Spin
By Monica Kendrick
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The Year of the Woman drivel has come especially fast and furious in the last decade or so: the year Tracy Chapman hit it big, the year Queen Latifah and Monie Love and Yo Yo bum rushed the boys’ club of hip-hop, the year the mainstream press got wind of Liz Phair and Hole and L7–those were the Year of the Woman too. Are we–women musicians, women music fans–really supposed to believe this is good news? Should we thank sugar daddy Jann Wenner for his generosity in giving the gals one issue all to themselves (all the writers as well as the subjects are women) in 30 years? Is Spin safe again now that the little Gooch has copped his feels and cut his losses? Can his transgressions be redeemed by hot pink pages that list self-mutilation, Christina Ricci (“in The Ice Storm, now out”), and Kurt Cobain as defining aspects of “Girl Culture”?
For all its self-congratulatory smugness, Rolling Stone’s special issue is far superior to Spin’s. The writers dug deep to provide pages of fairly solid history in small type, with loving attention paid to female pioneers in blues and country music, unearthing evidence aplenty that many of these ladies were in fact smart businesswomen who practiced a lot–and giving early rock ‘n’ roll singer Wanda Jackson something resembling her due. But as history creeps up on the present day, the cases get shakier and Rolling Stone once again displays its chronic inability to “get” anything lurking in the depths below Billboard’s top 20.
At the end of the piece Powers becomes a shill for her own position as taste shaper, contending that advertising and fashion have actually created social movements, instead of capitalizing on and trivializing them. She also claims the Gibson Girl advertisements of the turn of the century “begat the Suffragette and won women the vote.” But if Powers had spent more time reading about Susan B. Anthony’s life and less time critiquing her wardrobe, she would know that the suffragette movement began earlier, a direct outgrowth of the abolitionist movement (in which Anthony and many other prominent suffragettes learned to agitate and organize), the urban housing and labor reform movements, and the temperance movement. She claims the fashionable, hedonistic flapper of the 20s had something to do with women entering factories in record numbers during the 40s–never mind that working-class women had always been there (providing the bulk of the labor in certain industries like textiles), or that with World War II on there simply wasn’t anyone else to do the work. At any rate, Rosie the Riveter’s “redefining” of the role of women in the workplace was short-lived: middle-class women were herded back into the kitchen by the nagging voices of advertising as soon as the war ended, and if you watch any channel but MTV, you know they still have to rush back there after work to pop giant cookies into the oven for their hapless families. Such glib revisionism shows that Spin has no real interest in or insight into those aspects of “Girl Culture” that might complicate its demographic research.
