Theme Songs: Angry Women #1 - "Women Getting Violent/Creative Revenge On Men"

[meserach.livejournal.com]

On the theme of angry women:

Nominations please for the Best Songs About Women Getting Violent And/Or Creative Revenge On Men!

* You're aiming to nominate a song that is A) GOOD b) FITS THE THEME and C) YOU THINK I HAVEN'T HEARD YET

* Please OFFICIALLY NOMINATE one song only.

* Put your official nominations in BOLD, please.

* Please include some kind of a LINK whereby your nominated song can be heard! If it isn't easy for me to listen to your song I won't! Good methods for me are Youtube links and Spotify links, but anything else that works is fine, and I'll let you know if it doesn't!

* The BEST song that (in my judgement) FITS THE THEME WELL that I DON'T REMEMBER HEARING BEFORE will WIN, and the person who NOMINATED IT picks the next THEME.

* You may also mention additional songs - this is a good way to include classic songs which I probably already know. Other people may pick your suggestions as their official nominee, but unless this is done there is no guarantee I will listen to them, so please choose you ONE official nominee carefully! You don't have to provide links to songs you merely mention.

SOME GOOD SONGS I ALREADY KNOW ABOUT IN THIS THEME:
(man when did all youtube videos become unembeddable)

Carrie Underwood - Before He Cheats (unembeddably: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxofSejV-7w)

Jazmine Sullivan - Bust Your Windows (unembeddably http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCgfgkrz_BA)

Blu Cantrell - Hit 'Em Up Style (unembeddably http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekIuWl-Ffq4)

Obviously I know others but we'll find out together which!

EDIT Oh and I guess I will stop accepting nominations on Friday night (unless it seems to peter out way earlier) and then render my OFFICIAL OPINION over the weekend.

Comments

Re: hello i am pretending to work, excuse my typos

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

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.