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Reviewed by:
  • Singing for Themselves: Essays on Women in Popular Music
  • Elizabeth Fleitz Kuechenmeister (bio)
Rudden, Patricia Spence, ed. Singing for Themselves: Essays on Women in Popular Music. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2007. 280 pp.

In her Spivak-influenced analysis of Melissa Etheridge’s music, Ellen Lansky cleverly asks the reader “Can the subaltern rock?” (169). Lansky and the other contributors to this anthology all seek to answer this question through their scholarship on female rock artists, and they respond with a resounding “yes.” Each of these articles takes a different path to this conclusion, from looking at live performances to reading the text of a music video to analyzing lyrics or discussing the social context of a female musicians’ career. This collection is a useful guide to doing scholarship on women in popular music, as it presents a variety of texts and methods for analysis, expanding the possibilities available for this kind of scholarly work.

The types of texts studied in this anthology vary nicely, covering the spectrum of women in popular music from R&B’s Etta James to country’s Dixie Chicks and from pop music’s Destiny’s Child to rock’s Patti Smith, Bjork, the Indigo Girls, and the riot-grrrl culture of Le Tigre. These thirteen chapters each take on a different musician or band, critiquing them in terms of their feminist significance. Some of these performers are more overtly feminist (Bjork, the Indigo Girls) than others (Destiny’s Child), but the ways that each artist or group is analyzed help the reader understand the reasons for their inclusion in the volume.

The mix of methods used to study each of these musicians is useful as well. Editor and contributor Patricia Spence Rudden writes an interesting analysis of Laura Nyro by looking at the structure and organization of the tracks on her studio albums. Deborah Kennedy uses the parallels between biblical passages and Patti Smith’s song lyrics as a way to describe and critique Smith’s artistic motivations. Samantha Thrift looks at various texts produced by Destiny’s Child, from interviews to music videos to albums, liner notes, and song lyrics, and argues that the group uses their black female sexuality to empower themselves and their fans. Helen Louise Davis takes on Bjork’s music videos—from the texts themselves to behind-the-scenes interviews about their [End Page 258] creation—in order to theorize gender as a performance and to expose the ways in which the female body can be empowering. Hillary Chute analyzes the live performances of riot-grrrl band Le Tigre to show how they create a feminist community through their punk performances, which Chute names “punk activism” (227). The broad diversity exhibited in these articles demonstrates the possibility for research on women in popular music, showing that much more scholarship is waiting to be done in this area.

Although some anthologies are strictly edited to include only scholarship from the same viewpoint, utilizing the same methods, this anthology does not; it allows its contributors more freedom in their methodologies. While all of the articles are focused on establishing specific female artists as feminists, the ways in which these articles come to this conclusion are varied. There is no single, overarching definition of feminism, or what it means to be a feminist musician in today’s society; instead, there are thirteen different approaches to the label. As for method, there is some discrepancy among the contributors concerning the level of criticism necessary for a quality paper. Some authors, such as David M. Jones in his analysis of Etta James and her contribution to R&B are wholly uncritical of the artist. In response, Helen Louise Davis, in her article on Bjork’s music videos, calls this type of scholarship “fan-based writing” that idealizes the celebrity figure and calls for a more careful challenging of the artist’s message (150–51). The inclusion of both articles lends credence to both methods of analysis.

Along with a general sense of freedom regarding method and methodology, this anthology is also different from other scholarly works in that it lacks a clear authorial or editorial voice. Often, anthologies will include a lengthy preface...

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