In music, men have been the gatekeepers since time immemorial, making judgments about good and bad, high and low, promising or hopeless. That also applied to pop music: the boys determined what was hip. Although there are fortunately exceptions, most stars, DJs, producers and music critics are men. They determined the musical canon, in which men dominate.
Who has read the texts with which This Woman’s Work, essays by women on music, were announced, would think the book is about fighting for a place for women on the musical ape rock and failing to earn deserved honor and fame. But that’s not what the authors are talking about. Perhaps a book of sixteen high-quality essays by and mostly about women is in itself an act of defiance, but the pieces themselves are not about deprivation or denial.
These Anglo-Saxon-speaking writers, from very young to their seventies (unfortunately their ages are not mentioned, which would have been interesting given the time frame they paint) describe the soundtrack of their lives, the melodies that colored their youth, the rhythms to which their thoughts and emotions arose, the sounds and idols that guided them in choices in their work, relationships and identity.
The collection was compiled by Kim Gordon, co-founder of rock band Sonic Youth, and Sinéad Gleeson, an Irish writer and music journalist. The editors’ contributions are not among the highlights of the book, but they managed to bring together an impressive line-up: acclaimed writers such as Rachel Kushner, Margo Jefferson, Anne Enright and Maggie Nelson.
In the essays that have stuck with me the most, music has the role of emotional conductor. Music takes you back in seconds to where you never wanted to be or agonized back to. To never untraceable happiness or wonderful reveling, to the most romantic, joyful, most painful, embarrassing and saddest moments and phases of life.
Fatima Bhutto, a child of Pakistani parents, political refugees emigrating to Syria, was infused during her childhood in that country with a longing for a country she had never known, but would one day go to if the dictatorship was ousted. Her father turned The Dock of the Bay by Otis Redding grey, the song of a man far from home. With Harry Belafonte they sang ‘daylight come and me wanna go home’. At home there were also Pakistani folk songs and sung poems, banned by the dictator. ‘Tyrants hate music because despite all their power and violence they can never, ever control what is beautiful.’
In a funny, poignant essay, Leslie Jamison traces her own development into the woman she is today – successful writer, single mother – through eight mixtapes she made or received from others. She discovers that for years she had no taste or preference of her own, but conformed to those of admired men, first her brothers, later her lovers, whose approval she craved. Shortly after her divorce, she ends up with her toddler daughter in a cramped Brooklyn apartment, where they are quarantined because of Covid. In that isolation, she shakes off the male-dominated past and the eternal mourning of rejection. She makes a new mix, and dances around the room with her daughter. Love was where I always wanted to be. Apparently I was already there.’
Music offers a form to grief. In the touching essay by Zakia Sewell, the child of two parents who made music together, an old recording of her singing gives the young adult daughter her mother back. Sewell’s mother was diagnosed with schizophrenia shortly after Zakia’s birth; she was often absent. On that tape she sounds happy: ‘The voice of someone I lost a long time ago, before I could understand what I had lost.’
The most poignant essay is that of Yiyun Li, a Chinese-born American novelist. She tells how, alone in the car, she sings out loud communist propaganda songs from her childhood – an embarrassing form of melancholy. She tells something relaxed about her son Vincent, who loved musicals, especially Les Miserables. Victor Hugo’s book became his favorite book. Then she writes, like a sledgehammer, that Vincent suddenly died one day. The musical and the book lost their luster, became loaded. Li concludes: ‘Art is no more than a symbol, a placeholder for life. (…) You are not wrestling with the symbols, but with life itself.’ This collection is brilliantly written about that symbol.
Sinead Gleeson and Kim Gordon (eds): This Woman’s Work – Essays on Music. Translated from English by Janine van der Kooij and Petra C. van der Eerden. Nijgh & Van Ditmar; 288 pages; €22.50.