Author Talk: ‘Sex and Gender in Pop/Rock Music’

360ºSound recently had the pleasure of chatting with Walter Everett, Ph.D., about his new book Sex and Gender in Pop/Rock Music: The Blues Through the Beatles to Beyoncé (out now on Bloomsbury Academic). The book traces how popular music reflects and influences concepts of gender and sexuality. The book provides not only an overview but also a more detailed analysis of songs and artists.

Everett is Professor Emeritus of Music and Music Theory at the University of Michigan. He is also the author of Foundations of Rock and The Beatles as Musicians, Vols. 1 and 2. In this interview, Everett discusses how modern pop music reflects current public discourse surrounding gender, the book’s contributions to the literature, sexual themes in the Beatles catalog, and more.

Editor’s Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

360ºSound: Sex and gender in music is a broad topic. What were your considerations when deciding how to narrow the focus?

Walter Everett: At first glance, you might see this book and think, Oh, that has been covered already, which is what I thought. But the more I dug, I just wasn’t finding what I was interested in. My focus is on the music itself. It really penetrates into what’s being sung and played in the recordings or the stage performances. Other books treat artist biographies, the iconography of artists’ appearance, their record covers, and their videos. That’s all well covered elsewhere. I only touch on that here and there when it’s directly related to musical arguments.

The focus of the book is on the actual music. The book is also broadly comprehensive in covering songs from the past 75 years, and earlier too to set the context. I think it’s fully representative of all popular styles, less so on jazz because I didn’t want to talk just about instrumental music and the jazz standards. I cover it to a degree, but this is mostly about the rock era. I not only cover lots of different styles but also draw support from decades of research done in related music and non-music fields. Lots of physiology and psychology and all kinds of other things that I thought would support studying sex and gender and sexuality comprehensively. In a way the book is focused, dealing almost entirely with the music, but it’s also pretty comprehensive, too.

In recent years, there’s been more public discourse surrounding gender and LGBTQIA+ issues. What are some ways in which you’ve seen that reflected in pop music?

As social movements take shape and change, music’s right there with it. Popular music is usually right there or slightly behind changes in society. In recent decades, there’s been lots more songwriting by women. Lots more gay themes. Jane Siberry’s “Mimi On The Beach” is a lesbian-tinged song, which builds on ocean waves as a metaphor for the female sexual response. In terms of gay performers, Brandi Carlisle has risen to the top of the pop world and some of her songs address lesbian love.

The book discusses a number of different nonbinary performers. Conchita Wurst comes to mind. Wurst, who uses they/their pronouns, sang with a woman’s very high tessitura. And they dress like a glamorous diva, but they sport a full beard. So that’s really ambiguous. Their song “Rise like a Phoenix,” which I didn’t know, was a big European hit. It’s really anthem-like in its dramatic setting in the minor mode with tense dissonance, most poignant lines, and it’s got these affirmative choruses that symbolize transformation or rebirth in resolving to major chord sonorities. It uses music in this very big dramatic way to illustrate transformation.

It undeniably really depicts one transfigured beyond recognition in rising above slights and tribulations with gender and sexuality, given this context, only in the singer’s appearance and reputation. I say gender and sexuality themselves can’t be suggested musically, but the attitudes and the dynamics within and surrounding them may be suggested with musical affect.

As you write, songs from the pre-rock era (e.g., the Great American Songbook), rarely explicitly addressed sexuality and gender. What shifted in the second half of the 20th century?

That Great American Songbook – Cole Porter, Gershwin, Irving Berlin, and so on – has some innuendo, but it’s usually there for humorous effect. It’s not usually the driving force in the song. This is back in the Jim Crow era, when there really were two different Americas. There was the dominant white culture that was long sexually repressed, especially as codes were formed to control what could be distributed in media, including photography, film, sound recordings, and broadcast material. African Americans had far less access to outlets like that and were far more open, less inhibited in their live performance about the artistic representation of sexual topics in their music.

Interestingly, the rise of rock and roll among mixed audiences in the 1950s brought attention to the establishment, resulting in a moral panic. We’re all drawn to the fun rhythms and frankness about sex in R&B that gradually grew more and more open right to the present day. In the 1970s we saw a lot of visual impact with David Bowie and so many instances of gender appearing ambiguous. But in the ‘80s, sex-related rock songs would typically rebel strongly against those moral panics in the Reagan era, moral panics about promiscuity and AIDs particularly. You’d get songs like Samantha Fox’s “Naughty Girls Need Love Too” normalizing sexual desire in ways that hadn’t been done earlier. Things just became more and more explicit from there.

As a Beatles scholar, what are some noteworthy themes relating to sexuality and gender that run through the Beatles’ catalog?

It’s funny because when I was writing those Beatles books, they came out in 1999 and 2001, sex wasn’t a big focus for me. But in writing this book, I went back to discover that the romantic relationships they wrote about in their early songs were very clean on the surface, but sex was always hinted at in songs like “Please Please Me” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” You could tell the Beatles had this clean Everly Brothers and Buddy Holly-like approach to romantic relationships, but there was a gritty undertone. “Please Please Me” with its “come on, come on, come on.” And “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” you can imagine he’s probably visibly aroused when the subject is singing, “I can’t hide, I can’t hide, I can’t hide.”

And then in the mid-period, sex was heard in the heavy breathing of “Lovely Rita” and certainly was right out front in “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road.” Also from the White Album, there’s gender play with Desmond and Molly changing gender [in “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da”] and you wonder if it was almost a mistake on McCartney’s part because they had done so many takes of the song. You wonder if maybe he just mixed up Desmond and Molly when he was singing about Desmond doing his makeup and so forth.

In “Get Back” in 1969, McCartney was clearly talking about a person in gender transition. And so, it got pretty interesting there. Lennon, particularly in his solo career, continued more strongly to develop the feminism that he had first shown in the song “Getting Better” in 1967. His very strong feminist support was right out there in front in the single “Woman is the N-word of the World.”

But still, even with Lennon’s highly open stance in support of women, it’s interesting to me, I’ve discovered recently how much Yoko Ono contributed to “Revolution #9” in particular. She should get composer’s credit but never does. It’s always Lennon-McCartney, or in one case Lennon-McCartney-Starkey. That track at least should be Lennon-McCartney-Ono for sure. But no, they wouldn’t have even considered giving a woman publishing license or the royalties that would come from that. It’s a very mixed thing back in the 1960s. But the Beatles did in some of those ways bring issues of sex and gender into their music.

What do you think are your book’s key contributions to the literature?

I would say comprehensiveness in the amount of literature it covers. I don’t know how many songs are in the book’s index, but there are 3,000 in the online appendix [available as a free download on the Bloomsbury site]. Songs from all different styles right up through hip-hop are discussed in a wide range of analytical techniques. Sometimes I focus on the instruments that are played, sometimes on the rhythms, sometimes on harmony or the formal structure of a song, so I focus on lots of different aspects and lots of different interpretive insights.

I always believe that there aren’t any rules in forming an interpretation of music, that you don’t have to be bound by what the creator intended. You don’t have to be constrained by worrying if such and such was meant by the composer or the singer. The music’s there to make your own. I want to demonstrate lots of different ways that readers can hopefully use more imagination in forming their own interpretations of the music they listen to.

Purchase your copy of Sex and Gender in Pop/Rock Music: The Blues Through the Beatles to Beyoncé direct from Bloomsbury here.