufus and Jörn married at their family home in Long Island, New York State. On the 26 June 2015, the US Supreme Court ruled that same-sex marriage be legalised in all fifty states.

Conclusion

The life and work of selected LGBTQ singer-songwriters has provided a useful lens through which to view the increasing social tolerance of sexualities and perspectives outside the heterosexual norm. A major upswing in social awareness occurred in the early 1990s, and since then John, lang and Wainwright have actively used their fame to promote LGBTQ causes and same-sex marriage. In addition, each of the case studies under consideration has supported activism in other areas: in 1992 Elton John founded an eponymous AIDS foundation to support research and work into HIV and related illnesses, and in 1997 reworked and reissued the 1973 tribute to Marilyn Monroe ‘Candle in the Wind’ in memory of Princess Diana, which raised millions of pounds for the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund to support humanitarian causes in the UK and worldwide. k d. lang’s popstar persona lent heft to the PETA ‘Meat Stinks’ campaign in 1990, and Rufus Wainwright began promoting the environmentally conscious Blackoutsabbath in 2008.³⁹

LGBTQ singer-songwriters have become more open in expressing their subject position, both as cause and effect of changing attitudes and increasing social tolerance. As a result, more perspectives on life and love are heard and understood by fans.

Shamanism in popular culture

The term ‘shaman’ is believed to have come from the Tungusic languages found in Siberia and Mongolia, referring to a medicinal and spiritual healer. Though applied initially to the ancient religions of Turks and Mongols, the term was later used by anthropologists to describe a variety of tribal spiritual practices, including those of the natives of the Americas. What most ‘shamanic’ religions share are practices involving chant, trance, spirit possession or contact, and the evoking of powerful symbolism, all of which are brought about by a shaman through charismatic ritual performances. Despite similarities among reputedly shamanic religions, by the 1960s, some anthropologists criticised the universal usage of the term by Western scholars for religious practices in almost any tribal society, which sometimes glossed over the significant differences between them.³ Nevertheless, renewed interest in shamanism among academics and the general public arose in the 1980s, as reflected in the appearance of popular books on the topic.⁴

Tori Amos performs a shamanic persona onstage and on recordings, and there is a long history of entertainers enacting such roles. Rogan Taylor, in his book The Death and Resurrection Show: From Shaman to Superstar (1985), makes a provocative argument that contemporary popular performers are the shamans of the modern West. Taylor states that:

Taylor argues that there is a human spiritual need for extraordinary and ecstatic experience. Expression of this need may be found in every human culture, even though, like language, the variations on this expression are as diverse as human cultures themselves. Many traditions of ecstatic religion, for Taylor, share a common feature – the presence of a mediator between the material and spirit worlds, which is the basis of shamanism. In late capitalist culture, this mediator can be a superstar of the mass media, and he tracks the careers of artists like Houdini, Bessie Smith, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, and John Lennon as mass media ‘shamans’ whose power over audiences had almost mystical overtones.

Taylor defines the shaman as a ‘transformed’ individual, one ‘who must change in order to survive’.⁶ Archetypally, an individual is initiated into shamanhood through an extreme, existential experience, a brush with death, or a traumatic ordeal. Through this experience, the shaman gains access to the ‘other-world’, with the powers and insights that such access brings. Once initiated, the shaman can call up intuitive sources of knowledge, and navigate the imaginary worlds of myth, and channel the spirit world for purposes of physical and emotional healing. This role is ambivalent: a shaman may possess uncanny talents or insights which may benefit society, but they can also be outcasts.

Amos’ biography manifests such ‘differences’ quite early. Born Myra Ellen Amos in 1963 in North Carolina to a Methodist minister and his wife, who was part native Cherokee, Amos showed prodigious talent on the piano as early as age two, and was sent to study at the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore at age five. However, she left the school at eleven, as her intuitive musicality and rebellious streak fit poorly with the highly prescribed and structured curriculum of the conservatory. Meanwhile, the conservative religious environment in which Amos grew up left an impression that impacted her creatively throughout her career. At fourteen, she performed professionally in gay bars and lounges, and by twenty-one, she moved to Los Angeles and fronted a glam rock group called Y Kant Tori Read. Despite releasing an album in 1988, the group was a commercial failure. Moreover, during her time in LA, she was raped by an acquaintance to whom she had offered a ride home after a gig. Part of her recovery involved returning to her roots as a singer-pianist, and crafting the songs that would appear on her solo debut, Little Earthquakes. The album, including its a cappella rape narrative in the song ‘Me and a Gun’, did much to establish Amos as a performer of ‘healing’ songs, and it was here that the trope of Amos as a shaman gained traction.

Such descriptions abound in representations of Amos in the press: journalist Lucy O’Brien introduces Amos in her History of Women in Rock as America’s ‘shamanic piano-playing answer to Kate Bush’;⁷ John Patrick Gatta refers to Amos’ music as ‘techno-shamanic music for a new millennium’;⁸ an MTV news feature speculated that ‘the relationship that Tori Amos shares with her fans may well be studied by misguided religious historians centuries from now’, and says of Amos and her fans, ‘she is more than a musician to them; she is a mother, a healer, a saint and a shaman’.⁹ Even a People magazine interviewer felt compelled to describe Amos’ appeal in exotic spiritual terms: ‘There is an other-worldly quality about her – the moment I saw her I was entranced’, he says, speculating that ‘her brand of sorcery is rooted in her part-Cherokee ancestry’.¹⁰

Amos herself is aware of the power of the shaman archetype, and has referred at various times to shamanic spirituality as a source of creative inspiration and therapeutic restoration. She described to Tom Doyle in Q Magazine a period in the late 1980s when, in an attempt to heal herself, she experimented with a neo-shamanic spiritual movement in Los Angeles, which included taking Ayahuasca, a hallucinogen associated with native Amazonian medicine.¹¹ With respect to her effort to discover her dark, angry side on the album Boys for Pele (1996), she told Ann Powers that she found ‘a woman, a shaman, who was reputed to know how to take you on a spiritual journey by uncovering things that you were avoiding in your view of yourself’; she described the journey she took with this woman as a kind of ‘initiation’.¹² Her 2005 album, The Beekeeper was partly inspired by Simon Buxton’s book, The Shamanic Way of the Bee (2004), which, in part, probed pre-Christian spiritual ideas about female sexuality as nourishing and restorative, rather than sinful.¹³

Shamanism, healing, and song

Admittedly, the backstories of Amos’ life which provide so much topical material, gravitas, and truth-value to so many of her songs could be viewed simply as part of a larger singer-songwriter pattern. As Donald Brackett concluded, the work of singer-songwriters can be viewed as a ‘dark mirror’, a reflection of the pathology that the artists see in themselves, yet ‘speak[s] for all of us in a way that connects with what we all feel’.¹⁴ For Brackett, singer-songwriters trade on expressions of ‘dis-ease’, ‘travers[ing] an immensely huge landscape in a way that provides a haunting kind of coherence and continuity … [and] a discovery of a shared melancholy of alarming proportions’.¹⁵ It is striking how Rogan Taylor makes very similar remarks about the role of shaman with regard to pathology and healing: ‘The shaman’s sickness is, in reality, everybody’s sickness’.¹⁶ Even more broadly, the idea of musicians or poets speaking ‘divinely inspired’ and ‘universal’ truths is ingrained historically, and can be witnessed in, for example, the ‘cult of virtuosity’ in nineteenth-century European concert music, or in the ‘bodhisattva’ role ascribed to black bebop jazz musicians in twentieth-century American beat culture. The need to authenticate such music, or to explain experiences of ‘depth’ and profundity in its reception, may be the reason why the performers are sometimes given spiritual titles. For singer-songwriters, the terms ‘visionary’ or ‘prophet’ have been used in connection with artists like Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, so the term shaman is not an unprecedented means through which the potency of singer-songwriters may be described.

The songs which have been most closely associated with Amos as a healer are those which confess both trauma and feelings of isolation. Many commentators on Amos make ‘Me and a Gun’, where she narrates her experience of rape, a central part of this side of her repertoire, and with good reason.¹⁷ Amos sings the song unaccompanied, underscoring how alone and vulnerable the victim was during the attack. The melody is spare and narrow in range, and the vocal is delivered in a reserved and deadpan manner, not with overt emotionalism and pathos. If anything, the minimal delivery adds to the bleakness of her account. The lyrics intersperse details from the rape – being attacked with a weapon inside a car – with surprisingly trivial thoughts that went through her head at the time, which were actually part of her survival strategy. ‘I’ve never seen Barbados’, she sings, ‘so I must get out of this’. She also rehearses her response to the inevitable question levelled at the victim (‘was she asking for it’?) by insisting that her right to wear tight clothing does not mean she has a ‘right to be on [her] stomach’ and be attacked in a car.

In her study of Tori Amos fans, Adrienne Trier-Bieniek quotes a number of women for whom ‘Me and a Gun’ was experienced as an important source of healing from their own experiences of sexual assault.¹⁸ For one respondent, the song ‘triggered a flood of emotion, I guess, and I felt incredibly overwhelmed but also incredibly grateful because it felt like … I wasn’t so isolated … Tori is responsible for the first time I started healing from when I was raped. It’s her music that led me there.’¹⁹ Another respondent notes that Amos’ song led her to start talking about her own rape for the first time, which began her own ‘bridge from being a victim … to being a survivor’.²⁰

While ‘Me and a Gun’ is perhaps the most high-profile example, a number of other songs work towards the same sort of healing through the breaking of silence. In the song ‘Silent All These Years’ (1991), Amos narrates the thoughts of a woman bravely rebuking an abuser after years of feeling voiceless. ‘Precious Things’ (1991) describes the ways in which Amos felt belittled and inadequate, and offers angry retorts against each of them. For example, an audience member says, ‘You’re really an ugly girl/But I like the way you play’, and Amos, to her own disbelief, thanks him for the backhanded compliment, and then curses him under her breath. Then Amos shouts down the sexual double-standards of the ‘those Christian boys’, and the ‘fascist’ backdrop to the world of the ‘pretty’ and ‘nice’ girls. The refrain of the song uses the image of a bloodletting ritual as a way of cleansing herself of these feelings: ‘Let them bleed’, she sings of these ‘precious things’ to which we hold on, ‘Let them break their hold on me’. As Reynolds and Press note, this rich image of haemorrhage as cleansing and release ‘offers physical and mental relief, gives vent to the festering negativity that’s pent up inside the body that’s been silenced for so long’.²¹

The song ‘Spark’ (1998) is another example of a deeply personal confession of trauma, in this case Amos’ miscarriage, in which she narrates the doubts (‘Doubting if there’s a woman in there somewhere’), the denial (‘You say you don’t want it/Again and again’), and the shaking of her faith (‘If the divine master plan is perfection/Maybe next I’ll give Judas a try’). While the song offers no resolution or answer to what happened, it is the intimate nature of her revelations that give songs like this their power to connect.

Problems and issues with pop-culture ‘shamans’

While it is clear that Amos has self-consciously cultivated shamanism as a frame surrounding many aspects of her songwriting and public image, problematic elements do surface. The image of the shaman or ‘medicine man’ carries historical connotations of primitive exoticism in Western entertainment. To appropriate shamanistic elements in song, concert, and video is, in part to take them out of their original contexts and into a sphere where their meanings and effects are unpredictable. Moreover, it places Amos’ work in a similar category with popular writing about shamanism targeted at general audiences, such as that of Carlos Castaneda, Michael Harner and Rogan Taylor,²² which some anthropologists suspect tell us more about what modern, Western urbanites want to believe about shamanism than about any actual shamanistic traditions.²³

While Amos seems to genuinely respect the myths and spiritualities she explores, her own descriptions of participating in shamanistic rituals in Los Angeles and taking hallucinogenic plants like Ayahuasca are difficult not to see as embedded in the recent popularisation of shamanism which, for Atkinson, was ‘spawned by the drug culture of the 1960s and 1970s, the human potential movement, environmentalism, interest in non-Western religions, and by popular anthropology, especially the Castaneda books’.²⁴ Like New Age spirituality and the self-actualisation movements of which it is a part, such ‘neo-shamanism’ may be critiqued as a sign of the privilege of white Americans, who can freely and eclectically sample the spiritually exotic as they search for meaning and identity.

Amos abets her spiritual experiments by publicly acknowledging her part-Cherokee ancestry, seemingly suggesting that the fraction of ‘non-Western other’ she carries within her provides a passport to authentic participation in alternative spirituality. Through this, she seems to use a kind of essentialism to add authenticity to her shamanic persona, and this is significant because none of the other rock musicians that have tried to tout a shaman-like performing persona – including her own influences in Led Zeppelin (who suggestively courted the Faustian myth of Robert Johnson), but also Jim Morrison (who believed himself to be haunted by the spirit of a Navajo shaman) and Bob Dylan, who was received as a countercultural prophet – could claim the kind of ethnic or biographical backstory that made Amos’ shamanic image seem so plausible.

In light of this, I believe that conferring some kind of authority and authenticity on Amos (and similar performers) is partly what is at stake with the rather loaded, complex shamanic label. Insofar as the term ‘shaman’ can denote a venerable spiritual tradition to some people, and is regarded as a universal human phenomenon by writers such as Rogan Taylor and Joseph Campbell,²⁵ the label might be used to construct a sense of legitimacy when applied to a performer. The constructed relationship between shamanism and Western entertainment is discussed by Richard Schechner, who notes, like Taylor, that myth, ritual, and entertainment (theatre, especially) are more related than is commonly thought. Authenticity, in particular, is at stake. Schechner describes ‘attempts at ritualizing performance, of finding in the theatre itself authenticating acts. In a period when authenticity is increasingly rare in public life, the performer has been asked ... [not just to] mirror his [or her] times ... but to remedy them’. Intriguingly, Schechner discusses shamanism as an appropriate metaphor for this process: ‘The professions taken as models for the theatre are medicine and the church. No wonder shamanism is popular among theatre people: shamanism is that branch of doctoring that is religious, and that kind of religion that is full of ironies and tricks.’²⁶ This gives us a good lens with which to contextualise the shaman image surrounding Tori Amos as a cumulative effect of her confessional, mythical and symbolic lyrical narratives, her career biography, and her reception in the press. This image is tied to discourses of authenticity, but also provides an example of an artist’s persona symbolising redemptive acts of ritual or theatre, as suggested by the theories of Taylor and Schechner. It places the theme of personal and psychological healing, common within the confessional singer-songwriter genre, in a compelling, if exotic, frame. With this in mind, one could regard ‘shamanism’ as a convenient and appropriate, if contestable, term for the functions and pleasures that Amos’ music serves.

KT Tunstall

For Scottish singer-songwriter KT Tunstall, whose debut album Eye to the Telescope (2005) was an international success,²⁴ gender identity is a site of conflict. Tunstall has garnered a large lesbian following arguably due to her tomboy, ergo masculine gender identity that invites the queer gaze.²⁵ Her music videos for ‘Suddenly I See’²⁶ from Eye to the Telescope and ‘(Still a) Weirdo’²⁷ from her 2010 album Tiger Suit show two versions of Tunstall – an authentic, strong-minded, tomboy version, and a constructed feminine or muted and suppressed version. The lyrical themes of both videos suggest an internal struggle between how Tunstall perceives herself (a weirdo), and how the world expects her to be represented. These videos emphasise Tunstall’s apparent struggle with herself and mask, as Lucy Green points out: ‘the mask has the effect of splitting the displayer in two. From the point of view of the onlooker, the displayer takes on a double form, as both ‘other’ and ‘mask’; from the point of view of the displayer, the self is doubled into ‘self’ and ‘mask’’.²⁸

KT Tunstall demonstrates this struggle, and in doing so, the flexibility accorded to female singer-songwriters in a number of ways. Firstly, she is represented as both an authentic self and a constructed mask. In ‘Suddenly I See’, the establishing shots of Tunstall lit in blue, performing in a live set up with an electric arch-top guitar in an industrial warehouse establishes a tomboy gender identity as Tunstall’s true and authentic self. Tunstall’s performance on electric guitar is significant, because as Green notes, ‘women singers … who make use of technology as part of the inherent meanings of their music … threaten in some ways to break out of definitions of femininity, by challenging women’s alienation from technology’.²⁹ This representation of Tunstall is juxtaposed with a sexualised, red-lit doppelgänger who enters about a third of the way through the video. This juxtaposition establishes the second Tunstall as the mask – a realisation of patriarchal expectations of femininity. She is sexualised, not playing an instrument, and the camera focuses on her body more than her face. This establishes her as an inferior musician, as according to Green, ‘the more she goes in for displaying her body, the less likely it is that she is a “good” musician’.³⁰ However, this video, rather than confirming patriarchal definitions of femininity, destabilises or queers them.

Although the doppelgänger Tunstall is represented primarily as in competition to the first Tunstall (emphasising the self vs. mask), Tunstall interacts with the doppelgänger by singing with her, either in call and response, or chorus. This demonstrates Tunstall’s representation as both self and mask – further queering gender binaries through the connotations linked to how both Tunstalls are represented. Additionally, both Tunstalls stand opposite each other, reminiscent of a mirror. Tunstall thus reveals her position as both subject and object of her own gaze. As such, she is able to play with her mask because ‘display is not so much a single act by a displayer as a relationship, an exchange which is mutually constructed by both displayer and onlooker’³¹ and as an onlooker to her own display, ‘since … s/he participates in the active construction of the mask, so s/he can “play with the mask” conceptually’.³²

Representations of Tunstall in the music video for ‘(Still a) Weirdo’³³ reaffirm her tomboy gender identity. In the lyric of the song, Tunstall describes herself as ‘eloquent’, but ‘never quite elegant’, and the video reflects this struggle. It employs the use of a masculine geography – a local pub, as the setting. Tunstall is seen in isolation either a bare rustic room or by an empty pool table, or walking empty streets. The video is saturated with natural light contrasted with the dark interior of the bar. She is presented finger-picking an acoustic guitar, wearing ripped jeans, a t-shirt and stereotypical ‘dyke boots’. At one stage in the video, Tunstall is seen at the bar, drinking a beer (a masculine coded drink), when she sees herself as the bar tender in a mirror. This doppelgänger Tunstall is represented as suppressed, as the viewer only snatches glimpses of her at the bar, or passing the original Tunstall in a car driven by an aggressive-looking man. Her face is constantly in the shadows. Whereas the original Tunstall is represented as autonomous, free to roam the streets and visit pubs, the ‘suppressed’ Tunstall is always confined to a particular space.

As mentioned earlier, Green argues that in the West, display is coded as feminine, whereas the position of spectator is masculine.³⁴ What effect does this have when the object is both displayer and spectator as in the case of ‘(Still a) Weirdo’? Tunstall is the displayer (ergo feminine) in that she is the object of the video. However, there are a number of devices used to destabilise typical femininity and construct a masculine gender identity. Primarily, that she is the spectator of her doppelgänger – this is the only interaction she has in the video: she is otherwise represented as an outsider and loner.

Through being the displayer and the spectator simultaneously, Tunstall is coded as both masculine and feminine at the same time. Thus, gender binaries are destabilised, and lines are blurred between her masculinity and femininity. This enables the queer gaze because, through gazing at her doppelgänger, Tunstall invites a gaze directed at her doppelgänger from the perspective of a female (here read queer gaze, as the gaze is both of and at a woman). This reveals an apparent suppression and passivity of her doppelgänger who is placed within the confines of patriarchal definitions of feminine gender identity, juxtaposed with Tunstall’s masculinity, which provides a sort of freedom. This enables a mode of identification for the queer viewer due to the freedom afforded Tunstall’s tomboy persona, in contrast with the suppressed, passive, thus feminine, Tunstall. However, this freedom that Tunstall enjoys in the video comes at a cost – she is portrayed as a social outsider, a weirdo, who does not interact with any other characters in the video, walking along the street by herself, drinking by herself, and playing her music in isolation. Again, this provides a site for queer identification as it aligns with narratives of homosexuality in the Western heteropatriarchal world. Up until very recently, homosexuals have been viewed as outsiders – always in a heterosexually permeated society, but never quite part of it.

Missy Higgins

Singer-songwriter Missy Higgins is an openly bisexual artist, whose catchy tunes and down-to-earth tomboy persona have made her an Australian super-star.³⁵ The original music video for ‘Where I Stood’³⁶ from her 2007 album On a Clear Night is exemplary in its emphasis of Missy Higgins’ tomboy gender identity. The lyrical content of the song is ambiguous in regards to the gender of the object, which creates an opportunity for a queer reading. The break-up narrative is addressed to an ambiguous ‘you’ but there are hints that the object could be female. There are two lines in particular that invite this reading. The first line in the second verse; ‘I thought love was black and white, that it was wrong or it was right’, offers the possibility of an internal struggle between a supposed heterosexual right and white and homosexual wrong and black, which to the queer listener may suggest that Higgins was taken off guard by homosexual desire, forcing her to reassess traditional views on romantic relationships. Indeed there is a strong theme of discovery throughout the song, with the first two lines of the chorus containing themes of internal conflict and then addressing her former lover saying ‘you taught me how to trust myself’. These themes are typical of a coming-out narrative – a journey of self-discovery. The hook line of the song ‘cos she will love you more than I could, she who dares to stand where I stood’ emphasises this gender ambiguity, as the woman who dares to stand where Higgins stood could either be homo- or heterosexual.³⁷

The original version of Higgins’ ‘Where I Stood’ music video places her firmly within a masculine geography and away from the feminine domestic interior. The video is set in an urban subway, in a photo booth, and on city streets. The colour palette of the video consists of masculine-coded colours, mainly blues and greys and faded greens. The film is edited with a dark filter, emphasising the darker colours. Overall, the effect is a gritty urban look, typically used in male rock videos that destabilises Higgins’ gender identity. This can be juxtaposed with the domestic interior that the US version of ‘Where I Stood’³⁸ is set in. Higgins plays the piano in a studio apartment filled with seemingly natural light, emphasising nature and domesticity, two of the signifiers that, according to Green, reaffirm femininity. She states, ‘first, the woman singer continues to appear masked and enclosed in her body; secondly, this helps to affirm her closeness to nature and her alienation from technology; thirdly, public singing calls into question her sexual life; fourthly, she is contrarily counterposed as an image of maternal perfection in the domestic setting’.³⁹ Through affirming her femininity by a connection to nature and a domestic setting in the US version, Higgins promotes a heterosexual viewing and invites a male gaze. However, through destabilising these indicators of femininity in the original version of the video, Higgins creates a tomboy gender identity and opens up opportunities for queer readings of both the lyric and video.

Additionally, Higgins’ drab costume in the original video, consisting of a woolly beanie and a big coat and scarf with her greasy hair, downplays her sexuality and emphasise her tomboyish carelessness. Higgins is also represented as a solitary figure throughout the video, firstly through her isolation in the photo booth, and then by her walking towards the camera in the opposite direction to the extras, who are always walking away from the camera. This invites a queer reading of the video and the lyric as it constructs a loner narrative tied to Higgins’ queer gender identity. In contrast, through the US version, she is shown wearing a short pink dress, playing piano and painting boxes which she eventually arranges into a makeshift projection surface that plays images of polaroid photographs superimposed with lyrics from the song. There are multiple shots of Higgins’ face, but the camera focus is soft, ergo, feminine. There are lingering shots of her hands, legs and body as she sings. Although the image of Higgins is not highly sexualised, there is a noticeable difference in the construction of her gender identity between the two videos. The US version invites the male gaze by emphasising Higgins’ femininity through its use of colour, costume, lighting and camera techniques. There are not many opportunities for queer subversive readings as there are little or no indications of female masculinity, and the narrative of the video does not support queer narratives, in fact, it has little to do with the lyrical narrative.

The same can be said about the two different versions of Higgins music videos for ‘Steer’, also from On a Clear Night. The US version’s representations of Higgins are feminine, but not highly sexualised.⁴⁰ She is shown in a passive role, lying under an autumn tree, standing on a mountain, silhouetted against a bright moon, occasionally playing an acoustic guitar. There is no particular narrative permeating this video – its sole purpose seems to be to present Higgins in a variety of natural settings, emphasising her femininity. Shots of Higgins’ face have a soft focus, which in combination with the natural yellow lighting serves to construct a feminine gender identity. The many shots of Higgins’ body invite ‘thoughts about sex and sexuality rather than intellect and character’.⁴¹ While this video serves the male gaze, it detracts from Higgins’ authenticity and artistic credibility as a songwriter leaving her in a murky no-man’s-land, away from the highly sexualised, yet commercially viable representations of women in pop, but without anything to compensate for its lack.

The Australian version of ‘Steer’⁴² offers more options for queer readings. The video has a strong narrative – aligning with the lyrical themes of autonomy and ‘taking control of the wheel’. Somewhat literal in its interpretation, Higgins is portrayed as a car-crash test driver by day, driving cars at speed into walls. It shows Higgins stuck in her routine, with little activity outside of her work. Towards the end of the video, Higgins appears to realise she doesn’t have to keep hitting a brick wall and escapes into the Australian outback. The video primarily, again, has an urban setting, switching between an industrial warehouse where Higgins works, and a high-rise rooftop. The colour palette of the video consists of mainly greys and blues, as with the Australian version of ‘Where I Stood’, emphasising Higgins’ masculine gender identity.

The occupation in which Higgins is depicted is a gendered one. Typically most occupations dealing with mechanics and cars are coded as masculine. This connection destabilises Higgins’ gender identity as it connects her with technology.⁴³ It is also interesting to note that Higgins is the only female character in the video. There are two male doctors, and two male technicians dressed in the same blue overalls that Higgins is dressed in, but it is she who performing the active role of driving the car. This suggests that, not only is Higgins one of the boys (the matching blue overalls suggests this), she is actually at the top of the boys’ game, being the driver instead of a passive observer.

The most obvious, yet crucial point here is that, when taken as a body of work, the two different versions for each of Higgins’ videos destabilise her gender identity. This flexibility aligns with the role of the singer-songwriter, which is can be seen as both a masculine and feminine role. The US versions for each song seem to construct a more feminine gender identity for Higgins, but it becomes obvious that this is only a part of Higgins’ mask of display when compared to the original videos for each song, which demonstrate her ability to play with this mask by constructing a masculine gender identity. I am suggesting that, like Tunstall, Higgins indicates an awareness of different representations and their effect, and her female masculinity offers the queer spectator multiple sites for identification.

Bic Runga

Bic Runga is an iconic New Zealand singer-songwriter who became securely ensconced in the Kiwi rock canon early on in her career through representing herself as a working, touring musician who is one of the boys.⁴⁴ She has maintained a mostly feminine gender identity, with only subtle indications of female masculinity, however I posit that this has been instrumental to her success in the New Zealand popular music industry.⁴⁵ In the New Zealand version of her music video ‘Get Some Sleep’,⁴⁶ Runga is represented in an active and stereotypically masculine role as a travelling DJ. The narrative centres on her operating a mobile radio station out of an old Bedford van that is travelling around the New Zealand countryside to remote towns. In addition to this, snippets of old 8mm handheld footage supposedly shot by Runga whilst travelling in the van add connotations of authenticity attached to documentary modes of signification. More traditional devices that invite the male gaze, such as the soft focus on Runga’s face when she is shown operating the DJ equipment, have toned down these masculine aspects of Runga’s representation. However, Runga’s mastery over electronic equipment (the sound desk and 8mm camera), as well as her isolation in the DJ booth is essentially disruptive to the male gaze and elicits identification from queer viewers because it places her firmly within a discourse of female masculinity.

A comparison of this video with the international version of ‘Get Some Sleep’⁴⁷ will reveal the full effect of the masculine aspects of Runga’s gender identity. This version shows Runga in a heteronormative passive role – being driven around in the back of a car, and rolling around on a bed. She gazes into the camera alluringly, inviting the male gaze. There are many body shots of Runga, with shots lingering on her legs and at one point, flirtatious movements of her hand whilst she is talking on the phone, inciting connotations of her feminine sexuality, appealing to the male gaze. At one stage, she is shown deciding which outfit to wear out. A series of shots show her trying on different outfits- mainly different variations of jeans and a shirt – a decidedly tomboy outfit – before settling on a little black dress – the epitome of feminine sexuality.

There are two important devices used to destabilise Runga’s gender identity in the videos for this song. Firstly, although she is coded as feminine through her position as the object of the video, in the original video, she refuses to engage the spectator by avoiding eye contact with the camera, whereas in the international version, she actively invites masculine spectatorship by gazing seductively into the camera throughout the video. Secondly, the narrative of the lyric unveils Runga’s life as a working musician, and this reveals her awareness of the mask of display when she sings ‘putting on my daytime eyes, a good enough disguise until I get some sleep’. As with Tunstall and Higgins, this awareness is emphasised by the fact that there are two different videos for the same song, hence two different representations of Runga, indicating her willingness to play with her mask, destabilising her gender identity.

Conclusion

A queer gaze finds many opportunities for identification and desire within these videos, whether through a potentially queer video narrative, as in the case of ‘(Still a) Weirdo’ and ‘Steer’, lyric narrative (‘Where I Stood’), or the destabilising of typical feminine gender identities throughout these case studies. The heterosexual female viewer may either identify with the artist’s representations of strong-mindedness and independence often associated with masculinity, or temporarily desire the facets of masculinity as portrayed by them. This chapter has attempted to add to discourses on women in popular music by defining a role – the singer-songwriter in the folk tradition – that enables female musicians to construct masculine gender identities, destabilising heteropatriarchal gender binaries and appealing to a queer gaze.

Introduction

In May 1994 the cover of Q magazine featured three female singer-songwriters, PJ Harvey, Björk, and Tori Amos, with the strapline ‘Hips. Lips. Tits. Power.’ These three women were hugely popular artists, all riding high with five commercially successful albums between them at that point in time. The 1990s saw a new kind of female artist emerge, writing songs that focused on intimate topics of sexuality, gender and the body in an explicit, direct way. The artists pictured on the Q cover represented varying expressions from this new wave of singer-songwriters. They explored how everyday life is experienced through the body and at the centre of their songwriting was a specifically female experience, drawing on female agency and power, all experienced through an embodied self. The strapline of the Q cover neatly draws out these themes in its punchy four-word phrase. These artists also drew on the confessional history of singer-songwriters, drawing in their audiences with a closeness and intimacy, through their bodily experiences. Other singer-songwriters in this group included Fiona Apple, Liz Phair, Alanis Morissette, and Ani DiFranco.¹ This chapter will explore these themes of embodiment in the work of this wider group of singer-songwriters, whilst locating their work in a broader cultural and musical context.

As songwriters, these women had creative control over their output and a high level of agency. All of the artists in this group wrote their own material, predominantly with sole writing credit, and most played an instrument as well as providing lead vocals. They often worked with independent labels, whose ethos allowed for more experimentation and more artist control. For example, Björk has released all her work on One Little Indian, Harvey’s debut was on Too Pure, and DiFranco has her own label, Righteous Babe Records. These singer-songwriters drew on a number of stylistic approaches, with their music straddling multiple genres; Björk’s jazz and dance music influences, Harvey’s distorted punk guitar, DiFranco’s acoustic folk, and Amos’ classical piano technique painted varied sonic worlds.

It could be argued that, despite being contemporaries, pulling together these women into one coherent grouping is rather arbitrary, given their stylistic diversity. In the 1994 Q interview, Björk, Polly Harvey, and Tori Amos are asked if they feel in competition with each other. All answer in the negative, and Amos goes on to say: ‘If you think about Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton they were all much more similar to each other than we are. We have tits. We have three holes. That’s what we have in common. We don’t even play the same instruments.’² This answer, in response to a question phrased rather negatively about a competitive mode – which be seen as a misogynistic strategy to undermine female power or positivity, as Amos notes in the interview – draws a reactive response, and therefore does not allow the question of commonality to be fully discussed in a more nuanced way. There are, in fact, many similarities in these singer-songwriters’ approaches, the thematic content in their work, their reception (both in terms of media and fan responses), and the social context of their music. However, Amos’ response does highlight the need for a simultaneous awareness of difference, fissures and discontinuity, particularly in terms of the artists’ self-definitions.

Alternative and mainstream

The 1990s saw the increase in popularity of what was described as ‘alternative’ music, and singer-songwriters such as Harvey, Björk, Morissette, et al., highlight the problems of the terms ‘alternative’ and ‘mainstream’. On the one hand, many of these artists had significant mainstream commercial success. Alanis Morissette’s 1995 album Jagged Little Pill reached number 1 in the Billboard charts. Björk had significant sales with Debut in 1993, and was certified double platinum (two million units sold) by BPI (British Phonographic Industry) by mid-1994.³ Yet on the other hand, the material they were releasing was, in parts, experimental and genre-bending, with subject matter that differed hugely from what had been heard in the mainstream pop charts. At this point in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the term ‘alternative’ shifted in terms of its connotations. Music that had come from an underground or niche scene – and had specific sonic or lyrical qualities that were previously considered to be too abrasive or challenging for mainstream listeners – was now achieving mainstream commercial success. With the popularity of grunge – indeed the industry’s invention of the term and capitalisation on all things grunge-related – the music industry had realised that ‘alternative’ music was a lucrative and untapped market.⁴ As Catherine Strong argues, grunge can be described as a mainstream music despite it having ‘oppositional qualities’.⁵ The female singer-songwriters that also found mainstream success had been partly enabled to do so by this mainstreaming of the alternative that began in the late 1980s and, though they occupied a mainstream position, could simultaneously exercise a dissenting and oppositional voice.

Embodying femininity and female power

Grappling with societal expectations around female sexuality, bodies and behaviours is expounded in multiple ways across the output of these singer-songwriters. In particular, expressions of embodied selves are at the centre of their work, and an oppositional voice is spoken through the body. Fiona Apple’s direct statement of ‘This mind, this body, and this voice cannot be stifled’ in ‘Sleep to Dream’ (1996 from Tidal) rings true for many of these artists, who express strong views about their experience of ‘bodily being-in-the-world’, and in particular their experience as sexual and gendered individuals.⁶ PJ Harvey’s ‘Dress’ (1992 from Dry) explicitly explores the paradoxes of trying to fit within gendered corporeal norms of femininity.⁷ Harvey presents a stark picture of the impossibility of trying to please a man, under stereotypical societal expectations. Lyrically, the individual woman tries to achieve feminine status through manipulating her body into a prescribed template of what a woman should be. However, because she does not fit the template, and cannot fulfil what is expected, she becomes a ‘fallen woman’, by breaking taboos both around femininity and appropriate sexual behaviour. By the last verse she is described as ‘it’, as though becoming ungendered through the very act of failing to live up to these expectations. Harvey’s sonic world becomes louder, more distorted and dissonant as the track progresses, and gives an aural representation of the anger and discomfort felt at the impossibility of task at hand.

Having a sense of a strong individual voice and expressing forthright opinions also set apart this cohort of women. The Q cover identified these women with ‘power’ and a common media characterisation was one of ‘angry young women’ or, in the case of Harvey in the Q interview, the ‘mad bitch woman from hell’.⁸ In particular, Alanis Morissette’s ‘You Oughta Know’ (1995) was an anthem for female rage. Morissette’s track is commonly believed to be autobiographical and documents an explosive, sarcastic anger against a former lover, and his new partner. Part of the definition of power in the output of these singer-songwriters is tied to an unashamed sexuality which characterises much of this work. In ‘You Oughta Know’ Morissette’s question ‘Is she perverted like me? Would she go down on you in a theatre?’ puts the narrator’s sexuality front and centre. From Björk’s ‘Big Time Sensuality’ (1993) to Liz Phair’s ‘Fuck and Run’ (1993), these artists were not afraid of censorship, or expressing their sexual nature. And the sexuality expressed was about their own pleasure, rather than an expression of expected female desire. Tori Amos’ ‘Icicle’ (1994 from Under the Pink) is about masturbating whilst her father, a minister, is downstairs conducting a prayer group. There is no sense of guilt or shame, as might be traditionally expected from a self-orientated expression of female desire.⁹ Amos also expresses a sense of pointed indifference about male sexual power over the female body in ‘Precious Things’ (1991) when she sings ‘So you can make me come, it doesn’t make you Jesus’.

Other embodied topics in the work of the singer-songwriters related to more taboo issues around sexual violence, miscarriage, and abortion. Tori Amos’ 1998 album From the Choirgirl Hotel was written ‘from a place of grief’ after a series of miscarriages.¹⁰ Fiona Apple’s ‘Sullen Girl’, from her debut 1996 album Tidal, is an autobiographical and intensely emotional track, dealing with her experience of rape at the age of twelve.¹¹ Tori Amos’ debut album Little Earthquakes also features the striking a capella song ‘Me and a Gun’ which is a bold narrative retelling of her experience of rape. Both women have spoken about their aims to connect with other rape survivors and provide support, with Amos going on to become spokesperson and patron for the charity RAINN (Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network).¹² Ani DiFranco’s ‘Lost Woman Song’ from her 1990 self-titled debut album deals with the complex political issues around abortion, through her own personal experience of abortion as an eighteen-year-old. DiFranco says: ‘On my first record, I wrote about my own abortion when I was 18. I wasn’t just trying to “get away” with something, but connect with people, and not just those in my own tribe, but maybe people with different opinions.’¹³ This sense of connection with others, in a range of different ways and settings, marks out the work of these singer-songwriters, and connects them with concepts of authenticity and truthfulness.

In the sonic world drawn out by female singer-songwriters in the 1990s, there are numerous sounds where the artists are drawing attention to bodily expressions, through the use of paralanguage; non-lexical communication.¹⁴ In these instances, bodily experience can be heard through the voice, through various screams, whispers, murmurs, and whimpers.

Paralanguage allows artists to draw attention to the body, and gives a more embodied listening experience. Instead of removing sounds to disembody the voice, such as breath and the moistening of lips, these sounds are retained, in order to become a part of the timbral palette of the song. Furthermore, including paralinguistic features actively focuses attention on to the bodily source of the sound, from Amos’ shriek after the first chorus of ‘Precious Things’ (1991) to Harvey’s guttural and sexual word elongations in ‘The Dancer’ (1995).

Social context in the 1990s

In order to fully understand the work of these singer-songwriters, it is critical to analyse what was happening culturally in the early 1990s that allowed for women singer-songwriters to begin writing more freely about bodily experiences. Through the 1990s we see parallels in other movements and fields, where the body was becoming of more interest. In academia, feminist writers were exploring bodies in culture. Judith Butler began to write complex and involved theoretical work that engaged much more transparently with culturally situated bodies.¹⁵ She evidenced the performativity of not only gender, but also of sex, and how the two relate to bodily practices and norms. The range of bodies analysed and philosophised was being broadened, and writers such as Elizabeth Grosz engaged with what she termed ‘volatile bodies’ – bodies that shifted and were dependent on cultural prescription; the naturalness of the body and of sex was being heavily challenged. A new playfulness was also becoming apparent in the academic literature; if sex and sexualities could be performed, then they could be moulded, played with, shaped, and reorientated, in new and exciting ways.

This playfulness was also paralleled in the musical experiences and cultures of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The music saw not only a revelation of taboo and explicit bodily experiences, but also showed a playful and humorous approach to gender, sex, sexuality, and bodies. Madonna’s output during the early 1990s evidenced this clearly. Her book Sex (1992) and her tracks such as ‘Erotica’ (1992) and ‘Hanky Panky’ (1990) showcased a new openness about sexuality and bodies. Madonna could be said to have laid the ground for future musical explorations of the body and of sexualities. However, where Madonna’s work was camp, theatrical and played on notions of drag and performativity, the women singer-songwriters that came to prominence in the early 1990s took their cue from a more confessional style of singing. Their work followed on from artists such as Joni Mitchell, who were writing songs with an autobiographical and deeply personal approach. This emotional and truthful style of songwriting, which reveals flaws in the narrator and a complexity of character, became the vocabulary of the 1990s singer-songwriters. Building upon this emotionality and confessional style of singing, the 1990s scene of female writers spoke more explicitly of bodily experiences and traumas. Whereas many of the singer-songwriters from the 1960s and 1970s had spoken of war and broader societal trauma, these artists in the 1990s initially at least, looked at more individualised traumas, and with a focus on personal bodily traumas such as rape and sexual abuse.¹⁶

It is important to note that a number of cultural shifts had taken place that resulted in more frank discussions about bodies and sexuality. In the 1980s the AIDS epidemic, and the media representations thereof, had spawned a culture of fear and caution around both bodies in general, and sexual bodies in particular. The AIDS advertising campaigns of the 1980s in the United Kingdom featured graphic images of tombstones, and there was significant anxiety about how widespread the epidemic could be. Towards the end of the 1980s, however, it became apparent that the AIDS threat had lessened somewhat but its cultural impact had not. The AIDS crisis had engendered a culture where more open and frank discussions about bodies and sexualities took place, both in the private and public sphere. This, combined with a more liberal approach to homosexuality, meant that once-taboo subjects were now being discussed openly in a range of settings. Within this changing context, a third wave of feminism was developing that broke down some of the second-wave concepts of a singularly defined ‘woman’ and drew attention to difference, often through a more embodied notion of the self.¹⁷

Riot Grrrl

The Riot Grrrl movement was important culturally and musically as an expression of these changing cultural circumstances. Riot Grrrl shared similar characteristics to female singer-songwriters in the 1990s, with a lyrical focus on bodies, the challenging of gender norms, and explicit content about taboo bodily subjects such as rape, menstruation, abortion, and masturbation. In contrast, however, Riot Grrrl bands (e.g. Huggy Bear, Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, Heavens to Betsy) focused on a collective and DIY approach to music, levelling the musical field as punk had done before it. Being part of a group, and part of a community, was central to the Riot Grrrl ethos.¹⁸ Musicians such as Amos and DiFranco raised themselves into a more singular and iconic position. Rather than being part of a community of women, they became role models and representatives, expressing the emotions, feelings and experiences of young women but from an iconic and individualised standpoint. Most importantly, they became idolised by audiences who felt they spoke the truth about their own experiences.¹⁹

Riot Grrrls drew directly from feminist heritage, and were explicitly part of the third wave movement. There was anger around women’s position in society, about the regulation and control of female bodies, and about the silencing of women’s voices. This same anger translated into the work of the female singer-songwriters but perhaps in a more subtle way, for example in Tori Amos’ ‘Crucify’ or ‘Silent All These Years’ (1991).²⁰ The feminist label was hugely applicable to the Riot Grrrls and many were vocal about their feminist sensibilities. The singer-songwriters, however, had a more troubled relationship with the term ‘feminist’. Whilst the content of the singer-songwriters’ music explicitly referenced frustration around the expectations placed on women, and discussed ways in which women could gain more power and more agency in their lives, the label itself was rejected by some of these women. Ani DiFranco explicitly owned her feminism, arguing that ‘all decent people, male and female, are feminists. The only people who are not feminists are those who believe that women are inherently inferior or undeserving of the respect and opportunity afforded men. Either you are a feminist or you are a sexist/misogynist. There is no box marked “other”’.²¹ Tori Amos has also been very vocal about her feminism, arguing ‘I was born a feminist’.²² However, others were much more reluctant to align themselves with feminist principles. PJ Harvey in particular disavowed the label, saying ‘I don’t ever think about [feminism] … I don’t see that there’s any need to be aware of being a woman in this business. It just seems a waste of time.’²³ Despite her protestations, the content of her work clearly spoke of feminist issues and many felt aligned well with the concerns of third wave feminists.

Female singer-songwriters in the 1990s were diverse in many ways, yet came together through a shared exploration of embodied femininity, sexuality and female power. Through vocal and lyrical strategies they connected with female listeners, and became icons for a new expressivity and for female agency.