Listening to the Rolling Stones’ “Mother’s Little Helper” the other day, I was struck by how much the lyrics resembled a misogynistic MRA rant. Ostensibly a song pointing out the hypocrisy of suburban squares attacking the drug culture whilst themselves popping prescription pills, the song extends its “critique” to cover such subjects as the evil of women making cakes from mixes instead of from scratch. (See below for videos of all the songs mentioned in this post.)
So you go from this bit of, ahem, social criticism:
“Things are different today,”
I hear ev’ry mother say
Mother needs something today to calm her down
And though she’s not really ill
There’s a little yellow pill
She goes running for the shelter of her mother’s little helper
And it helps her on her way, gets her through her busy day.
To this:
“Things are different today,”
I hear ev’ry mother say
Cooking fresh food for a husband’s just a drag
So she buys an instant cake and she buys a frozen steak
And goes running for the shelter etc etc
Yep, that’s right. Mick’s as bothered by the frozen steak as he is by the dangers of tranquilizer abuse. By the end of the song, the hypothetical freezer-and-cake-mix-using mother has died of an overdose. Told you so!
Misogynistic rock songs aren’t exactly a rarity – hell, “Mother’s Little Helper” isn’t even the worst offender in the Rolling Stones’ disography.
But unlike more straightforward outbursts of misogynistic nastiness like, say, “Under My Thumb,” “Mother’s Little Helper” pretends to be something nobler: a social critique.
The blogger behind the wonderfully arch I Hate the New York Times blog pointed out to me in a tweet that a surprising number of old rock lyrics play this little trick. Taking the form of a “critique of today’s inauthentic & hedonistic society” they are in fact “directed at [a] specific shallow hussy.”
Along with Mother’s Little Helper, IHateNYT suggested I take another look at the lyrics to Paul Revere and the Raiders’ “Kicks.” And, yep, it’s basically the same thing: a critique of drug use in the form of a patronizing lecture to a young woman in search of “kicks,” starting out with this little bit of I-told-you-so, delivered with a sneer:
Girl, you thought you found the answer on that magic carpet ride last night
But when you wake up in the mornin’ the world still gets you uptight
It turns out that the song, written by the songwriting team of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, was inspired by the drug use of a male friend of theirs – though somehow in the song this specific man became a hypothetical “girl.”
And then of course there is the Guess Who’s American Woman, a sort-of critique of America’s “war machines” and “ghetto scenes” in the form of a long, sneering diatribe against a hypothetical woman:
Now woman, I said stay away
American woman, listen what I say
American woman, get away from me
American woman, mama let me be
Don’t come knockin’ around my door
Don’t wanna see your shadow no more
And on and on and on for a very long five minutes and nine seconds.
One of the reasons these songs sound so much like MRA rants is that MRAs like to play the same little game, dressing up their misogynistic sentiments in the form of “social critique.” Thus Paul Elam’s faux-environmentalist attack on female consumers, and all that talk about how single mothers and/or “picky women” are going to bring about the end of civilization. Heck, some manosphere fat-gal-bashers even pretend they fat-bash out of concern for the well-being of the women they’re ridiculing.
It might be entertaining to transform some of these old woman-hating songs into critiques of woman-haters. “Stupid Girl” by the Rolling Stones might be a good place to start. I mean, seriously?
Like a lady in waiting to a virgin queen
Look at that stupid girl
She bitches ’bout things that she’s never seen
Look at that stupid girl
Those are real Rolling Stone lyrics, not a comment from NWOslave. Have at it.
Here are videos of all the songs I mention above:
She never wrote a song called “You’re So Trite.”
What’s Mr Kitteh’s instrument there?
@lowquaks, LOL! I’d never seen that parody. I’m glad to have struck on a band and artist who almost everyone seems to hate.
@lowquacks – I think it’s a lute, though it’s small enough it could be a mandolin. I raided the original of the pic from the net and didn’t look up what the instrument was.
@kittehhelp
Well, arguably mandolins are lutes. “Lute” is more a family than a particular instrument, but lute could refer to a particular instrument in some scenes I’m not familiar with, maybe? Renaissance/Late Medieval is the kitteh thing, right? I have a friend who plays wonderful recorder pieces from that era.
The important question is whether it sounded good and the performance was an experience, of course!
It’s certainly not a modern mandolin.
Good points! I know zip about musical instruments, so I’m going from the general look. Yup, medieval through to early baroque is definitely the kitteh thing. Mr K learned lute back in his earthly days: it was the king of instruments for court music then. He’s always been keen on stringed instruments in general. You ain’t heard Born in the USA till you’ve heard it performed on lute and sung by a foot-stamping Frenchman! 🙂
It’s a Renaissance-style lute, or certainly looks like it in that picture.
The couple whose pic I pinched to make this are early music performers, so yes, it would be a recreation of something of that era, whatever its proper name is.
Heh, its proper name is “Renaissance-style lute.” (Just “lute” for short works fine, too – “lute” typically means “Renaissance-era lute” by default.) Sorry for the lack of clarity – I’m actually an early music performer myself, so I figured I could help out a little with the lute questions. 🙂
Twitter won’t let me log in :/
Anyway, I think I learned most of my internalized misogyny from the pop punk/emo/hardcore music I enjoyed as a teen. And when I was hanging out with bands, wow, so much sexism. I have no idea why there’s so much of it in that scene, it’s baffling. But I watched a lot of women get treated like shit and personally got treated so badly by quite a few bands.
Why do I still like the music?!?!
Examples (trigger warning, some violent lyrics)
It’s still hilarious to me though that this band used quotes from Dawson’s Creek in multiple songs hahahaha.
To be fair he also talks about mutilating a man in another song, but sigh. I can’t help but love Saves the Day despite the violent lyrics against women.
There are a lot more but my finals brain is not really allowing me to think very well right now.
@Polliwog – that is so cool! Do you have a favourite/favourites among the various periods or types of music? Have you recorded?
So I have a problem with the whole Nickelback hate thing.
Yes, they’re a pretty stupid band, but really it’s inappropriate the amount of hate they get. It’s just an exaggeration of the whole “bully people and cast yourself as superior to them by disliking bands” thing.
@kittehhelp
You mean luted and pillaged!
@Jessay
At least all those bands are relatively young or were when they recorded those…
@lowquacks – Argh! LOL!
Okay, I can’t resist. This is a clip of Joan Kirner, who was Premier of Victoria (Australia’s first woman premier) 1990 – 1992. She *coughsangcough* I Love Rock’n’Roll on The Late Show in 1993. The other guitarist is David White, who was one of her government’s ministers.
The clip was hugely popular, so much that JK joked that if she’d done it before the election, she might have won. I used to hear it a lot during an exhibition on women’s suffrage in Victoria, back when I worked at Museum Victoria. That was years later and just about everyone who came into the exhibition played it at least once. It’s one of those so bad it’s good moments. 🙂
http://youtu.be/TxJg9zYXuW0
PS that’s the other guitarist in the suit, not the guy with long hair!
How does one start working in a museum? I love those places.
There was an awful bipartisan UK group of MP’s called MP3 and later MP4 at one point, famous for butchering “Teenage Kicks”…
I was in customer service when they started it (as distinct from secuirity) in the 90s. I enjoyed my time there, but it was a dead-end job if you didn’t have some sort of studies in an appropriate field. They leaned heavily toward casual positions toward the end of my time there. I’m glad I worked in the old Swanston St building, not the new one that opened about 2000.
The coolest job I had there was when customer service was being wound up for the big move in ’97. I spent a few months working in the Preparators’ department, doing skeletons for the research collections. I think they asked me cos I was a Goth … 😛
TV time for me – niters all!
If I had a pound for every time some creepy dimwit tried to chat me up by opening with the line “wow, you look like you could be a Suicide Girl”, I would have enough to buy a flamethrower to use on the next dude to try it.
Also, my rant about Suicide Girls, let me give it to you: There’s nothing edgy or ‘alternative’ about a bunch of white, thin, able-bodied, conventionally attractive young women getting their boobs out to be fwapped to. Even if they have tattoos. My mum has a fucking tattoo. Having a tattoo or a couple of piercings does not legitimise objectification or make it ‘better’ than rubbing one out to your average glamour model.
Sorry, just seen too many dudes who look down on the kind of people who ‘read’ FHM/Nuts/Zoo, but put pictures up of SGs like it’s any different.
But… but.. they have piercings too! And asymmetrical dyed hair!
There’s also the fact that Suicide Girls underpay their models, and instead of compensating them properly lure them in with the prospect of emotional validation via internet popularity. It’s kind of halfway between Hot or Not for alterna folks and an actual porn company. In my opinion this actually makes it far worse than porn companies that pay their models the going rate and don’t exploit their need to be liked.
I didn’t think it was possible to hate them more, and now I do. Cheers CassandraSays 😛
Re: Suicide Girls
(Might be a bit too off-topic)
I don’t know much about Suicide Girls but I think we have something similar in Germany called Kinkats. It’s basically a community for amateur pin-ups and models with a somewhat “alternative” style (punk, goth, rockabilly, steampunk, cyberpunk, etc.). They also used to publish a magazine but I think it’s only an online community now.
If I recall right, they don’t pay their models or at least not much. They get a free subscription for the community and get to take professional photoshootings, that’s all. And if other people want to look at their photos they have to subscribe to a monthly payment. So basically they are being sold to other people while they don’t get much except popularity, which sounds a lot like what CassandraSays said about SG.
Well, at least there are also male models and several people with a non-standard thin body type. And the photos don’t look as cheap to me as most of the SG photos (at least those taken by professional photographers).
Anyone outside of Germany heard of it? And is SG about the same?
Oh, did I miss the ‘list our musical tastes’ bit of the conversation? I’ll be so sad!
Wait! I shall be an attention hogging misandrist and talk about mine anyway 😉
My main CD buying days were late high school/early college when I was deep in my “Angry Rocker Girl” phase, so a lot of Tori Amos, Ani DeFranco, and the like. But I was also just discovering I actually liked (some) pop music, so if it was popular in say the ’98-’02 years, I was probably listening to it.
Now I’m back to listening almost exclusively to musical theatre songs, preferably in foreign languages. My iTunes library is a fun mix of German, Hungarian, French and (a whole lot of) Japanese.