February 2018 – James Rovira

Women in Rock: Chrissie Hynde’s Reckless as Künstlerroman

Check out my iTunes playlist for Chrissie Hynde’s Reckless.

Chrissie Hynde’s autobiography, Reckless, has generated a number of mixed reviews and ambivalent reactions on social media. I’m going to try to untangle those reactions because I think it’s an important work for a number of reasons. Before I get started, though, I’d like to add that my comments here will be supplemented by my own research into Chrissie Hynde and the Pretenders at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Library and Archives in Cleveland, Ohio, when I was researching a proposal for a 33⅓ Series book on the Pretenders’ first album about three years ago. Part of my research involved the usual music magazine readings and whatever available scholarship there was, which included Chrissie Hynde’s own music writing when she did a brief stint as a writer for the London-based music magazine NME. Reckless was hilarious on this point. She felt like a fraud as a writer. I think she wasn’t. She offered what she had, which were authentic reactions. But feeling like a fraud, she said writing for a living was “like getting paid to shoplift.” The real gem of my time in the archives, though, was six cassettes recorded by Kurt Loder when he was interviewing band members for his May 29, 1980 Rolling Stone article about the Pretenders, who hit it huge both in the US and in the UK with their first album that year. Those cassettes cover much of the ground in Hynde’s autobiography and add different details.

Hynde and her autobiography are important because, first of all, she is undeniably one of the most important female figures in rock. I’m using the term “rock” narrowly rather than broadly: classic rock, punk, post-punk, new wave, grunge, indie, or alternative as opposed to rap, R&B, or pop, which is almost never guitar-based. She stands out not just as lead singer and “frontman” but as a rare female rock guitarist, at least rare for her generation. Janis Joplin and Grace Slick were singers, Suzi Quattro played bass, Patti Smith has appeared onstage with a guitar but is mainly a singer, and Hynde’s peers — Wendy O. Williams, Debbie Harry, and Siouxsie Sioux — were also just lead singers. The only prominent female rock guitarists were usually in all-female bands like the Runaways, the Go-Gos, and the Bangles. Joan Jett is her only real peer after the end of the Runaways and the start of Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, who released their first album in 1980, same year as the Pretenders, but that band didn’t significantly chart until 1982. Lita Ford may well be the first frontwoman in rock playing lead guitar since Sister Rosetta Tharpe, but her first album didn’t come out until 1983. Female singer-songwriters like Joan Baez played acoustic guitar and weren’t primarily “frontmen” for a band, and they usually weren’t playing rock.

Hynde, by her own accounts, in her early forays into being a musician was often slotted into the lead singer position — which she deserves, because she has a great voice — but she also insisted on being able to play rhythm guitar too. Not because rhythm was all she could play, but because it was all she wanted to play: “I’d never once been tempted to play a single note. Chords, for me, three, less is more” (193). Apart from her own position as a rare female “frontman” and guitarist, though, she was a very close eye-witness of the rise of punk and post-punk in London in the late 70s and early 80s. She associated with Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo while she was at Kent State, she was present during the shooting there, and she was close to members of the Clash and the Sex Pistols. She got close to Lemmy of Motörhead and started angling to steal his drummer. She almost formed a band with Tom Verlaine. She’s an observer of that bit of our cultural history from the standpoint of a close insider, so her account is also valuable for those reasons.

The mixed reviews are due in part to frustrated expectations. The original subtitle, My Life as a Pretender, implies for many people that the book should consist of background on Hynde followed by her history of the band from about 1978 to 2014 or so. But that’s not at all what we get. What we get is her life from childhood to around the time of the deaths of James Honeyman-Scott and Pete Farndon, the Pretenders’ original lead guitarist and bass player, respectively, in 1982 and 1983. She makes quick work at the end of that period of an attempted marriage to the Kinks’ lead singer and guitarist Ray Davies and of her first pregnancy, by him. When the clerk saw Hynde’s and Davies’ emotional and physical states when they came to get married, he told them to “come back another day.” They returned home and acted like it never happened. And she makes even quicker work on the last page of her marriage to Simple Minds lead singer Jim Kerr in 1984, which lasted until 1990 and with whom she had her second child.

So if Hynde ends her story around 1984, why subtitle it “My Life as. . .” anything? The book ends when she’s 33, just over half a life ago as of the time of this writing. She announces the beginning of the Pretenders with the line, “And that, essentially, was the beginning of the Pretenders,” which appears on page 235 of 312. It’s the closing line of chapter 26. The actual history of the Pretenders takes up the last 25% of the book and only covers their first two albums plus Hynde’s initial work on “Back on the Chain Gang,” which would appear on the Pretenders’ third album. Readers who were expecting a comprehensive life didn’t get it. And as one reviewer complains, understandably, she left out quite a bit of really interesting material by cutting her autobiography off at 1984.

She didn’t discuss, for example, what it was like being a mother of two and a rock star. She’s said elsewhere that her daughters didn’t know what she did for a living until they were teenagers: they just slept in the tour bus while she performed. She didn’t describe much what it was like being a woman rock star and “frontman” on the road, which she does cover in interviews. Some of this material is on Loder’s tapes but didn’t make it into his article. She didn’t describe her six years with Jim Kerr or her second marriage, and she didn’t go through the many iterations of the band and her songwriting after Pretenders II, not to mention her many appearances and collaborations aside from the Pretenders as well as her solo album. She does not, of course, have any obligation whatsoever to write about any of these things, but readers expecting to read about her life as a Pretender might have expected some of this material. She’s still able to write a second book, so who knows what she may approach in the future?

I think, in part, the subtitle means that for her the Pretenders really ended with the deaths of Pete Farndon and James Honeyman-Scott, but especially with the death of the latter, as Farndon had been fired from the band for drug use shortly before Honeyman-Scott’s death. Hynde credits Honeyman-Scott with her own success as the leader of the Pretenders. She wrote the songs, but his guitar work, by her account, made them great. The subtitle also alludes to her perception of herself as a pretender: while she recounts that she spontaneously came up with the name when the song “The Great Pretender” popped into her head, her book narrates the various personas she had to navigate since childhood. Her parents were post-World War II conservatives who wanted normal lives and normal daughters, and Hynde spent years hiding her love of rock music, drugs, and bikers from them. Her parents were Rush Limbaugh fans in the 80s and 90s, and when Limbaugh started using the opening riff of the Pretenders’ “My City was Gone” to start his show, Hynde refused to pull it because she knew her parents were listening. She even says in the Prologue to Reckless that “I couldn’t have told this while my parents were alive.”

It’s natural to care about the opinions of one’s parents, but this feeling has persisted, intensely, until Hynde is in her 60s. It’s hard not to see it as a sign of Hynde’s feeling of dividedness over her own life. So is she perhaps pretending with herself? Sherry Truffin’s “‘Crying Like a Woman ‘Cause I’m Mad Like a Man’: Chrissie Hynde, Gender, and Romantic Irony” in Rock and Romanticism: Post-Punk, Goth, and Metal as Dark Romanticisms (Palgrave Macmillan, April 2018) is a good study of Hynde’s androgyny and ambivalence as Romantic phenomena and is worth checking out. There’s no hiding that Hynde believes her book is about drug abuse and its consequences, which is what she said she meant by the title Reckless. I don’t think she’s pretending in the book. After listening to Loder’s interview tapes, the book captures her voice, though not always with her energy. One reviewer accused Hynde of holding back, but I don’t think she ever does. At least, she never holds back from her readers anything that she’s not also holding back from herself.

Understanding this facet of Hynde’s writing helps us approach one of the most controversial parts of the book: Hynde has been raped twice, and in the book and in interviews she blames herself. Needless to say, victim-blaming doesn’t play well with many people, and it shouldn’t. But there’s some misunderstanding at work, both on the book’s end and on the part of reviewers and other respondents, and it has to do with Hynde’s intent for taking blame. In terms of legal and ethical blame, the only persons at fault for a crime are of course the ones who commit it. If I leave my car door unlocked and someone steals my wallet from the front seat, the thief alone is responsible for the theft, and he or she isn’t let off because I left my door unlocked. But that doesn’t mean I don’t exercise any agency in the matter: I could have locked my doors. In other words, blame has to do with ethical and legal responsibility for an act, while agency has to do with the outcome of an act, or the ability to affect an act, to determine to some extent its ultimate success or failure.

The problem with so much rape discourse, for as long as women have been taught strategies for avoiding rape, is that blame and agency are often identified with one another. Too often women have been told that if they didn’t exercise agency, then they are to blame, but that’s wrong because blame and agency are completely separate categories. Rapists, thieves, or any perpetrators are always to blame for their own actions. That doesn’t mean we can’t or shouldn’t exercise agency to prevent rape or theft. Maybe we should think of it this way: everyone is responsible for their own agency but not anyone else’s. Leaving your door unlocked doesn’t mean that someone is somehow compelled or obligated to steal your wallet, just like seeing a woman passed out on the ground doesn’t mean that anyone is compelled to rape her. While you might be responsible for leaving your door unlocked, only thieves are responsible for stealing your wallet, because that’s their exercise of agency. But on the other hand, placing the blame on perpetrators of crimes, where it belongs, doesn’t mean that we’re all powerless. Blame only rests on the person who commits the act, but there’s plenty of agency to go around. I think Hynde’s comments constitute her assertion of agency, her wresting control of her life, and what happens to her, from the rapists to claim it for herself. Only the rapists are still, and always, to blame.

The general idea of a confusion of categories gets us close to the real issue with the book. We certainly learn quite a bit about drug abuse from the book (yes, it’s horrible), but the book isn’t about drug abuse. We learn quite a bit about Hynde’s life, but the book isn’t just an autobiography. I think the book suffers, just a little, from being unaware of its own purpose, which is that it’s a very special kind of autobiography. It’s a Künstlerroman, or a book about the growth and development of a person into an artist. What the book most consistently narrates are the origins of Hynde’s attraction to rock, her desire to perform, and the experiences that created her as a songwriter and a performer. Once she gets into her early 20s, and especially into Pretenders-era personal history, the book becomes a history of her early songwriting too. It’s an explanation of how music became her vehicle of freedom and her primary exercise of agency, the way she took control of her own life to make it what she wanted it to be. It is a narrative of her life starting with her awakening to music and ending with her attainment, and then apparent loss, of everything she’d worked for.

What ultimately drove her to rock, to music? For her, rock was “nothing you could be taught, coming from inside and upstairs: never black or white; never good or bad. Personal, personality–Him up there, that’s who we were all talking to. To address another human was one thing, but a singing voice was capable of so much more” (194). Hynde would agree with Steve Argent, and I think she’s been trying to give some rock back to the person she believes gave it to her.

Kicking the Bucket in Academic Writing

I think that when students (at any level) are given a writing assignment, they sometimes think of the assignment as if it were a bucket. So a ten page paper is a bucket of a certain size and a twenty page paper is a bucket that’s exactly twice as big. In this way of thinking, academic writing consists of pouring words into a bucket until the bucket fills up, and writers get in trouble if they run out of words before the bucket is full — say, at page fifteen of a twenty-page paper.

I think that’s a painful way to think about writing, though. When we think this way about writing, we’re writing in order to meet a page requirement, not writing because we have something to say. I think it’s better to think of academic writing — or any kind of writing, really, even creative — as if it were a piece of architecture. We should think of our writing as if it were structured like a building. Bigger buildings have more rooms in them and are differently organized. And, bigger buildings with more rooms have more room for different functions, and these different rooms relate to one another sometimes in very specific ways.

So when we first get married, we might live in a one-room apartment. There’s a kitchen with a linoleum floor, a little metal border, and then carpet, and you’re in the living room. The bathroom connects in there somewhere. The couch folds out into a bed. But if you move into a bigger apartment, you might have a kitchen, living room, and a bedroom. A bit bigger, maybe a house, and you’ll have a living and a dining room, maybe a breakfast nook, maybe a study, and maybe a bathroom that opens up to the backyard if you have a pool.

Similarly, a two page paper might have an introduction, a body, and a conclusion. But a ten page paper might have an introduction, a literature review, a section of the body that reflects on the literature review, a section of the body that argues a new thesis out of the literature review, and a conclusion that develops the thesis in a more complex form and considers its significance. It might have subsections within each section that alternate evidence with reflection. It might have a section that addresses counterarguments and, as it does so, modifies its thesis. This paper would have many more rooms than a two page paper, and the paper is the length that it is because of the number of rooms that it has, not because it’s being written to meet a length requirement.

When we think this way about academic writing, we lose concern with page count and start being concerned instead with the size of our idea. How many different parts does our paper need in order to present, explain, support, and develop our main idea? My dissertation was 300 pages in a Word file when it was done. At the time, it felt like one continuous essay with section breaks. But really, when you consider the section breaks, it wasn’t 300 pages. It was six forty-five page(ish) chapters (with a 25ish page bibliography at the end plus front matter). Each of those chapters were usually broken down into three fifteen-page sections. And if you look closely, each of those sections were broken down into three to five page increments. So did I write a 300 page dissertation, or did I write 54 five-page papers — which could be further broken down into paragraphs serving different functions?

Since I had no specific page length in mind, I wrote to the size of my idea. Now of course we don’t want to write 300 pages when only twenty pages are due, but maybe we can think that part of planning and research is developing a ten, or twenty, or twenty-five page idea.

So the key to writing is not writing to fill up a bucket, but writing to develop an idea. In practice, writing to develop an idea might look like this:

first you have an idea,
then you think about its parts,
and you think about how its parts relate to one another,
and you think about what each part contains — what kind of evidence, reflection, or explanation is needed in each part.
Once you start writing, you rethink each part of the process as you go, as needed.
Once you’ve finished writing, you rethink each part of the written product in the light of its conclusion.

I think we can turn this idea around and let it guide how we think about reading too. Do authors put meaning into books the way we might put something into a bucket? In that case, authors put meaning into a book and readers take, hopefully, the same meaning out. Or did they create a structure of some kind, a patterned object, and our acts of reading involve different kinds of pattern recognition? I think the latter is a better approach. It helps us comprehend not only the parts and a central idea, but how the parts relate to one another. It also allows us to ask different questions about the same text, so that we can carry out different pattern recognition activities to draw different meanings from the text.

So I think the best thing we can do is kick the bucket in our academic reading and writing practices. The mind is more complex than an empty container.

2018: My Year of the Edited Anthology

Yes, blatant self-promotion here: I have a few publications coming out this year, and they’re edited anthologies, either my own or my contributions of chapters. I don’t feel too bad writing about it, as I love doing this work, so I love talking about it. But I also love hearing other people talk about the work that they’re doing, and I like promoting the work of others — I love it when people I’m connected to produce good things, and I like taking about that too.

There’s also a bit of an ethical imperative behind book promotion: if a publisher invests in your work by publishing it, you should feel obligated to promote it — to help the publisher recover that investment. On a side note, you can trust me when I say there is no real money in almost all academic publishing for the authors of these works, at least not in terms of direct compensation for the publication. I got one check a year for three years for my first book, Blake and Kierkegaard: Creation and Anxiety (Continuum/Bloomsbury 2010). Each check was big enough to take my wife out to dinner to an Olive Garden / Red Lobster kind of restaurant, but it wouldn’t cover the sitter too. It sold about the average number of copies for an academic book, 300-350. It’s listed in over 1000 libraries around the world, but shared databases mean that libraries don’t have to own their own copy of a book to have access to it.

But best of all, because these are all edited anthologies, I’m not only promoting my work, but the work of colleagues around the world. So what I’m really saying here is, “check out this interesting work that we’ve all come together to do.” Publications appear in the order of their release.

Rock and Romanticism: Blake and Wordsworth, Book Cover — Taylor Fickes, cover photo. Fickes Photo.

Rock and Romanticism: Blake, Wordsworth, and Rock from Dylan to U2 (Lexington Books, February 2018), edited by James Rovira. Check out the book page to see descriptions of each chapter, lists of musical works discussed, lists of literary works discussed, and links to iTunes playlists associated with each chapter. Most of the music covered in this volume falls in the category of classic rock or folk/roots/country rock (Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, Rush, U2, Blackberry Smoke), but we have chapters engaging acts like Lil Wayne and the 1960s’ Italian pop singer Piero Ciampi. Why I love writing about music.

Kierkegaard, Literature, and the Arts (Northwestern UP, February 2018), edited by Eric Ziolkowski. Great study of the subject under discussion edited by a leading Kierkegaard scholar — not to mention the contributor list, which is almost a who’s who of Kierkegaard scholarship. I was fortunate to contribute chapter 12, “The Moravian Origins of Kierkegaard’s and Blake’s Socratic Literature.”

Assembling the Marvel Cinematic Universe: Essays on the Social, Cultural and Geopolitical Domains (McFarland, March 2018), edited by Julian C. Chambliss, Bill L. Svitavsky, and Daniel Fandino. I was privileged to contribute “Silly Love Songs, Gender, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Avengers: Age of Ultron.” The table of contents isn’t available yet.

Rock and Romanticism: Post-Punk, Goth, and Metal as Dark Romanticisms (Palgrave Macmillan, April 2018), edited by James Rovira. Yes, it’s a second rock and Romanticism book released in the same year, but it’s completely different from the first with its focus on the Gothic. I’ve built a book page for this one too, which should go live either mid to late March. The book page will also have chapter descriptions, links to the music and literature under discussion, and links to iTunes and Spotify playlists. This anthology takes the thesis stated in the previous Rock and Romanticism book then narrows and focuses it upon the Gothic. After an initial discussion of Milton, Shelley, and the Rolling Stones’s “Sympathy for the Devil,” chapters focus on music from the New Romantics and the Pretenders onward, covering a variety of acts: post-punk, goth/emo, Eminem, and metal bands.

In development: Interpretation: Theory: History (under contract with Lexington Books). Really interesting project in which contributors examine a variety of reading practices from Plato to Object Oriented Ontology against their historical backgrounds to establish a dialectic between our reading practices and their social milieus. I hope to send a first full draft to the publisher by the end of March.

Active CFPs:

The next two projects are in very early stages of development and continue to narrow and focus my study of rock and Romanticism:

Rock and Romanticism: The David Bowie Edition (will probably be retitled David Bowie and Romanticism).

Women in Rock: Women in Romanticism

Literary Studies and Professional Studies

[Note: this semester I’m teaching a Survey of World Literature class to Nursing students. I designed the class with a Medical Humanities focus. This blog post is a modified version of an announcement I posted to the class about the importance of this class to their degrees.]

Big picture: college degrees can very generally be divided into two types. First, degrees that prepare students for a vocation, and next, degrees that develop student capacities, skills, or knowledge in a broader sense. The latter kind of degree falls under the designation of a “liberal arts degree.” Liberal arts study was developed in the current university system when all university education was designed to train priests but was still seen as valuable to people who did not wish to be ordained. Liberal arts study — originally grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy — was then pursued to give free (liberalis) men the training they needed to conduct business in the world. Liberal arts study, therefore, was the original business degree.

An Associate of Science in Nursing is a vocational degree — it trains students to do a job. Paralegal degrees, other medical science degrees, criminal justice degrees, and other similar AS degrees do the same thing. They provide narrow, focused courses of study that provide job training in a specific field. Bachelor degrees, on the other hand, seek to produce more broadly developed graduates: people who have developed certain skills and attained more advanced levels of knowledge both within and outside of their vocational training.

Vocational degrees are great. In the right fields, they lead to decently paying jobs with a minimal of student debt or time to degree. They are limited, though. Because they aren’t portable to other fields, what happens if you hate your job? Or what happens if the tech changes, or your job goes away? Suddenly, your education is useless because it’s been so narrow, and you need to go back for retraining.

In a very broad sense, college classes designed to produce more advanced students tend to do two things: impart knowledge and develop skills. Almost all classes do at least a little of both, but some classes are very heavily weighted toward skills development (like a Drawing or a Painting class, or some other fine art class), while other classes are very heavily weighted toward imparting knowledge, like a chemistry or anatomy class.

Classes that are weighted toward imparting knowledge teach students information that they expect students to believe. An anatomy class, for example, expects students to name many (many) different parts of the human body, and they’re expected to know these names as facts. Sunday School classes or sermons are similar — we’re taught things there because we’re expected to believe them, because they are presented as truth.

Classes that are weighted toward skills could be seen as developing different kinds of not just skills but literacy: drawing and painting classes increase your visual literacy, or in other words, not just your ability to see in more detail, but to critically interpret what you see. Classes that are reading intensive, such as history, English, and philosophy, develop a variety of cognitive skills, all of them involving the ability to process a lot of incoming and outgoing text quickly. History tends to focus on concrete objects of study, philosophy on abstract, while the study of literature tends to combine the two: it teaches us to analyze concrete, creative products using abstract conceptual structures.

Based on this understanding of what a literature class does, I’d like to encourage students, and everyone else, really, not to think of literature classes as classes that teach students information they ought to believe. Literature classes aren’t anatomy classes, and they aren’t Sunday School classes. Literature classes are somewhat off the map in terms of either kind of thinking as they are usually designed to combine these two purposes. Literary study imparts knowledge for the purpose of developing skills. The skills imparted by literary studies are partly cognitive, partly relational, and partly academic. For example, reading and writing skills are enhanced through literary study, and they are foundational cognitive skills that contribute to the development of more advanced ones. Literature classes regularly ask students to learn to think in very different ways by reading complex texts. Yes, that’s hard. Students who struggle and have to reread often aren’t at a disadvantage, though. Going through that process is a sign of student learning.

On the relational side, literature classes ask questions like, “How do other people think, what do other people think, why do they think that way, and why is it important, especially to them?” These “other people” may be fictional, real, or mythological, but the literature class doesn’t care: readers have to exercise their judgment, or interpretive skills, equally on all three without ever knowing what the right answer is.

That is one of the biggest benefits of a literature class: each work of literature is like a real life case study in that it presents characters whose words and actions must be interpreted without anyone ever being able to tell us that we got it right. The act of literary interpretation in this way mimics the kind of real life reasoning that we do on a daily basis as we try to understand other people. Literary interpretation just slows down the process and makes it more explicit and deliberate rather than on the spot.

In one narrow sense, literature classes do teach facts they expect students to believe, such as the approximate date of composition of a work, the geographic location in which it was composed, its authorship, etc. Even if we don’t know who the author of a literary work is, we might regard it as a fact that we don’t know who the author is. All of these facts fall under the category of “literary history” and make up the known facts about a literary work with the caveat that, as is the case with all historical artifacts, what we think we know now can change later with a new discovery, as in many of the sciences.

But most literature classes only pay minor attention to literary history. It’s background information. For the most part, literature classes do not teach anything they expect students to believe. They present interpretable material and ask students to interpret it, and to do so coherently, but they never claim that any one justified or coherent interpretation is the right one. Note my caveats, though: justified or coherent. In other words, any valid interpretation according to the range of possible meanings of the work is a right one, but there’s not just one. Meaning in complex literary works is of course not completely subjective, nor is it arbitrary: it is limited to the range of meanings made possible by the words on the page.

For example, the word “green” might refer to a color, to someone who is envious or ill, to someone who is new, or to someone who is pro-environment, which means that the word “green” can produce a number of different meanings in a single context, sometimes even more than one at the same time. This idea of a literary work, or even a single word, meaning multiple things at the same time is “polysemy.” It’s an idea found in Plato’s works and very strongly emphasized by the Medievals in Biblical interpretation from the time of Origen, continuing to the present in the current Catholic catechism. Despite the long-known polysemous quality of language, the word “green” can never be a direct lexical substitute for “tall,” so while literary interpretation isn’t fixed, simple, or singular, like the names of our different bones, it isn’t arbitrary. Learning to negotiate a field of information that is neither completely subjective, completely arbitrary, nor completely fixed is one of the several important cognitive skills developed by literary study.

So I’d like us all to avoid approaching literary works assigned in a class with the mindset that the class is trying to get us to believe something. I’d like us to approach these literary works with the mindset that the class is trying to get us to understand how other people think — people in different cultures or people who lived in past versions of our own culture. The medical humanities-focused world literature class I developed uses world literature to seek to understand how people thought about their bodies, about health and sickness, and about caregiving in past cultures around the world. This study does involve a seeking after fact, but these facts are at least in part the product of interpretation. They aren’t just presented in a simple and straightforward way on the page just waiting to be consumed and regurgitated.

As a result, yours or my own or anyone else’s agreement or disagreement with any of the ideas presented in any literary text are completely irrelevant to the purposes of most literature courses, because these courses are not really designed to get students to believe something in particular — aside from facts related to basic literary history described above. It’s asking students to interpret something that’s different from our usual way of thinking to help us better understand people who think in ways that are different from us, and to help us in a general sense be more advanced thinkers — which is a skill that students can take with them into any profession.