A 21st century feminist music memoir written in tribute to Patti Smith, Siouxsie Sioux, Chrissie Hynde, Pat Benatar, Joan Jett, Laurie Anderson, P.J. Harvey, The Slits, Le Tigre, Cibo Mato... more...

Why I Don't Have Any Female Rock Idols... continued...

Where do you go to register as a wonder of science? I’ve self diagnosed as musically-autistic, and I think there’s probably research-grant-rich neurologists out there who’d pay good bucks to get a look at my grey matter. Listening to music, for me, is an experience of abstraction. I hear the sounds and I think thoughts, then while I sit puzzling at the possible relationships between the two, whole songs pass by without me noticing.

When I am in love, I listen vicariously; feeling something sometimes. Emotions pass over the features of my friends, as little waves of varying lenths rattle membranes in our ear canals.

When I was a youth, I rarely went out to hear live bands. In clubs I was at a loss, the lyrics were indistinguishable, the sound a sort of ambient force, the beat just a physical sensation. At that time, music appreciation was social currency, and I was an outsider. Til one day when I saw David Bowie on TV and everything changed.

Bowie was performing on Saturday Night Live (circa. 1979). His posing and flirting; vogueing in a long black priest-like dress-jacket, introduced me to those "down there" feelings that were so soon to become a confusing-yet-driving force in my life and I became obsessed. Bowie's role-playing, his teasing, his winking and nodding and prancing and pulling out all the stops; the saucy silly bits, the overwrought drama, the arch conceptualism, and the sheer brilliant self-conscious performance of it all, gave me the signposts I needed to "read" the music. Following the Bowie narrative I started listening to music with emotions.

This narrative window into music developed further when my fried Loretta introduced me to The Who. She had an older brother who, for some unknown reason, let us commandeer his room and play records on his stereo. Loretta cried everyday when she listened to music, a quirk that I found exotic and admirable at the time. She made up fantasies about the members of all the bands she listened to (as well as all the characters on Star Trek). Her stories involved weird daily life stuff, like Roger Daltry helping her with her science essays. This trick of fiction suited me perfectly, and I dove into a fresh obsession, this time creating my own narratives and attaching them to the songs. Every song by Pete Townshend was a personal message of love meant only for me, a communication that, through the twin miracles of music and popular culture, transcended the bounds of time, geography and reality itself. In my mind we were lovers meant to be, separated only by the fact that I was a teenage girl sitting in a smelly boy's bedroom in a farmhouse in rural South Western Ontario and he was an aging English rock star of mega proportions. Obsessive unrequited love with this unattainable guitarist gave me emotional access to his music.

A teenage rockstar crush is not unsual. But something else was happening to me. I was not just lusting after a grown man, I started to become him. In my mind I went back in time, inhabited Pete Townshend's body, wrote all of his songs and performed them in front of audiences. Contrary to my docile, nerdy real life, in my Townshend fantasies I threw temper tantrums (complete with guitar smashing, of course), long protracted arguements with Roger Daltry, and even love affairs with girls! I started going to school dressed in a white jumpsuit like Pete Townshend sometimes wore, on other days I'd wear a modish blazer. This had a strange effect as I was I not a lithe and lanky English boy but a rather plump and bookish Canadian girl. I kept a bottle of gin, which I barely touched, hidden in my sock drawer. But most importantly, in my mind, I wrote and played the songs.

I was no longer interested in sharing music and fantasies with Loretta. I'd lie on my bed alone, staring at the ceiling, physically embodying every nuance of every song Pete Townshend had anything to do with. To the outside observer I was passive, inside I was making the music, writing it, performing it, owning it.

I've never played an instrument. As I mentioned, I am musically hopeless. Left to my own devices I will work in silence. Or I will put on music and promptly ignore it. If motivated I will listen with enjoyment to something with technical transparency like Bach Cantatas (preferably following the score to provide shape and meaning to the exercise), or Stephen Reich, or Kraftwerk. I will listen with great pleasure to the songs chosen by my loved ones, filling in some meaning by association.

Once I wrote a letter to Pete Townshend. I was in my thirties. He was in his sixties. It was like writing to an old camp counsellor. I thanked him for being a role model at an early age, that while I was not a musician, I felt that his example had helped me to find the courage to put myself forward. I sent him a copy of the magazine I was working on, and of which I was very proud. He wrote back, not a figment of my imagination or some strange extension of psyche, but a real person, with a real pen that ran real (purple) ink.

Sally McKay, "Why I Don't Have Any Female Rock Idols To Call My Own,"
first published in Grey Goo (Print Edition), Toronto, 2005
- sally mckay 5-25-2006 9:46 pm