Old Saw That I Just Invented

"The rain falls equally upon the rich and poor -- but the rich can afford umbrellas."

Musical interlude: Wherein I Deconstruct Gender in Andrews Sisters Lyrics

Having put together an entire exercise set this morning from a "Best of the Andrews Sisters" album, I suddenly noticed how gender-bending some of their recordings are when viewed from the right angle. Some cross-gender point of view is inevitable when you had an all-female group singing songs from the point of view of (at the time, by definition male) soldiers leaving/far from home, and especially the point of view of those soldiers addressing either their (female) sweethearts back home or occasionally women met overseas.

So, for example, the first-person voice of Apple Blossom Time -- though sung by female voices -- expresses traditionally male roles ("I'll be with you to change your name to mine", as well as the assumption that it is the singer's agency that will reunite the two). Although the focus on aspects of the expected wedding ceremony expresses traditionally female concerns, the song is straightforwardly a (heterosexual) man's song that simply happens to be performed by a woman's voice.

But although Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree has many of the same characteristics of the previous item -- 1st person POV of an absent soldier ("'Till I come marching home") addressing an overtly female sweetheart back home ("The girl ... fits you to a T") -- when the song enters the middle section we get the singer's gender overriding the song-POV-gender in the pronouns. The refrain is separated into a lead-and-echo with the lead voice retaining first person ("anyone else but me") but the echo-voices picking the line up with 3rd sg fem ("anyone else but her"). In the song's original temporal context, both military and social gender roles and available models of sexuality would have blocked the literal scenario that the song sets up (i.e, a female soldier addressing a female sweetheart with expectations of marriage as a goal), but listening to the song today, it's almost impossible not to have that scenario evoked as one of the natural readings of the text/performance.

A similar conflict in singer vs. POV gender comes when the intro to Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen sets up a first-person POV admiring a male addressee ("Of all the boys I've known -- and I've known some") in contradiction to the grammatical femininity of the addressee in the chorus ("I could say 'Bella! Bella!') and the social agency inherent in the POV voice ("I am begging for your hand") and perhaps the greater likelihood at the time of a man being in the position of wanting to court someone in a non-English language. Given that the grammatical gender issue with "bella" may slide by many listeners, the conflict here resolves (to me) more in the direction of a (heterosexual) female POV/singer appropriating male social agency -- but this may be because I find the gendered noun ("boys I've known") more intrusive than a gendered pronoun ("anyone else but her").

Hmm, I may have a future as a post-modernist after all! (Just kidding.)

A Good Word for Good Customer Service

Blackstone Audio (a producer of audio books) is hereby proclaimed a Good Company. One of the tracks on one of the disks of my 8-disk unabridged Histories by Tacitus (thanks for the xmas prezzie cryptocosm) kept breaking iTunes. I described the problem and my attempts to troubleshoot it to the Blackstone Audio sales contact e-mail and they responded the next day with the information that they're sending me a replacement disk. (All I'd asked for was a downloadable copy of the one track.) If you are a fan of audio books, check them out.