Angels In Red

In her book, Women and Popular Music (Routledge, 2000), Sheila Whiteley is interested in identifying and examining female archetypes in popular music. She has observed that there are benign female fantasy figures (“inscribed within a dreamlike and unreal world”), but fantasy women can sometimes become supernatural (as an example, think of The Eagles’ “Witchy Woman”), and therefore dangerous and unpredictable. But there is also the highly idealized woman, the object of the (male) singer’s devotion and desire. The flipside of these highly idealized women are highly sexualized, fallen women, and in songs about them they are defined exclusively by their sexual availability. This morning I sketched out these categories, along with some songs that typify each. Whiteley’s primary interest is in images of women in Sixties rock songs, but in the following list I haven’t confined myself exclusively to songs from that era. Obviously many other examples could be cited; I restricted my list to ten songs in each category. While this is nothing more than a sort of parlor game, it is revealing nonetheless.

Benign Fantasy Women:
(The ideal woman, the “dream lover,” often appears only in dreams; while these songs are about fantasy women, they are also about male fantasy)
The Beatles – “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds“
Johnny Burnette – “You’re Sixteen”
David Allan Coe – “Angels In Red”
Bobby Darin – “Dream Lover”
Electric Light Orchestra – “Can’t Get It Out Of My Head”
John Mayer – “Love Song For No One”
Roy Orbison – “Dream Baby”
Roy Orbison – “In Dreams”
Sugarloaf – “Green-Eyed Lady”
Neil Young – “Cinnamon Girl”

Dangerous Women/Malignant Fantasy Women:
(In which the female becomes predatory and is often unmanageable; they are often given names, but names such that only a writer like Poe would use)
The Beatles – “Girl”
Derek and the Dominos – “Layla”
Fleetwood Mac – “Rhiannon”
The Four Tops – “Bernadette”
Hall & Oates – “Maneater”
The Hollies – “Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress”
John Fred and His Playboy Band – “Lucy in Disguise (With Glasses)”
Chris Rea – “Stainsby Girls”
Rod Stewart – “Maggie May”
Neil Young – “Like A Hurricane”

The Earth Mother (and Itinerant Men):
(In which women are nurturing, patient, long-suffering, metonymically associated with the “comforts of home.” In contrast to the Earth Mother, however, the male singer is itinerant, shiftless, financially irresponsible, and unable to “settle down”)
The Rolling Stones – “Angie”
Glen Campbell – “Gentle on My Mind”
David Allan Coe – “Under Rachel’s Wings”
Hall & Oates – “Sara Smile”
Waylon Jennings – “Amanda”
Kiss – “Beth”
Looking Glass – “Brandy”
Chris Rea – “Standing in Your Doorway”
Marty Robbins – “My Woman, My Woman, My Wife”
Conway Twitty – “I’d Love to Lay You Down”

The Sexually Available Kind:
(These contain rather obvious sexual innuendo in which the women are defined by their sexual availability, preferably to be dominated as well)
Aerosmith – “Walk This Way”
Cher – “Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves”
Confederate Railroad – “Trashy Women”
Def Leppard – “Pour Some Sugar on Me”
Kiss – “Lick It Up”
Billy Paul – “Me And Mrs. Jones”
The Rolling Stones – “Honky Tonk Women”
Shocking Blue – “Venus”
Conway Twitty – “Tight Fittin’ Jeans”
Neil Young – “Saddle Up The Palomino”

Women figure in songs featuring the carpe diem (“sieze the day”) theme, such as Billy Joel’s “Only The Good Die Young,” in which the male singer pleads with the female (“Virginia”) to give up her virginity. Such songs would also include Rod Stewart’s “Tonight’s the Night,” but I would argue that because the erotic scene of such songs is so highly theatricalized, or “staged,” it strongly suggests their subject is male fantasy and not women at all.