Taking Control: Manifesto of a Girl Journalist in the 90s - work in progress
This post includes the Introduction and Chapter 1. To register interest in purchasing the book at a later date ngaireruthsbook@gmail.com
Introduction
This book is not all about how cool I was and the famous people I met during my many years writing for the legendary weekly music paper Melody Maker.
It’s based on a short, bullet-pointed manifesto I wrote in 1989, after seeing my first review published in the Live! Reviews pages. Almost every chapter represents a pointer from my agenda for writing. Often, this is referred to as an ethical framework or in the case of brands, as values and mission statements. The topic of each statement is a trigger for my creative non-fiction re-call of my world in the music industry - as a 25-year-old working-class girl writer. I reference books I have read in the field of feminism or media theory which relate to or are applied to (by me), in the context of the music industry. This book also includes archive material of reviews which have been deconstructed with an intersectional 21st-century viewpoint and my research, which is always ongoing. To that end, this book includes some more recent, direct quotes from some of the artists and musicians I interacted with during the most fabulous 90s era.
Chapter 1
I am absentmindedly staring at the most famous groupie of all time, Cynthia Plastercast, and pondering her dated panty-hose choice.
Cynthia is lying on the bed in the rose room of a detached mansion once owned by the band Bad Company. My friend, singer and songwriter Jenny Chapman, aka Agent Beartrap, is the owner now, inheriting the old cat, a basement studio and recording room, and an outdoor heated swimming pool - in the middle of busy Brixton FFS.
Cynthia is very attentive to the man on the edge of the bed, one of the two young men who arrived with her just a moment ago. My dad, a man of his generation, would say “If her skirt was any shorter she’d have two more cheeks to powder.” Like me, the rest of the room’s main view is of Cynthia’s panty-hosed feet; to get to her talking face you have to pass the view of the overstretched diamond-shaped crutch of the hose. Her languid, comfortable, confident pose and attitude are in contrast to the fact that she must be really uncomfortable (in those too-small tights).
She is dead now. I would argue that she turned heroes into nothing but a symbol of the cock rock they represented, being that she made plaster casts of the erect penises of many famous men, including Mick Jagger and Jimi Hendrix. Even acquaintances of mine have confessed to waiting in line to have their cocks slapped and moulded with plaster sludge for her statuesque collections and join the list of some of the biggest names in rock music.
I want to ask her about the size of Jon Langford’s (the Mekons) cock. I want to know if the story about her art teacher telling her to go out and plaster cast something hard, which launched her illustrious career, is a true story.
“I imagine” I will say, “It’s the male-dominated media who came up with the word choice of legendary groupie, rather than say, radical new artist?”
Maybe she should be hanging out with the alternative performers and writers, poets, and artists like Lydia Lunch or Linda Mereno, and Kathy Acker who I’ve been reading about in my new book Angry Women. Riot Grrrl legend tells how it was Kathy Acker who suggested to one of its most famous pioneers, Kathleen Hannah (Bikini Kill, Le Tigre) then a spoken word artist, to use a more popular medium for her feminist message, like music.
Like them, Cynthia grew up in a time when girls were defined by the boys they hung out with; they talked about boys when the boys weren’t there; they listened to music, went to films or dances according to the boys' preferences; they hung out with their boyfriend’s mates, such as a band. And lesbians were invisible to this hegemonic worldview. These assumed heterosexual girls were passive in their social interactions, encouraged to compete with other girls for male attention, the reward being home and hearth, and continued isolation. There was no such thing as the fluidity of gender. Even in the very-trendy-at-the-time Subculture, The Meaning Of Style, Dick Hebidge presented girls’ lives in this context when discussing mods and rockers, and the punk scene (a point noted by feminist academic Angie McRobbie).
Cynthia had excelled then, getting in all of that with even the cool guys - Jello Biafra, MC5’s Wayne Kramer, the entire Dead Kennedys - yet avoiding the end goal altogether. Female liberation as sexual liberation (mostly from a man’s perspective), it’s still a popular and arguably sound theme. But she seems out of time, and in the wrong place.
On the other hand, I suddenly realise that this is my stop – whatever I decide to do will be the room’s outcome. I leave.
Chapter 2
“… for many of us escaping from the family and its pressures to act like a real girl remains the first political experience. “
Angie McRobbie
At first, I have no idea that I’m different, in that I like my own records and books, and being the centre of my own story, not on the sidelines, cheering on the boy I think is cute. Later on, in the 90s, the feminist phenomenon that is Riot Grrrl spells this out in their manifesto: Because “us girls crave records and books and fanzines that speak to US that WE feel included in and can understand in our own ways”.