DON’T LET THE BOY O’ERPOWER THE MAN

IV.


Don’t remember feminism coming up before the final chapters…? That whole section on Tina Turner, where I call her an earlier and more important force for feminist values than Gloria Steinem? That didn’t ring any bells? As far as I’m concerned, “feminism” is still CATCHING UP with Tina Turner.


“And if Springsteen is the only modern living feminist male rocker you could think of to write about, that’s really sad…” Honestly it’s like every time you start pointing out the distance between male and female perceptions, the distance widens… I never said anything REMOTELY like Bruce was the ONLY living feminist male rocker, only that he may be the most important, and as a writer he presents a worldview that I find most worthy of thoughtful critique. He’s REPRESENTATIVE of a very strong current in rock’n’roll manhood that goes against most assumptions of the style as a mysoginist, macho stereotype, and for that reason stands out as someone who articulates rock’n’roll values with a fresh take on the ROCK STAR persona. He follows as a type from Townshend in that they both take on the idea of manhood as a subject for their songs… In the sixties, as feminism is brewing, men go into a very confusing state about their response… How to “handle” a woman as powerful as Tina Turner? What does the new feminism do to manhood? If we want to be different from John Wayne, and even Elvis (ultimately), what are the new ideas about manhood going to consist of? At first (Townshend) it helps simply to articulate this confusion; with Springsteen I wanted to draw a broad portrait of this emergent new idea of the modern male. It sounds to me as though Springsteen has ingested rock history and its themes surrounding manhood better than any other figure.


Yeah, I’ve gotten to know Sleater-Kinney since writing FEVER and I did miss an opportunity there… I really love them, and love how they toy with gender, sort of inverting the Townshend stance. And I can’t get enough PJ Harvey, would have liked to go on and on about her, but I had all this history and by that point I was trying to close the damn project… I started out all ambitious, wanting to do an encyclopedia of gender in rock, and had to pare it way back and choose figures I could illustrate ideas through, and use as examples, rather than following persona after persona and noting all the variances along the way.


Presley never wrote his own songs but neither did Sinatra, they both inhabit the music enough that we come to think of the songs as “theirs,” and we get to know their inner state through their singing even though they’re not composers. Janis didn’t write “Bobby McGee” either, but she sure owns it, as surely as Aretha owns “Respect,” and pretty much everything else. It’s not whether Presley wrote a song but what he projects through it.



And hey, let’s not forget Smokey, who articulates this whole “confusion about manhood” idea, which had been mostly a subtext until him.



Back atya, toots. TR