The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion, and Rock 'n' Roll

Abstract

The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion, and Rock 'n' Roll. By Simon Reynolds and Joy Press. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1995. [xvii, 410 p. ISBN 0-674-80272-1. $24.95.] If popular music is about anything, it's about gender and sexuality. Yet until 1995, no one had undertaken a broad analysis of popular music from this perspective. A few previous books had addressed topic while focusing on specific genres (rap, heavy metal), forms (MTV, club scenes), or musicians (Madonna), but one of strengths of The Sex Revolts is that it draws together and puts into relief a great variety of musics of rock era. Critics such as Simon Reynolds and Joy Press tend to be better equipped than academics to write such wide-ranging surveys, if only because they receive many free compact discs, concert tickets, and opportunities to interview stars. But these critics have done some reading, too: work of Julia Kristeva, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and Helene Cixous underpins their attempt to account for rock's pleasures and dangers. Such theoretical work helps them to explain how what sounds and feels like 'freedom'--the music of Rolling Stones, Stooges, Sex Pistols, for instance--can conceal seeds of domination (p. xv). I wish more rock critics did as they did, supplementing their privileged access to artists and recordings by reading some history and cultural theory. Reynolds and Press call their book a psychoanalysis of rebellion, a description that I would endorse only for weakest parts of book, first two of its three sections. Rebel Misogynies heads an initial group of chapters that indicts musical masculinity from Rolling Stones through gangsta rap. Into Mystic looks into softer side of male behavior, which Reynolds and Press cast as a return to womb. The third section, Lift Up Your Skirt and Speak, is far better than others because it places female musicians within a political context, not merely a psychological one. Its emphasis on female agency within specific historical moments contrasts so greatly with stress on timeless masculine essences throughout opening sections that I can't help suspecting that authors divided their task by gender and wrote separately. In these later chapters, Reynolds and Press identify four representational strategies that distinguish women in rock: can-do tomboy style of Joan Jett and L7; different but equivalent femininity of Tracy Chapman, Queen Latifah, and Sinead O'Connor; postmodern poses of Kate Bush. Madonna, and Annie Lenox, who imply that femininity is a mask; and irresolution of women such as Patti Smith and Rickie Lee Jones, who they see as rebelling against fixed identity and insisting on process. Whether female rockers growl in leather or whisper in gauze, reason passionately or speak in tongues, Reynolds and Press respect them as creative negotiators of a patriarchal world. The authors celebrate particularly emergence of strong female bands in 1990s: Hole, for example, reclaim abjection as a terrain of damaged subjectivity of which women have an insider's knowledge (p. 261). In contrast, they see mid-1980s as a kind of Dark Ages for women in rock--a view that differs sharply from Lisa A. Lewis's characterization of that period as a Golden Age, when Tina Turner, Pat Benatar, Madonna, and Cyndi Lauper worked medium of MTV to achieve a cultural prominence that strong women hadn't had since blues queens of 1920s. These opposed perceptions would have furnished grounds for productive debate, so it is a shame that Reynolds and Press ignored Lewis's fine book. Gender Politics and MTV: Voicing Difference (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990). Yet Reynolds and Press are also somewhat troubled by recent wave of women in rock, because they see innovations only in content, not form. Even post-punk Riot Grrrl movement comes under criticism for not interrogating the phallocentric forms of rock itself. …