Switched on Pop - All About Those Baseline Assumptions About Femini$m in Pop

Episode Date: June 6, 2016

With Meghan Trainor's new singles "No" and "Me Too" ubiquitous on the radio dial, a larger discussion about the uneasy relationship between social movements and selling records takes a feminist bent. Memories of the polarizing 2014 hit "All About that Bass" come to the surface, reigniting debates over whether Trainor's songs express radical thought or package it for mass consumption. Or is that distinction a distraction, forgetting that manufactured pop can still pack a political punch? That might depend on how you listen. Andi Zeisler, author of "We Were Feminists Once," professor Robin James, blogger Jenny Trout and writer Andrea Warner join for a dive into the complexities of feminist pop politics. FEATURING Meghan Trainor - Me Too Meghan Trainor - No Meghan Trainor - All About That Bass Spice Girls - Wannabe Big Sean - Dance (A$$) Taylor Swift - Shake It off Demi Lovato - Confident Grimes - Flesh Without Blood The Slits - Typical Girls Sleater-Kinney - #1 Must Have Jonathan Hoyle - Never Ending Road Lizzo - Good As Hell  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Euporia of Calvin Klein, the new collection Elixir. Three new elixires perfume intense. Solar, Magnetic, Boll. Pulsed in the banner, do you know, and discover your fragrance euphoria. If you're tired of endless scrolling to figure out where to eat, same.

I'm Stephanie Wu, editor-in-chief of Eater. We've just launched the new-ish and way-better Eater app. It has all the restaurants we love, gives you personalized picks wherever you are, and serves up smarter search results just for you. You can find my list of the best places for martinis and fries in New York City. And save your favorite spots, share lists, follow editors, and book right in the app. Download the eater app at eater app.com.

It's free for iOS users. Hey, Nate, so I've got a topic for this week that might be a little bit of a minefield. Okay, you mean metaphorically speaking, I think. Yeah, definitely. We're in a closet and under a blanket recording. We're definitely not in danger of anything. Right. But, okay, so what is this metaphorical minefield?

Megan Trainers back on the charts. She's got two new songs on which she reengages with a pop feminist message, which she's been known for. Yeah, when we first heard Megan Trainor singing about, my number is no, you need to let it go. You need to let it go. Aha. Yeah, when we first heard Megan Trainor singing about. pop feminism. She was focusing on the specific topic of body empowerment on her song All About that bass from a few years back.

should do an episode about Megan Trainor's feminist redemption. Ooh, are you sure we should do that? Yeah, no, exactly, because then I realized that there's a lot of problems with this idea. Right. Most obviously, we're a bunch of white guys with microphones, potentially mansplaining our ideas about feminism. Not good. Yeah, we could easily slip into this blogosphere trope of, well, actually, style clickbait articles where we're not really informed on an issue and it's not really about in this case say feminism but mainly just about

celebrity and taking them down or building them up yeah and i definitely don't want to fall into that trap but at the same time i think it's really important that we listen deeply to pop music and with major artists like taylor swift and katy perry and biont claiming a feminist mantle it would also feel wrong to avoid the subject altogether totally but maybe we need to be careful here so that this doesn't turn into a conversation about what we think is and isn't feminist. Agreed. And I don't want to do that. No. Yeah, so let's ask a different question. Maybe something like, how could we learn to listen to pop music from a feminist perspective? There we go. Mindfield.

Potentially averted. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. And on this episode of Switchdown Pop, we have a mission to explore the history of pop music, feminism and to see how we can tune our ears to listen to this music from a feminist perspective. Great. So let's get right into it. The very first thing I wanted to know is where is this all coming from? If there's suddenly a trend where it's now popular to claim that you're a feminist, it certainly wasn't earlier. And I want to figure out where this came from. So I thought I'd speak directly with someone who really knows the story of pop feminism.

I'm Andy Weissler. I'm the editorial creative director. of bitch media and the author of We Were Feminist Once. Andy's book is all about the shift from activist feminism, focusing on collective issues of women's rights to what she calls Marketplace Feminism, which is really more about making commercial choices, which are sold as a form of empowering individual expression. And though this trend has happened over decades

in advertising and film and fashion, the story of how pop music contributed to the explosion of Marketplace Feminism really takes off in the 1990s with the rise of girl power. Girl power was one of the original kind of rallying cries in the riot girl movement. And the very first issue of riot girl zine, which was kind of a manifesto, talked about the general lack of girl power in society by which it meant, you know, girls, teenage girls, preteen girls, tend to be the most sort of sidelined in culture because, you know, we laugh at the music they listen to. We push them aside. They're not

taken seriously as a demographic or an audience. And so that became kind of the basis of this movement that was really about standing up, making space, taking space, being heard, and not being afraid to do something before you had perfected it. So that was the, that was certainly the ethos of the zines and the music was, you know, sort of do it even though there are going to be people telling you that you can't do it. But as Andy tells it, Riot Girl wouldn't stay DIY for long because savvy Don Draper types on Madison Avenue and music executives saw this trend happening and needed a way to repackage it and make it extremely sellable.

It was very easy to sort of co-opt Riot Girl because it, A, it wasn't a particularly organized movement, and B. they were very media-shy. So the media took the opportunity to just basically make stuff up and run with it. And Riot Girl found itself in a position where 75% of what was written about the movement was sheer lies or conjecture based on media assumptions. And that made it easier to sort of harvest this idea of girl power and use it in a much more sort of commercially nefarious way,

which happened when the Spice Girls became a thing. Their rallying cry became girl power, but it was completely different. It had nothing to do really with actual power. It had to do with selling things. And it had to do with selling things that were already familiar to young girls. You know, nail polish and lipstick and images that were all sort of made along the lines of stereotypes. You know, the sexy hot girl or the cute sporty girl. or the super naive baby type girl.

So there were all these personas, and all of them were supposed to be about girl power. But what they really were was about getting young girls as early as possible to be consumers in the name of girl power. Okay, so this was a major pivot point in shifting the public's perception of feminism, making it more digestible and upbeat and available to a pop mainstream. Right. But that's not to invalidate the spice girls to say that they weren't hugely important for a lot of young listeners and maybe remain so today providing a bridge into deeper issues. No, definitely not. We don't want to invalidate anyone's feelings about the spice girls. But rather, it raises this question for me about what does feminist music sound like? Or, Charlie, maybe the question is, can music sound feminist?

That is the question. Let's go there. Let's do it. Okay. So this whole question sparked in my mind when I read a blog post called Why Is There No Music Analysis and Feminist Theory by Dr. Robin James, Associate Professor of Philosophy at UNC Charlotte. It made me think about how my initial reaction to all about that bass was all about the lyrics.

But maybe I was missing something in the music. How could we interpret the song if we were just listening to the music? You're saying you were all. about those lyrics, about those lyrics, no music. All about those lyrics, about those lyrics, no music. For deeper, more insightful analysis, let's go to the source. We spoke directly with Professor James. When we listen for feminism in music, you have to sort of really deeply listen, I think,

and be familiar with how certain sounds become gendered, for example. A famous example of this would be something like the booty clap zone that you hear in a lot of trap music, right? like the 4-4 hand clap. It's on a lot of sort of trappy strip club music. It's like in Big Sean's ass is like the classic example. That becomes gendered in a certain way because it's associated with women's bodies, right? Now make that mother of hammer sound like...

Okay, this is definitely making sense to me because if we're listening to a song, we're automatically making associations with other songs, like one bass line sounds like another baseline, one melody. Right. Another melody. And if you're drawing from it, from something else. You have to be careful about that source material, especially if it's doing something which maybe misogynist or in any way just has a bad negative association.

Yeah, this is such an interesting idea from Robin James, right, that sounds themselves aren't necessarily just neutral, as we might think of them, but can be loaded with associations and especially gendered connotations. Go on. Well, I think it's probably hard to argue that any sense. sound is inherently gendered, right? Yeah. That, say, a C major chord is more feminine than an F minor chord. That seems kind of absurd.

Absolutely. Ditto, probably, that to say that a bass is no more feminine or masculine than a piano. Yeah, of course not. I mean, I guess you could say that a bass is lower and that men have lower voices, but... Well, does a bass actually go lower than a piano? No, piano goes lower. Ooh, good point. Good point, Charles.

Still, we have associations that maybe do more to accidents of history, like the fact that women in Victorian high society were relegated to only playing certain instruments that were deemed appropriate, such as the piano, the violin, and the flute. Can you imagine an instrument that would not have been appropriate for a Victorian High Society lady to play, Charlie? Uh, the timpony. That's okay. Yes, that would have definitely been way too aggressive. And there was one that was surrounded with a lot of controversy, which was the cello.

Oh, okay. Because you have to wrap your legs around it. Ooh. And that was seen as very unladylike. And one British cello instructional guide from the late 19th century actually says the way that women should play the cello is not the normal way, but by moving their legs to the side of the cello. Which will not let you play the cello very well. No, which makes it sound terrible.

Totally absurd. Whether we know it or not, there are these very gendered connotations attached to different sounds. Right, and it might not just be the instruments themselves, but it can also be the way that we play it, which sets up expectations of style and genre. For instance, Professor James is really interested in how we interpret vocal performances from a gendered perspective. Some people call this feminist. I don't necessarily call this feminist. I would call it kind of

Lehman-style corporate post-feminism. But you hear women using strong voices, right? So like the vocal malisma, the drop in Taylor Swift's break it off, right? It's her sort of letting go of all constraints and just being herself, right? Or Demi Lovato sort of taking on this Gary Glitter style beat, right? Being confident. Right, that sort of uses the forceful, aggressive voice. Some people call it feminist phonic aesthetic that you hear in pop today. A couple of components of a feminist aesthetic might include things like refuting patriarchy, right? Or doing something other than the sort of common or expected thing, right?

Because the normal thing, in a patriarchy, the normal thing is patriarchal. So if you do something other than the normal thing, right, that might be one way of sort of intervening in the gendered sonic landscape. I just saw Grimes play at Morgfest last weekend. Part of what she does is she has this really high-pitched feminine voice, which you don't hear a lot of in electronic music. That really stood out to me, right? Like her vocal timbre and her pitch and the sort of girlishness of her voice and the sort of way that intervened in a gendered way.

Yeah, I love what Professor James is saying here, and I actually asked Andy about the exact same thing, and I like how she expands on the idea of how, refuting the norm can be a form of feminist expression. Whenever you're hearing something that kind of refuses to conform and is then paired with lyrics, where the music is not necessarily pleasing to the ear, I feel like the slits and the raincoats are really obvious examples of this.

There's definitely this sense of like this is music that is going to put off some people, and it's also going to probably anger some people who are very concerned with, you know, formalism in music. Sleader Kinney is also a really good example of this, especially with the vocals, which are what a lot of people would term, you know, shrill. This sense of not needing permission, not needing the sort of stamp of approval from what is a largely male rock community. and, you know, not conforming to the codes of, you know, classic, formal, recognized rock and roll. And there's a defiance to it, too,

even if that doesn't always come through, again, in the vocals or the lyrics, there's a sense of, I'm doing this without your permission, and I honestly don't care if you like it. Wow, I can see how this is a really powerful idea of not needing permission to sound, however you want to sound. Yeah, and I like that Andy actually extends this idea of who has permission to play music, actually back to the listener and who has permission to listen.

We certainly have a long history of musicians actively distancing themselves from feminist movements, but still having their work sort of held up as emblematic of feminist principles or feminist feelings or feminist theory even. That split is part of what makes the experience of the audience very rich because you don't necessarily need the permission of the creator to understand it through a feminist lens or a socially conscious lens. It's there and it's open to interpretation. It's sort of a gift in that way.

Oh, so in a way there's this ongoing conversation between artists and listener between the intent and the interpretation in which the so-called true message of the music actually lies not in the song, but in the ether of our collective listening. That's right. It's not just our listening, as in like you and me, Nate, listening to music, but it's all of our listening. And that kind of makes it complicated. It's challenging to say, what is a song about, what was its intent, when we are considering this larger collective interpretation, it makes me wonder,

how can we listen from this wider perspective? That is a great question that I am totally ill-equipped to answer. So can we go back to Professor James for a sec? Absolutely. Your background certainly gives you access to a range of things, but it's limited and you have to look to others to see what they can contribute to talk about things that, are inconsistent with your background.

So, for example, things that might seem neutral to you might not seem neutral to someone else, right? Like, part of it just involves talking to people, reading outside of your own subject position or area of expertise, and just recognizing that you really have to sort of listen to other people and take them seriously and their experiences of music seriously. I think this is exactly why I was feeling uncomfortable at the beginning of the episode and starting to realize that perhaps our backgrounds give us only a limited perspective on what we're hearing in a song. We're not hearing it from the perspective of millions of other people.

We're hearing it as Nate and Charlie. So when we come back, let's learn to listen to all about that base through the ears of other people. Yeah. Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it. What's the first step as a podcaster? Well, you have to ask lots of questions. I'm Maria Sharpova, and I'm hosting a new podcast called pretty tough. Every week, I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness.

I have a few pretty tough questions for you. Okay. Ready? Ready. Do not sugarcoat something for me. No, no. No. We'll dive into their stories and get valuable insights from top executives, actors, entrepreneurs, and other individuals who have inspired me so much in my own journey. Pretty tough is your front row seat to the women who have demonstrated the power in being unapologetic in their pursuits. I hope you'll join us. New episodes drop Wednesdays on YouTube or in your favorite podcast app. Immigration may be Donald Trump's signature issue. President Trump is now targeting predominantly democratic cities for ice raids and deportations. Dozens of protesters clashing with immigration and customs enforcement agents in Minneapolis Tuesday.

We will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal. aliens back to the places from which they came. But what we want to do in this space is talk about America and politics beyond the current president. So what do most Americans think about deportation and border security, period? I think that Americans are definitely against the kind of violent displays that we've seen in the street from ICE. When it comes to the question of deportation, the answer is more complicated. My sense is that people want border at the border.

They don't like the idea of having no idea who's coming into the United States at any given time. The view on immigration from the bottom up instead of the top down. That's this week on America Actually. Every Saturday in your audio and video feeds. Okay, Charlie, back to our central question.

Yeah. Which is, I might remind you, how can we listen more deeply and tune our ears to a feminist perspective in pop music? Great, let's do it. And what I want to do is Let's look at this case study of all about that base and figure out why am I hearing such conflicting messages. I mean, in light of what Andy Zaisler and Robin James are saying, I wonder if part of what's bugging you about this tune all about that bass is its strong sense of musical formalism.

Right. For Andy Zisler, musical formalism might be anything which sounds immediately pleasing or familiar. And I don't think we're getting anything particularly jarring with Megan Trainor. All of her songs are pretty catchy. They're upbeat and they're full of musical retro throwbacks. Because you know I'm all about that bass, about that bass. No trouble. I'm all about that bass. Yeah, I mean, when we listen to all about that bass, I'm hearing, what, a complete

throwback to 1960s pop, doo-op girls group, a familiar blues bass line. This pleasing retro vocal style. the bottom to the top. And a highly repetitive chorus. It starts with the chorus. The chorus goes on again. Highly repetitive. It goes on again. It goes on again.

Highly repetitive. Make it stop. Sorry, where am I? What's happening? Thank God. Or actually I should say that's what I'm hearing. And just because I hear it a certain way doesn't mean that others aren't hearing it differently. Yes.

Very wise. I think that we should definitely take Professor James' advice and learn to listen through other people's ears. So what I did is I reached out to someone who really helped me wake up to what's actually going on in All About That Base. I'm Jenny Trout, and I'm an author and a blogger, and I blog about pop culture things in sometimes funny ways and in other times, just kind of ranky ways. You wrote an excellent article on Megan Trainor, taking a really critical eye at her body empowerment song, all about that base. In your piece, you pull out some really meaningful contradictions, problems and stereotypes in her song.

And I want to get into that, but I wanted to just first ask, do you remember perhaps your very first non-deep listening initial reaction to her song? Yes, I do, actually. My husband came home from work and he said, I just heard a song and you're going to hate it. And I said, well, what is it? And he said, well, he's like, it's called all about that bass. He's like, you're going to love the song, but you're going to hate that you like it. So I listened to it and I was like the first time I listened to it I'm like oh yeah this is like you know really cute and this is blah blah and then then like the second time I listened to it I was like oh man he's right I really like this song but I really hate the lyrics and everything around it so what do you think the message of the song is trying to portray?

I think it's definitely trying to tell women and probably specifically young girls that. It doesn't matter what you look like. It's not, you know, that you should love yourself and all that. But it's a very shallow message sort of at that level. And so I think, you know, it had good intentions. She had good intentions. Right. But what message are you hearing?

Very much that there's only one right way to be a woman. There's only one. You have to look a certain way that what your attractiveness is based on is, is what a man values in a woman's appearance. There's so many different layers to this where you go, okay, I can see where all of this stuff is coming from. I can see that, you know, we're saying that these male standards of beauty and basing ourselves on our self-worth on what a man likes about us.

And then the whole, you know, oh, I'm better because of that. And there's only one good way to look. It's this whole, like, it's like a stew of misogyny, of internalized misogyny that women directed themselves and that's unfortunately what's getting across she totally inverts her message here yeah exactly it goes from we shouldn't be judging ourselves and that's really the whole thing actually is that she's she's saying you know we can't judge ourselves um because you know we're beautiful we're all beautiful and wonderful but you know the guy's judging us is what gives us value so in jenny's piece i am not all about that base she also goes on to point out that in the song's music video

They're actually very few plus-sized people. Right. And despite this really tough, deserved critique, Jenny is also careful not to fall into the trap of shaming trainer for her less than feminist body anthem. Sometimes when you critique a work or something like that, it's taken as a critique of the artist performing it or the person who wrote it.

But unless you are calling this person out by name and saying this is because you're a bad person, What you're saying is your work is falling short. And that was something that I think, well, it's something I know people forget all the time because I still hear people say to me, they'll go, oh, well, you just hate Megan Trader. And it's like, no, actually, I like a lot of her songs because they're catchy as hell. I just don't like this song, and I think it was a bad choice. And I think that we're talking about someone who's very young who probably can't, you know, call the shots and go, hey, maybe I'm going to change this or I'm going to mix this up.

there would have been some lyric changes and some things would have been a lot different. I really appreciate your perspective. Thank you so much for being on the show. It's been a real pleasure. Hey, thanks a bunch. I'm all about da base, face, face, face. So if we're feeling a little jaded on this supposedly body positive anthem, I thought it could be good for us to find perhaps a more exemplary song in this vein.

Oh, yeah, I think that would be fun. Maybe once again, I'm probably not the best person to make that choice. So why don't we find someone else to help us out here? Totally. So I reached out to my friend Andrea Warner. She's a writer, critic, and host of the excellent podcast, Pop This for her thoughts on the matter. I look at someone like Lizzo, Good as Hell. Good as Hell is, one, an amazing song.

Lizzo is a woman who actually is plus eyes. And she has a, you know, her video shows women of all. sizes, all shapes. I feel like she talks really sort of eloquently and interestingly and with a lot of authority and thoughtfulness about what it is to have a body that's not quite like, you know, sort of the normal average size and represent that space and be proud of that body, be proud of the space that she takes up. And her songs therefore have, it just feels more resonant. It feels like it hits home and it's a hell of a good song. Oh, this is a really fun track.

I love it. Right. But I do want to say, like, whether we're listening to Megan Trainor or this Lizzo Jam, courtesy of Andrea, we can see that both of these songs are part of a larger trend of pop music feminism at the moment that's garnering both criticism and adulation. Which makes me wonder, what should we make of this trend? I mean, there's no doubt that when Beyonce steps on stage and the words feminist, are behind her in a 30-foot giant sign. She's definitely opening the eyes and ears of young people to a movement with real power, right?

Yeah, and to answer that question, I think we need to go back to where we started with Andy Zaisler, who's the real expert on how we might bridge pop culture and feminism. You know, the thing is, I don't necessarily see marketplace feminism and activist feminism having nothing in common. I think there's a place where they overlap

that has the potential. to be really rich. You know, I think where we need to be careful and maybe where we need to be watchful is when it does start becoming about selling a product. But Andy does see a place for celebrities and pop stars and raising awareness for social issues. They have this sort of PR ambassadorship. You know, someone like Harry Belafonte, for instance, his role in the civil rights movement was in many ways one of ambassadorship in the sense that people were familiar with his music,

they were familiar with his background. He had a kind of way to straddle both the civil rights movement as kind of a subversive movement and mass culture as a very, very popular entertainer. We've always seen that bit be a pretty crucial way to bring awareness to issues that other people might not know anything about. So I think there's a way in which they have a crucial role to play and they also have a crucial moment to sort of step back and make it not about them and make it in fact about the actual issue. All right, Nate. So what have you learned through today's investigation? Oh man, Charlie, so much. But I think above all, we've seen that We need to be careful about getting caught up in what might seem like internet debates but are actually just clickbait.

Yeah. Because the focus on one celebrity's feminism or not can actually be a distraction from real actions on feminist issues. Which kind of makes me think that this whole podcast might be complicit in our own criticism. That's like in some recursive loop. Yes, that's entirely possible. but I also think that we are coming away more equipped to listen from a feminist perspective, right? To question musical formalism as political agency. Yeah, and I think we also learned that musical sounds can have gendered associations that we have to pay attention to.

Right, and maybe that musical meaning doesn't just exist in the ear of the beholder, but rather in some collective interpretation of a song that, you know, can change over time. For now, I think we should close this in. investigation because it's about time to end the episode. But I think that we need to make sure that we're using these tools as we look at music on Switch on Pop in the future. Ditto, man. I totally agree. This episode of Switched on Pop was produced and edited by me, Charlie Harding, and my pal, Nate Sloan. I especially want to thank Andy Zizer for joining us. You should definitely go pick up her book. We Were Feminist Once Out Now.

I could not put this book down. There were moments where I was screaming that I couldn't believe the history of pop feminism and other times that I was laughing out loud because it's just such great writing. You can also catch her at the printer's Ro Lit Fest in Chicago the weekend of June 11th. Also huge thanks to Professor Robin James, Jenny Trout, and Andrea Warner for contributing their voices to this episode. Thank you also for production assistants from Alex Kaplanman from the podcast pitch, as well as Susan Kaminar and Pergo, Pergo Lizzie. Luke Harris designed our logo.

You can find his work at Luke Harris.com. And you can listen to more episodes on www. W.Switchedonpop.com, Stitcher, Google Play, and iTunes where we'd really appreciate it if you left us a review. Or you can reach out on Twitter with show suggestions at Switched on Pop. We'll be back in two weeks with a new episode, and until then, thanks for listening. Whoa. Convierte your passion in a business with Shopify and bathe records of ventas with the form of pay with a better conversion of the world. Has you heard of bien?

The mejor conversion of the world. The incredible system of Pago of Shopify facilitation the market on your site web, in the networks,

and in quite place. That is music for your ears. No, you'll be more

your business will be a super-exit with Shopify. Empecies your period of the per year

at a month in Shopify. coms bar records.