Patti Smith
‘You see, Patti started out as a poet, then turned to painting, and then she suddenly emerges as a real rock star. Which was strange, because I don’t think she could have got very far either in her poetry or her writing, just from scratch. But suddenly she’s a rockstar. There was no question of that’.
This quote from author William S Burroughs sums up the public image of Patti Smith. She is, first and foremost, an artist. Called ‘Punk rock’s poet laureate’, there is certainly no question of her skills as a lyricist.
She came in number 47 in Rolling Stone’s list of the greatest artists of all time (alongside only nine others, I might add). She is considered to be one of the most influential members of the New York arts scene in the 1970’s.
Some attribute her success to the ability to ‘be one of the guys’. I find this pretty interesting, but I suppose in some ways it is true. For starters, she cultivated an androgynous appearance, and she was an integral part of punk, a genre not often associated with women (fans and musicians). She entered a genre usually associated with angry young men and made it her own. Drawing inspiration from high-culture French poet Arthur Rimbaud brought intellectual lyrics to punk while still remaining avant-garde.
While reading up on her, I found no articles that called her credibility as an artist into question (though I’m sure one exists, somewhere). She seems to be seen as quite separate from other female rock artists. New York artist Penny Arcade once said ‘Patti was a very demanding person to know because she was very driven. Patti wanted to look like Keith Richards, smoke like Jeanne Moreau, walk like Bob Dylan and write like Arthur Rimbaud’ (quoted in Please Kill Me).
I really like these lyrics from ‘Revenge’:
‘I feel upset.
Let’s do some celebrating.
Come on honey, don’t hesitate now.
Needed you, you withdrew, I was so forsaken.
Ah, but now the tables have turned, my move.
I believe I’ll be taking my revenge.
Sweet revenge.’
When asked about how she feels as a female musician in an interview with Rolling Stone Magazine in 1996, Patti says ‘I hate genderising things. That’s not a riff for me: it’s a basic philosophy of work.I’m happy to be a woman. I’m a mother; I’m a wife. I like it when men open doors for me. But as an artist I don’t feel any gender restriction. When I’m performing it’s a very -for me- transcendent experience. I can’t say I feel like a male or female. Or both. What I feel is not in the human vocabulary’.
Of all the female musicians we’ve covered so far, I found Patti Smith to be the most interesting. Not only did she enter the ‘man’s world’ of rock, she went on to influence so many other women to do the same. She continues to be a supporter of emerging rock artists (of either gender).
by Alex
blondie live
you can really see, physically, what Harry was about in this video.
She plays up her sexuality throughout the performance, her clothing is risque, her hair is wild.
Her masculine voice in this song is very challenging, very provocative, however if you turn off the sound and freeze frame on a close up of her face you could be forgiven for thinking she could be singing a pure pop song.
Debbie Harry is an amazing set of contradictions, this is what makes her appealing, especially to men. The reason she’s had so much success in the rock industry is because she can both utilise her femininity and challenge in a masculine way.
-kass
Suzi Quatro
Suzi Quatro, a talented singer, song writer and bass guitarist. Suzi was born in the USA in the 50’s leaving her to grow up experiencing the rock’n'roll revolution as it happened. She started her singing career as a teenager in the band The Pleasure Seekers. After the band broke up Suzi moved to London to become a solo artist with a string of hits during the mid 70’s.”She was really one of the first women to break the mould and play hard and driving rock’n'roll” (King. B) in addition to this she often recorded cover songs that male artists had released without changing the lyrics, she wanted to everyone out there that women could do what men could and possibly even better “she showed the world that women could do rock ‘n’ roll just as well as men and her music still has a drive and message that has so much to say.”(King. B)
Suzi has also ventured in to the TV industry, starring as Leather Tuscadero in Happy Days and guest apperences on many other British shows. In the 90’s she tried her hand at starring in and writing musicals.
These days there are talks of a movie about her life which she would do the album for.
References:
Oglesbee. Frank W, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2822/is_2_23/ai_61838449/pg_7, 1999, Accessed 11th May 2008
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio2/shows/quatro/biography.shtml, Accessed 11th May 2008
King. B, http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Contrib/music/suzi-quatro/, 23rd July 1996, Accessed 11th May 2008
Lauren Duncan
Profile: Nico
Nico
The first time I heard Nico’s voice was on the Velvet Underground’s first album, aptly titled The Velvet Underground and Nico. I was deep in my Lou Reed obsession, and after listening to a few solo albums I decided to hear where it all started. On first hearing ‘Femme Fatale’, the first song Nico sings on the album, I was a little confused. Her incredibly deep androgynous voice fascinated me, and immediately I had to know more.
Brian Eno once said that while hardly anyone bought The Velvet Underground and Nico when it was first released in 1967, all of those who did seemed to go on to form a band. While Nico was only a guest star on three of the tracks on the ‘Banana Album’, it was largely due to her involvement that the album was ever recorded.
Born Christa Paffgen, the iconic actress, model and singer spent the early years of her life in war-time Germany and post-war East Berlin. At the age of fifteen she was ‘discovered’ outside a department store in Berlin and became a model. She met Andy Warhol in Paris while he was promoting Poor Little Rich Girl, and early film starring Edie Sedgwick. Nico had also worked in films, namely Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, where she played herself. When Nico moved to New York, she became one of Warhol’s ‘Superstars’ and a regular at his Factory.
Warhol then suggested (read, insisted) that she sing with resident band The Velvet Underground in his Exploding Plastic Inevitable, a travelling show which combined music, film and theatre. While she intrigued audiences, Nico often complained that she had to struggle to gain any respect in the band. ‘They played the record of Bob Dylan’s song ‘I’ll keep it with mine’ because I didn’t have enough to sing otherwise. Lou wanted to sing everything. I had to stand there and sing along with it. I had to do this every night for a week. It is the most stupid concert I have ever done’ (Nico in McNeil and McCain 1996: 12-13).
Her involvement with the band at this stage led to her recording of three songs on their debut album.
In fact, it was Nico that brought the Velvet Underground thir recording contract, as recalled by their former manager Paul Morrissey: ‘Verve/MGM only bought the albums from me because of Nico’ (Morrissey in McNeil and McCain, 1996). Yet they had little commercial success. The Velvets chose a rather unfortunate time to record an ‘arty’ album. The year was 1967, best known as the ‘Summer of Love’. Audiences weren’t interested in songs about heroin and S & M. The majority of music was coming out of San Francisco, and the Velvet Underground’s music was as far from the popular folk style as possible.
Later that year, Nico went on to record her first solo album with Andy Warhol, titled Chelsea Girl, which was the first of six solo recordings she made until her death in 1988. Nico struggled with a heroin addiction in the last 20 years of her life.
Surprisingly, despite her underground success and her involvement with one of the most influential bands of the 1960’s, Nico is best known for her bedhopping. The amount of writing on her affairs with Lou Reed, John Cale (also in the Velvet Underground, Nico was blamed for Reed and Cale’s creative split), Jim Morrison (The Doors), Iggy Pop, Tim Buckley and Bob Dylan, just demonstrates the point of this whole blog.
Nico is constantly represented as a beautiful (and somewhat scary) non-musician who was carried along by the more talented musicians that surrounded her, the girl who stood to the side of the stage playing a tambourine because that’s all she could do. But her career reveals more than that. Nico completed six solo studio albums in her lifetime, plus her work with the Velvets. And while in her early career her peers wrote songs for her, by her second solo albums The Marble Index, Nico was writing all her own music.
Her bizarre singing style and the dark subjects she sings about led Rolling Stone to name her as the founder of Goth rock in 2003.
Sources
McNeil, L. and McCain, G. 1996, Please Kill Me: the Uncensored Oral History of Punk, Grove Press, New York.
Author Unknown, 2007, Nico’, Woman’s Hour, BBC Radio 4, 30th September.
By Alex
Courtney Love
When talking about influential women in rock, it is impossible to ignore Hole’s lead singer, Courtney Love.
Courtney Love challenges the social norms which bind society through her association with sex, drugs and rock and roll.
Born in 1964, Love was initially named Courtney Michelle Harrison and is best known for being a lyricist, singer, actress and the wife of the late Kurt Cobain who was the lead singer for Nirvana. She established herself as an advocate for women in rock music through playing with bands of the alternative and grunge genres, particularly in the 1990’s. These bands include Hole, Babes in Toyland and Faith No More.
Love has become infamous for drug abuse, parole violation and custody battles over her daughter, Francis Bean Cobain.
in 1994, Love’s band, Hole, performed at the Reading Festival in the UK and was reviewed by broadcaster John Peel in the Guardian. He stated:
“Courtney’s first appearance backstage certainly caught the attention. Swaying wildly and with lipstick smeared on her face, hands and, I think, her back, as well as on the collar of her dress, the singer would have drawn whistles of astonishment in Bedlam. After a brief word with supporters at the foot of the stage, she reeled away, knocking over a wastebin, and disappeared. Minutes later she was onstage giving a performance which verged on the heroic…Love steered her band through a set which dared you to pity either her recent history or that of the band…the band teetered on the edge of chaos, generating a tension which I cannot remember having felt before from any stage.”
Whilst researching for this blog, I began thinking; what are the characteristics that categorise women as ambassadors of rock music?
- Women who compose music of the alternative, rock and grunge genres;
- Women who create a clear and distinguished separation from mainstream society through music; undergound bands and personifying the genre “rock” (which can be highlighted through clothing);
- Negative press, especially in the case of Courtney Love, who is linked to rock music through the suicidal death of her husband, her abuse of drugs and controversial song lyrics.
In a society where rock music was dominated by bands including Nirvana and Nine Inch Nails (Love’s band Hole suported each of these international grunge bands) Courtney Love has defined herself as someone who epitomises the word controversial and ultimately, an influential woman in the area of rock music.
Courtney Love’s myspace page shows pictures, blogs, music and videos which reinforce Love’s relationship with the term “rock.”
Love uses her official website as a tool for blogging as well as providing insight into her “rock ‘n roll” lifestyle. Her attitudes towards music, life and society are shown within these blogs, particularly the blog title ” 11:02:07 BIGGGG fucking elf”; “i was in the kictehn at kung fu making a collage of smashed wedding cakes and i hear this epic rumble and studio b doors opemn and its the most amazing stoner fucking rock ivbe EVER fuckimng heard, mixed and mastered, Damonb is a genius i kno that fvromm y own record but this is like Sabbath Bloody Sabbath meets Radiohead karma police meets delicacy meets slayer- its the sexiest sunset strip stoner rock ever evr rout of la and my mystical jukebox partner loves them too, hes puttong rock bnr oll contratgg somng i heard on the mystical jukebox man you gott ahear this shitt.”
Rolling Stone has called Love “the most controversial woman in the history of rock.
-Ellie
debbie harry
Deborah Harry admits that realising she was Blondie, the name of her multi-award winning, internationally famed band, was both a blessing and a curse. The singer, now 62, was the most vivacious, outspoken woman of the punk-rock/nu-wave set in the late 1970’s and onward through the 80’s. Characterised by her shaggy bleached blonde mane, no-rules fashion sense and rock-chick sex appeal, Harry struggled with the intrinsic linking of her personal identity with the band she so successfully fronted.
(No Exit Tour Book)
Her personality, style and technique continue to remain an inspiration for females today. Gwen Stefani can be seen Harry-esque in much of her No Doubt days, model Agyness Deyn takes cues from the bleached blonde hair and 80’s style and Sophie Dahl featured in a Vogue tribute to the Blondie front-woman.
Adopted at the age of three months, Harry lived in the boroughs of New Jersey, graduating High School in 1963. After working as a Playboy Bunny in the late 60’s and singing in several bands including a folk group and a female-trio “The Stilettos’” Harry met her eventual beau Chris Stein. Together the pair began the band Blondie, releasing a first album in 1976 and receiving international interest first in Australia in the late 1970’s.
The band seems to have become so successful through the marketing of Harry as a poster girl for the punk-rock scene. Early advertisements proclaiming “wouldn’t you like to rip her to shreds’?” have a sexual undercurrent, Harry is dominant yet seductive, innocent eyes with a belligerent pose.
Says Harry in the book Making Tracks (Bockris, 1982)
Harry earned her reputation as a rock ‘n’ roller; wild adventures, trashing hotel rooms and creating chaos wherever Blondie went, the behaviour parallelling the traditional masculine traits of punk-rock bands of the era.
In 1979, the cover of American tabloid magazine Circus, placed Debbie Harry on the front with the words “BLONDIE: NEW ROCK SEX SYMBOL”, below in smaller font, it read “Is she selling out to chauvinism?”
The UK magazine Record Mirror also said of Harry in 1979- “Debbie on stage resembles a ruined cocktail waitress trying to recall her days as a cheerleader in high school.”.
Here is where we begin to see the backlash of the two paradigms of Harry as an artist and a performer. In some aspects she exploits her sexuality, in other degrees it is done for her, being a female in a male dominated profession. If she was to shy away from the character she had been marketed as, backlash would surely ensue.
There is no argument that Debbie Harry was in control of her body, style and performance techniques during Blondies hey-day but what can be questioned is if she had approached her role as front-woman in a different way (for example demurely) if the band would have been as successful or pigeon-holed into a more pop segmented musical genre.
Deborah Harry (Record Mirror, 28.04.79)
In the mid-1980’s, after Harry had released several solo albums (all varying degrees of commercial success), Blondie formally announced it’s hiatus. The bands’ most recent album had received lacklustre reviews, founding member (and long term partner of Harry’s) Chris Stein was diagnosed with a genetic disease, and it is during this time speculation arose that Deborah Harry was suffering from depression. Eventually as Stein recovered, the relationship ended, Harry put on vast amounts of weight and was ridiculed by the press- going into hiding.
In 97, the band began working together again, then in 1999, Harry entered the Guinness Book of records as the oldest woman to reach Number One on the UK charts, with a new Blondie release.
Still touring both with the band and solo, Harry remains a firm heroine of the punk-rock scene, proving age is no barrier, nor sexuality.
She has also put her Blondie persona to good use, becoming a spokesperson for Gay and Lesbian Rights and fronting MAC aids campaigns in the US.
http://www.rip-her-to-shreds.com/archive_press_magazines_rm28april79.php
http://www.punk77.co.uk/groups/blondie.htm
http://www.hellomagazine.com/profiles/deborahharry/
-kass
