Results of "Women Getting Violent/Creative Revenge On Men" - Short and Medium Versions

[meserach.livejournal.com]

So the response to my solicitation for songs about acts of revenge by women on men was very interesting, and thanks everyone who participated whether you ended up nominating a song or not - the response was quite different to what I expected but was probably all the more stimulating for that, and I was glad to get as much actual conversation and discussion about the theme as we did.

In the interests of getting the orgafun itself ticking over ASAP, I'll announce my winner now:

girlboymusic has won my heart with Ashlee Simpson's "Follow You Wherever You Go", which is a bit like if you took Eminem's "Stan" and mixed in bouncy bluesy basslines, handclaps and 60s call-and-response backing singers, and then got an adorably demented slurring Ashlee to front the whole operation. So you get to pick the next theme! Post it up yourself with a little commentary and perhaps some examples and we'll get going!


Okay, so. I decided to go with this theme for a few reasons - I and my girlfriend were on a huge kick of listening to "Bust Your Windows" and "Before He Cheats" over and over as sometimes happens with songs for some reason and I wanted more of the same; a parallel conversation was happening on Tumblr about angry women in music after a Grauniad column on the topic; I generally have a fascination with aggressive/broken women in music (and art in general tbh) which I plan to psychoanalyse later at length.

I came to regret restricting the theme as much as I did - particularly the "violent/creative" specifiers cry out as being unnecessary and looking back I'm not sure why I felt the need to include them. Nevertheless I liked pretty much everything that was linked to and some stuff that came through that didn't fit the theme as stated was nonetheless very good, leading to the above regret about the narrow scope.

Songs differ a lot in how seriously they take revenge. My first blush at this is that there were three basic types of songs, but in fact they bleed into each other in interesting ways:

1. Focusing on the act of revenge itself, focusing on the cleansing effect, the payback, emphasising the way the person deserved it - these songs tended to have a triumphalist air, and this was also the angle which a lot of the country hit me, at least at first
2. Focusing on the woman - still plenty of bitterness here, and contempt, but also self-loathing - this is the darker spin, often acknowledging the pointlessness of revenge - the damage being already done - but doing it anyway.
3. Revenge as spectacle, as theatre, whether comic or tragic - here the wronged woman is more stock character ("psycho bitch" in the Ashlee above) and the emphasis is, Kill Bill style, on what the revenge narrative enables you to achieve - the scenario it allows you to paint.

But really it's hard to separate these threads, and most songs contained all three to varying degrees - it depends on what you listen for, and sometimes how seriously you're inclined to take a character or situation.

That last clause comes in especially because most (all?) revenge songs are about imagined scenarios, not real ones - probably for the singers (I can imagine "Bust Your Windows" having actually happened, although I doubt the similar "Before He Cheats" somehow), but definitely for 99.999% of the audience. The appeal isn't in actually imitating the scenarios.

The appeal is in incarnation - the making real and physical - of a feeling. There's something ritualistic about it, I feel. Music (like all art) can create a safe ritual space in which fiction can be given power to shape reality without actually invading it - there's catharsis for the audience/participant yes, but there's more to it than that, a sense of having temporarily created a universe in which justice operates differently and the impossible becomes possible....

I'm encroaching on my own future. I hope this ramble is of use to someone!


Behold the fruits of my brain at 10am having neglected to sleep. I hope it is at least spelled correctly.

Comments

[koganbot]

Excellent post. I'll comment later, I hope.

In the meantime a thought. In the first thread you mentioned murder ballads from the Anglo-American tradition, but I feel that none of our choices really derived from that sort of murder ballad, which even when narrated by the murderer were strangely dispassionate, sometimes leaving out the explanation much less justification (if there was one), so very few would have counted as "revenge." That sort of ballad was pretty much out of popular music by the Sixties, though "Hey Joe" retained elements, and Neil Young's "Down By The River" was a self-conscious throwback, but done for entirely different psychological purposes (sort of an expressionist "look at that potential darkness that inhabits the normal boy-girl stuff," which as I said on that thread is something the Ramones were to do for laughs and for outrage). Richard Marx had a very good down-by-the-river song in the '90s (think it was called "Hazard" but don't have time to check), and Bobby Gentry's "Ode To Billy Joe" back in '67 held an echo of a murder ballad, though it was about a suicide.

But the thing about murder ballads is that they were quasi news reports, maybe reporting our mythical subconscious, and one thing they've been superseded by is actual newspapers and news stations and now the 'Net. The reason I bring this up is that your saying "a sense of having temporarily created a universe in which justice operates differently and the impossible becomes possible...." has to do with a lot of news stories too, except the news stories leave a gaping sense of justice unfulfilled. In the U.S. there's a population of 300 million, and culled from that, what makes the news isn't the normal day-to-day crime but the most extreme: teen sells eight-year-old sister into prostitution, teens face felony charges in small-town New York for bullying girl who eventually hanged herself. (Those were both among yesterday's Associated Press top headlines.) And it's not like these things are utterly, completely isolated, but they're not must people's day-to-day lives, either. (Bullying might be for too many, but the hanging and the felony charges aren't.) But news stories like that are consumed day to day, and probably will end up fictionalized as episodes on Law And Order.

[meserach.livejournal.com]

Man what did I say about murder ballads. Oh right I can go look.

* looks *

Oh right moral fables, yup. What you say about quasi-news reports is definitely a thing of them for sure. I couldn't claim to have heard a enough murder ballads to know much about how far moral dimensions are present in them but it was a thing I had observed. I was only waving at the idea that country revenge stories might have inherited something from them, I have no actual idea about the scholarship of that (would love to know though), and you're certainly right that the stuff nominated wasn't very murder ballad-y in particular lacking the dispassion you note.

Here's my favourite murder ballad. Do you know Dave Carter and Tracey Grammer? It seems like you should know them. Late nineties, folk duo - Dave's sadly dead now but Tracy's keeping on, sometimes as here doing performances songs that Dave wrote but never got to recording.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NY2R3voOjqg

So people still make murder ballads in 2000!

There's certainly something very interesting going on with the way the wolrd became hooked on crime stories and in particular the types of crime stories that always become the huge media events and I'm sure there is a link there but I'm not in the brain state to attempt to elucidate it at present.

That video again, with EMBED POWER +1

[meserach.livejournal.com]

I never knew the danger

[koganbot]

I like this. You've linked it before, I'm pretty sure. It reminds me that "Whiskey In The Jar" could have been eligible for the last thread, depending on if you think Molly is avenging herself (the song leaves her motives unexplained, though money or fear seem as likely as vengeance).

(The Metallica vid might inspire some women to vengeance, however.)