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BARBARA BRADBY
Sexy (No No No): the Cool and the Hot in Female Popular Song
Tears of a Cowgirl
In her article on women‟s advice books, Arlie Hochschild identifies a
“cooling” of the modern female self, as intimate life is commercialised and
taken over by the metaphors and reality of market forces (“Commercial
Spirit”). For her, this represents an “abduction of feminism”, just as the
protestant ethic escaped the bounds of religious Calvinism and engendered
capitalism (22-3). Hochschild illustrates this cooling with an example from
Dowling‟s The Cinderella Complex, where a Chicago woman experiences
a “magnified moment” of feeling, as she contemplates her independence
having left first her husband (at home), and then her married lover (back at
the hotel), while she goes skiing in the mountains on her own:
I remember sitting by myself on the Greyhound bus, looking out the window…
I felt so good, so secure in the knowledge that I could be myself, do what I
want – and also be loved – I started to cry (Dowling 237, cited in Hochschild,
“Commercial Spirit” 20).
For Hochschild, this image is that of the “postmodern cowgirl”, who
“devotes herself to the ascetic practices of emotional control, and expects
to give and receive surprisingly little love from other human beings” (22).
This is the “managed heart” of late capitalism (Hochschild, Managed
Heart), a world where women have learned to “disinvest” from love, and
to control the desire which Dowling elsewhere expresses as that “to be
safe, warm and taken care of”, in other words, “the dreaded „Cinderella
complex‟ which … is „the chief force holding women down today‟”
(Dowling 32, cited in Hochschild, “Commercial Spirit” 21).
Hochschild notes that there is no audience for this epiphanic moment.
The Chicago woman‟s drama
doesn‟t take place between herself and her husband, but between her desire to
be attached and her desire to be independent … She comes alive focusing
inward – figuring out a troubled boundary between herself and anyone else …
2 Barbara Bradby
Her exertion is private and internal, against her very dependency on others
(20).
Hochschild contrasts this cool, modern self with the warmth of that
advocated in Morgan‟s “traditional” women‟s advice manual (The Total
Woman), where the self “tries to have fun, likes to act and feel exuberantly
playful in the confines of a unitary patriarchal world” (Hochschild,
“Commercial Spirit” 21).
*************
In this article I argue that Hochschild‟s work on gender and the
sociology of the emotions provides a fruitful lens through which to
examine popular music, and that popular music in turn provides an
exemplar of what Hochschild calls the “emotional dictionary” of modern,
intimate life (“Sociology”). However, I take issue with various aspects of
Hochschild‟s argument across a range of her work. The first of these is her
singling out of “advice manuals” (more frequently referred to in Europe as
“self-help books”) in her critique of the “commercialisation of intimacy.”
The market for self-help books has undoubtedly grown, but how big is this
market, and in comparison to what? Hochschild is anyway unclear about
whether she is criticising the commodity form taken by these books and
the self-help industry more generally, or whether she is more concerned
about the application of metaphors from economics to personal life.
I would argue that self-help books are embedded in and circulate
within a much wider, non-commercial network of social care and public
discussion, ranging from the semi-formal, twelve-step movement, to the
informal friendships of women, which even and perhaps especially for the
“postmodern cowgirl” continue to have their importance. Such books are
frequently exchanged and lent between friends and among groups, and so
cannot be reduced to the sum of their commercial sales. Furthermore,
some, including Anthony Giddens, have seen the self-help movement as a
democratisation, one which takes the power out of the hands of
psychological and medical experts, previously only accessible through
lucrative private markets, and puts it firmly into the hands of the users
(“Modernity”, “Transformation”).
A much bigger and more plausible candidate for this commercialisation
is female popular song. This has seen a huge growth since the new
beginning represented by rock and roll in the 1950s and 1960s, with the
biggest growth being possibly in the years after the height of feminism as a
social movement in the 1970s. In the 1960s and 1970s, female-performed
The Cool and the Hot 3
and female-oriented pop was still despised as an “other” to male-oriented
rock and (to a lesser degree male-dominated) soul or funk music. It was
not until the 1990s and 2000s that we have seen a massive growth and
diversification of female artists across a variety of genres, to the extent
that there is now a plethora of such acts.
1
However large the audience
reached by self-help books, that reached by pop music is wider and also
greater in age-range: pop is consumed by girls as part of a “coming of
age” that now begins in the early, pre-teen years, but is also part of
everyday life for much older women.
If in addition, we look at the way in which female artists have tended
to ambiguously disown feminism (“I‟m not a feminist but…”) or have
blatantly commercialised it in a dumbed-down version, as in the Spice
Girls‟ notion of “girl power” and their endorsement of Margaret Thatcher,
then female pop seems a very plausible candidate for Hochschild‟s idea of
feminism bursting the boundaries of a social movement and being
abducted by commerce.
At the same time, popular song seems to exemplify very neatly
Hochschild‟s idea that culture provides us with an “emotional dictionary”,
where we can look up and identify the “feeling rules” that are appropriate
for particular situations (“Sociology”, “Emotion work”). Indeed, if we are
to look for a commercialisation of the feelings aroused by feminism, of
what it feels like to be independent or to work through the implications of
striking a new deal in gender relations, then the burgeoning of female
popular music seems to be just that. While advice manuals go into book-
length rational arguments about how women should behave in the changed
social context of work and relationships, the pop song provides us with an
instant scenario of feeling. Social contexts in pop song are drastically
reduced – work, family, class and kinship all disappear, except insofar as
they are necessary to understand the emotions being felt within the self in
relation to (usually) an other. In this way, the pop song corresponds to
Giddens‟ notion of the “pure relationship”, though we should also note
that popular song‟s expression at an emotional level of the relationship
pure and simple predates by several decades the theorising of both
Giddens and Hochschild.
In developing her notion of “feeling rules”, Hochschild was concerned
to develop a sociology of the emotions, as distinct, in particular, from
1
I say this tentatively, aware of the difficulties of measurement, and of the extent to which female
performers become hidden from history by the process of historical construction of canons. A recent
musical in the UK, for instance, has highlighted Kathy Kirby as one of the biggest selling pop music
acts of the 1960s, yet who has even heard of her today?
4 Barbara Bradby
psychoanalytic theory (Hochschild “Emotion Work”). The latter had
famously seen an opposition between instincts and culture, where instincts
represented animal urges that must be channelled and repressed by our
cultural conventions. A sociology of the emotions, by contrast, does not
locate our feelings outside culture in this way, but rather shows how
culture gives us rules not just as to how we should behave, but also as to
what we should feel in particular situations. The self, in mediating between
these cultural rules and our actions in particular situations, is thus involved
in a kind of “emotion management”, and Hochschild is at pains to point
out that this work of managing the emotions must be seen as part of the
emotion itself.
The division of the self involved in managing emotion is exemplified by
going back to the lonely cowgirl on the bus and asking the question, “Why
is she crying?” A sociologist of the emotions must recognise the variety of
meaning that can be conveyed by tears in multiple situations. From anger
and frustration to despair and self-pity, tears signify emotion, but we do
not necessarily know which. We can only intuit the feeling that calls forth
these tears, as invoked in the words that precede the crying in the account.
To an extent these are tears of triumph, such as those shed by Alexandra
Burke in public when she won the UK‟s The X Factor in December
2008;
2
but there is also an expression of self-nurturance, an emotion also
implicit in Burke‟s reaction, when she cries for all that she has been
through on the show. Personally, reading and thinking about the Chicago
woman‟s account, I became aware of “the tune playing in my head”, and
heard The Crystals singing: “I felt so happy I almost cried”, (a line from
the song, “Then He Kissed Me”). In the 1960s song, the desire to cry from
happiness expresses the triumph of being picked by the desirable boy for
romance and marriage. The Chicago woman‟s account is clearly not this
conventional romantic narrative; nevertheless, I argue that the division of
the self involved has much in common with romance.
The heroines of romantic fiction, as has frequently been pointed out,
tend to be independent, intelligent, feisty, and they are resourceful when
their social status is thrown into question by an early narrative move
(Radway). It is the conjunction of these almost masculine characteristics
of independence with the very feminine ones of being loved and in love,
that makes for the poignancy of the romantic narrative. It is just such a
combination that is succinctly put in the Chicago woman‟s account. It is
2
I refer to the televised live final of The X Factor on ITV on December 13,2008). See
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kT9aE6oSe_w&feature=related (last accessed on 22/1/09)
The Cool and the Hot 5
not her independence alone that makes her cry, even if interpreted as
loneliness; rather, it is the conjunction of this independence and of being
loved that brings tears. In this moment, the woman is her own audience.
Her tears are her own as she reflects on her self, a reflection that is spun
outwards in the further recollection of the account. In her inner conflict,
the emotion-managing self sides with the “cool”, independent self in
crying for the one that is warmed by love.
The Cautionary Self in Girl-group Music
However, the continuities between the divided self of the postmodern
cowgirl and earlier narratives of the female self can be taken further if we
look to the sphere of popular music. Indeed, the second point with which I
take issue in Hochschild‟s work is that her key concept of a “paradigm of
caution” in modern advice manuals (“Commercial Spirit” 25) is not simply
typical of late or post modernity, but rather is anticipated in the girl-group
music of the early 1960s. In writing more generally of emotion
management in today‟s society, Hochschild extends this concept of
caution to the modern, western culture of love. She explains that the
“modern paradox of love” consists in the contradiction that today‟s culture
both encourages us to explore and experience love as never before, and at
the same time cautions against “trusting love too much” in an era of high
divorce (“Sociology” 8).
Paradoxically, while people feel freer to love more fully as they wish, and to
trust love as a basis of action, they also feel more afraid to do so because love
often fades, dies, is replaced by a “new love” (9)
The girl-group music of the first half of the 1960s was distinctive in its
use of voices within the group. Several musical genres of the 1950s and
1960s were defined by their singing groups, including doo-wop and
barbershop singing, while others frequently featured lead and backing
singers (rockabilly, early rock‟n‟roll, rhythm‟n‟blues, gospel and its
emergence into soul music). This paradigm of lead/backing singers, where
the lead is the prominent solo voice and the backing singers have a
subordinate role, using simplified lyrics and less prominent music, has a
fairly continuous descent through male-performed beat and rock music
from the 1960s through to the present day (see Bradby “Oh Boy! (Oh
Boy!)” and “She Told Me”). In much girl-group music, however, it is not
possible to talk of lead and backing singers in this way. In a sample of 28
girl-group songs that were hits in the US between 1960 and 1967, I found
6 Barbara Bradby
that all of them in some way reverse the expected relationship of solo
singer and chorus (Bradby “Do Talk and Don‟t Talk”). My study used six
criteria, three of them musical:
chorus opening the song;
chorus singing at a higher pitch than the lead;
chorus singing in counterpoint with the solo voice in the fadeout of the song;
and three lyrical:
chorus articulating the pronoun “I”;
chorus articulating full subject-object sequences of pronouns;
chorus having the more verbal part in the fadeout.
Of the 28 songs, 18 exhibited three or more of these characteristics, and
all showed at least one of them.
3
While I am not claiming that all girl-group songs exhibit a cautionary
voice in the form of the chorus‟s restraint of the lead singer, there are
several songs that are emblematic of the genre where this is the case.
4
They include the Chiffons‟ No. 1 hit, “He‟s So Fine”, where the chorus‟s
loud “Doo lang, doo lang” introduces the song and almost drowns out the
solo voice, as well as their later “Sweet Talkin Guy”, where the lyrics
divide more explicitly between solo and chorus voices, particularly in the
closing fadeout where both “voices” sing “Stay away from him” in
different rhythms, as it were to each other.
In the Cookies‟ “Don‟t Say Nothin Bad (About My Baby)” the purport
of the lyrical message is a defence of the girl‟s choice of the “bad” boy
against society‟s disapproval. Here the “chorus” voice represents this
outer disapproval of society, and is louder, higher in pitch, and preceding
in time to that of the solo voice, which presents an inner defence of her
love. For instance, in the “Middle 8” section of the song, the chorus sings
“Everybody says he‟s lazy”, in dialogue with the lower, solo voice, which
replies, “But not when‟s he‟s kissing me”. In addition, the music of the
song presents the lyrics of the title line in such a way as to give them a
different meaning than is implied in the title as it is written down:
Written song title: Don‟t say nothin‟ bad (about my baby)
Line as sung: Don‟t say nothin‟ [[silent beat]] bad about my baby
3
See Bradby (Do-talk and Don‟t-talk) Table 4, p. 360 for the detailed findings.
4
I have written about these in more detail elsewhere (Bradby, “Do Talk and Don‟t Talk”), and so will
only briefly summarise here.
The Cool and the Hot 7
In the written song title, the phrase is “Don‟t say nothing bad” (a dialect
form of “Don‟t say anything bad”). It‟s breaking up as sung into the
shorter phrase “Don‟t say nothing” gives out a more generalised negative
injunction, more akin to the solo voice‟s reply at the end of the first verse,
“So girl you‟d better shut your mouth”. The break in the line then
associates the word “bad” with the second half of the phrase, implying
that there is indeed something bad, or bad news, about the boyfriend. This
is elaborated in the second verse, where the line, again broken with a
silent first beat of the bar is:
Don‟t you tell me [[silent beat]] My baby‟s just a playboy
In other songs, caution is expressed more directly through the lyrical
message. Indeed, one of the founding songs of the girl-group genre, The
Shirelles‟ “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” is an exemplary “cautionary”
song, and is worth examining in more detail. This song was a hit in 1960,
before “the sixties” as a decade had happened. The song‟s lyrics
repeatedly contrast “tonight” as a time of both passion and trust (“Tonight
you‟re mine completely”) and “tomorrow” as one of uncertainty and loss
(“But will my heart be broken When the night meets the morning sun”).
This contrast is pointed up musically by the intervention of the chorus in
the line (see Bradby “Do-Talk and Don‟t Talk” 361). From this contrast
flows the repeated question, “Will you still love me tomorrow?”, and its
accompanying plea, “Tell me now, and I won‟t ask again” (also endlessly
repeated because, within the song, unanswered).
This song may perhaps be interpreted through a feminist lens of the
critique of the sexual double standard, whereby women/girls are liable to
be discarded by men once they have slept with them, as “soiled goods”. It
may well have been the case that this ideology prevailed at the time, but
such a critique is not assumed in the scenario evoked in the song, which is
more simply that of doubt for the future of a present, passionate love. The
fact that the feelings evoked are those of a teenage girl in bed with her
boyfriend is undoubtedly radical for the time, and there may be a mild,
feminist critique of the lesser constancy of men implied. However, it is
worth noting that this song was performed live by the Beatles in their early
concerts (Everett 96), and so was quite capable of a meaningful
performance by male voices. The very strong voicing of possession in the
first lines of the song may even be heard as more appropriately sung from
the male perspective (“Tonight you‟re mine completely You give your
love so sweetly”), and the song has had a recent live reincarnation as sung
by the Red Hot Chilli Peppers on their 2006-7 tour.
8 Barbara Bradby
In its contradictory messages of present passion and future doubt, the
song expresses very economically the injunctions analysed by Hochschild,
to explore sex and love, but to beware of loving too much. What is more,
it does so not through the development of an argument, but by evoking the
feelings that are being experienced by the girl in the scenario. The scene
itself is vividly sketched, particularly in the evocation of the night/sex
ending with the sun rising; the performance itself, with the girl‟s interior
voice speaking to us/herself and unheard by the boyfriend of the bedroom
scenario, also generates an intimacy with her and her thoughts which is
unusually immediate.
This song‟s frank depiction of a teenage girl‟s sexuality and sexual
feelings can be seen as a curtain-raiser for the conventional image of “the
swinging sixties”. What I wish to emphasise is that this is in some sense a
cautionary song, and this message of caution is there from the beginning
of the period. Unlike many other famous girl-group numbers, there is no
invocation here of society, or the girl‟s mother or father as opponents of
her love.
5
In this sense, the caution and doubt of the song appear to stem
solely from the relationship; hence, I would argue that this move in
popular song voices the feelings appropriate to the “pure relationship”,
freed of social class and kinship ties and constraints. It is arguable that
gender is still an external social factor: in its successful recorded forms
(first by the Shirelles in 1960, and later by the song‟s co-writer, Carole
King on her hugely successful Tapestry album in 1971) the song does
appear to articulate a gendered message, aimed at and voiced by women
and girls. In this sense, I argue that the song forms an entry in the
“emotional dictionary” which we all inherit from that time, and that this
entry is appropriate to the time when women first enter into “pure
relationships” on a mass scale.
Managing the Divided Self
However, it is not my wish to overemphasise the “cautionary self” of
girl-group music to the exclusion of the self that expresses desire. It is the
power of the active, desiring self that is so distinctive about girl-group
music, a power which is generated precisely through the sustaining of
individual female desire against the cautioning of society, parents, the
peer-group, or simply the more conventional side of self. In this way, the
5
The Shangri-Las, “Leader of the Pack”, The Crystals, “He‟s a Rebel”, The Shirelles, “Foolish Little
Girl”, are just a few well-known songs that voiced the opposition between a girl‟s desire and social
factors.
The Cool and the Hot 9
self of the girl-group music of the 1960s is nearly always a “divided” one,
anticipating Hochschild‟s analysis of the split in the postmodern self
between “the desire to be attached and the desire to be independent”.
A major feature of the active expressions of desire found in girl-group
music from the 1960s was that the grammatically “active” verbs were
found mainly in songs where the “I” of the performance addresses her love
in the third person, as he/him. In such songs, the entry of the grammatical
third person means that the song is very clearly heard as a conversation
among girls, and it is here that the most active expressions are found, as in
“I‟m gonna make him mine” (from the Chiffons‟ “He‟s So Fine”) or “I‟m
gonna walk right up to him, Give him a great big kiss, Tell him that I love
him…” (the Shangril-Las‟ “Give Him a Great Big Kiss”). In the group of
songs addressed to a love in the second person, as “you”, the expressions
of desire are nearly always passive, as in “So won‟t you say you love
me?”, (from the Ronettes‟ “Be My Baby”).
This passivity, while manifested through grammar, is socially
constructed in relation to gender, and has proved remarkably tenacious
over the years. While male-performed songs regularly link I and you with
an active desiring verb, female-performed songs do so much less
frequently, tending instead to substitute a You-me wish or expression of
desire. The analysis is complicated by the finding that I-verb-you
sequences do occur in girl-group songs, but they tend to express the
painful reality against which the wish, or fantasy is asserted. In this sense,
the I-you sequences work as a caution against the wish of the fantasy self.
The Chiffons‟ “One Fine Day” exemplifies this contrast:
Though I know you‟re the kind of guy
Who only wants to run around
I‟ll be waiting and some day darling
You‟ll come to me when you want to settle down
One fine day….
I turn now to look at some of the songs of Britney Spears, starting with
her first big hit of 1999, “Baby One More Time”. I have chosen to focus
mainly on Spears in this paper because the public discussion of both her
person and her music over the last decade seem to have provided a focus
for society‟s conflicting ideas and feelings about what a modern
girl/woman should be like. In applying this schema of the social grammar
of female desire to her early songs, I have found that similar contrasts of
reality and fantasy, activity and passivity can be observed in the pronoun
10 Barbara Bradby
sequences of “Baby One More Time.” Ignoring for the moment the visual
images of the video, the lyrics of the song are expressive of loneliness and
missing the boy, with the wish, or desire, expressed as the passive, “Hit
me baby one more time.” The singer actively castigates herself for having
let her boyfriend go (the reality) and contrasts this with the wish to be hit
upon one more time (the fantasy). The active pronoun sequences in the
lyrics are:
I shouldn‟t have let you go
and
When I‟m not with you I lose my mind,
Both of these take the form I-not-you: that is, the reality being described is
a negative one. By contrast, the wish of the song is expressed in the
passive, you-me form
Show me how you want it to be
Tell me baby
In this case, although there are strictly speaking no subject-object pronoun
sequences, the you is nonetheless weakly expressed as the subject of the
imperatives of which me is the object, (“show me,” “hit me”); and you is
also strongly expressed as the subject of the verb “want”. From the point
of view of the singer, then, she is the object of his wants, and this is once
again, the conventionally passive, female expression of a wish. The
continuation of the above extract, “Cos I need to know,” clearly separates
the fantasy me from the actual I. Elsewhere, the musical interweaving of
voices means that we hear, “My loneliness is killing me and I,” a phrase
expressive of a schizophrenia of loss, a split that is already implicit in the
pronoun schema quoted above, “When I‟m not with you I lose my mind,”
which can be outlined as I-not-you-I.
Britney Spears‟ second major single, “Oops I Did It Again”, reverses
the more conventional scenario of the feelings of the woman who has been
left, and instead sketches a scenario where she is unable to reciprocate the
love of a boy. In this song, she is doing the leaving, and she justifies this
claim by again singing of loss, albeit this time more abstractly, as the loss
of romance:
You see my problem is this:
I'm dreaming away;
Wishing that heroes, they truly exist.
I cry watching the days.
This song contains a repeated active expression of reality,
The Cool and the Hot 11
I made you believe,
but contains no full pronoun sequences expressive of a wish. Instead, the
lyrics repeatedly juxtapose and counterpose two subjects, you and I, as if
the I were refusing objectification into a me. As in her first hit, the
narrative is still of the loss of romance, but the self is more resigned than
protesting. The singer recognises that she is only dreaming of old-style
romantic heroes, and that this makes her a fool, even as she competently
plays the adult game of pretence. The maintenance of her independent
subjectivity is at the cost of any serious fantasy of love.
These songs sketch the appropriate feelings for a social context where
romance is no longer a believable scenario for a girl as she makes the
transition to adulthood, but nevertheless, is still very much there as a
reference point, as something which has been lost. If the transition of
growing up is the “master narrative” of rock and pop music, and if this
music allows children to rehearse this transition ahead of time, then it is
also the case that pop‟s appeal to a younger and younger audience
corresponds to a widening of the ways in which children are allowed to
pretend to be adults. Britney Spears‟ appeal to a new demographic known
as “tweens” (between childhood and teenage years) was both typical and
constitutive of this. Inasmuch as the tweens were a strong part of Britney‟s
fan base in the early years of her career, one surprising implication is that
very young girls were already rehearsing feelings of nostalgia for the loss
of romance even as they explore what it will feel like to be an adolescent
girl, herself rehearsing to be an adult woman.
The songs obey the structural grammar set out in the 1960s songs, in
that the address to a male you invokes a passive wish on the part of the
female singer. The tempering of this wish by an active expression of
knowledge about the you is also part of this structure. More notable is the
fact that songs which involve girl-talk about he/him are rare in recent pop
music, and the “third person” expression of active desire found in the
1960s songs seems to have largely dropped out in the last decade. Even a
group like the Spice Girls, which explicitly invoked a group ethos and an
address to the female audience through girl-talk, never sang songs to/about
“him”. Their sassy independence was, to some extent, an independence
also from the romantic narrative, which perhaps helps to explain this.
Other groups that have sung songs of female independence have always
sung them defiantly at “you” (e.g. TLC‟s “No Scrubs” [1999], Destiny‟s
Child‟s “Independent Women” [2000], Pussy Cat Dolls‟ “I Don‟t Need a
Man” [2006], Beyoncé‟s “Irreplaceable” [2006]), even where there is an
initial address to the female audience and some talk about “he/him”.
12 Barbara Bradby
However, the absence of the third person romantic address to “him”
does not mean that there is no voice of desire coming through recent
female pop. It hardly needs saying that there has been a shift from the
discourse of romance to one of sex in the years since the 1960s, with
Madonna‟s “Material Girl” of 1985 being a significant landmark in this
shifting terrain. Perhaps paradoxically, while expressions of sexual desire
by female performers have become more and more insistent and explicit,
they have tended to keep within the grammatically passive structure of the
you-me trope. Compare, for instance, Britney Spears‟ expression “Hit me”
(from “Baby One More Time”, 1999) with her “Gimme More” (2007):
while the lyrics of the second song are more explicitly sexual, and the
imperative is more repeated and insistent than in the earlier song, both
songs are asking you to do something to me. The imperative gives strength
to the female voice, but it cannot undo this grammatical passivity.
A song which is an exception in that it does contain girl-talk about him
is Girls Aloud‟s “Sexy (No, No, No)”, a hit in the UK and Ireland in
2007.
6
The song has a repeated refrain in question and answer format:
Did you tell him? No, no, no
Give him kisses? No, no, no
Whisper honey? No, no, no
You're delicious? Hell no!
[and so on]
This format recalls some of the Shangri-Las‟ big hits (“Leader of the
Pack” [1964], “Give Him a Great Big Kiss” [1965]) and also the recycling
of this style in John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John‟s “Summer Nights”
(1978). The “retro” referencing to the Shangri-Las is to songs where the
conversational style is very prominent and where the girl‟s desire is very
forcefully expressed. The core of the song is contained in the solo verse
(also repeated several times) that immediately follows the question and
answer refrain:
I can't deny no way my d-d-dirty mind is saying
Lover, come and get me, get me
But for a while I dropped that d-d-dirty style when I discovered
That it's sexy, sexy
The message appears to be that while the girl subject is capable of
active expression of her desire (the second group of four lines in question
6
Girls Aloud have been a consistently popular band in the UK and Ireland over the last decade.
However, they have never had a hit in the US, nor apparently elsewhere in Europe. Created by a TV
talent show in 2002, they have since then had 20 consecutive top ten singles in the UK.
The Cool and the Hot 13
and answer format ends with an emphatic “Hell, yeah!”, with the “yeah”
then taken up and repeated), she attributes this voice to her “dirty mind”
and discovers that her sexual pull increases when she drops this active
voice and instead ignores her lover. This message could be read as simply
a restatement of an old rule of flirtation, power and attraction, which could
apply to either gender. However, the allusion to her sexual desires as
“dirty” does seem to make it into a more traditional reinstatement of
female sexual passivity for fear of (self-)censure as slag/slut. The
contradictory nature of these desires as well as their articulation in
conversation are both well captured in the title of the song (“Sexy (No,
No, No)”). At the same time, the song exemplifies the shift from the
1960s, when the contradiction was about the expression of romantic
desire, to the current decade of the 2000s, when it is around the
expression of sexual desire. The next section examines in more detail this
shift to a contradiction around the sexual self.
The Cool and the Hot
The themes in Britney‟s first songs of the loss of romance, and a self
that has grown out of it but still hankers after it, resonate with
Hochschild‟s analysis of the cooling of the modern self and the
disinvestment in love. But what is very obviously missing from the
analysis so far is the sexuality displayed in the performance of Britney
Spears‟ songs. My third point at issue with Hochschild is that the lack of a
developed theory of sexuality in her work means that she cannot fully
account for the modern female self, although I believe that another of her
concepts can help us to a better understanding, as I shall try to show.
Sexuality comes through Britney Spears‟ vocal performance from the
first broken utterances of “Oh baby baby”, especially when heard in
conjunction with a sexual understanding of the lyrics.
7
In common with the
prioritization of the visual in popular culture, however, it has more
frequently been identified in her videos and visual images (Lowe;
Redmond). A word that occurs frequently in favourable online
7
See, for instance, the discussion at http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=232732, for
the mystery around the meaning of “Hit me”, and the assumption that it must therefore have a sexual
meaning, backed up by reference to the Urban Dictionary,
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=hit (both sites last accessed on 22/1/09)
14 Barbara Bradby
commentary on Britney Spears‟ songs and videos is “hot”. To quote but a
couple of examples:
loverofbeats (4 days ago)
regardless of what has been said about britney, this song and video is so classic,
it's still hot.
Erii77 (4 days ago)
damn she was hot (was, probably making a comeback, but was)
(from comments under the video of “Baby One More Time” on Youtube,
http://ie.youtube.com/watch?v=J0nVAC2gkpk , accessed on 22/1/09, just ten
years after the first release of the song)
senorvergara (1 year ago)
sorry to upset the haters but she looks fucken hot in this video.
(from comments on Britney‟s “Gimme More” video on Youtube,
http://ie.youtube.com/comment_servlet?all_comments&v=m3ceCMpPJgc&fro
murl=/watch%3Fv%3Dm3ceCMpPJgc , accessed 22/1/09)
Als Fußnote?
The interchange between loverofbeats and Erii77 exemplifies the dual
meaning of “hot” to mean both successful, and sexual. The second
example uses “hot” in a more straightforwardly sexual sense. In my
opinion, the widening of usage of this term in recent years is itself
constitutive of changing ideas about sexuality and the female self. From
having been indicative of rock‟n‟roll‟s view of (often young) women
(think Rod Stewart, “Hot Legs”, or Prince, “Hot Thing”), the term has
been appropriated in the last few years by women to talk about
themselves: a newly confident female sexuality is no longer just a
reflection of male fantasies. That “hot” can now be used in a positive and
approving sense by and of women is surely a major conceptual change
from a time when most words linking women and sexuality were negative
ones (as in the “slut” lexicon), or indicated a seductive subordination to
male desire (as in “sex-kitten” variants).
This shift, which is in line with what Wouters analyses as the change in
the “„lust balance‟ of sex and love”, cannot be encompassed by the
critique of “ladette culture” or in Hochschild‟s words, of how advice-book
culture has resulted in women “assimilating to male rules of love”,
including “the separation of love from sex” (“Commercial spirit” 26, 27).
Contrary to these critiques, being “hot” is not incompatible with
femininity, nor does it mean behaving badly. Hochschild‟s continual
emphasis on the “cooling” of the female self here seems very much at
The Cool and the Hot 15
odds with contemporary popular culture. However, in her rich exploration
of time in modern working/family lives in The Time Bind, she puts
forward the idea of the “potential self”, as the one we would be if we ever
had time to (235-7). She introduces this concept in relation to how fathers
working long hours in an American company talk about their relationship
to their children, giving the example of a father who plans a camping trip
with his children to the mountains, and buys all the equipment, but never
gets around to going. His potential self imagines many other future
projects. “The problem was that his actual self had no time to carry out
any of them.” (236) These potential selves, says Hochschild, “were
substitutes – not preparation – for action” (235). I want to suggest that in a
rather similar sense, modern female-oriented pop music puts forward the
sexual self as a potential self; and that it does this for a female audience.
The example of the unused camping equipment already implies an
interchange between public discourses (of advertising, the body, health,
and so on) and private conversations of the self. It is just such an interplay
that is involved in the construction of the “hot” female self of
contemporary pop culture. If pop music presents us with a series of
potential selves, and in particular with sexual selves, it may well be the
case that in our own lives these turn into selves that we don‟t really have
time to be. Dorothy Smith has pointed to the time and labour that women
must expend in learning to put on make-up as instructed by ads in
women‟s magazines: for her, this labour-time is a hidden cost of the
discourse of femininity in our society. Clearly, much more time, effort and
expertise is involved in acquiring a body with/and the ability to dance and
gyrate in public like modern pop stars do, let alone all the other
adornments and accoutrements needed for particular “looks”.
However, the potential, sexual selves of pop music remain potential for
reasons other than our lack of time. For one thing, the sexual self is only a
partial self, that has typically belonged to the night rather than the day.
Dress codes, particularly for women, have carefully differentiated these
selves, so that dress considered too sexual in the office or workplace will
incur social disapproval. In the past this day/night division was
superimposed also on a public/private division: “nice” women did not
wear sexual clothes in public. The growth of public spaces for teenage and
young adult socializing outside of family contexts – the dancehall, the
disco, the club – is of course one of the major social changes that took
place in the 20th century, and it is a commonplace to associate these with
the growth of genres of popular music such as rock‟n‟roll, disco or
techno/dance music. These spaces have allowed for the growth of public,
16 Barbara Bradby
sexual selves in ways that traditional society could not contemplate. But
however the “hot”, sexual self is indicated – and dress and dance styles
have changed enormously over the years – it is for most women a partial
self, not one that they wish to maintain or attempt to emulate at all times.
Secondly, the sexual self remains a potential self to the extent that
women and girls still feel constrained by unequal discourses of gendered
sexuality. This is more than Hochschild‟s “stalled gender revolution”
inasmuch as that refers to the failure of men to assume family and
housework roles to the same extent as women have assumed public
working roles (The Second Shift). I refer rather to the continued operation
of pre-feminist discourses of “slag/slut”, through which women are
condemned for alleged displays (or leakings) of inappropriate sexuality
(Cowie and Lees). Whether particular women/performances are praised as
“hot” or condemned as “sluts” is a new tightrope that women must
negotiate in the contemporary world, which now extends to virtual life
online – the most recent public panic about these issues has been in
relation to the posting of sexualised, or “hot” photos on Facebook and
other social networking sites.
While Wouters acknowledges that the optimistic egalitarianism of the
1960s “sexual revolution” remains somewhat unfulfilled, this is not just
because of what he sees as the puritanism of the feminist and anti-
pornography movements of the 1970s and 1980s. It is also implicit in the
grammatically active and passive roles that still predominate in the
gendered discourse of sexuality. As long as the “hot” female self still
articulates desire in the passive voice, as in the repeated title/refrain of
Britney‟s “Gimme more”, it is hard to see sexual roles as equalised,
particularly if this continued grammatical passivity exists because of the
social unacceptability of forthright active expressions of sexual desire by
women.
Music critics have seen the career of Britney-Spears-the-performer
through the narrative of her “growing up” from teenage girl to adult
woman. The scenario of loneliness and loss that had accompanied the
image of the “hot” dancing schoolgirl in her first hit was quickly reversed
on her second album (Oops I Did It Again, 2000) where, as already noted,
the title song sketches the girl who ends the relationship because the boy
is too serious, a message reinforced in the next release from this album,
“Stronger”, which even negates a line from her first hit (“My loneliness
ain‟t killing me no more”). In brief, the transitional period (“I‟m Not a
Girl, Not Yet a Woman”) of this and her next, “reflexive” album, Britney
The Cool and the Hot 17
(2001), which between them contain six songs about leaving men, and
another seven exploring aspects of being alone, may be seen as providing
“feeling rules” for the “postmodern cowgirl” whose cooled self derives
strength from leaving men and experiencing alone-ness.
However, the move to playing the “adult woman” on her next album,
In the Zone (2003), is seen by the critics as one in which she “equates
maturity with transparent sexuality and the pounding sounds of nightclubs”
(Erlewine, “Review of In the Zone”). In this adult world, there is precious
little room for love and romance, which are invariably qualified by critics
as “teen”, hence discursively inappropriate for “adult women”. Instead,
the “invitation” song comes to predominate on this and Britney‟s 2007,
“comeback” release, Blackout, as an indication of sexual independence. If
in the early years, the invitation was one primarily to dance, with sex as a
double entendre, on these two albums the invitations become more and
more literally sexual, with numbers such as “Freakshow” and “Get Naked
(I Got a Plan)” incurring critical scorn as “strip-club anthems” (Erlewine,
“Review of Blackout”). Indeed, Britney‟s online fans take up this issue in
relation to the video of “Gimme More”, where many of the comments are
critical, and the words “stripper” and “slut” occur quite frequently.
8
It is
instructive to compare these comments with those under the video of
“Toxic”,
9
which are overwhelmingly favourable, even though her
raunchiness is discussed. The narrative of the video for “Toxic” is one in
which, as one fan perceives it, “the girl took advantage of the man, when
usually its the other way around” (appletini43). Hawkins and Richardson
have also highlighted the agency being attributed to and enacted by Spears
in this video, while going further and finding an “obvious” camp or drag
meaning:
We witness a fantasy where the pop diva fashions herself as an imitation of an
original, which is parodied in order to be provocative and challenge (618).
I suggest that the hotting up/camping up of traditional roles such as the
air-hostess
10
work only insofar as they are “provocative and challenging”.
8
These comments can be read by accessing “view all comments” under the Youtube posting of the
video for Britney Spears‟ “Gimme More” at:
http://www.youtube.com/comment_servlet?all_comments&v=m3ceCMpPJgc&fromurl=/watch%3Fv
%3Dm3ceCMpPJgc Last accessed on 6/02/09
9
These comments can be read by accessing “view all comments” under the Youtube posting of the
video for Britney Spears‟ “Toxic” at:
http://www.youtube.com/comment_servlet?all_comments&v=TkIytHD5v9c&fromurl=/watch%3Fv%
3DTkIytHD5v9c Last accessed on 6/02/09
10
I use this term deliberately, conscious that Hochschild rejected it in favour of the gender-neutral
“flight attendant”, precisely because of its sexual connotations, in her important examination of the
role and its “emotion work” (The Managed Heart)
18 Barbara Bradby
Even without her futuristic, Lara Croft alter ego of the poison narrative,
Britney‟s air-hostess character is already one who having summoned her
man down the aisle, pushes him into the toilet, grabbing him by the tie
before stripping off his face and kissing the beautiful actor underneath.
The gesture of grabbing men by the tie around the neck and pushing them
backwards is repeated in 2008‟s “Womanizer”, filmed by the same
director as an obvious sequel to “Toxic”. To be provocative and
challenging in this way is to set the princess up as attainable only to those
who pass the test of overcoming her almost superhuman strength. While
this sets up a competitive trial of strengths with the male viewer, I suggest
that to the female viewer, this image of hyper-real strength and sexual
agency is attractive precisely because it presents a fantasy reconciliation
of sexual desire without (i.e. outside) the discourse of the “slut”.
The lyrics of “Toxic” clearly attribute danger and toxicity to the man,
whose lips are poisonous.
11
The video reverses this, attributing toxicity to
the female performer, as if she were singing to her self as “you”. She is the
one who obtains and wields the poison in a narrative of sexual revenge
(Hawkins and Richardson 608). In making the toxic male into a femme
fatale in this way, the video arguably sanitises the remarkably ambivalent,
anti-man message of the song, which repeatedly spits out the phrase,
“You‟re toxic.” Once again, however, the important point to note is that
active female sexuality is presented in a highly contradictory way. The
feeling I get from the conjunction of song and video is that the hyper-
sexualised imago (Hawkins and Richardson 614, 618) is one who rejects
(says No to) all the spellbound, gawping men in her way, and her only
message for the one she did desire is again negative (revenge, death, No)
because he has cheated on her/is a womaniser.
In conclusion, I believe the case of Britney Spears is interesting
precisely because she is the pop performer who has possibly most
consistently been accused of going too far in displaying provocative
sexuality over the last decade; yet even within this body of sexually
ambiguous work, it is possible to find ample support for the feelings of the
“postmodern cowgirl” from which we started out. Her early, romantic
persona has been “cooled”, she is fine with leaving men and being alone,
and she strikes off on a nightclub life where she is sexually provocative,
challenging and issuing invitations to men. These songs represent for the
young women of today the “feeling rules” for the “hot” alter ego that they
11
And despite two apparently active I-you pronoun sequences, both of them leave agency with the
man: I‟m addicted to you – addiction is loss of agency; I love what you do – again, it is you who is
doing something (to me).
The Cool and the Hot 19
would like to be, a “potential self” in Hochschild‟s terms. Young female
fans continually refer to and praise Britney (and, of course, other stars) as
“hot” in their online comments, a recent innovation in everyday discourse
which attempts to attribute a positive value to active, female sexuality. The
difficulty of being that “hot” self in the still-real world of slags and drags
is sometimes overcome through ironising performance, as in camping it up
and posing/posting photographs online. Since the time of “Toxic”, the
constructors of the Britney persona have themselves become more and
more ironic about her own performative relationship to the voracious,
global audience, not just in “Piece of Me,” but in a series of other songs,
from “Overprotected,” through “Freaskshow,” “Circus,” and
“Mannequin.” This “ironic” escape clause is also present in the song
“Gimme more:” while I have up till now interpreted this phrase as the
voiced sexual demand of the female singer (Lacan
12
and Danja
13
come
together here), the phrase is contextually that of the crowd in the club
context, who demand of the performer, “Gimme more”. This ironisation,
drawing attention to the performative element of the “hot” self, is what
makes it postmodern, and at its best, fun and pleasurable.
This paper has not been about the “real life of Britney Spears”, since
her person, in as much as it ever existed, has been legally destroyed in the
last year, under a draconian “conservatorship” which has stripped her of
all legal, financial and parental personhood (Eliscu), making her one of the
most unfree persons on this planet. Her downfall and condemnation have
been so great, though, as to give more than ample credence to the
“cautionary self” that gave warning in the 1960s songs of what would
happen to a too independent female sexual desire. Her “life” as it is
known through the media is itself the cautionary tale of our times.
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12
See Lacan in list of works cited.
13
Danja, the producer of “Gimme More” is quoted as saying that the song is about “feeling good,
celebrating womanhood” (MTV News staff, “Britney Spears‟ Single is Released.” August 30, 2007,
accessed at http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1568618/20070830/story.jhtml on 6/2/09).
20 Barbara Bradby
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