I’m a terrible hypocrite. I realized this during a recent enthusiastic listen to The White Stripes cover of Blind Willie McTell’s “Your Southern Can is Mine." I call myself a feminist, but there I was, joyfully singing the words, “if I catch you, momma, down in the heart of town, I'm gonna grab me a brick and tear your can on down.”
Further proof of this hypocrisy — when The Rolling Stones' “Under My Thumb” comes on, I pretty much always turn it up and announce to my two little boys that, “This is my jam.” True, it is a damn fine toe-tapper, but shouldn’t a feminist be rocking out to Ani DiFranco and sharing her messages with the youth?
Back in the day when I’d got to a bar, Jimi Hendrix’s “Hey Joe” (by Billy Roberts) was the first song I’d play on the juke box. That initial lick was like easing into a warm tub. It was time to settle in and get my drink on. I didn’t really give the words much credence. Or maybe I didn’t want to because I love the melody and progression and Jimi’s soulful delivery so much. Sometimes the passion and drama in these dark lyrics have a kind of seedy draw. I’m not proud of it.
Though hip-hop gets a lot of flak for its misogynistic lyrics, these type of lyrics are nothing new. Early American blues singers often sang about beating or killing women. Plenty of beloved musicians from the 1960s are guilty of singing demeaning lyrics, including The Beatles and Johnny Cash. The '70s gave us women’s lib — Thanks Mom! Still, hair bands and 2 Live Crew took their shot in the eighties. Guns N' Roses objectified the hell out of us in the '90s, and in the early aughts Eminem reminded us people with vaginas are scum. Even now, the trend continues across genres. And it sells.
Maybe it’s because we humans are a fucked-up lot who easily put their principles on the shelf where entertainment is concerned. Like how some of us love Don Draper even with his inability to be faithful or honest, or how we relish all the sick shit that happens in Game of Thrones. As a kid, I loved George Jefferson, even though he was such a dick to Louise and Florence. In entertainment all these things are acceptable. It’s not real.
Only, it is real for some women.
Does enjoying misogynistic art make us somehow complicit in the acceptance of these wrongs, or are they just songs? Are abusers riding around in their cars listening to Neil Young’s “Down by the River,” romanticizing the lyric, “I shot my baby”? The idea of bad men feeling empowered by this type of songwriting is deeply unsettling.
It’s about time for songwriters to stop disparaging women. Me, I’m already ruined because I’ll always love GnR’s Appetite For Destruction, but I will pledge to keep my guilty pleasure songs out of earshot of my little ones in the hopes that we can stop making misogyny acceptable, one little boy at a time.
This article appears in Jun 4-10, 2015.