viz.

Image Credit: Harper’s Bazaar 

This blog post started as a conversation in the break room here at the DWRL.  After a discussion of the subversive, alternative female artists of the 90s—not only in band formulation like Riot Grrl or Bikini Kill but especially the singer/songwriters who dominated top 40 radio: Alanis Morissette, Melissa Etheridge, Fiona Apple—someone mused, “Where have all the angry girls gone?”

I can’t say I like the answer.  The angry girls have been billed as terrorists (MIA) or criminals (Fiona Apple).  Some girls perform anger in a way that only weakly resonates with the general public (Miley Cyrus).  But the angry girl has also been rebranded. The inevitable subsumption of alternative culture by the mainstream has cloaked our angry girl in airy dresses with flowing tresses and the voice of an angel to deliver the proverbial “fuck you.”  I am, of course, referring to the girl who’s on the cover of every magazine this week as she promotes her new album Red.  So hey girl hey, Taylor Swift—this week’s post goes out to you as I explore the paradoxical relationship between the underground and the mainstream, which emerge and subsume and emerge again in a cycle as endless as the couple on the verge of reconciliation (really! I think so!) in “We are Never Ever Getting Back Together.”

So how do we get from Courtney Love to Taylor Swift?  Perhaps we might take a look at one of my favorite pieces of concert memorabilia—the sparkly heart barrette sold during Hole’s Live Through This tour.

Image Credit: Tastingsin's Tumblr

Live Through This dropped merely four days after the death of Love’s husband Kurt Cobain, an event many music critics identify as crucial to Nirvana’s transition from underground to mainstream popularity.  Certainly we can read Barthes’ Death of the Author into the cultural narrative here, but let us defer that question and focus on the larger movement of grunge and punk rock into what I will call the “stadium rock” sphere in the mid ‘90s—that is, that the initial countercultural impulses of grunge and punk become incorporated into the sphere of mass culture.  Hole’s second album serves as an important piece of rhetorical evidence for this.  It is drastically more accessible than the first and received acclaim from popular and alternative music critics alike. 

There are two ways we might read the heart, which was sold in large quantities throughout the Live Through This tour.  We might read it as an ironic statement on Love’s part; that is, that Love is attempting to show her distaste for traditional cultural mores of gender and femininity by expressing her identity in an exaggeratingly feminine object.  (The more popular version of the barrette came in hot pink.)  The cover of Live Through This seems to affirm this reading:

 Image Credit: Amazon

But the mechanism is not purely ironic.  As Erika Reinstein famously said in what has come to be known as the Riot Grrrl Manifesto (published in a ‘zine in ’92)

“BECAUSE we girls want to create mediums that speak to US. We are tired of boy band after boy band, boy zine after boy zine, boy punk after boy punk after boy… BECAUSE we need to talk to each other. Communication/inclusion is the key. We will never know if we don’t break the code of silence… BECAUSE in every form of media we see us/myself slapped, decapitated, laughed at, objectified, raped, trivialized, pushed, ignored, stereotyped, kicked, scorned, molested, silenced, invalidated, knifed, shot, choked and killed. BECAUSE a safe space needs to be created for girls where we can open our eyes and reach out to each other without being threatened by this sexist society and our day to day bullshit.”

Love’s incorporation of the barrette can be seen, I think, as a reclaiming of femininity on women’s own terms; that women should feel free to take back the domestic or the feminine as a willing and willful act, not as an act of subversion of subservience.  The precondition for this, as Reinstein argues, is a self-designated, self-created feminine space.

But as that space became defined by powerful, “angry” female vocalists of the ‘90s, the line between ironic or self-designated participation in the feminine and the feminine space as inferior or restrictive (i.e. a patriarchally defined feminine space) became, in my view, increasingly blurred.  Once female-defined, female-inhabited spaces became available for mass consumption, the mechanisms of popular culture transformed Hole’s barrette into a face-value gesture.  The anger regarding and demand for social justice, especially for women, transforms into a more palatable “women scorned” motif.  Thus, the danger of female anger is contained by means of isolation; by individualizing it (Swift’s endless parade of breakup songs) rather than generalizing it.  A breakup, after all, is something we “get over.”

So finally, I’d like make some particular comments on Taylor Swift’s visit to Ellen: 

The video has earned Swift some heat for being “humorless,” especially about the central theme of her songwriting—her breakups.  (An ecard recently made the internet rounds, expressing “Taylor Swift, maybe you’re the problem.”)  But as much as I might object to a particular brand of singer/songwriter that I think Swift represents—the woman who, despite the plethora of social injustices against women that exist, chooses to use her potentially empowering anger to wax generic on winning at breakups—the idea that Swift is obligated to make her personal life available for public consumption for daring to aestheticize her feelings is the worse offense.  So although I think we might read Swift as complicit in a tired out old narrative that sanitizes “girl power” into something ultimately less threatening than the demand for social justice, complicit with patriarchal ideas of femininity or not, she can never deserve to be subject to them.