i'll even omit my customary lame professor humor about the ncaa tournament, for example, that's how serious this is. let's think for a minute though about where we're situated, what we're working on here. in this last third of the course that we started last week, we're dealing with the post revolutionary era. we've built this idea that something radical and transformative happens to music nick the 1960s. you worked hard over the course of several weeks to establish those ideas. and we can't leave without justice a kind of baby boomer nostalgia for the days that were. what we've been trying to deal with is the sense of disappointment that the revolution somehow end nd the early 1970s, that popular music became a disappointment as thetically, politically. that's the cliche. we saw plenty of evidence for it. what we've tried to do is say o kay, maybe if we shift perspective, if we don't simply buy the asumgtss thpgss that we the age of countercultural music i we do that, we may see music engaged in a different kay. the way we started out, isn't it the case that popular music nick the u.s. in the 1970s was doing what popular music typically had done well before the 1960s, which is to mediate relationships between men and women, to mediate notions of gender, to rethink sexuality. that's where we started last time. with ideas about masculinity and the way in which there's a radical transformation about ideas of masculinity tied up with the emergence of the gay liberation movement, bound up in music such as glam rock, bound up in disco. as we said, in a sense, that music was inherently political. something the really vicious anti disco campaign really drove home. so it seems we've started building the idea that post '60s, american music still is politicized, still is engaged, but in way, a way that rejected, as we saw with david bowie, that rejected counter cultural rock. that's where i want to go today in talking, as i promised about issues of women in popular music in the 1970s. we dealt with this before and thinking about the limited place accorded to women in popular music as a business, it's deeply embedded in western culture and ideas. yet, this is a period in the 1970s of real change and thinking about women. there's an opportunity for us to say just as there was this political agitation over gay rights, what can we do with the emergence of feminism and what musical implications did they have? so i want to do five things. you should get your bets down about me getting through this. i will. i have not lost yet. first of all i want to think a little bit about the context. do you know this, it's familiar, but let's remind ourselves of the way in which american societies relationship to women, notions of women changed radically with the emergence of what was called women's liberation. i want to use that as a backdrop for looking specifically at music, four different settings here, two, three, four, five. first of all, with the thing that's most stunning and yet we're ready for this, the idea that in fact counter cultural roc rock, acid rock, it was quite conservative in the terms of this famous essay i gave you, it was defined by the needs of masculinity and almost completely o blib rated the place of womens. the business hardly altered. and that sets the other thing music januagenres in a differen perspective. you'll see once again there's a tendency to try to make that disappear, to explain it away. and then stunning to me, but we've built on this too, country music, which is supposed to be so conservative, so anchored in older notions of family that we've seen in talking about country music in the 1950s or the 1960s, it's country that has this space to articulate a country feminism and it's summed up in that piece that gives this lecture it's title, "your squaw is on the warpath." no costume and singing. that's my quarantine to you. at last, i want to think about where a more open kind of feminist politics emerges in the '70s. it does to a degree in disco. but the real place is in mainstream popular music. in musical terms, it's there that with helen reddy's hit "i am woman" that you have a breakthrough. history is interesting and completes this picture of what is a very complicated response within music to the rise of the women's movement. at the end, i'm going to want to draw in a together. that's where i want to go here. as i say, i'm going to start with what you know already. let's get a common point together from which to works here which is the emergence of new ideas and new activism among women that would lead to a new critique of popular music generally and rock music in particular. all of women's liberation is not a preparation for journalism about rock music. but that's going to be the key linkage. you know this, and history of modern feminism is very complicated. you see that in those sources that gave you and i will take time to work through them. in very simple terms, we're talking about a couple of basic sets of ideas here and we can flush them out as we go along. you know this, the first wave that emerges in the late 1950s, early 1960s is liberal feminism, liberal in the sense that it's a middle class movement, focused on demands for equality, both in the workplace, equal pay, for example, for women, equality in the workplace and the idea that women should have full representation politically, not just the vote. liberal feminism too because these are women who believe that activists liberalism of the kind that john f. kennedy and president lyndon johnson embodied, government intervention could repecreate equality. most famous founding figure is author of the feminist mystique. arguing where -- how ideas about women's inequality get embedded in american society. she's one of the key founders of the national organization for women. there's a suense of the urgency that becomes the most important vehicle for liberal ideas and one of the ultimate expressions of liberal feminine nichl and one that would be granted, an equal rights amendment to the constitution. the e.r.a. change in government to promote equality. almost as soon as that emerges, this makes it complicated, you have slightly later in the 1960s what people very quickly called radical feminism. middle class mostly to be sure, but somewhat younger women with roots in the black freedom struggle, the push for civil rights and campus activism. radical feminists shared many goals with liberal feminists. what's interesting are some of the emphasis, the slogan, the personal is the political sums that up. the idea that what happens in the intimate spaces of our lives, that that's political too. as you can see from this course, that idea is one of the things that animates the idea that music matters. that music is political, precisely because so often it is about intimate relationships that often weren't -- often weren't traditionally considered political. some of you in my '60s class have heard me talk about this in another setting, radical feminism is one of the most important intellectual developments in the modern world, not simply for the arguments about power relationships between men and women, but by redefining what's important. classes like this exist not just because aging allegedly hit baby boomers like me want to relive our youths, though, that does seem very important to me, but also because of the intellectual terrain opened up by radical feminism. part of this focus on the personal includes issues about male violence, especially in the home, about women's control of their own bodies, concerns about rape, about abortion, which is a liberal concern too. it's radical feminists who also played more, argued more about the nature of feminine identities themselves and wanted a broader range of them including a celebration of lesbianism that is relatively absent in liberal feminism. radical feminism is especially important for us to -- for its focus on culture. many radical feminists zeroed in particularly on the importance of words, cultural categories, ideas like beauty. words like whore, for example, categories like beauty. this is a famous moment. you've seen the pictures. this is the protest against the miss america beauty pageant in atlantic city, 1968, famous poster that parodies what you see in a butcher's store where a piece of beef is sliced up so you know what the cuts are. here is a woman presented that way. welcome to the miss america cattle auction. the idea that women are sold in part through the world of beauty and of course pre-abs. that concern on culture immediately gets us because it makes it very likely that in turn radical feminists would focus on music, that they could see music as one more cultural area, one more set of categories that could be used to denigrate or celebrate women. they don't monopolyize everything. there's substantial backlash. there's an active antifeminism. here is a big best seller from 1973, "the total woman." it's only when a woman surrenders her life to her husband that she becomes beautiful to him, his queen. antifeminism produces a strong woman-led movement against the equal rights amendment to the constitution led almost paradoxically by a woman, an important conservative thinker. you get the point. this is a very rocky terrain in which to think about music and the place of -- of women and music. even arguably more than in response to the emergence of the gay rights movement. the first response is here. it's from the radical feminists who thinking over cultural, thinking over words, thinking over the power of words to put people in their place in the same way, say, that the "n" word was a way of putting african-americans in their place. it's feminists who first come to terms with music. and what they criticize is not so much country music, which you might have expected, not even disco, which you might have expected, it is mainstream rock 'n' roll, the biggest icons of '60 rock 'n' roll. i want to take some time to work through the sources that i gave to you. there are three of them. we have three radical feminist critiques of counter cultural rock as a form of male privilege. that's obvious and we want to work beyond it. in particular, i want to note a couple of points here. one in line with what we've seen this sense of disappointment, you've got these women saying we've misunderstood the '60s, we need to reinterpret the '60s about the kinds of power relations that we've had in the past and that ties in turn to their subverting the whole idea that the '60s represented some kind of revolution. instead it becomes a way station towards the revolution that still needs to happen. so there's a powerful set of ideas here and some real differences among them. but the question of how much impact is something we're going to need to gauge. the first piece is this one from susan. it appears in 1970 in "rat magazine." women's liberation with the "rat" highlighted. working away against main treem ideas. this was published when it was an that will jazzed. the who used the amplifiers among others. this is someone who is hiding her identify but playing with the rock 'n' roll world but more than playing it, cock rock is a stunning title. for her, she describes it, the personal is the political. each one of these three pieces, you see this personal journey that leads to a new set of ideas and a new set of attitudes. for susan, it's this idea when she's growing up in school, in school and college, rock 'n' roll was a generational thing for her. she saw it in those terms, not in gendered terms, not in social terms, but as part of dealing with the gulf between young and older. it was the only thing we had of our own where the values weren't set up by the famous wise professors. it was the way not to have to get old and deadened in white america. it took me a lot of going to the fill mother, the auditorium we talked about and reading "rolling stone" before i registered that what i was seeing and hearing was not all of these different groups, but all of these different groups of men. once i noticed that, it was hard not to be noticing all of the names on the albums, all the voices on the radio, even the g deejays between the songs. they were all men. powerful moment. and to her, that leads to the obvious conclusion, that rock representatives the massive exclusion of women, it keeps them out. in the female 51% of woodstock nation that i belong there, there isn't any place to be creative in any way. she says there are no women electric guitarists, no wilmer drummers, leaders of rock bands, nothing. there are women singers, but they have to be twice as good just to be acceptable, just to play this traditional role that women have fulfilled in music. it's strongly argued but it rests in the reality, the reality we started to talk about in discussing girl groups back in the '60s. as she says, to become the top of the heap in black music, aretha franklin is better by far than anybody else. and rock, janice joplin, of course what precipitates this piece is the death of janice joplin which we mentioned before. she says joplin's demise as this sad acknowledgement of what music does to you. she says joplin for audiences was an credible sex object. that's what drives underneath is this anger at the reality of the narrow space that women can occupy. what you can do to be a woman is strum an acoustic guitar, be like joni mitchell, folk musician over here, but you can't electrify, you can't get out of line the way that janice joplin did. again, born out. she says, the people who play guitars, the people who get to use the power of electricity through those high-watt amps are men, jimmy hendricks, jimmy page. do we have to interpret this here? as i said to you before, the best female electric guitar player in the '70s is the bass player carol k. she's a studio musician. no one knows that a woman is playing bass on those records. that's susan's point. deejays, i gave you the opening for that. deejays have been a basic phenomenon and they're overwhelmingly men. the first woman dejay -- deejay allison steele. the night bird. where we exist only to feel come fly with me. she's on in the middle of the night. daytime when lots of people listen, it's all men. that's susan's point about the world of rock. women are invisible. but it's more than that. she argues, rock is fundamentally nasty. it's misogynist. who is truly where the edge comes in again. you feel it when she talks about what happens to janice joplin. she describes the attitudes of men, the men who sing songs, men who write the lyrics. when you listen to rock lyrics, the message is ridiculous, we're cunts, sometimes bitchy, and sometimes just plain cunts. radical language. here is susan occupying this new space of language and blowing up words and the way they're used to put people down. all of that sexual energy that seems to be in the essence of rock is energy that climaxes in fucking over women. after all of the groovy, hip celebration of rock music at the end of the '60s, the spirit of woodstock, even the kind of despair, this represents a stunning shift in perspective, really radical. she also finally makes a point. women are excluded but they're necessary. they still do have a role to play in music. women are required at rock events to pay homage to the rock world, a world made up of thousands of men. woman are there to be worshipers of men and to provide them with what they need. and so drawing it all together, susan ends with the really striking point, that revolutionary is the counter culture seems to be, as much as it represented blowing up old values, an attack on capitalism, property should be communal, the exception is women. and so women remain the last legit form of property that the brothers can share in a communal world. can't have . for the musicians themselves, there's their own special property, groupies which enrages her. you get the point. there's a powerful set of arguments. she's not alone. there's a whole proliferation of this line of thinking which is w why i've given you examples. this one is from marion mead. she wrote a book called "bitching" that is a summary of women's conversations about men. it's the "new york times" folks. no four-letter words. much more buttoned down. but she drives home the same analysis with a couple of really interesting points. one of them, again, with this project of rethinking the '60s, changing our understanding, her jumping off point is woodstock. it finally dawned on me not at the concert, it dawned on me when i saw the film a couple years later. it finally dawned on me that this is a fantasy land that welcomed only men. how about the women? it's interesting to see how women are portrayed at woodstock. there's the admiration -- that's michael lang on his motorcycle. look at him soaking it in there. nudity, it's interesting, most of it is shared nudity. mead's point seems kind of selective to me. what's not selective, the thing you see over and over is women and babies. you look everywhere for signs of men taking care of children and you don't see it. women's basic role is to have sex, conceive and then maybe some nudity there, but taking care of children. mead's point is really well taken. you can see why it would sink in. the other thing she does is really build on this idea that the '60s revolution wasn't real. just like woodstock is a fantasy land. she says, we were told that the '60s was about the reconfigure ration of masculinity. don't be fueled by uni sex clothes. nothing really changed. all of those things are hip camouflage for the same old sexism, same power relations that existed before. style changed, culture may have changed, but underneath power didn't. in fact, she says, the '60s are worse than the '50s. here you see how this critique blows up the conventional rock history. instead being history of progress from the '50s to the '60s, instead, as she says, look, earlier rock didn't at least treat women in such a nasty away, and in such a false way. women were passive sexual partners to be sure, but not that passive. e m that's not the '50s, that's the '60s. and the people who are most guilty of it are the beatles, bob dylan, the rolling stones. all of it blown up including this idea that rock is a history of progress. the last one is ellen willis. work with me, these ideas are -- those of you who had to do this assignment, analyzing these sources, you know what i'm talking about the. these are a little more complicated. it's worth being careful and laying the foundation. 1941, pioneers rock critic. here is a woman at the center of rock culture. she was the rock critic of new yorker magazine for a number of years. she was a member of two founding radical feminist groups, the new york radical women who helped organize the protest against miss america and the red stockings. willis was a creative, an original thinking across a range of areas. she's really interesting for us because she liked rock music. there's much more struggle within the piece i gave you than there is in, say, cock rock. she's more positive. she says, before we succumb to another set of stereotypes, think about what rock did. insofar as the music expressed the revolt of black against white, youth against parental domination, it spoke for both sexes. it pitted girls against all of their conscious and unconscious frustrations, it spoke for female liberation, implicitly, which is a big concession. for all of its limitations, rock was the best thing going. so her stance is different. she's not as ready to give up on what rock was. but like mead, she believes it's gone wrong. she believes that it's gotten worse. there's an alarming difference between the naive sexism before 1967 and the much more calculated almost idealogical sexism that has flourished sense. it became a music of pseudo liberation. it's an attempt to fool people and women into believing they're living a freedom when in fact their circumstances are the same as before. she also does one other really interesting thing that's striking given our own interest in the degree to which popular music reflects outsider culture and values. african-americans, white working class americans in particular. willis says, look, mainstream rock is middle class music. it is the product of middle class people and not even just any middle class people, but of educated middle class elitists. she says, certainly, look, men are contemptuous of women, but these men, they're contemptuous of everybody. they hate everybody. they look down on everybody. their attitude toward women is a part of that, is a product of their class and educational position. and she says also, they use women as scapegoats. they don't want to admit that middle class culture was a male product. men were in charge. they created that culture. so how is it that they blame women somehow as being the people who represent those values. so she says the misogyny of rock is based on class forces too as well as these fundamental issues between men and women. the last difference, you can see it rooted in her affection for rock music, the belief that it could be progressive, she says, 1971, things are changing. things are going to change. she believes that rock will open up to women, that the same kinds of expressive power that it's had for men could be used for more politically liberated reasons for women. there are more female rock musicians, more openly feminist ones. she notes the group joy of cooking which is a pun. it's a best-selling cookbook in history in the united states. everybody had "joy of cooking." there's the domestic image, but playing hard and fast, swinging, rocking. this idea that it's crossed over into what's a male preserve, cooking of women, cooking of men, in music. the leaders were two women, tony brown and terry garthway. she was an electric guitarist. here is a woman breaking into the world of male-dominated rock. they had their first album on capital records. and they made two more. she says, see, things are changing. now, i want to give you the other side to this. there's not so much. the neatest piece is from this priest, of all people, who writes to the "new york times" after he's read marion mead's piece and says, wait a minute, look, just a minute, he says, look, you're overrating the rolling stones. they're not as important as you think. you're misinterpreting bob dylan by picking his most misogynist songs and misinterpreting the beatles. they're not so bad. and he says you're contemptuous of eleanor rigby. why are you rejecting her? if you're about sisterhood, why is it that feminists critiques of rock would condemn songs about female subjects. interesting, but not much. not much of an answer to these powerful critiques. but the real answer is here in impact. the they force you to rethink what exactly we mean by the revolutionary nature of the music. in the process, there's a curious thing. this is a final exam question waiting to happen, i realize this, actually. there's something very similar about their condemnations of rock in the early '70s to the condemnations of rock 'n' roll in the 1950s. the idea that it's an inherently corrupting music, that it turns people into degenerates or outcasts, the terms are shifted here. but, again, here is the ideal that male rock turns you into bad people. as you say, it's rather curious in the end that this radical set of ideas is so close to the sort of consecutive critique that we had in the '50s. all of that said, as we'll see it in the weeks to come, very little changed. for all of the optimism of ellen willis, women do not emerge as a major force of rock 'n' roll in the 1970s. not really. not when when you think about comparisons to other genres which is what i want to do the rest of the way. as i say, this is really surprising to me. but on reflection, it shouldn't be. the first area is disco. disco, which we've analyzed largely in terms of its relationship to race, the influence of latinos in music, discotheque, african-americans, we talked about it in terms of male sexuality and its relationship to the gay rights movement. it's interesting to consider it in terms of gender. you have a much larger role of female performers in disco. they were known as disco divas. the biggest star of disco, donna summer, born in boston, 1948. younger than the critics we've been discussing. changed her name. summer is a version of her married name. interestingly for us, she was the front singer for the -- the lead singer for a psychdelic rock band. she becomes a disco singer. the queen of disco. the 1975 breakthrough hit "love to love you baby." there's the cover. she had numerous hits including "hot stuff." another one is gloria gaynor. had the first big hit album. "never can say good-bye." they are only three songs. talking long songs in clubs, deejays would play the whole side of the first album. 19, 20 minutes of essentially uninterpreted dancing to three different pieces, all of them featuring donna summer -- excuse me. gloria gaynor. and two years later," "i will survive." we're not going to do this as a group number. first this side of the room. okay. the last one makes the point, grace jones. 1948. jamaican. looking ahead, when we talk about the origins of rap and hip-hop, one of the things you're going to see is the importance of caribbeans and caribbean migrants to the united states in creating this new culture. here is one of the first signs. grace jones had the hit "i need a man." there you go. she was billed as the queen of the gay discos. notice the collar on the other guy. famous sequence of photos with her includes this one with the whip. there's another one of her biting the whip. you get the point. very popular figure. a lot of women, we could expend this list more. especially in comparative terms, far more visible presence of women in disco than in rock. we've given you another primary source which is a piece in the "new york times," john rockwell, who says straight out in an engaging way for us, why are there so many women in disco? what's up with that, is his attitudes. and he says a number of striking things. he says, first of all, a high piping sound suits the silly partying mood in many songs. unimportant music, something we talked about before, unimportant people, of course, to see it, match. he says women singers suit the national mood of escapism. when the country doesn't want to deal with reality, it turns to the voices of women. it's astonishing. you get the drift again. women -- he's almost saying women play such a big role in disco precisely because they're so unimportant, so useless. and then his third act of dismissal focuses on the importance of gay culture within disco. without wishing to generalize too loosely about a gay sensibility, the fact remains that many women, especially ones with exaggerated feminine characteristics have become cult figures for homosexuals and his prime example is grace jones. there's a funny kind of slippage going on here where he's starting off with the idea, women are so important to disco and you lurj yoch your way thro the article and women are less important. he says, after all, let's face it, men run the world of disco. they have the labels, they have the -- they run the production facilities. they control all of it. disco music is a producer's music which men's men's music, which means the exploitation of women to support men's fantasies. he's seeing the emergence of gay liberation. it's a puppet like acting out as a male fantasy of women of exaggerated lust and dominance. you're excited, but it's bad. you're thinking this is not good. it's almost -- it's really too simple. it's a very weird piece. it's smart, but it's this disappearing act. you're looking -- here is the rabbit, going to be gone. here are women, they're gone. they don't matter. it effectively erases all of these very visible disco divas. this is with summer, gaynor and jones, have no identify of their own. it's striking because of the intensity of those women embodied a particular kind of identity. john rockwell is light years away from the antidisco movement but he's engaged in the same kind of enterprise of making it disappear, in this case for different reasons that have to do with women. it's too simple in the sense that he's making identity be one thing or another thing. a song is this, or a song is that. which is striking for us because we've seen how in the world of glam rock, for example, identify is becoming this thing that shifts and takes new forms just as david bowie would take on a new appearance from album to album. gloria gaynor's song "i will survive" was known as a gay a i anthem. different people could see in that something different. and they could find a kind of community. the '70s is about breaking down these iron barriers between categories. it's as if rockwell wants to deny that. wants to make it go away. it can only be gay music, men's music. you get the point then. for women to occupy visible, powerful space in music in the 1970s, just as before, was very, very difficult. almost close to impossible. and then you hit this truly strange thing which is to say by now, we've come to expect. country music is different. if you want to contrast to rock, it's different. if you want a contrast to the way power works, it's different. country music had lots of women in it. something we've seen before. mostly overwhelmingly, singers. but weren't they conservative in politics? well, let's see. there's a kind of paradox here, then. country consecutivism. country women has more women star singers. they were full-time working women. they were women who balanced career with motherhood. they were women who in a time when the personal is the political, made music that was personal. but the message that they conveyed about gender when they focus so much on women and women's identifies, like dolly parton here, seems very consecuti conservative. if you're going to think about what's the music for others, you wonder why i put them in the lecture at the beginning, it was for this. this is the background for "total woman." it's reacting against change in the 1960s. not that simple. two really good cases for you, i've given you these, i won't play the music for you. first, tammy wynette. 1942, a bit older than the disco divas. just the title, you're thinking, really? you make me want to be a mother. absorb that. some of you are grimacing there. "you make me want to be a mother." "make me your kind of woman" which is sung to a man, by the way. and don't liberate me, love me. you get the point. morgan is going, this is great. it's about -- she's saying, i was visited by a delegation of women, these women's liberationists who wanted me to change, wanted me to see you in a different way. she says i didn't want to do it. i know my job really is to support you and care for you and you're going, this is conservative. and then she suggests that's because you need basically all the help you can get. and that's when you begin to realize that something is going on in country music as usual, underneath the hairspray and the apparent convention, something is going on. it reminds me of patsy montana. i want to be a cowboy sweetheart, you're thinking, she wants to define herself in terms of a man, no, she wants to learn how to rope and ride from him and live a fairly independent existence. country is complicated. there's instead a kind of resistance on the part -- for traditional women. it's not radical politics. it's not proliberationists. your good girl is going to go bad. keep behaving the way you do, my husband, keep doing what you do, and what you're going to end up with is me copying you. your good girl is going to want to go back. you want women to be like this, do you really want me to be this way? of course the answer is no. driving home in the end the argument that what really -- what men really want is different from what they think they want and they better behave. complicated. your good girl is going to go bad. and your ultimate one "stand by your man." big, big record. number 19 on the billboard hot 100. the list that tracks sales across popular music. huge hit. supposedly, the ultimate in female submission. this is going to date me, talk about age, hillary clinton famously paints herself into a bad corner by saying she's not going to be like tammy wyenette and stand by her man. you wonder if she knew the lyrics which are fascinating. i want to go through them with you. tammy wrote -- co-wrote this. sometimes it's hard to be a woman giving all your love to just one man. you'll have bad times and good times -- you'll have bad times and he'll have good times doing things that you don't understand. but if you love him, you'll forgive him even though he's hard to understand. if you love him, be proud of him -- you're thinking, really? you're going to put up with him doing what you don't understand? because after all, he's just a man. most famous put down. it's saying, okay, stand by your man, not because you're so inferior to your man. stand by him because he's just a man. that's how country music works. it's weird. tammy said, i'm not a radical here. i'm not a women's liberationist, but her songs are about pushing man toward a uniform standard of behavior and framed by this idea that men are so wonderful, but rather, that they're so pathetically limited that you have to make the best of it that you can. and she's not alone. the other great example that gives us the title of this lecture is loretta lynn. a beautiful example of outsiders music, the way in which country music remained deep into the '60s and beyond. she was billed as the coal miner's daughter. her father was a coal miner. cultivated a traditional image. she's canning. she's selling music by putting up preserves in ball jars. that's how far they go in packaging loretta lynn as conventional. she married in 1948, do the math, pretty damn young, six children. here is a woman defined by marriage and family, but because her husband urged her to do it. not she herself, because her husband urged her, she becomes a singer. a full-time professional. someone with a career and who still has marriage and family life. she is successful because she's talented but also because she taps into the same vein that tammy did. taking what is seemingly a conservative world and a conservative stance and saying, okay, i'm accepting these ground rules, but i will push for change within it. early example is "don't come home a drinking with loving on your mind." . number one hit. we don't have to do the lyric. you get the point from the title. negotiation, you want to carry on, you want that much freedom, no sex for you. and, again, look at the -- look how convention the cover is. that does not scream women's liberation, the 1960s, and yet the personal is the political. then you have your squaws on the warpath. what an album cover, by the way. what an astonishing thing. here she is in a series of squaw scenes. when you download this, you can get a look at it. here she is taking on still more of an outsider identity in racial terms, you can cringe. but she's actually doing the squaw thing, as you'll see, to do something fairly radical. the promerformance of this, she standing there smiling. you're looking at that going, this is safe. it's even bland, kind of dull. and then you listen to the words. and, again, that's a reminder for us, country music has been more word-centered than most of popular music. in an age when radical feminists are arguing pay attention to words, it's country musicians like tammy and loretta and the songs that they're writing that are playing around with words and categories in new ways. these words are just stunning. well your pet name for me is squaw. when you come home a drinking and can barely crawl, all of that loving on me won't make things right, you leave me at home to keep the tepee clean, six papooses to break and wing, while your squaw is on the warpath tonight. nice song. you get the point now. he's using the native american language to reduce her, supposedly, to a greater level of subrogation. i found a big brave chief, the game you're hunting for ain't beef. get off my hunting grounds and get out of my sight. do i have to do it? you're supposed to be hip, come on. this war dance i'm doing means i'm fighting mad. you need no more of what you've already had. in other words, you've committed adultery which is a constant theme through these songs. your squaw is on the warpath tonight. all pretty good and she goes where as far as i know no popular song had gone before. really, just -- she's smiling. you saw it in the video. she smiles along and says, well, that fire water that you've been drinking makes you feel bigger, but, chief, you're shrinking. you're with me there. we could break up into small groups and discuss what that means. but i'm going to trust you on this. makes you feel bigger. but, chief, you're shrinking, since you've been on that love making diet. don't hand me the hold peace pipe, come work with me, don't hand me that peace pipe, there ain't no pipe can settle this fight. your squaw is on the warpath tonight. i found out a big brave chief, your squaw is on the warpath tonight. that's a stunning piece of work. she looks so conventional, dressed in a middle class sort of six children for her. there's going to be some changes made right here on nursery hill, and then in a really stunning image, you've set this chicken your last time because now i have the pill and the song goes on. kind of angry. it's a song that's saying, i'm not going to walk out of this relationship, but the balance of power within it has to shift, has to change. nobody in american popular music, mainstream, major hits, was dealing with this set of issues as continuously as loretta lynn. and of course she's seen as conservative, doubty, all the rest by mainstream commentary. john rockwell doesn't even bother with that. it's those country people, what could they possibly know. of course to add to all of this naturally, loretta lynn, liberation, absolutely not. i'm not a big fan of the women's liberation -- the women's liberation. maybe it will help women stand up for the respect they're due. neat, very nice politician's remark. i'm not in favor of this, though, it might be a good thing. that's how you do it. that's how you push the culture while seeming to be conservative. and we've seen this before. the beatles, if you smile and you're dressed in suits, you can get away with a lot. loretta lynn, same thing. so you get -- you know where i'm going with this. what we've seen is then astonishingly difficult it is for women to open up a space with unpopular music, to raise the sets of issues that are raised by radical feminism in the 1960s and 1970s. ironically, but not really ironically because we understand the mechanism, ironically it's country music and disco that in certain ways advance women's issues more aggressively than rock ever did. and finally to complete this, the most successful women's song, the most successful form of women's message music to go with the kinds of message songs we've seen, whether it's "eve of destruction" or others, the most powerful message song comes not from rock, but from mainstream popular music. helen reddy, "i am woman." that is very conventional pop music. it's not hard-edged at all. the critical response to that as music is pretty negative. reddy, a bit older. born in 1941. australian. she came from a show business family. she hated that. her rebellion was i wanted to be a wife and a mother instead of a performer like her parents. that's how she starts out. but she realizes what she wants to do is to perform and she wants to make it in the u.s. where she arrives in 1966, 25 years old. she arrives divorced, a single mother, with a 3-year-old child. so making it -- balancing the things that loretta lynn was balancing, tammy was balancing. she made it as a singer,s of di styles. she remarries to a man who becomes her manager. they move to l.a. in 1971, she has the number 13 billboard hot 100 hit. she's become involved in the women's liberation movement. she was part of a consciousness-raising group. they get together to raise one another's consciousness by talking about the realities of their lives as women. building an ocean of sisterhood. and out of that experience, i realized i wanted to do something musical about that. the result of this reflection beginning in '71 is i am woman. and she says, you know, i first -- they didn't think of writing a song. i would have performed somebody else's song. she says, when i looked around, i found total door mat songs for women that in pop music, that's all you find. there's not really anything there that expresses what she wants. so she writes her own statement instead. neat history. she writes "i am woman." radio stations won't play it. we've seen in that system of popular music, the business of popular music, then, you needed radio play. you needed air play to get people to go out and by the records. radio stations think it's awful. remember, we've completely male-dominated world. they think it's sickening this song. so reddy and her husband come up with an interesting idea, to kind of grassroots build this record. what they do is go around to afternoon talk shows in different cities in the u.s. where there were talk shows for stay-at-home women. it's out of this world that oprah winfrey's show would grow. here is reddy with mike douglas. smooth, pleasant man. and reddy would go on these shows, talk about her life, talk about what led to the song. she'd perform it and what she hoped would happen, happened, that women viewers would hear this and phone their radio stations and say, why aren't you playing this song? i heard this record, play it. well, the volume of calls is enough that gradually "i am woman" gets attention and it gets played and it takes off. the lyrics is interesting. it's worth taking it apart. it's a very subtle song, actually. it does a couple of very interesting things. i am woman, hear me roar, in numbers too big to ignore and i know too much to go back and pretend because i've heard it all before. no one is going to keep me down again which is one of the most carefully modulated descriptions of violence against women. people get it. i've been down there on the floor, no one is going to keep me down again. it starts off with this issue. yes, i am wise, but it's wisdom for the pain. if i have to, i can do anything. i'm strong. i'm invincible. i am woman. and then you can bend but never break me because it only serves to make me more determined to achieve my final goal and i come back stronger, not a novice any longer because you deepen the conviction in my soul. you're thinking, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, and really fascinating. she started with this subtle image of violence between the sexes and implicitly, heterosexual relationship, i am woman watch me grow. growth pitted against a willingness to be confrontational. as i spread my loving arms across the land, women is love, nurturing, growing, but i'm still an embryo with a long way to go until i'll make my brother understand. it begins and a song implicitly as male as a potentially opposite and perpetrator of violence ends with the idea that the relationship between men and women is that of sister and brother. so not necessarily sexual. as they say, it's a complicated song whether you like the rhymes or this or that or the background which is an interestingly, stylistic mix and the guitar backing is interesting, too, but what's going on ideologically is really striking. this notion of pride, you know, and that pain is denigrated and translated into strength and again that violence is an issue and that ultimately the relationship between men and women needs to be understood differently and in different terms and that's what popular music does. that's a very conventional thing, but this is a much less conventional form of that message. the male reaction to this is pretty striking and helen reddy is beneath contempt and a purveyor of all that is silly in the women's movement. boom. done. i gave you a neat review and a music writer in cleveland who writes on the eve of reddy turning up to perform in cleveland. as an admitted male chauvinist pig in the area where my own wife has not yet beaten me into submission, speaking of images and violence and i must admit that the distaff, and miss reddy sings it so well that her modicum of chest beating for the cause of that one song is fair enough. so one time. one time. just this once i'll let you sing "i am woman" and i won't puke, just this once. yeah. that's the reaction. reddy, though, was used to it, and in a moment she said, look, for a lot of men thinking about the women's movement makes them grab their groins. what can i say? i did not say we were going to cut their dicks off or anything, you know? speaking of male violence and you see mike douglas going, yes, and now a commercial from doug. i love that picture of her. you do not find many pictures of redding going, oh, yeah? but that's underneath this. what can i say? number one billboard hot 100 hit. so here's a song that radio would not play, that many men considered openly revolting and not just in favor of being in favor of a woman's revolution, but being sickening and in spite of all of that, number one hit in the united states. the following year she wins a grammy award for best female vocal performance and in another controversial moment she gets up and says i want to thank god because she makes everything possible. people go, what? she gets a ton of letters and she says in one of her favorite ones begins you skinny, blasphemous bitch. abbreviated usbb and again, it's interesting and radical feminism that argues that notions of beauty are used to discipline women, to be skinny here is clearly to be somehow unfeminine as part of being a bitch. the history of this song is just stunning and there she is accepting it and there's her husband behind her, you skinny blasphemous bitch. she goes from there and the united nations has its international women's year in 1975 settled for all time all issues about women's equality. they have -- [ laughter ] >> it's irony. they have a symbol. they also have for the international women's year a theme song which is "i am woman." so again, this song becomes international on the basis of all of this. the reaction by now is not so much for a man going okay, my wife likes it. it is a number of feminist activists who don't think she's radical enough. i spared you, i was going to give you one more source, but ellen willis writes one more review of helen reddy's review of "the new yorker" and it's this very twisted, convoluted thing as saying i don't really like the music, but her values are the right values, but i don't like it and i can't quite explain why i don't like it and you're on to page 3 of this going, helen, just say it, but t saying it part gets us to the questions we've dealt with all along how music can be politically effective. "i am woman" is really much of a piece with the kinds of music that we've dealt before. there are no policy prescriptions, you know. verse 2 isn't about i don't like the wording of the equal rights amendment and i think they ought to redraft it. none of that, nothing technical there at all and its lowest common denominator in music which is not a putdown, as we've seen. working on collective identity on a sense of pride, we've seen this before. that's what's revolutionary about rock music and country music and aspects of soul and funk in the '60s is this pride by saying this is what unites us and this one is striking because even though it is "i am woman," even though it seems so subjective, it is a collective song and it is merle haggard does this, james brown does it. "all you need is love," the beatles song for the first television broadcast in 1967 functions as the lowest common denominator value drawing together a group of people. what helen reddy does is very old in one sense and really quite conventional and it was as conventional in many ways as that song is in performance terms, but what's different is it's done in the service of politicizing women. now reddy's reaction to this is to say i'm not defined by that. i don't do women's libber songs all the time. i do a lot of other things like bob dylan. she doesn't want to be imprisoned in one identity and she knows she doesn't have to do it all the time, that you know, in the words of the cleveland rock critic i'll let you do it just once is to do a great deal, is to begin to change things. so that draws us together to this point, as they say. if we're trying to build an argument here about post-revolutionary popular music, that after the supposed fall of rock, the place we end up looking is not in rock itself. it's among people who consciously pulled away from mainstream counter cultural rock, the counter cultural had become mainstream who stood outside them and instead respond to new kinds of imperatives, who respond to the ways in which the status of gay men have arisen as a political issue, and the way in which the status of women, collectively, lesbian, heterosexual have emerged. rejecting the politics of '60s music in many ways and appropriating the kinds of tools and the weapons and the cultural musical weapons that had been forged in this musical culture that they were rejecting and you get the paradox there. very, very effective. the third element in this, the third thing as we build forward, we've already seen this period of time represents an intensified sense of economic decline. we've seen that already in the music of merle haggard, a working class centered music was already was registering what the industrialization would mean and what stagflation would mean and the strange slowing down of the u.s. economy including hyperinflation. there's another line of transformation and one that we've lived with for a very long time just as we've lived with these developing notions of rights and new sexual identities that we've discussed these last two days. so the next pathway i want to take out of here has to do with the economy, the transformation of capitalism, the limiting of the opportunities that once had seemed so limitless that you can dream of a free city and free music and free rock 'n' roll. what if there's a u.s. that can no longer afford to have everything be free? that's what i want to do next and we'll see, as well how that builds on even as it opposes earlier rock culture and with that, we're done. enjoy the rest of the day. >> weeknights this month we're featuring american history tv programs as a preview of what's available every weekend on c-span3. up next, c-span's cities tour takes you across the united states and through time as we explore our music history. some of the stops include the ryman auditorium in nashville, cleveland and the birthplace of jazz, new orleans. enjoy american history tv this week and every weekend on c-span3. ♪ ♪ >> american music often reflects or impacts different points in our country's history. over the next 90 minutes we'll take you across the united states and through time as we

Related Keywords

New York , United States , Boston , Massachusetts , Jamaica , Australia , New Yorker , Americans , Australian , America , Jamaican , American , John Rockwell , Eleanor Rigby , Ellen Willis , Loretta Lynn , Marion Mead , Susan Point , Michael Lang , Joni Mitchell , David Bowie , Jimmy Hendricks , Helen Reddy , Bob Dylan , Gloria Gaynor , Aretha Franklin , John F Kennedy , Mike Douglas ,