Page 131 - Cultural Studies A Practical Introduction

Music 115

enjoyed commercial success operating in the male - dominated mode of
electric guitar rock, critical evaluations of their work tend to foreground
their gender in a way male artists rarely experience – we don ’ t fi nd special
issues of music magazines or documentaries dedicated to “ Men in Rock ”
– and these women are often back - handedly praised for their ability to be
“ one of the boys, ” that is, to display the lust and swagger usually coded as
masculine.
In the 1980s and 1990s, pop stars such as Madonna and Gwen Stefani
toyed self - consciously with sexist stereotypes, while other female artists,
Alanis Morissette and Courtney Love among them, embraced the aggres-
sive dynamic of hard rock and combined it with raw, confessional lyrics
that expressed a greater emotional complexity than has normally been
permitted of women in the genre. And yet, it is questionable whether
women in mainstream music have achieved the level of artistic freedom
accorded to male pop musicians, who are regularly able to experiment
with gender - bending aesthetics and a varied palette of lyrical themes
without fear of being pigeonholed or censured. While women ’ s creative
control over their images and artistic output has increased substantially
in recent years, most female artists must still trade upon their sexuality
to some degree in order to achieve recognition in the mainstream music
media.
A review of the brief but tumultuous career of Britney Spears may help
illuminate the ways in which music culture rewards or punishes female
artists based upon their adherence to or rejection of narrowly defi ned
categories of acceptable performances of sexuality. Spears ’ breakout 1998
single “ Baby One More Time ” was immensely successful, topping the
charts for two weeks and helping her debut album sell more than 25
million copies worldwide. What garnered more attention than the song
itself was the public persona that was crafted for her. The 17 - year - old
singer embodied a titillating confl uence of womanly sexual sophistication
and girlish innocence. She appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone wearing
a push - up bra and cradling a child ’ s doll, danced provocatively in a
Lolitaesque schoolgirl outfit in her video, and publicly pledged to abstain

from sex until marriage. Spears was strategically situated in two ideals of
femininity that are usually diametrically opposed: she was both virgin and
whore, an illicit temptress who covered the tracks of her transgression
with a sweetly na ï ve cover story. She was simultaneously the nubile sexual
object that heterosexual males could leer at, the sexually empowered teen-
ager that adolescent girls could aspire to be, and the polite, Southern