Review of Laurie Stras' She’s So Fine: Reflections on Whiteness, Femininity, Adolescence and Class in 1960s Music

it has displaced. According to Szeman, one of the ways that literary studies hasadapted to this reality is by reorienting its analyses around transcultural connec-tions, moving away from the parochialism of national cultures and extending “cul-ture” to encompass the experiences of diasporic communities, cultural translationand the poetics of the Other (75). The problem with such strategies is that they areoften all too amenable to the logic of capital. Financial markets set the socialagenda and culture plays a minimized role as an expedient for the restructuring ofrelations of production. Culture is thereby wielded as a tool for social ameliorationas opposed to a weapon in the service of radical change. Szeman argues that themaster narrative of globalization is not the inevitable horizon of social reality.What literary constructs, he asks, might open up new visions of the future (78)? Arevived poetics would be fully immanent in the social, Szeman says, and so withthis we should not be surprised if tomorrow’s agents of radical change come in onskateboards wearing reissued Mao suits, swadeshi overstock, and yes, fancy head-scarves too. In sum, it seems to me that the differences and tensions that are mediated in thisanthology are not only disciplinary but political. The conservative gesture, to mymind, is to bury political discussion in the technocratic subtleties of disciplinaryjargon, especially as it becomes multi-disciplinary. In the end, the reader ofCultural Autonomy is rewarded by the fact that most of the essays seek to clarify theways that globalization shapes and limits both the forms of cultural autonomy andcultural contestation.

Dennis Pilon

It’s Her Party: What We’ve Been MissingAbout the 1960s Girl Singers

A review of Stras, Laurie, ed. 2010. She’s So Fine: Reflections on Whiteness, Femininity, Adolescenceand Class in 1960s Music. Farnham: Ashgate.Excepting Janice Joplin and a smattering of jazz and R+B artists, female vocalistsof the 1960s are routinely overlooked. Rock critics have dismissed them as inci-

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dental or irrelevant to the rock canon, contributing nothing of value to its mythicdevelopment. Academics too, many of them feminists, have harshly criticized pop-ular female singers for mouthing patriarchal platitudes in their songs. It seems thewomen of the 1960s can, at best, hope to cash in on some kitsch value for theirgaudy gowns, towering hair, heavy make-up, and melodramatic lyrics. Can onereally listen to the Shangri-Las’ “Leader of the Pack” with a straight face today?The song (and many like it) is now reduced to being the punch line to any num-ber of pop-culture jokes. This contempt for 1960s female vocalists is tempered insome accounts by a recognition that most female artists of the period did not seemto have much control over their careers. Then, as now, the pop music field wasdominated by men: they wrote nearly all the songs, played the music and made thedecisions about how to present it. But even such qualifications can’t change the factthat the lyrics women had to sing were pretty stereotypical about gender relations.Needless to say, for many critics, there just wasn’t any room to read “girl power”into girl singers and girl groups of the 1960s.The edited volume She’s So Fine seeks to change all that. Its contributors think thatthe music and singers of the period have much to tell us about gender, the 1960sand power—both positive and negative. They argue that we need to approach girlsingers differently than we have up to now. Instead of analyzing them as staticproducts—record albums and singles, lyrics, photos—we should examine them asimplicated in dynamic processes—sounds, voices, movements and the interplaybetween singer and audience, individual and society. The focus here is on the per-formative aspects of the girl singer phenomenon. This opens up a whole new spacewithin which to judge the contributions of these women both to the history ofpopular music and the social milieus of which they were a part. For instance, onenovel area carved out by this collection concerns contributors’ attempt to “write thevoice” or analyze the ways girls sang in the 1960s as a crucial part of their genderperformance. Through this and other highly original lines of analysis, the collec-tion’s various authors uncover a more complex story of gender struggle in song, onethat crosses racial, class and national lines while avoiding the dualism of stale“agency versus oppression”-style narratives. The result is a challenging, oftenprovocative, book that continually subverts conventional readings of the genre.Readers who don’t know this kind of music will learn a lot about the players, theirvarying reception amongst audiences and how they fitted into the larger socialchanges going on around them as they made their music. For readers who do knowthis music—even those who know it intimately—the book will force them torevaluate how they hear it and what they think it means.She’s So Fine is organized into eight substantive chapters, framed by a separateintroduction (that acts as an analytical overview), and it concludes with a shortresponse piece by Martha Mockus. The eight case studies are divided into threedifferent sections, one focusing on American singers, another on the British and

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the last on women and rock (as distinct from pop and pop-rock). The breakdownis both thematic—i.e., nations (U.S. and U.K.) and style (pop versus rock)—andtemporal, with the Americans covered from the late 1950s and early 1960s, theBritish from the early to late 1960s, and rock singers from the late 1960s to early1970s. Many chapters also draw in more historic and contemporary examples, asrequired (e.g., Madonna, Courtney Love, etc.).Editor Laurie Stras both introduces the book and authors its first substantivechapter. In her introduction “She’s So Fine, or Why Girl Singers (Still) Matter,”she makes the case for the book’s focus, defines its subject and sets out the essen-tials of the distinct research approach that the volume pursues. For Stras and herfellow authors, a girl singer is different from a woman who sings, and a girl groupis not the same thing as a female band. Instead, the girl group is a gang or cliquewhose “lyrical conversations can mimic the interaction between teenage girl-friends” with an “appeal … directly expressed towards other girls.” At the sametime, musically, the girl group or girl singer is “defined by [an] almost exclusivereliance on others for the practical realization of the performance or recording” (2).In this view, the girl singer is not so much making music with the band as per-forming in front of them, an object to be focused on by either the band or the audi-ence in a sexual or empathic manner. As a result, the girl singer, like the office girl,“is at the bottom of the professional heap,” put on a kind of pedestal not “for thepurposes of respect or protection so much as sensory consumption.” Stras arguesthat she “is an object of desire and an icon of possibility, be it sexual, aspirational,or even nostalgic in nature” (5).This is typically the point where academics lose interest. Yet Stras and her con-tributors make a strong case for going further:

For better or worse, the models for behaviour and attitude projected by 60sgirl singers shaped the generation that produced both second-wave femi-nism and the feminist backlash; and without the practice run girl singersgained in the media, later feminist voices, both black and white, would nothave been heard quite so loudly or effectively. (8)

Stras makes this case by contextualizing girl singers against a backdrop of rapidlychanging norms of appropriate female behaviour throughout the 1950s and 1960sand the emergence of the teenager as an historically distinct phase of life in post-war America and Britain. Out of this flux emerged a distinctly new phenomenon:“teenage girl singers who sang like, about, and for teenagers” (9). But the identityof the teenager was never stable. Instead it was pulled in different directions byracial, class and national factors, as well as by the many conflicting messages—bothcommercial and traditional—that girls in the baby-boom era faced as they strug-gled to define themselves. Out of this internal and social conflict emerged fluidrepresentations of gender, ones that could be read in multiple, sometimes conflict-

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ing, ways. As a result, studying girl singers can potentially tell us a lot about howthe intersectional identity of the “teenager” was influenced and performed at a cru-cial point in its historical emergence.In chapter one, “Voice of the Beehive: Vocal Technique at the Turn of the 1960s”(the first essay in the collection’s American section), Stras examines the develop-ment of the girl pop singer in terms of her vocal technique, noting how technique(or its lack) is used to construct identity. She claims that girl singers of late 1950sand early 1960s created a new “teen vocality” that was quite different from that ofprevious generations. Furthermore, she argues, this new vocality was recognizedand owned by its consumers, teenage girls, and, like other aspects of the girlsinger’s self-presentation, it could be mimicked by its consumers. Stras under-stands both the mechanics of singing and the musical structure of songs, andapplies this knowledge to deconstruct the songs of girl groups as well as their per-formances. For instance, Stras suggests that though some kinds of girl singing wasthe product of poor technique and coaching, the resultant “fragile teen sound”became a clearly viable commercial product by 1962. Indeed she cites PhilSpector’s 1963 Christmas album featuring his girl groups as a deliberate attemptat the “teenification” of traditional holiday fare designed to capitalize on this mar-ket. In the next two chapters, this focus on voice is explored further in a critical reread-ing of the teenage career of Brenda Lee and a rumination on the role of anger ingirl group songs. In both cases, the authors argue that the sound of the voice playedan important part in the impact of the music. And yet in both discussions the voiceaspect seems to get overshadowed by the larger sociological insights the re -searchers uncover. In the case of Brenda Lee, Robyn Stillwell places her earlycareer into the larger context of child stars (e.g., Shirley Temple, Judy Garland,etc.) singing about mature subject matter as well as the class and sexual overtonesof rockabilly. Lee emerged as a commercial artist when she was just eleven yearsold, singing rockabilly songs in a dynamic and, some argued, suggestive manner.For Stillwell, Lee was negotiating a minefield of conflicting tensions that includedher “white trash” roots, rockabilly’s perceived sexual laxness and her obvious child-like features. In the end, Stillwell convincingly argues that Lee was neither com-pletely manipulated nor entirely in control of where her career was going. Instead,she and her advisors (including producer Owen Bradley) were responding toAmerica’s less than honest juxtaposition of children and sexuality, shifting socialmores around gender and commercial pressures. Jacqueline Warwick also underlines the larger social pressures on female singers inher examination of anger and early 1960s girl groups. She argues that though thesegroups are not often thought of as producing “angry music,” there are nonetheless“themes of conflict, rage and even violence [that] run through this repertoire” (26).By examining lyrics, melody, harmony and arrangements, as well as images depict-

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ing choreography, fashion and bodily self-presentation, she demonstrates howthese groups operated within a “framework of self-discipline and repression visitedupon teenage girls in the 1950s and 1960s” (26). Part of the frustration for girls wasthat then, as now, they were encouraged to avoid direct conflict. They consequentlyneeded to find other outlets for their frustration. Warwick cites a host of examplesof girl group songs depicting girls negotiating conflict (like the Cookies’ “Don’tSay Nothing Bad About My Baby” or Martha and the Vandellas’ “Nowhere toRun”). She also offers intriguing counter-interpretations of songs long dismissedas hopelessly sexist. For instance, she makes a compelling case that JoanieSommers’ “Johnny Get Angry” is lampooning the angry and domineering malestereotype rather than endorsing it.In “Part II: ‘Everything’s Coming Up Roses’: British Girls in the Mid-60s,” thefocus of the volume shifts to the U.K. and the ways in which the careers of girlsingers were distinctly different from those of their U.S. counterparts. Here too, allauthors focus on voice and its key role in shaping the identity of the singer, thoughagain the sociological insights offered often end up being more fascinating thanany formal analysis and critique. In “Dusty’s Hair,” Annie Randall highlights howthe obvious artifice surrounding Dusty Springfield’s look was a crucial part of herappeal as it suggested that any girl could change her appearance and, by extension,control how she was perceived by others. Randall’s narrative of Dusty’s career alsoprovides some surprises for those assuming that girl singers had little career inputor control. By contrast, the story of Dusty reveals a woman with a vision, withenough success in the 1960s effectively to produce her own records and launch thecareers of a number of Motown artists in Britain. Other British singers could notemulate Dusty’s career path but they often proved more successful at furtheringtheir interests than American girl singers. In her contribution, Patricia Smith cov-ers the careers of Petula Clark, Cilla Black, Lulu and Sandy Shaw, noting that theywere typically older and had more experience than comparable Americans andshowing how their records were less focused on “girl talk.” The British chapters ofShe’s So Fine also highlight the ethnic diversity of the singers discussed, whoseroots were Irish (Dusty), Scottish (Lulu) and northern English (Cilla). Sarah Hillexamines the ethnic dimension in some detail in her chapter on Mary Hopkin,using her to illustrate the negotiation of Welsh femininity in an English-domi-nated U.K. music scene.In “Part III: Girls on Top: Rock Chicks and Resistance at the End of the 60s,”Norma Coates and Susan Fast challenge conventional readings of MarianneFaithfull and Tina Turner as simply victims. Coates’ case is less than compelling,however, since the story she tells certainly seems to cast Faithfull as a victim in the1960s, the period on which the volume is primarily focused. Indeed Coates arguesconvincingly that Faithfull was effectively used by the Rolling Stones to add totheir bad boy allure when it became known that she was participating in their wild

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party lifestyle. Not surprisingly, the gender double standard was in play as misbe-haviour for the boys meant increasing rock credibility while for the girls it trans-lated into notoriety and career trouble. Fast’s case for Tina Turner is moreconvincing. The outlines of the conventional Turner story are well known: she iscast as a puppet to Ike in their time together, singing and dancing as he directed.But Fast argues that it was Tina, not Ike, who performed the songs and routinesand, frankly, it is her singing and exuberant dancing that people remember. HereFast is drawing our attention to “the act, the performative moment, the body sig-nifying” (212) as evidence of Tina Turner’s agency and contribution to art. She’s So Fine ends with Martha Mockus’s deceptively brief “Response” to the bookand its contributors, deceptive because it is impressive how much insight into thebook Mockus manages to squeeze into three pages. Mockus argues that girlsingers “effectively worked within and against the dominant ideology of woman-hood” and that “such masquerades … were forms of labor, a set of vocal perform-ances that both concealed and revealed the social conditions under which thosevoices labored,” producing moments of rupture “in the pretty girl surface of themasquerade itself ” (236). Yet Mockus cautions that we are still left with manyquestions, such as why various singers made the decisions that they did and whichdecisions were actually theirs to make.She’s So Fine is a welcome and important addition to the academic study of popu-lar music, one that will undoubtedly become influential. Of course, one could takeissue with many of the choices made here. Why focus on Brenda Lee rather than,say, Connie Francis, who was arguably much more successful and influential inearly 1960s? How could Lesley Gore be ignored when nearly every one of her hitsaddressed the themes that matter to this book? Why a whole chapter devoted toMary Hopkin, whose slight career seems hard-pressed to sustain the focus?Everyone has his or her favourites. How well does the typology of the “girl singer”really work? Many of the features associated with the “girl” of the girl groups (i.e.,that she is adolescent-sounding, teenage-focused and so on) do not seem to applyto the U.K. girl singers. And why is Tina Turner included in the collection? Shedoesn’t appear to fit the “girl” definition in terms of either her voice or the focus ofher material. If, on the other hand, She’s So Fine is right to emphasize performance,then the Turner chapter proves to be an exemplary and necessary contribution. Butthen again, a focus on performance needn’t be restricted to just girls or pop. In fairness, no one book could address the depth of possible material that might beincluded under the analytical rubric set out here. As the authors in this collectionrightly point out, with so little attention to girls or women in popular music thereis simply too much to choose from. However, one curious omission in a book ongirl singers of the 1960s, particularly the ones highlighted here, is the lack of atten-tion paid to their reception by gay men. Though noted in passing by a few authors,the careers of girl singers after their popular heydays were often sustained by

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legions of gay male fans. As someone who has inherited all the records discussedin this book from older gay men, and as I re-listened to them in preparing to writethis review, I wondered why gay men particularly identified so strongly withBrenda Lee or Dusty Springfield? The link is certainly historical—as a gay man ofa different generation I didn’t feel quite the same connection to these particularwomen (which isn’t to say that I don’t love their records!). Perhaps gay men willhave to wait for another volume, and perhaps they should do so in order to keepthe focus here on some remarkable women and girls, both as producers and con-sumers of popular culture.

Gary Genosko

Turning on in Saskatchewan

A review ofDyck, Erika. 2008. Psychedelic Psychiatry: LSD from Clinic to Campus. Baltimore:The Johns Hopkins University Press.Erika Dyck’s Psychedelic Psychiatry recounts with economy of purpose and schol-arly restraint the history of psychiatric experiments with LSD in Saskatchewanduring the 1950s. The lives and works of “psychedelic pioneers” HumphryOsmond and his small-town Weyburn colleagues at the Saskatchewan MentalHospital, as well as Abram Hoffer and his university hospital cohort in Saskatoon,may be read as an antidote to the unethical practices of Ewen Cameron at theAllen Memorial Hospital in Montreal—surely one of the most publicized andexemplarily dishonourable moments involving LSD in the history of Canadianpsychiatry. Dyck deploys this contrast early in her introduction without any fuss inorder to banish the monster Cameron and his Cold War backers and reorientreaders to an altogether different political reality: progressive healthcare reformand the aspirations of Tommy Douglas for socialized medicine that includedlarge-scale LSD clinical trials. Dyck describes 1950s small-town Saskatchewan as a place characterized by anattractive, politically stable and socially progressive “culture of experimentation”

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Review of Laurie Stras' She’s So Fine: Reflections on Whiteness, Femininity, Adolescence and Class in 1960s Music

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