“I think there’s nothing better than seeing a three-chord straight up rock ‘n’ roll band in your face with sweaty music and three minute good songs.” — Joan Jett
There was a lot that was fucked up in the ’80s in terms of gender roles. Everyone is affected by these things – even if you’re rebelling you’re showing you’re affected by external messaging. I’ve been thinking about it a lot. My thoughts aren’t abstract or theoretical: I grew up then. Let’s grant a couple things: I am not in the mainstream – certainly not in what my life looks like, as compared to the norm and/or the expectation. I wasn’t “mainstream” then either, for a variety of reasons. I was a career-minded artistic kid. I studied acting like it was a full-time job. I didn’t care about about being “popular” at school. My friends in high school are still my friends today. I found my people and I found them young and I am very grateful! Because I didn’t care about fitting in with some OTHER group or trying to rise in whatever perceived hierarchy there was in high school, I didn’t have to compromise myself just to exist. My friends and I were not “cool” – at all. Drama Club kids are, in general, not the “cool” ones. Mine wasn’t a John Hughes world, in other words, and we all watched John Hughes, he was huge to us, of course, but our world was actually more interesting and diverse than the world he presented.
All of this is to say that the mainstream makes its demands, regardless. If you are a girl, you feel the pressure, to look/be a certain way. (Boys experience pressures too, with the added pressure of never being allowed to publicly show any emotion other than stoic no-emotion. Recipe for disaster.) When I was a teenager, I didn’t think I was pretty and of course I wanted to be pretty. I felt like the fact that no one fell in love with me was proof I wasn’t pretty. So my “worth” was connected to outside validation. (This is why having some outside passion – acting, for me – is so important for kids. Even as a teenager, I could say to myself, “Okay, oh well, I’m not pretty, and no one loves me, but at least I have my ambition!” The “conventional” idea that women’s value was connected to her date-ability, or whatever, definitely had a hold on me – but not a choke-hold. I’ll get to that in a bit.) I didn’t come into my own until my 20s. I wanted to be in love, and (more important) BE loved, but it never seemed to happen and I felt like it would never would. I had issues – bipolar without knowing it, existential dread – all of it – but one thing I didn’t experience was groupthink. I was immune to peer pressure. I didn’t worry about what everyone else was up to because I was having too much fun doing jazz hands with my friends in the hallway, and making my way through the entire filmography of Marlon Brando in my spare time.
There were other factors in my being impervious to the kinds of pressures you see in every teen movie. I was blessed with parents who didn’t put gender-restrictions on me. i.e. No, girls don’t do that, act like a lady, daddy’s little girl is all grown up … like, none of that. I was not vulnerable to buying in to lies. I dressed “like a boy” from a very young age, but it was the Golden Age of Tomboys. I wrote about this! Still, for every Kristy McNichol in Little Darlings there were 20 Tatum O’Neals in the same movie (she who was the Tomboy Icon in Paper Moon). When I write like this, I am not denigrating the girls who loved girlie things. Be yourself, follow your bliss! My perspective, though, as I mentioned, is someone who definitely didn’t feel comfortable with all of that, and I just … did what made me feel comfortable. I don’t even remember much agonizing over it, like “I wish I was more girlie!! I wish I liked dresses so I would be perceived as a girl!” It just wasn’t there for me. I think having a strong friend group – and we all were individuals – really helped. I wore my dad’s blazers and shirts and even ties all through high school. This was unusual but not all THAT unusual in the era of Annie Lennox, Boy George, and Prince, icons but not exactly icons of traditional gender expression. Madonna arrived, a cultural game-changer. I didn’t feel the pressure to “be sexy” or act sexy like Madonna. I was Catholic – like she was – but I wasn’t ready for those ideas in high school. By the time I came out of my shell, it was the ’90s, ushered in by the Blonde Ambition tour – but also (more importantly for me) Courtney Love and riot grrrl and Liz Phair and Veruca Salt. The Lolita-teen-queens hadn’t arrived yet. We were women, we were perceived as sexy while wearing jeans and flannel. lol Tina Fey has some pretty funny jokes about that in her book. On the flip side, coming of age sexually during a plague was awful and there needs to be more awareness around that, around what it was like. The terror was real. My point is: we didn’t have to “perform” womanhood in an overly proscribed or conventional way. Maybe some women felt those pressures, you had to have curled hair, be more demure, wear pearls and dresses … There are many different cultures in the United States. If you were a Christian sorority girl at a Southern university in 1993, you were subjected to pressures different than the ones I felt, hanging out at improv clubs and bars in Chicago. I am not saying “How could you succumb to the pressures??” I don’t want those pressures to exist for girls at all. But I am only talking about what it was like for me. Don’t take it personally if that wasn’t your experience.
I also have to just add that everything I just said above happened on an unconscious level. The message was subliminal. I am sure there were thinkpieces galore about Madonna, who exploded onto the scene like a platinum-blonde atom bomb, but I wasn’t reading that kind of stuff in high school. I didn’t feel any pressure to “declare myself” in terms of identity. At least not consciously. I was doing it, of course: wearing your father’s suit to high school is a strong declaration! It came out of growing up and discovering what I liked and didn’t like. The whole “preppy” thing exploded while I was in high school. I had no interest in dressing like a member of a yacht club. And so I didn’t. Again, I think this might have to do with having been a Drama Club kid, as opposed to, say, a cheerleader. Cheerleaders dealt with things I didn’t have to deal with. Peer pressure, for one, and ideas about the “place” of girls in a hierarchy. My friend group also formed a cheerleading squad. But it was a little bit different. A lot of this, in my memory, happened naturally, without a lot of over-thinking. There’s something comforting in that.
The other thing about the 80s that I sometimes think is lost in the shuffle, the nuances blurred, is the sheer diversity of TYPES there were on display. It wasn’t like the late 90s early 2000s where – at least my younger friends have told me – the paparazzi/reality TV/Lolita era had arrived – and low-rise jeans and performing sexuality, and Girls Gone Wild, and Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. No shade against ANY of those things – except for Girls Gone Wild – but if that was the dominant model of womanhood when I was a teenager my experience would probably have been quite different. I’d have gone goth, maybe, as the only alternative even vaguely in my wheelhouse. But in the 80s: If you weren’t into Madonna’s blatant sexuality, you could groove to the Go Gos, who wore berets and pedal pushers and played their own instruments. There was Cyndi Lauper. There was Tina Turner, for God’s sake, and she was 45 years old at the time. One of the biggest female stars on the PLANET was a 45 year old Black woman. This was huge for us, and I can only see this in retrospect! You had Janet Jackson. Pat Benatar! Chaka Khan! Each of these women were individuals. Oh and this was when Dolly Parton rocking her pop era. Cookie cutter womanhood wasn’t what was being pushed. All were sexy, I think, but sexy because of their talent and also because sexiness is diverse and doesn’t look one way.
Of course I left one name off the list of women stars. Joan Jett.
She was SO important.
“In a world full of Barbies, every girl needs a Joan Jett” — Dave Grohl
One of the things to keep in mind about Joan Jett, because it helps add context and nuance to not only her legacy but someone else’s, is her love for Mary Tyler Moore. When Moore died, Jett released this statement on her Instagram:
Jett sang the theme song for The Mary Tyler Moore Show on Letterman:
Another essential influence on Joan Jett, even more important, was bassist Suzi Quatro. Jett was interviewed for the recent doc about Suzi Q. As an early teenager, Joan Jett’s bedroom wall was covered in pictures of Suzi Quatro.
“[Chuck Berry is] the epitome of what it is to be a rock ‘n’ roll guitar player, songwriter and singer.” — Joan Jett
Jett’s tough-chick persona, and hard sound, was rousing and thrilling – and those songs still thrill me today, after probably 1000s of listens. I still get excited when I hear the opening chords of “I Love Rock ‘n Roll”. My blood quickens when I hear “Do You Wanna Touch Me”? Her voice had grit to it, a rough rasp, and her looks were so striking. She was tough and also gorgeous as a movie star. But she didn’t “use” her beauty as currency. She’s sexy as hell. There was nothing “performative” about it, at least not in the typical sense – she did create a persona but it was an alternative to the expected woman persona. She wasn’t “playing to the boys”. She was ONE of the boys. This was so attractive to me. I had all her albums and pasted a picture of her on my bedroom wall – just like she taped up pictures of Suzi Quatro. I also got into the Runaways, mainly because – as I did with Marlon Brando, with Kazan, with Al Pacino – I was following the bread crumbs. Wherever you’ve been, Joan Jett, I will find you.
Some years back, I went to go see Wanda Jackson play at a big hall out in New Jersey. It was an event planned through the NJ Food Bank, and my friend David was very involved in the local chapter, organizing charity fund raisers, like this concert. At one point, I moved to the back of the room to hang out with David, who was working the door. It was an about an hour before the show, so the only people in the joint were the folks working the gig. And, of course, Wanda, doing sound check. It was relatively quiet. As David and I were talking, two people walked in the door. One was a small skinny woman, dressed head to toe in black, with black hair fringed all around her face. The guy with her wore a little porkpie hat and a black leather jacket. She glanced at us, and I saw it was Joan Jett. She said to us, “I’m Joan. I’m here with Wanda.” I nodded, she moved past, and then I fainted.
She was EVERYTHING to me in the 80s, before Madonna arrived and took up all the oxygen. And there she was. In the flesh. Coming from New York all the way out into New Jersey to see Wanda Jackson.
The hall was still empty and Joan sauntered up to the stage, and Wanda greeted her rapturously, reaching out her hand from the chair. Joan reached up to hold her hand. They talked for a while, and it was a moment to witness, I’ll tell you. Talk about Woman Power. They own it. It’s not even a question.
The crowd showed up. It was all ages. Geriatrics to teenagers. Does the heart good. There was no assigned seating because there were no seats. I stood up front. Great view.
Joan Jett, incidentally, was also standing up front, about one person down from me. As Wanda rollicked through her greatest hits, the crowd laughed and danced and sang along, including Joan. I kept glancing over. Seeing her jam out to Wanda made me so happy! Every show, Wanda plays Hank Williams’ “I Saw the Light”, paying tribute to her Christian faith. During her rousing performance of the song, a couple of blazingly emotional things happened:
1. Everyone sang along. Hank wrote “I Saw the Light” almost a century before.
2. Everyone respectfully left Joan alone during the concert, even though, of course, we all were WELL AWARE of her presence. I glanced over during “I Saw the Light” and there she was, deadpan face (of course), but moving her body around to the beat, singing along.
In that moment was 100 years of American music history.
It was so cool!
In 2019, my nephew and I and a couple of his friends went to the great “Play It Loud” exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, an exhibit filled with instruments: Steve Ray Vaughn’s guitar. Prince’s guitar. Ringo’s drum set. Buddy Holly’s guitar. Elvis’ guitar!
Joan Jett’s guitar was incredible, covered in stickers, stickers telling a whole story, of who she was (is) and what she was (is) about.
Joan Jett means so much. I would have been lost without her in those formative teenage years, as the culture swung right. When the culture swings right, it always has a lot to say about women and girls, and who we should be and what our roles are. I was always able to say, “Fuck that. I don’t fit with that. Get the fuck out of here with that.” Jett’s persona had resonance because she carved out her own lane. In carving out her own lane, she made space for herself and others – of course – but she was also rejecting – with a middle finger – the ideas that women were supposed to look and be a certain way.
I saw The Wild One when I was around 14, 15. A crucial performance in Marlon Brando’s filmography.
Simultaneously, there was Joan Jett, in black leather pants, snarling at the camera, but with a wink, letting us know we were in on it.
Joan Jett and The Wild One are separated by thirty years but since I discovered them at the same time it was as though they were happening simultaneously. They both came from the same source, imparting the same message.
Resist the group if the group’s rules don’t feel right for you.
Be a wild one, a rebel, a runaway.
