Ashley Compton's Article Review 1

Wilson, Janelle. "Women In Country Music Videos." ETC.: A Review of General Semantics 57.3 (2000): 290. General OneFile. Web. 4 Oct. 2014.

            In Janelle Wilson’s “Women in Country Music Videos”, she discusses the differences and similarities between men and women’s style of presenting their values and ideas about life and love through their lyrics and music videos. She explains that while most all of country music is about love, the men and women who sing about it do so very differently. Wilson comes to the idea that “Country music videos offer a space for contemporary female artists to more visually and openly challenge that which their predecessors challenged in their time – the traditional, confining gender roles that dominant American culture espouses”. (290)

            To support her argument, Wilson conducted an analysis. She selected twenty-six of the number one music videos presented by CMT’s “Top 12 Countdown”. When studying theses videos she looked at theme, gender of the artist, gender of the protagonist, and the way women were portrayed in the video. She divided all the videos into three categories: happy love, hurtin’ love, and difficult/reconciliatory love. After categorizing the videos she looked at how the women artists presented their song and video in that topic differently than the male artist did.

            The “happy love” category brought Wilson the conclusion that most men artists who sing about happy love do so in a traditional sense, while most women artists portray themselves untraditionally when singing about happy love. She came to this conclusion because all five men artists in the happy love category sang about the man working, loving his wife, and having children. Most of the songs also gave the more traditional idea that every person has one true love meant for them. Of the four women in this category, only one artist’s lyrics were about the traditional true love, while the other three portrayed women as “active and assertive”. (294)

            In the “hurtin’ love” category, Wilson discovered that men artists are more likely to sing about self blame for losing love, while women are not. All of the men’s videos she studied in this category were either about remorse/regret for losing the woman or feeling like a fool for losing the woman. For the female artists that fit into this category, they are “less inclined to fall into self-blame”. (296) In the women’s videos, one asked for help from angels to stay away from a man, one acknowledges that letting go is a process, and another is just asking for the man to understand, however she doesn’t ever blame herself. From these videos she watched, Wilson decided that while men sing in despair and self-blame, women only tend to comment and move forward from the situation in their songs.

            Finally, in the category “difficult/reconciliatory love”, Wilson concludes that the men sing about the idea that the only way to fix a relationship is to stay together/get back together. This is because in all three songs by men in this category the couple ends up together even though there are still difficulties in the relationship. On the contrary, the women artists do not ignore the problem. One sang about the “wild angels” being the reason the couple is still together and the other sings about a couple who is very different, but support each other. This gave Wilson the idea that women are more likely to sing about the problem in a relationship being “acknowledged, analyzed, and dealt with” rather than avoided or ignored (300).

            This article ties perfectly into my blog topic, which is “women and country music”. This is because the article examines one of the main issues that are very evident when looking at women and country music, which is gender stereotypes. This article also connects to subjects that we have discussed in class. Wilson’s article could be considered to have similar ideas to Cecilia Ridgeway’s article “How Gender Inequality Persists in the Modern World”. Ridgeway’s article discusses the inequalities of gender and she also talks about how women do most of the housework, very rarely hold supervisory positions, and therefore seem to hold less authority than males because of the traditional, socially developed gender stereotypes. This idea is also present in Wilson’s article when she discusses that the men who sing about “happy love” always tend to sing about a traditional idea of marriage and love. The men singing about women in this way are continuing the ideas of gender stereotypes and the “normal” gender roles. I believe that anyone interested in the topic of women and country music or learning about the differences between the music of the men and women artists of country music read Wilson’s article.

- Ashley Compton