1st Edition

Girl Groups, Girl Culture Popular Music and Identity in the 1960s

By Jacqueline Warwick Copyright 2007
    286 Pages
    by Routledge

    286 Pages
    by Routledge

    Then He Kissed Me, He's A Rebel, Chains, Stop! In the Name of Love all these songs capture the spirit of an era and an image of "girlhood" in post-World War II America that still reverberates today.

    While there were over 1500 girl groups recorded in the '60s--including key hitmakers like the Ronettes, the Supremes, and the Shirelles - studies of girl-group music that address race, gender, class, and sexuality have only just begun to appear. Warwick is the first writer to address '60s girl group music from the perspective of its most significant audience--teenage girls--drawing on current research in psychology and sociology to explore the important place of this repertoire in the emotional development of young girls of the baby boom generation.

    Girl Groups, Girl Culture stands as a landmark study of this important pop music and cultural phenomenon. It promises to be a classic work in American musicology and cultural studies.

    Introduction; Part 1 Girl Talk; Chapter 1 The Emerging Girl Group Sound; Chapter 2 The Voice of the Girl; Part 2 A Brand New Dance Now; Chapter 3 Embodying Girlness; Chapter 4 Restraint and Violence; Chapter 5 Uniformity and Masquerade; Part 3 He Makes Me; Chapter 6 Record Producers and the Politics of Production; Chapter 7 Carole King and Ellie Greenwich; Chapter 8 Up against the Wall of Sound; Part 4 Look Here, Girls, and Take This Advice; Chapter 9 Respectability Versus Rock’n’Roll; Chapter 10 Motown and the Politics of Crossover Success; Chapter 11 Mothers and Daughters; Part 5 Out in the Streets; Chapter 12 Group Identity and Public Space; Chapter 13 Rebellion and Girldom; Chapter 14 Girl Groups, the Road, and Public Record;

    Biography

    Jacqueline Warwick is Associate Professor in the Department of Music at Dalhousie University, Canada, where she specializes in music history and popular music. She is an active member of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, and has presented papers at numerous conferences in North America and Europe.

    "…[Warwick’s] thoroughness lends the book—which flies in the face of the notion that producers are musical gods—a sense of much-needed authority. Through [her] Marxist feminist lens, even thin-voiced Diana Ross seems worthy of a little more R-E-S-P-E-C-T." --Harp Magazine

    "This eminently readable and groundbreaking book is a must for all girl group fans, and anyone interested in the social history of music and culture during the 1960s." --Readings, Australia

    "Warwick is on solid ground with her arguments, and this book makes strong contributions to popular musicology.  Her work on female identity in a popular-music context is particularly innovative.  Highly Recommended." --CHOICE