Should Museums Show Their Johnsons? (Part 1)

 

God, I haven't had that much fun creating a title in a long time! I guess the opportunity was arranged by the Fates and Muses in some occult ritual. 

Cries had just gone up regarding the planned placement of Seward Johnson's monumental sculpture of a slightly exposed Marilyn Monroe near the entrance to the Palm Springs Art Museum, when a group of anonymous scholars threw into question the naming of museum institutes and university buildings after Philip Johnson, the modernist architect and one-time American fascist. These days, it seems that having a Johnson is not always an asset.

Let's do Seward first. His 2011 Forever Marilyn depicts the movie star in a famous shot from The Seven-Year Itch, where a gust of wind from a subway tunnel blows her dress up above her knees as she tries to press it back down.

"Forever Marilyn, by Seward Johnson" (Photo: Christopher Lance)

 

No less an authority than the Palm Springs Art Museum's Director, Louis Grachos, as well as three former directors and other Palm Springs cultural luminaries, have spoken out against moving the statue there. Here's a quote from Grachos: “When you exit the museum, you are going to see the exposed backside of a 26-foot-tall Marilyn Monroe, including her underwear,” he explained by phone this week. “That’s not the message we want to give to our community.”

"Exposed backside?" Listen, um, Louis, and your predecessors, with your undoubtedly shining credentials as artworld  judges of taste and propriety, I have one piece of advice for you: Don't go to Florence!

Michelangelo's David at the Academia Gallery in Florence

 (Photo: Anton Alterman)

I mean, seriously - from directly below the statue you can look up at Marilyn Monroe's underwear... So what the hell is in your museum, Mr. Director, if you are so horrified by the thought of the Marilyn's underwear outside the museum? Just still lifes and Abstract Expressionist canvases? Or are you saying it's okay to show depictions of privies within your hallowed halls, but outside you'd better be more cautious? (Actually, don't go to Florence, but do go to the Vatican - where a guard stands outside the Sistine Chapel checking that there are no bare shoulders or knees about to enter, while a priest inside warns over a PA that "this is a house of god". But I digress.)

Let's keep in mind that Johnson's Marilyn has been around the block and behind the bushes once or twice. Forever Marilyn has resided in a public plaza in Chicago, at Grounds for Sculpture, Johnson's public sculpture park, in New Jersey, and in Downtown Palm Springs. This has not, to my knowledge, resulted in the deterioration of the moral fabric of society. (Okay, that fabric has deteriorated - but that has more to do with a certain New York demagogue than a New Jersey sculptor.) The brouhaha is all about moving Marilyn from Downtown to a spot near the art museum's entrance. I guess the culture czars of Palm Springs were too busy to raise the cry of poisoning the public mind when the statue was downtown, so they made it a NIMBY issue. Terribly responsible of you folks.

What, then, is the right "message" to send to the Palm Springs community? How about: "We will do absolutely nothing to offend your presumed 19th century sexual morality. Indeed, we are not so much an art museum as a repository of artifacts pre-approved by a committee of West Coast evangelicals, the Pope and the local Republican establishment..." 

Wait! What? This is actually a liberal southern California city, one with the highest concentration of LGBTQ households in the country, who just elected an openly bisexual woman as mayor, and where a Republican is lucky to get forty percent of the vote in a local or national election. What is this community doing imposing such anachronistic Victorian prudishness on their art institutions?

According to the directors and their cohorts, the objections are not due to phony religious scruples about sexuality. Rather, putting the statue at the museum "elevates an approach to women that is inappropriate in 2020, introducing a blatantly sexist statue in front of our most significant cultural institution." They refer to it as "a 26-foot statement about women and sexual appeal". Johnson's monumental "war memorial" statue of a sailor kissing a woman at the end of WW II has similarly been criticized for its upskirt view and the woman's submissive pose. (He called it "Unconditional Surrender", obviously relishing the double entendre.)

But women have been depicted in sexually suggestive and submissive poses since, oh, Botticelli's Venus? To say nothing of the frankly pornographic works of Picasso and others. Or Lautrec's prostitutes. Today, though, we know better than to show a woman's undies. Today we know that when men depict women's bodies they are being used as sex objects. In fact, why focus on secondary works like Forever Marilyn - what about The Seven Year Itch itself? Not to mention other Marilyn Monroe films, and of course, her Playboy spread. She didn't actually agree to be in Playboy, but she agreed to pose nude for photographer Tom Kelley, who sold the pictures to Hugh Hefner; apparently, she didn't mind the attention it got her. So, is the idea that the best way to honor her is never to show the films and photographs in which she is, clearly, depicted as an icon of beauty and sexual attraction - a role she conspired in over the course of a roughly 15-year career? Or am I missing some hidden logic? 

Sorry, I don't see any more sexual objectification in this derivative work than in numerous cinematic and photographic images that Marilyn participated in hundreds of times. But perhaps the narrative is supposed to be something like, "Marilyn was forced to let the male-dominated studio system make a sex object out of her in order to have an acting career, but we need not endorse that grim reality." (I believe something like this was argued by Gloria Steinem in a book on Marilyn.) 

There have been plenty of cases where women were taken advantage of in film and other visual arts, and I have no doubt that in order to break into the field Marilyn had her "MeToo" moments. But a blanket label of "blatantly sexist" for representations of her as a sex symbol is blatantly false. She was actually a trend-setter in taking control of her career; she formed her own production company, carefully managed her image, and forced the world to take her seriously as an actress after having edged into cinema in "dumb blonde" roles. I regret if it doesn't fit the pretentious piety of the #MeToo era to point out that some women want to be admired specifically for their beauty, glamor and desirability, but, whatever her other troubles (they were many) Marilyn was apparently very comfortable with expressing her sexuality in a variety of ways. There's absolutely no reason to think she would have been disturbed by Stewart Johnson's sculpture.

It seems that even art directors toss around casual judgments about sexuality without so much as a thought about the broader implications of what they are saying. To give the slightest credit to their offhand comments about sexual morality would be to write off a vast segment of the plastic arts, film, theater, vocal music in various genres, ballet and perhaps much else, past, present and future, as an affront to decency and something from which to protect the impressionable minds of society at large. It is frankly quite disturbing to see people who ought to be upholding principles of liberty, progress, openness and artistic freedom buying directly into a moral agenda that could equally come from the playbook of the religious right. 

But this, sad to say, has been my experience of the left in general, going back many decades, and the more so the more left they are. The unfortunate truth is that there is a thin line between the fulminations of the Moral Majority or the Catholic Church about the sanctity of family, with its narrowly defined limits on what constitutes legitimate sexual expression, and feminist scruples about sexuality and sexual oppression. The latter run side by side with reactionary efforts to suppress female self-expression when it happens to take sexually liberated forms that they do not understand as empowerment. 

Left and right, using superficially different vocabularies, attempt to suppress explicit sexual expression that doesn't fit their political narrative. But before modern feminism and gay liberation and the coming out of transgender people, what happened was the sexual revolution of the sixties, and you cannot go backwards to undo that without taking a lot else with you. We need to sharply distinguish between the critique of moral transgressions like rape, domestic abuse and the sort of serial predatory behavior that #MeToo targets (when it is on target, which it often isn't) and the celebration of sexuality as a game, a skill, an art form and or just a facet of human nature. Otherwise the public conversation is like a coin with the same face on both sides. Attacking a work of art with feminist rhetoric about "sexual objectification" adopts a different language to achieve the same ends as conservative monitors of aesthetic propriety

Let Marilyn's butt wave free. Maybe her message is just what Seward Johnson's was: if you don't like it you can kiss my ass.

Before I leave this part of the Johnson disputes, it seems worth adding that the Palm Springs art directors, before they got into their feminist rant, were complaining about the fact that the statue would obscure the art museum itself. Though it seems like a problem easily solved by judicious consideration of its exact location, I bow out of that conversation. It certainly was possible to debate that point without bringing in spurious social critiques.

But more interestingly, they did not even address other more serious issues of aesthetics and morality in their statement, to wit:

1. The statue, like many of Johnson's other works, was copied from a shot in Billy Wilder's film, and Johnson might be accused of plagiarism, as he was with Unconditional Surrender (apparently based on a famous photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt, V-J Day in Times Square). I'm not endorsing this view, for there is a robust tradition of secondary uses of images from previous artworks, and Johnson's sculptures surely add an aesthetic dimension that is not there in the original. But this is a more serious discussion, and one suspects that the relevant authorities had no taste for intellectual challenges, preferring to haul out some trendy epithets about sexism that need not be backed up with real logic in the current climate.

2. This and other Johnson works have also been described more than once as kitsch, not real art. His manufacturing process, employing CAD (computer-aided design) software to create works from existing images, has also put his originality in question. I have been to Grounds for Sculpture, where many of Johnson's works reside, among hundreds of works by other sculptors whose content ranges from contemporary abstractions to, let's say playful humor and fantasy.

Seward Johnson, "Dejeuner Déjà Vu" (Photo: Anton Alterman)

 

I've been to enough sculpture gardens to say that the range felt liberating. There is nothing wrong with modernist mountainsides like Storm King or rolling estates like the one at the Nassau County Museum of Art. But a visit to Grounds For Sculpture can relieve you of the tendency to stomp your foot and insist that "this public sculpture stuff is Very Serious Business!" And whether it is or not, I see Johnson's work being in the tradition of Warhol and the artists who used popular culture as a jumping-off point. He had an eye for the iconic, and if his work is kitsch or lacks originality then so does that of a hell of a lot of pop artists who stand in modern art museums all over the world.

3. There is also a more legitimate reason to at least consider the charge of sexism, though against Wilder, not Johnson. I recall that it was reported not very long ago that Marilyn, though she had agreed to the famous shot in which a gust of wind blows her dress up from below, was not expecting the strong blast that not only blew it above her knees but made it impossible to push the dress back down, exposing her for several seconds on the movie set in public.There was some suggestion that this was all intentional and that she was not very pleased about it. (I am not going to hold up this post trying to find the reference, but I believe it was in the NY Times; I'll keep looking.) Even if true, Johnson would not have known this when he created the statue. But one might argue that it rubs the wrong way to have an embarrassing moment so monumentally immortalized. The problem is, it is already immortalized in the film and a thousand reproductions of the clip. Making a sculpture of it does not necessarily endorse the original motivation, and if someone finds the statue disturbing, all the better. Andy Warhol did silk screens of an electric chair and other unsettling images. This is your culture, make of it what you will.

4. Finally, in this era when support for the arts by morally bankrupt corporate executives, and in particular by those involved with predatory pharmaceutical companies, has become an issue, it might have been interesting to raise the question of the extent to which Johnson's monumental sculptures owe their existence to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, spoils of a drug company that has been involved in plenty of ethical controversies. Seward Johnson was the grandson of Robert Wood Johnson, the company founder, one of whose sons (Seward's uncle) ran the company, and fired him from a job there at the age of 32. Seward became CEO of The Atlantic Foundation, a non-profit established by his father. Though he was not a direct heir of the Johnson & Johnson fortune (he even had to wage a legal fight for a small portion of his father's estate) it seems likely that his studio, artworks and sculpture park were at least indirectly subsidized by money from the pharmaceutical company. It has been an ethically rocky road for Johnson & Johnson, perhaps tainting Seward's work like a bottle of Tylenol or talcum powder. I say "perhaps", since I remain a bit skeptical of this charge too, given Seward's minimal connection with the company himself. But someone might develop such case, and it might even have more sticking power than the sexism label for Forever Marilyn.

So the putative art experts with their feminist consciences decided to shoot from the hip about the exposure of the metallic undergarments of a woman who is known the world over as a symbol of beauty and sexuality, because it was an easy potshot to take, while other objections would actually require an argument. Unfortunately, the whole thing is a sad reminder of another recent public art debacle by the liberal West Coast intelligentsia - the decision by the San Francisco Board of Education to paint over, then (after an outcry) to cover up instead, Victor Arnautoff's historic WPA murals in George Washington High School, out of fear that they may be exposing minority high school students to uncomfortable realities of U.S. history. (Read what the Parrot had to say about this one here.) Maybe California should just remove all its public artworks, close its art institutions, and take a breather.They have Disneyland and the Hearst Mansion, anyway; do they really need all these sculptures and murals too?

I think I have discovered something about myself. When forced to choose between freedom of artistic expression in just about any form, and political correctness in at least some forms, I stand with the artists, ready to endure the slings and arrows of self-righteous activists for the long-term good of our cultural heritage. But (there's always a "but"), there are limits. Peppering the landscape with works by admirers of Adolph Hitler is one of them. I'll talk about that in the next post.

List and You Shall Hear (II): NPR's "150 Greatest Albums Made By Women"

In this post I continue my critique of NPR's "150 Greatest Albums Made By Women"; scroll down to the previous post for the first part.

Whose Rankings? Which Recordings?

(The heading is a reference, no doubt too obscure for many, to a book on ethics by Alisdair McIntyre, entitled Whose Justice? Which Rationality?")

It was a choice, not a necessity, to make a list of albums rather than bodies of work. It was a second choice to list them albums according to a ranking of "greatness". Both of those choices were mistaken, in my view.

First of all, choosing one or two albums by outstanding artists is very arbitrary. As mentioned below, I'm happy with ranking Joni Mitchell at the top of the heap; but I disagree with both the album choices made on her behalf, even if they happen to be critically popular choices. The problem is the same throughout popular music. For example, there is some kind of critical consensus that The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is one of the two greatest albums ever made; the other common choice is The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds. But I know rock critics and other music fans who think Sg.t Pepper is not even a good album, and certainly not The Beatles' best album, though they would agree that The Beatles are the greatest rock group ever. Ditto Pet Sounds – some think it is highly overrated, though I have yet to meet (and would fight) anyone who thinks the Beach Boys are not at least one of the greatest American rock groups (for me, hands down the greatest). So why honor this or that album when the real achievement is the artist's corpus of work?

Had this caution been taken, it would have been clear, for example, that whatever the merits of Lauryn Hill's 2.The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, it is a bit bizarre to find this effort, which was followed up with nothing, as second in a list of the greatest popular music by women. The work of artists who were excluded from the list, like Joan Armatrading and Grace Slick, would be much harder to ignore if bodies of work were the subject. Picking individual albums opens the door to not only very arbitrary choices but to sidelining women whose overall contributions are greater, whether or not they have an individual album considered to be one of the "greatest".

Having decided to select albums, it was certainly not necessary to rank them #1 through #150. What does it mean to place Liz Phair's 31. Exile in Guyville 63 places higher than Sheryl Crow's 94. Tuesday Night Music Club? It seems odd in itself, but meaningless in the context of all the other possibilities. Why shouldn't Sade's 22. Diamond Life be closer to #1? Why is Bobbie Gentry's 83. Ode to Billie Joe ranked higher than Marianne Faithfull's 129. Broken English? Virtually every entry in this ranking seems debatable when compared with other entries. So what was the point?

My feeling is that the classical, folk, rock, Hip-hop, world music and jazz albums are all incommensurable with albums in the other categories. There's no picking a Pauline Oliveros recording and comparing it with Shania Twain or any such thing, no way Mercedes Sosa can be ranked in greatness with No Doubt. This is all just a big mashup: there really is no order to speak of, though you can speak of a very broad consensus that certain albums are among the greatest ever, some are among the most important, some are among the most original or unique in some way and some are of great interest to women's rights, causes, self-esteem and the like.

Lists of "greatest albums" are in general a lot of nonsense, as is obvious from a comparison of NME's "500 greatest" with Rolling Stone's "500 greatest": neither the top 10, the top 50, the top 100, nor any other grouping is even remotely the same from one list to another. NPR's list has no added legitimacy for being a list of only albums by women; it's an absurdly arbitrary ranking of women's album rather than an absurdly arbitrary ranking of all albums. This is not exactly a great leap for womankind.

Sung (mainly) By Women

The idea is that the list represents albums "made by women"; but that phrase is never defined, and no more than a handful of the selections would actually fit a strict definition of it. Just about all of the choices are collections of "songs sung mainly by women", albeit with male vocals in various harmony and sometimes lead roles, while in some cases the songwriting, production, instrumental performance, engineering, mastering, and just about every other aspect of the album was done by men. It's not the case with all the selections, but having been largely, in reality, "made by men", was obviously not reason enough to avoid including some of these in a list of albums "made by women".

Let's discuss some of the actual levels of involvement women have with these albums:

Overall artistic control by women: In some cases a woman clearly has overall artistic control of the final product - Tori Amos, Mariah Carey and Madonna are good examples. On some of her albums Sheryl Crow wrote the songs, sang lead, played about a dozen different instruments, produced the album and had female recording and technical engineers. That is clearly an album "made by women", even if there were also men involved in various important roles. Later so-called "girl groups" (I guess this NPR initiative might suggest that we re-think that term?) like The Bangles, The Go-Gos and Indigo Girls substantially controlled most artistic aspects of their recordings. I can't say exactly how many of the albums on the list fit into this category but my suspicion is that more than half do not.

Limited artistic control by women: Here the situation is more mixed. Take The Ronettes, who released just one studio album (in 1964): they were clearly in command of the vocals, and among the songwriters who contributed to the album were two women, Ellie Greenwich and Cynthia Weil. The producer, of course, was Phil Spector, whose influence on the final product was enormous, and the other songwriters, all the session musicians, and many other participants were male. On Shania Twain's zillion-selling album Come On Over she sang all the lead vocals and co-wrote all the songs. The other writer was her husband Robert "Mutt" Lange, who produced and had overall artistic control over the album, and virtually all other musical and technical personnel were male.

Women as more or less equal partners: Many of the mixed gender groups in the list – The B-52's, the Cocteau Twins, Fleetwood Mac, No Doubt, etc. – are more or less equal partnerships between male and female members. As I point out below, if these groups belong in the list, then the #1 group in this category is Jefferson Airplane, due to Grace Slick's foundational role among women in rock; but they are not even recognized in the list. (They are, however, in the similar ListChallenges list mentioned in the previous post, where Surrealistic Pillow is #19 out of 100.) On the other hand, Evanescence is largely dominated by Amy Lee, but they are not included either. It seems that the canonizers have simply appropriated groups or albums they liked as "made by women" without any consistent criteria for what that means.

Sung by women and that's just about all: Albums that are all but the opposite of "made by women" are also represented in the list. There is little reason to question the fact that the #14 choice, Whitney Houston, introduced one of the greatest and most influential voices in the history of popular music – perhaps the greatest pop vocalist ever. That surely deserves recognition, but her own vocal style is virtually all she was responsible for on the album. Clive Davis made the executive decisions, Jermaine Jackson and a bunch of Michaels - Masser, Walden, Kashif (born Michael Jones) – teamed up to write and produce songs for Whitney to sing; add three more Michaels (Barbiero, Mancini, O'Reilly) in the engineering and mixing room, and a host of mostly male studio musicians and vocalists, and you have an album. Britney Spears had practically nothing to do with ...Baby One More Time other than singing the lead vocals (and not with one of the greatest voices of all time, either); she did not select the songs or make other key artistic decisions about the album. On her eponymous Aaliyah the singer did little other than sing: while she gets "Executive Producer" credit, almost all the songwriting and actual production were handled by men. (Missy Elliott penned the lyrics to one song and had some artistic input on the project.) Nico's Chelsea Girl was written, produced, arranged and engineered entirely by male former Velvet Underground members as well as folkies like Dylan and Tim Hardin. Nico did not even like the album, as it was far from the sound she hoped to project, and if she had fans they did not show up in droves to buy it. You could call it one of the 150 Albums Most Inappropriately Dominated By Men, but not really an album "made by women".

So the notion of "made by women" needs clarification, to say the least. Of course, an album with a female lead vocalist gives the impression that she "made" the album, but while the contribution of the lead vocals is of course very important, it can also give a misleading picture of the extent to which it is the lead singer's album. When The Monkees turned out to have done nothing but sing on their first two albums they were ridiculed for it (unfairly, since the session musicians who had played the instruments had done the same for hundreds of other recordings, without any outcry). Singing a song is quite different from the kind of artistic control that deserves the "made by" label.

Here, then, are a few options for a tighter definition of "greatest albums made by women":

1. Albums on which a woman was among the featured performers and had overall artistic control.

2. Albums on which a woman was the featured performer and is credited with writing most of the music.

3. Albums that were almost completely created by a team of women that included the performers, songwriters and key production and recording personnel.

Some of the albums chosen by NPR would not meet any of these sets of conditions, and very few would meet all of them, leaving the impression that "made by women" really came down to having prominent female vocals.

It's not always possible to know how much a female lead vocalist deserves credit for an album. Reba McEntire has recorded 29 albums, on each of which she has written at most one song and almost never plays an instrument. She occasionally receives credit for production, and I suppose the listmakers were careful to select an album (Rumor Has It) on which she is credited as producer. She presumably selects at least some of the songs she will record; or does she only exercise veto power? It would take some research to figure out exactly how much control she has over her albums, and whether they deserve the "made by a woman" label. (She at least gets the blame for both singing and "acting" on her insufferable "Back to God" video.)

1964: It Was a Very Good Year, But...

The decision to begin in 1964 and include only albums (as opposed to a body of work in any recorded format) has the odd effect of eliminating a very large number of black women who set the standard for women in music. Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington, Eartha Kitt, Mahalia Jackson and Marion Anderson, among many others, seem like they are being relegated to a sort of fuzzy background role for no other reason than that Powers et al. thought it would be best to only consider albums from 1964 on. Not a few critically important white women, like Patsy Cline and Mother Maybelle Carter, are apparently excluded on similar grounds.

On the other hand, some albums seem to have made the list merely because they were post-1964; how else do you explain the relatively unimportant Nina Simone album I Put a Spell On You dropping into the #3 slot, replacing the much better sung and played The Amazing Nina Simone (1959) and other earlier choices? I'm really not sure how the choice of 1964 is motivated. For example, had 1963 been chosen, the list might have included Heat Wave by Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, He's So Fine by The Chiffons, and about a dozen other albums by artists who were either left off the list or are represented by later and not necessarily better work. The so-called "album era" in pop music was really ushered in by the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds in 1966; but artists have made albums since the early 1950's at the latest, and made them regularly since the late 50's, so the argument that the list should be confined to "album era" recordings has no particular force and is not actually captured by the choice of 1964.

Nor does the list of "greatest albums" consistently show a choice of great albums, as the above point about Nina Simone demonstrates. For another example, Tammy Wynette's single "Stand By Your Man" is certainly one of the most important (and perhaps "greatest") country music songs (albeit, ironically, a target of feminist ire) but the album of the same name on which the song appeared is of no special importance, being filled out largely with naive tearjerkers about emotionally wounded children and other pap; it is there simply because the single is on it. It's clear that the ill-defined criteria for being on this list could not even guide the selection of albums, leading to many mediocre recordings that contain a notable song or two getting on the list.

To return to the first point, if you want a new canon you can't exclude many of the most canonic musicians because they didn't make albums. For what exactly is a canon of albums? Something like a canon of novels? Which naturally will not include Chaucer, Flannery O'Connor or Alice Munro, since none of their most celebrated works are novels. But a canon of albums seems more arbitrary than one of novels; for even in the so-called "album era" an album may have been more than a collection of songs – a form of composition, in a sense – but it certainly was not always. An album does not have to hang together like a novel (squawck... the Parrot has perused a contemporary novel or two that hangs together about like jungle mist, but forget that for a moment). I suspect we shall soon see a companion list of "25 Greatest Pre-Album Era Recorded Legacies of Women" or some such silly acknowledgment that 1964 is not a cutoff with any real historical merit.

That albums of the woman, by the woman and for the woman shall not perish...

Why not require that the albums really be in some sense for or about women, or that they lend support to the advancement of women's rights or equality or recognition, or somehow make a statement of importance to women, or enhance the position of women in music... or something like that? Now, clearly there are albums on the list that do this; and just as clearly, there are many that do not, and have nothing more to say about women than some very boilerplate expression of a woman's side of romantic relationships. Some of these albums sold a lot of copies; but even if every household in the Western world had one they would have little to say that had not been said before, either musically or lyrically. A truly new and liberating voice in country music is hard to come by. The Dixie Chicks might be on this kind of list, maybe Iris DeMent, but most of the Nashville crowd would not be. Shania Twain, for example, makes some feints in the direction of feminist talk, but the sort of feminism that sells between 30 and 40 million copies is not going to push any buttons or break through any glass ceilings.

Some of the most clearly and consistently feminist sentiments are expressed by worthy folk artists not on the list. What sort of list is this without Holly Near or Peggy Seeger or other outspoken feminists who also have a huge recorded legacy? The idea that the list should favor albums or artists that have something to say about women's rights and struggles seems not to have occurred to the Powers That Be. Reorganize it along these lines and many things would be quite different. Tori Amos would get more than a 27^th-place nod for her first album; she does everything but explicitly proselytize about women's issues in her music, and she does that in other ways. Suzanne Vega would not have been overlooked (which is unaccountable on almost any grounds anyway), and even Ferron might have been recognized. Christina Aguilera, bizarrely omitted from the parade of superstars, might have had a better claim to a slot than Mariah Carey, and any of half a dozen country singers could have replaced Reba McEntire (Carrie Underwood and Mary Chapin Carpenter would be two good choices).

To put it in a nutshell, the apparent feminist impulse behind the list and the feminist content of the albums themselves seem to diverge far more than had to be the case.

Nothing would have been lost, and some moral ground might have been gained, by at least taking into consideration what an artist or an album has done for women.

Gratuitous "Greatness"

There really is nothing to the term "greatest" in the list's title, which is why a lot of the comments I have heard both on public forums and in private are, to be nice, dismissive of the whole undertaking. To be not so nice, a good deal of the list appears to be nothing but pop fluff, recordings with absolutely nothing to speak for them other than female lead singers and high chart positions or album sales. The lack of taste exhibited in the selection of various Z100-type pop stars, country divas and disco queens leaves one guessing as to why some of these superficial recordings made the list while other equally, or perhaps less superficial recordings of the same type and caliber failed. Thumbs down on Katy Perry, Lady Gaga and Rihanna, for some reason, each of whom has recorded material that ought to be of some interest to creators of a women's music "canon", while others who hardly seem like apostles of anything except Gold, in all its forms, somehow adorn the list. There's no accounting for taste, but there is for judgment, and there doesn't seem to have been much of that exercised here.

In the previously mentioned exchange between Wesley Morris and Jenna Wortham, Morris comments that "I think that the list is trying to strike a balance between greatness and importance. But sometimes, I think it assumes that importance is a form of greatness." To which Wortham says (a little later in the exchange), "It’s literally called the 150 Greatest Albums Made by Women." Well, that's just it, and I think Morris is being overly charitable: while selling itself as a "greatest" list it tries to strike a balance between greatness, importance, fairness and mere popularity. A popular album, no matter how popular, is not necessarily either important or great. The two commentators then seem to agree that a recording by Destiny's Child doesn't really merit inclusion. But the other question is why they chose The Writing's on the Wall rather than Survivor, with its feminist anthems? (I agree that neither of these has the degree of inventiveness one finds in Beyoncé's later solo work.)

In general: if you are going to do a list like this – a curated list, not the results of an online poll or the choice of a specialized audience – it ought to have some clear criteria for "greatness", which this list doesn't. Here is one example of criteria for a list of "greatest" albums by women:

1. It should be important for its musical and lyrical qualities, not merely another blockbuster entry in a tired genre.

2. The level of women's contributions should be considered carefully: being sung by a woman is important, but songwriting, production and any other significant contribution are important too.

3. It must have some quality – in the lyrics or any other way - that speaks to the liberation of women in some important respect or other: emotionally, economically, sexually, politically, even musically, but in any case it must have something significant to say about women per se.

This is just one example of a set of guidelines for critical judgment. The choices should be based on something more than record sales, or having been listened to enthusiastically by your friends at college. Or being boldly presented by someone in the selection group and receiving nods of assent, which, I suspect, is something like how many of these choices and rankings came to be.

Political notes

The last of these guidelines deserves some comment. What I do not mean by it is that in order to be on a list like this an album should have some explicit feminist content. My worry is that Powers and her associates think that many of these albums already do. But if so, I suspect that what counts as being a feminist statement is something like Lemonade, and I have to demur from that view. A woman stating forcefully and eloquently how hurt she is by a man's infidelity, and poetically describing the pain, anger, recovery, reconciliation and redemption that follows is a great thing in itself, but it is not a political statement at all. A sensitive male who has been similarly hurt could express the same set of feelings, go through the same emotional process. (I know I have; I don't suppose I have any claim to uniqueness in that respect.) Many, many other descriptions of relationships gone bad pepper these albums, and popular music in general, but have no feminist political content on account of that.

The country song "What Hurts the Most" describes in aching detail the aftermath of a breakup: written by two men, it was recorded by both male and female groups and solo artists without change of content. Another example is "Since U Been Gone", the Max Martin-Dr. Luke song made famous by Kelly Clarkson but also covered by various male vocalists. The song is also a bit of an emotional echo of Dylan's "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright". Emotions like "I can breathe for the first time" and "You just kind of wasted my precious time" are not political statements. Infidelity, emotional abuse, control issues, and the like, are gender-neutral hazards of relationships.

Political claims for music have to be judged according to the context in which they are made. Neither "Respect" nor "The Greatest Love of All" are necessarily statements either about either racism or the oppression of women, but they came be perceived that way due to the larger social context. "Respect" was written by a man (Otis Redding), about a man looking to get little respect at home for working to support his family. The lyrics to "The Greatest Love of All" were written by a woman, but as the theme song for a biopic about Muhammed Ali, who had long ago adopted the title "The Greatest". But in an era when there were still serious limitations on the respect a woman could expect either at work or at home, Aretha's forceful (and slightly rewritten) version of the song rang out with an unmistakable message. So did Whitney Houston's version of the Michael Masser-Linda Creed composition, at a time when the oppression of minority women had begun to be recognized as a struggle with its own dynamics. But though this can happen, it does not mean that every time a woman sings of respect or self-fulfillment a political statement is being made. Plenty of women, like plenty of men, are too full of themselves already to be honored as apostles of feminism for being independent, sexually explicit, or critical of something perceived to be a male defect.

What my third criterion suggests (and as with the other two I do mean they are simply suggestions, conversation-starters) is that the album either (1) represents a particularly original aesthetic accomplishment that focuses attention on what women can contribute to popular music (this, I would argue, is why Lemonade belongs on the list; ditto for Horses and many others); or (2) turns our attention to the experience of being a woman (which might include explicit political issues like rape and abortion, but need not), to issues of sex role stereotypes, or to women's efforts at self-realization and the challenges that faces, in a forceful and original way. I don't know how many of the albums on the list would survive this requirement, but I do know that several albums not on the list would do so. A lot of them come from the folk music genre, whose severe underrepresentation is one of the worst things about the list. Joni Mitchell's "Roses Blue", Janis Ian's "At Seventeen", and Suzanne Vega's "Luka" are subtle but intense contemplations of particularly female experiences. The first song is on neither of the selected Joni Mitchell albums, and the latter two artists are not even represented.

*****

Well I guess I have made enough noise about the general considerations that went into making the list. In the next (and last) post I turn to consideration of specific selected albums, and to some omissions.