Regrettably She’s a Midget
The following is an extract from ‘Will it Be Funny Tomorrow, Billy?’, Stephen Cummings’s excellent collection of ‘misadventures in music’, published by Hardie Grant.
At the psychiatrist’s a while ago I was reading a magazine article about women in rock when I discovered this quote from Poison Ivy, bad-girl guitar vixen in The Cramps. ‘Men,’ said Poison, ‘act as if playing the guitar is complicated. But there are only six little strings on a guitar.’
I shared this information with my girlfriend one evening. ‘I could tell you my theories on women and music,’ I offered.
She settled in front of her new iMac with the 24-inch screen. She slurped some shiraz. I could see quite clearly that she was watching Ricki-Lee Coulter on EyeTV while pretending to listen to me.
I could hardly blame her. She hates theory; she had to teach film theory one year and never got over it. ‘No one cares who is playing the music anymore,’ I began. ‘All they care about is whether they can download it for free.’ I shook my head sadly. ‘Gender is irrelevant.’
I tried bamboozling her with statistics. ‘Listen,’ I said, reading from a printout from Slate.com, ‘in 2008 Mariah Carey eclipsed Elvis Presley’s record for most No. 1 hits by a solo artist with her eighteenth chart-topper “Touch My Body”.’
Mariah might not be cool but she is frigging popular, and in pop culture popular outranks cool. I thought that as a Ricki-Lee fan my girlfriend would appreciate that.
She replied that she had read at her hairdresser Marco’s that Ricki-Lee was getting over her recent divorce by becoming the poster girl for positive body image. Being a size fourteen is swell as long as you are fit and healthy.
I said somewhere in the world there is a guy for Ricki-Lee whatever her body size. I said I hoped that Ricki-Lee’s next lover would be the one special person who means everything to her and that all her wishes would come true.
Then something strange happened. My girlfriend threw a book at me.
Young people who do buy music today have grown up in a fabulous sonic climate of rhythms, beats, raps and wails, and women. When I started out there would at least have been a man in the shadows, pulling strings. More often the man would be at the front of the stage, looking shy and angst-eaten and cute. That day is gone.
A tidal wave of pretty Australian girls with acoustic guitars – Clare Bowditch, Missy Higgins, Sarah Blasko, Holly Throsby and dozens more – are singing sad songs. They are a continuation of the long folk tradition of confessional songwriting. Years ago, A&R scouts were instructed by their record-company masters to scour continents and not return until they had signed up a couple of photogenic young women. The logic was standard industry modus operandi: we need a good-looking chick because everyone else has got one. Also, solo acts are cheap. One airfare, one room, one dinner. These girls all sing a slightly different version of the same song.
My girlfriend scowled. ‘Aren’t you a folk singer?’
‘No. I’m a pop singer with hang-ups.’
My girlfriend looked ready to explode. She loves soul music, disco, Dragon and The Buzzcocks. ‘Aren’t you clever.’
Kooky geek-girls with a keyboard, lute, autoharp or ancient piano are another emerging sub-genre. They give themselves a moniker – Little Boots, Ladyhawke, New Buffalo – as if they are a group, as if by adding another layer of artificiality they will seem even cooler and less frivolous. These geek-girls are stripped-down versions of the sensational Joanna Newsom, who my oldest son introduced me to. Visually they encompass every popular look since the fifties. They have a soft spot for eighties nerdiness. Cheap and crappy keyboard sounds are essential.
Sally Seltmann, aka New Buffalo, is clever, polite and has a good voice – which also helps. She gave her song ‘1234’ to Leslie Feist, aka Feist, and the song subsequently featured in an iPod commercial and sailed past 73,000 downloads a week. Her second album got rave reviews even though it was not a patch on her debut. It was called Somewhere, Anywhere.
When New Buffalo and I filmed an episode of the TV show RocKwiz, we sang a duet of The Jesus and Mary Chain’s ‘Sometimes Always’. It was fun, although I got nervous and drank too much. During rehearsals she explained with great seriousness that she was a huge Fleetwood Mac fan. I considered confessing my own obsessive feelings about the way those three voices – two girls and a boy – mingle so bizarrely yet magically. I thought better of it. Instead I informed New Buffalo that I had been playing her first album on high rotation.
New Buffalo didn’t blink. There was silence.
‘Was it a cold silence?’ my girlfriend enquired.
‘It wasn’t warm. She showed more interest in the guest singer Jim Keays’s eye shadow than me. And she kept checking her watch. She was wondering why the record industry was suddenly punishing her by making her talk to this idiot.’
‘You’re so melodramatic.’
I got the feeling that New Buffalo prizes control; she probably makes lists most mornings and pastes them on her fridge or keyboards. She has toured Australia’s cities and backblocks with Paul Kelly, who I got to know back in the days when people would drop by on a whim. It was just before he joined The High Rise Bombers with Martin Armiger. Paul knocked on my door in Malvern, sat down at Jimmy Niven’s piano and played an hour’s worth of songs. He seemed to have thousands of them, which was amazing and annoying. I still remember one – ‘This Train Is Headed for Derailment’, or something – that I don’t think he ever recorded. When he asked me to play some songs I had an attack of stage fright and concentrated on acting as normal as possible.
Pikelet, aka Evelyn Morris, wears thick black glasses and uses a loop pedal, setting up repeating patterns that swirl and frolic all around. Her songs are infused with irony. When she performed at Manchester Lane the room was filled with devotees dressed as her double. She’d smile shyly and say, ‘This one’s a disco song and we’d like to dedicate it to ABBA’, or ‘This one’s for Umberto Eco’. She seems boundlessly ambitious in a nonboundlessly ambitious way. Her mother apparently makes excellent small pancakes, hence the stage name.
These newbies have an unconditional affection for each other’s music – music which tends towards midtempo, share-house, sooky New Zealand pop. They attend each other’s shows and leave supportive messages on each other’s MySpace sites. They are a throwback to the fifties, valuing control and moderation over showing off. When I was a young pop singer I hated all the other groups.
My girlfriend twitched her nose. ‘Zelda Gilroy.’
I considered this blankly. Then it hit me: the original kooky girl in the sixties TV show The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. Zelda was besotted with dapper Dobie. But Dobie was sweet on the blonde bombshell played by Tuesday Weld. Zelda would wiggle her nose at Dobie, sure that he would fall for her some day, and Dobie would wiggle right back, involuntarily. ‘Now Zelda, stop that wiggling,’ he’d bluster.
‘Kylie Minogue.’
I explained that Kylie recently turned one hundred or something equally unthinkable. Some say her magnificent buttocks, judging from the latest publicity shots, remain in mint condition. I have read a University of Central Lancashire study acclaiming them as technically perfect. I sat behind her, clad all in white, on a plane trip once. Regrettably she’s a midget: a great performer, singer, supertrooper and entertainer, but little. Madonna, Kylie’s queendiva predecessor, is in robust health but looks weird, with those musclebound upper arms and that turkey neck. I feel similarly about Mick Jagger. Mick is in top nick, but his face is enormous in relation to his diminutive body.
‘So all you’re saying,’ my girlfriend intervened, ‘is that men are drama queens who used to hold the purse strings. Now women are expressing themselves. When I was fifteen you hardly ever saw a girl surfing at Cronulla. Now it’s a given.’
I skolled a pint of iced water. My liver and kidneys are not in great shape and I have to get through a gallon a day. I spied a photo of myself on my girlfriend’s mobile phone screen. I thought: I must drink more water.
‘Well,’ she announced, ‘I like some of these new female singer-songwriters. Neurosis from a woman’s perspective makes a change from all those men singing sorry babe, I’m dumping you.’ And then she snapped, ‘That pretty much covers my interest in women and music.’
I glanced once more at the photo on the phone. I took no pleasure in it. I look overcome by the conviction that the exciting part of my life is over, that my body is disintegrating, that the young women I pass on the street stare straight through me.
She caressed my arm. ‘You are such a narcissist. You try to disguise it by feigning interest in others.’
‘I don’t have to justify myself to you.’
‘Of course you don’t.’
I sighed, and put on a glum face.
‘That sad look of yours has a number of possible meanings,’ my girlfriend said. ‘Mostly it tells me that you are a compulsive flirt. Enough is enough! I love you, but you have to learn it’s not all about you. People of both sexes have always listened to pop music to escape their pressurised lives. It’s simple.’
‘Will It Be Funny Tomorrow, Billy?’ by Stephen Cummings is published by Hardie Grant Books. RRP$29.95 Paperback. Available at all good book stores.
Stephen Cummings has been making music for over three decades. In addition to the book excerpted above, he is the author of two novels, 'Wonderboy', and 'Stay Away from Lightning Girl'. Visit his MySpace.
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