Empowerment Vs. Exploitation: Women in Music
"If Betty were singing today she'd be something like Madonna, something like Prince, only as a woman."
Miles Davis famously said this of his ex-wife. They were married only for a year in 1970. Three years later she unleashed herself on the world through her self-titled funk album. She was raw. She was sex. She was power. Miles wasn't wrong. But all this provocation and posturing; was it empowering or ultimately just wilful sexual exploitation?
Sex has always been in music, of course. Jazz was born in the whorehouses of New Orleans and blues recordings from the 1920s contained a myriad of coital references ranging from fluffy euphemisms to just plain crassness. In the golden era of Soul, Wilson Pickett sang about the activities (or is that proclivities) in the Midnight Hour and Dr. Marvin Gaye prescribed carnal remedies. These examples do not even begin to mark the surface of the varied musical styles in which sex has been explored, but that's another tome entirely.
Implicit in every art form is the expression of human experience. Often, where there is repression, this expression will counter it in a Newtonian fashion. In 1973, Marvin Gaye, Sly and the Family Stone and many of their colleagues had released albums that reflected the consciousness of the day: against Vietnam, against racism and all for free love. Even in that environment with the sexual revolution in full swing, the world wasn't ready for Betty Davis. Nor was the establishment ready years later when Madonna and Prince were making similar statements, shocking and inspiring a whole new generation. These are now in the pantheon of musical revolutionaries: those who took their right to free speech in both hands and explored the depths of the most intimate of human activities, not always taking it too seriously in the process.
To take us into the now, a line can be drawn from Davis through Tina Turner, Janet Jackson and Beyonce to end up at the tween and teenage stars like Miley Cyrus and Hilary Duff. Was Davis only a model for exploitation that has been shape shifted into a modern context? A pawn of the male dominated recording industry in order to move more units? It would be hard to argue that her skimpy outfits and explicit lyrics aren't similar to the candy that fills today’s singles shelves.The difference, as Davis tells it, was in why she did what she did. "Men are in a good position. Because I look this way, I had to act a certain way. I had to use a hard edged approach”. She was reacting to what she had experienced. Whether or not it was ultimately effective, she claimed back the exploited image of women and powerfully made it her own.
The question of whether teenagers are being sexualised from too young an age has filled many a headline. What's the connection between these social symptoms to the 'sexual empowerment' that has been explored through music during the last three or four decades? If you take a look at any video clip of an up-and-coming starlet, you will be guaranteed three minutes and thirty seconds of excessive rump shaking. That's the image. No surprises. That's what sells. Just the same as what was being sold in 1920s. But is it more about who's selling it rather that what is being sold? One of the top billers of yesteryear was the "Empress of the Blues" Bessie Smith. She was a hard woman. A tough childhood, huge stature, appetite for alcohol and promiscuity with both sexes gave her a lot of blues to sing about. It was real. As with Davis, her songs were borne of her life.
Isn't this a bit killjoy, to dissect people Gettin' It Orn through music? Lighten up, it's just sex. It is and the celebration of it, in all its various forms can be a wonderful thing. The commercialisation can viewed as similar to the fallout of the punk movement. It was just that, a movement; however brief that black-leathered, studded light shone and it has had a long-standing cultural influence. Sexual objects are made of people who are barely aware of their own sexuality and many are only appropriating (or, are being made to appropriate) the image of those ‘empowering’ artists who came before rather than finding their own path, their own individual reactions.
The production and marketing of artists is blurring the already indistinct line between provocation and profit as from the first comes the second and it can be hard to tell which came first. A chicken-and-egg situation. So where is the border between exploitation and empowerment? There is a lot of the former being dressed up as the latter and the difference may not even be that apparent to the individual who is the subject of it. When external forces influence a loss of innocence then this is the ultimate crime, primarily against the subject and, to a lesser degree, their audience. Regrettably, this is the pattern that appears to be set and does not show any sign of changing. What would today's Betty Davis sing about all this? I hope: whatever is on her mind.
