Decades? drug abuse has been happening for centuries or millenia. I’m not gonna say “rampant” for lack of statistics.
I don’t necessarily accept that society was more polite in the 50’s either.
My wife gave me a set of DVDs with movies from the 30s on rampant drug abuse, white slavery (we seem to have conquered that one - the white part, at least) and the perils of premarital sex and STDs. Reefer Madness is only the most famous example, and it was relatively sane compared to the others. I’m sure the SAs of the day thought that everything was much better in 1900, absent the occasional bits of child labor and sweatshop fires, of course.
Well, I think objectification is what everyone is talking about here, at least in the context of music lyrics.
I’m not saying Rap is not often misogynistic, but there’s whole subgenres of Rap out there that just plain aren’t. And Rap will have a way to go before it is as misogynistic as the Blues.
No, Rock and Country are not often as *verbally *misogynistic as Rap can be, but the content? Whooo boy. Both genres partake in the often-misogynistic murder ballad form, for instance, while rap doesn’t use it very often AFAIK. Such household names there as Johnny Cash, Elvis, Art Garfunkel, Bob Dylan and the Everly Brothers
I wouldn’t know, I’m not that old. But our 50s were definitely not a time of polite social discourse. It was a time of active oppression, and White people had no problem calling you “kaffir” or “Hot’not” to your face. So we’re more polite now than the 50s, actually. And that’s a good thing. But you’re right, it’s pretty much impossible to separate that from Apartheid and its end.
But, I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die!
Why those man-hating rock and rollers! Somebody should do something about them! they did it all!
Can’t you people see that? It’s not the liberals who did it! It’s the misandrous musicians behind it! Starving Artist, you got it all wrong!:smack:
Well, I was thinking that all of the events and changes of the 1960s-'70s that vex Starving now also happened, in greater or lesser degree and with local variations, throughout what was then the “Free World” (NATO plus Australia, NZ, Japan) – the sexual revolution, the feminist revolution, rock music, growing visibility/acceptability of drug use and other hedonisms, and a half-intentional deformalization of manners. (Well, maybe not so much in Japan.) And I was wondering if it all had ripples in what was then (and still is, I guess) the “Third World.”
This is close to being utter nonsense.
First, the Wikipedia article you link to show it is largely a form of folk music. Secondly, it states that “Often the ballad ends with the murderer in jail or on their way to the gallows, occasionally with a plea for the listener not to copy the evils committed by him as recounted by the singer.” This means that the song is not upholding and praising the killing of women but condemning it.
One of the most well known murder ballads, the article says, Tom Dooley, isn’t praise for a murderer, though it is symapthetic to the title character, but the sympathy is out of a belief that Tom Dooley is not actually the killer. The song doesn’t in anyway say killing women is good.
I can think of one rock song that seems to praise a killing, but I always took it as a joke. Murder can be the subject of humor, too.
There surely is some misogyny in rock and roll. But there’s misandry and a bunch of hating other things too. Even so, you take all of the rock songs that promote hate and they are far outweighed by the ones that promote love.
You’re just way out in left field to claim rock music is generally misogynistic or has anything but a slight degree of it present.
You are really claiming that anything mentioning a woman dying wrongly is misogyny, but I guess you didn’t think very hard about coroner’s reports.
(I know it’s the misogynistic coroners that did it! How anyone could think it was liberals when those misogynistic coroners are running around, all the time, promoting the killing of women!)
I don’t know. In Delia Curtis is upset about being in prison for longer than he expected to be, but he still kind of blames her - “you loved all those rounders, but you never did love me.” In *Hey Joe * the guy who shot his lady down was heading down to Mexico where a man could be free. In Spoonful the spoonful of '.45s saves her from another man. Robert Johnson is going to blow his woman away if she don’t come, and he can do it because her gun is not as powerful as his. A lot of these songs are written from the pov of the killer, and the blues come from the fact that he is in jail (often) and that his lover is no longer around, or from the fact that she betrayed him. I’m sure that there are some songs where the killer shows real remorse, but I’m not thinking of any at the moment.
Shouldn’t the person to blame be Alfred Kinsey? Before him, it was much easier to pretend that homosexuals, sexually-active teenagers, dissatisfied women and other icky things didn’t exist.
The killer doesn’t have to show remorse for the song to not be misogynist. It has to praise it or promote it unjustly in some way in order to be against women in general. Anger-at-the-woman-who-done-you-wrong isn’t misogyny as I have explained, even if it results in a killing. Misogyny is the hatred of all women in general, not a specific one.
Think of a folk song that praises the hanging of a female serial killer. Let’s make it a vigilante hanging too, so we can be sure to call it murder. This isn’t misogyny. It may be wrong for promoting vigilantism, but that’s not misogyny. The praise is focused on the punishment the wicked woman got.
Misogyny is more than anger at a specific woman, especially if she has done something wrong.
A song that advocated harm to all women cause none of them are good, now that would be misogynistic. Or even a song (to get away from murder ballads) that says all women are bad in some way. “Soul of a woman was created below.” Dazed and Confused, Led Zeppelin, another example of a misogynist song. (BTW Jimmy Page ‘wrote’ [stole] those lyrics. After the first Zep album, Robert Plant wrote legit lyrics and Zep was never misogynist again. I refuse to play Dazed and Confused due to its misogyny even when my bandmates really want to. But it kinda speaks volumes about the mental/emotional condition of someone who just hates all women)
Hey Joe is not misogynist. It’s about anger at a specific woman, because she done him wrong. The fact that killing her is not a just response doesn’t make the song into an expression of hatred toward all women.
Misogyny doesn’t mean “something wrong happened to a woman.” It means a hatred of all women generally.
I’d like to add that while foregoing is true a misogynist person (I suppose I was gonna say man but then thought of a couple women-hating women) might still favor songs that feature harmful acts to women or says bad things about them. That doesn’t make the songs themselves misogynistic.
I’m sure that must have been the way it looked to those who were not part of the culture itself. But then how would they know? I was brought up thinking about civil rights for blacks. And the women’s movement did take longer to go mainstream. But it was certainly part of the counter culture. What things in culture do you think we were countering?
The reason that 80% of your teachers were women was that men knew that they couldn’t support a family on what teachers made. That was not a “perfectly adequate living.” Women attending workshops for extra pay and held down other jobs during the summer or after school. The more reasonable pay went to the administrators. What percentage of them were women?
Separate and unequal more than likely. Your use of “our black people” makes me shutter. I like you personally, Voyager, but that did smack me in the face.
The shut out didn’t apply just to Ivy League schools. Even the government shut us out. We could not attend any of the service academies then either. Those were free primo educations leading to commissions. In newspapers job offerings were separated by Female Jobs and Male Jobs in the classified section. I didn’t think anything about that being terribly unfair. I do now. Even men and women doing the same jobs are paid differently when companies can get away with it. (Not all companies, thank goodness.)
I was an adult when I came to Nashville in the mid-Sixties. I can remember that in the neighborhood that I would later teach in, there were ten virtual shacks on Herman Street that all shared one outhouse. Some of you just can’t imagine the poverty.
Is that neighborhood better or worse now?
But the attitude that holds that, if your wife or girlfriend displeases you, you are justified in doing violence to her, is not something that’s restricted to a specific woman. It is an attitude towards women in general. It’s just that it’s usually only directly expressed towards a single woman at a time.
I dunno. I really like the unreleased Hendrix track Hey Joe, I heard you shot women in general down for the unspecified and distributed offense of being unfaithful to men.
My comment was more against the speaking in absolutes. I recognize that a lot of institutions would not accept women, and the fundamental unfairness. Still there were some institutions that did. I wasn’t challenging the gist of it, but the use of the absolute, which is nearly always wrong.
The song would have to justify the killing with some kind of its ok to murder. In that case I would agree with you.
I heard it was the main influence behind BananaBoatBob and the BananaLand Band’s hit “Kill Them All Cause They Never Got Bananas.”
Thinking about this further, while it may be anti-wife, it’s not against women in general. Bad ideas about marriage aren’t necessarily bad ideas about all women. Unless women in general are all one’s wife, in which case I am severely remiss in husbandly activities.