by: Stephen Fried
I am not sure if it's sexism or just another example of the rampant "comparisonitis" that has plagued the creative arts for centuries ("Moby Dick," Melville's agent probably explained, "is sorta like Jonah with a handicapped lead character"). But I have always found it amusing that female singer-songwriters are invariably compared to Joni Mitchell, as if she were the only woman who ever contributed anything to popular music and as if she set the musical standards by which all others should be judged. Now, I like Joni Mitchell well enough (Melville I can live without), and I think that most performers would be happy to be as talented as she is. But as I look back over the past year in popular music, one thing I see clearly is that female artists made a substantially more interesting contribution than their male counterparts did for perhaps the first time in history. Rock's girl is a woman now.
It goes without saying that many of the top commercial acts this year were women. If you exclude heavy-metal music from the conversation (and let's do that, shall we?), pop music was basically dominated by Whitney Houston, Madonna and Tina Turner. (Okay, Michael Jackson, but he's not really male.) But more important than this most recent graduating class of female singers and song stylists - for which there has always been acceptance, feminism or no feminism - is an entire undergraduate school of female singer-songwriters, musical poets and players who are pushing aside stereotypes and offering some of the first inspired ideas music has heard since the punk movement. They aren't just the future of "women's music" (which has been relegated, I notice, to a separate section in some major record stores). They may very well be the future of music, period. Because, let's face it, a lot of the guys who have dominated music for the past twenty-odd years - the Claptons, the McCartneys, the Jaggers - are pretty burned out, and their heirs apparent have made alarming gains in appealing to lowest common denominators.
The women, however, have just begun. Diana Ross, Joan Armatrading, Chrissie Hynde, Laura Nyro, Rickie Lee Jones and, okay, Joni Mitchell notwithstanding (you can have all those Bangles "girl" groups), women with anything but nice voices and nice, um, eyes were all but left out of pop music until recently. So, unlike other trails blazed by the feminist movement, many of which appear to be getting grown over these days, music is just beginning to clear a path for artistically ambitious women.
One obvious manifestation of this phenomenon is the success of New York singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega. Vega's album Solitude Standing shocked the pop world by rising to No. 11 on Billboard's album chart and to No. 6 on the CD chart, as well as producing a No. 3 single in Luka. To a Bon Jovi or a Cinderella, that barely covers the cost of hair-care products. But to a quirky female artist who writes and sings songs about offbeat topics - like child abuse, urban paranoia - chart performance like that could trumpet the arrival of a new movement: ERA Rock, equal play for equal players.
I have no idea who bought Vega's record. If the crowd at a recent concert was any, indication - and, by the way, if you get a chance, you should really catch her very tight, very captivating live show - her appeal is amazingly diverse. I saw everyone from reticent women's-college students to dyed-in-the-wool-blend professional couples to mainstream rock and rollers who yelled out for her first semi-hit, Marlena on the Wall, as if it were Free Bird or something. (Actually, I've noticed this at a lot of concerts lately - pop acts seem to attract much less homogeneous crowds than they used to. Maybe MTV is broadening the reach of word of mouth.) But the fact that Vega can get such mass-market attention for her work - the album alone has already sold close to a million copies - is a testimonial to the fact that there is an audience out there for what sounds like a new kind of music. A kind of music that is so vulnerable and chancy that I doubt there are many male artists who could get away with it.
More fascinating to me than Suzanne Vega, however, is Natalie Merchant, the lead singer and chief songwriter of the highly underrated and ineptly named band 10,000 Maniacs. Like Vega, 10,000 Maniacs have released two good major-label albums - their most recent being last summer's In My Tribe, produced by Peter Asher and highlighted by an inspired cover version of Cat Stevens's Peace Train - and neither of their records really captures what the band can deliver live. After seeing them recently, I feel certain that, regardless of what happens to the rest of the group, Natalie Merchant has the talent and charisma to become the next major new voice in popular music. She is a great singer, a really gifted poet and one of the most entrancing personalities I've ever seen on a stage. Natalie Merchant, my friends, has It.
The group's sound, if you'll excuse another outbreak of comparisonitis, is a strange confluence of all the bands the 10,000 Maniacs covered on the way up and all the musical scenes of which they have been a part. They come from Jamestown, New York, just a stone's throw from Lily Dale, our nation's preeminent colony of psychics and spiritualists, and Chautauqua Institution, where classical and progressive musicians convene each summer. The group has some ties to the Atlanta-Athens, Georgia, scene - especially to the band R.E.M., for whom they opened on tour this fall - and has some musical roots in London as well. Their original lead guitarist, since departed, once said of 10,000 Maniacs' sound that "we're as close to the Band as we are to Blondie." But they have covered everything from the Clash to the Mighty Diamonds to Fairport Convention, and you can hear all that and more in their songs. As for the lyrics, the only description I can muster is one I stole from my wife: Natalie Merchant's words are "poetry in commotion."