When women get angry, they are regarded as shrill or hysterical…One way around that, for me, is bleaching my hair and looking good. It’s bad that I have to do that to get my anger accepted. But then I’m part of an evolutionary process. I’m not the fully evolved end.
In the eighties and early nineties, music journalists often considered too much spectacle a distraction, or evidence of something prefabricated and therefore inauthentic. “Spontaneity has been ruled out,” Jon Pareles wrote of Jackson’s live show in 1990. “Rockism,” as it later came to be known, valued songwriting and a particular kind of pained earnestness over practiced performance. As a young critic, I internalized these values so thoroughly that it took me years to unlearn them, to figure out how to trust pleasure and lightness and drama
Grohl’s end-of-days drumming
It feels like they took to heart the overt message of disco, which said that there’s a place for everyone at this party, and joined it with punk’s lack of care for the straight world’s opinion.
Arriving exactly on time for my interview with Jennifer Lopez, I am escorted through the interior of a luxurious Beverly Hills mansion where she’s staying, out onto a sun-drenched terrace. There, as if I had strolled onto the set of Imitation of Life, I find all 66 caramel-colored inches of Jennifer Lopez lying face down on a poolside chaise. Her bikini top is slightly loosened, her nether regions are towel-draped, and a masseuse is kneading oil into the precipitous peaks and valleys of her formidable body. Her skin glints as if it were flecked with 24-karat gold. I park myself on a nearby chaise, and Lopez greets me with the slow, languid smile and half-mast gaze of someone not entirely anxious to surface from a better-than-life dream. “Hi, Stephen,” she says. “I’ll be with you in a second.” Then, responding to the masseuse’s skillful ministrations, her lips part in sensual abandon, and she turns her head away, sending her hair cascading over the side of the chaise.
This classic Hollywood star tableau has, of course, been orchestrated by Lopez for my benefit. She knows that I know that she knows that I know the whole scene is deliberate, right down to the supporting players–assistants, various friends, family–arranged here and there around the pool, ready to do a star’s bidding. Included in this artfully arranged backdrop is model and restaurateur Ojani Noa, Lopez’s husband of roughly a year, who, in a muscle T-shirt and sunglasses, is splashing water into the pool from a garden hose. “Sweetie, Steve and I won’t be able to hear each other,” says Lopez, as she turns and finally begins to ready herself for something other than rubbing. Issuing one last, voluptuous “Mmmm,” she rises slowly from her chaise, grins at me, adjusts her bikini top, tightens the towel around her midsection, rakes her fingers through her hair, and slides onto an adjacent lounge chair for our chat.
There’s a quote that I love from the British philosopher Alain de Botton’s book How to Think More About Sex. De Botton writes, “Tame it though we may try, sex has a recurring tendency to wreak havoc across our lives: It leads us to destroy our relationships, threatens our productivity, and compels us to stay up too late in nightclubs talking to people whom we don’t like but whose exposed midriffs we nevertheless strongly wish to touch. Sex remains in absurd, and perhaps irreconcilable, conflict with some of our highest commitments and values. […] Perhaps we should accept that sex is inherently rather odd instead of blaming ourselves for not responding in more normal ways to its confusing impulses.”
thedarksidegoddess