Groupie: A Powerful Woman

One morning a band of three brothers awaken from a night of mischievous activities, but only two stand up to find the last’ clothes on the ground with their owner nowhere in sight. They then see movement from the shirt moving up to the neck, then a frog appears in place of the last brother’s body! This occurred after the day the brothers were entranced by three sirens. Similar to Homer’s “The Odyssey,” “O Brother Where Art Thou” has many events that relate the Odysseus and his adventure.

It didn’t take long before my nervousness and apprehensive mental state fled. Their group solidarity was pretty evident with a few short minutes of meeting them. It felt like home, like what I was a part of when I was still an

August Wilson’s highly acclaimed play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is set in Chicago in the late 1920’s. The main character, Ma Rainey, is an African American blues singer, and she is managed by a white music producer named Irvin. Levee, the youngest of four band members, takes on a surprisingly dominant role in the play. Anyone can open a history text book and learn about the general social issues that were present in the early nineteen hundreds. Wilson takes this history lesson one step further, and shows his readers the affects of these racial issues on a personal level. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom shows how the disrespect and exploitation of young African Americans in the music industry can either lead to empowerment or downfall.

“The rise of rock ‘n’ roll and the reception of it, in fact, can tell us a lot about the culture and values of the United States in the 1950s. According to historians James Gilbert, there was a struggle throughout the decade ‘over the uses of popular culture to determine who would speak to what audience, and for what purpose”. At the center of that struggle, rock ‘n’ roll unsettled a nation had been “living in an ‘age of anxiety’” since 1945” (p.15). Altschuler talks about how music and race interlock with one another. Rock had become a “highly visible and contested arena for struggles over racial identity and cultural and economic empowerment in the United States” (p.35). Other chapters within the book state the battles involving sexuality, generational conflicts, as well as other social issues. The author states ideas that are somewhat problematic. For example, he states that there is a myth that rock ‘n’ roll went into a “lull” following the payola hearings (the practice of record promoters paying DJs or radio programmers to play their labels ' songs) of 1959 and did not come about again until the arrival of the Beatles in 1964.

In the 1920’s, blues was a very popular and dominating genre in the music industry. Generally, the blues was sung by African American women because according to the book entitled, “Blues Legacies and Black Feminism” by Angela Davis, “…The most widely heard individual purveyors of the blues—were women.” (Davis 4) The blues delivers certain emotions such as sadness, loneliness, love, sex, and feelings about the certain circumstances the artist may be going through at the time. Two women who dominate this style of music are Gertrude “Ma” Rainey and Bessie Smith. As stated by “Gay & Lesbian Biography”, “The careers of Rainey and Smith are closely interwoven.” Ma Rainey is a woman who is admired for both her amazing vocals and her ability to entertain. Bessie Smith is a woman who started off as a background dancer for her peer Ma Rainey, but then went on to emulate her by outdoing her success. Both women are very talented musicians who can not only sing and entertain, but they also create an impact as two of the most influential feminists during the 1920’s who helped shape the blues into what it is today.

“You’ve got to listen to the heavens, you got to try to understand. The greatness of their movement is just as small as it is grand.” Most young adults of my generation do not know who The Grateful Dead are, but they unknowingly dawn the apparels and slang created in the counterculture of the bands following the Deadheads. The band, The Grateful Dead, became popular in the 60s and carried out wide spread recognition and fame into the 80s. Their calming, peace-promoting music became popular because it ‘transported’ people, it took them away from whatever they were going through in their life and set them on a new path. Fans of the band

As soon as 1939 when he had joined Harry James’ music makers, a frenzy of female fans ensued. Connie Haines, a singer who began working with Harry James at the time, recalled the reaction of fans after Frank’s first performance with James; “After the first show, the screaming started in the theater, and those girls came backstage. There were about twenty of them… it happened, it was real, it was not a gimmick” (Kaplan 76). The biggest height of the hysteria had to have been in October of 1944: the Paramount/Columbus Day Riot. Around 30,000 of Sinatra’s fans, many of which were teenage girls nicknamed bobbysoxers, lined up for his show at the Paramount Theatre in Times Square (Doyle).

Women’s music came from radical, grassroots origins in the 1970s thanks to contributions by brave women, mostly lesbians (Mosbacher, 2002). These women used non-violent, peaceful force to forge their own way into the music industry. It was a peaceful yet political revolution of togetherness and liberation. It brought together women of different backgrounds who produced easy-listening, mellow harmonies played with lyrics filled with tumultuous

Throughout the book, Bogle places particular attention to gender differences. Supporting Bogle’s findings, there is still a double standard for men and women. Participation in the hookup scene is risky for women, while men have few, if any risks. Women who behave too “sexually” in the hookup culture have to recognize that there are repercussions. These repercussions include damaged reputations, being labeled, and being ostracized by peers. Women can get labeled, damage their reputations, or ostracized by having too many partners, hooking up with two guys that know each other well, dressing in a seductive manner, constantly hanging around a fraternity house, or drinking too much.

It was a cold winter night in Boston. All alone a man sleeps in his cold apartment, which might as well be a fishbowl, on 56th street. This 27 year old man’s name is Andrew Miller. He is a former architect, but there is a very simple reason he’s only a former architect. He lost his job, his wife and now he’s about to lose his apartment. But there is a bright side to every dark right? He met this woman who he knew he was supposed to marry. She’s 26 years old, 5’6” and she’s beautiful, but everyone tells his that there’s something off about her. Nobody can put their finger on what it is. So we should see how this ends up right? Let’s just sit back, relax and enjoy the show.

When it was my time to go observe the other group, it was so confusing. I had no idea what was going on or why people kept touching my arm when I got close to them. This was very strange and unexpected because I am not used to people

I was very nervous about attending an AA meeting alone, I had never been to one and I surely didn’t not want to go alone. I remembered a close cousin of mind attended AA meetings frequently, so I asked her if she wouldn’t mind going to one with me. I attended the Beginners and Slippers meeting at the Western Club. My first thought on this meeting was that there were going to be a lot of people that are just beginning their journey to recovery. It was very intimidating to attend the AA meeting simply because I felt out of place, like I shouldn’t be there. Once we had arrived to the meeting, everyone seemed so friendly and just like ordinary people. Everyone greeted one another and seemed so nice. There were individuals there from higher class to lower class and they looked perfectly find to me,

One of the most influential groups of the 20th Century—the Beatles revolutionized rock and roll into what we know it as today. Not only were they great musicians, they wrote and composed each of their songs. The band proved to be popular and exciting causing mass hysteria at each of their public performances. The “Fab Four’s” talent was so great that the phenomenon was termed “Beatlemania” in Britain and eventually erupted in the United States being called the British Invasion of the Beatles (Britannica Online, 2005).

Believe it or not, on January 1st of 1962, the group known as The Beatles flunked their audition at Decca Records in London, England. The label’s executive, Dick Rowe, brushed them off like they were nothing. He simply stated that “guitar groups are on the way out.” Little did Rowe know, The Beatles would soon conquer modern society and alter the course of pop and rock music. There have been no other entertainers in the history of music that has been so popular, influential, or as groundbreaking as The Beatles. In the early 1960’s, their popularity was often called “Beatlemania,” as thousands of screaming fans would crowd their concerts and sing-along with the Fab Four. They sold over 600 million albums internationally and had 20 Number One hit singles – a Billboard record that has yet to be broken. The band took over the entertainment media with music videos and films, but also influenced sociocultural, political, and fashion movements throughout the sixties and seventies. From experimenting with several different genres to incorporating classical elements into their melodies, The Beatles still reigns as one of the most creative and successful bands several decades later. Today, fifty years later, The Beatles and their music are still engraved in the hearts of many.

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