Yearlong Song Challenge, Day 86: Joe

Prompt: "A pro-women anthem"

Selected by Joe

"You Don't Own Me"

Dusty Springfield

A Girl Called Dusty, 1964

Enough time has passed since I wrote some of these prompts that it feels like a past version of myself is trying to trip me up. The phrase "pro-woman anthem" sounds clunky, and unfortunately could be interpreted as serious or sarcastic. I forget if its murkiness was my intention in December 2023; I feel like I probably didn't really give it much thought at all, just kinda slapped some words on the digital page and called it a year.

Had I chosen to interpret it sarcastically—a tricky proposition—then I probably would've chosen the song that NYG TE Darren Waller recently released about his ex-wife, titled "Who Knew (Her Perspective)," which, nominally at least, sounds pro-woman. Right? I finally listened to the song after having its title in my YSC notepad for a couple weeks, and I don't know. Doesn't really feel like you can be "pro-woman" when presenting yourself, a man, as the victim in the breakup, also after cheating on your wife... anything said further than this would require me to wade into the weeds of the celebrity tabloids, and I don't like doing that. Here are some of the top comments on that song's YouTube video, which I thought were funny, and not necessarily pro-woman but definitely anti-this-specific-man:

• "Bro got more auto tune than receiving yards"
• "Leave bro alone, he's grieving"
• "When That CTE Starts Effecting Your Speach"
• "This is what happens when Drake is your favorite RAPPER SMH"

There's probably no way to say, as a man, that you are "pro-woman." Anything said on the subject just feels like protesting too much. Choosing a song that says "I'm pro-woman, I swear!" would be like when Frank Reynolds wanted a song about "not diddling kids" to prove that he doesn't diddle kids. At a certain point, it's like, okay, but why do you need the song? So I'm not spending this blog post explaining that I love and respect women, because that sounds like something that an ANTI-WOMAN individual would write.

The right way to do this would typically be to have a woman choose a song for you, and maybe even choose what you should write. But that seems antithetical to the spirit of Yearlong Song Challenge. If Pam had something that she wanted written on the blog, she'd write it herself. If she wanted to hear a song, she wouldn't have to hear it on PoYB. She could just queue it up on Apple Music and then add it to a playlist of songs to listen to on the way to her women-only Finger Lakes trip next week. Still... I asked her anyway, and she named a Beyoncé song. Can I say that I am pro-woman and that I'd rather take a cyanide pill than put another Beyoncé song on this blog? I don't know! Probably not!

Speaking of my beautiful wife Pam, who likes Beyoncé a lot more than I do, Pam bought me a book for Father's Day (a decidedly non-pro-woman holiday) called 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. It's a book to page through and use as a reference. So I've been paging through it, and marking up the pages with symbols for "I'm familiar with this" and "this was a Record Club album" and etc. And of course reading the blurbs, which are really satisfying. They are in the same style as the RS500 list's blurbs that were so foundational to my understanding of music. It feels like dipping into a warm bath, to be moving through this list of "essential" albums.

In the blurb for A Girl Called Dusty, which is an album that you must hear before you die (and I will, eventually, because of this book), "You Don't Own Me" is a "feminist anthem," which is a description that stood out to me because I was desperate to find a song that met this prompt. And so here we are. Yes, two men wrote the song. Yes, the author of the blurb that I just quoted was a man. Yes, the general editor of 1001 Albums is a man. Yes, I am a man writing about it now. But Dusty and Leslie Gore (the singer of the original version) are women, and you cannot deny, based on the lyrics, that this song is pro-woman, and also a certified "anthem."

Outside of the demands of Yearlong Song Challenge, as dictated by its prompts, I would've probably written about this book in some fashion. Told you about how I was planning on using it. How I wanted to utilize it as a way to dive even deeper into the so-called "canon" of popular and important music. How I am starting to visualize what a blog series would look like in this way, and maybe give you a little preview. But that's straying to far from the path today. Today, we are praising women. Those are the rules.

To prove that I am not being sarcastic (beyond the mention of that dumb autotune football song, which, sorry, I couldn't help myself), I am donating $25 today to Women Against Abuse, and if you are a man on this blog today struggling to write genuinely about this without sounding like Andrew Tate, I am asking you to join me.