No One's Little Girls

Last week London was on blast, burning up from a heatwave that had settled on top of the entire island, melting train tracks and pavement as far north as Scotland, even trapping one young man whose foot went into a puddle of tarmac as if it were quicksand. The tube was full of signage warning people to bring water everywhere and leave the train if they felt ‘unwell,’ but despite the imminent prospect of someone fainting at your feet, it was kind of awesome. Having just arrived from a land of rage and nastiness, it was soothing to be enveloped by the giddy sensation that everyone around me was unreasonably, even guiltily, happy. Between that royal wedding, the world cup and the weather, England was in a good mood for once. England was dreaming.

But there is one thing I can’t stand about England right now and that’s Love Island, a nightly television program on the BBC in which 14 total tossers live together in a villa in Spain in order to hook up with each other. There is ostensibly some kind of a prize at the end, but the rules to this game are obscure: in essence, they just walk around wearing as little as possible, flirt with one another in unintelligible accents and say really dumb things. (Example: “What animal is beef made of?”) Of course all fourteen of them are gorgeous, although absolutely identical to one another, especially the women, who are blonde, ‘fit,’ and surgically altered. All of England is absolutely riveted to this inanity, but it made me impossibly sad. On Love Island, the women literally service the men on camera (albeit under duvet covers), and then cry when the men change partners. So much for the #metoo movement: With the immediate destruction of women’s rights, I found its gender dynamics absolutely dystopian.

And so I repaired to the continent, where in some ways it’s eternally 1985. For example, one night I got in a taxi in Porto and the driver had the radio set on Bryan Adams song “Run To You” – on repeat. I heard it three times before I got to my destination, which was three times more than I’d heard it in the last couple decades. And also three times too many.

Bryan Adams makes music that is indescribably banal. It’s hard to imagine that it could spark the smallest amount of interest in a listener, especially twenty years after its release. As the cab wound it’s way through dark streets of Porto, questions arose from my subconscious like bubbles surfacing from the deep: questions like, ‘Who would listen to this and like it? Who is even supposed to speak to? What is the point of it, and why does it even exist?’

In some ways, questions like that don’t deserve answers. But the answers may well cut at the heart of all the taxing things about women’s roles in this era. After all, Bryan Adams is quotidian man, and his songs are quotidian culture. They use three chords and words of one syllable and a four-four tempo and an electric lead guitar. “Bleached’ isn’t a white enough word to describe it: It is dumb music, using the word ‘dumb’ in both its senses. It is emotionally mute, yet weirdly dominant. Even when it’s not toxic, masculinity like his isn’t exactly reassuring.

 It is also the kind of music that punk tried to disrupt and though punk didn’t succeed — if it had, I would have been hearing “White Riot” instead of “Run To Me” in that cab that night — it did lead me to this city on this day, to participate in an academic conference on punk rock entitled Keep It Simple, Make It Fast, at the University of Porto.

KISMIF (as it’s called) is in its third iteration, and this one’s theme is gender. To that end, the conveners had asked organized events around ideas that explored gender, identity and DIY cultures. Gender, identity and punk ought to be a but there were occasional hitches, as when, after a plenary talk in which Dr. Helen Reddington discussed the connections between reggae and feminist punks, the first question, from some : “….but…what about the Clash?”

Honestly. There are so many great men that I know, but there are also a number of men who feel a need to insert themselves or their proxies into every narrative, no matter what the topic. I get that they don’t even know they’re doing it, but I no longer feel like putting it aside. I wish I felt entitled enough, like a white male, to just tell men as a genus to just shut the fuck up.

Actually, I know full well that my life would be so much poorer, if all men shut the fuck up. But so is theirs, when they make women do so. And yet they do so, again and again, without even meaning to.

Later on, in the Cyber room of the Casa da Musica, an intimidating brutalist building by Rem Koolhaas that is full of uncompromising angles and uncomfortable planes and dangerous stainless steel staircases, the seminal punk band the Raincoats performed six songs in front of a huge picture window. Behind the glass, a Portuguese cityscape turned the scene into a gigantic painting, a landscape foregrounded by a portrait by Vermeer, or John Singer Sargent or Lucien Freud. It was like one of those painterly pictures where medium is all daub-y and thick, and the people in them look all craggy and lived in, and are holding objects that speak of their profession. The Raincoats were holding electric guitars, rather than carrying jugs or lanterns or flowers, and I can’t even articulate how great it was to see women who, rather than lying about in dim repose to be gazed upon by viewers, were caught in the midst of the act of creation.

The Raincoats music isn’t angry, really; not in the way the Slits or the Clash were. It’s observational and empassioned, and sounds at times like a verbalized sigh; like you’re listening into someone’s thoughts. Along with the Slits, whose drummer they shared, the Raincoats were an all-girl punk band formed in London in 1975. Its members met at art school in Hornsey, having come from a world which Viv Albertine once characterized as being closer to the 1940s than to the 70s. In her speech at KISMIF, Gina Birch reiterated this point, when she mentioned that the home she grew up in had outdoor toilets; Guitarist Ana Da Silva grew up on the island of Madeira where in her youth there was no daily newspaper and no television. Somehow that makes it all the more remarkable to me that the bands they formed with their women friends in London used the form of punk to reconfigure everything about the world they lived in. Just by cutting off their hair and wearing odd unflattering clothes, they disrupted the very notion of how women were looked at, at the time, and here’s the thing: they’re still doing that. Live, today, the Raincoats disrupt everything you thought you knew about how music should look, and sound, and feel. They are unlikely heroines in a world where the women of Love Island reign supreme.  

KISMIF’s focus on gender in punk was not only timely, it was spot-on. Later, in another plenary speech, Gina Birch talked about how, as a female, you have to go through you life ‘listening over’ lyrics: “I mean, like, ‘lay lady lay…lay across my brass bed,” she quoted, rolling her eyes. Jeez, I hadn’t even thought of that one, and I think about this kind of thing a lot.

But that in a nutshell, is the tension that won’t go away. Women, like the ones on Love Island, are seen and men are heard – even if their music is utterly banal and indifferent, even if they have nothing to say, even if they’re old and ugly, even if, like Bryan Adams, you can’t possibly imagine what it’s adding to the world by existing. It gets heard even then.