I was becoming a girl as instructed by girls
but I knew I wasn’t a real girl, at least not of this kind. I wanted to be a
disco girl like Tina whose every aspect conformed to some golden section of
girldom: her height relative to her shape, her prettiness relative to her
smartness, her niceness relative to her toughness. Tina offered certainties.
She issued instructions on how to dance, who to like and what to wear. . . .
Each morning, her face would be retuned – the brightness turned down, the
colour turned up – and she would stride into school, her hips and breasts
armoured, her hair a winged blonde helmet. I wanted this shell, which she used
to attract or deflect at will. To me she was wise and ruthless, a goddess of
war.
Those
certainties soon become illusory, their surfaces shivered. Greenlaw’s
leave-taking from disco (to take up another set of surfaces, another glamour, in
punk) involves an accidental collision – a moment of casual violence – with her
friend on the dance floor; as she waits for help with her cut face, she catches
a glimpse of herself in a washroom mirror: “the face I saw was mine but this
was not a reflection. It was too far away, more like some inner self that had
slipped free and looked back at me now with my own fundamental sadness.”
Mimesis is belied by its own bad promises. What’s fundamental for her, as a
girl, what’s essential to who she wants to be, can never be more than pathos in
lack: a likeness – “more like some inner self” – that sadly never can or will
make herself whole.
Lavinia Greenlaw’s about my age. My own
leap wasn’t from disco but from some sort of sci-fi soft rock – I liked Styx a
lot – to punk and after, but the dynamics were roughly the same as hers.
Except, of course, for the girl part. I was enabled by the same dynamic as
Greenlaw, and I understand her preoccupation with want and fracture, with that
fundamental sadness, but I came at it as more of an insider, as a boy. I didn’t
seem to need my own version of that armour, and I could choose to identify more
directly, though still at some remove, with Joe Strummer or (like Greenlaw) Ian
Curtis or with any other self-styled punk frontman. I perceived the homoeroticism in Pete
Townshend’s 1980 song “Rough
Boys” as emblematic of a transgressive effeminacy in punk ‘s – particularly
the Sex Pistols’ – preoccupation with image, although I am not sure how far I
was ever able to follow through on its gender trouble.
Still, I was reminded of this version of the girl
problem with the release in November of About
Time, Ellen Foley’s first album in
about thirty years. (I haven’t listened to the record well enough yet, but it
sounds to me so far like the power, the tough richness of her voice has
remained undiminished, and I’m so glad to be able to hear her belt out some
raw, driving rock and roll again.) Ellen Foley’s return to
recording recalls how important her first two albums were to teenaged me – Nightout (1979) and Spirit of St Louis (1981) – as well as her vocal presence on Sandanista! by The Clash (who are
essentially her backing band on the second record, which was made while she was
dating Mick Jones, billed in the liners as “my boyfriend”). She was the girl, as far as I could see and hear
then. Her sound, her image and her sensibility yoked together a seemingly fey
prettiness – what Greenlaw says she wanted simultaneously to embrace and to
throw off – and a powerfully resilient, gutsy resistance to bullshit effeminacy.
Despite appearances, she was nobody’s girl, nobody’s fool.
There is plenty to say about what Ellen
Foley’s music comes to embody, but I want to concentrate on her take on the
iconography of the girl. She first made her presence known in pop music as the
female interlocutrix on Meatloaf’s “Paradise by the Dashboard Light,” and she
recorded duets with Ian Hunter (who had produced, and performed on, her debut
album, Nightout) and others that
extend her role as respondent, as the girl you serenaded but who could out-sing
and even out-swagger you back. She performed a version of “We Gotta Get Out of
Here” with Hunter on “Fridays,” ABC’s short-lived answer to Saturday Night Live, on May 5, 1980, a
performance that suggests much about how Ellen Foley takes on a male-dominated
stage.
She
comes in half-way through the song – you can catch glimpses of her, back to the
audience, waiting to pounce. Most importantly, for me, is her refusal to be
subdued, even by Hunter’s obvious recalcitrance. (And it’s important to note
that these are rock-and-roll theatrics: Ellen Foley has stressed in a number of
interviews how grateful she was to Hunter and to Mick Ronson, and how happy she
was with their musical relationship.) At the close of the song, she declares
into the mike she’s going to have a dance contest with Hunter, and he turns to
face her, but does nothing. Undaunted, she goes ahead and has a dance contest
all by herself.
She seems here in one sense to have
donned the blonde armour, the make-up of girlish deference that Greenlaw
describes around disco girls, but – strident in her flashy white pantsuit – she
also becomes something more in this clip: unshaken, energized, assured. She
owns the last minute of that song. This playful, ironic doubling emerges most tangibly in one of the
most memorable covers on Nightout (a
song she still performs in concert), the Jagger-Richards penned “Stupid Girl”:
I'm not talking about
the kind of clothes she wears
Look at that stupid
girl
I'm not talking about
the way she combs her hair
Look at that stupid
girl
You see the way she
powders her nose
Her vanity shows and
it shows
She's the worst thing
in this whole damn world
Well, look at that
stupid girl
The
song first appeared on the Rolling Stones 1966 lp Aftermath,
occasioned as both Keith Richards and Mick Jagger have separately admitted by
their frustration with female fans and with their failed relationships. Prima facie, as the lyrics make obvious,
it’s a misogynist rant. Girls are sick and stupid, Keith and Mick tell us,
because they’re so shallow, so vain, because of their obsession with image. (Not
at all like Mick and Keith. Not at all.) So why would Ellen Foley choose to
sing this particular song? Because the thing is, if you listen to her version,
backed by snarling guitars and thumping four-on-the-floor kick drums, you get
no sense of anything but absolute commitment, of anything but digging in and
digging deep. There is nothing vain, nothing insincere about Ellen Foley’s
voice. It sounds completely like she means it.
But what exactly can she mean? Because,
despite the venomous lyric, what we hear from her isn’t a woman calling others
out, sniping at all the Tinas she can’t ever be. She’s singing the admixture of
desire and loathing that the Stones song articulates, sure, but she’s also
shoving it back in their faces, in their ears, our ears. I remember hearing
this song as an adolescent listener, blasting it out of my stereo, and feeling
that mixture of toughness and allure that few singers beyond Ellen Foley, in
those transitional years, ever managed to catch. In a lip-synched video of
“Stupid Girl” made for the Kenny Everett television show in1980, that catches a
little of this pushback in its campy staging around body builders and beauty
contestants.
When
Ellen Foley sings into the beefcake armpit of some muscleman or into the
plasticized coiffure of a pretty second runner up that “She purrs like a
pussycat / Then she turns 'round and hisses back,” it’s not at all certain
whose image – boy, girl or her own – is being confronted and undone. Rather
than self-pity, the fundamental sadness that Greenlaw highlights, Ellen Foley
offers her audience a means to uncover another certainty, a centredness that
the unshakable timbre her voice enacts.
Mick Jones wrote “Should I Stay or
Should I Go” for Ellen Foley. As a provocation, it seems to offer a bitter critique
of indecision, of a girlfriend unable to make up her mind and of a boyfriend in
thrall to her waffling. I’m assuming the song comes at the end of their
relationship, and the recording by The Clash does appear to offer a sort of
vindicating, and maybe even vindictive, catharsis for Jones. The thrashing
guitars and double time chorus enact a release, a letting go that the lyrics themselves
never allow.
A
2007 audience video of Ellen Foley performing “Should I Stay or Should I Go”
suggests that her vocal power remains undiminished, and goes a long way to
reclaiming her agency, again by taking hold of the song and singing it back at
the boy or boys who authored it. More than that, it points to the subtle ways
in which the indecisiveness of the lyric comes not from the object of its
attention – an interlocutrix who doesn’t really answer back within the
framework of the song – but from its male persona, who stays bugged by his own
irresolution, by the unsatisfied involution of his own desire. When he says that
if he stays there will be trouble, but if he goes it will be double, he’s
pointing – at least when we hear the song with Ellen Foley’s voice in mind, in
our mind’s ear – to the essential conflict, the trouble, around heteronormative
desire, around gender and identity, that Greenlaw’s memoir confronts, and into
which it sometimes spins and stalls – the difficult importance of music to girls. And for me, that importance, that insistence, sounds
something like the intensity, like the depth and like the ruthless beauty of
Ellen Foley’s voice.
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