BABY I DON’T CARE

II.



I’ve been trying to figure out a way to engage with you on some of your arguments. I deliberately steered clear of the homosexual themes in part because they don’t reflect my direct experience but also because I felt a firm groundwork needed to be laid first before somebody could come along and give that treatment… I think it would still be very useful, can imagine a VERY good book waiting to get written… but to me the LEAST interesting aspects of Bowie, Elton John, and Boy George are their sexualities… I wanted to mount a spirited DEFENSE of Mick Jagger because I sense he gets too easily written off as a woman-hater when to my ear he’s FAR more complicated than that. 



Gender has become this buzzword, in academia it can mean almost anything, it gets tossed around too much, etc. I was trying to address the area that Robert Bly wrote so ignorantly of [in IRON JOHN] when he said “Young men today have no role models…” What do we mean when we talk about “feminism” anymore? How did men respond to it? Why has it gotten so demonized and twisted? And who will stand up for the figures that paraded through rock that set it all off? 



That’s the area… Presley’s view on women is all over the place: he’s a Momma’s boy who was quickly corrupted by his power and tended to treat women as second-class citizens… but in SONG, it was clear how devoted, how romantic and how obviously wowed he was womanhood, don’t you think? Otherwise, why are we still listening? Why does he stick up so firmly for his girl in “Blue Seude Shoes”? Why does “Suspicious Lies” sound so vulnerable? What is he so AFRAID of in that song? 



yada yada yada, BUTCH