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typicalgirls - Re: [TypicalGirls] The Young Lady's Post-Punk Handbook

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Subject: Typical Girls: Women in Punk/Post-Punk/Underground Music (Circa 1975-1980s)

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  • From: Dina Hornreich <dina.hornreich AT gmail.com>
  • To: "Typical Girls: Women in Punk/Post-Punk/Underground Music (Circa 1975-1980s)" <typicalgirls AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [TypicalGirls] The Young Lady's Post-Punk Handbook
  • Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2009 18:50:28 -0700

Fabulous post, Sharon. Thanks for sharing your perspective.

One thing: I was quoting that Ian dude on the "felt completely free to express their feminine and masculine and simply human qualities freely."(I wish I could take credit for this observation!)

-Dina


On Feb 14, 2009, at 6:35 PM, Sharon Cheslow wrote:

Dina and Mike, you both bring up some really good thoughts. Having
been there at the time (although just as an observer in the
beginning), it's hard now to explain how different things were for
women. Even though the '60s had brought on many positive changes,
there were still many rigid and superficial roles that were expected
of girls and women. If you attempted to break out of those roles,
you were ostracized or teased or called derogatory names.

I can only speak for myself in terms of how these women were
perceived or what impact they had, but what I noticed right off the
bat with punk, and then with post-punk, was that most of the girls &
women involved were subverting stereotypes of females. Yes, a part
of that meant androgyny. But it also meant looking at the signifiers
of what constituted women in society and women in rock and then
turning those things on their heads or doing something playful or
shocking with them.

Even though many weren't commercially successful, they had just as
much of an influence on the "rock culture at large." For example,
Patti Smith didn't have a top 40 hit until Because the Night with
Bruce Springsteen in 1978, but she'd already had a huge influence by
then (she'd been performing for five years prior). Many rock mags
and newspapers wrote about her - she was critically successful before
she was commercially successful. Part of the reason she was covered
is because she was a rock writer herself, but mostly it's because she
was so unique and powerful for that time.

In the US, both Patti Smith and Debbie Harry dealt with this in
different ways. Patti wore a tie and embraced her male rock and
poetry idols - she made you think about how we define women by the
way they dress and act. It caused an uproar when she appeared on the
cover of Easter revealing her hairy armpits and led to Gilda Radner's
Candy Slice character on SNL which made fun of this. Debbie took the
girly-girl stereotype to its extreme and even the band name Blondie
was a reference to the dumb blonde stereotype. Yes, she was
subverting the girl singer, and she was also parodying the role of
the female lead singer with the male backing band. Females were not
expected to do anything other than sing in a band. If they were a
singer-songwriter, they were allowed to play piano and sing or play
acoustic guitar and sing. It was very, very rare for females to play
electric instruments or drums until punk and post-punk came along.

In the UK, the Slits and Poly Styrene dealt with this by writing
lyrics examining these stereotypes and societal expectations.
Siouxsie Sioux, like many other UK punk ladies, bared her breasts in
revealing clothes as an act of protest. One of the first widely
distributed UK punk photos in the US was of the Bromley Contingent
after the Sex Pistols' Bill Grundy TV incident...Siouxsie Sioux and
Sue Catwoman were shocking merely by having close cropped hair and
extreme make-up! These images were widely distributed in the
mainstream media, both print and TV.

In those days, women were expected to be groupies, not to express
themselves creatively. That's why the cover of the Slits' Typical
Girls record is so amazing. Not only were they liberating themselves
from the groupie role by playing their own instruments and writing
their own songs, but they represented themselves naked in mud in
defiance. As Dina notes, they "felt completely free to express their
feminine and masculine and simply human qualities freely." The Slits
may not have been widely known in the US at that time, but they were
very popular in the UK and were covered regularly by NME and Sounds,
both of which were widely available in the US.

Sorry for the long post. I could talk about this forever!!

Sharon
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