It is a song women have sung for years, in pop music if not so often in life: a ballad of unlimited availability and bottomless devotion. The Ronettes sang it in 1963 on “Be My Baby”; the Shangri-Las riddled it with kitschy pathos on 1964’s “The Leader of the Pack.” Written or produced largely by men, delivered by ensembles known as girl groups, this song infused rock fantasy before the Beatles wanted to hold anyone’s hand. And now it has returned, brought on by a tide of girl groups, major sellers all: Salt-N-Pepa, En Vogue, TLC, SWV, Xscape and Jade. In “Whatta Man,” slithering on a white bearskin rug and wearing a black negligee, Spinderella (Dee Dee Roper) revamps the spirit–“Highway to heaven /From seven to seven/He’s got me open like 7-11.” Three decades after the Shirelles and the Crystals faded like teen angels, the girl group-tough, boy-crazy and now defiantly raunchy -is back.
But these are new girl groups, and this is a new song. Cut away from Spinderella rolling on the fur, and Salt is putting a fresh stitch in this old musical dress. Her superlover, she says, “Spends quality time with his kids when he can,” and is “Never disrespectful/‘Cuz his mama taught him that.” This is a celebration we haven’t heard before, one that schools men as it praises them. Swinging the graphic assertiveness of rap and the sexual power plays of Madonna and Janet Jackson, the new girl groups play sex as sex, but also as politics. At a time when popular music is particularly hostile to women, theirs is a celebration of female sexual control. The Dixie Cups of the mid ’60s were going to a chapel and wanted only happiness; the new girl groups make demands. Thrusting a toned leg from her bubble bath, Pepa (Sandra Denton) casts a withering glance on the general state of manhood: “He’s not a fake wanna-be trying to be a pimp.” Fellas, this is a warning.
Playing the kittens but at the same time showcasing their own power, Salt-N-Pepa and En Vogue, like the other groups, have it both ways. “Women are supposed to be sexy,” Pepa told NEWSWEEK. “I always want to feel and be sexy.” But she also says she sees the group as role models. “We say to girls, respect yourself, to guys, you got to respect us.” The friction between these two assertions is the essence of the contemporary girl group. Like the catty flip of “My Boyfriend’s Back,” it sings for its times.
It also aligns the groups with a vogueish blip suspiciously dubbed “do-me feminism” or “Bambi feminism,” commemorated in the current issue of Esquire with the sentiment expressed by one punk rocker: “A lot of us just want to go spray-paint and make out with our boyfriends and not worry about oppression.” As Coko (Tamara Johnson) of the New York trio SWV puts it, contradictions intact: “You can be sexy and still want respect, still get your respect. As long as you’re not going overboard and showing all parts of your body. If you can enjoy the vocals, I’m happy.”
This has long been a nettled area for the women’s movement, and is a newly nettled one for pop: how to be overtly sexual and still be a feminist. In the frenzied language of hit singles, the argument often boils down to blunt metaphors. As they gyrate through the same poses as women in the most exploitative male video, the girl groups pour on a celebration of female control. Says Left Eye (Lisa Lopes) of TLC, who wears condoms as a fashion statement, “We try to teach women how to be strong, how to believe in themselves, how to make themselves happy, as opposed to pleasing someone else first.” As they utter their come-hithers, in songs like SWV’s double-entendre hit “Downtown,” the new girl groups demand to be satisfied, even adding a new battlefield to pop pillow talk. “We thought we should say as ladies how we would like to be pleased,” says Coko. “In concerts, when we do ‘Downtown,’ the ladies are chanting, ‘Go down, go down.’ They understand exactly what we’re talking about. This is like their anthem.” This is gender politics by extreme shorthand, but gender politics nonetheless.
But does it still count if men are behind it? Male songwriters and producers still script a lot of the action (Salt-N-Pepa recently took over the lion’s share of their writing and production). Jermaine Dupri, a rising Atlanta hit maker, writes music for the quartet Xscape, produces it and owns the record company. “It’s easy” to write for women, he says, “because I know what I would write what a girl wouldn’t write…What most girls wouldn’t say is what people want to hear today.” This is, it seems, largely OK by the women. For SWV’s engagingly smutty “Blak Pudd’n,” an oral fixation that makes “Downtown” seem chaste, the male songwriters were told “to act like they were writing for the men, don’t think about writing for girls,” says Coko. “That’s what they did. [The lyrics] were written for a male.”
In part because of this male contribution, girl groups have rarely gotten their proper respect. Written off as the playthings of Svengalis, they have influenced only each other; when they faded in the mid-’60s, it was as if their light had never shined. No music so wonderful has had less impact on what surrounded or followed it. But this remains part of the groups’ charm; they reveled both in their insular, obsessive passions and their goofy exuberance the myth, at least, of pure innocent fun. Beneath all their contradictions and their newfound sexual explicitness, this is the real legacy the new girl groups restore: the innate pleasure of a perfectly turned beat (or a bunch of great wigs), the charm of a sharp line sung with disarming sass. They’re a lot of fun. That we’ve lost our faith in fun’s innocence-and that the fun really is no longer so harmless–only makes their return more welcome. It’s about time.
