Girl, You’re a Product Now

This first ran on Splice Today.
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Japanese pop star Minami Minegishi, member of the pop-band-cum-walking-reality-show AKB48 was caught leaving the home of Alan Shirahama, a member of the boy-band Generations. In the US this would be gossip fodder and a boost for both their careers. In Japan, though, it was a scandal—Minegishi had signed a contract promising not to date, and the apparent tryst with Shirahama violated her agreement with management. Facing the prospect of being kicked out of the band, Minegishi recorded a video for the band’s official channel in which she tearfully begged to be forgiven… and explained that she had shaved her head in penance. (The official video seems to have been taken down, but a sample is here.)

 

As I noted above, AKB48 is not just a band; it’s a kind of American Idol reality-show performance-art extravaganza, with 88 members, different teams, and a cast of aspiring wannabe singers. Fans are encouraged to follow individual performers as they try to get into the band and then move up the ranks, eventually graduating as they get older.

The performers are banned from dating because having boyfriends would interfere with the fantasy of virginal purity and availability which drives the male fan investment. In this context, Minegishi’s tearful apology is itself a packaged dramatic moment in the band’s marketing; the singer’s deference and pain are, and are meant to be, consumable entertainment. Which in no way means that her tears or desperation aren’t real, it just means that real tears are extremely valuable to her employer. It’s possible that the management miscalculated somewhat on the extent of the international push back, or, perhaps not. Scandal is rarely bad for business.

All of this is fucked up, as Ian Martin points out in an excellent article for the Japan Times. Different cultures are different, and I’m as wishy-washy as the next liberal relativist, but still. Forcing young women into the closet and then raking in money based on their emotional distress is evil, whether it happens next door or overseas.

In this case it did happen overseas, and it’s hard not to in part react by saying, “Those Japanese are crazy!” There’s certainly something to that—the individual giving up her rights to the collective, and the ritual apology both seem quintessentially Japanese. It’s impossible to imagine even a pre-fab pop star like Justin Timberlake or Britney doing anything like this, not least because their images and marketing are partially based on rebelliousness.

Still, if mores are not the same in the US, the underlying dynamic is perhaps not necessarily quite different enough from comfort. I’m thinking of Ann Wilson, the force-of-nature vocalist for the 1970s rock band Heart. Wilson was allowed to date—the hit song “Magic Man” is about her then-relationship with band manager Michael Fisher. Nor was she not a contractual employee of her band. And her appeal to fans was not her virginal fantasy persona, but her amazing singing.

Or so you’d think.  And yet, over the course of Heart’s career in the late 70s and 80s, Wilson started to gain weight. As the VH1 “Behind the Music” episode makes clear, this became a serious problem. Music critics were vicious, incessantly focusing on Wilson’s appearance rather than on her phenomenal singing. The band’s label was just as bad. They harassed Wilson constantly… and tried to cover up her weight in videos by piling her hair higher and higher and by focusing more and more obsessively on sister and Heart guitarist Nancy Wilson’s breasts.

In the “BTM” episode, Nancy notes that the management kept saying that if Ann would lose weight they would make more money, which was kind of ridiculous since they all were, as Nancy said, making plenty of money. Similarly, it’s difficult to believe that AKB48 would actually stop being successful if it allowed its performers to date. The issue, then, seems like it’s less dollars per se than a kind of ideological capitalist rage for totalizing commodification. The product must be the product; the product shall be the product; that’s the logic of the market, and if there’s some human over there with desires or a body, then that human needs to be erased.

Sometimes the erased humans in question can be male… but women, in our society and in others, are more enthusiastically objectified than men. Thus, in Japan, Minegishi’s boy-band boyfriend didn’t face any repercussions for having a girlfriend. And in America, there’s Meatloaf. Guys aren’t expected to be fantasies, or products, the way women are in Japan, or were in the 1970s—and the way they still are, in many ways, in the US today. In that sense, Minegishi’s video doesn’t seem odd or foreign at all. On the contrary, it seems quite, depressingly, familiar.

Gluey Tart: Kicking and Dreaming

Kicking & Dreaming: A Story of Heart, Soul, and Rock & Roll, Ann Wilson, Nancy Wilson, and Charles R. Cross (It Books, September 2012)

As I work my way through the biographies of all my seventies and eighties rock heroes, I realize there’s no point in fighting my demographic destiny. I did expect this book to be dreadful, at least. Dreadful and tedious. Dreadful and tedious and full of repetitive boredom. Dreadful and tedious and full of repetitive boredom and clichés.  And of course it is not entirely free of dreadful, tedious, repetitive, boring clichés, but mostly it is “surprisingly readable,” title aside.

I have always wondered how Ann and Nancy Wilson managed to become kick-ass stadium rock stars in the age of Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones and Aerosmith and all those other very, very male bands. I always wanted to know how much of the early guitar sound was Nancy and how much of it was Roger Fisher.  And I always wanted to know how eighties and nineties Ann felt about being piled with huge hair and big, dark costumes, and shot mostly from the chin up in their videos in a viciously stupid attempt to keep us from noticing she had gained weight. (Answers: because they kicked ass; more Roger, in the songs I like best, but the acoustic stuff is Nancy; and humiliated and irritated, as one might expect.)

The book is told in snippets of narrative by Ann, by Nancy, by other members of Heart, by associates, friends, their mom, and Chris Cornell. This is a half-assed way to put a book together, but it does give Ann and Nancy their own voices. And they are charming. As fluttery, breathlessly dancing in a sun-dappled springtime meadow as you’d expect of anyone who wrote “Dreamboat Annie” and “Dog and Butterfly” and so on, but also as driving and relentless as you’d expect of someone who wrote “Crazy on You” and “Barracuda.”

That’s the dichotomy that made Heart brilliant, and frustrating. I can’t listen to any of their albums all the way through, and individual songs are often divided against themselves, the wild, hard-driving fervor never blending seamlessly with the frothy, acoustic effervescence. (I should point out that I speak of Dreamboat Annie through Bebe Le Strange; I don’t entirely acknowledge the existence of any of their other works.) But they have written some of my all-time favorite songs. I wonder if the hit and miss situation with so many Heart songs is because they were feeling out something that nobody had done yet.

A couple of million critics have written about this dichotomy as a balance of masculine and feminine, but that misses the point. It’s all feminine, and what gets called masculine is instead a side of femininity we don’t usually acknowledge. It was thrilling, back in the seventies, and it still is, more than thirty years later, even though we’ve gotten used to seeing women on a stadium stage. (“Straight On,” for instance, or “Magic Man” – these are pretty much perfect rock songs.) Which brings me back to wondering how they did it, when they did it. Or any time – but especially in the mid-seventies.

And they explain pretty well, considering that it’s really just one of those things. They start out by meticulously recounting their early lives, and in fact their entire family history. I found this touching, in part because I’m a huge fan of putting things in chronological order, but also because they love their family, and each other. I’m into that. They were a military family and moved all over the world during the girls’ childhood, making Ann and Nancy a solid, close unit. They were also musical from a young age. And they found the Beatles. Ann and Nancy see that as the crucial pinch of magic dust that launched them – or Ann, specifically – toward stardom. I’m less convinced; while all their friends were playing at being Beatle girlfriends, Ann and Nancy were pretending to be the Beatles, with guitars and everything. They already had whatever it was.

Next up: Who wrote what. I want to know who slept with whom or what as much as the next person, but I also want to know who wrote what, and under what circumstances. And the book has a lot about the music and about dealing with the music industry, which is always fascinating, in a degrading, evil kind of way. I’m curious about what inspired the songs, too, but that’s usually sort of discouraging. Magic Man, for instance, was a straight-up homage to Ann’s first and overwhelming love, Michael Fisher (brother of guitarist Roger Fisher and, for a few years, their manager). I’m somewhat uncomfortable with that overboard, overwrought song being about a specific man. That’s what happens when you listen in on someone’s creative process, though.

The book is also very much about Ann’s struggle with her weight – or, more accurately, the music industry’s struggle with Ann’s weight. She started gaining in the eighties and, eventually, she was fat. It doesn’t seem like such a horrible thing, but it just wasn’t allowed, in society or, especially, in the music industry. The shit everyone gave her over it destroyed her self-confidence, that blistering individualism that allowed her to get on the stage in the first place. (Well, that, and the music industry in general, and coke.) Have you seen any of those videos from the eighties and nineties? They have Ann’s hair so big she can barely stand beneath it, and her jackets and dark and broad of shoulder, excessive of lapel. She is shown in shadow, cloaked in smoke, or only in close-up, where the big hair and startling blush situation are supposed to fool the eye into thinking she’s smaller than she is. Or, perhaps, just short circuit the viewer’s thought process from an overload of confusion and perplexity. Either way, it’s pathetic. This is a beautiful and shockingly talented woman, and all the music industry could think to do with her was turn her into some kind of clown. That, and focus on Nancy.

This was more or less their approach to the music, as well. Most of Heart’s hits came after Bebe LeStrange, the 1980 album I consider their last acceptable one (although I haven’t checked in recently – I guess their albums from the last two years, Red Velvet Car and Fanatic, could be great – but I wouldn’t bet on it). Ann and Nancy tell the story of how the music industry repackaged them in the eighties, choosing hits they didn’t like and clothes they found ridiculous. I was pleased to find this out, because some of that shit is very, very bad, and knowing they realize this, at least to some extent, makes me feel much better about things. All the dirt about the music industry and its hangers on, by the way, is good stuff. It becomes very clear how bands go from brilliant to embarrassing in the space of one album. (Hint: Letting the music industry tell them what they need to do if they want to make it really big. Also, coke.)

I’d read a couple of popular feminist books recently, and I was surprised to find that the Heart biography was one, too. I don’t know why it surprised me, given their beginnings – perhaps because of songs like “All I Want to Do Is Make Love to You” (which it turns out Ann never liked, thank god; that song is the kind of shit you can’t wait to wipe off your shoe, and even then, you keep smelling it anyway). Ann feels strongly that she was judged by different standards than male rockers were judged by, and she suffered for it, and she resents the hell out of it. That isn’t tricky, as feminist arguments go, but sometimes simple is good. (I was glancing through the Amazon reviews, by the way, and noticed that Ron, an Indiana Republican who can’t spell, is unhappy about the book’s liberal leanings. Life must be frustrating for Ron.)

I got involved with this book, and not just because I spent at least a week reading it (its not exactly tight, and when you’re reading it in spurts of fifteen or twenty minutes a day, it seems endless). Also, I feel that now the Wilsons and I are so close, it’s cold of them to obviously leave out so much of the dirt – because the absence of certain things is palpable. (For instance, despite a decent number of generalized statements about drug use, there are surprisingly few actual anecdotes, making me suspicious. And in the later years, we learn about Nancy’s marriage to Cameron Crowe — and the demise thereof — but there’s almost nothing about what Ann was doing in her personal life over the last twenty years. What up, Ann?)  So, it was a bit of a slog, and a vague slog, at times, but that was all right. Ann and Nancy are likeable, and interesting, and they kick ass.

And I just saw that Rod Stewart has a biography out. God damn it.