Swift but ladylike belts
By Janet Maslin
The country influence on male pop musicians has been readily apparent in recent years: California cowboys. mostly of the greenhorn-tenderfoot variety, have been hard at work trying to synthesize the perfect musical equivalent to the Frye boot. Their efforts tend to be overly antiseptic, and accusations of listlessness prevail. But it really should be noted, to these male performers’ relative credit, that women who affect country mannerisms tend to be infinitely less appetizing.
Consider, for one grisly moment. Olivia Newton-John and her accomplishments. For her recorded work of 1974 she received approximately four more Grammies than were warranted. and she also earned both the Country Music Association’s Performer of the Year citation and the ire of that outfit’s most prominent members. (Tammy Wynette along with several others helped organize a rival group to protest the winner’s illegitimacy.) Despite the steel guitar strains in many of her arrangements. Newton-John’s wispy, sugary style is strictly pick-to-click; however, her manner is sufficiently weak-kneed to both burlesque and reveal a profound misunderstanding of the female country singer’s basic persona. That’s what makes her so annoying: she takes the kick-me lyrics at face value, without realizing that great country delivery also implies the capacity for eternally dignified endurance, and sometimes even the potential for offering a swift but ladylike belt by way of counterattack. Tammy Wynette is nothing if not indomitable.
Newton-John’s fluke success not-withstanding, a certain modicum of grit is pretty much de rigueur for female singers these days. However, the kind of overt belligerence that male singers can get away with (remember Rod Stewart’s congenial instructions to his plain-Jane groupie “Sit down! Get up! Get out!” in “Stay With Me”?) is hardly the sort of thing upon which a woman could expect to build a commercial career. The trick is to somehow balance the aggression with enough seductiveness to render it non-threatening, all the while bearing in mind how unappealing mere flirtation for its own sake can be. The seductiveness need not be strictly sexual, either; Carole King compensates for her strident voice and insistent manner by radiating what feels like ingenuous motherly love.
Janis Joplin was often photographed looking bereft, depressed and abandoned, and it was a well-known non-fact that, for all her wailing, and boozing, what she really needed was one good man. Joni Mitchell sounds headstrong yet flaunts her vulnerability by, on the evidence of her material and the gossip columns, falling in love anew on a biweekly basis. Cher cranked out a string of supremely calculated hits by blending her harsh, accusatory voice with who-could-fail-to-sympathize tales of racism and abuse. Bonnie Raitt has a fragility that she emphasizes backhandedly by trying to ignore it. Maria Muldaur is laughing at you, but not so loudly that you still wouldn’t like to feel her leg.