Why the Shirelles Mattered

Susan Douglas Story Telling Goddess

Douglas takes us on a journey, one all women can relate to.  She tells us the story of women becoming women, individually and as a gender in whole, that is timeless and one we all know.

She is able to take something so simple as music, and tell us how it revolutionized being women in the day in age, and how it continues to do so.  With her chronological format, we are able to depict map out our history as women and put together a geniological map (if you will) that creates claims as to why we are they way we are and how we became that way. 

She begins with her short sentence, it captures the audience "Ok - here's a test."  It's very conversational, we all speak this way at times.  "Ok" she's saying, lets talk.  I have something I want to share with you - you should listen. 

A second "attention getter" right up front and in the beginning... the test.  A test?  The reader asks him/herself.  I love tests!  Douglas is able to draw the reader in with an unconscious psychological (biological?) ingrained human behaviour.   We love to be challenged.  Conversationally asking us to take her up on her offer is just begging to be read further on. 

Douglas carries on with her conversational piece.  She paints the pictures gorgeously, nonchalantly, casually, informally:

Get some women

throw them in a room

find a stereo

play some music...

These are all images we can picture clearly.  Douglas is saying we know women, we know music.  Now put them together and see if they enjoy it. 

She's also creating a recipe with her pictured words.  Mid-age women + Older music = baby boomers.  As humans we know how to add, we are good with solid-formulas-plug-in-the-answer-and-hand-in-your-homework types of work.  Its easy.  Its simple.  Its enticing.  We feel like we are accomplishing something, like we get it. 

Douglas is humorous!  She enters the small little pokes and jabs without meaning any harm, but just to get her point across.  "... Any less, and the group has been infiltrated by imposters, pod people, Venusian..."   POD PEOPLE?!  Oh silly baby boomers, thinking they are the first and only non-foreigners on the planet.  

However, she gets serious and lets the reader know that even if you aren't a baby-boomer, Douglas would classify you as "adoring" this music as well.  And why do we do this?  Because its music like this that created music for women at all - and we all love knowing where we came from.  She uses metaphors like "... cling to the lyrics like a life raft..." to help us understand.  Why would we hold on to old, outdated music?  Its because its how our life began... and it shouldn't ever be let go of. 

The DASHES my goodness the dashes!!  It's my kind of reading.  I love matter-of-fact, listen to me riiiiiiight now kind of talk.  "First of all, girl group music was really about us - girls."  The entire article is about women becoming women and the struggle we've had to pursue to get where we are even in the avenue of music!  Why the dash and then tell us who its about again?  It's like she's saying... here let me remind you.  Let me tell you.  Let me give it to frankly.  If you didn't know. 

Douglas uses recognition and relativity for comparison all throughout her article.  Even if we don't really know who she is talking about, or even if we haven't ever heard the song she just mentioned... you still know of it.  We can all recognize the name faintly, we can all recall the song vaguely, we know it is/was relative to the time, that it made a huge stamp in the music world, and we can compare it to other who were big in their own time, or our own.  

... ooooh so THAT's who she is, she DID sing that song, she WAS as big of a star as ____.  

Douglas uses strong, descriptive, powerful word choices.  She also creates lists continuously.  If you don't understand with the first word, here's another, and yet another.  This just confirms, reconfirms, and repeats the points she is trying to make.  She wants to understand, she wants you to get it.  She wants the picture in your head, she wants the feeling to surround you, she wants you to remember. 

"... haunting, earthy, and provacative..."

"...Insistent, pulsing rhythm..."

"...teen girl angst and desire, grounding the song in fleshly reality, violin arpeggios fluttered through like birds..."