Disruptive Divas: Feminism, Identity and Popular Music (Studies in Contemporary Music and Culture)

Disruptive Divas focuses on four female musicians: Tori Amos, Courtney Love, Me'Shell Ndegéocello and P. J. Harvey who have marked contemporary popular culture in unexpected ways have impelled and disturbed the boundaries of "acceptable" female musicianship. Contents General Introduction Acknowledgments Preface 1 A Cultural Studies Approach to Women and Popular Music • Mélisse Lafrance 2 “Close Readings” of Popular Song: Intersections among Sociocultural, Musical, and Lyrical Meanings • Lori Burns 3 Tori Amos, “Crucify” (1991) The Problems of Agency and Resistance in Tori Amos’s “Crucify” • Mélisse Lafrance Musical Agency: Strategies of Containment and Resistance in “Crucify” • Lori Burns 4 Courtney Love (Hole), Live through This (1994) Cultures of Injury: Courtney Love on Violence against Women and the Patriarchal Aesthetic • Mélisse Lafrance Musical Force: Violence and Resistance in “Violet” • Lori Burns 5 Me’Shell Ndegéocello, “Mary Magdalene” (1996) Textual Subversions: The Narrative Sabotage of Race, Gender, and Desire in the Music of Me’Shell Ndegéocello • Mélisse Lafrance Revising the Sexual “Gaze”: Musical Attributions of Power in “Mary Magdalene” • Lori Burns 6 P.J. Harvey Is This Desire? (1998) Terrains of Trouble: P.J. Harvey and the Topography of Desire • Mélisse Lafrance The Crafting of Desire: Musical Voice and Musical Embodiment • Lori Burns Appendix 1: Song Lyrics Appendix 2: Reductive Analysis: Notation Terminology Notes Bibliography Index Four "disruptive divas" -- Tori Amos, Courtney Love, Me'Shell Ndegeocello, and P.J. Harvey -- have expanded and upset the boundaries of "acceptable" female musicianship. By challenging our sense of what a female pop musician ought to be, they disrupt a dominant discourse that includes particular ideas of femininity, sexuality, desire, and the social relations of domination and subordination. Taking these women, their music, and their personae as exemplars of subversive elements within the pop culture milieu, Lori Burns and Melisse Lafrance examine a collection of their songs from both cultural and musicological perspectives to discover how a woman/musician/icon can disturb the very logic of her own popularity. The result, disruptive divas, is a remarkably engaging look at how these musicians challenge and overturn a host of conceptions about female identity through the medium of pop stardom. Book jacket

Disruptive Divas: Feminism, Identity and Popular Music focuses on four female musicians who have marked contemporary popular culture in unexpected ways. Tori Amos, Courtney Love, Me'Shell Ndegéocello and P. J. Harvey have impelled and disturbed the boundaries of acceptable female musicianship. Disruptive Divas gives close readings to individual, representative songs by each of these artists, in order to make general statements about the role of women in popular music. The artists and songs selected explore a range of textural themes and musical studies. Disruptive Divas shows how this material has disrupted the general expectations of popular music style, performance and marketing; in turn, it helps to empower women to be creative artists.

This book represents an effort to make sense of the multitudinous mechanisms through which four women have contested the discursive regimes of sex, gender, and race organizing late-twentieth-century mass culture.