This is Part 2 out of Part 5 of “Women In Resistance Through The Means Of Music” thesis written by Jamie Alvis.
CHAPTER II
PUNK AND WOMEN
“Women had traditionally had the strongest presence and they were certainly
involved in the forming definition of punk.” (Frith and Horne, 1987:129)
As I have stated in the introduction, the main focus of this dissertation will be three
generations of women in resistance by the means of music. I will discuss what is
perhaps thought to be the foundation and thus the starting point of women in music
and how they challenged the norms of femininity and thus resisted patriarchal
ideologies. I shall begin by introducing Patti Smith who was known to inspire women
and the Punk ethics of the mid - late 1970’s. I will then discuss the ‘100 Club’ Punk
festival of 1976 and explain how it developed a further means of female resistance
and how it provided a further stepping stone for women to be acknowledged. I shall
specifically focus on Siouxsie Sioux and Poly Styrene, whom later became symbolic
figures in Punk history and how they sought to challenge the sexist male-dominated
music industry “The music industry was incredibly sexist and very old fashioned
when Punk started” (YouTube, The Punk Years: Typical Girls’). The approach that I
will be drawing on will range from the aesthetics, political, the avant-garde and how
this art-form/avant garde style was incorporated into Punk music as a further means
of resistance for women in Punk. I shall also be drawing attention to ‘pop music’ to
widen the forms of resistance in music, as basing this chapter primarily on ‘Punk’
would be rather narrow, as the connotations of ‘Punk’ has generally been seen as
rebellious, so essentially, by also considering a figure in ‘Pop music’ will enable me
to elaborate on the ways in which resistance existed in both genres. In this chapter I
will look at the works of Sheila Whiteley, Simon Frith, Sue Lees and Howard Horne
amongst other important writers in this field.
PATTI SMITH
Initially it will be essential to discuss the ‘active’ and ‘passive’ audience in relation to
music performance. Lees argues that girls are not passive how ever, she continues to
state that “Girls are not passive victims but are daily constructing complex strategies
for contesting the language and abuse that render them subordinate” (Lees, 1993:
261-262). There is no context or period of history that Lees is referring to so in that
case it would seem to be a generalized statement. However Sheila Whiteley argues
that in the context of 1960s and 1970s rock music “women were the ‘passive squaws
of patriarchal hippy men” (Whiteley, 2000: 9 
. Whiteley’s argument seems to
provide some significance as she continues to say that women after the 1960’s and
1970’s became ‘warrior and mystic’, which implies the starting point of women and
their resistance by the means of music and this indicates that the Lees quotation that I
have inserted shows some significance and perhaps Lees was referring to the context
of the 1960’s and 1970’s. It would be crucial to introduce Patti Smith as significant in
this starting point which I shall discuss more fully later in this chapter. Simon Frith
and Howard Horne discuss ‘Punk’ in their book “Pop into Art”. They discuss the
theoretical side of ‘Punk’ and how it was established and conceptualized through the
means of art and aesthetics. They place strong emphasis on the role that women had
and how it was profoundly a woman-made subculture and thus how women made
significant contributions to Punk, including, the design of Punk clothing and style (for
example the role of Vivienne Westwood in designing the Punk ‘look’/aesthetic, the
production and circulation of fanzines and women as musicians i.e. Siouxsie Sioux
and Poly Styrene. The influential poet and songwriter Patti Smith is introduced as an
example to identify the reactions that were received from the public, when Punk had
yet to capture the attention of the general public and at a time when female
performers tended to be received and circulated in such a way as to objectify women
and subjected them to an assumed ‘male gaze’. “She was hugely influential on all the
women Punk singers” (YouTube, The Punk Years: Typical Girls’). Patti Smith
challenged the status quo when she dressed herself in typical male clothes for her
album cover art ‘Horses’. At the time of being released in 1975 the general patriarchal
ideology condemned and associated women with thus seen women as Frith and Horne
explains “innocent/slut/mother/fool” (Frith and Horne, 1987: 155), which indicates
the angst which influenced women in punk to rebel against. As a comparison, Frith
and Horne introduce David Bowie and Patti Smith, and discuss their similarities in
dress codes i.e. how they both resisted dressing in the conventional sense and how
they both challenged traditions.
“Patti Smith, like David Bowie, had a significant influence on punk and she had a
much more sophisticated understanding of gender codes. Because ‘femininity’ is
made for the male gaze, so it is defined by a look, in the hang of one’s clothes, the use
of make-up, the angle of the camera” (Frith and Horne. 1989: 155)
Judith Butler discusses gender as a performative fashion in the sense that the
definition that divides male and female are acted out in specific ways; evidently
Smith and Bowie subverted this mode of performance and this expectation of sexual
difference. “…the regulatory norms of ‘sex’ work in a performative fashion to
constitute the materiality of bodies and, more specifically, to materialize the body’s
sex, to materialize sexual difference in the service of the consolidation of the
heterosexual imperative” (Butler, 1993: 2). So fundamentally Patti Smith represented
the terms of the resistance – to challenge the dominant ideas of femininity – this
challenge was what other women of the Punk era aspired to do.
ABBA 1975 as heteronormative Smith 1975. A subversion
PUNK FESTIVAL AND
WOMENS LIBERATION…
In her book Sugar and Spice, Sue Lees explains that adolescent girls find it even more
problematic to create an identity when pressured into the ‘norm’ of society. They are
constantly trying to create themselves but at the same time face the complications of
worrying if boys will find them sexually attractive. “Girls are encouraged to work
hard and plan a career, yet developing academic interests carries the risk of rendering
them unfeminine and unattractive to boys” (Lees, 1993: 262) This is why something
such as the Punk festival was significant to women and adolescent girls. The
community of female Punks had something in common, they wanted to be subversive,
the world outside of Punk simply could not accept them, so this community allowed
them to be and say what they wanted. The 1976 Punk festival at the London ‘100
Club’ was symbolic to giving women and adolescents a voice that had previously
been more difficult to find in music as well as domestically.
Siouxsie Sioux at the 100 Club 1976
The festival was arranged by the Sex Pistols manager, Malcolm Mclaren. One figure
to appear on the stage was Siouxsie Sioux. The editor of the feminist fanzine ‘Jolt’
commented on the festival as a significant time for female expression and recognition
though the means of Punk, which essentially offered a platform for women to speak
as it were. The central ethic of ‘Punk’ denies conformity and so this was a medium in
which women were able to be taken seriously.
“…women were singing about their own experiences in a way which I don’t think
they’d done before. I never got one Punk woman in any interviews to say she was a
feminist, because I think they thought the feminist label was too worthy, but the lyrics
they were coming out with were very challenging” (Whiteley, 2000: 10
SOUXSIE SIOUX
Much like Poly Styrene, Siouxsie Sioux sought to challenge the status quo, but
initially in a much more radical sense. She once applied a Nazi swastika to her arm.
This infamous incident was allegedly done for ‘shock value’, a gesture that inevitably
led the media to believe that she was a member of the National Front (in fact Sioux
was anti racism, she was later involved in the ‘rock against racism’ music event,
perhaps an event to articulate her true feelings about the prejudice she was thought to
be supporting.) Punk music and the avant-garde would be imperative to mention here.
The avant-garde is a term that is defined as ‘pushing the boundaries’ of the ‘norm’ or
‘status quo’. The term has been used to describe the work of Punk artists as a ‘work of
art’. What Siouxsie Sioux proposed by her Swastika was to shock people, much like
some forms of the avant garde sought to do “Punk performances were thus informed
by avant-garde arguments about shock value” (Frith & Horne, 1987: 128). A
statement that almost suggests that old traditions such as female repression should
become obsolete. It would also be relevant to note in this instance that most Punk
artists were in fact members of art colleges. “Artists…suddenly found that they could
apply their ideas in a pop club setting and get much more vital reaction than they ever
got in a gallery – even gobbing was a better response to an experimental show than
polite applause” (Frith and Horne, 1987: 12
Siouxsie Sioux challenging the status quo
SITUATIONIST AND PUNK
Whilst discussing Punk’s connection with the avant garde it would be useful to
discuss the term ‘situationist’. The term itself refers to the 1968 French artistic
student movement. The aim for the situationists was to take an art-form and use it as a
political weapon, in this case ‘Punk’ was an art-form. In many ways Punk is tied with
the principles of ‘situationist’. Punk as an art- form would challenge the conventional
and eventually turn establishments against themselves as a form of subversion and to
demonstrate what people could not see in capitalism i.e. major music industries.
“Their activities were intended to conform to true situationist practice, which aimed
imaginatively to disrupt the everyday life of capitalism in order to expose its
oppressive nature” (Laing, 1985: 126). Malcolm Mclaren (Sex Pistols manager)
would use fragments of the situationist approach, as would most female Punks
because it was in a sense subversive. “Vivienne Westwood also ascribed to
situationist ideals, and everything from album cover sloganeering to the bondage
trousers they wore was intended to provoke a specific social response.” (Wikipedia,
Punk ideologies). Mclaren himself took inspiration from Andy Warhol and used the
ideas to form the Sex Pistols, but in the context of this dissertation in this chapter it is
predominately women I am looking at. Nevertheless McLaren’s idea was to be
confrontational and subversive which involved his band the Sex Pistols on the Bill
Grundy show, in which also featured Siouxsie Sioux. This particular interview
demonstrates the Sex Pistols members and indeed Siouxsie Sioux are challenging the
conventional.
POLY STYRENE
Poly Styrene of the X-ray specs is another significant example when discussing the
areas established above which are centrally concerned with Punk music being a
platform for women to give voice to that which was previously restricted. I am
interested in Styrene because of her presence as a woman in a male dominated genre
and cultural milieu, her subversion of feminine norms in terms of her dress and style
and the content of her music and the style of her performance. The lyrics of Oh
Bondage Up Yours begins with “Some people think, little girls should be seen and not
heard, but I say, Oh bondage up-yours!” This it self indicates that women now had the
capacity of articulating what they sought to do before the Punk movement began.
Another example of Styrene’s subversive lyrics can be heard in the Styrene song I am
a Cliché, which discusses the fact that ‘Punk’ had now become manufactured and
capitalized to some degree. This then rendered her with ‘cliché’ characteristics of
what ‘Punk’ was thought to be. Whilst Styrene makes no explicit claim to be a
feminist her performance and her lyrics are consistent with a feminist critique of the
norms of femininity. Poly Styrene’s image also reflected the exact opposite of what
women were expected to look like in the conventional sense of the music industry. i.e.
her denture braces and obscure bin-liner-look dresses she would wear, not to mention
the soldier helmets that she would include in her performances!
Poly Styrene (photo taken around 1976-77)
“Poly was attacked by male critics for having a brace [braces]” (Gaar, 1993: 242).
Her performances were very mundane in the sense of extracting any sign of female
sexual objectivity to a potential male gaze. “By not being thin, white, or
conventionally “feminine,” Styrene’s mere presence in a rock band was enough to
challenge convention, and her songs, which cheerfully attacked the materialism of the
modern world, added to the challenge” (Gaar, 1993:241).
ANNIE LENNOX
As I mentioned in this chapters introduction I shall also be drawing attention to a
resistant female ‘Pop’ artist, so I will discuss Annie Lennox here. Lennox appeared
shortly after Punk and much like the idea of Patti Smith; she challenged the
conventional role of female artists through her visual image. The ‘Sweet Dreams (are
made of this)’ video featured Lennox in a suit with a stance of a man. Also
accompanied by this male appearance was the unconventional and unfeminine hair
style. The general consensus of the public opinion rendered Lennox as ‘gender-bending’. Gaar makes reference to this in applying MTV’s news week story entitled
“Britain Rocks America – Again”. Gaar inserts “with Lennox and Boy George paired
on the cover as the prime gender benders of their generation”. (Gaar, 1993: 327).
Annie Lennox in the Sweet Dreams music video is purely sending out a message of
resistance through aesthetics, a very close analogy of what Patti
Smith did for her album cover ‘Horses’ in 1975.
An evident analogy to what Patti Smith did in 1975
It is evident that sexual objectivity is subverted. The video itself places Annie Lennox
into a position of complete power and control that would have been unthought-of
previously. “As the first major MTV star, Lennox had demonstrated how visual
imagery could be used to challenge traditional images of women in rock” (Gaar,
1993: 329). The 1985 song, ‘Sisters Are Doin’ It for Themselves’ was thought to be
extremely feminist in lyrical content, so much so that singers such as Tina Turner
refused to sing with Lennox because she did not want to be projected as a political
feminist figure in the Pop world.
The notion of women and resistance in music seems to relate to the ideas and style of
Patti Smith, she certainly appears to be an iconic and inspirational figure for the
women in Punk music of 1976-77 and certainly inspired women to give voice and
most importantly in the context of this dissertation, to reject conformity that was
expected of women during this time. I have referenced several writers who similarly
create a consensus that the Punk era of the late Nineteen-Seventeey’s was an iconic
time as the traditional ethics of Punk were open to literally anything and new
experimental ideas which inevitably proposed that women would not be excluded and
could say something outside of the patriarchal ideologies. The idea of female
resistance in music continued to materialize in the early 1980’s with figures such as
Lennox who challenged the status quo by the means of dress and her apparent
‘feminist’ anthem ‘Girls Are Doin’ it For Themselves’ . This chapter has now set up a
foundation of my next chapter on the Riot Grrrls. As women in music progressively
moves on, a pattern of similarity remains which seem to refer back to the ideas of
Patti Smith. The identifiable key terms of resistance revolve around the notion of
identity, challenging conformity and sexual performativity. The presence of these
women that I have discussed here challenged the orthodoxies of the music industry.
For many years women in music presented sexual objectivity to some extent and thus
established the male audience in terms of objectivity rather than the music, so this
new emergence challenged and fractured what was known as the norm. Before the
closure of this chapter, I might add that the combination and thus application of the
Situationist and Avant Garde was a very important aspect of the late 1970’s punk era.
Through this juxtaposition it enabled artistic and political messages to appear on the
stage.
