The Subtle, the Blatant, and the Purple

762. CHARLENE, "I've Never Been To Me"
Written by Ken Hirsch & Ron Miller
Prodigal 0636 1977 Billboard: # 97
Motown 1611 1982 Billboard: # 3

763. REBA MCENTIRE, "Fancy"
Produced by; Tony Brown written by Bobbie Gentry
MCA 54042 1991 Did not make pop charts

Like a lot of people I know, I first started paying attention to Barack Obama after his speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. It wasn't just that he was a great public speaker. It was that, unlike the speeches of so many politicians who tried to inspire me, the moving words Obama spoke actually seemed to describe the country that I thought I lived in. We worship a mighty God in the Blue States, he told the partisan faithful at the convention, and we don't like the government poking into our libraries in the Red States. Even back then, that was the America I knew: conservatives in Massachusetts and liberals in Missouri, not one America ("the real America") or two (Red and Blue), but a dizzying number of semi-interlocking subgroups. It was beyond ethnicity or even ideology. It only seemed to simplify around election time, when the press-politician feedback loop made sure that all those many groups were reduced to just two, two easy actants that even the most casual audience member could follow.

Once can make facile analogies to McCarthyism, to Henry Ford's war on New York City, even to the bimetallist Populists of the 1890s, who saw England and the Eastern United States in cahoots to rob the West blind. But the electoral map of red and blue that seemed so clear throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s really goes back to 1968, to George Wallace, Richard Nixon, and (especially) Roger Ailes, who figured out a way to break up the loose coalition that had helped Democrats win the Presidency in all but two elections over almost four decades. The rise of cultural conservatism in post-Nixon Republicanism only made this tie stronger. By 1980, battle lines were drawn, and every American needed to decide which side of the internecine barricades s/he was on.

Charlene's "I've Never Been to Me" is a fascinating artifact of that cultural transformation. The single barely made the Billboard Hot 100 in 1977, when it was first released (the year before the Moral Majority was founded). Yet it rose all the way to # 3 when it was re-released five years later, after influential d.j. Scott Shannon had taken to playing it repeatedly on his show. In terms of production, it is obviously a 1970s song, so why did it have to be rereleased in the early 1980s to be popular? Reaganism, obviously: just say no; antisex conservatism. Case closed.

Maybe.

"I've Never Been to Me" is musically obvious throughout and lyrically clunky at points, nowhere more so than in the spoken word section toward the end. Admittedly, spoken word in the midst of a sung performance is very hard to pull off on record, as even an established pro like Kenny Rogers could tell you (cf. 1979's "Coward of the County"). There are some cute stretches in this lyric, though, particularly in the internal rhymes in many of the verses, which double the words' impact but must have been hell on Hirsch & Miller's copy of Clement Wood. As anyone who has attempted this song at karaoke can probably tell you, "I moved like Harlow/Through Monte Carlo/And showed 'em what I've got" flows particularly well. Those words can be as much fun to sing on top of those notes as the events they describe were supposed to have been for the narrator back in the day.

And then there's the one internal rhyme that really drives the song home, a better conveyor of its would-be message than the clunky reference to "unborn children" a few lines earlier: "I've spent my life exploring/The subtle whoring/That costs too much to be free." Vulgarity is much more common in pop now than it was thirty years ago. If you weren't around back then, you can't really appreciate the impact of the word "whoring" in a song that otherwise sounded so inoffensive and gentle. It's almost the reverse of Joey Ramone singing that he wants to be your boyfriend over dissonant punk guitars. In any case, the first time you heard those three lines, it hit you like a sledgehammer.

Okay, so there's a little bit of craft in the songwriting. It's still part of a conservative plot to brainwash women, right? The real author of the song has to be Phyllis Schlafly. To which I say, have you seen Priscilla, Queen of the Desert? A lipsynched performance of this song by drag queens opens the movie. Yes, yes, I know, "camp"--as if slapping that one word on a cultural artifact allows us to avoid all further critical thought. For the entirety of the movie, though, this song almost functions as a sort of thesis statement, emphasizing the way in which one can be oversated with sensation. In truth, what fails about the song, even in Charlene's rendition, is not its delineation of the narrator's problem, but rather the solutions that it offers to it. We don't know how much of a jerk the husband of the woman she's talking to really is, or how much of a strain it is to raise her bratty children. But that still doesn't mean that the narrator's weltschmertz isn't very real.

Indeed, one of the reasons why this song might work better as a drag number is that a man can identify with its narrator without politically letting down his gender. (Rearrange that last clause any way you like--I assure you each meaning is intended.) This isn't a song about turning back from feminism to femininity but rather one about growing weary of compulsive sensation and consumption, a feeling that was certainly very apt in the early 1980s. And if that is a wholly "conservative" emotion, then Charles Baudelaire was a pioneer of Reaganism. Just take another look at his address to his "hypocrite lecteur" at the beginning of Les Fleurs des Mal.

Alright, I hear you say, but you're stretching the point: any anticonsumption weariness in the early 1980s was sucked up by the rising tide of cultural conservatism and then walked in lockstep with the platforms of the Republican Party, which promoted even higher levels of consumption than almost any other organization in our society. I admit you may have a point there, one captured in the ideological contradictions embodied in the antiselfishness/procapitalism acceptance speech that Bob Dole gave at the 1996 Republican Convention. Charlene's single, you could claim, succeeded because it was coopted on the occasion of its re-release and only its antifeminist message remained. As Chuck D most assuredly didn't say, Red States win again.

Which brings me to 1991's "Fancy." This isn't a rereleased single, but rather a rerecorded one. Bobbie Gentry wrote this song back in the late 1960s, but Gentry's arrangement of it almost makes the song come off as a smarmy dirty joke. This is not quite the right approach for a story about an impoverished girl whose mother "turns her out," as the lyric bluntly puts it, pushing her into a life of prostitution. Gentry's original rendition features kicky horns (once again, the continuing curse of Herb Alpert), but while horns may have worked on Dusty Springfield's "Son of a Preacher Man," they don't work there. Neither does Gentry's vocal, which is too distanced to convey the song's true roach-populated horror.
Logically, Gentry's rendition should be the more feminist version of the song--she's in the thick of the 1960s and crosses over more to rock. Reba McEntire, by contrast, is firmly in the Country camp. After Reagan, Tennessee is as Red a State as you can get.

Nevertheless, McEntire's version of "Fancy" is a revelation, beginning with the electric guitar that rightfully replace's Gentry's popping horns. There's also no distance to McEntire's vocal, which is both tortured and sly in turns, and both at exactly the right places: screaming for momma on one verse and taking the pathetic rich johns in stride on the next. In McEntire's hands, this is an unabashed song about the worst kind of female empowerment, one that balances the agency that its narrator gains with the heavy price that she had to pay for it.

Could you construct an argument that this record is conservative rather than liberal? Sure, if it's really that much more important to you whether you live in New York or Indiana. But whether you're Red or Blue, this is a song about the world of poor, uneducated women, the ways in which they may attempt to form cross-generational ties, and the ways in which they are commodified by a male-dominated world.

Because, my fellow citizens, there is no Red America, and no Blue America. We can grow sated with our consumption, our amusement, our pleasures in the Blue States; and we can feel righteous anger at the way rich men exploit both women and the poor in the Red ones. E pluribus popu[lu]m!