 Hooray For Me!
A Friendly Rant From Captain Spaulding
(Captain
Spaulding Action Figures Sold Separately)
DOING A
HALF-GAYNOR INTO A SEA OF ESTROGEN
What is it with
women and the Gloria Gaynor disco song "I
Will Survive", anyway?
It happened
again. I saw a female having an epiphanic moment
to that song. The thing was, she was just a girl;
couldn't have been more than twelve years old.
She and an adult woman were in the fast-food
joint where I had lunch yesterday. "I Will
Survive" came on the radio station piped
over the restaurant's P. A. The girl tipped back
in her chair, closed her eyes, and broke into a
blissful smile. Holding onto the table with one
hand, she pounded out the disco beat with the
other. I half-expected her to murmur in contented
Homer Simpson fashion, "Mmmm...slanty."
The adult,
rather than admonish her young tablemate for what
I was always taught was the egregious social
error of chair-tipping, merely smiled in return.
Check this
phenomenon out, men. Seventies night at the local
club. A disco party thrown by one of your
theme-oriented friends. A chance airing of the
song on an oldies station when you are in the car
with a woman. A DJ'ed wedding reception. Watch
their reaction. Women love this song. They
can't hear it enough.
I'm
generalizing, right? Well, consider this: I have
never been in a situation when this song was
played where the entire room didn't erupt into a
burst of female attitude. Granted, I've never
been around any no-nonsense female rock-n-rollers
of the Chrissie Hynde or Joan Jett type in
this situation--women who would have been just as
derisive towards disco as I was in the winter of
1979, when this song ruled the charts for three
straight weeks. I have been in the
circumstances outlined above in the company of a
wide variety of women when "I Will
Survive" came on. And each time the reaction
was the same. If there was room to dance, they
danced. If they had been dancing with a man, his
presence was completely ignored for the duration
of the song. If there were other women with whom
to sing along, they harmonized in gleeful,
unspoken sisterly solidarity. And if it was just
me and her, her eyes glazed ever so slightly, she
tapped her feet to the beat, and she stared into
the distance, smiling. Conversation died.
"Mmmm...slanty."
What gives?
Well, the feminine fervor inspired by "I
Will Survive" might have something to do
with disco. This is only my casual observation,
but it appears that among white heterosexual
Americans females are much more likely to enjoy
dancing than men (this doesn't include moshing,
which is more like a rugby scrum with a
soundtrack than it is actual dancing). Whether
women are more hormonally inclined to vertical
rhythmic gyrations set to music, or men are too
traumatized by adolescent mixers spent holding up
the walls and working up the nerve to ask Jenny
or Debbie to take a spin around the floor for
them to enjoy cutting the rug later in life, I
cannot say. But this does not explain the "I
Will Survive" vibe, as dozens of other
boogie fever blisters from the late seventies are
still heard on a regular basis by radio listeners
and wedding reception guests.
Is the song's
effect tied to the fact that it is sung by a
woman and has a female lyrical perspective? No.
Literally hundreds of songs have hit the charts
in the rock-n-roll era sung by, for, and about
women...ranging from the teen romance party
snapshots of Lesley Gore to the vituperative
yowlings of Alanis Morissette. Riot grrl groups
have created an entire cottage industry around
rock-n-roll by women for women. And there have
been hits more generically tailored to females.
Cyndi Lauper's "Girls Just Wanna Have
Fun" is an example, and so is Madonna's
"Material Girl", not to mention the
ur-feminist declaration "I Am Woman" by
Helen Reddy. None of them have the same effect as
"I Will Survive". Of course, the Lauper
song is too girlish and the Madonna song too
self-incriminating to be anthems. Riot grrl
groups like L7 and Bikini Kill are
heard by only a fraction of the listening public.
And the Reddy song? While it may have energized
the armpit-hair sisterhood in its day, its
unrelenting stridency makes it laughable in
retrospect for women as well as men. And you
can't dance to it.
Part of the
secret may lie within pop music itself. Even the
most casual music fan is aware that the history
of rock-n-roll is rife with misogynistic songs.
Some acts, such as the Rolling Stones and a high
percentage of heavy metal bands, have built the
entire franchise upon lyrics that demean, berate,
threaten, or degrade women. Rap has taken this
unsavory approach to the nth degree. Songs that
address the female dilemma of having to pay
emotional dues in a man's world are a natural
foil to the "19th Nervous Breakdown"s
and "I Used To Love Her (But I Had To Kill
Her)"s of the airwaves. If girls just wanna
have fun, or be materialistic, or roar when they
are made to scrub the floor...well, they're
entitled to be cut some slack.
But the magic
that "I Will Survive" holds for so many
women, I suspect, lies within the words
themselves--proving the lie to the conventional
wisdom that all disco music was lyrically vapid.
The song is about survival, about triumphing over
heartbreak (whether caused by an unfeeling or an
ignorant or a malicious man; it isn't specified
in the song, and I doubt that it makes any
difference), and about having the last laugh in a
relationship. It isn't about revenge, which is
the theme I suspect the song would have taken
were it male-oriented. It's about getting on with
life. It's about having the power to no longer be
someone else's victim, a fact which makes its
appeal all the more interesting in an age where
self-declared victimhood and the mandatory
redress of grievances is seen as the birthright
of everyone ever wronged by another.
And, while the
song's concluding line, "Now I'm saving all
my loving for someone who's loving me" could
be about a new or future love affair into which
the feminine protagonist has entered or will
enter, the woman--who has "learned to carry
on" and learned that "as long as I know
how to love I know I will stay alive"--may
in fact be talking about herself as her love
object. It was the "I'm OK, You're OK"
feel-good-about-yourself era, after all.
Neither reading
holds out much hope for men. If the song is about
overcoming all of the Mr. Wrongs because she
deserves Mr. Right, then the objective is love
itself and the men are merely incidental to the
payoff. If the song is a paean to
self-actualization, then men are not only
irrelevant, they might actually get in the way.
I know, these
are lyrics to a disco song that I'm trying to
explicate here. But they are a bit
chilling. Not that I believe anyone takes
seriously the smart-aleck bon mot of Gloria
Steinem that "A woman needs a man like a
fish needs a bicycle" (the widespread
evidence that women continue to crave the
intimate companionship of men indicates
otherwise), but every man in his heart of hearts
has had occasion to wonder if all of the
unpleasantness we bring into the lives of women
balances out our good points.
I'm reminded of
the science-fiction novel Alf (no, not the
cat-eating prime time muppet alien). It is set in
a dystopian (or utopian, take your pick) future
in which men have died off from some plague. The
human race has survived because women have
perfected the laboratory procedure called
parthenogenesis--the fertilization of an egg
using the genetic material of another egg rather
than the sperm dictated by nature. In this
all-lesbian, test-tube-baby world in which the
human penis is extinct, the frozen body of a man
is discovered in Antarctica. The bulk of the
novel consists of a series of ethical debates
over whether or not the human race would be
better off if men, and the wars, violence,
coarseness, and instinctive need to exercise
power and control that they bring with them, were
reintroduced to the species. The novel,
incidentally, was written by a man...albeit one
who is willing to consider that the jerk gene
lies on the Y chromosome. All of the evil wrought
by his female characters--and there is quite a
bit of it--seems to be for the most high-minded
of reasons.
It's a sobering
read, particularly in light of the strides made
in genetics and fertilization techniques. Not
that I worry that some Nobel biologist will
perfect parthenogenesis and that all men will
subsequently go the way of the dodo and the
passenger pigeon. However, it's a nagging read
for an age and a culture where male/female
relationships seem particularly poisoned. The
truth is that women are the irreducible link in
the human chain of being, a chain where men vary
from being moderately-involved participants to
detached observers. In certain economically
benighted sectors of American society, single
motherhood and rootless, socially dislocated men
are no longer seen as pathologies but as the
status quo. What is the distance, in the end,
between women being able to survive without men
and men themselves being seen as vestigial?
Such musings are
a bit too serious--maybe even a bit too
farfetched--in the context of a disco song. I'm
too optimistic to believe that my kind is only
kept around for its sperm production and its
jar-opening and spider-killing abilities. I don't
truly believe that, given the chance, most women
would opt for the company of cats than of men.
The "evolved" man, after all, is
supposed to embrace the autonomy and empowerment
of women. If I find it a bit disconcerting that
twelve-year-old girls who have not yet entered
the far-flung sorority of women scorned are
blissing out over "I Will Survive",
then that's my tough luck. I know a rite of
passage when I hear one.
Okay, I'm
embracing. He just walked out the door. You don't
love him anymore. You survived. Good for you. A
round of applause. Whatever. As long as the quid
pro quo doesn't mean a bullseye painted on my
back, then I'm happy for you.
The moment that
most rang true for me in the movie Quadrophenia
came in the houseparty scene where all of the
girls are singing and dancing along with The
Supremes' "You Keep Me Hangin' On" (the
pre-empowerment prequel to "I Will
Survive"). Suddenly Jimmy and his mod
buddies rip the tonearm off the record, toss the
record aside, and put on The Who's "My
Generation". The girls stand there and look
disgusted as the boys pogo and
air-windmill-guitar their way through that butch
anthem of male tribalism and conflict that came
from a band so guy-oriented that they adopted the
masculine shield-and-spear symbol for the
"o" in their "The Who" logo.
The scene was the perfect illustration that pop
music, like so much else in this world, often
splits along gender lines.
I suppose that
the moment might come at some late seventies
theme party when the guys are enjoying
"Surrender" or "What I Like About
You" and in mid-song some chick hits the CD
changer to play "I Will Survive".
Should that moment arrive, I trust that I will be
evolved enough to recognize that turnabout is
fair play. I will leave the room without
grumbling. Evolution, after all, is all about
survival.
CAPTAIN SPAULDING
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