Women and Country Songs

Losing is a central theme of classic country and western music—losing your love, losing yourself in vice, or just losing at life in general. New country seems much more anxious about what is being lost; hence the nostalgia about how things were that reappears often in the genre. But while the loss seems to be mostly of a personal and experiential nature, it signals a deeper anxiety that while submerged nonetheless comes across quite clearly. Mom’s house, the old town, dad’s ways, agrarian or industrial labor, these are the explicit objects that are mourned in new country, but below them are fears about the loss of stable social categories. What is also being lamented here is the seeming disappearance of a society that makes sense in the eyes of many of the genre’s constituency. If things were coherent and true in the past, then the passing of time is felt as degeneration and as a welter of confusion.

Not everyone feels the same way about the past, of course. Groups that had been violently excluded from participating in society because of their race, sexuality, or gender generally tend to not have a particularly sentimental view of the past. It is impossible to be nostalgic about the past if you associate it with naked oppression. This is why country music appears as reactionary to many people: if you want things to return to the way they were, then you must have a strong investment in how things were. But new country, like all of culture, is not monolithic.

“Somebody’s gotta wear a pretty skirt/Somebody’s gotta be the one to flirt/Somebody’s gotta wanna hold his hand/So God made girls,” sings RaeLynn in an incredibly catchy version of the desire for social order. This song rejects the transformations in gender and sexual relations over the last half century by simply refusing to acknowledge that they happened. Gender roles in this song are clearly defined and comfortably stable. One is tempted to point out the obvious, that men can wear skirts and hold each other’s hands, but that would seem churlish in this context. For alongside the song’s blissful indifference to the changes in gender norms, so too does it not consider possibility of the lack of rigidly determined sexual identities. In the world of the song, boys fuck girls because girls wear skirts and hold their hands. And the certainty of this belief comes from the investment in a transcendental order that creates these roles and confers meaning onto them. God, rather than history, made these relations, insists this song, and therefore they are immutable.

But an equally catchy contemporary country song illustrates the artificiality of the gender norms that “God Made Girls” represents as given. Maddie and Tae sing: “Being the girl in a country song/How in the world did it go so wrong […] We used to get a little respect/Now we’re lucky if we even get/To climb up in your truck, keep our mouth shut, and ride along/And be the girl in a country song.” Country music is depicted by Maddie and Tae as detrimental to women because it depicts them as compliant and subservient to men’s wishes. The complexity of gender and sexual roles are obfuscated by country music, according to Maddie and Tae, in order to reproduce a social order in which women are expected to live up to expectations that belittle them and in which they have no say. Women and their needs are of no concern to the merchants of the figure of “a girl in a country song.” And Maddie and Tae make this critique of country music in a popular and commercially successful country song.

About thirty years ago Teresa de Lauretis proposed that we think of cultural objects as “technologies of gender.” By this she meant that we should think of gender not as something which culture depicts but rather as something which is the product and the process of depiction. We learn our gender by observing its representation and its representation, while not real as such, functions to create our real sense of what our gender is. But as these two country songs illustrate, we are often confronted with representations of gender that don’t quite agree with each other. How do we calm the tremors occasioned by the inconsistencies of culture? The answer to this question must relate to our own moral and political inconsistencies. We don’t change our minds about our political and moral values so much as we don’t have a very firm or consistent grasp on those values. Our political and moral compasses have no true north. Our needle wobbles here and there. Culture produces the technologies of gender, of course, but those technologies can sometimes be as inconsistent and contradictory as the people they turn into men and women.

Fashion and Style

Men popularized the sexy little skirt. A chronicler around 1350 observed that “men, in particular noblemen and their squires, and a few bourgeois and their servants, took to wearing tunics so short and tight that they revealed what modesty bids us to hide.” Even then haters were hating! This shift to immodest, junk-flattering wear marked a significant moment in history. After this, clothing became a matter of constant change in European society. The rhythms have always been slow. Black gowns or lace collars or short colorful breeches remained in vogue for decades at a time. But even these slow shifts were radical when compared to how little clothing had changed in Europe before then or how stable traditional clothes remained outside of Europe. In these contexts, the garments people wore varied very little. Centuries went by without any fundamental alterations to clothing. And still centuries after men started strutting their stuff in revealing skirts, most of the peasantry in Europe continued to wear what they always had. Only aristocrats and the rising bourgeoisie took to wearing new and unusual garments.

These sartorial transformations illustrate something at the core of European society: It was far more willing to turn away from its traditions than other societies and this explains Europe’s later embrace of modernity and the radical transformations that it entailed. We could see the beginning of Europe’s evolving sense of fashion as an indicator of its dynamism or we could also see it as a prelude to the ravenous consumerism that would later define capitalist society. And these two observations are of course related and complementary.

While fashion did indeed change in Europe and that change reflects something about European culture, fashion does not change radically that often. For example, instead of booty skirts, robes, dresses, smocks, frocks, pantaloons, or tunics—garments historically worn by men—men have preferred either trousers or short pants almost exclusively for the last 100 years or so. In fact, when I see men in pedal pushers I feel an involuntary revulsion that speaks volumes about the norms regarding appropriate clothing that society has instilled in me.

We can say then that fashion may be slow to change but style in the modern era is not. Skirts, pants, and shirts may stay more or less the same but patterns, cuts, colors, and materials change season to season, year to year. The dynamism of capitalist society that was revealed in Europe’s move away from traditional clothing in the fourteenth century has been powerfully felt in the last two centuries as the consumerist impulse that the fashion industry creates and satisfies through novelty. Style is the visual language through which subtle changes in clothing are meant to signify truths about who we are and what we believe. And just as we imagine ourselves as ever-changing so too do we want our style to reflect those internal shifts.

A few short years ago, Taylor Swift sang to her imaginary love interest “She wears short skirts/I wear T-shirts” to demonstrate how down to earth she was. Here, Swift presents herself as everywoman, the salt of the earth that gets ignored by the fashionable and the flashy. These days she sings to another imaginary lover “You got that long hair, slicked back, and white T-shirt/and I got that good girl faith and a tight little skirt.” How things have changed! In this song, she is no longer the ignored, unwashed masses. Instead, she has become a kind of timeless signifier of fashion. So much so that she associates her love with the image on an unchanging style: “Cause we never go out of style/We never go out of style.” But style is exactly that part of fashion that changes often. We recognize it because things go in and out of style. While it is hard to imagine that short skirts will once again become something that fashionable men wear, it is best for all of us to not place too much stock in the permanence of style.

Speaking of Geronimo

At the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, many Native American communities lost the land base that had made self-sufficiency possible. In 1887, Congress passed the General Allotment Act, also known as the Dawes Act, which dictated that reservation land had to be divided into individual plots and allotted to Indians as private property and whatever land remained after the allotment process would be made available to white settlers. Native people were nearly universally opposed to allotment. Most Native people then and now believe that land cannot be owned as property. It is to them like dividing the sky into plots and owning those, an impossibility. But white people be tripping, as you know, and they could not understand other people’s view of the world as legitimate. But in this case what white people thought should not have mattered because Native people had legal documents, treaties, to ensure that their view of the land would be recognized on lands they held.

White people have now mostly forgotten that treaties are legally binding documents that the United States entered into with tribal nations. England first, then the United States, recognized that the land belonged “from time immemorial,” as the legal language puts it, to the Native inhabitants. Thus in order to gain possession of the land, these governments negotiated with tribes in order to extinguish Native title. That is, tribal nations ceded land (what is now the continental territory that comprises the U.S.) but reserved for themselves some territory and rights that were spelled out in the treaties. So for all the territory they gave up, tribal nations reserved the right to have their remaining lands administered in trust by the federal government. The government agreed IN FUCKING WRITING WITH SIGNATURES AND EVERYTHING to hold Native lands in common and for the benefit of Native peoples. So when Indians objected to allotment, arguing rightly that allotment would deprive communities of the resources that had always sustained them, that should have been the end of it. The Indians were not counting on vague promises made by white people (fuck that noise, Indians thought), they were depending on documents that Presidents themselves had signed in solemn rituals. But by passing allotment, then enforcing it, the federal government went back on its legal obligations, not to say its moral ones, evil motherfuckers. Congress declared it had plenary power over Native lands and thus could renege on the very contracts it had made. Of course it wasn’t phrased that way. Congress argued that it was trying to "help the Indian.” By turning Natives into property owners, the argument went, they would magically give up their culture, their history, their communities, and turn into permanently tanned white people.

Allotment had the result that white people who pushed for it really envisioned: Indians lost 90 million of the 140 million acres they held prior to the passing of the Dawes Act. The loss of this land did not turn Indians into thriving white-ish people. What it did was impoverish Native communities and turn Indians into dependent people. The endemic poverty found on reservations today is the legacy of allotment.

But how many non-Indians think of this history today? How many non-Indians think of Native people in specifically historical ways? If non-Indians think about Native people it is usually as a symbol of something, a symbol they, non-Indians, can identify with. I hear the song “Geronimo” on the radio and wonder what it means for its audience. The song evokes Native history as a kind of thrilling heroic resistance, as valor in the face of impossible odds, as boldness. I’ve argued here before that it is very difficult for popular music to represent history, but as this song illustrates it is quite easy for pop music to obscure it.

Arcade

Dear Readers,

Arcade: Literature, Humanities, & the World has been kind enough to publish something from Pop Erratic in its fine digital pages. This journal is published by that fly by night outfit, Stanford University, so please give it a look before it's too late.

Sincerely,
Enrique

I Can Read You Like a Magazine

We finished the drinks and went outside. It was dark and raining hard. I wanted to keep talking to her so I offered to walk her home. She dressed like a cool kid from the early ‘60s. She wore her very dark hair pulled back, and her red lipstick contrasted against her fair skin. As we walked I could feel the rain seeping through the holes in the bottom of my shoes. We got to her house and she invited me in to dry off. I followed her up upstairs to her room. She turned on a lamp, which was just enough light. We sat on the side of her bed and talked some more. She laughed at me when I suggested that she was interested in me for the things I said in class. I had a high opinion of the kind of student I was. She told me about the languages she wanted to learn and why. She read some Proust out loud (pol). I found this silly. After a while she put The Boatman’s Call on the stereo—this phrase sounds so archaic now. “Into My Arms” started playing and we got silent. I lay back on her bed and closed my eyes to listen, my feet still on the floor. She lay down next to me. It was warm in her room but I could feel that my socks and shoes were still wet. When the song was over I opened my eyes and saw that she was lying on her side looking at me. She kissed me. We kissed for a while. It got very late. I said I had to go home. She said she would walk me back. We went back out into the rain. About halfway between our places we stopped under the awning of a convenience store and kissed again. My feet were soaked. When we stopped kissing I told her that this was wrong because I had a girlfriend. I told her she lived in Japan and that she was coming back for Christmas vacation in a couple of months. I said I was sorry and that this shouldn’t have happened. She said it was fine, and we went off in our different directions. The next night she called me some time after midnight. She asked if she could come over to talk. She came over. She told me she thought I was afraid and maybe I had a girlfriend but what had happened between us was real and we should give it a chance. I said that maybe she was right, but I couldn’t go through with that. We kept at the conversation for hours. She looked wounded and beautiful, and I wanted her most that night when I kept saying that I couldn’t. She left at dawn. A couple of days later I came home to find flowers on my doorstep. A few days after that, I was sitting on the curb reading when she walked up to me. I asked her coldly if she had left the flowers on my door. She said fuck you and walked away. The last time I saw her I was coming around the corner of my block, arm in arm with my girlfriend. She saw us and turned around. My heart was racing. I never heard from her again.

If all of this sounds like a cliché, it’s because it is. But it's no less true for being a cliché. That is, sometimes our lives take the form of familiar narratives. I think that this is one of the things that Taylor Swift is getting at in “Blank Space.” Sometimes things like desire develop in obvious ways and sometimes they turn out more or less in the way we imagined they would. Nonetheless, we feel these commonplaces as if they had never happened to anyone else before. No one’s broken heart is unique but it always feels that way.