Hookay, so.

Music has always been a spiritual experience for me. I was raised in a church and when I was a young girl I believed there was this thing called God and I honestly thought that music was God’s greatest gift to mankind and that music made God really happy and that anytime I got God mad, if I just sang to HER all pretty-like that it would melt all the tigers in her heart to butter and life would be brownie a la modes and rainbows. So I’d sing to God every night. Then one day I heard Fiona Apple or The Flaming Lips or Neutral Milk Hotel or John Coltrane or Nina Simone or Kimya Dawson or Sonic Youth or whoever it was and instantly I got swept away in the sinful world of secular music. Now I literally spend all my time listening to music. Whether I’m studying, drawing, reading, writing, sleeping, eating, playing with my cat, you get it: all the time, music. I once spent an entire year listening to nothing but Joni Mitchell. I’d lay in my bathtub for hours completely enthralled with her unique tunings, polytonality and lyrics like “I could drink a case of you and still be on my feet” and “I want to make you feel better, I want to make you feel free.” I have every album she’s ever even been a part of, anything she’s influenced as well as several tribute albums. I never really watch TV but sometimes I won’t leave my bed for days, I don’t need to, I have everything I need: a bowl of cherries, some dark chocolate and my records. I pretty much make every life decision based off of music, for example: can I listen to good music at that job? If I move to that city will better bands play there more often? Can this new friend introduce me to something I’ve never heard before? Let’s face it: life would suck without it. As trivial as it may seem, supporting female (musical, visual, etc.) artists is something I feel extremely passionate about. It is obvious that these musicians have a massive impact on girls in society and can help in subverting the damaging effects of patriarchy. As Gayle Wald says in Just a Girl? Rock Music, Feminism, and the Cultural Construction of Female Youth, “In this realm, female artists have ventured to celebrate girlhood as a means of fostering female youth subculture and of constructing narratives that disrupt patriarchal discourse within traditionally male rock subcultures. The "girlishness" so conspicuously on display among these contemporary women rockers demands attention, not only because it signals the emergence of new, "alternative" female rock subjectivities (revising earlier genre-specific models such as the rock chick, the singer-songwriter, or the diva), but because in so doing, it conveys various assumptions about (white) women's visibility within popular youth/music culture, signposting the incorporation-indeed, the commercial preeminence of ironic, postmodern modes of gender performance.”

Comments

Kristen said…
I love so many of the artists you mentioned! I have yet to find another John Coltrane or Nina Simone lover! I'm gonna have to check Joni Mitchell. I think many girls find that they have a spiritual experience with music.

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