A kung fu fighter in a disco

The embed isn't playable in Britain it would seem. I've found a youtube which is just lyrics, no actual video, which I am listening to now.

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It's admirably psychotic! there's this interesting thing structurally that one mostly seems to get only in songs about violent crimes in a folk or country tradition where what she actually did is left to the end - I enjoy this lyrical conceit v. much.

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I had heard Kerosene, but the other two are new to me and thereby could make for good nominations....

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koganbot

You Carrie link won't work for the U.S., so here's one that will.

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edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com

Ashlee Simpson, "Follow You Wherever You Go (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCgbSc0aXHs)."

Also seconding Frank's mention of Miranda Lambert, "Gunpowder and Lead," and adding Rihanna, "Fire Bomb (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YFiSLBE9c8)," "G4L (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJBcgB7uukE)," and "Breakin' Dishes (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHjUcpXvlyA)," and Kelis, "Caught Out There (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-D0Qs3cy22c)."

And depending on how broadly we're defining "creative revenge:" Kelly Clarkson, "Chivas (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHaEKbiEjoE)." Demi Lovato, "Every Time You Lie (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWFWRLE1X3Q)." Rihanna, "Good Girl Gone Bad (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yb_aa8n2mQE)."

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Hee! Enjoyed the Ashless VERY much; best part of this being the way she says "you looooouhve me"

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edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com

"No not really!"

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koganbot

Here is "Independence Day" on Dailymotion (should work in Britain).

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edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com

You might also want to check out Miranda Lambert's "Down," wherein she gets her heart broken and proceeds to take it out on the entire male half of the human race.

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koganbot

I just got back from a Seder with the intention of saying this very thing. "Down" is the eighth song down on that link I gave for "Gunpowder and Lead." And while you're there you might as well check out track four, "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend."

Speaking of which, you should all take a listen to Dwight Yoakam's "Intentional Heartache," sung by a man, but from the woman's point of view as she does the crazy ex-girlfriend thing.

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katstevens.livejournal.com

I've created a new tag for these posts - 'theme songs'.

I can't think of anything for this theme though! I have lots of songs by angry women but none of them seem to be doing anything about it except MOANING.

Well - this lass has got revenge on her chap by WRITING A SONG about how she's writing a song about how rubbish this dude is. Meta-tastic.

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Yay for tags!

I perhaps may have been too specific on this theme! Though nobdoy has even mentioned Lily Allen yet. (although "Smile" is only definitely fitting the theme when you look at the video but still)

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Roxanne Shante, "Fatal Attraction"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okRCZ4-5JE0

Creative uses for pickle jars!

Wanted to do the turn of the '90s Egyptian shaabi number "Akhbar, Ahram Akha Saah" by Shaaban Abdul Raheem, but couldn't find it on youtube. Translation: "With a big knife she created a massacre. She took the body and put it in plastic bags, and scattered it in many places."

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koganbot

Chuck, are you nominating "Fatal Attraction," or just letting us know it's there? (The nominations need to be in bold.)

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Am I nominating it? Yep.

Do I have the slightest idea how to bold it? Nope.

But okay, I'll take three wild guesses about how; if it none of these work, somebody please bold it for me okay?

Roxanne Shante, "Fatal Attraction"

Roxanne Shante, "Fatal Attraction"

Roxanne Shante, "Fatal Attraction"

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wow, 2 out of 3, cool!

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As you have discovered, standard HTML works!

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laschifosavita.livejournal.com

I'm officially nominating Miranda Lambert "Gunpowder and Lead." I stumbled across the community while looking for discussions about Miranda Lambert, so it just seems fitting to nominate it.

I also want to recommend Loretta Lynn, who is a 1960's version of Miranda Lambert. Her discography is full of songs about angry women, but "The Pill (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoqErv8bdcI)" and "Devil Gets His Dues (http://www.amazon.com/Honky-Tonk-Girl-Loretta-Collection/dp/B000002OSX)" fit the theme the best. The "Devil Gets His Dues" clip is the best I can find at the moment, but it also has "Your Squaw is on the Warpath," which is slightly off theme but still close.

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koganbot

CSS "Rat Is Dead [Rage]." Probably the band I identify with most.

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zcesl53.livejournal.com

i am most surprised by the low number of noms here - quite an easy theme i thought. Or maybe i just listen to more shouty woman music than most...

i recommend Vitriola by Silverfish - much loved in my teenage years

but my nom has to go to Shoot by Sonic Youth, since it is off one of my all time fave albums

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koganbot

poptimists has been depopulated, apparently. All that's left is tumbleweeds.

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I am a bit iffy about this as a theme. Not because it's not quite blatantly a long-running theme in music but because it's one that makes me feel uncomfortable; I've posted on FT (http://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2009/03/complex-semiotics-of-music-videos-pt-zzzzzz/) about the "casual violence against men by women is HILARIOUS and EMPOWERING" and I think I feel awkward with the potentiality of something like 'Call Me Guilty' by Jazmine Sullivan or 'Gunpowder and Lead' or 'Professional Widow' (which is surely one of the best and darkest revenge songs ever; self-hating and disgusting and furious and taunting and, err, danceable, with that phallic riff turned into the beat on the remix) being treated the same, as say, Avril Lavigne. Which isn't some kind of ~authenticity~ thing, I just think there's a markable difference between Miranda Lambert's Crazy Ex Girlfriend and, say, Lily Allen in 'Smile,' where it's like 'ok, you are actually a crazy ex girlfriend from whom it might be a good idea to keep a safe distance not because your boyfriend is necessarily a massive abusive tw4t but because you might give him an overdose of laxatives for a laugh and then block his toilet.'

I mean, I think 'I Don't Need A Man' (Pussycat Dolls) is a good 'creative revenge' song, in a sort of 'HELLO I AM MEDEA' way* but there are of course degrees of Medea. I like the way that and 'Professional Widow' use the medium as the means to some extent, so Tori's mocking her rapist's tiny c0ck publicly and Nicole Scherzinger is just being a bit more explicit than yr usual 'wahey I shall go and get my hair done and you'll wish you'd never left this' song but the difference in what's actually at play in the songs is obviously massive.

I s'pose what I'm saying is: I feel weird about this because it is such an expansive category that it seems simultaneously glib and too large to get a hook on. Something like 'revenge songs' generally might be less weird? I dunno, obviously this is just me and god knows, I'm in no position to criticise given the last time I did anything active was about this time last year but I sort of felt like I should say why I am not participating. I s'pose a conversation about revenge songs would be pretty interesting.

*This line of reasoning in full:
-'I don't need a man' is about w4nking
-Medea was all 'Jason I am not angry at you because you have stopped sh4gging me, I am angry at you because you have started sh4gging a younger edition and claimed this is all just to pay off the mortgage for me and the children'
-err

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koganbot

Looking at these various themes is a good way to talk about music and songs and stuff, which people once used to do in these parts, a long time ago.

Like "Independence Day" is among other things about community failure, the implication being that the ambivalent apocalypse didn't need to have happened if concerned neighbors had been willing to intervene - but nonetheless the song's energy rush comes from that apocalypse. Whereas Miranda Lambert is a lot more cavalier as to whether she'll bother to justify her vengeance songs, which makes her more of a punk, the vengeance being a combination of high spirits and a dark turning of her face to the wall.

And the stuff does run together, the funny songs and the pranks and the murder, with the actual violence being an outlier (that's what the Ramones' songs were about back in the day, taking the la-la-la boy-girl romance world and sticking in horror films and macabre headlines, sort of a combination of "there's something deeply wrong here in the la-la-la, the teen heartbreak songs of our youth suggested this, but we're going to bring it out" and an opposite, "Yes, we're all hurting and dysfunctional from our lives, so let's make a goof on it and dance to the goof, and maybe even find our way back to the beauty of the romance").

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Well I know that, that's why I'm talking about them. I think this is a big, dark topic and that it doesn't just concern women singing about revenge. I think revenge is something that it's more acceptable for women to sing about and I think particularly justified revenge in the case of songs about domestic violence, etc. is one of the formats in which "angry woman music" can transcend itself but this is part of a bigger gender play. What I'm objecting to isn't the songs: there are plenty of songs of this sort I like. What I'm objecting to or what's making it difficult for me to contribute is that this seems too wide and too accepting of a category that I think is awkward at best. These songs and these ideas should be discussed in full context because putting 'Professional Widow' and 'Potential Breakup Song' in the same box is possible but it needs to be supported by further evidence or something. I like

meserach's idea but I think what I want is that the description goes further or that there's more discussion. I'm not saying the post shouldn't exist at all, just that I find the material more complex than just being able to post a YouTube in answer; this isn't as simple a matter as posting the best songs of 2001 or whatever. To me, anyway and I suspect more people feel the same.

'Walk' by Pantera is a sort of similar (this is a sh1t example but I'm at work and happened to be listening to it on the tube) to 'Can't Hold Us Down' by Lil Kim and Christina Aquilera but it's seen as sheet aggressive (which it is) whereas 'Can't Hold Us Down' isn't (even though it also is) and there's only one of them you'd see on a 'empower yourself' compilation in the supermarket and I think this is a) an interesting dynamic and b) one that takes away from any empowering aspect of the female revenge song because it means ~oooh it is just a gurl they are not really dangerous~. Which is of course where Cowgirl from Hell Lambert comes in with the punk you're talking about.

Lord knows, I have plenty of (well, some of them now only semi-)obscure goth tracks to put into this genre; the entire of Opheliac is a revenge album and Rasputina often do revenge and Morgan Grace is a cartwheeling spew of it and of course Hannah Fury pretty much just has that and mother/daughter revenge as her schtick. These are theatrical things and they're interesting, particularly because the theatre of feminism is taking on strange angles, and the appropriation of abusive circumstances in order to legitimise threatening behaviour on the part of women, which to sort of come back to a conversation going on in several places elsewhere, is part of the terrible legitimising factor of 'quirk.'

I've been writing this all day in bits and lost track of it. Revenge songs are about power though and I think there's a potentially big and important (in the 'necessary to a lot of what's discussed here anyway' sense) ...well, not 'truism' because w/e but some sort of 'hammering out of philosophies' or whatever that can and should be done regarding the dynamics that these very songs play with. Which is all to do with the wider rock/pop/alienation thing that Poptimists spends a lot of its time engaged with.

Meh. That all sounds really w4nk and straight out of the mouth of some pseud but I don't really have time to sort it out.

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Thanks for this mogs, a thought-provoking response.

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Ok so, I am working my way up to a much lengthier post on this, but my first sally into these troubled waters goes like this - I think of music in general and music videos in particular as safe spaces for fantasy, for the expression and testing out of ideas which would be horrible in reality (revenge being a very strong example of something which sounds great in your head but is messy in the real world).

I remember reading an interview once with Blu Cantrell where she said she got fan mail about "Hit Em Up Style" and was horrified to learn that people had actually gone out and done as the song says - got revenge on cheating men. She said "It's just a song!". Blu creates a fantasy world.

Country music in particular draws on a strong folk tradition of murder ballads - stories in which someone comes to grief for the wrong they have done in their lives. AN detailed analysis of the semiotics of the murder ballad is beyond the scope of my reply right now but I will say that I don;t think the murder ballad was general every intended as a message saying "what the murderer did here was praiseworthy". There IS at least sometimes a moral message but it is usually aimed at the victim-class - "men, treat your woman right or she will go crazy and kill you", perhaps.

Perhaps this is all apologia for something I intuitively enjoy.

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I don't think it's something that it's shameful to like, at all. I think I get uncomfortable with the concept of 'angry women' as a genre and particularly the casuality with which females seem to be able to use violence against men as pseudo-empowerment, even though it actually trivialises female capacity and also inspires images of hysteria etc.

The 'fantasy world' thing is certainly a very interesting aspect to a lot of these songs; the real world/catharsis of songwriting world split is always kind of interesting, especially when it's with blunt metaphor.

Anyway: I think it's a good thing to post about, I just wanted to talk about the fact the genre (if indeed it is etc.) is a complicated one for me. Sorry if I came across as overly negative in the first post, I was more wanting to open discussion on the thing and raise the issues or whatever.

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koganbot

I don't think it is a genre, and if we get a lot of nominations and songs mentioned that could give us a sense of how disparate this all is, and how various cultural themes play within different cultural subgroups.

My guess* is that "Independence Day" was written by a liberal (Gretchen Peters) and sung by a conservative (Martina McBride) but as far as practical policies go they both would be arm in arm in thinking that battered women and children need the support of the community, and that a man's home is not his castle, etc., despite that song actually saying "Maybe it's the only way," "it" being murder-suicide. (Martina's got a Janey's Got Her Gun–type song on her latest album, so she hasn't given up on the issue.) But the excitement of the apocalyse is another factor that sane, humane social policies don't really embody, and I don't know if any social policies should embody them. And Miranda seems to be in different territory with stuff like "Down," which doesn't seem to imagine a better way, or to finger anything like a "social problem" here. I think that Miranda might "get" the Ramones in a way that Gretchen Peters and Martina McBride wouldn't.

*I put "guess" because I don't really know McBride's politics, whereas Peters made it clear she did not support the Republicans and resented when right-wingers took bits of "Independence Day" out of context and tried to co-opt it.

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Probably won't have the time or mental energy to join into this discussion in depth (and should mention that the Roxanne Shante song I nominated is in no way my favorite in this category -- just one that came to mind that I hadn't thought of for a while and I figured most people here hadn't heard), but the discussion's turing into a good one (as was that multi-venued Angry Women in Rock one which I didn't see until it was all over fwiw), but I did want to link to this Domestic Violence playlist that Rhapsody paid me to put together last year, the week the Rihanna and Chris Brown albums came out. A few songs on it have been named here already; a few others most likely fit this theme; several others (particularly the ones where men actually inflict said violence) definitely do not. Also, the introductory paragraph is hacked out and not especially thoughtful and includes an editorial "we" that I usually avoid like the plague. So feel free to skip it and just skim through the songs, if you prefer:

http://www.rhapsody.com/playlistcentral/playlistdetail?playlistId=ply.31104898

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Also, should note that a couple of those songs (like the Hole and Kittie ones maybe?) may or may not actually literally concern domestic violence, though it seems that quite a people have interpreted them that way.

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I wasn't saying all female revenge songs are about domestic violence; quite the opposite...?

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Never said you did. And I'm also obviously not suggesting that "Songs About Domestic Violence" and "Songs Where Women Get Revenge" are one and the same; just that the two categories might frequently seem to overlap on a Venn Diagram. (For what it's worth, quite a few of the songs on that playlist "where men actually inflict said violence" are undoubtedly about Men Getting Creative Revenge On Women, which might actually be another category worth considering sometime. Though just because it's creative, or vengeful, doesn't mean it's morally justified, of course.)

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