#susannah young

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491. Dolly Parton's 'Just Because I'm A Woman' (Written By Susannah Young)

Hey y'all: I have another guest post on the blog today. Since I'm looking at wrapping this up at post 500, I wanted to take the opportunity to further one of this blog's stated missions: publishing the music writing of Susannah Young. Susannah used to write about music for Pitchfork, Under the Radar, and the blog we met each other at. But now her career as a hotshot corporate writer limits her in this endeavor, and I'm not being biased when I say she's one of my favorite writers to read on any piece of music. So, for the third time, I asked Susannah to write about a record. Apart from me, she's the most prolific writer this blog has known. Here she is on Dolly Parton:

Gentle readers, forgive me in advance: this is supposed to be an essay about Dolly Parton -- and more specifically, about Dolly Parton’s Just Because I’m A Woman -- but I can't talk about Dolly Parton without also talking about my shifting, complicated relationship with country music.

As an imperious, know-it-all butterball of a tween, I remember telling my aunt -- who was just trying to bring me into her love for Brooks & Dunn’s “Boot Scootin’ Boogie -- that I “don’t care for country music” and “I don’t listen to it because it doesn’t talk about things that are important or important to me.” UGH, right?

Several years later -- still an imperious, know-it-all butterball but now a full-fledged teen -- I was still publicly making fun of my cousins for always wanting to dance to Reba McEntire’s Unlimited and Dolly Parton’s My Tennessee Mountain Home at my grandma’s house, and rolling my eyes at every twang and “dang” spilling out of car windows and backyards and repair shops into the still, humid air. But all the while, seduced by some genetic secret, I was covertly renting collections of traditional Appalachian music from the local library, soaking in every hiss and pop, weaving my own thoughts into the ghosts of the land and the past crackling out of the speakers.

Fast-forward to college, and Ryan Adams’ music is fully taking up 1/5th of my heart, and posters with his face, 1/8th of my dorm room wall. Present day, I probably listen to Unlimited and My Tennessee Mountain Home more often than anyone else in my family and have played the role of Miranda Lambert apologist more than once at local bars. Irrespective of how I felt about it, country music has always shaped my identity.

And identity is everything to Southerners -- for two reasons:

1) People who have everything and people who have nothing (those two income brackets combine cover just about everyone in the South) are the people who are most invested in their relationship to the place they’re from and the places where their people came from; and

2) More than just about any other region of the United States, the Southeast is, for terrible reasons, a nexus of cultural intersection where this blending produced fascinating music, food and accents whose origins beg to be teased out and traced.

I am from the South, through and through. My dad’s family were subsistence farmers in North Mississippi. My mom’s dad grew up in a rowhouse in DC, her mom’s family hailed from the mountains of western North Carolina. You had to drive up the mountains in a stream to get to their place because at a certain point, developers admitted that nature did a better job building roads into remote hollers than they ever could.

I’ve never been embarrassed of being from Appalachia and being so thoroughly of the South -- but I can’t say I wore it like a badge of pride growing up. Dismissing country music was a way of distancing myself from the place where I grew up, the place where my people came from. It was me, knowing deep down that I wanted to choose a different life; that I wanted to live in a big city; that I wanted to place my trust in other people who were different from me, not in God and my country and my truck; that poverty was a thing to work together and defeat -- not a thing to be silently endured, then romanticized in ways other people could profit from.

In aggregate, country music tells the story of poor folks, a marginalized population that’s been through some tough shit -- but so many of those stories get the rose-colored glasses treatment, the “we didn’t have much, but we had each other” treatment. Not that that’s not a valid way to cope with a tough situation, or that you shouldn’t find things to be grateful for no matter what your situation is -- but it can be a dangerous mode of thought, as it tends to neuter the notion of fighting back or taking down the forces that pushed you into this situation in the first place. In other words, the danger of romanticizing the ways you cope with poverty is that it breeds a certain measure of apathy about ending poverty. The part of me that’s always furious about things like this always thinks FOR GOD’S SAKE, DON’T ACCEPT AND ROMANTICIZE; RISE UP AND FIGHT BACK. But when I *actually* started listening to country music, I realized that a lot of it does that -- and sometimes in sneaky, underhanded ways.

Enter Dolly Parton. She’s as guilty as any country musician when it comes romanticizing poverty (see: “Coat of Many Colors,” even as much as I love that song). She came from nothing and ended up with, arguably, everything: from one of twelve kids living in a house with no running water or electricity, to an international star on the merits of her own talent...talent that, regrettably, often gets overshadowed by fake boobs, teased wigs, thick makeup. But Dolly -- like many other country musicians -- often uses country music as a way to introduce some challenging ideas to skeptical folks, in the same way you’d wrap a pill in a piece of ham to get your dog to eat it. Because of country music’s perceived inoffensiveness (read: whiteness), it’s the perfect safe haven for artists to express unpopular (and yes, sometimes even progressive) ideas in ways that get people to buy into them, without fully realizing the full scope of what they’re buying into. Even before the Dixie Chicks outed themselves as politically progressive feminists, they were singing things like “I opened my mouth/ And I heard myself.” It made my friends and I feel more comfortable with being “out” about liking country music -- but my conservative family and others throughout the Bible Belt were also singing along to those same songs, songs about women leaving men for bigger dreams and broader goals, getting the fuck out of small-minded small towns. They were getting smacked in the face with entry-level feminism without even realizing it -- all because it was set to fiddles and banjos.

Therein lies the genius of Dolly Parton. She frames empowerment, agency and equality in completely concrete ways. She doesn’t talk about feminism conceptually, which can be a hard sell to people who don’t already buy it. She talks about feminism in the context of how you’d act in real-life situations in the name of self-preservation and self-esteem.

And Just Because I’m A Woman is a case study in taking that approach to feminism. Every song on the album centers on women moving through the world on their own terms, and positioning themselves to make their own choices about the course of their lives. The title track unsubtly skewers the double standard that exists regarding men taking multiple sexual partners versus women taking multiple sexual partners. “The Bridge” finds a woman applying an Awakening-style solution to her unplanned, unwanted pregnancy.

Even “I’ll Oilwells Love You,” a song about gold-digging, has a whiff of empowerment: she’s playing your boy like a fiddle, using the patriarchy to her advantage to make herself comfortable and secure. And even on “False Eyelashes,” where she’s lamenting the way performing shaped her life and stripped its happiness and meaning away, she acknowledges that it’s her own choices that got her into this situation -- and only her own choices can get her out of it.

This is an album about agency, wrapped up in talk of men, of diamonds, of pretty dresses and wide eyes. It’s important. It’s subversive. It’s important because it’s subversive.

***

It’s worth noting that Andrew and I leveled up from writing colleagues at a shitty music blog to Full-Blown Internet Friends based on some tweet I tweeted so very long ago that went something like “When you say you like everything except country and rap, I hear ‘I only like songs about fake problems.’” Country and rap are almost all I listen to anymore. I discovered I loved music by listening to young white men sing about the Young White Male Experience, and while there’s some overlap there (though I am a woman, I’m tall and have blonde hair and blue eyes; that’s that privilege swag), that’s really not my frame of reference. That’s not MY narrative.

Nothing’s brought alternate perspectives and untold stories to the forefront the same way the internet has -- and it’s no coincidence that as that’s happened, outlets for music criticism have broadened the scope of what they’re willing to cover, genre- and artist-wise, country artists cross over into pop, and shows like Nashville get made, aired on network television and become moderately popular. It doesn’t necessarily mean country music is commanding more respect at the macro level, but at least more people are paying attention.

And I feel (mostly) good about that. Seeing your narrative play out on the big stage invites it to get corrupted and co-opted and denigrated and misinterpreted -- but having that kind of exposure does, on some level, validate it. It says this experience, this frame of reference matters, that it’s worth sharing. And the more insight any of us has into alternate points of view, the more tolerant we become. You can only fully hate something if you’re completely ignorant about it. Knowledge breeds nuanced opinions and promotes openness. Fittingly, over the years, I’ve seen a lot of folks reverse their stance on Dolly Parton as they learn more about her and hear more of her songs. They no longer see her as the butt of a joke, a composite of tits and plastic surgery and rhinestones and hairspray; they see her for who she is: a talented and insightful songwriting powerhouse, a powerful and creative entrepreneur, an advocate for the poor, a feminist, an icon for gay men.

This “knowledge-->appreciation” journey is the exact trajectory of my relationship with country music. Growing up, I thought I should hate country music because I am a progressive, open-minded person. As I became more secure in myself and my relationship to the place I come from, I realized that even though so many country artists preach a lot of narrow-minded bullshit, liking most country music has actually made me a more open-minded person. I’m more quick to stick up for the value of narratives and art that people are quick to dismiss as pedestrian, uncomplicated, hokey, dumb or cheesy. And my growing acceptance of country music went hand-in-hand with a more positive opinion of the place where I’m from. I’m a kinder judge of my roots, of my hometown. I’ve got country music to thank for this opened mind -- and I’ve got Dolly to thank for helping open my mind to country music.

I hope that as long as there are people grappling with the good and bad sides of their identity and the twinned awesomeness and awfulness of their homes, that there are kind, perfectly manicured hands to gently usher them toward a new way of thinking about themselves and where they’re from. Thank you for doing that for me, Dolly.

Susannah Young has been to Dollywood. She's on Twitter.--@susannahyoung

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329. Harry Nilsson's 'A Little Touch Of Schmilsson In The Night' (Written By Susannah Young)

Hey guys. Andrew again. For the second time in a week--and in an artist's discography--I am having one of my URL friends cover an album in my collection. This time it's my friend Susannah Young, who has written at Pitchfork, Under the Radar, and was consistently one of my favorite writers when I worked at Prefix a few years ago. 

I offered her a huge list of stuff to pick from, and she opted for this standards album by Harry Nilsson. I knew she had to have had her reasons, and she did what I thought she would: She wrote this great piece. Here it is:

The Sad Clown is a character trope with particularly enduring, widespread appeal. Our lives frequently demand masking our true feelings with ones we think will get a better response. We tailor our emotional responses to fit how we others might best receive us—but criticize people (especially artists) when we catch them in the act. We praise honesty in art, in life, but people have a hard time handling too much of it. And what do we so often tell people to do when we feel like they’re getting a little too wrapped up in a situation? “Take a step back,” as though only by removing yourself from yourself can you even hope to gain perspective.

That’s what I feel A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night is: Harry Nilsson, saddest and clowniest of the Sad Clowns, taking a step back. Two years after unleashing career highlight Nilsson Schmilsson, Nilsson pushed A Little Touch into the world: a covers album comprised solely of standards penned by songwriting greats from the 1930s, 40s and 50s. “It Had to Be You.” “What’ll I Do.” The hot jams of Irving Berlin and Gus Kahn. If you’ve heard it at a wedding, in a romantic comedy or a Woody Allen movie, it’s probably on A Little Touch.

In 2013, a manager or producer might say “eh, whatever” to this particular form of artistic license, since the “standards album” has become a box every fully canonized pop star checks off his/her list—but let’s remember that Nilsson did this back when Michael Buble was just a gleam in some randy Canadian’s eye. In 1973 this was an actual risk. In fact, (rightfully) predicting the album’s lack of commercial success and wary of the fact that it seemed like yet another stop on The Harry Nilsson Career Self-Sabotage Express, Schmilsson producer Richard Perry refused to help this one see the light of day. Instead, Nilsson worked with longtime Frank Sinatra producer Gordon Jenkins, who lives up to his credentials and then some on A Little Touch, nestling Nilsson’s voice into the gooiest midtempo strings anyone could possibly coax out of an orchestra and a soundboard.

Those contextual points aside, I think it’s important to note that the songs Nilsson sings on A Little Touch hail from an era where songwriting wasn’t directly equivalent to self-exploration and emotional transparency. Up until the 1960s songwriting and performance were largely separate jobs. As a result, the songs needed to be personal enough to make the singer and listener(s) care, but general enough to lend themselves to wide interpretation: a balance that produced lyrics that were mannered, writerly, removed even from their own concerns. And even though it was the singer’s job to lend his/her own interpretation to the words, to a certain degree they were always still singing from the sidelines, a healthy distance between them and whatever pathos (or mandate from Tin Pan Alley executives) originally inspired the songwriter to put pen to paper. Because a huge swath—though certainly not all—of Nilsson’s own songs are far removed from the first-person, erected barriers against the too-closeness of life, I can see why an album concept like this would seem appealing to him.

A Little Touch is full of contradictions. It was a progressive idea—yet it produced a pretty boring album. It was a brave, unconventional career move met with lukewarm response at the time—but became more popular as listeners’ appetites for this sort of album waxed in ensuing decades. And fittingly, the album inspires similarly conflicted feelings among Nilsson fans. Because my mom’s listening preferences skew more Greatest Generation than Boomer, growing up I had the completely unenviable distinction of being a six-year-old with an extensive working knowledge of Irving Berlin deep cuts. The kinds of songs on A Little Touch are what initially shaped what I thought of as music, crackling through our cheapo boombox in its precarious spot right over a sinkful of dishwater. I have a tremendous soft spot for music of this ilk, but because A Little Touch is arranged like a giant medley, listening to the entire thing at once is downright sedative. Yet even though you can argue that when consumed in its entirety A Little Touch is the aural equivalent of warm baby food, I defy you to say Nilsson’s voice ever sounded better than it did here, filling every phrase with enough warmth and clarity to sound simultaneously strong and vulnerable.

Nilsson’s outstanding vocals aside, A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night is not a great album. It’s nothing I’d recommend a Nilsson novice starting with; your life and record collection will be complete without it. It’s more remarkable for what it signifies than what it actually is: an artist choosing creative satisfaction over popularity, a man using his talents to put distance between himself and others.

Susannah Young is on Tumblr at @susannahyoung and Twitter @susannahyoung

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Susannah Young on Neko Case's Fox Confessor Brings the Flood (2006) and Fiona Apple's The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do (2012) (Rdio, Spotify, iTunes / Rdio, Spotify, iTunes)

In 2012, I turned 30 and decided to start therapy. Various “adults you trust” had suggested for years that it might be a good idea for me to take steps toward taming the anxiety beast, hoping that it’d make me a happier person and therefore more pleasant to be around. But for many years, I was totally not on board. I’m obviously not alone in getting suspicious and dismissive when people start casting aspersions on a woman’s mental well-being and trying to solve what’s “wrong” with her. Calling a woman “crazy” is a weighty matter; for centuries it’s been a convenient and socially-sanctioned way to invalidate women’s opinions, dismiss their actions, punish them emotionally. As a label, it’s not only isolating—it keeps you focused on your behavior and, in doing so, prevents you from moving past any issues you might really have. Slapping the “crazy” label on a woman is an quick fix, a way to immediately immobilize a situation that was escalating beyond your control. It’s a label that sticks, and a way to ensure women stay stuck. The problem is, no-nstop anxiety is its own immobilizing force. Your attention is constantly divided and you’re never completely out of your own head. There’s always at least one part of your brain devoted to re-living something awful, or thinking through every way a situation could go wrong, Choose Your Own Adventure-style. Nothing is ever completely fun; you’re never completely present, and it makes you feel selfish—yet another thing for you to feel awful about. Before I began therapy, I expended too much brainpower considering whether or not I wanted to or legitimately needed to take this step—which, not all that ironically, was its own source of anxiety. Would the therapist actually listen to me? What if I could be so much happier if I did this, but I never actually did it? This was the leitmotif that lurked in the background of just about every moment in 2012—and as a result I didn’t really care about listening to any music where the artist held you at arm’s length.  I flirted with Channel Orange, but throughout the year, Neko Case’s Fox Confessor Brings the Flood and (y’all saw this one coming) Fiona Apple’s The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do were constant companions. For both, discussion of them as women frequently preempts discussion of their work (“crazy over craft,” as Sady Doyle so eloquently put it). But even though music functions as far more than a coping mechanism for each artist, both of them can turn a phrase that captures an emotion succinctly and in a thoroughly crushing way, and both use songwriting to untangle a lot of mental snarls in their own distinct way.

Time and again on Fox Confessor, Case creates a character, situates him or her at a point in time that merits rumination but requires action, then trepanates that moment, bringing its full emotional scope to life, albeit from a safe distance. I suppose you never outgrow feeling safer and more comfortable using a conduit for emotions, as if by externalizing the problem and writing someone else into the situation, you’re ultimately able to make better decisions. Isn’t that why people start writing in the first place?   For me, Fox Confessor is fraught with uncomfortable nostalgia; it was released right after I graduated from college and slayed me then, so it’s a little embarrassing that it’s still such an emotional wallop seven years later. Right after college, I found myself alone in a city that had turned from “Finally Familiar and Friendly” to “Indifferent”; most of my friends moved away and moved on yet I was still stuck there. Although I wasn’t exactly in the same situation last year, there were a lot of times I didn’t want to be who I was or where I was—a thought that was often completely overwhelming and thus a source of paralyzing anxiety. All the protagonists on Fox Confessor are either stuck in moments where they should be taking action—the little girl on “Star Witness,” the woman chastising herself for being damaged goods on “Hold On, Hold On”—or impartial observers of something beyond their control, like the omniscient narrator of “Dirty Knife.” Ouch, man. Anxiety yields stasis. You think the world will reward you for thinking things through, but when you overthink a situation, you do nothing improve your standing or make things different for Future You. It’s preparing yourself for the worst while doing nothing to actually prepare yourself.   But sometimes anxiety provokes the opposite response. Idler Wheel is the pot boiling over, Apple’s thoughtful, mature skewering of her relationship with Jonathan Ames. Emotion might float closer to the surface on Apple’s earlier albums, but on Idler Wheel it actually feels like there’s less distance between you and her. She’s not burying her feelings under fifty-cent words as much; the shades and shadows undulating in her perception are replaced with straightforward talk: “super guys,” “great guys,” “I don’t even like you all that much anymore.”   Idler Wheel is a woman walking the line between self-loathing and self-affirmation, jumping into either pool as she sees fit. Moody, sure—but also mature. For all the blame Apple heaps onto those who jilted her, she’s equally willing to shoulder her responsibility, as she does on “Werewolf.” And for the emotional range on display, she never comes off as messy. She’s able to shove that raw emotion into the ol’ brain-grinder and exude something that’s not just personal, but also completely capable of inspiring empathy. It definitely floored me. “Left Alone” is the best, most succinct encapsulation of what it’s like to feel anxious all the time and no way to shut it out: “My ills are reticulate/ My woes are granular/ The ants weigh more than the elephants.” Here’s a person whose attention is constantly divided, who’s constantly worrying about the wrong things, compartmentalizing problems and situations until they seem like they’re getting more manageable but are instead each gathering their own magnitude. Apple spits anxiety and cultivates melodrama, but she does so in ways that always resonate and always seem to help her move forward—in her growth as a person, and in her evolution as an artist. By giving voice to thoughts like these, you often appear emotionally obsessive and emotionally possessive to others—but in actuality, you’re freeing yourself.  Crying “crazy” is a way to control women, but action and expression are means of fighting back, exerting control over your situation. There’s no “fixing” anyone—we all know the fiction of that particular fix—but in the end, I’m a sensible girl. Time to step across the line. Susannah Young tells nonprofit organizations what to do on a full-time basis, sometimes writes about music and tweets like once every three months.