Right now my reading material for the tube is She-Bop II, a veritable encyclopaedia of information on the role of women in popular music. No doubt there’ll be a proper post on the subject sometime in the near future, but for the minute take a look at these videos with rather unusual representations of gender.

Never guess she used to be a primary school teacher in Canada, would you? It’s pure cock rock, casting a woman in the sexual predatory role usually reserved for bare-chested alpha males. How many mixed metaphors can you get into one video?

This song could be the theme tune for this blog. Pretty obvious what this one’s about- freedom through sexual ambiguity. It also gives Shirley Manson an excuse dress up in half a dozen different outfits to make her point. Cherry Lips explores similar territory.

There’s something a bit special about seeing Manic Street Preachers in Cardiff. Given that it’s the nearest place of any size to the band’s hometown of Blackwood it’s not surprising that the city should have a huge contingent of fans, but the mark of Manics fans has always been their devotion rather than their quantity and that’s certainly evident tonight. You know you’re at a Manics gigs by the stray feather boa feathers floating around the venue, the home-made t-shirts spray painted with political and philosophical quotes, the leopard skin jackets, the dyed hair, the eyeliner and glitter. (If you can’t visualise this then Flickr is your friend, try here and here.) Also the fact that this style of dress seems to have been adopted with enthusiasm by both genders- and there are a lot of girls here, far more than at your average hard rock gig. When you’re surrounded by so many other cultural aberrations, you feel a little less weird, a little less self-concious. Which is of course precisely the point. As with punk, it’s a state of mind, not a uniform.

It’s been over fifteen years since the Manics first unleashed their cultural terrorism on the world. Since then they’ve gone from punk/metal agitators to ultra-nihilists, then to darlings of the Britpop establishment, then to relative obscurity as they explored musical avenues farther removed from their original incarnation. Latest album Send Away The Tigers returns to more successful musical territory, striking a mid point between Generation Terrorists and Everything Must Go and sounding more natural and more Manics than anything they’ve released in the last ten years. It may not have the anthemic singles of Everything Must Go or the intellectual rigour of The Holy Bible or the guitar pyrotechnics of Generation Terrorists, but it is the sound of the Manics remembering who they are and us remembering why we fell in love with them in the first place. Leave all this material belief/Remember the reasons that made us be.

It’s fitting, then, that the Cardiff gig feels even more like a homecoming than usual. After excellent support band Cherry Ghost have entertained with their brooding Doves-esque atmospheric rock, the stage curtain raises on a massive leopard skin backdrop and the sound of synthesised strings fill the air. James Dean Bradfield adds in the riff to Motorcycle Emptiness, and off we go.

Then Autumnsong, followed by You Love Us. Military uniforms seem to be the order of the day, and a noticeably leaner Bradfield is drenched in sweat after ten minutes. You know what I was saying about playing your songs with intensity, like they actual mean something? Crowd anarchy occurs during an unexpected rendition of Slash ‘n’ Burn, an song with an impossibly fiddly metal riff dedicated “to all those who came to see us at Treforest Tech 20 years ago.” The recent addition of a second touring guitarist beefs up the sound considerably, and 1985 has a raw power not heard on the studio recording. Policemen battle striking miners on the video screens.

The set is heavy on songs from Generation Terrorists, and from Send Away The Tigers we get the three singles plus the title track. Know Your Enemy, Lifeblood and The Holy Bible contribute just one track each to the set list, with She Is Suffering dedicated to missing band member Richey Edwards and legendary Cardiff independent music shop Spillers Records- “Richey’s first university, where he bought the records which inspired him to write all those songs.” During an acoustic interlude Bradfield plays solo versions of The Everlasting and Suicide Is Painless- “Our first proper hit, recorded about five minutes away from here, in an amazing fucking studio called Soundspace. And Cardiff city council knocked it fucking down, in their wisdom.”

Nicky Wire returns wearing a ridiculously short pink mini-skirt for the last few songs. Bradfield launches into a rendition of the Cult’s She Sells Sanctuary, but diverts into Motown Junk after a verse. Then the welcome surprise of Little Baby Nothing, and the anthemic Design For Life to finish. Welsh crowds are renownded for their singing and tonight they don’t disapoint. ‘HOPE LIES WITH THE PROLES’ flashes up on the screens.

So yeah, it was fun. If you want some more Manics, they’ve released a fairly cheesy Christmas single, which you can get from their site as a free download. You know you want to.

On weekends, when I’m not teaching art to preschoolers, I’ve started hanging out at the Fresno anarchy café with well, anarchists. The last time I was at the café, I came across a box which held a complete collection of Bikini Kill fanzines from the early and mid-nineties. They were great fun to look over, even if they already seem a bit dated (Kathleen Hannah also recently said the same thing.) And they got me thinking once more about the change in gender rolls for women in rock over the last few decades and this little spiel about Janis Joplin and Bikini Kill is the result (you can blame the anarchists.)

As with all rock ‘n roll heroes/heroines, Janis Joplin’s legend centres around just as much around drug taking, drinking, and sex, as it does around her music, but the difference between her legend and that of her male counterparts (Elvis Presley, Jimi Hendrix, and Jim Morrison to name a few) is that much is made about her gender and her rebellion is seen as gender based rather than being centred around class struggle or politics- both of which Janis’ music also emphasized. Janis Joplin was one of the hippy movement’s biggest stars, and one of its most controversial personas; her story of rock ‘n roll rebelliousness has reached almost mythological proportions. Janis is painted as the archetypal rebel, who stood against all the conservatism of the 1950s and epitomized the hedonism of the 1960s. While in reality the decades of the 1950s and 1960s are not in stark contrast to each other, as the stirrings for the social change of the 60s, certainly began in the 50s with the Beatnik movement and the anti-racism movements, Janis’ own social upbringing in a conservative small town in Texas, does fit in with the stereotypical 1950s ideal of the nuclear family living in a house with a white picket fence, in which a woman’s place was clearly defined. Because she rejected the expected women’s roles of her upbringing- that of a housewife and mother, to take part in the sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll of the hippy movement, and she can be seen as something of an antithesis to her angelic female contemporary folk singers such as Joan Baez, or Laura Nyro, Janis did not fit into any traditional roles allocated for women of the post war era. Interestingly, most writers do make note of the duality expressed in Janis’ character, as she was known for her eccentric, yet feminine wardrobe, but also her strong, gravely voice which harkened back to blues singers such as Bessie Smith, her lesbian affairs, and her “manly” drinking and drug taking. As an archetypal heroine which they had created, the music press needed Janis to undergo a transformation and thus in the legends built up through popular culture, she changed from a small town Texas girl to a counterculture queen the “manly” part of her character was emphasized and she was often described as being somewhat androgynous or “one of the guys.” For instance, in the biography Love, Janis by Laura Joplin, Janis’ producer Paul Rothchild is quoted as saying:

“How can I say this without sounding sexist? Janis was one of the guys. When I was with her, there was no sense of she’s female, I’m male… Her male balance was as strong as my female balance. We both acknowledged that place, the other side of our sexual whole.”

And in another book entitled Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin, the folk musician Don Sanders is quoted commenting on one of Janis’ performances:

“girl folksingers were kind of ethereal and fine-featured… Janis got up there and wailed… her face turned red… and [she] sang with all her body. I was so shocked it didn’t even make me critical. I had no reference point for it… [it] so powerfully crossed the gender line.”

Such viewpoints only recognize two genders and see those genders as set categories, rather than as existing upon a spectrum, thus because Janis was not a traditionally feminine woman, she was like a man; there is no other category to place her in. The de-emphasis of her feminine side in popular literature also helps build her status as a rebel, because traditional femininity was something she supposedly rejected. This image was built up by the press and partially by Janis herself, whether or not her fans back in the 60s actually saw her as un-feminine is another matter (many people who I’ve talked to say they always thought she was quite feminine.)

Fast forward a bit into our own century and it seems absurd to look at old photos of Janis Joplin or listen to her music and understand how people could have called her masculine- a strong, gutsy person, sure, but she was still womanly and quite glamorous to boot. It was women like Janis Joplin who made it okay for women to act or look somewhat androgynous and it was bands like Bikini Kill who made the whole concept of androgyny seem ridiculous. Girls in bands like Bikini Kill shouted, screamed, and played punk rock, just like the boys, but no one could lump them in with the men, because they refused to let that happen, by at times, deliberately emphasizing their girlishness. And I think that was their big gender achievement, they made it okay for girls to act like boys and still be girls. Once androgyny in any facet of culture is achieved, the concept itself slowly fades away as the behaviour becomes normalized. In rock music culture, however, the concept of androgyny was bashed to the ground.

Last April, I went to London to meet and interview Simon Price for my dissertation about androgyny in rock music that I was writing at the time. I was pretty nervous about meeting him, because I’m rather in awe of anyone who is a big, grown-up, published author, and a friend of the Manic Street Preachers, but I thought the interview went pretty well, despite my questions being a bit schizophrenic. Anyways, here’s a transcription of the interview with the man himself:

Alexis: So tell me about your nightclub here, like who plays there?

Price: We have live gigs there and DJs, it’s a very glamorous, androgynous place, glitter rock place. So we have people like Peaches and Nicky Wire, who have played there live.

Alexis: Have you ever encountered any negative attitudes towards your club here?

Price: Well, London’s pretty open, but lots of places aren’t- that’s why I left South Wales to come here- I just didn’t fit in. It’s very macho, they’re into sports and rugby and drinking; it’s very manly. And lots of people come from great distances every month to come to our club night. We’ve had people from as far as Norway, Denmark, and Ireland, who feel they don’t fit in where they live come and visit us.

Alexis: Wow, that’s impressive!

Price: Yes, it is.

Alexis: Do you think the Manics made androgyny acceptable in South Wales, has it changed at all?

Price: I don’t think it’s changed that much. They made being from Wales cool, and a bunch of bands came from Wales right after them. But they are sort of seen as something novel in Wales and are only just tolerated. I mean, Nicky Wire can walk around in his fur coats and dresses, but no one else can.

Alexis: Ah. Well, what about metal? Isn’t it really big in South Wales? And Metal can be quite androgynous- you know bands like Poison. How do they reckon with that?

Price: Metal is an interesting one, metal borrows a lot from gay culture, but they wouldn’t admit it. Like Axl Rose wearing assless chaps, that’s a very homosexual look, but they would deny it. They take gay culture and try as hard as they can to make it macho and hetero. And another example, do you know all those guys with holes in their jeans?

Alexis: (Nods)

Price: Well, in Prison when a guy has ripped trousers like that, you know he’s one of the guys who gives oral sex. So that’s where they get that ripped look from.

Alexis: I didn’t know that…

Price: Yeah…

Alexis: So, you’ve been writing for a while, 15 years?

Price: Oh, more than 20! I started writing for the local paper when I was in secondary school. And then when I came here to London for university, I was studying French and philosophy, and I was going to France for my course, and Melody Maker asked me to write about what was going on over there. So I did and then I wrote for Melody Maker for 9 years. Now I have a weekly Sunday column in The Independent.

Alexis: So you’ve been around for a while! I was gonna ask if you noticed any trends in androgyny and sexuality in rock during that time. I guess I also mean trends in public reactions and stuff…

Price: Well, I got started at the end of the 80s when metal was giving way to other things- grunge in the US, which was a very blokey thing, with the lumberjack look, people were growing beards again. In the UK, it was the same- the early 90s were quite macho, with the exception of the Manics and Suede who were feminine in a way that no one had been since the Smiths, (and they were 10 years earlier.) Then you had riot grrrl in the US, which we had too in the UK. And various alternative indie scenes, and dance club scenes, so even though people think of the 90s as quite macho with Nirvana and Oasis on the one side and the Spice Girls on the other, there was still a lot of sexual deviance going on. Well, and Kurt Cobain exemplifies this- he wasn’t always manly either, he wore eyeliner.

Alexis: He dressed in drag sometimes too, didn’t he?

Price: Yeah, he did. Though he was an exception, most of grunge was very stripped down- a pulling off of the makeup of metal and the whole 80s scene, whereas bands like the manics were still putting it on. And the late 90s were very open, you had the whole emo scene, which allowed men to be sensitive, which really shouldn’t be a feminine thing, but it is. Now, I think we’ve kind of come full circle and we’re very macho again. Lots of bands are just skinny white boys that make lots of noise, and they’re very macho about it, very hetero.

Alexis: You mentioned riot grrrl in the UK, what was it like here? I’ve read more about it in the US…

Price: Well, Huggy Bear was the main band here, they followed Bikini Kill in the US, and never really had a hit. There were lots of riot grrrl bands, but they weren’t very good.

Alexis: Maybe they weren’t really aiming for that?

Price: Yeah, they weren’t. You only have to be as good as what you want to get across. It was an equalizing movement, because they didn’t have to be virtuosic, they took the blokey guitar solos and power chords and made them their own, which is very feminist.

Alexis: Just curious, do you think an androgynous sound exists?

Price: What do you mean?

Alexis: Well, with non-vocal music, say classical, people talk about male and female elements of the music, so it makes sense that there is something in between those. I dunno, some writers that I’ve been reading have argued for an androgynous sound, but they don’t really say what that sound might be.

Price: Yeah, I guess so. In the 90s there was a movement called shoe-rock, that bands like “My Bloody Valentine” were a part of. They took the power chords and macho things out of rock, and can be described as being sort of womb-like. But I would be uncomfortable labelling a sound as masculine, feminine, or androgynous.

Alexis: What was that? Shoe-rock?

Price: Yeah. Shoe-rock… but on the other hand, I’d like to see people in the music press expressing strong opinions like that… I’m actually talking about this at a panel discussion later, but Id like to hear a band being labelled as sounding androgynous even if I disagreed, because it would be refreshing to read a strong opinion.

Alexis: It hard for me to hear lots of sounds as androgynous, I dunno, I guess so many sounds have been reclaimed by everyone that it’s hard for me to hear them as gendered, except for electronica, it sounds very androgynous to me… what do you think about electronica?

Price: It’s often very machine, very un-human, very robotic, un-sexual, I quite like that though.

Alexis: What do you think about Peaches, as a woman in electronica, who manages to be very sexual?

Price: I have so much respect for Peaches, I just love her. She has the nerve to be in your face about sex, in a way that’s sometimes quite scary, really. And then she goes and does things like poses for an album cover with a fake beard. She’s great, she’s played at our club before. But she’s never going to be mainstream or get radio play, she’s a bit too blunt.

Alexis: Sort of to switch topics a little, what do you think about homosexuality and rap or hip hop? I know of a small scene in San Francisco, but no one mainstream. It’s just odd that a genre which has spawned so many sub-scenes doesn’t have a place of a gay sub-scene.

Price: Well, there’re reasons for that. Minority groups or people who are economically down tend to have very conservative views. I’m not excusing it though. I think maybe Outkast would be one exception, but beyond them, it needs to develop more in the underground, before it will ever become mainstream and that will take a while.

Alexis: Is there much of a gay underground hip hop scene here in London?

Price: Yes, a small one. But like I said, it needs to develop even more, beyond what it already is, if it wants to become mainstream.

Alexis: ah, I see. Oh, and I have to ask… what do you think of the new Manics album? And what’s their direction for the future?

Price: It’s hard for me to rank their albums because I like them all, and I like this one too. “Underdogs” is a good track, I like their single, and also the title track. “Imperial bodybags”- I was glad to hear that one, because they are really going to be lyrically relevant and say something. It’s nice to hear, many bands aren’t as literate today, and are afraid of saying bold things like that, but they never were.

Alexis: Why do you think they never broke America?

Price: Well, there’s no shame in it really; they tried, but America wasn’t ready, America was into grunge at the time. And the Americans that were into Brit-pop wanted a very specific style- a very literate, university style. Well, the Manics are very literate too, but their sound is very American, maybe too American for those who were into Brit Pop; they just wanted Blur. And the Manics were pushed very heavily by record companies in LA, but maybe the people who would have liked them weren’t in LA, their potential fans could have been elsewhere. But I think it’s okay, and they’re fine with it. Lots of bands burn out trying to conquer America- they go on 18 month tours and then they come home and break up. It’s okay for the Manics to be an only British phenomenon. I mean, there’s a lot of musicians like the Manics, such as Bowie, or T. Rex, the Cure, or Suede who haven’t really cracked America. They might have one or two hits over there but it’s not like it is over here, they don’t have the fanatical audiences over there.

Alexis: Heh, that’s funny, because I knew about the Manics before coming to Britain, but I had no idea they were as big as they are, the fan culture kind of took me by surprise. It’s a pity it’s not in America, because I would have probably really enjoyed it as a teenager.

Price: How did you hear about them over there?

Alexis: They were recommended by a friend who was really into Brit pop, and I sort of liked their name, silly reason I guess, but I went to every record store in my area and only came up with their best of, but I liked that a lot…

Alexis: Well, I guess we’re mostly out of time. Thank you so much for this, you’re a big help, and it was great meeting you, I guess I’m sort of a fan of yours too.

Price: I’m really flattered by that. And it’s no problem, I like talking about this stuff anyways.

Stay Beautiful Club (a night club run by Simon Price)… Hey can we go there in January?