Imagine you're Billie Holiday sitting in the Lincoln Hotel in New York in 1938. Not in the lobby or anywhere near the front entrance - an area from which you are barred - but in the "little dark room" where you had to "remain alone until I was called to do my numbers". Why? Because you're a "Negro" and, even a hotel named after Abraham Lincoln is racist to its gilded roots. In fact you're doubly stigmatised, because you are also a woman - and your role as a musician during the Big Band era is seen as purely decorative. The more lame-brained males among your "fellow" musicians still refer to you as a "canary", the label they apply to all female vocalists.
Flash forward 61 years to the Grammy Award Ceremony at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles taking place next Wednesday night. The woman you now are is Lauryn Hill and as you step from your stretch limousine on to the red carpet, cameras click, the crowd roars, a little black girl from South Central presses her face against the wire fence separating "locals" from visiting "celebs" and maybe in her eyes more than anywhere else you realise how far you've travelled. Tonight you could be said to represent all women at this shindig organised by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, because this year, for the first time ever, "Women Dominate Grammy Nominations" to cull a headline from The New York Times. And you've got more nominations than anyone: ten.
Let's look behind headlines that holler names such as Lauryn Hill, Celine Dion, Madonna, Sheryl Crow, Brandy and Shania Twain. Yes, every singer competing for the album of the year award is a woman, while the record of the year (single) category is similarly dominated by women. This is a far cry from past years, such as 1994, when the academy publicly stated that "no suitable female entries could be found in the rock vocal performance category". This year the men nominated in all main categories were selected largely for their role in producing, co-writing or engineering albums by women. Yet is all of this anything more than a symbolic victory for women? A temporary reversal of "women in rock" still being "corralled into whatever areas the male powers-that-be have deemed appropriate" as Arminta Wallace recently wrote, in an overview of music this century?
To answer such questions we must first rid ourselves of needlessly reductive labels like "women in rock". The world didn't begin with the Shirelles in the 1950s or Janis Joplin a decade later, and that is not the lineage which, according to most rock historians, leads directly to the likes of the Spice Girls and Lauryn Hill. Girl groups originated with 1930s vocal acts such as the Boswell Sisters and solo female vocalists descend more from our old friend Billie Holiday who herself was "soul sister" to earlier blues singers like Ma Rainey and (let's not be sexist or separatist here) male vocalists such as Louis Armstrong. However, it wasn't until the arrival of Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald that women finally moved centre-stage in pop, winning world-wide acclaim and proving they were more than a match for male musicians. Particularly Fitzgerald, whose avant-garde "scat" singing in the style of an instrumentalist, on her 1945 recording of Flying Home placed her at the forefront of be-bop. Sadly, in the rock-fixated world of pop culture neither Ella Fitzgerald nor Billie Holiday are given the credit they deserve as groundbreaking female vocalists.
Sociologist Mavis Bayton, in her provocative 1998 book, Frock Rock: Women Performing Popular Music, clearly believes that female vocalists, in general, are not given the credit they deserve. "Within popular music (unlike perhaps, opera) singing is seen as `natural' or innate and women are believed to be naturally better singers. Women's singing is seen in contrast with the learnt skills of playing an instrument, a kind of direct emotional response to her life history of personal suffering, rather than in terms of learnt craft, an assumption which reinforces essentialist notions of biological differences between men and women. Thus the girl vocal group tradition from the Shirelles to Eternal, Shampoo and the Spice Girls have been undervalued despite being `the central female tradition within mainstream pop'. " Roughly translated, this means that pop culture, even the relatively limited "vocal talents" of the Spice Girls, should be rated higher. Indeed, had the book been written after this week's Brit awards, Bayton would probably heap similar praise on the female members of the Corrs, particularly as she claims that "the relative lack" of females "playing guitar, drums and bass means it is more difficult for the girl fan to identify with the instrumental performer and make the essential imaginative leap of picturing herself up there alongside her idol." So the nascent female star finds it hard to imagine herself as a musician and not simply mimicking the Spice Girls by "dressing up, dancing and singing" - "timeless female activities" according to Bayton. In fact, when it comes to the question of empowering female fans, Mavis Bayton would probably argue that the Corrs are more important than Boyzone or U2 - and she'd be right.
Rock bands such as Skunk Anansie, where a female is clearly identified as the driving creative force, serve a similar purpose. Acts such as Echobelly, Lush, Telstar Ponies, Pulp and Garbage, are also important, whether a woman is playing the more traditional role of fronting the band or contributing to the song-writing, arranging and performing. By applying a kind of watered-down, post "Riot Grrrl" rage to the singer-songwriter tradition, Alanis Morissette has at least stretched the boundaries of what previously was a relatively conservative genre. No doubt, countless upcoming female acts, in all areas of popular music, will similarly carry forward the highly-politicised and confrontational thrust of "Riot Grrrl" originators such as Hole, Babes in Toyland, L7 and Huggy Bear. But maybe one of the most powerful role models of all, for women, is Bjork. Her technology-based style of composition and performance art may inspire some women to be less "technophobic", a phrase used in gender and science education to describe the kind of anxiety that too often discourages women from choosing music as a career in the first place.
This technophobia stops women from taking their place at the "higher" levels of record production and engineering, in club-land mixing booths as DJs, and even encompasses more basic problems with amps and sound desks at gigs. Either way, it really is at this level that "women in pop" have come a long way since musicians such as Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald were dismissed as "canaries". Even in the arguably sexist world of jazz, female artists such as Carla Bley have burst beyond such restrictions. The same is true of folk, traditional and country music, particularly the latter. Where once singers such as Patsy Cline and Brenda Lee were little more than mouthpieces for male producers such as Owen Bradley, Reba McEntire now sits at the centre of a business empire in Nashville that would make her the envy of many women and men, in other areas of music.
This, of course, raises the proverbial $64,000 question in relation to "women in pop". Are Grammy-award nominees such as Madonna and Celine Dion simply "canaries" by another name - birds caged in and, ultimately, controlled by men? Or do they have real "girl power"? Some, but not all, do: Madonna certainly runs her own show, as do artists such as Celine Dion, Lauryn Hill, Sheryl Crow, Brandy and Shania Twain, to a greater or lesser degree. Acts like the Corrs and Spice Girls, who probably stand nearer to the Patsy Cline and Brenda Lee model of music production, have less control.
Let's face facts here. The music business, as with the business world in general, is still male-dominated. Managers, promoters, agents and directors of record companies are predominantly male "gatekeepers" or "cultural intermediaries", according to some sociologists. Mavis Bayton does suggest there are "some signs" that "women have a higher profile" in areas such as international marketing, product management, market research and video production. Bayton also notes that more often than not, women working in record companies are kept in the "female ghetto" of the press and public relations department. This is because "the work requires so-called `feminine' attributes" such as "nurturing the fragile egos of rock stars" and dealing with "(predominately male) journalists, when women are utilised for their sex appeal and `charm' in situations which can become institutionalised flirting". If this pretty much sums up at least one of the more limiting "cages" slapped around "women in pop" it also takes us back to the real power of a performer like Madonna.
The message she has sent out to successive generations of women is to do their damnedest to take control of their own careers in music, their music itself and by extension, their lives. That just may be the single greatest contribution "women in pop" have made to the 20th century. At this level alone I hope Madonna wins a Grammy next Wednesday, but wouldn't it be better again if Lauryn Hill dominated the awards this year and held one up high at some point, saying "This one is for Billie Holiday"?
