Leaders of the Pack: Girl Groups of the 1960s and Their Influence on Popular Culture in Britain and America SeanMacLeod. Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.

Abstract

Leaders of the Pack: Girl Groups of the 1960s and Their Influence on Popular Culture in Britain and America Sean MacLeod. Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.In the introduction to this superb book, Sean MacLeod describes the awakening he experienced after an acquaintance passed him a compact disc containing a number of Shangri-Las songs. MacLeod, writing now as a professional songwriter and lecturer at Limerick College in Ireland, remembers hearing the music again for the first time since his random encounters with it as a youth. He immediately recognized the songs as fresh and exciting and familiar all at once (xiv). MacLeod admits the production value of the music and the way the songs expressed anxieties about transitions (i.e., childhood to adulthood, innocence to knowing, dependence to independence) struck him in particular. As he listened, he fell in love with the sound, the lyrical content, and the emotion of it all. What a pity, he writes, I had not discovered the music when I was a teenager, at the same time that I had learned of those other male sixties groups that were an integral part of my growing (xv).After investigating further, MacLeod determined that critics of the time overlooked this music because they deemed it to be unimportant, frivolous, or uninteresting musically, socially, and politically (xv). MacLeod disagrees, citing the influence of such groups on bands like the Beatles, the Beach Boys, Blondie, the Ramones, and even Madonna and Destiny's Child as grounds for why overlooking the works of these artists was gravely misguided.In writing this book, MacLeod joins a small chorus of others writing on the music of the girl groups of the 1960s. The work of contemporaries such as Alan Betrock, Jacqueline Warwick, and John Clemente are featured throughout MacLeod's book. Betrock's Girl Groups: The Story of a Sound (1983) and Clemente's Girl Groups: Fabulous Females That Rocked the World (2000) present what MacLeod considers a resume of the work done by the girl groups of the 1960s. Jacqueline Warwick's Girl Groups, Girl Culture: Popular Music and Identity in the 1960s (2007) differs in that it situates the girl groups of the 1960s in the social and cultural moments of the decade. Separately, these texts examine both major and minor players of the era.Leaders of the Pack picks up where Warwick's book leaves off before it ultimately stretches to encompass later twentieth- and twenty-first century artists as well. …