Where did all the female rockers go?

Women once made a difference in rock music, distinguishing themselves as rockers to be reckoned with. Today, they are most notable for their absence from the scene. And Taylor Swift definitely doesn’t qualify, writes M. Taufiqurrahman.

When Patti Smith began her rendition of the Them song “Gloria: In Excelsis Deo” with the line “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine”, pop music was never going to be the same again.

Smith not only tore down the wall that separated poetry from music, high art from pop art, but also the gender-based division of labor in pop music.

In the period leading up to the release of her legendary debut album Horses, Smith was a poet in her own right. Her foray into the realm of punk in 1975 was motivated primarily by the conviction that the future of poetry belonged on the stage.

Her early gigs with Lenny Kaye, a rock critic moonlighting as a guitarist, were three-chord affairs staged to celebrate the poetry of French bohemian poet Arthur Rimbaud.

After blurring the distinction between poetry and pop music, the next step for Smith was to subvert the traditional male-female dichotomy in pop, where women were the novelty acts in rock performances.

It took a lot of guts, especially for a female performer, to speak openly about sex in those years. The second song on the album, “Redondo Beach”, a casually narrated tale of homosexual love, was boldly ahead of its time.

Above all the rock-as-art pretension, it was the iconic cover of Horses – produced by her soul mate, the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe – that served as her most forceful statement.

On the cover, Smith mimics Rimbaud in an unmistakably androgynous pose. (Movie director Todd Haynes in the Bob Dylan biopic I’m Not There takes this idea even further by portraying Dylan as an effeminate young artist who claims to be Rimbaud).

Smith’s appropriation of Rimbaud, her rail-thin appearance and penchant for wearing men’s shirts, as well as other gender-bending antics were her scathing critique of (classic) rock’s obsession with putting the sexes in what it deemed was their proper place: female performers in the music industry were supposed to be pretty and soft-voiced, singing wistfully about failed and forgotten romances.

At the height of classic rock’s excesses in the 1970s, those who were familiar with the term “groupies” would easily get the idea that women (performers or otherwise) were treated like sex toys.

Smith’s influence exceeds the number of copies of Horses shifted by her record company. Morrissey named his band after her, while Michael Stipe of R.E.M. said she was the chief reason he was in a band.

Smith also paved the way for a legion of angry female rockers who raged against the macho and male-dominated pop world. Early in the 1980s, when leather-clad, misogynist metal ruled the charts, Ohio native Chrissie Hynde of the band Pretenders returned the compliment by writing “Bad Boys Get Spanked”, confronting male rockers on their own terms.

In the early 1990s, the sole reason for Alanis Morrissette’s presence on the scene was to wave a big middle finger at the patriarchal world. She drove the point home by using invectives against her exes in the song “You Ought to Know”.

Chicago indie rocker Liz Phair titled her debut album Exile in Guyville, after the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street, in which she pushed back against a boyfriend who screwed her over in the song “F*@k and Run”.

On the local scene we had Oppie Andaresta, who campaigned tirelessly for women’s rights in songs like “Hanya Karena Aku Perempuan” (Just Because I’m a Woman) and “Bidadari Badung” (Naughty Angel).

And for a brief moment in the early 1990s, emancipated female rockers L7, Hole, Sleater-Kinney and all-female Surabaya-based band Geger took over, and the domination by male rockers seemed to be coming to an end.

But it was soon obvious that this vaunted resurgence of empowered female performers was nothing of the sort.

At the end of the day, what the world really wants are female singers willing to embrace the trappings of conventional femininity. Those who dare flout the gender rules by becoming sexually expressive end up becoming punching bags for criticism, from men and women alike.

Take the examples of Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, both of whom suffered serious career setbacks when they decided to get down and dirty with their public personas. These days, Lady Gaga’s sartorial and gender-bending antics only fuel speculation that she is in fact a he.

Recently, the New York-based pop sensation returned the compliment by donning a strap-on for the cover of British music magazine Q.

“We all know that one of the biggest talking points of the year was that I have a dick, so why not give them what they want,” she told the magazine.

As an antidote to the “moral decay” that Lady Gaga, Britney Spears or Paris Hilton bring to the world, the entertainment industry never runs short of wholesome female “role models”, epitomized today by the likes of Taylor Swift. But is she the new Joni Mitchell?

Upon closer inspection, it turns out she’s unwittingly reinforcing age-old sexisms. Ms. Swift’s lyrics are mostly about Romeo and Juliet running away together, or unrequited love themes that make Celine Dion sound like James Joyce.

(I should perhaps disclose that I’m a male music writer, so make what you will of my contention that Ms. Swift is guilty of prolonging sexism in the music industry.)

All the talk about girl empowerment that Swift, 20, allegedly promotes rings a tad hollow when you decode some of her none-too-subtle lyrics. No doubt true-blue feminists would tear their hair out in anger at lyrics like these:

“She wears high heels, I wear sneakers,
She’s cheer captain and I’m on the bleachers
…
I’m listening to the kind of music she doesn’t like,
And she’ll never know your story like I do.”

If the lyrics are too difficult to digest, I suggest you check out the video. Here the bespectacled Swift is insanely obsessed with a boy she couldn’t possibly be with because of her geeky looks. In the end, she snags the boy by taking a page from the popular girl's book, getting rid of her glasses and dressing to impress.

It’s apparent that Swift is sticking to the tried and true cliché that the bookish and smart girl will end up lovelorn unless she learns to be one of the (popular and pretty) girls (Ugly Betty, take a bow). She and her industry handlers must have forgotten – or perhaps never knew in the first place – that almost three decades ago, a female performer made a career by celebrating Baudelaire and Rimbaud. And in doing so, she also created superb music.

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