Girls in Popular Music

New book from Routledge, sounds terrific: Voicing Girlhood in Popular Music: Performance, Authority, Authenticity, Edited by Jacqueline Warwick and Allison Adrian

Contents:

Introduction Jacqueline Warwick and Allison Adrian  
Part I. Voice and Activism
1. I’m with the Band: Redefining Young Feminism Lucy O’Brien
2. Girl Activists Talk Beyoncé, Pussy Riot … Lyn Mikel Brown
3. To Them I am Just Some Girl Marion Leonard  
Part II. Voice and Singing
4. Valuing and Vilifying the New Girl Voice Diane Pecknold
5. Girls and Puberty: The Voice, it is a-Changin’ Barbara Caprilli  
Part III. Voice and Audience
6. The Curse of "O Mio Bambino Caro" Dana Gorzelany-Mostak
7. Nowhere to Run: Girl Group Transnationalism Gayle Wald  
Part IV. Voice, Body, Authenticity
8. Performing Pop Girlhood on the Disney Channel Morgan Blue
9. Girls Who Twerk on YouTube Kyra Gaunt
10. When Loud Means Real Sarah Dougher  
Part V. Voice and Narrative
11. Listen to the Mockingjay Robynn Stilwell
12. Struggling to Become Women Lori Burns and Alyssa Woods

And, the description:

This interdisciplinary volume explores the girl’s voice and the construction of girlhood in contemporary popular music, visiting girls as musicians, activists, and performers through topics that range from female vocal development during adolescence to girls’ online media culture. While girls’ voices are more prominent than ever in popular music culture, the specific sonic character of the young female voice is routinely denied authority. Decades old clichés of girls as frivolous, silly, and deserving of contempt prevail in mainstream popular image and sound. Nevertheless, girls find ways to raise their voices and make themselves heard. This volume explores the contemporary girl’s voice to illuminate the way ideals of girlhood are historically specific, and the way adults frame and construct girlhood to both valorize and vilify girls and women. Interrogating popular music, childhood, and gender, it analyzes the history of the all-girl band from the Runaways to the present; the changing anatomy of a girl’s voice throughout adolescence; girl’s participatory culture via youtube and rock camps, and representations of the girl’s voice in other media like audiobooks, film, and television. Essays consider girl performers like Jackie Evancho and Lorde, and all-girl bands like Sleater Kinney, The Slits and Warpaint, as well as performative 'girlishness' in the voices of female vocalists like Joni Mitchell, Beyoncé, Miley Cyrus, Taylor Swift, Kathleen Hanna, and Rebecca Black. Participating in girl studies within and beyond the field of music, this book unites scholarly perspectives from disciplines such as musicology, ethnomusicology, comparative literature, women’s and gender studies, media studies, and education to investigate the importance of girls’ voices in popular music, and to help unravel the complexities bound up in music and girlhood in the contemporary contexts of North America and the United Kingdom.

In defence of pop, and perhaps, narcissism

Nitsuh Abebe, writing in New York, defends contempo pop music against the moral panic over youth narcissism. And he makes sense of the trajectory of popular music on the charts since the '80s.

If I could choose, in retrospect, which set of music-based pathologies to spend my teenage years absorbing—the dogged outsider mumbling I picked up from indie-rock records or the brave thrusting entitlement and self-regard that allegedly speak through today’s pop—there’s a decent chance I’d take the pop.

Zoe Chace on women pop stars adopting personae

Nicki Minaj as the Harajuku Barbie at 2010 BET Awards (Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images)

There are some pop stars right now who look a lot like drag queens — Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj, Beyonce, Katy Perry, even Ke$ha.

Excellent report, on today's Morning Edition. Listen to it, or read it, here.

A few more juicy excerpts:

Gaga has started calling her fans "monsters." 18-year-old Darnell Purt is one of those them. He just graduated high school in Brooklyn. "We're all monsters," he says. "Like, if they think that I'm a monster because I'm bi, or I'm a hermaphrodite, or I dress funny, or I'm gay-friendly, then we're all monsters. We're all crazy monsters"...

This is a modern phenomenon, but that doesn't mean it's new, says Judith Halberstam, who teaches media studies at the University of Southern California.

"Look back at the 19th century at people like Oscar Wilde," she suggests. "Oscar Wilde may well be one of the early people who created a public persona for himself and then was happy, when called upon, to perform this role of the glib dandy who was full of one-liners."

Instead of spinning around helplessly in a media cycle devoted to his outlandish behavior, Wilde grabbed the steering wheel...

So are these stars controlling their fans, controlling their media coverage, or just enabling everyone's inner drag queen to come out?

Ann Powers, "Authenticity takes a holiday"

The ever-incisive Ann Powers, writing in the Los Angeles Times. "Pop music notes on the decade: Authenticity takes a holiday."

Of all the aspects of pop that went into fatal mutation mode in recent years, the cult of authenticity was hit perhaps the hardest...

One major one has to do with what we think is most real, most able to embody sincere and powerful emotions...

The most fascinating personalities of this new era would never present themselves as unwashed or genuinely unplugged. They're show people who are able to dance, crack jokes and work all the knobs that power their multimedia extravaganzas. Eminem and Britney Spears, will.i.am and Kanye West, M.I.A. and OutKast, Rihanna and Lil Wayne: In nearly every niche, millennial artists have shown a marked preference for artifice over raw expression, costume and theatrics over plain presentation and foregrounding the tools they use to make music over pretending that it all comes "naturally"...

As the decade ends, pop grows ever more bent on making inauthenticity ring true... There are obvious reasons for this abandonment of solid-feeling values -- not just "authenticity" but also "purity" and "rawness." Novelty and sonic shine are primary values in a music business powered by catchy ringtones and downloads instead of albums. Technology also has profoundly changed the way music is made; kids are learning how to play synthesizers before they bother with guitars, and tools like Auto-Tune and Pro Tools have made "natural" sounds passé.

But even as the dire economics of music-making (and, by the way, music journalism) call for a lament, I celebrate the return of glitter and weirdness and fakery in pop. It's opening up the doors to those who didn't fit more constrictive paradigms of authenticity: more women, more gay and lesbian faces, more multiracial and international voices. In general, it's making for a fuller reflection of life in our fragmented, hyper-accelerated time of struggle...

We've finally all learned the lesson of the disco prophet Sylvester: only by admitting that nothing is straightforward can we feel Mighty Real.