Extract
Anwyn Crawford
Girls Just Wanna Have Fun?
Who was the first teenage girl recorded to camera, caught screaming out for her musical idols? Probably no person alive knows her name, but more than fifty years on from Jerry Lee Lewis and bobby socks, a young woman in the throes of hysteria is still the signal image of the teenage girl’s relationship with popular music. Her hands are clenched into fists near her chin, and her shoulders are raised. Occasionally she gives a convulsive shiver. Her face is wrinkled into an expression of ecstasy verging on pain, her eyes closed, her mouth open and wet. Perhaps she is crying as well as screaming. In this state she is helplessly transported, but the transport is threatening. When will the fit be over? Who will shut her up? It is not that she has words – she is beyond and before those. Wordless, intensely emotional and undeniably sexual – this is the state in which teenage girls are understood to connect with music, and with those performing it. It is all in their bodies: they do not intellectualise; their opinions are instinctive rather than considered. Without rational judgement or the ability to articulate it, a teenage girl will always be a fan, never a critic.
From time to time the absence of female music critics is noted, alongside the absence of female producers, female DJs, female radio hosts, female roadies, female photographers, female managers, female label heads and female artists who are not automatically tossed into a box marked ‘female performer’, as if there was an open paddock where male artists grazed, free-range, and a cramped stall reserved for the women and queers. We need not rehearse the arguments about sexism in the music industry over again. It is so obvious that only those trying to wilfully ignore it could deny the material facts, and so entrenched that it almost always goes unremarked upon, acceded to and accommodated by nearly everybody, regardless of gender, including myself.
– The rest of this article is printed in Loops Issue 01, available to buy from these Stockists.
From time to time the absence of female music critics is noted, alongside the absence of female producers, female DJs, female radio hosts, female roadies, female photographers, female managers, female label heads and female artists who are not automatically tossed into a box marked ‘female performer’, as if there was an open paddock where male artists grazed, free-range, and a cramped stall reserved for the women and queers. We need not rehearse the arguments about sexism in the music industry over again. It is so obvious that only those trying to wilfully ignore it could deny the material facts, and so entrenched that it almost always goes unremarked upon, acceded to and accommodated by nearly everybody, regardless of gender, including myself.
– The rest of this article is printed in Loops Issue 01, available to buy from these Stockists.
