mamculuna | (no subject)

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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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.