Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it a karaoke session? No. It's the latest CD release by the American management consultant, Dorothy Marcic. A star of the lucrative US corporate training circuit, Marcic believes that the changing role of women in 20th- century America can be traced through the lyrics of Top 40 hits.
She has perfected a live show in which, attired in accessories ranging from feather boas to rock-chick leather, she performs said songs in her own inimitable style. Now she has written a book, Respect, which proposes the existence of female archetypes in pop music, equates Courtney Love with Janis Joplin - and sports on its cover a Mary Quant-esque Marcic clad in white plastic shades and thigh-high boots.
But to fully savour the Marcic method you have to - so to speak - listen to the music. On the CD A Woman's Voice she sets out to illustrate, with suitable musical snippets, her thesis that women have "grown up" in four stages. Stage One, childish dependency, is epitomised by social expectations circa 1900, when corsets were de rigueur and women were banned from practising medicine and law - and expressed in such songs as Bill Bailey, Won't You Please Come Home, which reached No 2 in the Top 40 of 1902. It takes a long time - some 60 years, in fact, but then there are two world wars, the Suffragette movement and the Wall Street Crash to get through - to reach Stage Two, teenage rebellion, summed up by Nancy Sinatra's 1968 hit, These Boots Were Made For Walkin', and Helen Reddy's I Am Woman which, in 1972, declared "I know too much to go back and pretend". By Stage Three we have reached cynicism, disillusionment and the glories of 1970s and 1980s pop: Janis Ian's At Seventeen and Tina Turner's What's Love Got To Do With It. Stage Four, responsible adulthood, is represented by - gulp - Shania Twain's Any Man of Mine. Progress? Hmm.
To give Marcic credit, she has an eye for a good line, and hauls out some memorable pop phrases during her trot through Tin Pan Alley: "He beats me, too - what can I do?" (Fannie Brice, 1922); "If I knew you were coming I'd have baked a cake" (Eileen Barton, 1950); "A man is a two-face, a worrisome thing that will leave you to sing the blues at night" (Dinah Shore, 1942). But isn't it a simple matter to produce, out of an entire century of pop, songs which support her thesis? Or, to put it another way, couldn't you also produce a totally different batch of songs in support of an entirely different thesis? No, says Marcic firmly, you couldn't.
"I did study all the songs that women sang that hit the Top 40," she points out on the phone from her consulting practice in Nashville, Tennessee.
"I decided to limit it to the Top 40 because, although there was a lot of other good music about women, it didn't hit the mainstream - and then it gets more complicated trying to measure how much impact it had. To me, this was looking at how society viewed women over the years. So I did a content analysis of all the Top 40 songs and put them in categories, and then I tried to choose the songs that were indicative of the largest categories of that period. Up until the 1960s, co-dependent songs were the largest category, but by the 1990s, although there were still plenty of co-dependent songs, they were only the third largest category; the largest was inner strength.
"Although there are some grey areas, like - what do you do with the Carpenters?" Good question. But how did she come up with the idea in the first place?
It all came about when she moved back to the US after having spent four years in Prague as a Fulbright scholar at the University of Economics and the Czech Management Centre. "I'd never lived in the south, and I had a really difficult time adjusting to Nashville. After two years I said: 'Boy, I have to figure out some way to love this city.' So I decided to get into music. I took voice lessons and started to use music to teach leadership in my seminars. And then someone asked me to give a talk at a social development conference on the equality of men and women, and I thought: 'Wow! I think I'll put a few songs into this.' "
Back at the thesis, if we've all grown up over the past 100 years, how does she explain Britney Spears? I mean, spot the difference - 1902: "He beats me too, what can I do?" and 1998: "Hit me, baby, one more time . . ."
"Ah," she says, airily. "Well, there's apparently some need in the culture for this Betty Boop archetype." What, the Betty Boop of I Wanna Be Loved By You, the cartoon character whose catchphrase was "I try to think, but nothing happens"?
"Oh, absolutely. The baby voice and the sexy body and she's claiming to be a virgin and it's so sweet," says Marcic.
OK THEN, what about rap, with its mucho macho lyrics - and dance music, which often has no lyrics at all? Where does that leave us? "What I noticed from the late 1960s on," says Marcic, in a confidential tone, "is that the number of categories and types of song increased tremendously. Before that there had just been a few types of song. So what I think you're seeing is more complexity and different types of music. There still are singer- songwriters, but then there are some songs - say, rap, where my daughters tell me you're not supposed to understand what's going on. Sometimes you can - unfortunately."
And what about the dangers of drawing deep sociological conclusions from the stereotype-laden subject matter of pop culture? "But that's exactly the point," she cries. "It is about stereotypes. What I'm trying to point out is the stereotypes that have been put on women. The most common feedback I get is when people come up to me and say: 'Oh my God, I'm forming a new paradigm in my head - I know all those lyrics, but I never thought much about what they meant. When you see them in progression, and see the songs that we were singing, how needy they were, you think about it in a different way'."
There is, it seems, no arguing with Marcic. But then she's used to persuading people. Her 12 books have racked up sales of over 500,000, and as a management consultant she numbers among her clients Coca-Cola, the Ford Motor Company, the Salt River-Pima Indian tribe in Arizona and the World Bank. Besides being absolutely sound on gender issues - "women still earn less than men; in the States now, it's 70 cents on the dollar" - she has come up with a number of innovative ideas for management, including the need for "emotional intelligence at work". Which, in a nutshell, proposes that corporate high-flyers - mostly men, despite the above-mentioned progess towards equality - would make better managers if they adopted a more discursive, "feminine" approach to matters of confrontation and motivation in the workplace. Applying management principles to music is , however, a dodgier proposition. As anybody who has ever heard the late, lamented Terence's version of Que Sera Sera knows only too well, the lyrics don't always tell the whole story.
Respect: Women and Popular Music, by Dorothy Marcic, is published by Texere (£18.99 sterling). To book Marcic for a seminar or order a CD online, consult her website at www.marcic.com
