Women and Popular Music: Sexuality, Identity and Subjectivity (review)

Women and Popular Music: Sexuality, Identity and Subjectivity. By Sheila Whiteley. New York: Routledge, 2000. [x, 246. ISBN 0-415-21189-1. $75 (cloth); ISBN 0-415-21190-5. $20.95 (pbk.).]

Contributing to the wide range of texts now available in popular music studies, this book seeks to further the debates that center on the role of women musicians in an industry dominated by males. There is now a basis for accepting that interdisciplinary theoretical directions have relevance within the musicological field, and, moreover, that issues of subjectivity, identity, and sexuality are pertinent to textual analysis. Couched in a wealth of historical, musical, and biographical facts, Sheila Whiteley's purpose is to expose the changing role of specific women musicians within the context of thirty years of pop history. Chronological in its organization, the book deals with selected case studies, performers whom Whiteley considers catalysts within their respective genres.

The motivation to write this book comes from a lifetime's work in not only researching the field of popular music but also experiencing it. In the wake of Whiteley's first book, The Space Between the Notes (New York: Routledge, 1992), Women and Popular Music extends many of the author's earlier debates and addresses the change of direction of feminism during the past few decades, especially with respect to the established theoretical paradigms of gender roles and relationships. An important aspect for the musicologist scholar are the methodologies that Whiteley draws on to extract musical signification. For here there is a sense of challenge in the reading of music within a holistic and intertextual field. While Whiteley's competence as a musicologist certainly comes through, it is quite likely that the analytical portions will not satisfy all those practitioners keen on discovering new methodologies in music scholarship. Clearly, this is not the aim of the author; Whiteley throws down the gauntlet for providing insights that are both "user friendly" and intellectually challenging, and therefore accessible to a wide readership.

Starting off in the 1960s, the reader is presented with a discussion that focuses on the counter culture's reactionary response to female artists through the music of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. An informative insight is afforded to Janis Joplin and the ways in which her songs have challenged notions of sexuality and civil rights for women, albeit at high personal costs. We are told that throughout the '60s and '70s the progressive rock scene remained hostile while the folk protest movement of the same period was more amenable. The analyses of songs from Joni Mitchell's albums Clouds (Reprise Records 6341, 1967) and Blue (Reprise Records 2038, 1971) testify to this as Whiteley situates her readings of the music and lyrics within a feminist debate. She explores how Mitchell's songs work musically with specific attention paid to vocal technique and word painting through melodic and harmonic contouring. In the conclusion of this chapter, Whiteley insists that Mitchell's "self-exploration anticipates the post-feminist emphasis of the 1990s, not least the importance for women to know, accept, and explore feelings" (p. 92). Yet it is within her musical expression that the strength of Mitchell's pragmatism lies.

Problematizing the tension of gender identification and changes in feminist theory (p. 96), Whiteley draws primarily on the work of Kristeva (in her interview with Tel Quel in Rosemarie Tong, Feminist Thought: a Comprehensive Introduction [New York: Routledge, 1992], 230) in considering punk discourse. Her focus falls on Patti Smith and Siouxsie Sioux and some of their songs from the 1970s. A contextualization of punk focuses on how women musicians started to flaunt and celebrate assertiveness through image and sound. By turning (p. 120-22) to Irigaray's critique of Freud (Luce Irigaray, The Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985]), Whiteley grapples with the now familiar debates of feminism in an attempt to throw new light on established femininity...