AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
Gwen stefani and zoom it real4/8/2023 ![]() “The perfect Trojan horse,” as Garbage lead singer Shirley Manson put it. I was more, in the band, like a tomboy.” But Stefani was always the sexy tomboy, blending seemingly irreconcilable styles into an aesthetic that became the blueprint for what would become “girl power.” It was a look that her own father, when asked in 1997 about her “sex appeal,” described as “the healthy, athletic, happy, honest approach.” “I see these girls as more going for the sex-symbol thing. ![]() “And - this is the point - when she thinks of herself, she does not.” In 2011, she rejected the claim that Lady Gaga, Rihanna, and Katy Perry were her “heirs”: “I don’t see myself in those girls,” she replied. “When she thinks of Madonna, she thinks of sex,” Rolling Stone explained. In the years to come, Stefani would often be likened to Madonna - a comparison she hated. I’m the furthest thing from a rock chick.” “I love makeup,” Stefani told Spin in 1996. This new mode was just as public, yet far more palatable to mainstream audiences, in part because it traded transgression, rage, and the rejection of feminine norms for the consumption and cultivation of “innocent” sex appeal. However false that dichotomy, it remained the guiding logic of the mid-’90s, when the label of “feminist” was subsumed by a different way of being a girl in the world. In hindsight, Stefani’s rise functioned as a pivot in the history of feminist rock: the first of many moments in a backlash that would transform a movement fueled by anthems like Hole’s “Doll Parts” and Bikini Kill’s “I Like Fucking” into a sparkly mimeograph of itself, a retort to the stereotypical notion of humorless feminists who hated lipstick. “I'm a more old-fashioned kind of girl, a real girly girl.” As the cover of Spin declared, she was a “Riot Girlie”: the diminutive version of the “riot grrrls” whose aggressive, alienating style had become the rock scene’s primary female energy. “I'm really not the type of person that's a big feminist,” she told Billboard in 1995. Stefani also prided herself on not being political. They were angry, and I didn't really feel like that.” “All the women around me that I could look at were in bands like L7 or Hole. “I didn't know where I fit in,” she recalled. She liked embracing her feminine side - something that, when she was coming of age, she simply didn’t see modeled in music. The reason you wanted her? She was hot but approachable, a frontwoman for a rock band who wasn’t mad, or aggressive, or ugly she wasn’t like Courtney Love or Kathleen Hanna or any of the other women who performed at those Rock for Choice concerts. On the cover, Stefani posed in a bra and panties, her hands in the shape of a heart just below her chin. That memory was included in one of the first major magazine profiles of No Doubt, published in Details in April 1997. “They were like, ‘We would’ve never asked Gwen Stefani to be involved if we knew she was going to say that.” It was a stance that Stefani found hypocritical: “They were pro-abortion,” she said. The organizers, Stefani later recalled, were not pleased. ![]() But isn’t it cool that nobody can tell me what I can and can’t do?” When No Doubt’s frontwoman, Gwen Stefani, got onstage, she told the audience, “If I got pregnant right now, I wouldn’t get an abortion. It was the latest benefit concert put on by Rock for Choice, a reproductive rights advocacy group founded by the all-women rock band L7. ![]() In 1995, No Doubt were asked to perform alongside Primus and Fishbone at a Roe v. ![]()
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |