Hey Generation X, What’s Wrong With Change?
I recently bought Havoc and Bright Lights, Alanis Morissette’s new album. It focuses on motherhood, marriage, and womanhood. Since I write about these topics, this is of great interest to me, especially since I was among the many Gen Xers for whom Jagged Little Pill resonated. I have the new album on loop to analyze the lyrics and write a post about it.
While researching, I keep seeing an irksome comment. Many articles or reviews mention something like “don’t worry because Alanis hasn’t lost her angst.” It’s not just Alanis, either. P!nk has a motherhood- and marriage-inspired album coming in a few weeks as well. From Pop Crush’s review of her single “Blow Me (One Last Kiss)”:
For fans who worried that the singer’s reunion with once-estranged hubby Carey Hart and subsequent birth of daughter Willow Sage had softened the heavily tattooed starlet, fear not. She’s still feisty, she’s still funny and you better believe she’s still vengeful, singing, “You’ll be calling a trick / ‘Cause you no longer sleep / I’ll dress nice / I’ll look good / I’ll go dancing alone / I will laugh / I’ll get drunk / I’ll take somebody home!”
Yeah, that’s what I worry about for a new mother, whether she’s still feisty, funny, and vengeful. We wouldn’t want marriage and motherhood to soften a heart and change some fave music. That’d be horrible.
Why is there such fear of change?
I was struck by a song by Pink, in the radio the other day, because from my uninformed perspective it didn’t appear either feisty or humorous, but as an outpouring of misandry. I thought “What if this were a man singing about women this way? Would he be called feisty? Or scary and abusive?”
The same applies to the difference between male and female characters in fiction. A woman can be anything short of (?) a mass murderer and all she’ll get called is “feisty.”
This disturbs me. It is not JUST a refusal to grow up. It is a refusal to admit we no longer live in the fifties and that women have as many opportunities to be evil and oppress others as men do.
And yeah, I too wish they’d grow up. And the culture too.
There is so much discussion fodder in Blow Me. That song is loaded. Now based on interviews with P!nk, I’m hoping that it is a song about momentary lapse–one of those moments post-baby when a woman thinks her husband is worthless. I won’t know until the album comes out next week. Her interviews sound like things are going well, so I’m hoping she got to Alanis’s Guardian point, essentially, the kind of person, wife, mother, woman you are depends completely on you–Alanis is talking to her previously ignored inner Guardian who has tried to protect those aspects. But again, there is so much in Blow Me, I can’t decide if it needs its own post or if I should do a bigger post covering Alanis, P!nk, Katy Perry’s Wide Awake (I almost want to fisk that one) with some other angry women lyrics from Adele to Avril for illustration.
And you are correct, it is not just a refusal to grow up. Nor is it just that women have as many evil opportunities as men do, but also that we excuse women’s evilness more than men’s. For example, men can sing songs about hurting women, especially in rap, but it either has to be straight up physical dominance or a joke like Train’s 50 Ways to Say Goodbye–in sum, ‘I’m too embarrassed to tell my friends you left me so I’ll tell them that she went down in an airplane, fried getting suntanned, fell in a cement mixer full of quicksand’, etc. The joke isn’t bothersome, really. The physical dominance should be. But could a guy get away with singing an upbeat dance song about leaving his wife and new mother to go trolling bars for somebody better to sleep with because she’s not as tight as before and has a headache, or any other relative woman equivalent of “whiskey d*ck”? I think not.
For those not familiar with the song, I did not choose the vulgar term for illustration. In one of the verses she describes how she is going to get drunk and go home with a guy from a club because her husband has the offending condition. It is the preceding rhyme for “trick” in the lyric excerpt above.
Why the fear of change? Two words: Chrissie Hynde. Not only did her songwriting skills go all to hell when she had a baby, but she turned into a flaming leftist.
Yeah, but admit that slide might have been complicated by drugs and band turnover.
I’ll grant you that much. But she’s not the only person in the world who ever dealt with tragedy.
If Obama wins again, change is something they are going to have to learn to live on.
For the same reason Dante’s Inferno outsells his Paradiso 1000:1
Bad and exciting tops good and boring.
Everybody says that, Kathy. Personally I think its more that the modern reader can’t be bothered to wade through all three books and tends to poop out after the first one. Weak minds that wander but can’t get far on their own.
Still, you do have a point. Dante certainly warmed to the subject in Inferno. ~:) Bwaha!
Cute pun, but ocmpletely inaccurate. In Dante’s “Inferno,” Hell isn’t hot, it’s FREEEZING! Indded, the lower you go, the COLDER it gets.
One of those folks that didnt even bother reading any of the books.
Leslie Loftis said: “but also that we excuse women’s evilness more than men’s.”
Leslie, I suggest that you and Sarah Hoyt are being entirely too kind here. “Women’s evilness” is not “excused” in modern culture. Nor even encouraged. It is CELEBRATED. It is reveled in. Women are exhorted to go forth and transgress exuberantly against the hated Man. They don’t all -do- it, but TV and radio are full of people telling them to.
I should add that in my experience, many, many women have no personal honor. They seem to exist in a permanent kindergarten of the soul where honor and keeping one’s word are things that men do, while women are free to do whatever freakish thing springs to their minds.
I can’t speak for Sarah Hoyt, but I must sadly agree. You’re right, not all women are like this, but they are encouraged to be like this.
Well, I can never quite figure out whether I’m officially a fringe Baby Boomer or an early Generation X-er, although I should point out that author Douglas Coupland who made that term famous was born in 1962, but I will say that I could never get the appeal of Alannis Morrisette. Her profanity-filled songs make me feel alternately suicidal and embarrassed, not empowered. I sincerley hope her kids will never hear “Jagged Little Pill”; they may never recover from the trauma.
My husband is the fringe Boomer and I’m a solid Gen Xer and we talk about how different dating, romance, etc. were viewed in our respective 20s. Basically, Gen X in college was transitioning to the hookup culture. We still dated, we still had some expectations of romance, so when it didn’t happen, we were angry about it. Alanis wasn’t popular because she was empowering, but because she was our primal scream. I’d write more but your comment broke some writers block on another piece I’m writing. Thanks!
God, all of this is depressing. I’m glad I grew up in an age when songs were romantic or fun, or exuberant as the big band jazz numbers. When I need a tonic, works like “The Very Thought of You”, “American Patrol”, etc. do the trick. I can’t imagine wanting to wallow around in someone else’s emotional problems.
No worries. I’ll do it and report back.
So…Lilith Faire would have a baby-minding station now?
It’s half-market segmentation. The producer has to sign off on the songs, too. What’s her market? Like, Tori Spelling has a new show and book where she extols her mother, her nanny, and jello molds. it’s not getting marketed at album stores.
So, do mothers buy albums? Do producers know that they buy albums? Are their fans the ones buying the albums? Or would these be new fans?
Pink got famous for singing songs about partying. Somehow, someone’s thinking that a Pink-mom party album would have lyrics about partying down at Applebees, or something Steve Carrell-ish. How old is her producer? There’s a big difference between BabyBoom age producers, and the younger set. The younger ones are more pro-baby and marriage, for one. Nicole Richie has more love headed her way, than single Paris. She’ll have a longer career, if she keeps showing up walking down the street with her man and their children.
Constant change is here to stay. Some of see things differently.
What you call the “settling of mind”, I call entering into one’s comfort zone and going to sleep. The only problem is that comfort zones don’t last. Technology and economic change requires that one always be willing to learn and try new things. This makes it necessary to go out of one’s comfort zone and do something new. This is how one learns and grows and is what contributes to personal resilience. Resilience to improvise and adapt to technological and economic changes.