Railin' About Raelynn, or "Reductio Ad Absurdum(b)"

Or maybe also "ad nauseum."  Okay, I know that it's ridiculous to single out one song in the history of music and call it "the worst ever, even worse than anything that might yet come."  But that's how I felt the first time I heard the execrable God Made Girls, and I think I hafta stick with that assessment.

This is the time of year when I spend as much time as possible in my excavator, thinning the woods around my house (God did a terrible job: there's just too much of everything, and it doesn't look at all like a park, so it's left to me to make it look the way it's s'posed to), building brush piles, cleaning up debris from ice storms, etc.  I wear radio headphones while I work, but the damn things are so twitchy, and I get so many stations up here on top of the hills, that the station keeps changing depending, often, simply on how I turn my head.  Consequently, I'm exposed to some pretty horrible music, stuff I'd never hear otherwise.  That's how I found God Made Girls. 

It's "sung" by someone named Raelynn, who was apparently an American Idol non-winner.  The first time, I just heard a verse or two, not the whole thing, but enough to simultaneously make me dumfounded and enraged.  Then last weekend, within the space of 15 minutes or so I heard the damn thing 3 times on three different country stations (and shouldn't there be a limit to how many of those things there are?  It's aural waterboarding, is what it is.).  So I did some research, and herewith are the "lyrics," reprinted without permission:


"God Made Girls"

Somebody's gotta wear a pretty skirt,
Somebody's gotta be the one to flirt,
Somebody's gotta wanna hold his hand so God Made Girls

Somebody's gotta make him get dressed up,
Give him a reason to wash that truck,
Somebody's gotta teach him how to dance,
So God made girls.

He needed something soft and loud and sweet and proud
But tough enough to break a heart
Something beautiful and breakable that lights up in the dark

So God made girls, God made girls
He stood back and told the boys, "I'm 'bout to rock your world."
And God made girls (for singing in your front seat)
God made girls (for dancin' to our own beat)
He stood back and told the boys, "I'm 'bout to rock your world."
And God made girls.

Somebody's gotta be the one to cry
Somebody's gotta let him drive
Give him a reason to hold that door so God made girls

Somebody's gotta put up a fight,
Make him wait on a Saturday night
To walk downstairs and blow his mind,
So God made girls.

Something that can wake him up and call his bluff and drag his butt to church
Something that is hard to handle
Somethin' fragile to hold him when he hurts

So God made girls, God made girls
He stood back and told the boys, "I'm 'bout to rock your world."
And God made girls (for singin' in your front seat)
God made girls (for dancin' to our own beat)
He stood back and told the boys, "I'm 'bout to rock your world."
And God made girls

Somebody's gotta wear a pretty skirt,
Somebody's gotta be the one to flirt,
Somebody's gotta wanna hold his hand

So God made girls, God made girls
He stood back and told the boys, "I'm 'bout to rock your world."
And God made girls (for singin' in your front seat)
God made girls (for dancin' to our own beat)
He stood back and told the boys, "I'm 'bout to rock your world."
And God made girls

Somebody's gotta wear a pretty skirt,
Somebody's gotta be the one to flirt (and God made girls, yeah)
Somebody's gotta wanna hold his hand

So God made girls

I did immediately check the calendar, and apparently it's still 2015, and so all that I remember having happened in women's struggles in the last 50 years did happen, and the glass ceiling is there and real, and women's healthcare and reproductive rights are still in jeopardy, and the ERA still can't be passed, and women still earn way less than men for the same work, and on and on and on.  Turns out, though that many are stubbornly trying to hold on to 1958 ("Goddam it, we had 'em all in a box once, but somuvem leaked out.  Let's see if we cain't get 'em back fer good, now") and all you have to do, "girls," is be cute/pretty, flirtatious, coy, and just rock that poor, emotionally vacant, slovenly-except-for-your-influence, tough-as-nails-except-when-you-allow-him-not-to-be Marlboro Man's world.  It's often said that men's brains are between their legs, but so, evidently, is women's power.  Maybe that's the great equalizer we've been looking for in the Battle Of The Sexes.  Glass ceiling?  It's just another (wo)man's floor:  stand up there, girls, like Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct, give the guys a good view, and they'll fall all over themselves to give you, still, what they want.

Jesus, you can't make this stuff up--except someone did.  Her name is Lori McKenna, a singer/songwriter from Stoughton, MA, of all places.  I figured it (prejudicial thinking fully exposed here) had to be someone from the South, and not necessarily a woman.  But no, it's a woman from the Northeast, someone who's received pretty good notices over the years for her songs and performances.  And she's totally in denial about what this song says, does, implies, is about.  In an article in Rolling Stone, McKenna says,  "We were careful to champion the things that we loved about that girl [in the song] and it being so RaeLynn," says McKenna, who notes the song isn't about being subservient to or looking good for men.  "To me, it's way more powerful than that. If we're making him do anything, we're making him be a better person," she says with a laugh.  "And we tried to say that in a fun way...."Yesterday, I picked up seven 13-year-old girls to come over here for lunch with my daughter, and right when they got in my car 'God Made Girls' came on the radio. I videotaped them all screaming it in my car and sent it to Raelynn.  To those girls, that song is empowering."

And that's just the point, isn't it? That's still the way for girls to see themselves as empowered, now, in 2015, after all that's happened in women's struggles?  It's like Jamie Foxx today making a biopic of Stepin' Fetchit and using that to show black empowerment: through, somehow, total subservience to whites?  How can McKenna be so disingenuous as to say "the song isn't about being subservient to or looking good for men?"  All she's gotta do is read her own words to see how ridiculous that assertion is.  And God's apparently in on this whole deal, conspiratorially smug as he tells the boys he's " 'bout to rock (their) world."  How fucked is that?  Clearly it's time for women to just give up; the fix is in all the way to the Top.

Unfortunately, too, the song has one of those insidiously catchy melodies and choruses, and the boilerplate arrangement so pervasive in pop/country.  I'm bettin' that those factors, along with the fact that so many innocent/unthinking boobs (not sexual slang, there) will love it such that it'll be a bazillion-seller and on every jukebox left in the country.  And how long before Ford or Chevy buys it for a truck commercial?  All guy's drive 'em, I guess, and only wash 'em when forced to by some manipulative, withholding, controlling sweet young girl, around whom they are helpless otherwise.  Paints a beautiful picture of us, huh?  We crawled from the ocean, despoiled the earth, and became nothing more than we'd really always been: walking genitalia, looking to manipulate each other by "virtue" of the power vested in our crotches.  How pathetically cynical to perpetuate that stereotype.

And so, labia and genitals, I chose a bunch of songs to play this week which have a rather unclear or at best loosely-tied theme:  something about girls, and what that term means and how it's worn and how it affects, at least in my mind.  Here they are:

Big Girls Don't Cry                                                            Four Seasons
Boys & Girls                                                                      Alabama Shakes
Catholic Girls                                                                     Frank Zappa
Disney Girls (1957)                                                            Beach Boys
Fat Bottomed Girls                                                             Queen
Don't Give That Girl A Gun                                               Indigo Girls
Girls Got It Bad                                                                  Amy Rigby
Girls Just Want To Have Fun                                             Cyndi Lauper
Girls Talk                                                                            Dave Edmunds
Girls!Girls!Girls!                                                                Liz Phair
Girls...                                                                                 Marshall Crenshaw
American Girl                                                                     Tom Petty
The Busy Girl Buys Beauty                                                Billy Bragg
City Girl                                                                              Joan Armatrading
In My Girlish Days                                                             Maria Muldaur
Perfect Girl                                                                          Sarah McLachlan
Stupid Girl                                                                           Neil Young
Unhappy Girl                                                                       The Doors
Cynical Girl                                                                         Marshall Crenshaw
Daddy's Little Girl                                                               Al Martino
Factory Girl                                                                         Rolling Stones
The Fat Girl                                                                         Lyle Lovett
Girl                                                                                       Fabs
Girl                                                                                       Tori Amos
Girl                                                                                       The Wild Colonials
Girl Blue                                                                               Stevie Wonder
The Girl In The Other Room                                                Diana Krall
The Girl Stands Up To Me Now                                           Jonathan Richman
Girl, You'll Be A Woman Soon                                             Neil Diamond
Girl to Be On My Mind                                                        Crosby & Nash
I Kissed A Girl                                                                      Katy Perry
It's Different For Girls                                                           Joe Jackson
Last Of The Good Straight Girls                                           Susan Werner
Local Girl                                                                              Neko Case
Lonely Girls                                                                          Lucinda Williams
Pretty Girls                                                                            Neko Case
Stupid Girl                                                                             Garbage
(You're) Having My Baby                                                     Paul Anka


What a motley crew, or murderer's row, depending on your view.  You'll note that, in spite of some of the dreck that is here, conspicuous by its absence is the song that started it all.  I couldn't bring myself to play it, so you have to go to YouTube or your own music collection (and please don't tell me if that's your source) to hear it.  It's a great blueprint for raising a daughter, is all I know.

Hope to see you Tuesday on the radio:  it'll be a fun-filled two hours, with a chance to win a dream date with Annette Funicello or Sandra Dee.

I Hear Dead People--Everywhere

Hello, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, and welcome to The Broadly Eclectic's salute to dead people, specifically musicians who've passed on in the past year.  There are relatively few that I could find and was willing to play (none of them women!) and, somewhat surprisingly, given the ages of those musicians of my generation, and the "care" they took of themselves, there were no really huge names.  Probably the biggest stars to fade out this year were Pete Seeger (and he was past 90), Joe Cocker and Jack Bruce.  But a number of just slightly lesser lights also moved on, and they're all gonna get recognition this week.

There's Ian McLagan, keyboard player extraordinaire, best known for his work with Small Faces (and later Faces) which he co-founded, the Stones, Billy Bragg--ah, 'most everyone worth playing with.  Another famous sideman, Bobby Keys, also died last year.  He too played with just about everyone, from the Stones to Joe Cocker to Delaney and Bonnie and on and on.  Even if he didn't have some memorable sax passages he deserves to be immortalized for having gotten kicked out of The Rolling Stones for partying too much and ingesting too many substances: The Rolling Stones, for chrissakes.  The final straw purportedly involved a groupie and a bathtub full of Dom Perignon, but it was just one groupie, in fairness.  Well, you can decide if that was fair or not, I guess, based on some archaic and prudish moral code.

Paul Revere (nee Paul Revere Dick, no kidding; I think dropping the "Dick" was a good call) also died in 2014.  I had mostly forgotten him and The Raiders, but they had a few garage-band-ish hits in the 60s, all done up in their Revolutionary War/Sgt. Pepper garb, tri-corner hats and all.  They were also essentially the house band for a Dick Clark show called "Where The Action Is" and which ran daily for nearly two years, telecast in the afternoon, of all times, usually filmed on a beach with no apparent electric connection for instruments or mikes.  Things were different then.

And finally, I have to single out Phil Everly, who virtually invented harmony singing, at least as far as the Rock Era is concerned.  He and his brother Don were maybe also the first of the battling brothers in rock music, followed by the Davies bros. of the Kinks and the Gallaghers of Oasis, siblings who just couldn't get along well enough to keep their respective bands together, often fighting physically and ultimately ending up not speaking to each other.  Oh, I guess you need a pretty healthy ego just to make it in showbiz, and those egos can be tough to keep in check, and boys will be boys, after all (cf. Bobby Keys, above).

Well, after that wicked uninspired (and uninspiring) lead in, here are the tunes I'll spin this week:

Into The Mystic                                                               Joe Cocker
Debris                                                                              Faces/Ian McLagan
Maybe I'm Amazed                                                                  Ditto
Mystifies Me                                                                    Ian McLagan & The Bump Band
Glad And Sorry                                                                          Ditto
Can't You Hear Me Knocking                                           Rolling Stones (Bobby Keys)
Brown Sugar                                                                                    Ditto
I Got The Blues                                                                                Ditto
Live With Me                                                                                   And Again
Theme For An Imaginary Western                                    Jack Bruce
What Becomes Of The Brokenhearted                              Jimmy Ruffin
I Wanna Be Your Dog                                                        The Stooges (Scott Asheton, drums)
Kicks                                                                                  Paul Revere & The Raiders
Hungry                                                                                          Ditto
Just Like Me                                                                                  Ditto
I Wanna Be Sedated                                                           The Ramones (Tommy, the drummer)
Blue Mood                                                                          Johnny Winter
It's All Over Now                                                               Bobby Womack
Rhumba Man                                                                      Jesse Winchester
Zyryab                                                                                Paco De Lucia
Waist Deep In The Big Muddy                                           Pete Seeger
This Land Is Your Land                                                      Pete Seeger
Cathy's Clown                                                                     Everly Bros.
Snowflake Bombardier                                                       Phil Everly
Bye Bye Love                                                                     Everlys
('Til) I Kissed You                                                              Everlys
All I Have To Do Is Dream                                                Everlys
No More Mr. Nice Guy                                                      Alice Cooper(Dick Wagner, guitar)
Only Women Bleed                                                            Alice Cooper (Dick Wagner, guitar)

All this tribute will take place Tuesday, noon till two at the usual spot, 91.5 FM, wool.fm.

Next week:  The worst song in the history of music, of humanity, of the planet, pre- and post-humanity.  And it just came out last year!  I can't wait.