Perhaps I should be bummed that Poly Styrene passed away from cancer on my birthday, but I will choose instead to celebrate her awesome humanity, artistry and womanhood. As my friend, Boston punk and DIY artist, Amy Toxic wrote me: "She was an absolutely radiant soul. Broke boundaries (age, race, music, image) and was a huge role model for all different kinds of people, especially women."
I took this statement from Poly Styrene's website: "Poly Styrene was a punk amongst punks. A groundbreaking presence that left an unrepeatable mark on the musical landscape, she made history the moment she uttered, "Some people think little girls should be seen and not heard but I think oh bondage up yours!" The influence of Poly and X-ray Spex has been felt far and wide ever since. Their landmark album Germ Free Adolescents is a landmark work and a primary influence on Britpop and Riot Grrrl. At the centre of it was PolyStyrene, a bi-racial feminist punk with the perfect voice to soundtrack rebellion."
Poly Styrene has just released a new album, "Generation Indigo" (a reference to a type of enlightened evolution believed to be noted in the newest generation of children). On the album, she has a track titled "Kitsch." In "Night Music," Adorno offers his description of the advent of kitsch: "When joy was unreal in society, its unreal form was ideologically enlisted by society, and in any art that strove for truth, there was no longer any place for [joy]"...the deprivation through kitsch...displays powerlessness of...great works [but] also reclaims their leftovers for society" (85). This can be said of women in music, who, as objects of fascination and commodity, have often been made powerless to express the truth of their experience from within the commodified product of music (though on an indie level, this is of course more possible). In the below video, at 0:20-0:45, Poly talks about "Kitsch," reclaiming the negative aspect of the word, the feminine "leftovers," and reframing it into something positive for women: "Kitsch was just all the negative things that you can say about women; but just turning it around and saying 'yeah, you can say this that and that, but I'm just a little bit kitsch...":
In Adorno's essay, "Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening," he writes about the voice in a way that I think applies to the feminine in music, as well: "If the moments of sensual pleasure in the idea, the voice, the instrument are made into fetishes and torn away from any functions which could give them meaning, they meet a response equally isolated, equally far from the meaning of the whole, and equally determined by success in the blind and irrational emotions which form the relationship to music into which those with no relationship enter" (278). Further , he writes, "the romanticizing of the particulars eats away the body of the whole" (281).
Women are historically "fetishized," their parts synecdochically presented to the public, pieces of a sexualized product, never whole--and in music it is amplified. A woman in music is not known for her voice, musical style or message alone, but for the size of her breasts, her hair color, her clothing, her age. In videos, we see her in flashes of thigh, eyes, lips. As Adorno writes, "The reaction to isolated charms are ambivalent. A sensory pleasure turns into disgust..." (290). Women in music are scrutinized and criticized, any commercially displeasing visual characteristic effectively destroying the message and the individual aspect of the female within the music. In "Philosophy and Music," Adorno claims that "[o]nly by remembering what one is loath to admit can one develop a relationship with the reality of this life" (465). Women music artists who speak in a meta-language about the synecdoche and fetishization of the feminine use the scene of the fetish to expose the act, like this song from the Divinyls, where Chrissie Amphlytt (also recently diagnosed with breast cancer) states "I am just a red brazier to all the boys in town."
Here Poly Styrene and the X-Ray Spex expose the "bondage" of the feminine: "Bind me tie me
Chain me to the wall / I wanna be a slave To you all."
R.I.P and rock on Poly Styrene! Oh Bondage - UP YOURS!
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