Girl Groups, Girl Culture: Popular Music and Identity in the 1960s (review)

Jaqueline Warwick’s Girl Groups, Girl Culture looks at an important aspect of popular music that is often overlooked or taken for granted. As stated in her introduction, Warwick explores ‘the phenomenon of pre-adolescent and adolescent girl identity as it was negotiated in the popular music of the 1960s.’ More specifically the book focuses on the output of groups such as the Shangri-Las, the Shirelles, the Ronettes, the Crystals, and the Marvelettes ‘that emerged from inner city and suburban backgrounds . . . comprised of three to five adolescent female singers who seem to articulate highly personal sentiments [but who have] also been regarded as a group of puppets masterminded by some behind-the scenes Svengali.’ While an extremely large number of such girl groups were recorded in the 1960s, Warwick’s work is among the first scholarly attempts to deal with this significant repertoire and draws on current research in psychology, sociology, and new critical theory to explore the important place of these songs in the emotional development of young girls of the baby boom generation.

The book is delineated into five distinct parts. The first section, chapters 1 and 2, deals with the emergence of the girl group sound from the early Chantels and Bobbettes and the influence of doo-wop. This section is highlighted by a fascinating chapter on the emerging voice of girl groups, the evolving vocabulary of their songs, and their role in establishing a dialogue among female fans. Part 2, chapters 3 through 5, concentrates on the stereotypical embodiments of ‘girlness’ that such groups enacted through their dance, uniform appearance, and other performative considerations. Part 3, chapters 6 through 8, analyzes the role of producers and songwriters on the girl group phenomenon and the rise of celebrated girl group female songwriters such as Carol King and Ellie Greenwich. Notably Warwick’s analysis of the Ronettes’s biggest hit, ‘Be My Baby,’ argues that it was primarily Ronnie Spector’s sultry vocal quality, the lack of a contrasting harmonic area in the middle eight, and the dramatic impact of Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound that combined to make this song ‘an irresistible expression of desire.’ Part 4, chapters 9 through 11, explores how girl group music, though being governed by notions of conformist respectability and morality, was nonetheless a source of female empowerment and patriarchal resistance. Again, the Ronettes are featured as projecting a sexually subversive image that ‘exerted an important influence on the self-definition of working-class and middle-class girls alike.’ Also of interest is a section on ‘advice songs’ that explicitly address themselves to female listeners often, as Warwick tells us, evoking the authorial voice of a mother. As such, Warwick concludes, such songs ‘were embraced by black and white teenagers alike’ and ‘must be understood as resistant to cultural forces that urge the separation of mothers and daughters.’

The final section of the book, chapters 12 through 14, considers the social impact of girl groups in creating visible networks of young females that gradually eroded the repressive gender containment associated with post–Second World War culture and ultimately signalled new possibilities of the collective power of young women. In particular Warwick connects the ‘rebel’ girl group image to the punk aesthetic of the New York Dolls, and cbgb bands such as Blondie and the Ramones, and on into the riot girl and Spice Girls ‘girl power’ movements of the 1990s.

Girl Groups, Girl Culture is a significant and scholarly overview of an important but far too often overlooked genre of popular music. Dealing with issues of gender, sexuality, race, and class, Warwick provides us with thoughtful musical and critical analysis that helps contextualize the impact that this phenomenon had on shaping the images and roles of women in both popular music and in North American society as a whole. Though perhaps relying excessively on a limited number of groups, particularly the Ronettes, to represent her arguments, Warwick’s work is...