Ryann Donnelly - Justify My Love: Sex, Subversion, and Music Video

Justify My Love

JUSTIFY MY LOVE

Sex, Subversion, and Music Video
Ryann Donnelly

Published by Repeater Books

An imprint of Watkins Media Ltd

Unit 11Shepperton House

89-93 Shepperton Road

London

N1 3DF

United Kingdom

www.repeaterbooks.com

A Repeater Books paperback original 2019 1

Distributed in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York.

Copyright Ryann Donnelly 2018

Ryann Donnelly asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Cover design: Johnny Bull

Typography and typesetting: Frederik Jehle

Typefaces: Meriden LT Std, Arial

ISBN: 9781912248414

Ebook ISBN: 9781912248421

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd

because of mom, Linda Donnelly x

CONTENTS

PART ONE

X.

I am invisible to myself because I do not have cable in the woods. I am the 1995 MTV Video Music Awards. I am Courtney Loves makeup compact ying over a balcony, interrupting Kurt Loders interview with Madonna. I am Madonnas discontent, her pursed, prude lips. I am a prude. I am Loders petrified congeniality when he shouts, HI COURTNEY! down the couple of stories from which Love has impressively (for both her strength and gall) launched her shit at the queen of pop. Madonna (naturally wired for provocation, but insincere): Should we let her come up? Loder (The purest yes man. Tone deaf to sarcasm): Yeah! Madonna (now sincere): No, dont. Please. Loder to Love: Come on up! Love ascends.

Satin is in this year. Madonna wears it in the shape of a turquoise Gucci dress shirt, unbuttoned down the length of her sternum. Her black bra is visible over each perfect mound of breast. This is the image of a shirt torn open in anticipation of other forms of opening and entry, paused and prolonged. Her black cigarette pants are satin too a soft barrier to the diamond-hard dancers musculature underneath. Courtney wears a black satin skirt so short and twirly that it exposes the high curve of her ass. Her matching satin shirt has lacy princess sleeves, and big, pastel violet bows in front. Madonna corrupts the masculine, and brings sex into view. Courtney subverts the feminine through its exaggeration and constant juxtaposition with her unpredictable, violent, compact-throwing-at-the-queen-of-pop body. The two speak in competitive insults, which Courtney acknowledges after several rounds by kneeling on the ground. She could never win, because she is indeed the more insultable, if not genuinely worse person, so she dramatizes her inevitable loss with the silent question: Is this what you want? The two briey discuss their shoes at Madonnas suggestion, then Madonna leaves. Love is the brash instigator, and stubborn survivor of their encounter, but Madge gets some fair jabs in before she walks off set like a quitter.

It would have been hard to say who won this competition of most intimidating woman in music had Love not proceeded to fall face-first off her chair as she recounted her early sexual history with Ted Nugent. The failure was too human. I am Madonnas splayed gem-tone satin, and Courtneys satin-covered ass. I am Courtneys thrash and Madonnas sobriety. For a brief moment in 1995, oil met fire. Captured in the same space was Madonnas control, and the destruction of Love.

X.

I have translated this encounter through the obsession I have with these women, as they were then, which has never been sated by passive admiration. As a teenager, I undertook the project of understanding my unbidden ardor by trying to do what they did. It lead to this.

The title of this book was initially chosen as an ode to the Madonna song and video of same name. Though the question of how love is justified, explained, expressed, or earned, came to re-frame my approach to this narrative. What started as a book on subversive performances of gender in music video an exploration of their aesthetics, justifications for their value and power now marries that research with the lived experiences the obsessions, the true love, the secrets, the sex that informed it. I am going to begin by weaving between the two because many of the authors, theories, and questions explored here have been with me for a long time. I have thought about how they operate within and outside of conventional performance contexts. They have been applicable to how I have performed and observed performances of gender, sex, sexuality in real life. The occasional collapse of time for the sake of pace is the main liberty I have knowingly taken with the verity of these memories. The second and third sections of this book are the outgrowth of the personal narrative that precedes them.

Courtney first. I was at the intersection of Sleater-Kinney Road and Pacific Ave., a passenger in my moms car, when the new Hole single was introduced on the radio Seattles 107.7, The End. I would turn thirteen in ten days. This is an ironic, and indeed embarrassing place for Courtney Love to have invoked the immediate and rabid compulsion to be her. Part of the job was already done because I was a singer, a certainty I arrived at really early, and that my mother responded to by sending me to singing lessons. Realistically, this was likely from a combination of genuine support and an astute anticipation of her own need to self-preserve. Id been under the instruction of a man since I was eight who brought the strongest, most gorgeous voices out of young women by screaming hideous things at them. I learned to sing big, and loud, and impressively, because I was afraid of him. But abiding by fear produced results, and it is a strategy whose effectiveness has been difficult to abandon for healthier, if, truly, less dependable modes of productivity. I knew I was a singer, but I wanted blonde beautiful widow screamer. I wanted pain and glamor and volume.

The aforementioned embarrassment and irony of this experience derives from two main factors. First, it is embarrassing to admit that the Love I loved was the post-Hollywood, and if not quite post-, then certainly less rock version that emerged in 1998 with the album Celebrity Skin; the vain, yet bereaved, yet catchy follow-up to 1994s Live Through This, the vicious, maternal, grotesque bodily-reference-laden, but still tender as a bruise, and by all accounts superior predecessor, all the more appreciable for its refusal to be eclipsed by the suicide of Loves husband, Kurt Cobain, which happened a week before the albums release. There was no polish to Live Through This-era Love. The aesthetic was ultra-feminine, but budget and broken: vintage velvet baby-doll dresses with fraying hems and lace collars, messy red lipstick, Mary Jane ats, cheap tiaras, and her original nose. Sometimes an old satin slip. If there was glamor, it was decayed. By 1998 she had become the pristine excess that Live Through This had suggested the feminine didnt need to be. Celebrity Skin-era Courtney wasnt cool. She name-dropped (she name-dropped before too, but now she dropped Hollywood names), and talked about how great pilates is for your abs, and did pre-shows on MTV where she tried on dresses by Versace and Roberto Cavalli that she might wear to the music video awards. All her clothes were new. I couldnt see this then; what I saw was a rockstar that dressed like a movie star. And growing up in a small town, to a working-class, single mom, this was a glamor that precluded and seduced me. She had not completely lost her bite, it just all felt a little more bratty than commendably, genuinely driven by rage. You can see the shift in strange documents like the ads she did for Versace in 1998. Theres a dash of fear in those pictures that asks if its OK that shes there, or if shes doing it right. Theres a first time-ness to her beauty, like she cant believe clothes that perfect even fit her. They were shot by Richard Avedon, whose famous images of Marilyn Monroe, blanked out in a sparkling evening gown, give away an exhaustion with the very performance of sex appeal and magnetism that Courtney is striving for in those 1998 portraits.