mamculuna | (no subject)

Current Music: King: So Far Away

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Girls Like Us is a delicious book, at least for a person of my generation (which I know is not most of you). I had already been getting absorbed in women singers like Eva Cassidy, Nina Simone, etc., but Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and Carly Simon also wrote ther songs--to be a creator and a performer just amazes me. They were the first women of their kind, on such a popular level at least. And so many of the songs I love, but more than that, these women lived my life (well, except that they were famous and talented--minor details that don't concern me!). They lived the change from the incredibly constricted fifties, when women were decorations and support staff for men's lives, to the bizarre sixties, when women suddenly became earth mother/free spirit incarnations, to the seventies, when they/we became people, maybe. And on and on. It's a fun read--occasionally I question a detail, but the sense of the music and the times is perfect. And it has pictures.

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Yes, I loved the book. I'm a little younger, so the sixties background was useful -- and the book put the seventies in much clearer focus for me.

I think it really does a good job of showing not just popular culture but what the world was like for young people at the various times (actually I haven't quite finished it--may not feel the same way about the later years).

I'll have to add it to my amazon list. Thanks.

I'm intrigued. I think I ought to find out more...

Their music is from the late 60's-and 70's. King originally wrote for black girl groups, but her own songs, while pop, are closer to blues, foreshadowing a lot of women singers today. Mitchell came out of folk music, but is an amazing poet as well as musician, and Simon is just really sensual (and funny).

I see. Thank you. :)

I read a review of that which made it sound really interesting. I'll have to pick it up at some point. A while back I read a bio of Laura Nyro that was fascinating for many of the same reasons; I hadn't known that much about her beyond the music, so it was really interesting to find out a little of what she was like.

I didn't listen to Nyro much at the time, but now she sounds really interesting.

I need to hurry up this retirement thing so that I can start reading what you review! :^)

I can tell you soooo many good reasons to retire as soon as you can. Work? We don' need no steenkin work!

*HIGH FIVE*!!!

I must find myself a copy of this book. You and I are the same age, give or take a year, and these women were part of my life soundtrack too. Carol King's Tapestry is forever linked to my days in the Slocan, and hearing one of those songs takes me back to those days..
The '60's produced some amazing women musicians, and I think it would be a shame if they were relegated to history.

I know you'd really like it. It focuses on the three famous women, but a lot of it is about how all women's lives were changing during those years.

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